I am amazed how hard it is to get people interested in 2R and this forum

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First I should say thankyou to Rufus and everybody who is responsible for coming up with this forum. The idea of a nascent “Second Renaissance” is a very good way of summing up the basic idea, and anyone paying attention to what is happening in the world ought to be able to see the need for it. I’ve always hated the format and environment of both Facebook and Reddit, and other sorts of forums are few and far between, and none of them come close to the sort of content being discussed here. This setup is like one of the old school forums, but technically improved.

Over the past week or so I have been following various relevant subreddits and FB groups, looking for opportune moments to plug the idea of 2R and send people in the direction of some directly relevant content here. These are subreddits/groups whose subject matter is collapse, degrowth, deep adaptation, and consciousness, and also more general places like “deep thinking”.

I got a few interested replies here and there. But I have been checking the registered number of users, and there’s been no sign of a major influx. A bit of ticking upwards, but not even enough for me to be sure that was a result of my posts. A grand total of 2 people actually told me they registered here.

I am troubled by the lack of interest. The subreddit r/collapse has got 520,000 subscribers. Tens of thousands of people must have seen those posts. The need is desperate. The crisis around us is accelerating all the time, and getting harder and harder to deny.

What, exactly, is the problem? Is at that people feel it is too hard to understand, and that they have nothing to contribute? That it is too far over their heads? Do they think we’re all just dreamers and that nothing will ever come of it? One person claimed it was a front for the status quo – that we’re not really trying to change the world at all but just fool people into thinking that’s the goal when actually we’re secretly working for the capitalists.

I realise I am an outsider to this community, but the forum makes clear that anybody is welcome provided they are interested in the subject matter. For me it was a no-brainer to join up and see what interesting discussion could be had. So I don’t think the problem is that it is in any way cliquey or unwelcoming. I guess what troubles me is that we have created a generation of people who can’t cope with anything much more intellectually demanding than TikTok. For them, posting on Reddit already involves more reading than they are used to, though judging by the quality of most of the posts not very much thinking goes on. But even that doesn’t explain the lack of interest among people on Facebook, who are generally older and more deep thinking.

Why do you think my efforts to drum up interest in this forum have proved so ineffective? What can we do to get more people involved?

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Thanks so much for this post - and for your efforts in trying to promote the content in other communities! It’s been great to have you being so active here.

I tend to think of this forum as at the more intellectual end of various spaces people might want to participate in, so from that point of view it’s perhaps understandable that not everyone really wants that kind of discussion.

But I totally agree we should be doing what we can to promote it in aligned spaces. It would be great if we could use this thread to help coordinate efforts to do so - for example if we could put together a list of related spaces and communities that we could direct messaging towards.

For example I’d be interested to know @GeoffDann which subreddits or other spaces you posted in (partly out of interest, but also to know they’ve already been tried).

Personally I’ve shared this forum in

  • some facebook groups with the name metamodernism in them
  • some whatsapp groups for aligned in-person communities in London (e.g. Long Now London)
  • Integral altruist whatsapp.

Some other places I think we should share at some point include:

  • Effective altruism forums and LessWrong
  • r/metamodernism

If others have other suggestions that would be great!

It would also be good to try to agree some standard wording for sharing. I’ve previously used this wording for example:

“Just wanted to share an invitation to everyone here to contribute to our new forum, which we’re hoping can offer a space for sustained discussion and sharing of long-form ideas. (‘Second Renaissance’ is intended as a way of connecting to a variety of emerging approaches to social and cultural renewal, including political metamodernism, integral theory, teal, liminal web, game B, regenerative and others.)”

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Subreddits that are relevant from my point of view:

Collapse of Civilization
Consciousness (no self posts allowed these days, has to be a link to external content)
Degrowth
Metamodernism
FoodForThought: Intellectual Nourishment

FB groups

Deep Adaptation | Groups | Facebook
BIOSOPHY 2.0 | Groups | Facebook
Degrowth - join the revolution | Groups | Facebook
In Search of Ecocivilisation | Facebook
Global Collapse Awareness | Facebook

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What a challenging situation we are in. We understand (at least in our own terms) the need and the urgency for deep thinking coupled with wise action. It’s natural to want to “spread the word” — to be “evangelical” if you like.

