Thread for exploring discussion of collective action bottlenecks and strategies for addressing them to nurture flourishing movements toward 2nd Renaissance, ecocivilization, etc.
Since there seemed to be some interest in developing a common space for pursuing discussion around collective action issues, I created this thread. Rufus indicated he would have some ideas to post here. If you’re interested in this topic or have thoughts about it, please post here, and we’ll see where the discussion takes us… Cheers,
Agreeing on things is generally hard but let’s agree that collective action is co-ordinated effort towards a certain common goal. Collective action can also be an effort to empower the group and the individuals to be able to ultimately reach those goals more easily. The first bit requires agreeing on goals, strategy, etc… and has proven to be a very difficult project. The second proposal seems relatively simple. Just an agreement between people to support each other in a way that will translate into empowerment of individual members and reciprocal re-enforcement.
My experiment (unsuccessful so far):
Take a group of people that have certain outputs (posts, essays, presentations, videos, generic presence that can be acknowledged and validated) and ask them to start supporting each other through likes and sharing of the content. This would be a reciprocal commitment - so every member undertakes to treat everyone’s content as though it cleared all thresholds for support.
That simple experiment already stretches the appetite for collective action when presented to similar groups like ours. Individuals are generally very keen to get others to support them, but very reluctant to reciprocate.
Objections I’ve heard so far:
My reputation would be adversely affected if I were seen to be endorsing a lot of content
Content should be endorsed on the basis of merit not commitment, etc…
Another observation - when you ask people about ideas for something, they’ll remain quiet. But as soon as you suggest something, there’ll be plenty of objections. People spring to collective action to shoot down other incentives, but reluctant to engage positively.
Do you have ideas for novel strategies?
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Here’s a modest proposal. Treat the Donella Meadows leverage points like a musical scale. Action plans should both ascend and descend running up and down that scale in rhythmic frequency touching all the degrees.
Meadows lists “power to transcend paradigms” as highest leverage. I would reinterpret that more like the highest note in the opera. Great note when the soloist hits it, but boring and useless if that’s the only note in the show! Equally useless is sitting around congratulating ourselves on how paradigmatically transcendent we have become. The real work in general is in the weeds - subsidies, taxes, standards, and all the intermediate level stuff. The notion of “bottleneck” is only relevant to those trying to accomplish something in the physical world.
Let me try one more metaphor. On a mountain hike, one must occasionally get a big picture view, or there is a risk of circling in the forest till supplies run out. That may involve map and compass, or better yet, standing on a ridge line and viewing the landscape for miles in all directions. That’s the transparadigmatic moment. Great moment! Definitely a highlight! But if you just stay there all through the day and night, prepare to freeze and starve. Most of the hike requires closer attention to what your boots are doing in relation to the ground, because there are rocks, roots, slippery spots, and other hazards that can break an ankle or worse. It takes a low leverage to scramble over a downed log across what is supposed to be the trail. But without going low, there is no getting past that log. At that moment, the log is the “bottleneck”. A few yards down the trail, something else will be. On life’s journey, bottlenecks are ever changing.
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This was the original goal of the last two books I have written. I did not come up with a new cosmological-metaphysical model of reality because that was my goal. Rather, the problem I was trying to solve was that as things stand we’ve no means of agreeing a starting point for serious discussion about fixing the world’s problems, because there is no stable, shared model of reality. We need a way to re-ground realism which does not suffer from the problems of physicalism and objectivism. I spent many years trying to find the best way to do this, and in the end this led me to the the two-phase model, which just happens to resolve the entire crisis in cosmology as well.
This is why I am so exasperated at the lack of engagement with these ideas on this forum. I have literally spent half my life trying to figure out a solution to these problems which actually works, and yet almost everybody on this forum is pathologically committed to postmodern epistemic and ontological pluralism. You are embracing the core problem - the direct cause of the meaning crisis and our cultural paralysis - as if it was an essential part of the solution.
The New Epistemic Deal | Two-Phase Cosmology
In order to start making real progress towards fixing our world’s problems, we need to change the way we think and communicate. The New Epistemic Deal is a proposed agreement to facilitate serious discussions about ecology, politics, economics, morality, spirituality and countless other topics without the discussion being derailed by people who refuse to start with the known facts about reality. We must do this without scientistically ruling out things that aren’t supported by science or reason but aren’t in conflict with them either.
