Hi Justin, welcome to the discussion!
Yesterday I had a video call with a fellow in Colorado who has a strong contact with a model permaculture community about 30 min. from my home. He and I connect philosophically across the board, so he will be guiding me in to work with them as a sort of consultant on practical implementations of “networks of mutual aid, cooperative economies, local-to-global federations”. So yes on your framework. Now to build out proof-of-concept.
Towards the end of this call, my new partner had a second ask. He has been reading my recent FB content (similar to my recent 2R content) and asked for a 3-5 page summary. Sounds like a Medium article to be written, so in a few days likely … Meanwhile, my writing process is very dialogic, so here is an initial brainstorm on what will go into that summary article. (You can hop around all over this forum and find more details on most of it.)
Meta Description of the Current World Process
- Pogany’s “chaotic transition” between world systems
1 a. analogous to Zak Stein’s “time between worlds”
- Karatani’s World Republic
2 a. aligned with Pogany’s projected GS3 ("strong multilateralism)
- Pogany’s end-of-career embrace of Gebser’s integral
3 a. aligned with your “deeper alchemy” above
3 b. aligned with SD yellow = Wilberian teal = metamodern (“=” meaning here “approximately =”)
Where I differ from @GeoffDann (quite a bit) is on process. That above is just my synthesis of books on my shelf (literally a yard away from current reach). I’m just one guy at a keyboard. I do try to curate the best ideas on offer, but anyone else might have a different scheme of things, and most likely does. This is not concerning. I figure truth will out in the dialogic process. (Note my 2 hour call yesterday with something like 99% alignment with a person I never met before. Not the originality of my thought, by any means. More like my ability as an academic hunter/gather to source interesting ingredients and blend them attractively.)
So about your alchemy … Pogany really comes at cultural evolution from the material side of things. Literally from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Gebser, by contrast, is a poetic mystical philologist. How do those two worlds speak to each other? In going through SD, Wilber, and MM in some depth over the past couple years, I always felt the connection between stages of psychological development and cultural evolution was sketchy at best, Procrustean at worst. So I sourced a bunch of other theory to fix that. (Let’s save all those sources for another time). But below I’ll close with with a quick and dirty attempt at something like an alchemical cookbook recipe.
People (going back to ape-like ancestors) cope with the environments that confront them. Thought, culture, language were adaptive for that. “Structures of consciousness” (Gebser), or more prosaically, the organization of thought, culture, language are relatively self-referencing, conservative systems, that tend to self-replicate generation upon generation. But as the pragmatic environment evolves (due mostly to human intervention over the millennia) from time to time these structures get wildly out of synch with the pragmatic world and we get an upheaval Gebser calls a “mutation”. (Or call it a SD spiral or whatever you like best. Same general idea in any case.) Due to the current “chaotic transition” (Pogany) we are getting cognitive dissonance on mass scales (aka the meaning crisis), which will catalyze your “alchemy” though simple Skinnerian reinforcement learning. People will try all the old practices. This will fail. Much grief and pain. At the psychological bottom, new willingness to try a different approach. Engage with model community built on the new practices. More pleasant experiences all the way around. Learning reinforced.
Note there are subcultures (ie 2R) that have this mostly figured out already and don’t need to learn it all the hard way. That’s why I see building model communities as proof-of-concept as the next important agenda item. Call me the lifeboat guy on the ship that is supposedly unsinkable, flirting with icebergs.