Sorry, I disagree…. I wish you were right 
Let’s check back in 5 years and see how it played out!
Martin,
Are you being deliberately or accidentally rude and personal? Forgive me if I’m not able to dissociate from the morality of Jordan’s dismissal of his fellow humans or overlook your fandom of a weak thinker. It’s my prerogative to discern bad faith or foolish actors and share my thoughts. I choose to be no-one’s fan or follower and prefer to think for myself.
In the most recent research meeting, I attempted to address the gap between neurological weak signalling toward the need for system change and the strong signalling of close emotional feedback. The majority of the male presence responded by suggesting I personally need development or to go to an ashram to develop more love.
There are too many here that fawns over celebrity thinkers—some of whom are showing war mongering, elitist, fascist-adjacent leanings and MAGA apologia—while offering ungenerous, anti-intellectual, and ego-driven feedback to those doing their own work is not a place where serious thinking happens. I use AI to help with my dyslexia, and it does show in the syntax, but dismissing my ideas as something “the AI came up with” is not only wrong—it’s ill-mannered and reveals an unwillingness to engage with ideas on their own terms.
The lack of mind-body connection and authenticity here is disappointing. This is a place where I have observed patriarchal status performed and loyalty is tested. The churning of old ideas dressed in new jargon, the dismissal of genuine critique as “smoke,” the passive-aggressive snark—these are not signs of intellectual rigor.
We have a world that is burning, and I don’t believe this space is a good use of my time. I want to be part of a generative and mutually beneficial research environment.
I am no longer interested in engaging on this subject or any other interminable wrangling. If anyone wishes to reach out to me personally to collaborate on generative work or projects, please feel free to DM me and I am happy to engage.
I refer to this troubling dynamic and adjacent problems on my Substack: Islands and Metamodern Monasteries - by Genzen
This wasn’t about you - Jordan Hall wrote his article using the Ai, I exchanged messages with David about it - it’s just that I recognise how the Ai coins concepts - because I use the Ai as well. Not aimed at you - just reflecting on how we’re already very much entangled with technology…
Regarding "fawning over celebrity thinkers” - I find Jordan Hall intelectually interesting. Should I be ashamed of it?
There’s something very real and visceral about this topic for all of us - it’s like we’re all “going off the rails on a crazy train” in the words of the immortal Ozzy, none of us in the conductor’s seat, but all of us suspecting that there might be something we can do about it. The conversation becomes charged at certain times because we all care so much. Furthermore, we’re all opinionated about what ought to be done, as we should be. When others bring different opinions, the instinct can be to deflect them, gracefully or not. I notice some of this going on, and it’s unfortunate when it becomes personal or snarky. We’re all humans with rough edges, and hopefully we can be honest with ourselves about this and move on - reconsidering our personal purpose as we do so, and our shared purpose with whichever groups we go on to collaborate and bond with.
Yesterday I was at L’Arche working in the greenhouse in the pouring rain. My job was to crawl around on my belly under the tables laden with hanging baskets to hack weeds that were growing in from the outside. Tiny ants were very noticeable on the dirty tarp floor, not far from my nose as my clippers latched on to stubborn grass stalks in the cracks along the siding. In the background, over the patter of raindrops on the glassy roof, core members were vocalizing with random shouts and squeals.
It stuck me there, down under the table, knees in the muck, that I have rarely felt more authentically Christian. In a Middle Ages sort of way. I simultaneously felt very authentically Buddhist and transported to rainy-season villages half way around the world, in any era there ever was. Planting and harvesting are what they are. The rest is commentary.
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Thank you all for all the engagement and explainations.. I’ve enjoyed a wonderful reading journey in this thread leading me to put in my two cents. My disclaimer is I listened to Jordan Hall on the Stoa, once and don’t remember it. I was raised an atheist and now include several spiritual ways of seeing and sensing. I often am allergic to discussions amoung men who notice my shadows but not their own and use reason and argumentation to prove, disprove or dominate.
I think Gen points out very well the unkindness and social-darwinian, patriarchy-hierarchy assumptions of Hall using as Robert points out the rather nasty side of Evangelistic hegemonic and enclosing cultures that exclude under the pretense of being christian, as Simon points out correctly. So the problem fweels like it is being replicated, even inside this safe container, is a culture of criticism as a defensive structured way to describe a future that is fear based. And whenever I hear exclusionist rethoric and designs for a better elitist-survival of the fittest worldview I sense the anxiety of overload and exhaustion.
