George Pór: My decades old quest for higher meaning reached a new phase with the question, “what is the pattern that connects awakening to our highest potential in individual, organizational,and social life?” I felt if I could discover that pattern, I’d be able to unlock the synergy between the directions of my calling to walk on the paths of personal, organizational, and social evolution.That discovery started in the early years of this century, when I got acquainted with and dove into Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics, frameworks that I could apply to the three domains of evolution that were of most interest to me. The exploration continued when Otto Scharmer introduced me to the U Process in 2005. This is a process that takes a group through cycles, where they can access different perspectives and solutions regarding organizational and cross-organizational (or even personal) issues.

In the years following my first Theory U work-shop, I immersed myself in the life of various“we-spaces,” nourishing environments for accelerated personal and collective development. That made me expand the domain of my pattern-seeking and insert the “community” level between“individual” and “organizational” in the chain that stops at the “social” scale of awakening. 

The understanding of the patterns that connect the edges of our evolution (in those four dimensions), and what drives them, became both my passion and an ever-deepening and endless work-in-progress. What follows is a report reflecting the current state of my quest, at least as much of it that I was able to pull into this writing, as of May 2017.

The four sections of this essay that serve as contexts for outlining the meaning, conditions and practices of “collective awakening” are: What Brings Me to We; Collective Buddha; Wisdom-Driven Enter-prise; and Awakening to a Wiser Society. Exploring and unleashing the synergy of transformative work across all four domains call for an action research.

Read the full essay below:

On the Verge of Collective Awakening by George Pór on Scribd

Photo by byzantiumbooks

The post Essay of the Day: On the Verge of Collective Awakening appeared first on P2P Foundation.

(1) Examine an organizational type and state clearly the goals of that organization. In Koestler’s formulation this would be the Gestalt-Form. In the Exponential Organizational model this is called the “Massive Transformative Purpose,” or MTP. For example, if it is a corporation that provides a software platform for connecting people, it might be “to connect the world.

(2) Figure out what fundamentals are related to the health of that organization. For example, if the goal of the organization is connecting people, there are probably ways to see how well this is working. How many people does the network have? How often do they communicate with each other?

(3) Find quantifiable mechanisms to see how well this is working. Once you’ve managed to prioritize goals related to the health of the organization, track them and optimized For example, dashboarding solutions as documented here

(4) Create motivational and accountability mechanisms. For example, it is shown that, for humans, small achievable goals create positive momentum that leads to more being accomplished than gigantic goals that may or may not be achievable.

This structure is remarkably flexible, and can apply to all types of organizations. In fact, it might even be sufficient to determine whether or not there is coherence at all in an organization. For example, in certain forms of cellular life, this coherence happens at the quantum level. Alignment at this level is probably what is most necessary.

Along these lines, this applies equally well to organizations such as a “church” as to corporations. For example, such an organization might have the purpose of “inspiring people and encouraging them to live in love.” When you have that, you might realize that certain ways of approaching problems are not conducive to that overall goal and that you need to embrace a new type of ‘love’ based metrics (perhaps including the latest in neuroeconomics research, among other things).

Equally important in Holonic philosophy is the continual fractal and nested nature of these structures. All of these goals and optimization happens equally importantly (and perhaps even more importantly) at the level of individuals. If the individual is not well, it is unlikely that the “corporate” manifestation will produce good fruit. Additionally, the process of social organization should be one of synchronization and not coercion. Once an individual has identified their purpose for living and is able to articulate it, he/she will be better able to aggregate with others who share it.

“Health” here is a very useful word, insofar as there are clear things which indication of sickness, as well as types of performance that are aligned with the goals of an organization which can continually be optimized. Additionally,the more tightly honed one is to the purpose, the more motivation one has for optimization.

Additionally, various other elements, like money, suddenly look a lot like fuel for facilitating the purpose, rather than ends in and of themselves. That said, creativity in attaining these goals may also be used, and, just as human biology has many different types of nutrients, it is unlikely that money will be an exclusive value transfer mechanism. In fact, in a highly honed purpose driven organization it may not even be the primary mechanism for
expressing value.

