Connected Community Conversations

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On the general theme of what might attract more people to 2R, what attracted me in the first place might be summed up with the phrase “connected community conversations”. Yesterday I was asked by a collaborator to summarize my recent theoretical postings across all social media. I’ll spare the details … but the conclusion amounted to, what the world needs most is collaborative networks. I believe 2R can contribute to that.

Operationally, what I’m hoping for is fairly simple. 1) Start with the ecosystem map linked below. 2) Have focused discussions on any and all of the detailed items on the map. 3) Have other discussions that cross-connect these items.

It should be evident to anyone who has explored a variety of the authors and movements on the ecosystem map, they do not all agree with one another on either detailed perspectives or major points. But they all landed on the map for reasons. The spirit of “connected community conversations” is to seek out the points of commonality.

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While that is understandable, you must already anticipate what my objection is going to be. I don’t have a problem with talking to people, but as you said in a previous thread:

Anyway, that’s all a large, established social circle with lots of regular conferences, people appearing on each other’s podcasts, thousands of pages of published literature, and a vastly interconnected online presence. If 2R must choose between that very influential social circle and your lone voice in the wilderness, I get the feeling your voice will be headed back to the wilderness soon enough.

Here, you have prioritised “connected community conversations” over what is actually required to make 2R work. You’re saying that they are where the action is – that’s where the connections are, and where the published literature is, and unless I’m willing to toe their line at least enough not to declare that they’ve got something fundamentally wrong, that I might as well just give up.

Gregg Henriques isn’t going to change his views, because he’s got money invested in defending his current position. Others have got their careers, and their carefully nurtured network of connections. Hanzi Freinacht is never going to be part of the same movement as myself because from my perspective “he” is indistinguishable from a postmodernist and from his perspective I am a fascist (apparently).

So for me it looks different. It is not just about making connections. It is very critically about getting a clearer idea of what 2R needs to be, and what it can’t be, and the process of assembling this new paradigm is necessarily going to involve leaving certain individuals and groups (or at least elements of their existing positions) out. You seem extremely reluctant to even contemplate such a thing, but I believe it is exactly what is required. Clearly we haven’t reached the crunch point yet, but sooner or later it will come.

In other words, there is no use trying to build a movement unless you have a clear enough idea of what that movement is actually trying to achieve that you can meaningfully distinguish between what belongs in that movement and what doesn’t. Without that, all you’ve got is a group of people who are talking about a movement, while nothing actually moves. The group, as it currently exists, isn’t going anywhere, is it? There’s a reason for that – it can’t go anywhere because there are certain elements which are trying to pull it in the wrong direction. This is not some minor problem. It’s a showstopper.

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Connecting to real world initiatives that provide practical deep connections is key. There’s already a lot out there: Global Ecovillage Network, Diggers & Dreamers, Climate Emergency Centers, ClimateSafe Villages. What 2R could do is provide the deep cognitive mapping that underpins systems of practice. Without a new story, a new fundamental perspective, things just cycle back to the same. This also contributes to why so many real world initiatives eventually fail. So it has something meaningful to give. The 2R whitepaper, which I only recently read, says it all. Though I’d highlight that great swathes of text require a deep commitment, and you cannot expect random people with whom no deep connection has yet been established to offer their time so generously. Not everyone has multiple hours a week to read text on screens, and of those who do, they are already tired and jaded from it, having done the very same as part of jobs.

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Recently I was asked by a collaborator to summarize my thinking on many matters. Below is an excerpt. This adds some more to your fine list of real world initiatives.

"Let’s begin on a positive note. What I would like to see more of (in general – all over the world) are permaculture-centered communities with co-housing arrangements, organized around spiritual centers. … influences leading me in that direction include: Nordic Bildung, Richard Flyer’s Symbiotic Culture model, the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka and India (which inspired Flyer), projects the world over facilitated by the Baháʼí Ruhi institute, and lots of other model communities affiliated with movements like Second Renaissance, Life Itself, Gameb, the Design School for Bioregional Regeneration, and others. That’s not comprehensive – just the ones I’ve had the most contact with.

So why models like that? Because I consider them resilient in the face of global events happening now and likely to escalate in the future. My thinking is around models that will benefit the current generation and have staying power generations into the future. I don’t see much point in building metaphoric houses on anything less study than metaphoric rocks. Self-sustaining, localized community with a collaborative and relational center is about as rock-like as anything social is likely to get. I’m a network architect. Resiliency, reliability, availability, and up-time are what I favor. A community that can feed, house, and take care of itself is about as resilient as we can hope to get.