But where do we find our agency and our authorship in these rolling crisis and guide ourselves well without picking up again the habits and methods of christian proclamation, western judgement and becoming another authority we were fighting against in order to stand up tall for what we believe? I don’t think it’s about the weak vs. the strong, the sick vs. the super achiever or any of those classical good-evil, foreigner-indigenous-local, alien vs. human survival. Those are all part of 80 years of American and European cultural constructs that when you live in those waters are hard to see and in turn shut down feeling so that you can carry on the fight for right.
Any future community or bioregion that does no consciously embrace the diversity of all living creatures and types of people creates again the internalised conditions for “othering” again and again as oppression. The regenerative culture challenges can not be worked with while holding any part of the colonialism shadows that show up in Hall’s arguments as I understand them in your writings.
I think we need to go back to a new bill of human rights. And I choose the one from Thomas Hübl:
The right to be. (to be whatever color, size, gender, belief, or educational level you are.)
The right to become. (the right that every living being from snail to scholar can become more.
The right to belong. (the right to belong in nature’s kin with kindness allows restoration and renewal.
I hear in Jordan Halls statements, a Will to Power over others which is the classic shadow story of US American that remains unacknowledged and will always return until the people grieve and connnect back to land and place. I fear a discussion without slowing down, connection to earth in acknowledgement of what violence and ignorance has been done through “Power Over” will only foster more disassociation and fragmentation. I look more and more to what I can do within 500 meters of my home, but also attend to and care for where I belong in my far flung family, friends and communities around the world. Thank you for all your passion and engagement wherever you find your feet in the mud and dust of this earth. And in most cases safe and secure while we live in a both slow and fast changing world, now.
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I agree with Roberts points here. Hall’s use of judgement about AI displacement and destructive power over peoples lives is not the point. This talk with Nate Hagen - Tristan Harris points in some very clear ways to works forward. But calling out what is going to extinct, what people will become loosers, where you can’t escape the perils of change belongs to the daily din of American media which seems now mostly aimed at preoccupying individuals and collective attention and imagination so that we are overwhelmed, might feel invalid or handicapped to help ourselves and living in fear of the techoligarchs and predators of the web. The Maga noise each morning if turned on before one does mediation or whatever practice one does is enough to disturb anyone. And that is the point actually. To take up so much attention and bandwidth that people can’t focus on work when the workplace is unkind or give their best in every social contact they have throughout their day. Jordan Hall’s “The talking down to and burdening our co-creative imaginal space with Evangelist propaganda is just repeating the patterns of the past colonialist paradigm. And so the future would be like the past.
Very good point! For a recent writing project, I surveyed all the 2026 Davos speeches on AI, from the extreme techno-optimism of Elon Musk, to the extreme techno-skepticism of Yuval Noah Harari, with more balanced opinion (like that of Gary Marcus) somewhere between. I would not fault the raw intelligence of any of these, but of course the perspectives are all quite different. Then - without any special AI reference at all - I’ve lately been absorbing the views of Nassim Taleb, who makes it abundantly clear how much we do not know about what we very much do not know. So on the Musk - Marcus - Harari scale, somebody is closer to spot on about the future of AI, but let’s not claim more certainty or prescience than our human capacities can truly support.
I do have my own opinions, of course. One of them is that techno-optimists ought to be paying quite a bit more attention to Nate Hagens, and many, many others who point to the fragility of energy infrastructure, material supply chains, and any number of other factors that will limit the massive spread of AI data centers. The current Middle East conflict is roiling those waters, for sure. In any case, we have an unfortunately wide array of potential apocalypse scenarios on the global menu, but I have to question if any among us truly understands the potential interaction of the many systems involved and how it is all going to play out. Jordan Hall strikes me as quite a bit too sure of himself in this regard, but of course, he is far from the only one!
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After reading through this thread, I thought of my own lineage and relationship to American adventrues in manufacturing belief and knowing better for other groups, races, genders, living beings that allow us to live and the awareness of our planet. I thought of my own family and the two generations of missionaries to native peoples in Dakota lands educated, trained and organised by American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).
And I wonder now if we should start a discussion topic now named «Why not be a Missionary?» Or from my perspective, «What do I need to learn from my missionary ancestors as they witnessed, preached, converted or counciled and stood tall in areas of power over “others” in conflict. Thomas Lawrance Riggs 1874-1918 neat Pierre SD and Henry H. Riggs who documented the genocide in Armenia by the Ottman Empire were grandsons of Steven Riggs from SW Pennsylvania. The patterns of that legacy sometime intrude on my families conversations.
