Curated Article: How do we change human consciousness ?
On the four root-metaphors of human thinking, and the religious and cultural ground motives that influence our ‘Thought-Shapers’ and ‘Action-Shapers’.
The following article is a preparation for a more flowing and personal article I will write on this topic. The material you will find here is mostly from people who have studied human consciousness ‘phenomenologically’, as it appears to alert observers, using social or human sciences, not necessarily the more current neurology or neurosciences. However, some of the conclusions at the end of this article are certainly ‘neurologically’ founded as well.
The article does not look at change as ‘manipulation’ of drives for immediate commercial or political benefit, but at how societies have changed more fundamentally. It doesn’t aim to be complete, but nevertheless, if you take the material seriously, it could set you on a long-term journey to understand the dynamics of change better.
I suggest a very broad methodology to put this material in context.
Your first ledger is the objective ledger of material conditions, what is the material basis of society, its technology, its geological and climate conditions.
Your second ledger is how societies and civilizations collectively respond to these challenges, i.e. modes of hierarchy, production, management, class and ownership.
This brings you to our specific topic today, a third ledger, which focuses on collective culture, forms of consciousness, both collectively and individually.
I want to start with the realization that contrary to expectations that ‘human nature doesn’t change’, human cultures have undergone dramatic transitions in the reigning mentality. Of course, there are also human invariants, but societal forms have a dramatic influence, in terms of incentives, rewards and punishments, of which parts of the complex human family of traits, it wants to promote or discourage.
1. The insights from Pitirim Sorokin
To acknowledge that change, it is perhaps best to start with the Russian ‘civilizational analyst’, Pitirim Sorokin. His 4-volume ‘Social and Cultural Dynamics’, is luckily available in a one volume abridged version. It is not very easy reading as it is most of all a ‘catalog of change’, showing how human societies undergo periodic polarity changes, from Sensate type civilizations, which are geared towards materialism, i.e. what can be seen and touched by human senses, towards Ideate societies, which reject the outward orientation towards material accumulation, and turn towards the ‘immaterial’ spirit. Think especially on how Buddhist and Christian societies emerged as reactions to failing materialistic-hedonistically oriented civilizational forms. He also mentions a more rare third form, called ‘Idealistic’, in which a balance between materialism and idealism is achieved, pointing towards 5th BC Greece and 13th Cy. medieval Christian Europe, respectively the centuries of Plato and Aristotle, and that of Thomas Aquinas. It occurs in periods where the Ideate impulse is on the way down, and the Sensate impulse is on the way up, creating a temporary equilibrium. Don’t mistake this for a Euro-centric bias, other civilizations have gone through similar periods, as an AI search may confirm.
Check the following two articles for an introduction:
But Sorokin didn’t stop with this overview, he also noticed how especially the Ideate forms of society, created a whole machinery to create ‘altruistic’ types of behavior, matching the dominant warrior ethos of feudal, monarchic or imperial systems, with the ideal of Holyness, which was born with the Axial Age, i.e. the period after the Bronze Age collapse of 1200 BC, that generated the big ethical systems that gave us universalist religions and ethical philosophies.
This topic is covered in a very important book:
Sorokin, Pitirim A. The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1954.
Short, article-length introductions are those from John Uebersax:
Love: Pitirim Sorokin and the Transformation of Society by the Power of Love
Transform: Pitirim Sorokin: Techniques for the Altruistic Transformation of Individuals and Society
The latter covers the main techniques of Altruization identified by Sorokin as a science of ‘Amitology’, which was the result of his work at the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism.
“The Amitological Paradigm (was) developed and tested at the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. This research yielded a field tested algorithm for transforming social relationships and improving the human condition. Sorokin’s works and those of the Center have been largely overlooked in the history and study of altruism and prosocial behavior.”
Reading Sorokin gives you a good basis to understand how societies evolve, not in a linear and pure evolutionary way, but as a ‘spiral’ which involves polarity switches. When one principle, the Sensate, ‘saturates’ and declines, then the other polarity is called for, the Ideate, until that format also saturates.
Michel Maffesoli, a French sociologist and philosopher, has explained this process of saturation quite well, elaborating on Sorokin.
