“We are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.” – Buckminster Fuller
Liminality is always the precondition of ‘becoming.’
Liminality insinuates a before and an after, an origin and a destination. It insinuates an existence in the nothing that exists between two somethings. But from what and where are we coming, and to what and where are we heading? What two somethings do we exist between?
We are coming from the linear material economy, fueled by the linear meaning economy. We are coming from the cascading collective trauma of the metacrisis. Ecocide and climate catastrophy. Authoritarianism and geopolitical aggression. War in Ukraine and tensions in many other parts of the world.
We are also coming from 200 years of massive human progress. There are many things that have become exponentially better for humans over the last century. For example, from the 1820s to the 1950s, our global poverty rate fell to under 50%, by 2001 we had cut this rate in half again. It was cut in half yet again by 2014 and this progress continues today. Yet since the mid 2000s, the data has been mixed among modern countries, while many globally have been raised out of poverty, wealth inequality has been skyrocketing. Additionally, indicators related to personal safety, personal rights, and inclusiveness are stalling and even declining significantly among historical leaders like the UK and the US.
Everything is getting better. And everything is getting worse.
Are we heading towards societal collapse, an entropic shift towards lower systemic complexity. Or we are moving towards a leap in the evolution of human civilization, an evolution of evolution itself as human consciousness is able to transcend the cultural and nationalistic biases on which we relied for survival in eons past. A future characterized by peace, cooperation, inclusion, and restorative justice? This future is one of higher ordered complexity, characterized by collective diversity and symbiosis. It is a future of emergence.
To live in liminality is to live in ache. A grief for what was and a hope for what could be. It is to live in what feels like an unwordable tension, a slow motion whisper. The words of the past – the past of certainty, where today looks like yesterday, and tomorrow looks like today – are insufficient for helping us live with the ache. To grow in our capacity for standing in the nothing between two somethings, we must learn a new language. We must weave a new story.
We are entering an entirely new epoch of history. One in which the telemetry of evolution is being radically disrupted, and the cosmic experiment of the universe will either prove successful, or make a major pivot. Humans as a species are crossing the threshold, moving from a past that has been linearly derivative, into a future that is exponentially disruptive.
There are two stories that help us understand the unique moment in history we occupy – the story of consciousness and the story of the metacrisis. These stories are inextricably linked; they also provide us with the necessary historical context to choose a future in which human civilization, and life on planet earth, thrives.
First we will quickly cover the story of consciousness. There are several schools of thought regarding the definition of consciousness; I will work with the definition of consciousness that seems to most uniquely distinguish humans from other animals – the cognitive capacity for abstraction. To illustrate this, consider the idea of sharpness. Sharpness as an abstract concept can be understood among animals that use tools or objects external to their physical bodies (such as birds who drop shellfish to break the shell open). Though humans are distinctly unique in our ability to understand the concept of sharpness across different objects and materials, without ever having used those objects and materials. We can also imagine other tools that could help us in creating sharpness, on whatever tool we may want sharpness. This compounded relational abstraction transcends our present reality and experience. In short, our consciousness transcends mere causality and allows us to abductively ascribe meaning to our sensory experiences. Our physicality married with our unique capacity for abstract thought – what some call “embodied consciousness” – has made our tool-wielding ability unlike anything else we’ve seen on earth.