When I listen to video’s from Jordan Hall and many other attention grabbers making news I try to remind myself of how ego accumulates privelage due to institutional alignment gives permissions for missuse. “The Board members are not present in the field but use instrumentalised agents to settle and subdue. I do not think I want to emulate any aspect of their characters. However, their belief, their devotion, their clear will to do the lords work without questioning their ability to stand against is part of what is both honorable and also atrocious. What courage it takes to ride across hundreds of miles of wilderness into hostile villages and stake you claim that you are worth listening to. Are these types of men carrying huge shadows culture surpremicy and fake conscience as they gas light indigenous people? How could they bring “others” to renounce their entire worldview of living in balance with nature and her boundaries? We can see it every day in the news. The falseness of reasoning to justify oppression while not acknowledging ones own preditorial and perpetrator breeding and habits of thought. The Epstein story is just one facet of not acknowledging the falsenss of “knowing better for others” who you did not take the time to listen to. That is always with us.
Beware of those who speak with confidence while laying forth arguments and architectures for living only according to their own ways. They carry the blueprint of colonialism and intramentalisated oppressors and war mongers. There is a certain coldness in how they stand and watch, ignore the persons humanity while judging themselves as better.
Sounds like an interesting topic!
To reframe all this in the widest 2R terms, the story of human cultural evolution across the entire planet can scarcely be told without disentangling a variety of threads that characterize the complex relationship between Christianity and dominance hierarchies over long time and wide space. Dominance and cultural genocide were well known to the ancient world long before Jesus arrived on the scene. The teachings of Jesus were either leveling or elitist, depending on which Gospel one reads or which parts of any given Gospel one prefers to emphasize. In any case, the dialectical tension between hierarchy and leveling has been evident throughout the long history of Christianity and continues to be fully present today.
The questions of mission, or conversion, or cultural assimilation are not unique to Christianity however. For example, I’m currently reading Scott, J. C. (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press. Various hierarchical states in Southeast Asia practices assimilation over many centuries based on an assortment of faith traditions, with Christian missionaries being a relatively late entry to this scene. But China, for example, was not especially shy about pushing all things Han Chinese into its geographic neighborhood. Theology and metaphysics are not especially featured in that conversion process. The West, of course, availed itself lavishly of Christian justifications for colonization, enslavement, and both physical and cultural genocide. Unpacking how much of that is specifically Christian and how much of it is just empires doing what empires do is an exercise worthy of the effort, IMO.
Actually, I was thinking of the Topic “Why not be a missionary?» from this moment in cultural upheaval and rapid change. One of the practitioners in the Collective Presencing session debrief said. « I don’t want to be a missionary.» as if to say he wanted to be clear of his role as dialogue host and professional change managment facilitator. Theecosystem of initators, speakers, space holders and creative generators that I first became aware of on The Stoa, since 2020 are seeding and grounding movements and as the 2R mapping events sought to evolve maps of relational network between the voices and clusters, perhaps qualify how the various voices and communites inform and desceminate. In my opinion, many are inquiry based like 2R- Life Itself and not trying to change peoples minds but to establish alternative cultures that are attractive and build coherence organically instead of from a foreign way of seeing and voice of power. I am curious what patterns of behaviour, open heartedness, stratigic gamesmanship and left over colonialist instrumentalisation are in the agency of those who are speaking. So how do we summen the courage, the clarity of aligned belief and integrated eco-system aware beings to move across the dangerous ground and met whoever seems in oppostion to use, like a missionary in “savagely beautiful country” without assuming we are right, elite, exceptional or enlightened… AND do be fully present in each meeting in service of integrative becoming for all life and for the generations to come. How are we seeing ourselves opening and aware of our forefathers and mothers lived experience and contributions to systems they had no idea that they were service and heal what remains hidden, scared and frozen in our nervous systems and the fear not seen between peoples? For this work in the ruins we will need the devotion and commitment, the backing of a organisation and the friends who are always with us to stay the course and work in the gardens of regenerative cultures and agricultures.
It’s a long read for me and I’m not quite done but I think Benjamin has it all put together here in his essay, A Farewell to Empire
Here’s a fun fact: I was using the idea of “underthrow” quite a bit in social media about a year ago as my various communities were struggling to make sense of Trump 2.0. AFAIK, that was creative on my part, not derivative of anyone in particular, but typically anything popping into my head gets there by way of complex provenance, so who knows? In any case, if Benjamin Life wants to take credit and run with the term, he has my blessing!