I’ve asked ChatGPT to summarize his explanation:
< Maffesoli uses saturation to describe the point at which a dominant cultural orientation exhausts itself. This exhaustion can manifest in various ways:
Overemphasis on a Single Dimension: When a culture becomes too focused on materialism, rationality, or spirituality, it neglects other essential human needs.
Loss of Vitality and Creativity: The culture no longer generates new, meaningful ways of engaging with the world, leading to stagnation.
Social Disconnection: People feel alienated or disconnected because the prevailing values no longer resonate with their lived experiences.
At the point of saturation, the dominant culture faces increasing resistance and begins to disintegrate. This marks a bifurcation, a turning point where the cultural system undergoes a transformation, giving rise to a new cycle. For example:
A sensate culture may saturate through hyper-materialism, leading people to seek spiritual or ideational values, prompting a shift to an ideational culture. Conversely, an ideational culture might saturate through rigid dogmatism, leading to a turn toward empirical and sensory experiences. >
We have now established that changes in societal and civilizational paradigms are not just not exceptional, but a rather ‘routine’ part of human evolution.
But how do these polarity switches happen, ‘technically’, even in more detail than the principle of saturation can provide us ?
2. The insights of Rene Girard on Mimetic Desire and the Scapegoat mechanism
For this, I think we best switch to the work of Rene Girard, on the topic of mimetic desire.
During the last Valley of the Commons pop-up village for commoners, I had the opportunity to discuss this topic with Carlos Perona of the Europos channel, one of the very few conservative cultural commentators, with a keen interest for the commons as a necessary institution.
This is from a personal communication between Carlos and myself:
“Rene Girard thought desire is triangular, the three vertices are:
1) an Object of desire (usually this is ultimately status),
2) the Subject who desires that object, and
3) the Model who possesses that object and whose enjoyment of it teaches the Subject that it’s desirable.
So really the Subject desires to become the Model. This creates rivalry. In order to avoid the Subject coming after him, the Model has to point him towards some Scapegoat (”the reason why you can’t have the Object of desire you see me benefitting from is because of that Scapegoat over there, get him!”). For Girard, cultures always end up celebrating the murder of a scapegoat, because it’s the means by which the culture stays together instead of exploding into rivalry.
Civilizational transition, I’d argue, can be understood as the emergence of new Models who derive status from new, often non-scarce, Objects – say the piety of a monk rather than the wealth of a chieftain. These objects are thereby made desirable, and society reconfigures around their pursuit. The less scarce, the more accessible status is, the more ways to pursue states there are, or the more ambivalent people are about status (most people want to be like the monk, but they don’t want to actually be a monk, and so are happy for him to have more status than them because they wouldn’t really want his life, for example), the less rivalry.
New models, new objects of desire, might also be one way to explain the Axial revolution, where we still want to be rich and violent, but the Model of holiness (Christ, for example) becomes a widespread ideal.”
Here is an introduction to Rene Girard’s theories of the Scapegoat, based on his foundational book:
Jonathan Bi has a dire warning about the next transition, given the specific nature of capitalist modernity. Indeed, in traditional societies, mimetic desire was regulated by caste or class, only allowing certain objects for certain groups, and rituals and their real or symbolic sacrifice, were available to regulate scapegoating in less socially destructive ways. But capitalist consumerism, by given everyone ‘equal’ access to the desire for material objects, depends on growth to satisfy this demand, opening up itself to potential violence in unprecedented ways. When growth stops, universal frustration will be the result.
Bi writes, citing Girard:
“Girard sees modernity as veering towards apocalypse because we have unleashed mimesis and accelerated the formation of mimetic rivalries by tearing down prohibitions while throwing away the tool of ritual that could tame such forces. As a result of this built up in societal tension, we resort to scapegoating at a dizzying frequency and scale. Girard would point to the atrocities of scapegoating in the Communist and Fascist regimes of the twentieth century as evidence of our increased capacity and need for violence:
“Entire categories of humans are distinguished (the Jews, the aristocrats, the bourgeois, the unfaithful, the faithful…) and we are told that utopia depends on the necessary condition of the elimination of the guilty categories. As the power of the mechanism breaks down, sacrifices at a larger and larger scale must persist to achieve the same calming effect. Before we could bring peace by sacrificing a goat or a few men, but now we must kill an entire race, religion, class — the eradication needs to be total, hence the “omnipresent victim”.”
