From Apathy to Impact…loving all life
What might a Reboot of Society’s Operating System look like?
There is no playbook for this.
No technical manual.
How will any of us know whether we are making real meaningful progress? Or not?
Good question…we’ve tossed and turned on that one. Can we possibly know the answer?
Too often, even the best of intentions fall short or worse…exacerbate harms with downstream consequences…
Navigating through complexity, uncertainty and deep shift calls for a break from the usual conventional patterns…
Seems our biggest and most pervasive barriers are truly very human. They occupy hearts and minds. Paradoxically, human system barriers pose our greatest challenges and our greatest untapped potential for creative life-affirming breakthroughs.
“All significant breakthroughs are break -“withs” old ways of thinking.” ~ Thomas Kuhn
We know that we can’t reboot people…it would be foolish and morally wrong to try. People are not machines. We naturally resist mechanistic manipulative tactics to induce change. At best, those efforts produce superficial compliance that lack deep-rooted intrinsic self motivation.
In fact, innumerable attempts at holding onto control, forcing, imposing or coercing people to make sweeping changes invariably have multiple damaging, deleterious predictable and unanticipated consequences — some obvious and immediate, some invisible, long term and downstream.
People cannot be programmed.
Or can they? Hmm…
We know that society’s operating system is extremely complex with many elements and subsystems. Layered and overlapping conventions, institutions, and standard practices or modus operandi do set the context for human behaviour in society and social settings.
Although we can’t literally program people, paradoxically (over time) societal and institutional conventions and cultural norms insidiously and blatantly shape people’s behaviour and standardize socially accepted and expected practices, norms and ways of being. The fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology and history are overflowing with case studies, examples and stories that drive this reality home. People, individually and as social animals can be very susceptible to (varying degrees of) cultural imprinting, subtle external influences, manipulation and brain washing.
The reductionist, mechanistic modern society Industrial Age has reinforced machine model, left brain leaning patterns. In essence, most (of us) ordinary citizens were programmed to accept and expect governments and businesses to take charge of most aspects of societal functioning.
It’s almost like people have been psychologically, invisibly held hostage by pervading norms (the paradigm) — without necessarily even being aware.
Trapped — kinda like The Matrix, with very real effects and repercussions. Maybe, without realizing it, many of us gave up our own power or agency?
The entangled mess of wicked problems that have grown into mountainous overlapping meta-poly-perma crises are the result of many years.
It’s as if the bulk of humanity was anesthetized — asleep at the wheel.
It’s as if we were lulled into a false belief that it wasn’t our job to keep vigilance, to play a role steering our trajectory, to prevent or address the big problems before they snowballed into entangled insurmountable heaps.
After all, our institutions, government policies and business entities were supposed to run things and attend to all that stuff.
Right?
We vote. We pay taxes. We use and buy goods and services. That pretty much summed up our societal contributions…
Right?
The Industrial Age predisposed us to expect things to work like engines or machines with a little tweak here and there.
⚙️ Did we become complacent?
⚙️ Did we blindly and mindlessly accept our roles as consumers and forget or overlook our responsibility as citizens?
⚙️ Have our institutions grown to a size and scale where we lost our sense of proportion?
⚙️ Lost our deeper sense of humanity?
Humanity reduced to Homo economicus?
This awful escalating mess is increasingly creating a bigger mountain of problems and producing a stench that we can’t ignore.
We are in deep sh*t. We are awake now and many more are waking up. We describe it as deep SHfT.
The emperors are naked. There are too many metaphorical elephants in too many rooms to ignore. We can’t pretend, downplay or fake it any more.
We can’t un-see what we now see.
Divisive blame games are raging and yet these easily become a continuation of the dysfunctional patterns that feed mechanistic compartmentalization.
There is limited gain pointing fingers of blame. While government leaders, politicians, CEOs and heads of institutions have all had a hand in this — with countless terrible and spectacularly outrageous examples that pepper the constant barrage of media coverage — they are also products of systems that have grown increasingly and irreparably maladaptive and addictive.
At some level, we all let this happen. We are all messy humans. The layers and complexity of what humanity collectively created over decades and hundreds of years, overtook our wise capacity to adapt in healthy life-affirming ways.
Some people and roles continue to carry more power and accountability. True enough. However, it makes little sense to keep on waiting for them to pick up all the dropped balls. In many instances and for all kinds of interlaced reasons, many are (still) are invested in maintaining the status quo — even as it crumbles.
And even those who want to solve the problems — truly don’t know how. These complex systemic problems cannot be resolved through conventional solutionism by individual heroic leaders or any one organization, sector or movement.
They require a critical mass of (increasingly) engaged citizens. Deep engagement goes beyond conventions of democratic representation that do not yet embody democracy in the full sense. Democracy has been more aspirational— at most, reflecting successive approximations.
