Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Peter Turchin’s latest book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, is receiving glowing reviews. Its message is highly relevant to our collective understanding of the emerging global polycrisis and what needs to be done to minimize it.
How Paicines Ranch in California works to bring business and investment up to date with our times and closer to nature—prioritizing ecosystem health, habitat, and the sequestration of carbon through soil practices.
Human societies the world over are confronted with a growing number and range of difficult and compounding problems and crises, which they are increasingly struggling to address and failing to solve, and which are slowly but surely eroding their ability to function effectively and undermining their capacity to coexist peacefully.
Only after accepting that there are hard limits has humanity a chance to change course and adopt to a drastically changing landscape. Whether we can do that, is question to be pondered…
Society has become so complex that all the complexity begets more complexity. And if that’s not complex enough for you, jobs have become so specialized that hardly anyone knows how anything is made or works.
On the one hand I believe it is vital to accept uncertainty, not-knowing, and unpredictability fully to the point of deep humility. On the other hand, I also believe that we need to choose to act from the conviction that we can design for positive emergence in complex systems even if it is not an exact science and we cannot know with certainty how our efforts will turn out to affect transformative change.
The U.S. Senate passed a bill last week that would form a government-industry working group to “examine ways to replace automated systems with low-tech redundancies, like manual procedures controlled by human operators.” … If we truly want long-term solutions to the problems that vex us in our increasingly high-tech society, then we will have to look elsewhere than the technologists.
The Science of Qualities is really an extension of conventional science in the sense that it depends upon consensus, agreement and a methodology whereby people come to recognize the agreement or the consensus they have about the qualities of experience of other beings.
Complexity science shows us not only what to do, but also how to do it: build shared infrastructure, improve information flow, enable rapid innovation, encourage participation, support diversity and citizen empowerment.
Interview with Fritjof Capra author of The Tao of Physics (1975) and co-author of the Systems View of Life – A Unifying Vision (2014).
Is modern society hitting our defining moment, the point of diminishing returns?
The discovery of new lands to exploit, and new energy sources, helped reinforce the notion that human societies can always find a way around limitations upon its growth.