In short, holonic philosophy is not merely a theoretical construct. It is a highly practical tool to facilitate optimal system design and applies to all types of social organizations and
individuals.

Photo by agroffman

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“Hanauer and Liu (write) on the existing economic story and what they call the “machinebrain” rationalistic approach.

It’s fairly standard fare:

– Call it the “Machinebrain” picture of the world: markets are perfectly efficient, humans perfectly rational, incentives perfectly clear and outcomes perfectly appropriate. From this a series of other truths necessarily follows: regulation and taxes are inherently regrettable because they impede the machine’s optimal workings. Government fiscal stimulus is wasteful. The rich by definition deserve to be so and the poor as well.

The roots of a circular economy, in contrast, lie with those thinkers and designers who recognise that:

– Economies, as social scientists now understand, aren’t simple, linear and predictable, but complex, nonlinear and ecosystemic.

The source for this quote is still Hanauer and Liu. It’s a matter of science, that is what economies are and they follow the ‘rules’ of feedback rich systems. That’s still a very dry, hardly understandable description. What is needed is a suitable metaphor group – a more consistent metaphor, which is more explicit than for example; “taking insights from living systems” which is common in many overviews of the circular economy.

Here is Hanauer and Liu’s suggestion:

– An economy isn’t a machine; it’s a garden. It can be fruitful if well tended, but will be overrun by noxious weeds if not.

In this new framework, which we call Gardenbrain, markets are not perfectly efficient but can be effective if well managed. Where Machinebrain posits that it’s every man for himself, Gardenbrain recognizes that we’re all better off when we’re all better off. Where Machinebrain treats radical inequality as purely the predictable result of unequally distributed talent and work ethic, Gardenbrain reveals it as equally the self-reinforcing and compounding result of unequally distributed opportunity.

Gardenbrain challenges many of today’s most conventional policy ideas.

One almost visceral reaction to the notion of a garden as a metaphor, let alone ‘Gardenbrain’ as a descriptor is that it reduces or diminishes the human from being in charge to a kind of stewardship. It means a kind of humility, working with the system, being in partnership – it’s somehow ‘fuzzy.’ A garden is also, well, just an old man’s [sic] pastime, an irrelevance surely in the big picture of a technological, fast moving increasingly urban world run by technocrats managing, controlling complicated systems. It’s potentially a big turn off.

Perhaps that’s a bit harsh, but one reality for the ‘machinebrain’ orientated for sure…let’s go on a little. Looking into Hanauer and Liu’s ‘Gardenbrain’ reveals these consequential reframings
Under the prevailing assumption, regulation is an unfortunate interruption of a frictionless process of wealth creation in a self-correcting market. But Gardenbrain allows us to see that an economy cannot self-correct any more than a garden can self-tend. And regulation — the creation of standards to raise the quality of economic life — is the work of seeding useful activity and weeding harmful activity.

Is it possible to garden clumsily and ineffectively? Of course. Wise regulation, however, is how human societies turn a useless jungle into a prosperous garden. This explains why wherever on earth one finds successful private companies, one also finds a well-regulated economy, and where regulation is absent we find widespread poverty.

OK, this sounds much like the circular economy, advocating “optimising system conditions” rather than interfering in the detail or seeking to micro manage anything. Taxes are reframed too, of course. Compare the existing ‘story’. Taxes take…“money out of the economy. It is not just separate from economic activity, but hostile to it. This is why most Americans believe that lower taxes will automatically lead to more prosperity.”

But for Gardenbrain types this question illuminates the key role of circulation:

– …taxes as basic nutrients that sustain the garden. A well-designed tax system — in which everyone contributes and benefits — ensures that nutrients are circulated widely to fertilize and foster growth. … Jobs are the consequence of an organic feedback loop between consumers and businesses, and it’s the demand from a thriving middle class that truly creates jobs. The problem with today’s severe concentration of wealth, then, isn’t that it’s unfair, though it might be; it’s that it kills middle-class demand. Lasting growth doesn’t trickle down; it emerges from the middle out.