When I reflect on how things are, I am continually and forcefully struck by how impossible it is effectively to filter even a tiny portion of the flow of words and ideas that flood the web. But I want to step away from competing for people’s attention, and play a different game. (Hint, it’s not Game B :slight_smile: )

Instead of giving others more and more to read and sift through, what if there was a collaboration to try to direct people to the place where they would offer and receive the most value — for themselves, and for the place.

Among other things, this implies separating ourselves from a “growth” or “numbers” paradigm. More is, increasingly, not better. Yes, there are many tropes like “quality over quantity”, “less is more” and even back to “small is beautiful”. I want to get beyond the slogan aspect of these, and contribute – somehow – to the realisation of the underlying truths.

To me, it is all about regenerating relationship. And that means, not the individual ever content with dipping in and out of multiple talking shops, nor the individual wannabe guru trying to assemble a crowd of admirers, but rather every one finding the right others, to be heard, to be understood, but even more importantly, to join in action effectively to change the world for the better — recalling the quote attributed to Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

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I agree with that. Yes, what is required is a small number of the right people, not a large number of less right people, where the signal will get swallowed up by the ever increasing amount of noise.

Even so, I was hoping to find more than two people interested enough to join this forum, but if they are two of the right people then that’s all good.

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I used to ponder the same questions. It’s a combination of the lack of ideas, lack of motivation and lack of confidence. The silence is a part of the intellectual bankruptcy of our age. Just when everybody thought that the technology would empower people - it turns out it’s not as simple as that.

That’s why I keep on giving you encouragement on your enthusiasm (regardless of what my thoughts are on your ideas) - it’s a rare commodity :-).

One of my interests is searching for a recipe for people to form “meaningful” relationships beyond small talk and theoretising. Imagine a protocol which would allow people to exchange frustrations, remove trust obstacles and match energy and capacities to co-create…

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A lot of talk about improving the quality of relationships but almost nothing in terms of embodiment and experimentation. Most practices that I’ve seen amount to mere faking and superficiality.

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It’s not a question of getting (any) people involved - there might be none where you’re looking for them. You need to prospect for the people with certain qualities and then ensure they match up to your vision. Capacity building/ team building is a project in itself.

Forums that attract people with gloomy outlook will be full of people with a wrong kind of motivation.

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I understand what you’re saying but I also see this a very different way. The sort of people who post on r/collapse don’t just have an outlook which is gloomy. They are beyond that stage. They are at various stages of coming to terms with having completely given up hope that western civilisation – or even humanity in general – can be saved. They are resigned to the collapse of civilisation as we know it. And there’s now a large number of these people, with more joining them all the time.

This is my core, target audience. There is much talk here about “theories of change”. Well…this group of people are ripe for my message, even if they currently only see the collapse part of the process and can’t imagine that it is a precursor to transformation. They have already got over the crucial hurdle of freeing themselves from hopium addiction. Most of them are ready to hear a new explanation of exactly how we got into this mess. Most of them also do not have any realistic vision of the future – they know things are going to be bad, but beyond that they are typically unable to make any more sense of it – it’s too much – it is too complicated, and there’s too many moving parts.

What I am saying is that this group of people are there for the taking, if you get my meaning. The only reason they aren’t looking for 2R is because they currently have no idea such a thing is even possible. They may well understand that the West is ideologically broken, but don’t understand that there is any scope to fix it. They are hopeless because nobody has given them any reason to legitimately have hope.