There is another issue that keeps me personally awake: can we succeed, based on the Sorokinian tradition, eventually amended by Girardian insights, of moving, not in a Ideate direction but in an “Integrative”, i.e. Idealistic direction, in which matter and spirit are held in balance ? But this time, we have to do it at a time of the saturation of the Sensate paradigm, with only faint signs of a growing Ideate reaction. This makes our current transition unique.
3. Introduction to the Integral Tradition
This is where I would have to introduce the importance of the integral and integrative tradition of human understanding! These are the philosophical schools which permanently attempt to hold ‘historical idealism’ (explaining the evolution of humanity through beliefs, ideas, willful actions, agency), in balance with ‘historical materialism’ (explaining the evolution of humanity through its material evolutions, modes of production, media, organizational forms).
(This is the most bibliographic and documentary part of the article, it may interrupt the flow of the argument first, so you may eventually skip it and go back to it for further reading afterwards.)
In the P2P Foundation wiki, this is covered by two major sections:
The first category is the broadest, and derives from my early interest in the works of Ken Wilber, but there are many more integrative traditions that came before, during and after Wilber’s work. The ‘Integral’ category of my wiki mostly covers ‘meta-theories’:
“Critical realism, integral theory, and complex thought are arguably among the most sophisticated contemporary integrative metatheories. We feel that all three can learn from each other in profound ways and so become more robust and powerful for addressing the global moment.” [2]
These articles are not recent, and really need updating, but will give you an idea of the original context of the P2P Foundation initiative.
It is indeed important to understand that the P2P Theory approach was initially conceived as a further specialized development within the tradition of integral theory. Most recently, I have been in dialogue with the particular development of Integral Theory called ‘Integral Humanism‘ as developed by Erik Haines.
Here is an important recent insight that has allowed me to distinguish the more ‘metaphysical’ integral approaches, from the ‘mere’ ‘systemic-complexity’ approaches.
On the one side, there are many integral authors like Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, that though they try to synthesize the insights of both material and ‘spiritual’ evolution (the insights that come from practicing the psycho-biological, spiritual techniques pioneered by the religions traditions, think yoga, tantra, the prayer of the heart, etc..). Though they recognize that we have entered a post-methaphysical age after Kant, which declared that spiritual knowledge was no longer receivable without a rational or material basis, they remain convinced of the validity of spiritual truths and experiences, drawing from millenia of tradition (reflecting real psycho-bio-chemical practices by lineages of practitioners).
Others only recognize material realities (but in a broad sense), but look at them in integrative and systemic ways. On the other hand, people like Edgar Morin, and more recently Francis Heylighen, (CLEA research center in Brussels, Belgium) do not recognize separate spiritual realities or realms. But bridges are being built. For example, the Human Energy project by CLEA, explicitly integrates the work of the spiritualist author Teilhard de Chardin in its scientific papers. Though I am myself more spiritually inclined, I am happy to work with the Philosophophy Portal which broadly takes the latter point of view.
All of these initiatives believe in the imperative of constructing a ‘Third Story’, that is neither exclusively materialist, nor exclusively spiritualist. This recent book offers a great summary:
The Evolution of Meaning, Volume 1: Cosmos to Culture. by Brendan Graham Dempsey. IAM Press (InstituteofAppliedMetatheory), 2026.
4. The Cosmo-Biology of Root Methaphors
OK, after the intermezzo of explaining the literature on Integralism, we are back to our broad argument. So, enough about the Integral and Integrative approaches.
What then, about the importance of the ‘Cosmobiological’ approach, which is a more restricted, but still very important thread. It represents the ‘Organicist’ tradition of understanding life and society, which is one of four basic ‘root metaphors’ to understand our world.
You will find this in the book:
“World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence, by Stephen C. Pepper (1942),
As the Wikipedia explains:
The book “presents four relatively adequate world hypotheses (or world views or conceptual systems) in terms of their root metaphors: formism (similarity), mechanism (machine), contextualism (historical act), and organicism (living system). In World Hypotheses, Pepper demonstrates the error of logical positivism, that there is no such thing as data free from interpretation, and that root metaphors are necessary in epistemology. In other words, objectivity is a myth because there is no such thing as pure, objective fact. Consequently, an analysis is necessary to understand how to interpret these ‘facts.’ Pepper does so by developing the “[root metaphor method, …] and outlines what he considers to be four basically adequate world hypotheses (world views or conceptual systems): formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism.” He identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each of the world hypotheses as well as the paradoxical and sometimes mystifying effects of the effort to synthesize them.”