It’s perfectly obvious; perfectly consistent, as all effective deployment of metaphor should be. Feedback rules; feedback reinvigorates. It is restorative and regenerative as with “circular economy” aspirations around materials, but explicitly applied to how jobs are created and the process of tax and invest. Note here that it’s not “tax and spend” since ‘spend’ has connotations of spendthrift, to lose, to diminish the organism [“I’m spent”], of waste. Hanauer and Liu write ‘The word spending means literally “to use up or extinguish value,”’

Making sure there is enough demand for products and services is therefore an obligation of governance and is part of creating effective economic flows.

This flows metaphor is, furthermore, deployed in a very interesting way:

Government no more spends our money than a garden spends water or a body spends blood. To spend tax dollars on education and health is to circulate nutrients through the garden.”

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By contrast, ‘left integralist’, such as Joe Corbett and my own ‘p2p theoretical’ approach, claim the next phase is marked by the importance of collaborative commons.

Joe Corbett makes the argument very cogently:

“One often hears within integral circles of the developmental oscillation between individual and collectivist orientations, so that, for instance, whereas modernity is characterized by an individual achievement ethos, postmodernity is characterized by a collectivist ethos, and therefore post-postmoden integral being and consciousness will be characterized once again by a more integrated individualist ethos, presumably one in which each individual becomes an innovative entrepreneur leading the way in a brave new world of John Galtian self-sufficiency and superhuman individualism.

My contention is that this vision is patently false and is based on a misunderstanding of postmodernism (green) that will require a complete reorientation of the direction and goals of the integral leadership and its community.

As Jurgen Habermas and Zygmunt Bauman say, postmodernity is not so much a transcendence of modernity as it is a hyper-modernity in which the goals and values of modernity are extended to people and society where once they were limited and circumspect. Women and minorities are granted rights once denied to them, and the truths of authority (from the white male heterosexual and imperialism to science itself) are put under the spotlight and hollowed-out of their sacred essence.

In a word, under postmodernity the myth of the given is dethroned, and with it the enlightenment myth of progress through the application of science and reason to social problems is exposed as a gender, class, and racial fraud that the white European male has imposed as a narrative on the world for his own advancement and self-aggrandizement. What began as a critique of religious superstition and authority under modernity ends in a critique of scientific materialism and political-economic authority under hyper-modernity (postmodernity).

Thus, what characterizes postmodernity above all is a kind of relativism that lacks moral and epistemological authority beyond the individual in what Norman O. Brown has called the loss of the Father, where there is no center, and self-identity is the only anchor left for individual stability and existential grounding. The vacuum is filled with narcissistic consumerism and the pursuit of money as an infantile anal-fecal fixation, patriotic flag-waving and its variant in vicarious identification with sports teams, and the endless other quasi-individual tribal identifications (gender, race, new age religion, etc.) offered as postmodern forms of self-identity in a factionalized anarchy of cultural centerlessness.

These are the cultural conditions that then make possible the seamless economic and political transformation into neoliberalism, where the institutional and material conditions of a war of all against all can be implemented without resistance for the benefit of the few. This is the current post-enlightenment period of plutocracy we now find ourselves in, where the democratic and scientific foundations of modernity have all but melted into thin air.

Notice that the era of postmodernity is not characterized by a collectivist ethos, but rather by individual narcissism and quasi-individual tribalism. Postmodernity is the logical conclusion of a modern individual achievement orientation, not its transcendence. Therefore, what comes after postmodern-green isn’t the hyper-individualized ethos of innovative entrepreneurialism, which is precisely the neoliberal conditions for a war of all against all, but a collectivist ethos—not of mass obedience to a central authority, but networks of p2p individuals working on common projects for the collective good, otherwise known as (integral) socialism.

If there is one thing holding back the development of the integral vision into a reality, it’s not a mean green-meme bent on social division and deconstruction, but the continued belief and practice of integral leaders and the integral community that the next integral stage of development is characterized by superhuman individualism in the oscillation of the spiral away from “collectivist” green. On the contrary, once integral leaders and the integral community come out of the delusion of superhuman individualism, they will realize that the only solution to first tier problems isn’t self-interested narcissism and tribalism but a collectivist vision of networked individuals working toward common purpose and universal human interests.”

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