Insights from 'Bend not Break (Pt. 3) - Sensemaking, Uncertainty and Purpose'

The third part of Bend Not Break, ‘Sensemaking, Uncertainty and Purpose ’ is characterized by so much openness, honesty, energy and emotion and shared feelings. There's a chance of melting away, you have been warned. ??

Bend Not Break is a highly insightful discussion between Nate Hagens (The Great Simplification ) and Daniel Schmachtenberger (The Consilience Project ) about the drivers of the global economy, in Nate term’s the?Superorganism?and in Daniel’s terms the?Metacrisis.

In this episode they go off script and discuss human conditioning, sensemaking, uncertainty, how they view their roles, their life journeys, lessons learnt, sources of hope and inspiration etc. In the midst of that emotional cocktail they also manage to introduce discrete phase shifts and an experiential model regarding the tragedies of the world. ?

??I create these posts to share how it increased my insights in the complexity of ‘the superorganism’ by naming and shortly describing the different constructs that are discussed. Beware that most of them are nuanced. It’s best read after my first and second post.

??Human psyche?- It is Nate's mission to describe the issue with all its complexity and nuance while the human brain doesn’t like nuance, it likes certainty. Daniel replies with: “I think evolutionary psyche is a very riddled field but interesting. We study humans who've been ubiquitously conditioned, mostly in the kind of 'WEIRD' model (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and then we take that to be human nature and then we try to describe why we are biologically oriented to be that way.” Following reductionism – i.e., our tendency to simplify reality, focusing on parts and neglecting the relations between the parts – it is easy to seek for correlations between a gene and a particular outcome (e.g., condition or behavior). Instead, Daniel prefers to look at “different cultures in the median of an important quality, difference in the distribution, across the whole culture, because it shows that it's not an outlier person, it is actually a different development.”

?????Rewards - Daniels illustrates how for many things in society we have been able to strip ‘the work’ away from ‘the reward’. For instance, fast food doesn’t require any hunting or gathering, porn doesn’t require any intimacy or relationship. As a result of having to do less effort, the rewards are pseudo-satisfiers, Daniel refers to these things as ‘one marshmallows’ (after the marshmallow test ). Additionally, ‘two marshmallows’ are the original, i.e. evolutionary relevant, activities that require work and effort and, as a result, provide a more true, longer-lasting satisfaction. [Personally, insights from learning about the working of our brains made a huge difference in my life and therefore I recommend everyone to study this using multiple sources].

??This tendency to go for ‘one marshmallow’ options is even higher in a society where personalized AI technology is used at a multi-billion person scale to hijack limbic brains and condition them for instantaneous rewards and certainty. For instance, through polarizing messages, screaming headlines and articles stripped of nuance simply generated for the clicks, views and likes.

??Steering ‘the superorganism’ on a bend-not-break path is definitely a two-marshmallow endeavor. It requires reconditioning ourselves to avoid seeking instantaneous certainty and look less directly for solutions. More specifically, “a pure desire for clear understanding as well as a desire to be effective”, “the willingness to be NOT part of an in-group that is certain” and “acknowledging that you will never get certain because there’s always more stuff that I don’t know.”

??Why is it important that ‘the superorganism’ or ‘meta-narrative’ is understood in a single human mind? This is important because reductionism (as explained earlier) is one of the fundamental aspects of the meta-crisis. To coordinate a lot of human activity in society we tend to decompose complex problems into smaller concrete tasks, perform those and then put the result of all the small tasks back together. This approach works fine for complicated problems (e.g., a machine or an IT landscape) but not when dealing with complexity (e.g. an economy or an ecosystem) [Note: this resonates with my takeaways from the Regenerative Design Lab, the Introduction to Regenerative Economics Course and Warm Data Labs].

????I can hear some of you think: “But how and when do you act then?” Daniel clarifies: “When you decompose it [reality/complexity] and try to solve the problems in isolation, you end up moving the problem somewhere else. Of course, no one person can understand everything, but they can seek to understand in a way that has cognizance of the depth of interconnectedness. That's the only way to be able to do something, like any degree of specialization that is, not itself part of the problem.”

?Taking a fundamental approach – Daniel shares how his exposure to and research on one societal issue (animal welfare) let to other societal issues (e.g. deforestation, overfishing) and they seemed to be interconnected. Over time, Daniel noticed that none of these issues were getting any better, in other words, overall, activists and initiatives involved in fighting single issues keep getting the shorter end. As a result, he decided to take a more fundamental approach and invest more time in understanding the meta view. With regard to his motivation he adds: “If there wasn’t something sacred in cows, in other animals, in all the life in amazon, in all life, then I wouldn’t care” and “The only reason I'm scared or pissed off is because there's something I really love.”