So one of these four ways in which we, mostly ‘unconsciously’ see and interpret the world is ‘organicism’, explained here:
“We are immersed in a biological world of living organisms, both plants and animals, including ourselves. Living organisms are organized, self-regulating, and actively functioning systems. A seed planted in favorable conditions, unfolding and maturing into a tree, is an example of an organismic system. The root metaphor for organicism is inquiring how living systems maintain adaptive balances between acting on the environment and being acted on and supported by the environment.”
Before the victory of the modernist mindset of separation and atomization, the Renaissance had attempted the construction of a participatory worldview, which Loren Goldner calls the Cosmobiological Tradition. The section on Cosmobiology of our wiki is dedicated to contemporary revivals of this tradition, through ‘organicist’ understandings of social change, mostly based on the work of two contemporary ‘neo-organicist’ philosophers, Robert Hanna and Otto Paans.
You can find out more about this approach here:
* Cold Reason, Creative Subjectivity: From Scientism and the Mechanistic Worldview To Expressive Organicism. Otto Paans. Borderless Philosophy 5 (2022): 161-212
Bear in mind that these mostly unconscious root metaphors are mostly produced by the framings of our religious and cultural history, and this is why the work of Herman Dooyeweerd is so important.
“A religious ground motive is a spiritual driving force that impels each thinker to interpret reality under its influence. Dooyeweerd wrote that, in the case of thinkers who presume that human thought is autonomous, who operate by the dictum that it does not matter whether God exists or not, such a thinker’s basic commitment to autonomous thought forces him to pick out some aspect of the creation as the origin of all meaning. In doing so, the supposedly autonomous thinker is made captive to a kind of idol of his own making, which bends his understanding to conform to its dictates, according to Dooyeweerd.”
Dooyeweerd’s concept of ground motives was an attempt to understand the deep motivating forces that have steered or influenced Western thinking over the last 2,500 years since the days of the early Greek thinkers.
Inspired by Kuyper’s view of world views, he identified four:
Matter-Form (Greek)
Creation, Fall, Redemption (Hebrew)
Nature-Grace (Mediaeval Roman Catholic; Scholastic)
Determinism-Freedom (Modern; Renaissance-Enlightenment to today)
But obviously, this will be the case, for every human civilization and religion, and this is why I very strongly recommend:
Beyond Civilization: The World’s Four Great Streams of Civilization: Their Achievements, Their Differences and Their Future. Keith Chandler. Rivendell Publishing Company, 1992
Chandler distinguishes pre-civilizational tribal forms, when people live in kinship and have a participatory relationship with the natural and ‘spiritual’ world, and shamans from all over the world would understand each other, from the civilizational attempt to deal with the trauma of an alienating class society based on human domination, in which suffering needs to be explained. But each ‘civilization’ explains trauma, and its solutions, in fundamentally different ways.
He thus distinguishes four fundamentally incompatible choices, three of which are summarized here:
Sinic civilization: Seeks to balance order and disorder. No extreme position; harmony between the two is the goal. This leads to a focus on social and political life.
Occidental civilization: Prefers order to disorder. The drive is to understand, control, and transform the natural world through rational inquiry, science, and external action.
Indic civilization: Views all forms of order as relative and ultimately without intrinsic value. The goal is to transcend the material world of order/disorder to reach a higher state of consciousness focused on the inner self.
In practice, what does this mean ? No matter how objective you think you are, most of your drives and frameworks are not directly under your individual control, they are largely determined, but the more you learn about how you are determined, the freer you are in your choices; and the less you know about them, the more you are driven by external and ‘internal’ forces. In that case, your agency and freedom are largely illusory. This means that the form of human consciousness is not just a given, but subject to change.
Chandler himself believes in the possibility of a ‘Post-Civilizational’ condition, through the development of a post-civilized mind.