1: Ecocivilisation is our shared destiny and guiding goal.
Ecocivilisation represents a vision of a society that harmonises human activity with ecological principles. This is not a utopian ideal but a necessity dictated by the realities of ecosystems and evolution. The claim that ecocivilisation is our destiny is pre-political, transcending specific ideologies or systems. The social, political, and economic structures of ecocivilisation are not part of this definition, but the core premise is clear: civilisation must work ecologically to endure.
2: Consciousness is real.
Consciousness – our individual interface with reality – is the one thing each of us can be absolutely certain exists. It is through consciousness that we perceive existence and recognise that anything exists at all. As such, consciousness must serve as the starting point for exploring what exists beyond our subjective experience and for discerning the boundaries of what we know and what we don’t.
3: Epistemic structural realism is true.
Scientific knowledge tends towards truth. We acknowledge that there is such a thing as an objective reality, external to human minds, about which science provides structural knowledge that is reliable, albeit with certain important qualifications. We reject the idea that all scientific knowledge is merely provisional, or as subjective as non-scientific forms of knowledge. We affirm the epistemic privilege of science.
4: Both materialism and physicalism should be rejected.
Materialism cannot account for consciousness. Physicalism either suffers from the same problem, or it implies things that most physicalists reject, in which case it is not much use as a piece of terminology. Both materialism and physicalism restrict our models of reality in such a way that they are never going to be able to satisfactorily account for everything we have justification for believing exists.
5: The existence of praeternatural phenomena is consistent with science and reason, but apart from the cases of psychegenesis and free will, there is no scientific or rational justification for believing in it/them either. The only possible justification for belief is subjective lived experience.
Psychegenesis and free will are structural parts of the system – there’s no point in being skeptical about them. Everybody is aware of their own consciousness and felt metaphysical freedom – we do not consider this “spooky”. The same does not apply to synchronicity or any other alleged praeternatural phenomena.
¶6: We cannot expect people to believe things ( any things) based solely on other people’s subjective lived experiences. There will always be skeptics about any alleged praeternatural phenomena and their right to skepticism must be respected.
Principles seven and eight are closely related, but sufficiently distinct to warrant the inclusion of both.
7: There can be no morality if we deny reality.
If there actually is an objective reality, and we can actually know things about it, then if we start our moral reasoning with anything other than reality we are engaged in fake morality – we will be arguing about what would be morally right and wrong in some ideal reality rather than the real one that we have to figure out how to share. And if the people we are having moral disagreements with are actually dealing with reality, while we are not, then they are engaged with real morality and we are claiming moral high ground we have no right to claim.
8: Science, including ecology, must take epistemic privilege over economics, politics and everything else that purports to be about objective reality.
Principle seven is specifically about morality. Principle eight is about everything that matters – it is about practical reasoning as well as moral reasoning. It demands that the whole of science, including the whole of ecology, the limits to growth and the reality of ecological overshoot, must be acknowledged before serious discussion starts about anything at all.It should be considered immoral to come to any negotiating table demanding concessions from others before you are willing to accept reality. Growth-based economics and politics are dangerous nonsense, and for anybody who understands that, engaging with them while failing to persistently challenge their false assumptions is an immoral act.
Do you have ideas for novel strategies?
There must be a shared epistemic starting point. We must agree that there is a such a thing as reality, and agree some basic rules about what we do and do not collectively know about it. See my other post in this thread about my proposal for a New Epistemic Deal.
There can be no other shared starting point apart from some sort of new epistemic agreement. If we cannot agree at the most fundamental level about what is real, what is not real, and what questions cannot be given a collective, objective answer, then our probability of being able to agree about strategies is effectively zero.
What I cannot comprehend about this particular organisation is that I thought it was based on a collective agreement that postmodern relativism was a central part of the problem. I thought 2R was explicitly post-postmodern. But actions are what actually matters, and what I actually see here is a near total commitment to postmodern epistemic relativism. Any attempt to move towards a more stable foundation is collectively rejected, exactly as you describe: the only thing which the people here seem to be able to agree on, is that a new shared epistemic foundation must be rejected. It is everybody’s human right to believe in whatever they like, even if it is nonsense.
And how does any of that actually move us forwards? It’s just talk, Robert. It sounds nice, but gets us precisely nowhere.