?Fragmented Consciousness – In a trip down memory lane Daniel shares some of his sources of inspiration, such as Krishnamurti, David Bohm and Einstein. From Krishnamurti he picked up that “the highest stage of intelligence is to observe without evaluation.” Based on this it is recommended to make better sense of things before pushing in through filters (of evaluation) too quickly. Additionally, Daniel refers to David Bohm who viewed ‘a fragmented consciousness’ as the fundamental cause of all problems in the world, from family conflict all the way to environmental issues. Last, according to Einstein, in Daniel’s words: “it is a delusion of consciousness to think that, because there are distinctions, that there are parts and that these parts are separable, while they are not. In that delusion we can try to optimize for a part at the expense of something else, either on purpose or without knowing it, and we cause a lot of problems. If you do it without knowing it, we call it mistake theory and externalities. If you do it intentionally, we call it conflict theory; war, oppression etc.” This supports delaying our tendency to strive for quick-fix solutions and certainty and, instead, increase our understanding of ‘the whole’ before acting as well as learning to adapt and let go of our tendency to control.

????Feedback and Pain – Nate shares that, apart from a lot of support, he also gets unexpected feedback on his work saying that he is too optimistic, for instance, “We are headed for collapse”, “there’s nothing we can do, humans are going to go extinct by 2050”, etc. Daniel recalls from his own journey “[…] when someone's really in pain, they just actually want someone else to feel it with them. They don't want to be made wrong and they don't want it to be lessened. Because the thing that makes the pain even worse is the loneliness of no one else can hold this with me.” I recall going through a phase like that. What about you?

?? Discrete Phase Shifts are activities or developments that break with previous trends. As they are often unforeseen and not factored for in calculations and forecasts, they render most of them irrelevant. Daniel found out about these phenomena after they messed up some of his doomsday calculations (luckily ??). To illustrate, he shares a story by Buckminster Fuller about a bird that is growing in its shell. The bird will use all the egg white to grow and eventually hatch. After hatching, the bird will no longer consume egg white but now learns to use its beak. So, the period in the shell could be seen as unsustainable but by hatching a whole new phase starts. Now, this is a kind of phase shift that we know about, however, regarding the future of humanity there are lots of (yet) unknown ones. Therefore, Daniel spends his time on questions like: “Which discrete phase shifts could occur? What would their impact be? And (potentially) how can I bring them about?”

??Daniel shares we have a bad track record when compared to predictions and that it is quite easy to come to catastrophic calculations that will turn out not to be true (partly because of the point above). This also holds true for optimistic calculations; it simply doesn’t go the way we expect things to go. Nate adds that he has veered towards certainty at times but acknowledges that 'the more that he knows and the more he talks to people about it, the more variables surface.' As a result, Nate now views his roles as passing the baton to other prosocial humans to take on a part of the work and also play a role. Daniel adds that he chooses – partly because of our historical bad track record of predictions – to work as best as he can in the presence of still not knowing.

??Understanding the world – We have been conditioned to be ‘customers’ and ‘voters’. Sensemaking is done for us and we get to choose from a constrained set of choices that doesn’t require any creativity or real, deep sensemaking on our own. Instead of doing the sense making for people and offering quick fixes, solutions and certainty, Nate and Daniel want to invite YOU to make sense of things on your own, because it will give you a deeper understanding of what seems to be a lot of different issues, that are actually interconnected. [The message of 'sensemaking on your own' resonates highly with what I picked up from these long reads about 'how Elon Musk thinks'. It is an older piece, takes some time to digest but I'm sure they will open your eyes to sensemaking on your own and thinking differently].

?? The deeper understanding will lead to different possibilities on how to move forward. In a similar vein, "if the only value of knowledge was its immediate, clear utility, then mechanics would be the only thing really worth studying. The reason one studies philosophy is not so much what you immediately do with it but what it can do to you. What it can do to you in the way that you relate to all information and all situations from a deeper place." [Daniel believes it was Bertrand Russell who said something along these lines, however I am unable to confirm].

??Nate also shares how much it means to him that he met Daniel which he refers to as “another human who is aware of all these existential risks, the trajectories, the probability distributions and the various futures” and that shares the same mindset of no matter how bad the outlook may be, “let’s roll up the sleeves and find some paths forward.” He calls that experience "buoying to his psychology” and it resonates with my experiences of the different communities and groups that I’ve joined the last year (e.g., Regenerative Economics , WEAll , nRhythm Design Lab , Post Growth Institute , Beyond Growth Conference , Post Growth Entrepreneurship , etc.).

??????Three phases model regarding the world’s tragedy – Daniel loosely describes different phases that people can be in regarding the tragedies of the world. First, ‘pre-tragic optimism’ that people will have, where they have ideals that have not yet been shattered on the reality of the world. Secondly, encountering the tragedy of the world; having one’s ideals shatter, possibly followed by cynicism. Some of my personal experiences that would fit this phase are learning about (the history of) economics, enclosure and continued colonialism. Lastly, there’s a post-tragic place that Daniel describes as “a commitment to being in service to the sacredness of life whether you can succeed or not. It’s still the right hill to die on.” This is a beautiful mission that resonates with me in an intellectual way. Truly feeling it is a path I’ve begun to explore.

??The whole episode is put into perspective by appreciating the fact that we, as humanity, have this gift of life by acknowledging our ‘brittle’ position in the galaxy. And that even if we manage to steer ‘the superorganism’ on a bend (instead of break) pathway, we might be taken out by a solar flare. I laughed out loud. ??

?The fourth part will discuss frameworks that inform better strategy, not a specific one, but a meta-strategy, meaning, in whatever domain one happens to be working in as the situation changes.?