🌍🔍 The Answer to Our Meta-Crisis: Six Critical Ingredients for a Syntropic World 🌱💡
We have a meta-crisis unfolding before our eyes. A combination of multiple events and sources, many initiated a long time ago, yet all pointing one way.
The collapse of human civilisation as we know it.
Our biology cannot take the whole of this in at one time.
We can feel sick when we see piles of plastic on a beach.
Or the slaughtering of trees and all of the life of a forest — for miles and miles.
Or the low cloud of pollution that is a permanent feature in so many cities.
We can gasp in horror when we see the distended bellies of children, their energy levels so low they have crossed into a twilight zone beyond pain, near death, from hunger. Still dying, in about the same numbers, every day. Despite the efforts of so many over decades.
Or the chickens stacked upon each other in factory farms as if their life means nothing.
We can rage against the monopolies who extract, extract, extract. From Earth. From us. From our future.
Or the politicians who lie first. And steal second.
We can despair at the tyrants and overlords who care less about all but their self-aggrandisement.
We can watch as the military-industrial complex amplifies itself every year. Weapons are becoming smarter, more deadly, and able to be deployed without humans — weapons now in the hands of anyone.
What will happen with the impossible to-fully-comprehend exponential growth of unchecked AI? Especially unchecked AI being developed in the very system, using the same structures and the same thinking that created the meta-crisis in the first place.
To absorb these implications simultaneously is almost impossible for our human biology.
It is so much to take in and so terrifying to consider.
In 2018 I determined that I would heed Buckminster Fuller’s call. To focus on building the new rather than trying to fix the broken.
We have much to do, and the task is massive, almost beyond comprehension.
Having been trained by Bucky for over thirty years, I revert to the central disciples that informed his work. These provide the Foundation Stones — the six critical ingredients for a Syntropic World.
The very first one, the place to begin every time
1. Start with Universe First. We must understand the whole. No matter the size of the problem you are seeking to solve, we must go the whole.
Synergy — from Beauty of Beginnings June 7th
Buckminster Fuller defined Synergy as the following.
The behaviour of the whole cannot be determined by examining the parts separately.
He went on to say that to solve anything, we had to begin with the whole.
“Start with Universe first.”
Yet our modern society is built on a platform of parts, specialisation, silos, and fractured perspectives. We see parts habitually and culturally.
Training to see, think, perceive, and act from a comprehensive understanding of the whole takes commitment and practice.
Until we do, we will continue to patch one hole in the bucket without seeing the other fifty holes and thinking we have effected real change.
To subscribe to Beauty of Beginnings
******
Understanding the whole is not something you do over a weekend. It takes Time + Curiosity + Great questions.
2. To understand the whole, Go back to Source.
Go back to the original impulse behind the creation of the word, the tool, the artefact, the system.
*Use the etymological dictionary.
*Go to the Source of money — when it was first created and used. What is it now, and how did it become that?
*How did capitalism start, and what are its integral features, what we call its Pattern Integrity? Repeat the same inquiry for any system, from democracy to fascism to markets and government.
3. Know the Pattern Integrity of the Source
When we know the Pattern Integrity of the Source, we can determine if that Pattern Integrity is being expressed in present time. For example, we can see that the Pattern Integrity of capitalism includes elements like win-lose, accumulation and scarcity. These are basic features of the system. They cannot be removed. Let me repeat. These are features — inbuilt by design.
If we do not want the win-lose, accumulation-to-extinction, scarcity-based current world to continue, then no amount of dressing capitalism in a different costume will change this. We must develop a new way of increasing the well-being of Earth and all her creatures.
4. Cultivate ecologies of wisdom
Wisdom
From wise — *weid- “to see” hence “to know.
Intelligence is not enough. Knowledge is not enough. We are required to be wise.
Wisdom is towards something more significant than our atomised self. Wisdom is in service to life, others, the future.
George Bernard Shaw wrote.
This is the true joy in life. Being used for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one.
Being a force of Nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. It is a sort of splendid torch that I’ve got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
Wisdom is a commitment, every day, to our comprehensive emergent development. Our interior development, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, moral, ethical, and systems development. It is open mind and open heart.
Wisdom transcends righteousness.
If righteousness is present, wisdom is not.
5. Create ecologies for Synergy — places where people, together, are far greater than they are in isolation.
Our meta-crisis requires people to collaborate, in distinction to the singular hero.
Elegant collaboration requires design science. It is not random. There is a geometry to collaboration that only some people appreciate. We teach this design science in the Syntropic Enterprise Masterclass.
Imbue the ecologies for Synergy in an architecture that has emergent, regenerative wisdom built in by design. It will be autopoietic.
Autopoiesis — from Wikipedia
The term autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-) ‘self’, and ποίησις (poiesis) ‘creation, production’) refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.
As we work together, everyone as an individual and the whole as a collective become wiser, more evolved, and more humane.
6. The central organising principle — the strange attractor of all of this is the purpose.
If it is anything less than increasing the well-being of Earth and ALL her creatures without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone, if our purpose does not do this, then we will continue to play the win-lose game.
Many other elements, laws of Nature, are woven into these six elements.
A Syntropic Enterprise is a living system. It emerges, breathes, adapts, changes, moves, dances and is alive.
It is created and held by people who remember that we are Nature. That we are not separate from Nature. When we partner with Nature in all things to increase the well-being of Earth and all her creatures, we are playing the infinite, Syntropic game.
Like this? Sign up for our weekly Sunday Syntropy https://syntropic.world/sundaysyntropy/
Syntropic World is a global education and community of practice applying the organising principles of nature to enterprise design and human coordination. Creating ecologies of trust, ensuring integrity in everything, enabling collective sense making, and organising around a central purpose — how to create a world that works for 100% of humanity without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.
Find us here https://syntropic.world
Linkedin https://www.facebook.com/syntropicworld
