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Jeremy Lent

Jeremy Lent is author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, which investigates how different cultures have made sense of the universe and how their underlying values have changed the course of history. It recently received the Nautilus Silver Award.The Guardian columnist George Monbiot has described The Patterning Instinct, as “the most profound and far-reaching book I have ever read… as almost every page caused me to rethink what I held to be true.” Lent is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering a sustainable worldview. For more information visit jeremylent.com .

Monarch butterflies

What Will You Say to Your Grandchildren?

By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning

Studies have shown that, once 3.5% of a population becomes sustainably committed to nonviolent mass movements for political change, they are invariably successful. That would translate into 11.5 million Americans on the street, or 26 million Europeans. We’re a long way from that, but is it really impossible?

  • April 8, 2019
Yuval Harari

Yuval Harari: Please Recognize Your Own Unacknowledged Fictions

By Jeremy Lent, Patterns Of Meaning blog

Like the traditional religious dogmas that he mocks, his own implicit stories wield great influence over the global power elite as long as they remain unacknowledged. I invite Harari to examine them here. By recognizing them as the myths they actually are, he could potentially transform his own ability to help shape humanity’s future.

  • December 17, 2018
Chinese Garden

We need an ecological civilization before it’s too late

By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning

In the face of climate breakdown and ecological overshoot, alluring promises of “green growth” are no more than magical thinking. We need to restructure the fundamentals of our global cultural/economic system to cultivate an “ecological civilization.”

  • October 11, 2018
Garbage on a beach

Five Ways to Curb the Power of Corporations and Billionaires

By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning

Transnational corporations have become the dominant force directing our world. Humanity is accelerating toward a precipice of overconsumption, and the large transnationals are the primary agents driving us there.

  • July 16, 2018

Culture Shift: Redirecting Humanity’s Path to a Flourishing Future

By Jeremy Lent, Open Democracy

What do all these ideas have in common—a tax on carbon, big investments in renewable energy, a livable minimum wage, and freely accessible healthcare? The answer is that we need all of them, but even taken together they’re utterly insufficient to redirect humanity away from impending catastrophe and toward a truly flourishing future.

  • March 23, 2018
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