Two decades ago, I participated in a systems science workshop with Dennis Meadows, lead scientist for the Limits to Growth study, the seminal 1972 Report to the Club of Rome. What we now call the polycrisis (or meta-crisis) was born in my mind on that day. For Dennis and his colleagues, the polycrisis was understood and anticipated for their entire adult lives. Dennis is now 82.
During the workshop, a participant asked Dennis, “When will we know collapse is imminent?”
“That’s easy,” responded Dennis. “The first thing to go will be our ability to cope.”
The Year We Lost Our Ability to Cope
History may judge 2024 as the year we lost our collective ability to cope. It’s not one thing—it never is with complexity. The horrific ongoing wars. Killing heat waves around the globe. Wildfires, hurricanes, and tornadoes finally causing people to throw in the towel and move. Biblical floods. The 1.5-degree “no-go” zone breached way ahead of predictions. Corruption in plain sight normalized. School shootings normalized in the US. Political violence now as well. Elections around the world bringing authoritarians, criminals, and clowns to power (mostly men, of course). A healthy 45-year-old whistleblower dead after giving a deposition. In America. The mental health crisis. TikTok reportedly uses more energy than Greece. AI everywhere without regulation. Vigilante execution of a healthcare CEO because “these parasites had it coming.” Crowds cheer not because they are evil. They cheer because they have lost the ability to cope.
Then there is finance. The richest guy in America demands an additional $60 billion (with a B!) incentive pay package with the support of his so-called “board of directors,” justified because he has manipulated Tesla into a meme stock “valued” at a staggering $1.4 trillion—22 times Daimler Benz. Truth Social, with sales equivalent to two Starbucks stores, is valued at $8 billion, representing most of Trump’s net worth before the White House grift gets underway, only to be outdone by the Bitcoin/MicroStrategy pump and dump, the largest and most brazen in the history of capitalism. It’s beyond insane and not a harbinger of good things to come. We yearn for the Savings and Loan crisis just as we yearn for Nixon.
It’s a lot. As my psychiatrist said to me 20 years ago when I was suffering under the weight of seeing what’s in store, “John, anyone who is not at least a little depressed is not paying attention.” The sense that we are losing our ability to cope is also the wake-up call that might not simply trigger us to hit the snooze button this time.
We Live Not in an Era of Change, But a Change in Era
Talk of systems change is no longer the purview of the extreme left. It’s out in the open. We live in dangerous times, with everything at stake. But here’s the rub. We don’t know how to change the system. We have not heeded Dana Meadows’ advice that the most critical leverage point in changing systems is to undermine and let go of the paradigm within which the system exists. Inspired by Dana, paradigm shift has been the focus of Capital Institute’s work since its inception in 2010. A change in era more profound than the shift from the Medieval Era to the Modern Era, and with unparalleled consequences on the line. A shift from the mechanistic and materialist worldview of the Modern Age to a living systems (Regenerative) worldview of what Dr. Jude Currivan and others are calling the Unitive Age, and some have called the Integral Age. The very latest understanding of Western science is now reaffirming and “uniting” with what our ancient wisdom traditions remarkably have always intuited. Everything is connected.
Paradigm shift demands confronting head-on the inadequacies of our largely Newtonian, mechanistic worldview of a “clockwork universe.” That mechanistic worldview just so happens to be the foundation upon which neoclassical economics is built, the bankrupt theory by which we blindly and ignorantly run the world!
I see this challenge on three dimensions:
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The problem-solving paradigm of our reductionist, materialist worldview is failing us because we treat the complexity of life on this planet and within our institutions as if it is merely complicated. Our leaders of all political persuasions and business heroes are comfortable with the latter, largely unfamiliar with the former.
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Our strategy to confront entrenched power to transform the system is not credible because the organizing challenge takes huge resources, a simple narrative, and decades (see the Powell Memo for a case study). We have none of the above. Furthermore, we must understand that force only attracts a stronger counterforce, as Gandhi understood.
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Despite our claims to the contrary, we don’t actually know what to do if we had the power to do it (see dimension 1). Can you say SDGs, ESG, Circular Economy, Green and Inclusive Growth, Net Zero 2050, bla bla bla?
The base case may well be “collapse” and, depending upon where one lives, it may already be here. But its dimensions are certainly not set, and at a civilization level, it is NOT inevitable. I say this with confidence because one core insight from complexity science (and all life) is that the future is unknowable (for better and for worse). We had better get comfortable with our unknowing.
Approaching the Bottom?
In 2015, I attended the Paris COP, my first and final COP. I had released Regenerative Capitalism: How Universal Principles and Patterns Will Shape our New Economy earlier in March of that year. More importantly, the Pope had released Laudato si a couple of months later. Sitting in a small roundtable session in the offices of Notre Dame filled with climate change luminaries and a contingent from the Catholic Church to discuss Laudato si, I felt I had my opening. You see, when I read Laudato si, I cried.
I cried because all of the 8 “first principles” of regeneration—the process that explains how life works—that I had so painstakingly researched, written about, and seen emergent in the real economy and now teach about, were scattered again and again throughout the Pope’s brilliant text in various ways using similar and sometimes identical language. It felt almost like a sign from heaven, giving me renewed confidence that I was at least on the right track, after a decade of struggle following Dennis’ complexity science workshop and the awareness that the polycrisis was inevitable.
At the beginning of the meeting, we all had three minutes to share what we were working on. At about the two-minute mark, I could tell no one understood what I was talking about, this “Regenerative Economics” thing. I paused and then simply said,
“Let me put it this way. I’m working on what people will only become interested in when they realize what they are working on is not working.” I literally said those words.
We may have finally reached that time. With my colleagues at Capital Institute and nRhythm, and all of us in the regenerative space (with all its confusion about meaning), the fresh interest is palpable. Of course, the co-opting by corporate marketing machines is also palpable.
We Must Emerge From Plato’s Cave
My best, although admittedly inadequate, response to the three-dimensional challenge outlined above is that all serious and truly effective roads forward begin with education. Let me put a stress on serious roads, for we are indeed racing down many unserious roads in our understandable desire to “do something.” Worse still, we are also having to deal with serious blowback against unserious responses. This is all a distraction.
To be precise, I am focused on, through multiple means, the questioning of what we believe that is simply not true, the wrong but vital assumptions we never question, and the education about how life works, how the economy must align with how life works, and how finance must work in service of such an economy. It’s quite “radical” to contemplate, in the sense of getting to the root causes. Such a project has given me my purpose. With my colleagues and our growing learning community of now over 2,000 beautiful humans from 80 countries working to manifest the regenerative economy in all kinds of ways, it keeps us filled with authentic hope, not the naïve and often ignorant optimism that appears on the walls of Plato’s cave.
If you sense there must be a better way, a wiser path, please join us.
If you are on the verge of losing your hope and ability to cope, come join us.
If you are mad as hell but want a constructive outlet for your rage, join us instead.
And if you are able, please support the Capital Institute’s Generosity Fund and its mission to remove financial barriers, ensuring that everyone in our growing and diverse community—regardless of means—has access to regenerative education and resources. → Learn More & Donate
Peace and goodwill to all.
About Capital Institute
Capital Institute is a 501(c)3 nonprofit non-partisan think tank working to create a more just and sustainable way of life on earth. Together with our collaborative network, we combine modern science, storytelling, and the knowledge of timeless wisdom traditions to illuminate the path from an extractive economy to an emerging regenerative economy that supports the long-term well-being of people, planet and business.