Why Now? Why Not Already?
So I’m basically proposing villages. Did humanity not have those already? Does it still not have those in quite a few places? Yes and yes. But of course, social trends like modern industrial capitalism have been upending village life the world over for multiple centuries. Moreover, a generalized notion of “progress”, current in the West until fairly recently, and still extremely current at the highest levels of government and industry, favors urban and technological solutions over anything land-based. I’m assuming you are familiar with the extensive literature on the limits to growth, potential civilizational collapse, the metacrisis, and a whole host of philosophical frameworks aimed at turning the page on “modernity”. To save both you and me some valuable time, I won’t summarize all that here now. But I felt I needed to establish some context. It’s not just that I like permaculture communities as a lifestyle choice. It’s that I see such models as addressing critical issues the world needs to address."

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You’re right, of course, we both know the situation already. Where to place these pockets of endurance, though - these villages that stand apart from the unfolding collapse? We are also at the mercy of wider factors and, although the manner of collapse may differ from place to place, it looks increasingly likely to be one based on immense chaos and destruction. That, of course, is just what has happened before, and we have countless examples to draw upon. Many people cite the fall of well-known empires, and those are relevant, but this morning I found myself looking at the Great Library of Alexandria. Its destruction was not a single event, as is often thought, but came about through gradual decay and then hostility towards the older belief system. But, when the final act came, when the last scrolls were burned, the timespan was short. We are looking at the same dynamics now. And yet we have some fragments of the Great Library preserved - principally through citizens who relocated to Constantinople. This is an important example, because the foundation of a society is its belief systems, its knowledge and traditions. Can villages sustain such a foundation, or would it eventually erode and dissipate? Granted, we are talking about creating a new system of perception, though this doesn’t mean all the wisdom of the past 2000 years should be set aside. Indeed, knowing the story of humanity across this time is key to understanding why taking a different path is necessary. So, I wonder if a network of villages, spread out across the globe, would preserve knowledge? Leaving aside the fact that many, unless located very well, would be found and used to feed the remnants of the collapsed civilisation in a manner that the indigeneous tribes fell to European colonisation. Thus, I wonder if we should instead be looking to some key locations - if not the equivalent of Constantinople under the protective umbrella of an empire, then something akin to a larger territory? Alternatively, how would you see these village surviving and carrying forward knowledge systems?

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No. I don’t think they can survive at all without some basic apparatus of sovereign state to enforce basic law and order, and ensure military security.

I think we need to focus on survival at the level of nation states.

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My recommendation is to seed them all over. Like real plant seeds, some will take root, others will get chewed up by this force or that. But it’s best to try. Of if a particular situation looks especially unfavorable, move to a better one.

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I’m all for strategic thinking. Generalized collapse of everything, everywhere, all at once is very unlikely. More likely is collapse of selected areas, with reseeding eventually from areas left more intact. Anyone with a precise roapmap to all that will do very, very well in real estate and related disciplines!

When civilizations collapse, frontier peoples generally get to start over on the edges of what’s left of the older system. So I’d recommend as a general strategy, head for the edges. Or - this being the liminal web - the liminal spaces.

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Makes sense. This pretty much concludes the same: How we could survive in a post-collapse world | Discover Global Society

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Very good article. Generally drawing on the same sorts of literature I am relying on.

The challenges are going to be different in every local situation, but some of the abstract patterns are highly generalized. At a very high level, I see two general types of predatory self-reinforcing systems dominating the world: Capital and the State. (Following Kojin Karatani in this analysis). Both are hard up against limits to growth, which is why beggar-thy-neighbor mercantilism is suddenly back in vogue. Local communities at roughly the village level have been the most resilient social formations for thousands of years. Any given village can be trampled by any given army or expropriated by any given extractive business model, but the village structure itself is a hardy perennial.

To me the 21st century is feeling very 17th century, which means war are depression on the menu. Eventually, I expect something along the lines of a new Peace of Westphalia, except on a more global basis. I do not expect Capital or the State to wither away. I do expect them to moderate their consumption rates to fit within biophysical boundaries and to become more service-oriented with respect to their constituent local populations. Why? Because completely predatory businesses and governments are self-limiting. After they expropriate their own customers and citizens to a maximum extent. like the wolves who just feasted on the last rabbits, they too will starve. Meanwhile, any business or state with a more balanced approach will still be in the game, which is why this more balanced approach will become the eventual global norm.