For me, before there was Carney, there was Pogany: Peter Pogany « integral permaculture
Pogany provides an elegant theoretical architecture for why the current situation is that of rupture, grounded ultimately in the 2nd law of Thermodynamics and complexity theory. TL:DR - the post WWII Breton Woods order could no longer bear entropic weight. Pogany passed in 2014, but clearly he saw 2026 coming miles away.
So much for retrospective analysis. Now what? Life proposes these four potential future patterns:
Sovereignty migrates to capital: corporate global governance
Sovereignty migrates to technology: the network state
Sovereignty migrates to ecology: bioregional governance
Sovereignty migrates to relationships: network nations.
My take is rather traditionalist by contrast. Start with Immanuel Kant. Run it through Kojin Karatani. Season with Pogany’s thoughts on the future of currency. What we get is a global confederation with new forms of “hard” money mapped to environmental realities. Karatani sees the impending Kantian global federation as a sort of Hobbsian Leviathan, consented to by otherwise Westphalian states, based on a calculus of mutual survival. It may be more like Carney’s nightmare than it is like Carney’s dream. All this takes multiple books and articles to really unpack, but I’d like to close here by comparing Life’s options above to the Kant-Karatani-Pogany model I have in mind:
Corporate global governance? In your dreams, Elon Musk! Not happening. Chairman Mao well understood where power flows from. So does Chairman Xi. In the US, the tech barons may think they are the power behind the MAGA throne, but are they really?
Network state? Niall Ferguson wrote a nice book about networks versus hierarchies. So did Yuval Noah Harari. Their politics could scarcely be more different. Their historiography could scarcely be more similar, at least with respect to large scale pattern recognition. So yes, networks are a hardy perennial and not to be neglected. But so are hierarchical states. Karatani - extremely well-versed in all forms of Marxian theory - is very clear that the state is very much not fading away.
Bioregional governance? Well yes, because Gaia gets an ultimate veto on everything. But IMO, it will take something like a global federation (or a more authoritarian sort of global governance) to make bioregionalism stick. If national governments in the meantime want to rape the environment in the interests of short term power or profit maximization, who exactly stands in the way of that?
Network nations? If this is a multiple choice question, I’ll go with D. This is pretty consistent with long term social change processes documented by Ferguson, Harari, and many others. When hierarchies show cracks, networks grow in and around. It also works well with Michael Bauwens’s thinking about the commons, with 2R in general, and quite a bit of other work in various liminal spaces. I would not underestimate the persistence of hierarchy and conventional military power, however. The endgame network of post-Westphalian globalism strikes me as more of a networked hierarchy than as something radically anti-hierarchical. Carney is still Premier, after all.
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Thank you for all your well informed and thoughtfully writen contributions Robert !
And also to all who join and inquiry with us, how do we do the work of reframing, not just with words and stories but in recasting the imaginal and practices spaces we are in contact with.
Sure. All it takes is a mission!
One of my stocks in trade is consuming lengthy tomes about civilizing missions, civilizing processes, the founding of religions, the dissemination of religions, etc. Beyond that - my children once were toddlers - so yes, once upon a time I did personally well and truly embody the Freudian superego! The Chinese process is to start with the “raw” (i.e. barbarians) and make them “cooked” (i.e. fully Chinese). Of course, lots of other peoples do that sort thing too.
Shall we launch a “civilizing process” for global governance? Why not? Step one is to align oneself with cosmic order (the Platonic vision), or the radically transcendent (any number of salvation religions), or whatever Source or Telos seems most compelling. Then do what comes to mind. Model the behavior. The order of society will flow from the order of the soul, as experienced in relation to Order itself. I’m not at all ashamed to preach that.
I’d be interested to know which parts of which Gospels you see as elitist, @RobertBunge , as to me the overwhelming predominance is levelling, not elitist. Not so sure about Paul’s letters, however.
One of the difficulties I have with any Gnostic tendencies is the sense of knowledge elitism. “I am enlightened, you aren’t; and that is why you need to accept my teaching as more true than whatever you thought before”. And this is terribly, terribly difficult to avoid, even for us, I would say. On the other hand, let’s be humble but not submissive: whatever world view any of us may have reached through our developmental process, it isn’t negated by other traditions. I would say, safest to see it as just another perspective.