A critical mass of deeply engaged citizens calls for many stepping stones, local and around the world…
Everything. Everywhere. All at once.
Local-community-micro-grassroots-bioregional-global-macro and everything in-between.
All sectors, disciplines, generations, cultures, genders — building bridges and multitudes of initiatives across all the divides — collaborating, co-creating, interconnecting and gaining momentum.
And-and. Cultivating multitudes of collaborative co-creative commons efforts.
Long overdue and underway. There is growing convergence — still fragile and not nearly enough…
At this stage…given the complexity and severity of overlapping entangled problems…we are all late adopters. Shifting the degenerative trajectory requires us all, working together in a variety of context-based and place-sourced ways — with gifts differing doing what we can, big and small…
There are some signposts or indicators that will enable us to move forward and discern meaningful progress…a reframed take on progress in the roughly right direction…
…and a reframing and reconfiguring of power and accountability as we navigate…
Picture this as a loosely representative trajectory whereby humanity increasingly takes on the multi-faceted work of rebooting society’s operating system, as an ongoing humbling learning journey with many new unfolding stories as we shape, adapt, move and are moved…
This kind of reboot — not really a reboot — starts and moves from within, when we sense and see more choices, when we recognize the interconnectedness of our choices, when we choose to stop doing the things that aren’t working, and (co-)discover some alternative ways…that can potentially work…mindfully, intuitively and with ongoing learning and diligent work…
It might look and feel something like this, with many variations on the themes…
WE, All of US ORDINARY HUMANS— MOBILIZE FROM ➿ ️APATHY • PARALYSIS • INDIFFERENCE • FEAR • PAROCHIALISM • INTRANSIGENCE • VICTIMHOOD • DOGMA • DIVISIVENESS • SEPARATISM • POLARIZATION • ELITISM • LEADERSHIP HEROICS — all kinds of metaphorical monsters that keep us stuck.
Envision this as an iterative, nonlinear uplifting spiral along an adaptive life-affirming trajectory, that begins with readiness stages༄
༄ SAFETY — recognizing/acknowledging our messy humanness/beginning to overcome some of our monsters (manifestations of messy humanness)
༄ PARTICIPATION — preliminary engagement and the invariable dance with uncertainty, systems, paradox, messy humanness and monsters…
༄ INDIVIDUAL AGENCY — having and experiencing conscious choice and feeling personally empowered
༄ CONVERSATIONS — discourse and early exploration, beginning to peel back some layers…gradually becoming more comfortable being uncomfortable…
༄ SAFETY IN NUMBERS — from isolation to social connection; building a reframed sense of belonging
༄ COHERENT COLLECTIVE AGENCY — channelling agency toward meaningful shared purpose & potential for activation
༄ DEEPER GENERATIVE DIALOGUE — coalescing towards shared understanding; meanings and possibilities…moving beyond superficial comfort to a deeper sense of what collectively matters — cohesion
༄ CO-CREATIVE EXPERIMENTATION — generating, building upon and testing preliminary ideas
༄ WORKING AGREEMENTS — coalitions/living labs/new forms of work systems with clear and common(s) purpose
༄ GOVERNANCE (moral compass) — enabling and protective stewardship, stake/care/holder rights and obligations, freedoms within limits — guardrails and criteria…
༄ COALITION ACTIVATION — undertaking shared and overlapping life-affirming purpose-driven work…
༄ CO-CREATED VALUE FLOWS — jointly defined, invested and generated; meaningful value exchange toward community and ecosystem health and resilience
༄ REGENERATIVE PROGRESS & OUTCOMES — healthy self-regenerating and self-regulating cycles of meaningful progress/outcomes with feedback loops…
༄ PILOTED DEMONSTRATIONS — tangible examples with stories that build credibility and amplify what’s possible, adaptable and doable…
༄ ONGOING ADAPTATION & INSPIRATION — human (living system) capacity for co-creative ideation and continuous improvement…
🔄 REPEAT — adaptive, recursive patterns learned and applied again and again…right scaled
Evolutionary navigation can also be (r)evolutionary…
At some point…
We consciously choose love over fear.
We learn through positive experience, some painful lessons and plenty of practice that love actually works better — much better! We tap our collective capacity to interbecome extraordinary…living into a better future for humanity and the living planet we call home.
We reconstitute the commons into the living fabric of society.
The metaphorical reboot of society’s operating system is paradoxically not a reboot at all. After all, adaptive living systems are not mechanistic, machines or computers! Living and loving life in the fullest life-affirming sense cannot be done by proxy.
*This article was updated July 2024, reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen and adapt — a humbling learning journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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