“Occupy the New Paradigm” -- leverage for transformation

A few years ago, I encountered the phrase “Occupy the New Paradigm” in a recording of Dr. Karen O’Brien’s keynote at the Leverage Points 2019 conference on sustainability and transformation. I found the phrase quite thought-provoking, and have brought it up in various conversations from time to time. I was also curious to learn more about the conference itself, which led me to finding Charlotte Weil’s delightful account online.

Today as I sit down to write this essay, I am inspired by three things. One is my friend and colleague Andy Paice’s new article on the implications of the “holistic paradigm” for democratic innovation . I am delighted to see him digesting the work of Nora Bateson, Bayo Akomolafe, Audrey Tang, Jonathan Rowson, and others, along with his own experiences facilitating Citizens' Assemblies and Citizens' Juries, to explore the “new paradigm” implications of participatory and deliberative democracy.??

I am also inspired by the nostalgia that Andy’s article has brought up for me. Over twenty years ago, I wrote a “seed essay ” on renewing enthusiasm for democracy by awakening the spirit of our shared life together. There I explored four aspects of paradigm shift:

• from “Inert Matter” to “Everything as Alive and Changing”?
• from the “Separation of Mind and Body” to the “Integration of Mind and Heart”?
• from “Leadership as Command and Control” to “Creative and Facilitative Leadership”?
• from “Mechanistic Theories of Change” to “Working With Field Effects"

That seed essay is currently only available via the Wayback Machine, and a few of the links in it have expired. Yet I’ve been told that much of it still holds up quite well. The essay was commissioned by Fetzer’s Collective Wisdom Initiative, a project whose work culminated in a small gem of a book, on “The Power of Collective Wisdom – and the trap of collective folly ” which remains deeply relevant for the times we are living in.

A third source of ongoing inspiration is Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer’s “Gardens of Democracy”, which explores the implications of the shift from “machine brain” to “garden brain”. In a thoughtful review , both critical and appreciative, by Peter Bearse offers some questions and concerns about how these “new ideas” could spread widely enough to influence our political system. Which is where “Occupying New & Ancient Paradigms” comes in…?

But first, as Andy writes in his essay,?

“Paradigms take time to take hold. We are still living in the structures of the one which began four centuries ago. Do we have time to change as a planetary species? Will rapid destruction of our ecosystems force us to change or will humanity destroy itself?”

This is the context that is calling us into a different way of understanding the world, one based on “cooperative, symbiotic relationships” instead of the “dynamics of competition, combat, and selfishness”.?

Where to start??

I offer the following three threads as conversation starters, on how we might go about “Occupying New & Ancient Paradigms”.?My purpose here is not to convince anyone of the value of a particular paradigm, but rather, to support and encourage those of us who are already feeling called to this work.

Visibility. One place to start is visibility. Among other things, the visibility of Occupy encampments served to raised awareness of the extreme economic inequality in this country. How might we make more visible, the support that currently exists for more connected and wholistic ways of understanding the world?? And how might we do so in a way that invites others in, rather than generating defensiveness and opposition?

Andy describes the prevalent mindset as follows:?

“The paradigm shift of modernity that began in 17th century Europe laid the cognitive foundations for the world we are living in today, how we perceive the natural world and our place in it. The world its scientists and philosophers describe is mechanistic and deterministic, a kind of a clockwork universe in which matter is fundamental and reductionist materialist science is the main tool for understanding reality.”

Yet my own experience has been that few people really believe in this reductionist view of “dead matter”... even though it’s the “mainstream consensus reality”, and there can be tremendous social pressure to “go along”, especially in academic environments. Which reminds me of visiting Cuba several years ago, and learning that many party members are privately quite interested in so-called “New Age” topics – even though in public, the official party doctrine is “scientific materialism”. Are we really that different, here in the United States??

Social psychologists have long known that it takes unusual courage to voice a different perspective than the one being proclaimed by others around you. For that reason, I have great admiration for the courage of biologists and philosophers who are speaking up to say that consciousness is much more broadly spread than originally thought, as well as the work of lawyers who are working around the world on the “Rights of Nature ”; I celebrate both of these as hopeful signs of shifting worldviews.?

Yet in addition to honoring the rest of the natural world, we also need to honor ourselves more fully, by having the courage to openly value of other dimensions of human knowledge, beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. Here I celebrate the example of James Gustave (“Gus”) Speth , environmental lawyer and co-founder of the National Resources Defense Council, who famously said back in 2015:

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

Of course science can be a valuable and useful tool for many things, including making significant contributions toward responding to the climate crisis. Yet as many scientists are realizing, they cannot do this alone. The more respect that scientists show for other forms of knowledge, the more likely that science itself will regain respect. And so a key part of? “Occupying New & Ancient Paradigms” can be ending the “culture wars” between scientists and people of faith;? if we happen to be among the many who find value in both, we can choose to be more visible about this.