I have not written a book which is aimed at people who understand integral theory or spiral dynamics. It is aimed at ordinary people who have reached either an intellectual or intuitive understanding that collapse is coming, and who are currently completely lost. I deliberately wrote a book aimed at the whole of that group of people, precisely because I am absolutely certain that (unlike integralists) it is a group that can only get ever larger as the real-world situation gets worse. My message is about both building an ecocivilisation and surviving the collapse. I have very deliberately targeted this mass market, which is currently not being offered anything else remotely like it. All they are being offered at the moment is doom (collapse, but without any positive message) and delusion (Jason Hickel, for example – “it’s bad, but if we act now it is still not too late!!”). My goal was to write a book which offered genuine hope for the future – a book which is both brutally honest and spectacularly hopeful.

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I totally understand the concern about the ‘growth’ or ‘numbers’ paradigm. But I would also have serious concerns about an approach that intentionally limits itself by not reaching out to the wider community. I think it is about finding a balance between the two, a cycle of expansion (reaching out to new people) and consolidation (clarifying core values, deepening relationships).

If the aim is to have real-world impact, it is simply not enough to settle for a small group of say 10 or 20 people, no matter how deeply connected they are. A movement is much more than that. Some of us have spoken before about the Effective Altruist and Rationalist communities as being - whatever you may think of their ideas - good models of how an initial small group of people can seed a much wider community.

Now we may reasonably disagree about where we are in this cycle. Personally I feel an expansion phase is what is most needed at this point (which is completely compatible with also deepening relationships within the existing group). We have on secondrenaissance.net for example a clear statement of core ideas that others can rally around - and these are ideas that are intentionally open to a diversity of metaphysical views for example.

I like your idea of commoning - I think at this point the way to make progress relatively to all the other small communities in the liminal web, is to try to identify what we all have in common, the minimal set of core beliefs that can get us where we want to go as a society.

Personally I don’t think this minimal set of beliefs would involve metaphysical conclusions on materialism, idealism or their alternatives, since all of these could - if framed in the right way - lead to the same practical conclusions, which is what matters. I believe the commonality needs to be sought at a less abstract level.

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Well, you got me here and generally I’m pretty stubborn joining anything new given my extensive involvement with other initiatives, two farm projects, and so on. If you can do that then I would hope/imagine others with less intense commitments can join. Just keep reaching out - individual connection is the key, rather than posting it in generic group posts.

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Interesting points @JonahW I guess my response comes in different parts, which I’ll attach to passages from you.

I can see the surface simple logic in this. If something is going to have real-world impact, it necessarily involves many people (leaving aside dictatorships and the like). In the long term, I agree. My question is, what is the most effective way of getting there? I’d say that’s where the Margaret Mead quote comes in to play. And I’m sure Mead would agree that it’s not much use if the small group of citizens have a lovely time incommunicado separately on a desert island.

My hypothesis – or indeed “story” if you like (story seems more appropriate than “theory” as in “theory of change”) – is that for a movement to take off we need two things:

  1. A clear shared vision with shared values — and the vision can be at any level, I guess
  2. An effective replication mechanism. That’s how life works, anyway, if you add in evolution not just reproduction.

And indeed you mention a cycle with the two aspects of expansion and consolidation, so far so good. For me, it’s not simply a question of where on this cycle we are, but how, in detail, we are doing both sides of that cycle.

Let’s start with the expansion side. As you know, I value quality over quantity here. I vastly prefer 10 deeply aligned people to 1000 random people. And this is from my experience (always, YMMV). If you have a dedicated team ready to sift the 1000, encourage the best fitting to join a core, great, but what do you do with the rest? I’ve mentioned my personal vision of helping everyone to find the place they best fit — the place they can best develop in the way they want and need. But at present we don’t have that capacity. If we are lucky, less fitting people will get the message and move on. But if we’re unlucky … ouch. This is how communities and movements fall apart, from internal conflict, which may be based on people not being aligned enough in the first place.

A great point that we have an intentionally open set of ideas, which is likely to attract a greater range than a homogenous culture; but I don’t see that as avoiding the danger of failure from internal discord.

