327 Part 1 — What is One Mountain? What are we doing here?
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [January 15, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.
Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
This is Part 1 of a two-part Series. See Part 2 HERE
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni LIVE every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.
This is not a regular podcast
I want to just say a word about what we are doing here.
I’ve gotten a lot of pressure from different people, and they’ve said, just turn this into a regular podcast, because you’ll increase the numbers and participate in the podcast world. And that’s beautiful, and there are reasons to start a regular classical podcast, and maybe we’ll do that at some point — but we didn’t want to make this into a podcast, this is something else.
We are trying to do something else. We are actually meeting each other in the space, and feeling each other, and this is the heartthrob of what we call the revolution.
We call it the revolution — not in a trite way, not in a sloganeering way.
At key moments in history, revolutionaries would see around the corner, and realize that the old order as it was could not hold — and we need to create a new order. This is more true at this moment in history than at any other moment. This new order needs to include the best of everything that came before it, but also to transcend it into a new possibility.
Global coordination is the only way to avoid the collapse of civilization
And as I’ve been privileged — ecstatically trembling — to share with you many times, take a look at Joseph Tainter’s book about how civilizations rise and fall (Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies). It is a very, very important book. One of the things that Tainter and many other writers point out is that all civilizations have fallen.
All civilizations have fallen because the stories that they lived in were, in some sense, based on rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics.
It was always us against them, and then the us against them stories always infiltrated the kingdom itself, so even when the kingdom was very powerful, it was the kingdom against other people.
At a time of war, you had clarity: you knew who the good guys and the bad guys were. But then, when the war was over — for example, the United States, when the war with the Soviet Union, in its classical sense of the Cold War, was over, in the late 80s, starting with Gorbachev, and then into the 90s — when America realized that it had won the Cold War, there was no longer anything to bring the United States together, so the United States began to be enormously polarized. The same thing happened in Europe: as NATO realized that the old Soviet Union wasn’t a threat in the way that they thought that it was, the internal divisions, the rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics of every country, began to explode again, and polarization began to define the landscape.
What was happening with every civilization is, interior polarization weakened the civilization. The lack of a shared story of value within the civilization weakened it, and the civilization fell. We now have a global civilization — and we haven’t created a shared story of value. We haven’t solved the generator functions that caused all civilizations to fall.
We now have a global civilization, and that global civilization is demarcated by exponential technologies and extraction models depleting the earth of resources that it took billions of years to create, and depleting our core energy resources, which we are burning through right now, which is going to lead to a civilizational collapse.
The only way we can avoid that collapse is through genuine global coordination.
We have to co-ordinate. Now, to ordinate means we look in the same direction: we co-ordinate. To ordinate, we need shared ordinating values, or shared First Values and First Principles.
- We cannot create global coordination without global resonance — which means we resonate with each other like instruments resonate in the symphony.
- We cannot have global resonance without global coherence — which means we have coherence together, where we form a larger whole.
- We cannot have global coherence without global intimacy — which means a sense of shared identity.
- We cannot have a global intimacy without a shared story of value, without a Universal Grammar of Value.
That’s what One Mountain is about.
That’s the revolution.
The most important revolution is to evolve the source code
As we see each other in the alleyways and in the marketplaces, and we see each other online and offline, we look at each other and we say, Revolution! It means that the single-most important revolution is to evolve the source code, and we evolve the source code by articulating a New Story of Value, that integrates —
- the best of the validated traditional value structures,
- the best of the modern validated insights,
- and the best of the postmodern validated insights.
For example, someone like my friend, Jordan Peterson, who’s doing a lot of podcasting these days, Jordan says, postmodernity is evil. Jordan, that’s a mistake. No, postmodernity is not evil. Postmodernity has got some things right and some things wrong.
There are validated insights in the traditional world, which was called premodern, there are validated insights in modernity, and there are validated insights in postmodernity — we integrate those together, and we create for the first time a New Story of Value.
I’ve been talking about this for the last ten to fifteen years. My beloved, beloved friend, Barbara Marx Hubbard, who co-founded with me this evolutionary One Mountain Many Paths, talked about it for forty years. It’s unimaginably important, this New Story — and often, we would talk about it, and there would be people in One Mountain who would then share it in articles that they write, and we’ve done everything we can to put this notion of a New Story into the world.
But a New Story doesn’t mean a made-up story. It doesn’t mean: Oh, I made up a new story, let’s declare a New Story.
It means doing the hard work of integrating the validated insights of the traditional world, the modern world, the postmodern world, into a New Story of Value that becomes a universal grammar of value, that then raises all boats.
Neuro-cultural plasticity: a time between worlds, a time between stories
That’s what we mean when we say that we are at this moment of neuro-cultural plasticity — just like the brain is plastic, so if you lose part of one hemisphere, for example, of the left brain, then the right brain will pick up and begin to learn, in a new way, those capacities — that’s called plasticity in the brain. And it’s something that we didn’t understand sixty-seventy years ago, it’s the last decades of brain research (and Merzenich did very important work in this).
