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Reality is a confrontation with yourself
“I do not challenge the reality of others, I created a new one and invite people and institutions to join. This brings them in confrontation with themselves”
(Jean-Paul Close, Sustainocracy – the new democracy – 2012)
The reality we perceive is an interpretation by our rational awareness. We interact with our surroundings according to the interpretation of reality. We learn to perceive a particular stability as “normal” and will not easily challenge it when it provides us with what we think we need. When things happen that are out of the ordinary our perception is challenged. Our reality changes and we enter in confrontation with ourselves when need to deal with change. This confrontation contains a learning process that has been the essence of human progress through periods of creativity and change. We tend to be conservative in order to provide is with a sense of safety and control yet are especially good as a species in adapting to new circumstances when the need presents itself. This adaptation process is filled with emotions and meaningful awareness development.
Many people are now experiencing such a personal confrontation as the money based human world collapses. It opens up our minds to a new reality. At first we see our trusted reality fall apart. The old reality is unstable but a new one has not yet been created in our awareness. I already wrote about the fear for change of people, the process of letting go of old securities and the acceptance of new responsibilities. We may at first look at the world with apprehension and distrust but in reality we are looking within ourselves for the energetic ability to address the forthcoming insecurities. A new reality needs to be dealt with as it unfolds in front of our senses and reaches our consciousness. We first project the new circumstances on previous experiences and old abilities to see if we can re-establish our stability by applying the old reality. When we see that this does not work we come in the new world of creativity, emotions and meaning. We start experimenting with our awareness and feelings by discovering and applying other talents or even develop totally new ones. Our worries go to the primary fulfillment of our needs first (such as food, housing, clothing, etc). We open up to new methods and approaches to reality. We also look at risk in a different way.
When we deal with our old and proven reality we have the tendency to avoid risk but when a new reality needs to be taken care of risk avoidance is exactly what we do not need. In the process of search for primary needs everything is possible, from self-sufficient initiatives to theft and criminality. Renewal and innovation are values that both have to do with the process of letting go and creating something new. The whole event of change is experienced as a risk, but a different one in each of the stages. The emotions around letting go have to do with fear of what we loose. The emotions in our personal chaos lead us to fight for survival. The risk felt to gain new stability using our creativity has to do with what we can gain in terms of safety and wellness. When we establish a creative dot on the horizon we have less problems in letting go then when we have nothing to go for. A dot on a horizon can also get others to join into the process allowing change to occur in co-creative manner.
An entire society
The confrontation process of dealing with individual change and fear in changing realities is also true for institutions s.a. business, government, schools, etc. The confrontation is more complicated because many more people are involved and the institution in caught up in a chain of dependencies with others. The surroundings of a human being are not just artificial yet the surroundings of institutions are man made with financial systems, risk management an chains of liabilities. The old reality of an institution is “managed” in a day to day comfort. When a crisis occurs that changes the reality of the system, the new reality requires institutional “leadership”.
In our current financial world of fragmented institutional interests we see many worldviews interact through the management of chains of relationships. When the chains break up or enter into a crisis only leadership can open up to new realities. Then institutions are not fragmented anymore but open up to new relationships. Organizations that are reluctant to change due to excess bureaucracy and self interest based on old remaining values are for sure entering in chaos and mortal stress. The ones that are open to change, and receive freedom to do so by the people involved, will assume experimental risks by confronting themselves with themselves through a changing reality. This reality change is an open interaction between the surroundings and the institution. Both change in the process
Sustainocracy is the dot on horizon for the global society
In Sustainocracy we deal with the confrontation between perceived realities with all the participants of society, and society as a whole. It is exciting to see how it works when the dynamics of a large community, such as a city, gets into a proactive mode of risk taking progression with all parties involved. Leadership develops where least expected and confronts itself with the old power positions of managerial risk avoidance that remain in the surroundings. We see managerial people hanging on to old positions of power while leadership acts with new age authority. The process of letting go and developing new creativity for change becomes visible and fills the environment with energetic passion. Sustainocracy then adds our definition of sustainable human progress as a common dot on the horizon. It helps people to define profound challenges that become workable and recognized by all. The energy of change gets focused and changes the world.
The confrontation with ourselves then changes fear into trust, insecurity into passion, conservation into progression and confinement into a sense of freedom. When reality change we learn through the confrontation with ourselves how to deal with it for our safety, stability and progress. Without change no progress, nor positive human evolution. Some of even take immense joy in riding these waves of transformative change and create a network of world changing initiatives. Sustainocracy requires such network of people active in the different fields of leadership authority.
Social innovation and paradigm shift
In times of crisis, such as a recession or a depression, people talk about social innovation a lot. Other words that are being heard are civilian participation, social responsibility, etc. In fact, what we see happening is that the old dominant institutional world is calling out for help. When we look at my blog about the Kondratieff sinus we see that at the peak of an economic hype the conservative dominance of risk avoiding governance is blocking all kinds of social innovation. When the people are happy, get what they want, have nothing to complain about, few stand up to become creative with a desire for change. The social cash cow of conservatism in a peak economy is not the best basis to introduce social innovation. If you would want to do that you would need the Otto Scharmer U-Theory to simulate chaos and get people to become artificially creative. It is not the same as a genuine crisis.