Let me quote from a review by Rolando M. Gripaldo, which refers to the page numbers in the book (this may refer to the follow-up book by Chandler, which I have not read):
“No civilized society ever existed without some form of slavery or serfdom” (397). There are the power elite and the ruled. The trend today is post-civilization, or that we are becoming decivilized in view of the emergence of electoral democratization, economic liberalism, general education, religious tolerance, administrative autonomy, and civilian-governmental supremacy of the military. Cosmic Mind has thought and done all these, except one more task: to make the human mind rational (401). Prior to civilization, there was mythology that eventually engulfed the civilized mind.The emergence of rational thought (Chapter 8) became possible with the existence of philosophers in the first three civilizations: Sinic, Occidental, and Indic at about the same time, the sixth century B.C. A process of demythologizing took place. In China the demythologizing process was facile in that there were really no grandiose myths in view of the Chinese “balance, moderating mindset” and their consequent preoccupation with the sociopolitical area (412-13). The demythologizing process of the West took the form of looking at the external workings of Cosmic Mind while that of India took the form of looking at the internal workings of CM. For Chandler, however, both science (Occidental) and mysticism (Indic) are not only real but ways of knowing CM as “transcendent Consciousness” (456); the first by inference while the second by direct experience. Chandler thinks that in the hierarchy of conscious states, the “Mystic Vision is the apex” (448), though not the apex of human evolution.”
The same issue of civilizational change through attending the forms of awareness is therefore explicitly but also pragmatically addressed by the works of Robert Hanna and Otto Paans, who introduce the very important concepts of Thought-Shapers and Action-Shapers. Their language is complex and philosophical, but I hope you bear with me, as the techniques they propose for overcoming and working with our conditioning, open a very fruitful path of ‘strategizing’ changes in the forms of awareness.
Otto Paans explains:
“Thought-shapers are essentially non-conceptual contents that operate in the construction of mental imagery and thought by arbitrarily picking out some topological and/or processual properties, and subsequently exaggerating or diminishing their presence.”
I interpret this as another view on the Dooyeweerd-ian ‘frames’. In other words, we can’t really think outside of them, so we need to know them.
They explain:
“More precisely, we apply the categorical distinction between
(i) mechanical (i.e., computable/recursive, entropic, and deterministic or indeterministic) systems and
(ii) organic (i.e., uncomputable/non-recursive, processual, negentropic, purposive, and self-organizing) systems, to fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind and cognition, with general application to the nature of human thinking in the formal and natural sciences, the applied arts and fine arts, morality, and socio-politics, as well as metaphysics and epistemology.
By “thought-shapers,” we mean mental representations of any or all of the following: allegories, analogies, blueprints, catechisms, diagrams, displays, icons, images, lay-outs, metaphors, mnemonics, models, outlines, parables, pictures, scenarios, schemata, sketches, spreadsheets, stereotypes, symbols, tableaux, and templates.
Correspondingly, we argue that human thinking is really possible only insofar as it’s partially causally determined, formed, and normatively guided by either
(i) mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers in a bad, false, and wrong way, or
(ii) organic, generative thought-shapers in a good, true, and right way.”
From another article, in which they perfect their ‘Theory of Though-Shapers, comes the key conclusion:
“The theory of thought-shapers (TTS) asserts that human thinking processes are either,
(a) shaped negatively by mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers, or
>< (b) shaped positively by organic, generative thought-shapers.
Because language is a social institution and because all thinking is mediated by language, then … the mind-shaping thesis … is empirically testable via scientific psychology, and can be implemented for positively shaping human minds-&-lives.“
The pragmatic outcome of a theory of thought-shapers is a practice of ‘action-shapers’:
“Thought-shapers pre-self-consciously shape thoughts and therefore they also pre-self-consciously shape intentions, desires, beliefs and volitions. But desires can become effective and turn into actions. So, we can say that thought-shapers at some point develop or extend into their action-oriented counterparts that translate desires into real physical actions. We call these action-oriented counterparts action-shapers. Likewise, we call the context-specific operating environment of an action-shaper the action-space. … Actions are not completely causally determined by action-shapers, just as thoughts are not completely causally determined by thought-shapers. If we were to hold that view, we would be thrown back into a kind of bleak, deterministic, and mechanistic picture about human agency. Thought-shapers primarily exercise their influence through our capacity for imagination (Hanna and Paans, 2021). By contrast, action-shapers exert their influence primarily via desires, affects or emotions. ”
Notice how the work of the neo-organicists conclude with fairly Girardian conclusions, i.e. achieving a polarity change through work on ‘desires, affects, or emotions’, and how this is strengthened by the Sorokinian conclusions that polarity changes are not only inevitable as periodic outcomes of societal evolution, but that a tradition of positive though- and action-shapers has already existed through the Axial Age.
