With permission from r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration), a nonprofit that reimagines how the global economy can truly support people and the planet, we’re publishing selected chapters from its Seeds Series Volume 2 as part of an ongoing series. This new volume explores a vital question: how can societies intentionally dismantle collapsing systems and replace them with regenerative ones that can endure and help life flourish?
Read more from the series here: Executive Summary | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
“One must make what we call an ‘OntoShift’ — a recognition that relational categories of thought and experience are primary… OntoShift refers to a shift in a person’s fundamental presuppositions and perspectives about the nature of reality and how it is structured. People’s ontological viewpoints are reflected in their perceptions of how people and objects exist in the world, and, as a result, what general types of culture, political economy, and coordination structures they see as possible and desirable… A real paradigm shift occurs when our fundamental presuppositions about reality change. The challenge that political changemakers rarely address is how to step outside of entrenched worldviews and question unexamined assumptions built into our cognition.”
David Bollier & Silke Hilfrich, Free Fair & Alive, 2019
In his introductory essay to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Thomas Kuhn’s landmark text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn simply called it the book), Ian Hacking devotes an entire section to the term “paradigm,” noting that back in 1962, when Kuhn wrote the book, “few people had ever encountered it… Nowadays, paradigm, along with its companion paradigm shift, is embarrassingly everywhere.” In a footnote, Hacking ventures a “flippant guess” of “a ratio of one to a million … for comparing the use of the word paradigm in 1962 and on the fiftieth anniversary of the book.”
Hacking points out the dilemma this popularization introduced for Kuhn, who wrote a 1974 essay, “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” clarifying the nuanced way he intended to use the term in the book. Kuhn’s essential point is that paradigms are a double-edged sword, aligning us around shared interpretations of reality (or ontologies) that “hold water”, but entrapping us when emergent understandings challenge the legitimacy and tenability of previously stable shared interpretations. These stable regimes increasingly resist paradigm change (Kuhn’s preferred term) until the potential energy of these new understandings wells up enough to spill over into the kinetic energy of paradigm shifts (the term that has gained currency).
The key point for our purposes is that paradigms (and the adjacent terms mindsets, worldviews, and even ontologies) are not merely passive concepts, but rather powerfully determinative constructs that control our spectrum of options for how to engage our world. The magical aspect, as Dana Meadows points out in her landmark 1999 essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,1 is the fluidity of cognitive concepts, which at the individual level “can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing.”
Meadows acknowledges the greater challenge at the collective level and channels Kuhn for guidance on how to change paradigms:
“In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.”
The inputs from our interviewees flesh out this guidance in more depth, acting as invitations to transcend the limiting dynamics of paradigms, mindsets, and worldviews by tapping into their empowerment to co-create a just and liberatory world.
Starting at the individual level with mindsets, Kate Raworth advocated for “a mindset of sufficiency. So, in the language George Monbiot put it, instead of private luxury and public squalor, achieve public luxury and private sufficiency.” Kate also argued for integrating complexity and systems thinking into mainstream economics: “We need to bring natural science understanding into the economic mindset.”
Steve Keen also focused on transforming the mindset of neoclassical economics, using the ratio of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas that exacerbates climate change when concentrated in higher-than-normal background levels, to the degree of posing an existential threat to humanity and other life forms, as the fulcrum to leverage change. In particular, he discussed carbon rationing as the market mechanism for transforming economist mindsets.
“But you’d also be getting an annual ration or given out virtually, only we could do it on a virtually a daily basis. Given modern technology so long as that survives. But I’d be rationing carbon consumption. So everybody who’d be buying anything would be paying its carbon content as well as its money price, would have a per-capita distribution of carbon allocations we call tradable carbon credits to everybody.”
“In a society, the per capita would be set at the average for each country as it currently stands. And of course that means the ultra wealthy would run out of their carbon credits before they got out of bed, while the the poor would have excess carbon credits they could sell back to the rich, and this would be a market mechanism to set a price on carbon, which would be a complete different process to what neoclassicals have been doing, where they’ve been trying to work out the carbon price themselves by basically pulling numbers out of their backsides.”