Any given person is essentially offered a choice between systemic statecraft and village life. Be a wolf or be a rabbit, basically. The third way between these two might be a sort monastic or clerical or even shamanic point of view: well informed about the big picture, but electing village life none the less.

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Geoff, I hear your call for clarity and direction. And I agree that a movement without coherence risks going nowhere. But I want to name something that feels vital in this moment: the desire to define the future by exclusion—by deciding who or what must be left out—risks reproducing the very patterns that got us into this metacrisis to begin with.

If 2R is to be a genuine paradigm shift, then it can’t simply be about choosing sides or drawing hard lines. That’s how modernity maintains control—by forcing binary decisions, by seeking purity, by assuming that coherence must come from subtraction.

What if the deeper task is learning to hold contradiction without fragmentation? What if the “showstopper” isn’t the presence of difference, but our collective impatience with metabolizing it?

You’re right—we’re not moving quickly. But maybe speed isn’t the measure of transformation. Maybe the movement begins when we stop trying to cleanse the conversation, and start learning how to stay in relationship through the discomfort of not knowing yet who “belongs.”

Paradigm shifts aren’t engineered. They’re composted.

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Well, surely that depends on exactly who or what you are deciding to leave out. To give the least controversial example, growth-based economics, which is currently considered to be the only game in town, must be left out. If you don’t leave that out, then there isn’t any paradigm shift. It must be left out because it is fundamentally detached from reality, and it is right at the heart of our problems.

The question is what else is in the same category of things that must be left out.

If 2R is to be a genuine paradigm shift, then it can’t simply be about choosing sides or drawing hard lines. That’s how modernity maintains control—by forcing binary decisions, by seeking purity, by assuming that coherence must come from subtraction.

How can we fix economics without drawing a hard line which prohibits theories based on the idea that infinite growth is possible in a finite physical system?

What if the deeper task is learning to hold contradiction without fragmentation? What if the “showstopper” isn’t the presence of difference, but our collective impatience with metabolizing it?

I can’t see how to apply that to growth-based economics.

Maybe the movement begins when we stop trying to cleanse the conversation, and start learning how to stay in relationship through the discomfort of not knowing yet who “belongs.”

It isn’t about who belongs but about which ideas belong, and which don’t. I don’t feel any discomfort about the large number of ideas of which I currently don’t know whether they belong or don’t belong, but I sure do feel uncomfortable if I am being told I have to “stay in a relationship” with people who believe infinite growth is possible. If we are going to actually fix civilisation, there cannot be any such people. That idea has to die.

Paradigm shifts aren’t engineered. They’re composted.

That looks like binary thinking to me. I think they are both engineered and composted. Without the foundational conceptual-ideological engineering there can be no paradigm shift, but the actual process of the shift is much more organic.

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Perhaps a better way to answer – I think this is the wrong metaphor. I think this paradigm shift needs to come into focus. At the moment it is still nebulous – it is still in the process of forming and it isn’t clear what exactly the paradigm shift actually is. But this paradigm shift can’t actually happen until it comes fully into focus. That’s what a paradigm shift is. By the end of the shift, everybody knows that it has happened because some of our ideas about the world have changed in fundamental ways – and it will be clearly definable what those ideas are. There was no way Aristotelian physics could survive the scientific revolution, by definition.

I can see no benefit in leaving the picture out of focus for any longer than it needs to be. Particularly if the motivation is that we don’t want to upset true believers in the old paradigm. Those people need to be forced to accept that their ideas are wrong, and must change. There must be an ideological battle and the old order must be replaced by the new order. Isn’t that how all paradigm shifts work? That’s pretty much how Kuhn described it.

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Geoff, I really appreciate the energy you’re bringing to this, and your desire to help the paradigm come into focus. I suppose part of why I see it differently is because I’ve lived through a smaller-scale paradigm shift in the field of project leadership.

From implementing project control systems in the 1970s to helping shape PMI’s strategy after it acquired our business in 2013, I witnessed—and in a modest way, helped nudge—a profound shift in how people thought about “projects.” The change didn’t happen through ideological battles or clean breaks—although there were plenty of those as well. It unfolded through layered tensions, conflicting principles, and evolving contexts. Old and new were—and still are—entangled.