Which brings us to consciousness as an evolution of evolution itself. Before embodied consciousness and the rise of human civilization, there was an adaptive symmetry in evolutionary processes. This means that as the rabbit became a faster runner through natural selection, the fox also became a faster runner through natural selection – faster foxes could catch faster rabbits. In this way species who shared an ecology evolved together – there was a symmetry to their adaptive capacity over time. When humans entered the scene with unprecedented tool-wielding capabilities (fire specifically), this symmetry was disrupted. Humans could now hunt, migrate, and cultivate their environments to conform with their liking in a manner that far exceeded nature’s ability to adapt. This was the beginning of what the philosopher Charles Eisenstein calls “the age of separation.” He explains:
“It is separation, then, in the form of technology and culture, that defines us as human. As well, it is separation that has generated the converging crisis of today’s world. People of a religious persuasion might attribute the fundamental crisis to a separation from God; people of an ecological persuasion, to a separation from nature. People engaged in social activism might focus on the dissolution of community (which is separation from each other). We might also investigate the psychological dimension of separation from lost parts of ourselves. For good or ill, it is separation that has made us what we are. Through long and torturous pathways, these forms of separation have created the world we know today. Our intuitions that life and the world are meant to be more reflect the ultimate illusoriness of that separation.”
Without the constraints of adaptive symmetry, humans began to see themselves as outside nature. As outsiders, humans could now reach in and disrupt evolutionary processes, either through the propagation of agriculture or the accelerated perpetuation of ecological destruction as we’ve seen the last few hundred years. This is amplified by the uniquely human capacity to create social technologies like religion and currency. In short, consciousness was the precondition for a unique kind of tool-wielding that equipped humans to step out of natural evolutionary systems. This adaptation asymmetry and separation from nature, compounded by the human instinct to pursue goals “good for me and my tribe” have ultimately led to us the next chapter of this story – the metacrisis.
The 20th century was a pivotal period in human history. Western imperialism and two world wars accelerated industrialization and globalization. The mass adoption of electricity, intercontinental telecommunications, human flight, the automobile, broadcast media, nuclear technology, and ultimately the silicon computer chip instituted new social, economic, and cultural paradigms that changed human civilization forever. In relation to the natural world, human’s adaptive asymmetry took unprecedented form, galvanizing the human species as “conductors of” rather than “participants in” natural ecosystems.
Today, we are living with the ramifications of this momentous shift in human civilization. The systems born of the enlightenment and cemented in the 20th century psyche are no longer sufficient for facilitating the scale of human society today – these systems are breaking down under the unrelenting pressure to grow as our resources to do so continue to dwindle exponentially.
In 1971, the think tank Club of Rome commissioned a study to understand the global impacts of exponential economic and population growth. The subsequent findings and published report titled “The Limits to Growth” concluded that without a complete overhaul of the mediating systems of human civilization, we would be doomed to “a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” In plain words, if the growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged human civilization as we know it will cease to exist.
Fifty years and many other studies later, the message is more true, relevant, and apparent than ever. Catastrophe and dystopia are inescapable in daily news. War, famine, climate refugees, political turmoil and economic stratification. Fear and scapegoating. AI and unregulated innovation. Social fragmentation and upheaval. Grief for the loss of certainty and anger for the cloud of complexity bleed through every part of our lives, affecting our health and our relationships. Economic growth contingent on corporate “financial maximalism” and the human labor (work) it is built on is literally killing us. The doctrine of growth and perpetual productivity has led us beyond a tragedy of the commons to a true existential threat to our species.
What then should we do with the wealth that the system of systems we know as civilization has created? If this system of systems is no longer a viable operating platform for the human species, do we continue operating until the platform completely crumbles under our feet? We must build a new platform. New systems. This is the role of imagination today – to direct the wealth and value of deteriorating systems (economic, technological, political, and social) towards building the next. Our linear material economy and our linear meaning economy must be reimagined and rebuilt.
Exactly what this looks like is what I hope to spend the next year leaning into. Fun things are in store, including a new platform to better engage in these conversations with more people. The only clue I can give you now is what I’ve been calling “practices of becoming” (of which Applied Imagination is a core element). Hope you join me along the way. ;)
–Joel
Great article Joel. I’m curious if you’ve come across any viable alternatives to the systems we know today. We (I mean collectively) continue landing on the conclusion that capitalism with all its flaws is still better than the alternatives. This narrative favors those who are in power for sure, but what is an alternative that the world could transition into willingly and peacefully?