A depression seems to get the best out of people in terms of adding true and lasting value to their community, especially when it collapses. Now why is that? There are a few reasons to mention:
1. Creativity needs stimulus
When a communities enters a recession is wakes people up to look at their own reality in a different way. Previously wealth was a matter of fact, now it is not anymore. Old securities disappear and people need to find access to new ones. They are obliged to think, triggered by their intense emotions. Fear for shortages, the pain of loosing previous wellness, the need to find a way out of chaos, the worries about their operational wellness, it all opens up peoples mind to change. It triggers a whole series of reactions, from complaints, aggression, suicide, etc, but also a boost of creativity in many.
2. Change needs to be “different”
In a recession people tend to do the same things over and over again to try to regain their old securities. They do not want to acknowledge that the crisis is caused because the “old ways” simply have become obsolete. You can’t take them for granted anymore, not matter how well they worked in society, business or family life before. When the markets shrinks one needs to adjust, not in the shrinking but bailing out by being different. When an economic peak gets people to copy each other to benefit from wealth without any new creations, a dip gets them confronted in competition. It shakes up their similarities and stimulates the search for renewed uniqueness. Pioneers appear who propose new things and a sense of social innovation invades the surroundings. This stimulates others to do the same.
3. Change needs freedom
When you wake up at 7 in the morning to start the day, bringing the kids to school, go to work, worry about the bills, the shopping, the taxes and a personal career, to get back home at 18.30 tired, feed the children, take them to bed, crash on the sofa and watch the telly……. Then you have little time or interest to even think of social innovation or whatever. Your world turns around your daily responsibilities and that is type of worldview you have.
When however one has enough freedom it is much easier to find inner strength to overcome the burden of a daily routine and become creative. Need combined with available time gets people to experiment with innovation. Some do this by discovering new abilities or pick up old forgotten talents (they start to act, dans, sing, play a musical instrument, paint). Others start doing voluntary works and start meeting totally different people than before. New ideas are born, some are actually tried our and can even flourish. In freedom people disconnect from old structures and mingle with new connections, developing new communities and change happens organically.
4. Innovation needs to be seen
During peaks of abundance there are also people who have a creative nature and develop social innovations. They are however hardly visible because no one seems to be on the look out for inspiration. When a recession wakes up people the sensitivity for innovation grows and all kinds of inspiring novelty get the chance to be highlighted or “discovered” for public enlargement. Someone who has the creative urge to create innovation may lack the managerial leadership to outgrow it to make it a new social standard. The interaction of an institutional world in crisis with a new dynamic world of creativity in purpose driven freedom can boost any novelty to huge proportions. Visibility of inspiring innovations is hence a double sided phenomena. On the one hand it is the creativity of social innovation boosted by a recession that wants to be seen, and on the other, the open attention of crumbling institutions that need innovation fast to renew their expectations for survival.
Paradigm shift
A paradigm shift is not the same as social innovation. Can social innovation produce a paradigm shift? Or does a paradigm shift cause social innovation?
A paradigm is defined to be “a specific way of looking at a reality, determining the way one makes decisions and acts in accordance”. This means automatically that there are different ways of looking at a reality, challenging the way people make their decisions. In our current social paradigm the consumer based capitalist economy has a dominant position, determining the way governments, business, public in general, institutions, etc interact. Social innovation at an individual level generally may change the texture and coloring of the paradigm but will not change this overall paradigm.
So when we address the issue of climate change, global warming, global pollution, new possible global diseases, etc and attribute this to the dominant paradigm then social innovation within the reigning paradigm may address these issues from a consequences point of view but will not solve them from a cause point of view. To do that a paradigm shift is needed.
Sustainocracy is a paradigm shift
Sustainocracy was idealistically conceived when I decided that I did not want to pass the old paradigm on to my children because of the negative consequences it causes. Of course I did appreciate the positive elements of this paradigm but realized that we had reached a point that the balance had tipped over to the accumulation of negative effects, creating permanent instability also at the positive end. So in a way my decision early in the 2000’s was a social innovation. Back then my surroundings had no desperate feeling of a crisis yet even though the signs were abundantly present already. The establishment was still confident that change could be done from within the reigning paradigm. In fact, the established power structures were also an inherent piece of that paradigm and gained their existence from it. It was not up to them to challenge their reason to be. The only one that could challenge the paradigm is the one who has eyes to see and awareness to distinguish between realities. And that is the human being itself, because we are the ones that create our instruments, even if we allow them to reign us for a while. We have come to point that we need to redefine the usages and positioning of those instruments. And that is what we do in Sustainocracy. We respect the instruments as human creations and reposition them around a new paradigm in which the human being is placed at the center of sustainable human progression, not the financial systems.