I see something similar in how the story of the so-called “scientific revolution” has been challenged by non-Eurocentric history. It turns out, even our narratives of radical clarity and rupture were always more interwoven, relational, and context-bound than we’d been taught.

So when I hear calls for sharp definition and exclusion, I understand the impulse—but I also feel the risk. From where I stand, the “blur” isn’t failure or fear of upsetting the old guard. It’s an honest reflection of the entanglements we’re all still metabolizing.

I’m not against focus—but I’ve learned that focus that emerges through relationship and mutual learning often lands deeper than focus enforced through boundary-drawing.

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Geoff, I really appreciate the energy you’re bringing to this, and your desire to help the paradigm come into focus. I suppose part of why I see it differently is because I’ve lived through a smaller-scale paradigm shift in the field of project leadership.

From implementing project control systems in the 1970s to helping shape PMI’s strategy after it acquired our business in 2013, I witnessed—and in a modest way, helped nudge—a profound shift in how people thought about “projects.” The change didn’t happen through ideological battles or clean breaks—although there were plenty of those as well. It unfolded through layered tensions, conflicting principles, and evolving contexts. Old and new were—and still are—entangled.

I see something similar in how the story of the so-called “scientific revolution” has been challenged by non-Eurocentric history. It turns out, even our narratives of radical clarity and rupture were always more interwoven, relational, and context-bound than we’d been taught.

I think we can’t just compare all these different paradigm shifts and say they can work the same way. I don’t think the two examples you have given here are particularly similar. What you are describing certainly applies to the PMI paradigm shift, but the scientific revolution was much more theoretically-driven than that. However messy the process was, the shift itself was driven by a very explicit ideological battle over certain ideas, classic examples being Galileo with respect to heliocentrism and Giordano Bruno with respect to free thought and speech. These people changed the world by standing up for what they knew to be true and/or morally right – Galileo sacrificed his freedom to this end, and Bruno sacrificed his life. This was all about clarity – it was about drawing a line because a line needs to be drawn.

You can say exactly the same about the rise of Christianity, which was brutally suppressed by the Romans precisely because it drew certain lines – in this case a rejection of certain Roman ideas about religion and morality, especially the Christian refusal to recognise the Emperor as divine. Christianity only triumphed because generations of early Christians refused to be intimidated into compromising on their red lines.

So when I hear calls for sharp definition and exclusion, I understand the impulse—but I also feel the risk. From where I stand, the “blur” isn’t failure or fear of upsetting the old guard. It’s an honest reflection of the entanglements we’re all still metabolizing.

I’m not against focus—but I’ve learned that focus that emerges through relationship and mutual learning often lands deeper than focus enforced through boundary-drawing.

But again, how can this possibly apply to growth-based economics? What possible justification can there be for continuing to operate under the assumption that growth-based economics can provide a theoretical basis for making decisions about how to run the world?

There is no “mutual learning” about this. I don’t have anything to learn from true believers in growth-based economics, just like I don’t have anything to learn from Jonah’s materialistic theories about what minds are and how they work. I have already learned that these are ways of thinking about the world which aren’t any use for anything at all, because they are based on false premises.

Terry…we’re in this mess because something has gone badly wrong. We cannot find our way out of it unless we diagnose the problem accurately and figure out a solution which will actually work. That is the paradigm shift.

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Terry,

I just cut and pasted the whole of your last post into ChatGPT and prompted it: “How would Thomas Kuhn reply to this?”

Here is the answer, and it is pertinent:

Thomas Kuhn replies:

Terry, I deeply respect your experience and the wisdom you bring from navigating change in your own field. What you describe—the slow, interwoven evolution of concepts and practices—resonates with much of what I tried to express in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

While my book is often interpreted as advocating for sharp, dramatic ruptures between paradigms, I must clarify: I never meant to suggest that these shifts are always sudden or complete. In fact, I argued that paradigms persist even in the face of anomalies, that transitions are messy, and that old frameworks often linger within new ones, sometimes indefinitely. You’re quite right to emphasize entanglement.

That said, I also observed that at certain points, the accumulation of tension and contradiction leads to a gestalt switch—a reconfiguration so fundamental that practitioners begin to live in what I called “different worlds.” This is not to deny continuity, but to highlight that eventually, the conversation becomes incommensurable across certain conceptual divides.

