Thoughtware Crisis 2020

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As we enter the Spring of 2020, Australia’s fires have already burnt 5 Million hectares of forest, killed over 2 billion animals, and created extreme conditions across the continent. Scientists and newspapers report that it’s only going to get worse. On top of the grim future stories, there is a flood of memes on the Internet about the possibility of World War 3. Saying, “Happy New Year,” to anyone feels as criminally insane as Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

What’s at the root of this painful insanity? Could it be our thoughtware?

Perhaps the most popular thoughtware on Earth entices us to ‘get rich quick, or die trying’. The thoughtware promotes imitating the so-called ‘first-world’ economies who gained wealth at the expense of other people’s lives and freedom, degrading ecosystem health, and exterminating species at the fastest possible rate.

How can it be that we allow over twenty-five armed conflicts in the world making certain individuals very rich? How can we permit companies to sell clothes made by child slaves? How can we allow the spraying of pesticides that poison the air and waterways so that supermarkets have shelves overflowing with food that then goes to waste?

Could these behaviors also originate in thoughtware? If thoughtware has such a powerful influence on our lives and our future, what is it? Where does thoughtware come from? How do we manage it or change it?

Thoughtware is the unique set of ideas each person uses for thinking about things. When you go to school you are taught what to think about. Before going to school you had already learnt what to think with.

If thoughtware does not come from school, where did you learn your thoughtware? You adopted your thoughtware from your parents. Where did you parents get their thoughtware? From their parents, their culture, their beliefs, their assumptions, decisions, and so on. A few bits of our thoughtware are conscious to us. Most of it is unconscious and is passed on from generation to generation for thousands of years. You have been given Standard Human Intelligence Thoughtware (S.H.I.T.). The more you become conscious of the thoughtware you use, the more you gain choice about using it or not.

Your thoughtware impacts how you see yourself and the world. We human beings do not interact with the world directly as it is. We interact with the world through the maps, perspectives, views, outlooks, points of reference — the thoughtware — that we have about the world. Thoughtware is a 360 degree filter between you and the world that ongoingly determines everything you can perceive and everything you can express. What this means is that if you upgrade your thoughtware you get a new world.

For example, if your thoughtware tells you that Earth is a thing, an inanimate material object, then it you become numb to the sensations of owning the Earth as a slave, buying and selling Earth for ‘profit’, exploiting anything you can take away from the Earth, and thinking you have power over the Earth. The consequences of using this 16th Century thoughtware are obvious: land ownership, destruction of countless habitats and ecosystems and the current climate chaos. If your thoughtware is that a person with dark skin is not a Being with the same value as yourself, then you enact colonialism, racism, slavery.

The way I look at it is through the results. Results don’t lie. Whatever intentions you might think you have, the results are the results. What is the current state of the world and climate?

Some of the thoughtware you are unconsciously using right now comes from modern culture. In modern culture you can only exploit water, minerals, plants, animals because modern culture thoughtware regards them as things. You more easily exploit people when you see them as things. I cannot think of any aspect of the climate crisis and other crisis that does not come from modern culture.

Modern culture uses capitalist patriarchal empire thoughtware based on scarcity and competition which claims that there aren’t enough resources to go around so humans must compete against each other to survive.

Modern culture’s thoughtware is colonial, hierarchical, consumerist, and stuck in child-level responsibility at best… when it’s not avoiding responsibility altogether.

Modern culture thoughtware holds convenience as a high value: the right to buy things with one click and get them hand-delivered the next day, triple-packaged in plastic.

Modern culture thoughtware keeps you in modern-day slavery, working in a job you may hate to be able to afford things you don’t need in a life you don’t own.

Modern culture produces more than enough food for every person on the planet, and yet — due to our thoughtware — people still starve.

Modern culture thoughtware makes us think it is okay to make huge collective messes (think nuclear waste, mass extinction of species, the amount of microplastic in your veins and in the oceans) with no conscience about cleaning them up. Our thoughtware makes us believe that poorer countries will deal with it, or next generation will clean up our messes. Modern culture thoughtware functions at child-level responsibility.

Results will only change if you change the thoughtware you use.

How can you upgrade your thoughtware or the thoughtware used in your family, company, school, or community? Upgrading human thoughtware is comparable to upgrading the software on your computer or phone.

• Before anything changes you first you need to notice that your thoughtware is terribly outdated.
• Secondly, you need to notice that upgraded thoughtware is available. This is exactly what this article is trying to tell you.
• Thirdly, you need to understand that — just like with your phone — there will be a few moments of chaos between when the old thoughtware shuts down and the new thoughtware is loaded and gets operational.

Probably ever since you were eighteen-years-old you were longing for authentic adulthood thoughtware-upgrade initiations.

When you feel enough pain and embarrassment about the degraded and decrepit condition of your thoughtware, the next question becomes relevant: “How can I upgrade my thoughtware?”

To upgrade your thoughtware you first need to take responsibility for your irresponsibility of using the selfish-child thoughtware of modern culture. This is a fairly painful process to do, especially if you are using modern culture’s thoughtware of feelings.

In modern culture it’s not okay to feel. Modern culture’s thoughtware tells us that there are good and bad feelings, negative or positive feelings. What results can you get when you are running that thoughtware? Surely you will tend to seek only ‘positive’ feelings and reject or repress the ‘bad’ feelings. This leads to polarity thinking about ‘us’ being the good ones and ‘them’ being the bad ones, so that we end up fighting each other to distract ourselves from facing the job of upgrading to 21st Century thoughtware.

Modern culture thoughtware produces billions of emotionally numb, incompetent, and imature humans. Can you imagine what kind of interactions they are limited to having? What kind of relationships are we limited to having? What kind of crippled organisations do such people create? Take a look at the current state of the world. We have become the kind of people who say, “Happy New Year,” to each other regardless of what’s really going on.

Upgrading thoughtware requires doing experiments with new distinctions.

Like I said before, results don’t lie. Some of these experiments take ten minutes. Some take ten weeks. Some take years. Right now there are tens of thousands of people experimenting with upgraded thoughtware around the planet. Some are creating extraordinary spaces to support others upgrading their thoughtware. You can become one of them. No one can do it for you. More interestingly, no one can stop you from doing it.

A crisis is defined as a time of intense difficulty or danger that is marked by a crucial or decisive turning point. What I am trying to say is that we are not facing a climate crisis. We are facing a thoughtware crisis. If you are to create a bright future for yourself and the Earth, you will do it through upgrading your thoughtware.

In this article there are a series of words that have hyperlinks attached to them. Each hyperlink will take you to a website. Each website is a part of a free-to-play massively-multiplayer online-and-offline personal-evolution thoughtware-upgrade game called StartOver.xyz, created by Anne-Choé Destremau and Clinton Callahan. Each website provides you with brilliant distinctions and practical experiments for upgrading your thoughtware right now. We welcome you into the next steps of your evolution.

The key to the 2020 thoughtware crisis is now in your hands. Will you help us pass it around?

Looking forward to creating the Next Regenerative and Thriving Culture with you,

Vera Franco