So this is the key to arrive at an ‘integrative’ phase change in human thinking, which takes the form of ‘thinking like the universe is alive’ rather than assuming we live in a universe of dead objects, subject to inevitable thermo-dynamic decay, which is at the root of our ‘nihilistic’ modes of thinking.
But I want to end with references to my earlier work on the temporalities of change. In my earlier work, based on a systematic reading of ‘Civilizational Analysts’, I have come to certain conclusions that we have ‘spirally’ arrived at a ‘Third Information Barrier’, which takes the form of a ‘Meta-Crisis’, which will require a deep civilizational reset.
In this context, the insight is that
< “ Civilizational crises are not the end of the world, but the signal of a shift in rhythm. “ > [1]
I have recently reorganized all the wiki material under the new paradigm of ‘Reconstruction Studies’:
< “Reconstruction Studies does not propose a single model of the future. It maps an emerging ecology of institutional seed forms. The central question is not “What should replace the present civilization?” but rather “What is already being built that demonstrates the possibility of a successor civilization?” >
Reconstruction Studies does not assume that a single theory, ideology, or movement possesses the blueprint for a successor civilization. Its purpose is to identify, compare, and connect the diverse seed forms emerging across disciplines, cultures, and social movements.
See also the companion term, Polyrenewal, which focuses on the emergence of responding ‘seed forms’, aka islands of coherence, which react to the coming crises with anticipatory consciousness: “the simultaneous emergence of multiple, interconnected practices that regenerate ecological, social, economic and democratic life.”
We need of course to pay our vital attention to both the processes of civilizational destruction and collapse. As I write this, I’m currently staying with my friends of the ‘And Now What’ project, in Leuven, Belgium, who cultivate ‘collapse preparation and awareness’. I have offered them space for a guest article in the future. My own documentation on ‘thermo-dynamic processes and limitations’ is here. Our specific response to this thermodynamic crisis is the institutional form of the commons and the practice of mutualization.
We cannot indeed assume that we will continue to have access to the same modern technologies and complex supply chains, in a world wrecked by climate change and other disruptions to vital systems. What this means in practical terms is that we are already entering the logic of a Dark Age, which is a recurrent phenomena during the phase transitions from one form of civilization to another.
William Irwin Thompson has a key insight here. Dark Ages are the time where consciousness transitions actually occur, but beware, before something new is gained, a lot is also lost:
“A dark age is characteristic of the transition from one structure of consciousness to another.
“Before agriculture, there was a loss of culture in the Mesolithic; gone was the high culture of the Paleolithic Lascaux, but not yet come was the high culture of the Neolithic
Agricultural society stabilized itself from 9500 to 4500 BCE, and then came the Kurgan invasions and the destruction of the undefended agricultural villages of the great goddess
By 2500 BCE, civilization had stabilized .. in the new forms found along the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates
There is an Aegean dark age of 1400 to 800 BCE, which expresses Gebser’s mythical to mental epoch
Before Western European Civilization there was the dark age of 476 to 800 CE
And now, before the shift to integral, we seem be be experiencing our own dark age in which our civilization is disintegrating.” (p. 14-15)
Yet, at the same time, I am assuming that the declining spiral of this civilization of ours will be uneven, both in terms of place and temporalities, and that technology remains part of the response, for the simple fact that we are technological beings. As our readers will know, we are adepts of a particular form of technology, which is distributed and commons-based. But there are other visions out there of course.
This may be the most Promethean alternative proposed that is not the trans- and post-humanist kind of the netarchical capitalists, but has looked at underlying matter-energy realities and is highly sensitive to issues of ecological and social justice. I’m not signalling agreement here, just mentioning it as one of the important proposed pathways that is being proposed. I personally have not looked into it seriously enough to have a considered judgment at this stage.
