Collectively Imagining Change, Part 1
Creating the Collective Imaginary of Tomorrow, Today
In this trilogy of articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), I interpolate Tomas Bjorkman’s magnum opus The World We Create: From God to Market, which is designed to awaken us to our own social constructions and develop a more conscious society based on evolutionary and complexity thinking, and ultimately reimagine monetary relations. I reviewed some broader themes of his book and the implications of the movement in an article titled The World We’re Creating (2018), which I followed up with The World That’s Emerging (2020). This is a process that invites our network as well as the whole of humanity into a collective imaginary generative of the paradigm shift. We need to collectively wake up and upgrade the social imaginary to match the shifting complex terrain of 21st century global civilization, while changing the money system at the same time.
We create our world, but it is hardly fair, sustainable, or meaningful. The metamodern thought perspective invites a dramatic shift across a set of social structures that can make relative utopia within reach. This paradigm is not monolithic but evolving on a new plateau of interlocking insights. In our capitalist matrix, where we are told that money is finite and you don’t deserve it, it is hard to realistically imagine a paradigm shift in which we’re all economically liberated and work together on the world civilization we need.
Detractors vigorously argue that no social investment or a big push for renewable energy is even affordable. Conversely, this series builds up towards an economic epiphany and post-capitalist transition enabled by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). From the dawn of history to the “end” of it, our collective journey is converging on a new consensus, and we need to be ready and responsible for the coming windfall. This necessarily begins with a long walk down our collective memory lane.
Some aspects of our present worldviews have ancient origins, deep in human history when we first started to generate inner landscapes of mental imagery. Our archetypal psychic spaces were forged over millennia through countless experiences encoded into language and cultural systems. This ability of abstraction is what humans have exercised to generate a social reality of shared meaning and productive relations, which is subject to increasing complexity. Evolution explains how the world came into being, how we emerge from it and evolve with it, and if we’re smart about it; how we survive the climate crisis. Humans are a self-organizing species, and now we have the capacity and need to act as a collective intelligence with a common social imaginary.
The origin of human beings is the stuff of myth and legend. This is where the narrative of Bjorkman’s book The World We Create begins, after an obligatory tour through the Big Bang. Anatomically modern humans emerged amidst several other advanced hominids now extinct, between 300 and 200,000 years ago. Symbolic languages slowly emerged until a speculated ‘linguistic big bang’ around 100,000 years ago. And through the “cognitive revolution” (70–30,000ya), humans have proliferated collective imaginaries and cultural symbol systems. The worldview of early humans are experienced and developed through animism, where the physical and mental realms are undivided, and only our dreams provide a window into a new imaginary realm.
The advanced beings we are today had to start somewhere quite humble. For tens of thousands of years, stone age humans deployed their newly found creative powers to generate culture, bit by bit. This is when memes started replicating through us, long before we had any idea what they were. Memes would be any replicable social knowledge, a word, a concept, an object, that early humans could learn and pass on to each other. There is likely no single origin story, but constant cycles of discovery and creation through countless experiments.
Gossip at the level of the tribe became a practice of memetic meaning creation as much as survival, to generate stable sets of cultural knowledge. By the time ancient cave paintings appear, long before any form of writing or permanent settlements, we had relatively complex social imaginaries and relations. The profound secrets of this primitive art lie in the simple fact that it never existed before. Then one day — poof! — there it was. The paintings themselves are not the spark of culture, but evidence of its psychic rumblings, and its abstract representation taking concrete form in the physical world.
These earliest known examples reveal fragments of our forgotten past and little tastes of forbidden fruits. Noble lies, founding myths, and worship of god or alien forebearers all seem perfectly plausible in such a magical mindset. Psychedelics also likely played a periodic role in the evolutionary mutations of mind and culture, specifically expressed through leaps in language, emotion, and abstract thinking. The actual culture of this antediluvian era is long lost, but we find fragments, traces, and echos of it and patch together a history.
All of this took place long before the last ice age ended and the holocene period began, along with the Neolithic revolution in the fertile crescent. Since then, our collective imaginaries exploded in the development of different complex concepts, belief systems, stories, symbols, language, techniques, rituals, narratives, laws, institutions, identities, religions, art, politics, philosophies, etc… It was a gradual shift, not really beginning to formalize until the first cities and empires. The problem with all these lineages is that we inherit all of it and forgot why things are the way they are. Knowledge and culture were passed down from the ancients, as it were, but history is forgotten or destroyed. It’s only in recent centuries that we could reconstruct it, and new discoveries are still being made.