Ok, thanks all for these initial comments, which suggests we do have enough interest here to shape a tent or forum for discussion of these issues. The point of shaping such a forum is to first open up the questions for finding a good agreed-upon starting or focal point that is coherent enough for moving forward with a sense-making project, so in response to Geoff’s comments, I would advocate for following a strong sense-making structure that begins with taking initial time to share our obviously different perspectives on what a good coherent focal or starting-point might be, realizing that we probably wont come to an immediate agreement, but that finding some agreeable focal point for the group of those interested in carrying on the discussion IS the first milestone for a good sense-making project having to do with collective action, since in fact this is ultimately one of the first key bottlenecks of all collective action arenas!
So I would suggest we allow some time to see who else from this community would be interested in joining this discussion, and then once we have a sense of a core group, perhaps in a week or so, agreeing on a first meeting time to come together in real time and begin our sense-making process by allowing everyone to share what they would see as a good way of focusing/coordinating a coherent discussion on collective action issues. I think Robert’s suggestion of building on Meadows’ Leverage Points might be one, but also would suggest we probably need to think about the importance of starting with some shared definitions of what collective action means, which would probably be the simple, direct question I would pose for an initial sense-making discussion. And we can certainly begin that work here, as Martin, Robert, and Geoff have already done, and I know Rufus is interested in this and will have some ideas to share here…
So if you know others who would be interested in this discussion, please invite them to post here, even if just to indicate their interest, and we’ll see where we’re at by, let’s say, next Monday. Sound good?
Sounds good to me, and I will see if I can get anybody else interested.
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And Geoff, in response to your comments, a few brief opening notes as an opening to dialogue: As a new participant in this 2R Forum, I obviously do not yet have any opinions about whether or not this 2R community/forum may or may not be a generative space for making progress on the core issues related to collective action, which is why I decided to open this space to see where it might lead. You seem to be suggesting, based on your own experience so far, that this 2R space has not been generative, so in the spirit of openness for testing your thesis re:
To test this thesis, I would propose the following, since I too will be curious to find out whether 2R is a space with the potential to move beyond the post-modern relativist bottleneck you are highlighting:
Let us open up this space to all who are interested in exploring these questions in full embrace of two basic principles of dialogic sense-making that I would suggest are foundational for developing any community committed to collective action:
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The first collective action problem that any PROCESS of Community- and solidarity-building must confront is recognition of the reality that such a process cannot BEGIN with any kind of imposed ideological or thought-based agreement. This is because, in REALITY, every person comes to an open space like this with their own set of individual presuppositions, beliefs, ideas, shaped by their unique life experience. And as Hannah Arendt emphasized, true politics begins with recognition of the plurality of our being-in-the-world-with-others. Any rejection of plurality and difference as the starting point for human dialogue about how to come together** for collective action** creates not just a bottleneck, but an insurmountable choke-point for beginning an authentic process of solidarity-building for collective action.
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Since solidarity-building for collective action cannot begin with ideological agreement, and must in fact be open to, and accepting of difference, the beginning of such constitutive action must be elsewhere - in the actual process of sense-making that will allow people coming from different perspectives to create a shared common understanding of what the foundations for their collective action will be. Such sense-making recognizes that all such agreements are inevitably contingent and fragile, grounded and dependent on the mutual interest of the group in nurturing the commons that can provide the sustaining ground for collaborative collective action.
This is, in any case, my attempt to suggest an open sense-making framework for initiating our collective action tent discussion, with the first test being whether we can collectively come together to define a commons of basic agreement that is coherent enough to allow those who are interested to move forward beyond this first bottleneck challenge of any new project of collaboration.
Geoff, perhaps this will not be a satisfactory starting-point to address your concerns and skepticism, but in any case it is my attempt to recognize the importance of taking responsibility for the ethical import of epistemic realism you are legitimately raising, while also recognizing that the reality of generative collective action is grounded in something other/deeper than epistemic agreement…
And as a reference point for what I am gesturing toward in the last sentence, I’ll simply quote here a paragraph from near the end of the Donella Meadows piece on Leverage Points that Robert nicely pointed us toward above:
1. The power to transcend paradigms.
There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that NO paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into Not Knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment.
I would propose that effective sense-making frameworks for collective action are grounded in a praxis epistemology that is fundamentally aligned with the kind of flexibility toward all paradigms of knowledge Meadows is underlining above.
