KOSMOS LIVE Podcast | Joe Brewer on Cultural Design and Midwifing a New Era
KOSMOS LIVE PODCAST SERIES Preparing for Profound Change
This podcast series, Preparing for Profound Change, explores the shifting global landscape and offers strategies for coping with what lies ahead. Economic turmoil, climate chaos, political upheaval – these may seem like forces to fear, but in fact offer us deep opportunities for transformation. Balancing a sober understanding of the of the collective challenges we face, with heart-centered response, calls for deep awakening by individuals, communities and societies. Our guests share their personal practices, strategies, and insights to help us manage our strong emotions and step forward to play positive proactive roles during these troubling times.
What skills, competencies and capacities will be most valued in the new world? How can our own inner practices keep us free from anxiety as we prepare body, mind and spirit for profound change?
(image) Episode 5 –Joe Brewer on Cultural Design and Midwifing a New Era
Joe Brewer is a change strategist working on behalf of humanity, and also a complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, and evangelist for the field of culture design. Joe is working to bridge the vast body of scientific knowledge about cultural change with the efforts of practitioners around the world to help guide humanity toward resilience and well-being.
“How is possible that we can create a future that collectively no one wants? It partly comes from us being unable to see the larger systems we’re embedded in and partly has to do with this developmental history of 10,000 years of war, conquest, and empire building that has only really reached saturation at the planetary scale within the last 50 to 100 years.”
“Collapse is not like what’s shown in Hollywood movies. Collapse doesn’t happen in 10 to 15 minutes of violent outbreak in a movie scene. Collapse happens across decades to hundreds of years. The Roman Empire took about 300 years to collapse. This Western, industrial civilization is already in the process of collapsing. The United States as an empire is already past its peak and going into decline. If we recognize that collapse is longer timescales than we normally think about and that it’s already underway, this allows us to let go of the feeling that we need to stop it from happening because we can’t stop it from happening, but at the same time, collapse doesn’t mean total annihilation of all things. Collapse means this system goes away and there’s a silver lining to that.”
“If I were to say it succinctly, even though the succinct explanation doesn’t really get at it, I would use the words of the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson when he says that we need to become wise managers of our own evolutionary process. A great deal is known about the competition and cooperation between different species and ecosystems. There’s this huge body of knowledge about these things, but generally speaking, when humans get together to solve societal problems, we don’t apply an evolutionary framework to dealing with things like public policy.”
“We have ecological expressions of culture that are fit to local landscapes, and some will prove to be resilient and others won’t, and we can’t know ahead of time which ones they will be, but whichever ones are resilient will have embodied within them the natural intelligence of nature to be successful in the new environment, and if they are networked, they can spread that learning as intelligence to support the decisions of other communities, so these culture design labs are a network of communities that become self-aware of their change process so that as they become resilient or they don’t, learning happens across the network, and if they’re successful, the network survives. Or said another way, humans don’t go extinct, that we manage to discover how to be resilient in the new environment.”
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Links for this Podcast
Joe Brewer’s Blog
Highlights:
Culture Design Labs — Evolving the Future
Becoming Midwives in the Great Transition
You Pay More Taxes Than Exxon Mobil
Guiding the Evolution of Cultural Sciences
In Kosmos Journal
The Predicament of Knowledge: A Challenge for Culture Design
The Cultural Sickness Needs to be Named
What If It’s All Connected? Humanity and the Global Crisis
Mentioned in this Podcast
The Rand Corporation: The Think Tank That Controls America
Credits
Within the biosystem, there is no trash, nature balances itself. Humans have been the disruption in that system of balance. In order to work cooperatively and harmoniously with the natural balance in various biosystems, humans must learn to live in such away that they make no garbage, they don’t create depletions, and imbalances within the system they live. We can no longer plead ignorance, revisions must be made before we destroy life as we know it. This doesn’t necessarily mean we must do without, but to live smarter, to learn from nature and how things work together naturally to provide for our needs, perhaps not all of our wants, but those needs that allow us to remain healthy and well balanced within the biosystems in which we live.
Thank you, Juanita. You expressed this so well.
Thanks a lot for this really important and meaningful conversation!