“This would say, ‘let’s get the market to do it,’ and that would have two effects. It would be an income redistribution from the rich to the poor, and it would put enormous pressure upon both the rich, and on corporations to find lower carbon ways of producing output.”
“But this is totally impossible until people realize this is an existential threat. Until that realization comes through, I don’t think anything can be done. Of course, when you have that, then you have a complete change in the direction of politics, and then it’s feasible to bring in measures like this [rationing carbon consumption], but it’s not feasible to bring them in beforehand.”
Steve, in his signature bluntness, continued along this line of thinking by pointing out the particular need for mindset transformation among the Global Minority (in both class and racial terms) of wealthy whites.
“So we just have an incredible need to change direction. But I frankly do not believe it’s going to happen until we start seeing truly catastrophic damages. And what I mean by catastrophic is climatic events that kill lots of white people – because fundamentally, there’s no way the West is going to wake up until white people start to die en masse. Just as you’re doing this interview right now, we’re seeing reports coming out of Jaipur in India of hundreds of people dying of heat exhaustion; the West won’t even react to that. But if the same thing happens in Texas, maybe they might.”
Lourenço Bustani generalized this sentiment from a subset of humanity to all of humanity, calling for a shift in consciousness to trigger the necessary worldview shifts.
“We’ve been trying to shift our intellect without doing the more profound work of shifting our consciousness. And if we don’t shift our consciousness, then there’s no real way for us to assimilate what’s changing intellectually because there’s a deeper worldview shift that reframes the world you live in. But, more importantly, the role you play within that world. And so we are living a crisis of consciousness at the root of all the other overlapping crises that define the metacrisis, or whatever you’d like to call it.”
“It’s a crisis of consciousness, and in loving the wrong things, we kind of forgot all those things worth loving. So we love money. We love plastic. We love Instagram. We love ultra-processed foods. We love cars. And we forgot to love each other – and the land we stand on, which, existentially-speaking, on a hierarchy, is much more important for our own survival and our own prosperity and our own well being than those other things. And so we need to elevate human consciousness through self-discovery, through self awareness.”
Lourenço believes that leaders, in particular, need to undergo “self-discovery work to check their egos, to elevate their consciousness, to inspire them to channel their power towards greater purpose.”
Picking up on the power-over dynamic of ego-based leadership, Gaya Herrington calls for flattening this power and transforming it into a collaborative approach, citing both historical precedent and current circumstances.
“On the continuum of partnership and domination, we need to shift from a domination mindset to a partnership mindset. We’re way too much under domination, and it’s very well documented that domination will always lead to unsustainable societies. And that’s just what’s happening.”
Nwamka Agbo takes up this time continuum, extending it from the present status quo into the potential future.
“How we get there is through developing the deeply personal capacity to navigate the contradictions of both our current system and world while aspiring and working towards something more transformative.”
From the individual level of mindsets, we proceed to the collective level of paradigms, where we hear again from Lourenço and Steve.
Focusing on the corporate and investment components of the economy, Lourenço critiqued the institutional frameworks that uphold the shareholder-primacy paradigm. He said we need to
“overturn shareholder primacy by actually requiring companies that seek certification to alter their articles of incorporation or their equivalent documents so that the leadership of those companies actually has a fiduciary duty to encompass stakeholder governance, looking at all stakeholders as opposed to just shareholders. It’s using the regulatory frameworks to incentivize and hold accountable the people in power to make decisions based on the interests of workers, communities, customers, suppliers, and ultimately the environment. And I’m a big advocate for having Mother Nature have an actual seat on the board of companies as an entity, which is very symbolic, but also ensures that those interests are being taken into account when these decisions are being made.”
In a broader scope, Lourenço advocates for abandoning the growth paradigm.