Footnote, though … I’d say we do need some kind of filter, to ensure that our world view in itself doesn’t demean others; isn’t imperialist or indeed colonial. So, just another perspective, yes; but not all perspectives are created equal, as some perspectives really are elitist.
Just to save some time, I let Gemini write me a first draft (see below). But the whole “Christian Nationalism” thing in the US speaks volumes. Somehow, those who think Jesus favors capitalist imperialism, not to mention the destruction of enemies without mercy (recent, allegedly Christian, prayer meeting by Pete Hegseth) love to pepper their screeds with Biblical references. This whole “God loves me more than he loves you” attitude has deep Biblical roots, not to mention many current political implications.
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Which Gospel passages can be used to justify the idea that Christians are elite?
Gemini said
The idea of “Christian elitism” is a bit of a theological paradox. While the core message of the New Testament emphasizes humility and service, there are several passages that describe the unique, set-apart status of believers. Historically, these have been used to argue for a sense of spiritual superiority or “election.”
Here are the primary passages often cited to justify the idea of a “chosen” or elite status:
1. The Concept of Divine Election
These verses suggest that Christians are specifically selected by God, which can be interpreted as a form of spiritual exclusivity.
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John 15:16: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit…”
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John 6:44: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them…”
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Matthew 22:14: “For many are invited, but few are chosen.”
2. Authority and Judgment
Some passages grant believers a level of authority that places them “above” the rest of the world in a cosmic or spiritual hierarchy.
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Luke 10:19: “I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.”
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Matthew 19:28: Jesus tells the apostles they will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. (While specific to the apostles, this is often extended to the “saints” in broader theology).
3. Separation from “The World”
The Gospels frequently draw a sharp line between those who follow Jesus and “the world,” implying a higher state of being or understanding for the former.
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John 17:14-16: Jesus says of his followers, “They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.”
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Matthew 5:13-14: The “Salt of the Earth” and “Light of the World” metaphors suggest that Christians possess a unique quality that the rest of humanity lacks.
Hmmm. Sadly, I will need to admit that you can justify almost anything by referring to your favourite passages in the bible. I guess that is probably true of the Quran and other older sacred texts. But I do think we do well to take a broader view than this, and try to get a sense of the overall spirit of texts taken together. One way this helps, as I see it, is to see specific quotes in the context of the whole. The people I respect don’t cherry-pick quotes to serve their own egotistical purposes (or those of their tribe), but make sincere efforts to see the bigger picture.
Thus, I would contradict what you claim here, in the sense that while you can indeed cherry-pick quotes to suggest that “God loves me more than he loves you”, I challenge anyone to make coherent sense of the New Testament in particular in a way that supports the idea that God loves me more than you. So I go with the word “allegedly” above.
Again, it is much easier to do this with the Old Testament, and I can see the connection of this potential to the kind of Zionism that we see in full destructive flow at the present moment.
And, to me, the history of religions is one of repeated renewal and reinterpretation, not one of entrenched stasis. Sure, human institutionalisation of religions tends towards stasis, but the spirit (or the Spirit if you are so inclined) moves on.
And I see it as rather nice that even Gemini sees this: “The idea of “Christian elitism” is a bit of a theological paradox. While the core message of the New Testament emphasizes humility and service, there are several passages that describe the unique, set-apart status of believers.” Core, versus cherry-pickable passages. I know which one I go with.
I agree with this completely. US culture is notoriously superficial about such matters, however. So when one lives in the land of cherry-pickers, one learns to pick one’s way around the cherries!
Brendan Graham Dempsey has done some interesting work lately using Fowler’s stages of faith development model, and even applying it to the biblical texts themselves. Different people read the bible through different cognitive filters. My own sense of the overall spirit of biblical texts is, unsurprisingly, rather metamodern. The people who run the US at the moment see things quite differently than that however, I’m sad to admit.
Was the historical Jesus a universalist? Books like this: Mitchell, S. (1995). The Gospel According to Jesus. HarperPerennial offer that sort of reading. Of course, Mitchell based his process on that of Thomas Jefferson, just cutting out all the inconvenient parts in which Jesus sounds angry, judgmental, ethnocentric, or apocalyptic in a literal sort of way. Mitchel thus turns Jesus into something like an Aikido sensai. Much as I am attracted to that interpretation, I’m not entirely sure it expresses the entire historical truth.
Lately I am reading Jürgen Habermas. (2024). Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 2. John Wiley & Sons on early Christianity. That book is taking the discussion to some interesting places … More later on all that.
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