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Thank you Geoff, and I very much appreciate the points you are making, which I understand come from a perspective that recognizes the extreme existential urgency of our situation, and the need for not getting stuck in “just talking.” This has also been a big issue for me, especially in so many of the regenerative “consciousness” platforms I’ve been engaging. And this is why I’ve proposed the specific topic of collective action as one that, even in our own attempt to create a common space here for opening up a coherent dialogue about it, will test whether we can help each other to understand the ethical character of sense-making that is absolutely necessary to break through even the first major bottleneck of any collective action project. Cheers,
The very fact that we are having this discussion is all the proof anybody needs that everybody is coming at this with their own set of existing beliefs. I am painfully aware of this. Our starting point is the normalisation of epistemic fragmentation and ideological anarchy.
But we need to start somewhere. I am open to discussion about where that is, but there is no point in me pretending that I am flexible about the need for some kind of shared epistemology and realism. For me, that cannot be negotiable, because without it I do not believe it is possible to move on from the postmodern impasse.
And in fact, I have never suggested we start with ideological agreement. The New Epistemic Deal (NED) isn’t about ideology at all. It is almost entirely about epistemology.
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At the initial project pitch, all I had was passion, conviction, and vision. I was sharing all that with a professional grantwriter/project manager, so that bit of context was quite important as well!
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Having made the best available pitch, I forgot about it for quite a few months. Then the funding came in.
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I recruited the initial authoring team of 3. Then the other 2 had to leave the project pretty early in development. The PM was not sure how to replace them. I asked her for a position posting for LinkedIn. She gave me that and I put it out to my network (1000+). We got an avalanche of interest!
There was quite a bit of co-author churn during the course of development, but I’m happy with the outcome. My own son finished a couple of my chapters and I finished one of his. There were many all-nighters for me in the development process. (Fun fact: I site @rufuspollock in one chapter!)
Some lessons learned from all that:
- Complex creative productions don’t manage themselves. Without my “auteur” energy, it never would have happened.
- Complex creative productions require team work. I worked like I was possessed on this project, but without all the other contributors, it never would have gotten done.
- Collective intelligence is for real. I was data mining inspiration out of this forum and similar channels during the entire development process. Bits and pieces of what turned into the book are scattered in multiple threads all over this forum.
OK, that’s what experience has shown me. Suppose, for the sake of argument, we wanted a collective creative production to spawn out of talent and vision available here. How might that work?
- First of all, leadership matters. Some one or two or three or so have to step up and be willing to lift a lot of load.
- Leadership also means making space for the rest of the team. Proofreaders and editors, for example, are indeed the boss of me when I hand copy over to them. I let co-authors have their own voices. If they wanted my input, they got it. Otherwise, I got mostly out of the way.
- On my textbook project, funding was the “attractor” that attached many participants to the project. Other relationships were in there too, but this project was in the key of capitalism. Can we pull off something ambitious like this without money changing hands? I’d say it’s worth a try, so we can find out one way or the other!
Geoff, thanks for clarifying this key distinction between ideological and epistemic agreement, a basic point with which I fully agree.
Yes, any group that wants to start collaborating on a project clearly needs to start somewhere, and I suggested a sense-making strategy as the structure for our dialogue about collective action because this strategy carries with it a practical epistemology grounded in the reality of how groups of different people can come together to achieve collective agreements and frameworks for collective action. I would agree that no group project can get very far without grounding in some kind of practical shared epistemology, but I am inclined to think of epistemology more in terms of praxis than theory, which begins with the acceptance of the realism of the complexity of human processes of meaning-making.
This is the only statement I would question, since I don’t agree that a commitment to a sense-making project that brings together people from different perspectives and with differing views on what even epistemology means necessarily commits those coming together to the “normalization of epistemic fragmentation and ideological anarchy.” Instead, I would argue that any group coming together - through their differences - with a commitment to sense-making around collective action is coming together precisely to challenge and break up such normalization. That would be one of my principle theses, offered up for testing. 
I think that maybe we are talking about different things when we say “group”. For me, the group which really matters is the whole of Western society (and eventually the wider world, but I am Western and the crisis we are discussing originated here). Crucially, the group I am interested in includes the scientific community. It has to, or it cannot be a contender for any “Second Rennaissance”…although this is partly why I have adopted “Second Enlightenment” as an alternative name. Without the scientific community, the group in question will just be another offshoot of postmodernism and integralism. It must learn also from the failures of UTOK – there must be a genuine integration of science and spirituality/mysticism, not just a psychological control mechanism bolted onto bad old naturalism.