Then, what does the consolidation phase look like? The kinds of story I’m looking for here are your and others’ stories of how exactly it can work. My own story is around ontological commoning — that’s a detailed and evolving hypothesis around how consolidation can work in practice. At present I see this as easily overwhelmed by sheer numbers. And we all have a tendency to default to an appeal to authority on this, to try to avoid disharmony … but which falls right back into an earlier cultural paradigm.

Personally I am open minded. The set of beliefs will emerge from the practice, and maybe the cultures of the people participating. WE can try commoning our ontologies here, which might lead some common beliefs and stories for us, so I would invite you (and others) to come forward either with clarifying what the “less abstract level” might be, or by explaining methodologically.

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We have a fundamental disagreement here. I think metaphysics is a central part of the problem. Specifically, I think materialistic metaphysics a key problem, because it illegitimately rules out the mystical. I don’t think there can be a Second Renaissance unless that problem is recognised and fixed. I think reality has been disenchanted based on a philosophical mistake, and I think it is of critical importance to rectify that mistake.

The only way we can resolve this is when you find the time to respond to my detailed explanation of why this is.

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Exactly. For this to work the ideas have to be joined up. That’s got to be the whole point of 2R, hasn’t it? Part of the central idea is that the old paradigm involves too much fragmentation and not enough holistic thinking. Instead of everything adding up, nothing does.

This is from very close to the end of the final chapter of my book, following the section on McGilchrist.

We have finally reached the point where I can define my own framing of the old and new paradigms, which divides the history of Western civilisation into three long periods.

Antiquity was the period from the Greek Golden Age to the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. It was characterised by the birth of Western philosophy, the development of early science, and the foundation of classical knowledge. Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle explored fundamental questions about reality, knowledge, and ethics, laying the groundwork for Western thought. The epistemic paradigm was of early philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality and the cosmos, with a strong emphasis on reason and metaphysics. The eventual rise of Christianity marked a significant cultural and ideological shift, integrating spiritual and moral dimensions into a prevailing worldview which had until then been notably deficient in these things.

The Greeks were the first great experimentors in civilisation, but for all their philosophy and politics they never settled on a model and never managed to extend individual instances of civilisation beyond the scale of the City State. The Golden Age began when a united Greek army defeated mighty Persia at the Battle of Salamis in 480BC, and it ended with the Athenian surrender to Sparta in 404BC – Greeks fighting Greeks over how Greek civilisation should be run. The Romans solved the problems of unification and expansion, but their solutions were practical rather than philosophical. Roman civilisation worked very well, at least most of the time, and certainly compared to anything else that was going on in Western Eurasia at that time, but in the Roman Republic spirituality and morality came cheap. This did not work for the Jews, and it was in that boiling cauldron of discontent that Christianity emerged.

Christendom is the period from the decline and collapse of the Western Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, culminating with the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment. Christian theology was integrated with the classical heritage of Greek and Roman thought to create a unified worldview that permeated every aspect of life, from politics and law to science and art. The epistemic paradigm was a synthesis of faith and reason, with theology serving as the ultimate authority. The Reformation fragmented the religious unity of Christendom, challenging the authority of the Catholic Church and laying the groundwork for greater emphasis on individual conscience and the reinterpretation of spiritual and moral life. This period saw significant theological conflict but also the opening up of space for the eventual secularisation of Western thought. The Renaissance revived classical learning, and the Enlightenment further emphasised reason, scientific progress, and individualism.

The Age of Disjunction is the period from the Enlightenment to the present day, and it is now drawing to a close. This period saw the fragmentation of the unified worldview of Christendom. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and progress led to great scientific and technological advancements, but also to existential crises and ideological conflicts as traditional structures were questioned and dismantled. This is the old paradigm, though it turns out to not really be a paradigm at all – rather, it is the lack of one. The Age of Disjunction is the age of modernism, rampant capitalism, techno-industrialisation, and, latterly, of postmodernism and post-truth. It is a paradoxical age where metaphysical materialism still dominates science and yet, in a broader sense, our culture has lost contact with reality.

