(Recorded November 11, 2024)
Description
In today’s complex geopolitical landscape, battles and tensions seem to exist everywhere we look. Power shifts and compounding crises are opening up new landscapes for change. As we inhabit and define an unpredictable world order, we will increasingly face “battles” at the individual and community level, too. Now comes the real work for pro-social, pro-future, systems-aware humans.
In today’s Frankly, Nate describes some of the battles – or polarities – of our time: the tensions and dichotomies we face from the global macro level all the way down to the level of individual metacognition. Nate reflects on how each of these polarities contribute in their own unique way to the overarching battle of power versus life. By harmonizing and better navigating these polarities we can move away from the extremes embedded in the Superorganism dynamic and instead sow the seeds for cultures in service of life which can flourish in the wake of the existing world order.
What are the key polarities that define this wider struggle between power and life? And how might we navigate these tensions in the trade off between who we have become and who we might yet be, as individuals and as humanity as a whole?
Show Notes
02:21 – US hegemony
02:26 – Multipolar world
02:40 – Endocrine disrupting chemicals + impact on male reproductive health
03:57 – A third of Americans have college degrees
04:10 – States with fewer college graduates voted Trump + Trump’s election fueled by working class support
04:42 – Real estate prices in Bozeman Montana
05:25 – Multilevel selection
05:38 – Big 5 personality traits
07:27 – The Carbon Pulse
08:47 – Total species on Earth
09:11 – We have lost 73% of wildlife populations
09:16 – Shanna Swan, temporal trends in sperm count
09:37 – We are losing 1-2% of insect biomass per year
10:22 – Dopamine
11:36 – Regenerative communities
12:04 – 19 terawatt economy
13:25 – Human-made mass outweighs all living biomass
16:35 – Brain stem + neocortex, evolution of the neocortex
21:40 – Sympathetic nervous system + parasympathetic nervous system
23:44 – Presentation with predictions
24:45 – The Pleistocene
26:42 – The Superorganism
27:00 – Mitochondria
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This piece by Nate is brilliant. It captures the tensions of our time and, importantly, charts the shifts we must foster within our own heads, hearts and spirit connections and in our relationship with each other. I am thinking and writing about this shift, trying to imagine the pathways to resisting death and choosing life.
It is hard, even from someone like myself has lived consciously and with purpose since the age of 14, almost 60 years ago. Getting detoured in hubristic concoctions that show up day in and day out, the narratives of modernity and the exercise of elite power that daily that intentionally generate discordant barrages of noise, can easily overwhelm.
What Nate has done here is a gift to all with ears and hearts opening to listening and reflecting.
Thank you. Michael Lewis