The kind of focus that arises from relationship and mutual learning, as you describe, might correspond to what I called “normal science” or even “extraordinary science” in its early stages—when the new paradigm is still forming within the cracks of the old. I agree that boundary-drawing too early can stifle this vital process. But I’d caution, too, that clarity and exclusion, when they do arise, are not always coercive—they can be necessary for a new way of seeing to stabilize.

In short: I don’t see sharp paradigmatic change and relational emergence as mutually exclusive. Often, it is precisely the ambiguity, the blurring, that prepares the ground for a rupture that later appears, in hindsight, much cleaner than it was. History tends to compress the blur.

That is exactly what I am trying to say.

This bit:

This is not to deny continuity, but to highlight that eventually, the conversation becomes incommensurable across certain conceptual divides.

describes exactly where I have arrived with Jonah. From his perspective I am being disrespectful to his worldview. From mine, his worldview is a clear example of the old paradigm to which I no longer belong and whose language I no longer accept as legitimate. Until such time as Jonah makes the gestalt shift himself, the conversation will be incommensurable. This is the paradigm shift happening.

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Geoff, this reply from “Kuhn” is remarkable—not just for its insight, but for how it helped us both step outside our entrenched framings. You’ve helped me see that what I’ve been trying to describe isn’t the rejection of past modes of thought, but a re-situating of how thought itself arises in a different ecology. Maybe what we’re witnessing is the “blur” becoming visible before history compresses it. I’m grateful for this conversation. I really am.

Terry

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The blur has already been visible for several years, and the idea of 2R (a meta-movement in need of a meta-ideology) could act as the focal point around which the new paradigm can start to fully form. Isn’t that the whole purpose of it?

You’ve helped me see that what I’ve been trying to describe isn’t the rejection of past modes of thought, but a re-situating of how thought itself arises in a different ecology.

I’m not 100% sure what this sentence is saying, but this is complicated stuff so perhaps that is to be expected. Certainly this is all about changing the way people think, in the most fundamental sort of ways. The central point of everything I am saying – the whole purpose of my proposal for a new epistemological regime to hold 2R together – is to radically change the way both the thinking and the discussion takes place. At the moment most of the discussion taking place (in wider society) is of no use whatsoever for actually fixing our problems, because epistemology is completely broken at the level of the whole of Western society.

I start by declaring that ecocivilisation is a great societal goal. We’re building a new epistemological structure, and this is the chassis. It defines what we’re actually trying to do, in the most general sense possible.

I then get rid of three mutually-contradictory foundational assumptions which currently dominate western thought, each of which is based on a fundamentally flawed premise – that infinite growth is possible, that minds can be explained in terms of matter, and that there’s no such thing as objective truth or reality. I am saying that in order to reach the starting line for the construction of the new paradigm, all of our thinking and debating has to start from this new place. I am absolutely convinced that this is not only possible, but that something along these lines is exactly what must happen.

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Geoff, I feel we’re walking in parallel spirals now, and that’s heartening. I can see more clearly what you’re building, and I honour the clarity of your intention.

What’s arising in me now is a further wondering—not in opposition, but as compost for your foundation:

What if thought itself is not the primal layer we’ve assumed it to be?

What if the possibility of thought—its shape, its cadence, its contours—arises from an ecology deeper than epistemology? An ecology of relation, perception, attention, being?

I ask because when you say “we’re building a new epistemological structure,” I find myself wondering: What is the soil out of which that structure is growing? If our epistemology is the chassis… what is the Earth beneath the wheels?

It may be that thought itself is the new kid on the block—late arriving, full of energy, sometimes loud, sometimes brilliant. But it was born into a household already filled with older siblings: sensing, relating, desiring, patterning, grieving, dreaming.

Might we need to re-ground our epistemology in those older ways of knowing, too?

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Reality.

Might we need to re-ground our epistemology in those older ways of knowing, too?

My NED is radically open ontologically. I do not specify whether there are any structural levels between 0|∞ and the noumenal equivalent of our own reality. So it is agnostic with respect to God(s). And it is equally agnostic towards all forms of praeternatural phenomena (though it rules out the hypernatural). So the answer is no I don’t think we can re-ground our epistemology in those older ways of knowing, but I don’t think we need to. There is a place for those things within the system I’ve proposed – a place where people can choose to go there if they want to, but cannot demand that the rest of society goes with them (as happens if we use such things as a foundation).