When I talk about neuro-cultural plasticity, what I mean is that there is a certain moment in which culture is plastic, when we don’t have a clear story. There is no clear story of value, and that’s what we’re calling a time between worlds. This is a time between worlds, meaning, we realize that the old stories of value are not quite valid, they don’t quite hold, so we need a New Story of Value — but the New Story hasn’t been born, so we’re calling that a time between worlds and a time between stories. We are in a time between worlds, and a time between stories. That’s what we call neuro-cultural plasticity.
We are doing this together.
We are the revolution.
We are at the heart of the revolution.
We are telling the story, and we’re telling a new piece of the story every week together.
This is exactly what the Renaissance was — it was a time between worlds and a time between stories. In the Renaissance, we were swept with and challenged by the Black Death, by a pandemic that swept Europe. The Black Death destroyed between a third to half of Europe and a huge part of Asia. It killed everyone. People died horrifically, brutally, in the streets. They had no idea how to meet it, and they had no idea what to do — and so, in responding to the Black Death, da Vinci and Ficino and their cohorts understood that they had to tell a New Story of Value — and that story was the story of modernity.
Modernity lost the source of value
Did they get the story right?
- They got part of it right. The part they got right birthed what I’m going to call the dignities of modernity (that’s Jürgen Habermas’ phrase), the new way of information-gathering and universal human rights.
- But they got lots of the story wrong, and part of what they got wrong in the story is, they deconstructed the source of value.
That value is real — they lost track of that.
That uniqueness is real — they lost track of that.
That the good, the true, and the beautiful are real — they lost track of that.
They lost the basis for the good, the true, and the beautiful.
The basis used to be divine revelation: God told us. But God told us was owned by every religion, and they realized that every religion had overreached and over-claimed, and that revelation was often mediated through cultural categories, and wasn’t fully accurate — so they threw out revelation, but they weren’t able to establish a new basis for value.
They said, we are going to ignore that issue, we’ll just assume that value is real — and they said about value in one famous document, the founding document of American revolution, we hold these truths to be self-evident. What does that mean?
It means we don’t really have a basis for value, but we just take that as a given — so what modernity did is it took out a loan.
By saying we hold these truths to be self-evident, they were talking about value. They were talking about value — that we hold it to be self-evident, but what they really meant was, we don’t really know what the basis is, but we just take it as a given. So, they took out a loan from the traditional world. They took out a loan of social capital from the traditional world, they said we are just going to assume the value is real — but they never worked it out, and then, gradually —
- Value began to collapse.
- The Universe Story began to collapse.
- The belief that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful was real began to collapse.
- The belief that love is real began to collapse.
Collapse of value is the source of existential risk
What do you do if you grew up in a world in which value is not real? In which all you have is programmed social media, run by companies whose interest is not yours, whose interest is to keep you on a program for as long as they can, in order to extract financial value from you?
We live in that immersive environment called an Internet, but —
- we don’t have a source of value,
- and we don’t have a Universe Story,
- and we don’t have a story of human identity,
- and we don’t have a story of desire,
- and we don’t have a narrative of power.
We have a failure of frameworks.
Value collapses — and when that happens, as the great poet said, the center does not hold. We become the hollow men and the stuffed men, gesture without form. The center does not hold (W.B. Yeats).
- You have a collapse at the very center of society, because you no longer have Eros.
- You no longer have a Reality in which value is real — and so you have this lingering sense of emptiness.
The most famous shows all over the world become survivor shows, where people are thrown together on an island, and the truth of who they really are is revealed, or at least that’s what television is saying:
- Everyone is competing with everyone.
- All you have is rivalrous conflict and win-lose metrics.
- All you have is a success story, which generates a world in which everyone’s against everyone else.
- You have no intimacy, you have no shared story of value.
You have a complete collapse at the very center — and that’s the source of existential risk.
The source of existential risk — all the risks, the fifteen risks to the planet that exist today — every single one of them is based at its root on this failure of intimacy, which itself is based on a failure of a shared story of value.
The only story is a success story, in which —
- every country competes against every other country,
- and within every country, everyone competes against each other,
- and within every company, every division competes against each other,
- and people in a relationship are competing against each other: am I getting my needs met, am I not getting my needs met? It’s me against you.
We no longer live in a world in which we are in devotion to a shared vision.
We no longer know what’s the shared story in which that which unites us is greater than that which divides us — that’s the revolution.
This revolution is not mine, it’s ours. That’s why we are not doing a classical podcast.
We are doing it so we can come together every week, and we can create this revolution together, literally — podcast by podcast, or One Mountain by One Mountain.
Okay, now one more thing. We’ve created this beautiful book that Elena did such beautiful work on, that Krista did so much work in bringing together, and it’s about the Russian-Ukrainian war. But it’s not really about the war. It’s called The First Four Weeks of the War, and we use that as a model to talk about values. I want to ask, really invite, everyone to get the book, and to write a review of it.
But it’s not to find out what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia. A lot has changed since we wrote that book. We didn’t write the book with the intention to talk about Ukraine and Russia. We used it as a model to talk about where we are, and what it means to have a shared story of value, and why that’s so critical in politics. I just want to just invite everyone to get that, pick it up, write a review. And thank you to Krista, to Elena, to our partnership, for doing such a gorgeous job.
This is Part 1 of a two-part Series. See Part 2 HERE
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni every Sunday in One Mountain:
Join Dr. Marc Gafni and the entire community in an evolutionary celebration this and every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.
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