The social imaginaries that enable society are made up, but it’s not so easy to stop believing in them. A core part of what makes us human is our cultural production of shared social imaginaries, as if we’re part of a collective consciousness dreaming histories and cultures from which we constellate our identities. The past necessarily sticks with us because we remember. Memory is what allows us to sort and access different memes that make up the shared imaginary. Our understanding must be upgraded into a metamodern thought perspective adequate for our complexity age. Everything really is different now, and there’s no going back.
Since the turn of the century, our new epoch was called the anthropocene, among other things, a distinct break in the collective imaginaries of the holocene prior where humans were subordinate to nature. Now we are the dominant geological force on the planet, while reckoning with the profound intersection of natural and human caused aspects of climate change. Our imaginary eschatologies have collided with eco-catastrophic realities, and we must quickly write a new shared narrative that reverses the course of destruction.
Can we imagine a world without war? How about an economy without externalities? Or capital without contradictions? These persistent paradoxes can be overcome if we converge our powers of abstraction to define the transformation from the present limits of our developmental stage to the next paradigm. This is the promise of the metamodern thought perspective, in the spirit of common sense and dignity. Most of the groundwork has been done, its just a matter of building consensus around the consolidation.
The constructed nature of money has evolved just like everything else, through many iterations and instruments, and now it is on the brink of a new evolutionary leap. In our proto-history of becoming human, the world made deep impressions on us, transforming us into bottomless inner-beings that we then project back onto the world. Language itself kept getting more complex, and created higher levels of abstraction (77). The bigger ideas then became part of society itself, encoded for future generations.
Money is one such imaginary product that we take for granted today, where it has become entirely unmoored from use value over time. We trust in money’s face value and fungibility, but at this point in the evolution of capitalism money has been abstracted far away from the concrete, evaporated into bits in the cloud.
It’s going to take a shared act of “collective agency” (77) to change the system and reclaim abstracted wealth for the collective wellbeing; we all have to do this together. It’s an emancipatory move, to free us from the double-bind that imaginaries like money, the market, and nation-states keep us in. Higher levels of imagination enable godly technologies, from automobiles to atomic bombs (78), but to understand our imaginary today we must continue tracing the first one: animism.
In the beginning the world was one, the anima was the spirit, the breath of life that ran through the world and us. The ‘patterning instinct’ in us enabled us to anthropomorphize and enchant the world (79). We projected a whole make believe world of spirits outside of us, that became just as real as actual threats (80), even though they didn’t really exist. This led to the creation of archetypal social structures and hierarchies, which led to more abstract religion over time, from sun gods to pantheons of mythical gods, to more divine principles later on. For the longest time, magic was our causal explanation for nearly everything. It remains embedded deep in our psyche today, hardwired into our brains, and correlates with stages early childhood development (82).
Our social imaginaries play out on a mindscape of memes, the “units of cultural information” (86) replicating through us. Memes are so abundant, any word can be a meme, as it represents a transmittable idea collapsed into a symbol or gesture. More broadly a meme could be an idea, skill, melody, theme, fact, person, conceptual object, etc… It can be a complex amalgamation of things so long as it works to share understanding. For example, internet memes crystallize a complex intersection of cultural references and distilled meaning, proliferated through social media. In these cases we often hold a very salient image or thought in our minds for each meme, even though they are highly contextual. This is an effect of metamodern superhybridity, where narratives and tropes are mashed up to the Nth degree.
The infinite scope is what makes a science of memetics so elusive, and the effort to map it (like the genome) so romantic and reconstructive. Memes can be contagious and they are subject to evolutionary pressures in their own novel ways. As the knowledge benefits the person and community, the meme is likely to be shared (though there is also incentives to secrecy). In the animal kingdom instincts and behaviours are passed on without a word. In early humans, various memes were the building blocks of our conscious effort to co-create reality, whether it be teaching tool-making, hunting, or talking to spirits.
On the other hand, pathological memes can weaken our intellectual defences and compromise critical thinking. They can instantiate common plagues like racism, sexism, and classism, to more elaborate ideological traps like consumerism, suicide cults, and fascism. Bad memes can corrupt the body politic like a pathogen, so we need ways to immunize ourselves, hence a Deliberately Developmental Culture, aiding a post-capitalist turn and memetic evolution. We’ve seen how memes can be weaponized in the culture war, how harmful ideas can spread like a virus. Though these pathologies eventually self-select out in a developmental culture, in my view we can’t afford to wait on piecemeal incrementalism anymore. A monumental transition is on the horizon that requires some degree of vision, and in this regard I attempt to mediate between Bjorkman’s open-source plan and alternative voices to chart a course.
The reason our collective imaginaries are so over-determined is because we reproduce them, and there was never really a break in continuity with the past. From deep into our history, culture is passed on through memes but we often lack memory or record of the specific origins. When we are born, we don’t possess identity or knowledge of ourselves, let alone human history. All of that has to be acquired, and in this way even our language and history is continuous with evolution, only artificially demarcated by us. The historical record is full of gaps, erosion and erasure, and nonlinear paths, but wherever we look, the intergenerational transmission of knowledge upholds a complex of collective imaginaries that also change over time. This is why there is no one supreme culture, but a myriad of threads mimetically reproducing and evolving.
