It's time to meet reality

Forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!

I’ve written about the necessity of active hope. I’ve expressed the fact that we need to accept before we can enact agency. And I’ve more recently discussed the relevance of Ouroboros (i.e. the gnostic and alchemical symbol expressing the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation).

All of these ‘frames’ kinda get at the same idea. Or rather, they get at the same kinda process.

The idea is pretty simple: We are complex evolutionary processes that have the ability to both participate in, and deliberatively / actively shape, our realities (to some very meaningful extent. I’m not going to get into the metaphysics of agency today). Yet in order to do that, we cannot be ‘fighting’ with our past or present. We have to accept* so that we can move in, through and beyond. We have to embrace the underlying process of reality that we are expressions of, and participants in (which comes with ‘constraints’ of various kinds). We also have to be willing to courageously embrace the inherent uncertainty, yet keep working towards a directional goal (fundamentally better tomorrows).

*I’ve got a lot of direct experience with this. See the video below.

Much more could be said about this. But let’s KISS (I hope you know this acronym… lol) for now.

Earlier today I saw a post from Joshua Stehr about The Stockdale Paradox and its relation to our global predicament (ie metacrisis etc.).

The basic idea, which was inspired by Admiral James Stockdale’s seven year experience as a prisoner of war, is that our adaptivity (the capacity we have to effectively and healthily navigate the challenges we are faced with) results from a grounding in reality and deep connection to a higher purpose (or belief in the possibility of better. This is my framing, not the Admiral’s).

Inversely, maladaptivity results from fear and / or an attachment to overly optimistic outcomes (techno-optimism anyone?).

*Please note, this framing of adaptive / maladaptive is my spin.

This is a basic TL;DR, but should serve as ‘good enough’ for the continuation of this musing (I note, as you may also, that this isn’t ’good enough’ to have much explanatory power etc. I’m cool with that for now. So let’s move on).

This gave rise to many thoughts and feelings. One of them relating to the body of work I’m currently engaged in about governance. Or more specifically, the universality of governance, where governance is defined as the processes through which systems manage complexity and direct their own evolution.

Although my co-author, Sam and I, will be publishing a fairly extensive essay introducing this work over the coming weeks, I wanted to share a little snippet that’s already made its way to LinkedIn:

"The 'functionality' of governance depends on context and scale. A process that appears beneficial at one level can be harmful at a higher level. For example, a single cell's rapid growth can harm or kill the host organism.

Governance is functional when short-term needs are balanced with long term goals. Governance is functional when the parts operate in service of both self (which is a ‘whole’ in its own right) and whole.

Dysfunctional governance occurs when processes undermine coherence, justice, resilience, or sustainability. This is true regardless of time scale.

Put differently, governance processes both produce, and result from, synergy. Synergy means ‘parts’ interacting that create a greater ‘whole’. This greater whole can exhibit new phenomena that were not predictable from the parts alone. This is emergence. Functional governance is both synergic and emergent. Functional governance is also negentropic. It leads to an increase in order or coherence.

Dysfunctional governance is antergic. This means parts act in opposition to other parts (antergy is the opposite of synergy). It is also entropic as it lacks or loses order. This erodes relationships and leads to maladaptive phenomena or a malfunctioning whole. Over time, this can result in decay and / or collapse.

Much more could be said about this given the technicality and nuance of such concepts. For the sake of brevity, we will pause it here (please continue in the comments).

*A brief note before concluding this section. Emergence is sometimes thought of as being something close to ‘magic’. We think of emergence as 'actualised potential'. It seems 'magical' only because the potential that actualised was previously unknown to us.”

So why did this come to mind when reading the post about The Stockdale Paradox?

Well, it’s pretty clear that most ‘formal governance’ (here I am talking about something closer to the processes, practices and deeper patterns of our more ‘formal organising structures’) is dysfunctional (see above). If we are to ‘make it’ so to speak, we are going to have to transition to functional governance. This process of transitioning is going to be more goddam multi-factorial than anything I can perhaps imagine. It’s going to require an incredible diversity of inputs and throughputs. It’s going to require all of us, to a greater or less extent. And it’s going to require, as you may have guessed, a grounding in reality that’s paired with a deep, near unwavering belief in some higher purpose (ie an actual civilisation. Boom!).

So my questions for you… Are you grounded in reality? Do you have an unwavering belief that somehow, against all probabilistic odds, we might eventually make it?

HUGE questions that can be approached from about a trillion different angles.

I’m actually tingling right now. As I write this. Yes. Tingling. Because these questions both scare and excite me. These questions have been living in, through and as me for well over a decade. These questions, I’ll bet, are pretty darn alive in you.

With that, I’ll bid you goodbye for now. It’s with love, as always.