As for the difference this could make – well, with regard to the climate crisis, there is a lot being written about how people of faith are starting to “shift the needle” in this area; one brilliant example of leadership here is the work of Dr. Carmody Grey . What might be possible, with greater synergies emerging between the worlds of faith and the worlds of science?

Vulnerability. A second thread in “Occupying New & Ancient Paradigms” is that of vulnerability, or non-violence. This connects with a question posed earlier; how might we become more visible in a way that invites others in, instead of generating defensiveness and opposition?

One aspect of vulnerability when we “occupy paradigms” is “standing alongside”, as in, is recognizing how much we ourselves are conditioned by the modernist paradigm… just as we are all conditioned by racism and sexism and ageism and classism. This can help us avoid the “moral violence” that accompanies the stance of righteousness.?

In this regard, I’ve been deeply inspired by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity ; both her acknowledgement of how modernity lives inside all of us, as well as her skill in creating effective learning environments for people to recognize this.?

When we stand in the inclusiveness of both/and, rather than either/or, we are acknowledging complexity;? “intersectionality” can imply the recognition that most of us have lived experience as both “oppressor” AND “oppressed”, albeit in different areas of our lives. The more we can acknowledge multiple aspects of our own experience, the more we can help catalyze the shift toward a greater appreciation of complexity, and beyond simple binaries.

These first two threads are linked: visibility implies vulnerability, which is why it takes courage… the next thread, solidarity, both requires and strengthens our courage.

Solidarity. A third thread is solidarity. Our current economic system is designed to create? scarcity, insecurity, and competition, as so cogently described in Astra Taylor’s brilliant The Age of Insecurity . In turn, these mindsets also affect how we relate to one another on non-material levels; we all end up conditioned to compete for time and attention and recognition and status. Insecurity also leaves us more susceptible to authoritarianism.?

Yet we can intentionally choose solidarity instead, as explored by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix in their recent in-depth book on this subject . While they focus primarily on solidarity at the macro level, we can build up to that by starting to practice solidarity at a more micro level: choosing to invest time and energy in collaborating with one another, celebrating one another's successes, looking for possible synergies rather than going at it alone. This can be a powerful way to “Occupy New & Ancient Paradigms”, as it serves to amplify, extend, and multiply our various efforts...?

As Andy writes,?

“Advances in science now suggest the universe teems with cooperative, symbiotic relationships, much more so than the dynamics of competition, combat and selfishness. So perhaps it is now our evolutionary task to align our social and economic systems with these deep realities and bring them into harmony with the natural world of which we are but a part…”

One good place to begin aligning our social and economic realities in cooperative and symbiotic ways, can be to start right where we are, in the realm of social change initiatives. We can acknowledge and appreciate initial steps that have been taken in this direction such as the “collective impact ” movement; we can also appreciate new field-building efforts such as the transformational social systems initiative, and honor the fine work of long-time network-weavers such as June Holley and Beth Tener .?

As we grow further into developing real solidarity among the 99%, we will need many kinds of bridging work, including both “short bridges” (bridges across to generally like-minded others) and “long bridges” (such as the exemplary work of Braver Angels, helping people connect across red and blue divides.) I’ve long felt inspired by Starhawk’s vision in The Fifth Sacred Thing ; if and when we as the 99% become able to create and sustain peaceful and powerful solidarity among ourselves, we need not fear the 1%. Instead, we can invite them to join us at the ample table we’ll have laid out, a table with plenty of nourishment for the well-being of all...?

For this crucial work, we will need to honor and draw upon the supportive practices of group facilitation, mediation, negotiation, and conflict de-escalation. While we can always choose to take individual initiative for extending a gesture of support to others, it’s also true that we don’t need to “do solidarity” on our own; indeed, as the “collective impact” folks have recognized from the beginning, designing in "backbone support" is essential for?expanding this work.

Whether we are working on short or long bridges, we can benefit from conversational practices that welcome individual differences while generating larger shared understandings . These relational practices offer participants the opportunity to experience the benefits of an “me AND we” mindset, in contrast to the prevalent “me OR we” perspective of the dominant mindset. Herb Shepard, one of the early founders of Organization Development, contrasted these two mindsets as? “primary and secondary mentalities” (the reference can be found here .)

In the past, “solidarity” has too often meant sacrificing individual differences at worst, or at best, engaging in undesirable compromises. Instead, it can mean creative synergy, along with a deeper sense of wholeness. The heart of this work is learning to work creatively with differences , as explored in this pattern from the Wise Democracy Pattern Language – and as exemplified in this case study written by the Co-Intelligence Institute.??

In closing…

I have offered some thoughts, resources, and stories on Visibility, Vulnerability, and Solidarity as three ways we can deepen the work of “Occupying New & Ancient Paradigms”. I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have in response!