The old paradigm – that of the final stage of the Age of Disjunction – is a collection of mutually incompatible epistemic-ideological systems, the most important of which are growth-based economics/politics, scientific materialism and postmodernism, each of which is founded on a false assumption. The old paradigm is what happens when the left hemisphere takes over and the right hemisphere suffers in silence.

The new paradigm is still forming, and this book is my contribution to that process. I am advocating a post-postmodern epistemic meta-ideology, the purpose of which is to minimise both incoherence within, and radical incompatibility between, the new ideological systems that Western civilisation needs to create an ecocivilisation. I am proposing an epistemic peace treaty that binds its signatories to start with as much realism and reason as possible, without leaving anything important out, and to endeavour to co-operate with all other signatories on all matters pertaining to the creation of a Western ecocivilisation. The ultimate goal is global ecocivilisation. The new paradigm is what happens the the right hemisphere can make itself heard.

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Thank you @Asimong for that considerate response. I agree with basically all of that. Yes you’ve persuaded me about the importance sometimes of helping people find the place they best fit. And yes I’m increasingly seeing the importance of ontological commoning too - though as I’ve said, I’m not quite sure precisely how you understand that concept and it would be good to have a session on it in the research group as we discussed!

My perhaps simpler version of the idea is more around finding a minimal set of beliefs or ideas that we think it is important to agree on, both within our community, and within the wider community that we want to be affiliated with - and my sense is these forum discussions have gone a little way towards that.

Like you I feel very open minded about this, but I also think we should recognise that there’s no need start from a blank slate. In particular we are all here because of some interest in the idea of a Second Renaissance, and presumably some of the content on secondrenaissance.net.

As I’ve suggested, I think the white papers do a good job of setting out what those minimal beliefs or ideas might be. And I would just point out that those ideas are mainly at the level of cultural history and values, and not epistemology or metaphysics.

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I think that process is just beginning, and I think that you may personally have an important role to play in what is coming. You may be in a position to influence others in an important way.

Like you I feel very open minded about this, but I also think we should recognise that there’s no need start from a blank slate.

It is 100% essential to start from a blank slate. I would like to start now, from a blank slate. Then you need to respond to my post about materialism, which starts from first principles.

We cannot start by accepting everything on the ecosystem map. There are multiple serious problems with it. It contradicts itself.

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The discussions here have already made crystal clear to me where the fault lines in 2R are. I have three red lines. One of them nobody is contesting – growth-based economics has to go. Most people call it “capitalism”, but I doubt this will present a major problem.

It is the other two which are going to necessarily cause the current 2R ecosystem to break into three pieces. I believe the majority can be convinced to accept all three red lines, and this opens the door to a meta-movement sufficiently unified and close to the truth to make the paradigm shift happen. But there are two groups who cannot be accommodated, one for spiritual reasons and one for political reasons (and both for epistemological reasons).

The first are materialists, and current discussions with Jonah are showing exactly why. There can be a place for skeptics, atheists and new-paradigm naturalists (like Nagel), but materialism throws a show-stopping spanner in the works. Some people currently on that map will not be able to make that transition, and that is going to cause a serious problem at some point. There will be a residual group who will wish 2R would accept materialism, but that schism won’t be reversible. Eventually materialism will die out (I expect).

The second are postmodernists, and I include in that any metamodernists who think postmodern anti-realism is going to be incorporated into the new paradigm. The perfect example is Hanzi Frienacht, who I am guessing is both a materialist and a postmodernist, so is on the wrong side of two red lines. These are people who are driven primarily by social leftist politics, not spirituality, and many of them will be as insistent that people like me don’t belong in the movement as I am insistent that they don’t belong in it. This schism is going to be particularly unpleasant, but it too is unavoidable and will ultimately be irreversible. I believe this group will ultimately be defeated politically (and it has already started happening).

There is no way to avoid the conflicts that this is going to lead to, but I think it can only be a good thing that as many people as possible understand that it is coming.