The breakthroughs in the sociology of knowledge in the 1960s pulled back the curtain on how entangled we are in our own social production. We humans reify our mental concepts with real world gravitas and trust them as such, even though they dissolve under scrutiny. From time and space, to crime, race, gender, class, and much more, virtually everything we can describe in our human world is ‘made-up’ in some regard, not absolute but subject to our struggle over it. We move from knowledge and culture being taken for granted, to deconstructing them, and now metamodernism is concerned with reconstruction.
Cultural evolution in early humans enabled the explosive speed of change and growth, and successive technological revolutions have accelerated that process exponentially. Symbolic language and imagination really unleashed our potential as co-creators of our own collective evolution many times before, and now we must take a collective leap into a new imaginary. The Thomas theorem from sociology is instructive here; ‘what we believe is real, is real in its consequences’. If you believe in a certain god or fairy tale, it will influence your behavior even though it’s not real. If we believe in endless economic growth, then we will act accordingly, but it doesn’t make it true. We have taken for granted too many imagined rules and regulations, which blind us to the constitutive level of reality, that we must see to change things at the root level. We also need to start believing in a higher paradigm, so it can have real effects on our development.
Transpersonal psychology gives way to the sociological idea of the ‘dividual’ and development, which can and should be made a political priority (495). We have the means to facilitate Bildung in each person on a global scale. We have the capacity to create a listening society, the opposite of a surveillance state. It just requires a successful socio-technical systems phase transition, no big deal. If we do it right, it will be surprisingly better than we can even believe is possible today; a world of perpetual peace, solidarity with all life, and most fundamental to this success; one where everyone’s basic needs are taken care of by effecting the biggest lever of all; the monetary system. This is not a pipe dream, it is the prefigurative politics we need. We can imagine some simple amendments to the current system, for better efficiency and justice (347).
Bjorkman proposes very agreeable changes at the fundamental level such as social and environmental bottom lines. The biggest socio-economic myth is that poverty is natural, when it is actually an imaginary assumption that is upheld by powerful interests. Our collective denial and complicity in these lies deepens the crisis. Bjorkman asks for shareholder accountability, new definitions of work, and investing in purposeful people ahead of profit. These are but a few prescriptive baselines which we can all believe in. Through reasonable policies like a clean jobs guarantee, minimum wage, universal basic income, and universal education and healthcare, a just tax code, and MMT, poverty can be effectively outlawed.
The typical answer to the question “How does systems change come about?” is that anomalies mount, old believers die off, new systems emerge and become the norm among younger generations (484). This may hold true but is not very satisfactory. The more complex and interesting answer is that the change is currently upon us and it’s our role to understand why and how. Bjorkman favours the Two Loops Theory (Berkana Institute), the process of which bifurcates and either fails or evolves. This parallels the choice we have to make with metamodernism. A critical mass has to adopt a new worldview to reach real tipping points (486).
According to Bjorkman, it starts with innovators, then emerges into bridge-building networks, evolving into full on practicing communities, such as Burning Man, the Syntheist node, and so called ‘Teal organizations’. These are privileged examples, and don’t necessarily feed back into positive change, but are nonetheless embodied attempts at higher consciousness. The Two Loops model then reaches a new threshold where the experimental social values are shared a majority. After this real political power must be acquired through democratic means, then it becomes the new normal. This is one model; there are others. And the pandemic crisis and global protests adding to the meta-crisis provide yet another scenario for reflection and action.
We are constantly dancing on this ‘tipping point’ towards seizing real political power, but are held back by skeptics, moderates, and reactionaries alike, lacking the necessary faith and commitment when it matters most. Evil prevails when good people fail to speak up and act together. New technology and world events are fast forcing and enabling us to learn to work together peacefully, sustainably, and equitably, because fighting is a waste of scarce resources. It has become an ongoing ‘emperor has no clothes’ situation, where the market is the emperor, a naked market fundamentalist, with us demanding he abdicate his arbitrary power. But if we can’t imagine a healthy politics to manage this chaos together, then technology might just be a multiplier of inequality and destruction.
Increasingly throughout human history we are cultivating self-awareness as a species, which poses many inconvenient truths. There is a high price on such enlightenment, but we can’t afford not to invest in this common future. The idea of the social imaginary is not self-evident, and is very resistant to change, but our sanity and survival are entangled with it, so we must upgrade it together, which is further discussed in Part 2. The economics of MMT is one major lever of this change, which we explore deeper in Part 3.
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