“I think we also need to bid farewell to the hegemony of growth as a 21st century paradigm, changing the performance indicators with which we measure the health and prosperity of the planet… there’s a steady-state point past which growth can actually lead to a decrease in well-being, livelihood, and prosperity.”
Steve called for a shift in the paradigm of urgency, using the concept of a “wartime” economy, though not in the conventional sense of this term. “So it is a wholesale conversion of the economy from what you might call a peacetime economy to a wartime economy. But this war is against our own mistreatment of the climate.”
Worldviews (which we’ve already encountered) were the most often cited framing of human cognitive constructs (akin to what David Bollier calls ontologies) that need to transform.
Jude Currivan focused on the relationship between real-world behaviors, and the worldviews (of separation or wholeness are the ones with most sway, she believes) that inform them, positing that shifting worldviews shifts behavior (as well as underlying emotions).
“This is a disease of separation, and of course our behaviors flow from our worldviews. So the behaviors we’ve had are the symptoms of that disease of separation. Our collective trauma is luggage we carry that unless we’re able to heal that and release it and lighten it, then we’re not able to really fully access the deep wholeness that is deep within their hearts. But that accretion, that sort of overlay of the perception of separation is a tough nut to crack. We know that facts don’t change people. Feelings change people. Just as conflicts are a natural behaviour of a worldview of separation, peace is a natural behaviour of a worldview of wholeness.”
Jude also points out that the dynamic can also go in the other direction, from behaviors to worldviews. “The other thing that I’m very conscious of is a conversation with Lynn Twist, who spoke to how changing behaviors can have a feedback effect on changing worldviews. Just as worldviews have a forward effect on changing behaviors.”
While some might interpret wholeness as homogeneity, Ashish Kothari advocates for the heterogeneity of a pluriversalism, distinguishing between the isolated agnosticism and quantitative focus of pluralism and the holistic qualitative encompassment of pluriversal worldviews, calling for an embrace of the latter as a more profound commitment to transcend the universalisms of modernity and coloniality.
“Sometimes when people say plurality, it is this sort of a numerical thing that, okay, we have X number of cuisines or X number of languages, let’s say. And I think we need to move beyond the numerics of it, beyond the quantitative aspects of it, to look at the qualitative aspects of it. And when we say pluriverse, we’re not just talking about individual elements of diversity, like languages and cuisines, and so on – we’re also talking about worldviews, visions of life, cosmologies of life.”
“Pluriversality entails moving away from homogeneity and universality to the pluriverse, to understanding that if you’re talking about diverse societies, diverse cultures, diverse economies, we’re not saying there’s only one solution out there, there’s only one model out there. There’s many, many of them, as long as they are within the tenets and the principles in the ethics of equality, justice, solidarity and so on. So I think moving from universe to pluriverse, from homogeneity to heterogeneity and diversity is another imperative.”
John Fullerton considers the potential for regeneration as the fundamental worldview shift needed.
“The just transition path comes through seeing and recognizing and manifesting regenerative potential. Otherwise it won’t be a just transition. It is already unjust, and it will get more unjust if we’re realistic about it. So the imperative of doing this worldview shift in order that we can begin to see where to find this regenerative potential is, is the work. It’s the transformation. It’s the worldview shift that will open that up.”
Daniel Christian Wahl likewise centers regeneration, with a slight twist: he sees regeneration as a fundamental component of a kin-centric (or relational) worldview, which he sees as the key.
“You need to ground this whole conversation in understanding that there are certain patterns that are core to life itself, and then a call to our evolutionary survival pattern. Regeneration happens in every cell of the body. Regeneration happens in every organism on this planet. Regeneration is part of the systemic evolutionary process of how life creates conditions conducive to life. Therefore we would not be here if our ancestors had not excelled in being regenerative.”
“And we need to frame the entire thing as a coming home, as a listening, as a being more humble again, as a return to a kin-centric worldview. Otherwise, it’s not going anywhere, to my mind.”