The only other group that might not fit are idealists like Kastrup, but in this case the problem lies with him rather than me. I have no major problem with idealists so long as they don’t try to claim that idealism is the only possible answer. If they do, and Kastrup does, then there’s no way they can be part of 2R, because there’s no way on Earth that we can convince the whole movement to accept idealism (ie belief in disembodied minds – minds without brains). Life after death is potentially another very divisive issue, but it is manageable compared to the other two. If people want to believe in re-incarnation I don’t see it as a major problem. Heaven and hell are more problematic, but we’re getting too far into details here.

That is how it looks to me, anyway.

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It would seem to me instructive as well as inherently interesting to delve into this idea of red lines and potential splits. From my ontological commoning (meta-)perspective, I wonder if you have insight into the ontologies of the different parties. Then it would be extremely interesting to see if we can find those ontologies again through the process of working down via stories and belief systems.

Of course, what I would enjoy even more would be to see if we could make significant progress to establishing common ground between the different sides of the red lines.

Is there any way we can actually try this in practice, not just in theory?

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Not sure exactly what the question is. Everybody has their own belief system, so there are many different combinations. I can’t tell you what Hanzi Frienacht’s ontology is – they have to do that. And clearly I can’t speak for Jonah or Gregg Henriques either. From my perspective they believe things which are logically incoherent, or just don’t make any sense when closely examined.

I am interested in your ontological commoning idea, but not clear how it is supposed to work. I’m starting with epistemological commoning instead, but I am guessing the two approaches can work together constructively.

Is there any way we can actually try this in practice, not just in theory?

I’m struggling to understand what you are asking. Surely you should know the answer to this. It’s your theory. ?

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This may also be of interest (another quote from the book):

What sort of reality do we actually live in?

I offer a thought experiment. For the purposes of the experiment, we are concerned only with what happens while we are alive, and not with questions about any alleged afterlife. Let us also suppose that we know for certain that everything that happens does so in accordance with the laws of physics, and that we know that the randomness inherent in quantum theory reflects an objectively real randomness – the quantum dice rolls are truly and totally random. I will describe all these characteristics together as being definitive of a “type X reality”.

Many people believe that we actually do live in such a reality. Among them are people claiming to be materialists, physicalists, dualists, idealists and neutral monists, as well as people who aren’t strongly committed to any of those metaphysical positions. Type X versions of all of them can be constructed. If we know our reality is type X, should we even care which sort of type X it is? Is there any important difference between a dualist type X reality and an idealist one? The answer is surely no, unless you have a liking for purely semantic distinctions. What does matter is whether we really do live in a type X reality and not some other kind – one where there is an afterlife, or where sometimes things happen that defy the laws of physics, or where something non-random is hiding in the apparent randomness of quantum mechanics.

Whether materialism is true or false makes a functional difference because materialism entails naturalism. The same does not apply (at least in a general way) to the other three – there are versions of dualism, idealism and neutral monism that are consistent with naturalism, but there are also versions that aren’t. If something other than the material world exists, and is capable of interacting with the material world, then things can happen that aren’t reducible to the workings of the material world. If the material world is all there is, then that is not possible. This is why people who believe materialism is true find it impossible to take any sort of woo seriously.

I am much more interested in what is actually going on in our reality (about causality, in a general sense) than I am in whether a particular type of reality should be categorised (for example) as neutral monist or objective idealist. Dualists, objective idealists and neutral monists all believe in an objective world external to our minds. Dualists say it is material, objective idealists say it is mental, and neutral monists say it is neither. My view is that I’m not interested in arguing about the label. I’m committed to ESR – that there is indeed an objective reality and that we have knowledge of its structure. I will simply refer to it as “objective reality”, and leave open for now the question of what it is made of, or instantiated upon, or what else it might contain along with the structures that correspond to the material reality we’re experiencing. All that matters for my argument is that it exists, and we can know and say something about its structure.