I’m therefore citing Nafeez Ahmed ‘as is’ and at length here:
“I set out this framework in detail in my 2024 Foresight paper ‘Planetary Phase Shift’. The argument, in plain English: civilisations behave like other living systems. They grow, mature, break down, and either reorganise into a new form or collapse. We are in the breakdown stage – a moment when the way societies generate energy, move people and goods, feed themselves and process information is coming apart, even as a new way of doing all of that is being born in its shadow.
Five sectors of the global economy are crossing into new configurations at the same time. Each on its own would be a generational story. Together, they reshape everything.
Energy – Solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are now the cheapest source of electricity on the planet, on a cost curve that has been stable for two decades. Since 2011, onshore wind costs have fallen 59%, offshore wind 61%, solar 89% and batteries 83%. Some 84% of new global power generation in 2023 was renewable. Two trillion dollars a year now flows into clean technology investment – double the amount going into fossil fuels.
Transport –Electric vehicles, and behind them autonomous vehicles, are following the same cost curve. The internal combustion engine is heading the way of the horse and cart.
Food –Precision fermentation and cellular agriculture – using engineered microbes to produce proteins and fats at scale – are projected to make protein production five to 10 times cheaper than industrial animal agriculture by 2035. As the think tank RethinkX has documented,industrial livestock is heading for the same collapse that wiped out the kerosene-lamp industry in a decade. Up to 2.7 billion hectares of freed land could become available for rewilding, regenerative farming and carbon drawdown.
Information – … AI is following a much steeper cost curve. The cost to train a model such as GPT-3 fell from $4.6 million in 2020 to a projected $30 by 2030. What Blair has missed is what AI is connected to.
Materials –Advanced materials, 3D printing, robotics and circular-economy chemistry are converging into a different industrial base that uses far less mining, land and brute-force extraction. The Congolese cobalt mine belongs to a world on its way out.
These are five threads of a single story. Cheap clean electrons make precision fermentation viable. AI optimises the grid that carries those electrons. The grid powers the AI. Autonomous electric vehicles become moving batteries that stabilise the grid. New materials make the batteries lighter, cheaper and recyclable. The loop closes.
Together, these revolutions amount to what physicists call a phase transition – a system flipping from one form into a fundamentally different one, the way water flips into steam. The cascading crises everyone now talks about – the cost-of-living crisis, energy shocks, geopolitical fractures, the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine – are the noise of the old system coming apart. The five revolutions are the outline of what is being born in its place.”
In conclusion, after we have reviewed civilizational change from the point of view of changing the forms of human consciousness and awareness, I want to briefly mention the political-strategic vision that we defend:
Based on our synthesis of the insights of the macro-historians, we believe we can propose the following streamlined process of social change:
The phase of crisis, in which the integrative capacity of the institutions of the previous phase ceases to function, which leads to disintegration of their coordinative capacity.
The phase of atomization and fragmentation, which leads to polarization and forms of ‘civil war’ (Christians against pagans, Neo-Confucians against Taoists and Buddhists, Catholics and Reformers, the current ‘culture war’ in the West between identitarians and others).
A first exit phase, in which first the pioneers with anticipatory consciousness leave the old institutions (and associated urban territories) and places to experiment and pioneer new forms of coordination and value creation and distribution;
Then, in a second more significant Exodus, they are followed by larger masses leaving the old centers of power. These communities center on ‘seed forms’, that gradually interconnect in subsystems, until they are ready to become the new ‘core’ of a new civilizational system. The concept of Exodus stresses that fundamental transformations start at the margins of the failing system, through people who explicitly reject the old forms and attempt to create new ones.
Eventually, to become politically dominant, regenerative jurisdictional alliances need to be formed, which support the new regime of value and render it, in turn, ‘hegemonic’. These regenerative jurisdictional alliances are related to our ‘trialectical’ analysis, used by Mark Whitaker, that show alliances between social groups situated at the bottom, middle, or top of the status or class hierarchy. These alliances can be degenerative, leading to social and ecological deterioration, or can, in some cases and some periods, be oriented towards the regeneration of their territories and populations.
If any of these insights and proposals appeal to you, check out our Cosmo-Local Initiative, which is our own view of how technological change fits in the process of consciousness change