This puts constraints on my project which yours probably does not have, because the scientific community has got major problems of its own, and these are the directly result if the fragmentation of knowledge both within materialistic science, and in the adjacent parts of philosophy. Why does this matter? Because there can only be one correct solution to the mega-crisis in materialistic science. We can’t have one solution to the hard problem of consciousness, another solution to the quantum measurement problem, and ten different solutions to the different problems in cosmology. That is not how major paradigm shifts work. How they do work is that somebody has to come up with some pivotal idea (such as heliocentrism, transcendental idealism, or evolution by natural selection) which suddenly makes sense of the whole picture by providing a gestalt shift. Ideas of this sort are never the result of negotiation. They depend on discoveries of fundamental structural elements of reality.
What I am trying to say is that there is only one correct solution to the crisis in materialistic science, and we cannot decide what that solution is based on praxis, psychology or politics. Rather, somebody has to find the correct answer, and other people have to actually accept that it is the right answer, which will necessarily require them to revise their own belief systems. Thomas Kuhn wrote a very famous book about this process, and the paradigm shift we are talking about right now is the biggest since the Rennaissance/Englightenment period itself. It is the completion of that revolution.
tbh this already seems too wordy and theoretical. I don’t think that soul searching is what we need right now - that’s all that most of us have been doing. I’ll probably stay out until something concrete and actionable emerges.
I don’t think that soul searching is what we need right now -
I don’t think that is what I am offering. I am trying to get people to understand that the search is over. What is required now is engagement.
It seems almost everybody, including the people on this forum, don’t actually believe a new paradigm is possible. Either that or they think it’s somewhere over the rainbow. I am trying to convince you that we’ve been on the verge of an actual paradigm shift for about ten years now, and that somebody has figured out how it will actually work.
Cosmology is deep in crisis, and the cosmologists have got no idea what is wrong, because they are totally brainwashed into believing physicalism cannot be questioned. This wrong conclusion is re-inforced by the tendency of the anti-physicalist camp to lazily assume the only alternatives are dualism, idealism, panpsychism or anti-realism. But a specific new form of neutral monism resolves all the logical and empirical problems, and exactly the same foundation can provide a common ground for the collective action being discussed right now.
You (collectively) need to move beyond the assumption that there is never going to be any metaphysical “right answer”. We need that right answer or 2R will remain exactly what you currently see it as: lots of words and soul-searching, but no tangible progress.
The menu of ontological, epistemological nonsense must go. The whole of Western society needs to grow out of that stage.
I’m not responding to you specifically @GeoffDann , just in general. If anything, we need less cooks…
Less cooks indeed. On this forum, each cook has his/her own recipe, and there is tacit agreement that space must be reserved for all the recipes. These recipes don’t take any notice of science – they are psychological, spiritual, maybe political, but have nothing to do with cosmology or the failure to quantise gravity. They do not even attempt to integrate at the foundational level.
Here is somewhere else there are too many cooks: (2) GENERAL RELATIVITY & QUANTUM MECHANICS | Facebook
Supposedly a group for discussing how GR and QM can be reconciled, it is actually (when you ignore the spam) a place where everybody can post their own personal AI-generated theory of reality. A culture has developed where people dislike other people shooting these theories down. Shooting them down is easy, because they are 99% pseudoscientific garbage, but the new culture believes everybody should be allowed to have their own personal framework. Never mind whether it is total garbage, or the logical inevitability that only ONE of these frameworks can possibly be correct (because they all contradict each other).
It’s a different manifestation of exactly the same mindset: everybody must be allowed a go at guessing a theory of reality. All views should be respected; none need to be tested against logic or science.
We like this situation, because it is entirely free from responsibility. But in fact it is a new kind of tyranny.
This is the meaning crisis, and it can only be ended with a new theory of reality which is actually correct. How would we recognise such a theory? Answer: it must have enormous cross-disciplinary explanatory power, and yet be basically elegant and simple.
Until now, nobody was offering anything of the sort. Nobody (including Wilber and UTOK) has come anywhere near the correct answer, because it requires breaking the biggest taboo in science. It’s a Copernican counter-revolution.
Yep, no responsibility…