With this simple change in mindset and observing the world, the world itself learns to see itself differently and starts to reshuffle their power positions accordingly. Slowly the two paradigms become visible to everyone and so does the choice everyone has. Social innovation then gets an entirely new dimension that changes everything simply because of the way we look at things. We live in a unique time-era in which we see a new paradigm arise, co-exist with an old one for a while, interacting probably with certain conflicts and eventually take over. People in next generations will read about this era in their history books but will look at society from that new dominant paradigm without the challenging adventure of living through the transformation, or even playing part in defining it. This era is therefor unique in the history of humankind and referred to by me and some others as “the quantum leap in human evolution”.
Open up your mind and be part of it. It is exciting, challenging and rewarding to be a pioneer of a new world.
Frozen and liquid egos
The ego
Ego stands for “I”. It represents the unique, living physical identity of a single living being. This ego becomes relevant in a dynamic environment where it needs to interact with the surrounding to survive, liveand develop itself. When interacting with other ego’s it becomes the “I am”, a self reflective revelation of self awareness. This “being” than becomes gradually aware of talents and skills which it needs to shown off to its surroundings in order to establish valued reconition with a social group order and potential hierarchy.
Frozen ego’s
Modern group dynamics of human beings have evolved into the type of robotics described in the previous blog. Institutionalized tasks are being populated by human beings who are serving the institutional objectives by performing specific predefined tasks without competition or open interaction. The interaction is predetermined by the hierarchy of the establishment. Such structural organization can be compared with the solidification of liquid or gassy elements. The molecules slow down their vibrating rhythm and take a static position within a fixed structure, connecting in a specific format with their neighboring molecules. They become frozen in rock like objects. That tends to happen with people in hierarchical organizations.
From a human point of view the “I am” is being largely eliminated and so is the dynamic development of the ego. The ego itself becomes frozen in a predefined fitting within a frozen context. Only the “I” counts as functional pupet in a puppetering theartre. The ego is surrounded by dogma’s that he or she adopts as truthful indisputable reality in order to remain in the structure. The surrounding enhances this by imposing the dogma’s formally by asking for loyalty in exchange. The group structure lacks flexibility and dynamics in exchange for control and predictability. The human being is not challenged to evolve, just to perform automated tasks within fixed patterns. People who manage such rock like structures tend to have frozen ego too as they fragment human abilities into functional routines without accounting for universal laws of chaos and evolutionary interaction.
A business or government hierarchy becomes an artificial being composed of many frozen egos. The people involved in such environment get disconnected from the universal reality and become dependent of the overall structure of the institution to provide certain securities. Those would otherwise have been found in a much more complex competitive interaction with other ego’s and nature. Frozen ego’s tend to adore the state of rest and lack of certain worries. Ego’s may learn rationalized patterns but lack the development of spiritual, physical and emotional awareness delaying the true evolution of the adulthood of each individual.
Frozen ego’s
When society gets over-organized through bureaucracy the frozen ego’s remain frozen also in a structured environment full of rules and control systems.
Liquid ego’s
A human being is in essence as volatile as gas, a unique complex element in a highly dynamic universe. We are excited by our surroundings and interact with it through multi-level communication in search for harmony and safety. We do not only interact with other ego’s, we also need to interact with nature to feed ourselves with energy and material composites that are life supportive and enhancing. Other species depend on us and interact with us in a similar way of interdependence and evolutionary dynamics. Human egos connect to each other for co-creation of off spring (establishment of families) and safety (cooperations), by organizing communities of self supporting groups of individuals.
The dynamics is based on open interaction and flexibility giving the community a liquid like behavior that adapts itself in shape and interaction with the environment with great ease and transparency. The ego’s in such liquid state are challenged to find and redefine harmony continuously becoming liquid also in the learning process. The inner competition is functional to the mode of self sufficiency of the group. Talents and skills are challenged to change, evolve and interact using the wisdom of adults with the volatile, explosive creativity of the younger generations. Purpose and learning become a natural process that enrich all involved in a process of sustainable adaptiveness with the environment. People who get accustomed to doing this like the excitement and challenge of change.
Education
A child develops and discovers the ego through trial and error experimenting with its physical capabilities, often under protective guidance of the parents. Through comparison with the abilities of others in one’s surroundings it enhances and challenges itself further, often asking for attention “look what I can do”. They play games that stimulate the mind and body in every possible way. This young ego can be seen as a vibrant growing and learning molecule in a huge human sea of alike molecules, each a different complex ego.
The continuous open demonstration of the ego at the growing up and competitive phases of a person are necessary to distinguish and position itself in the complex group dynamics of human beings. “Adult” in this sense has nothing to do with the physical full-grown state of a human body. That was just the protected growing up phase when the real competition starts and other types of adulthood are obtained: the emotional, rational and spiritual aging, up to the state of higher awareness. That is when an ego is in perfect harmony with its surroundings and needs not continuously expose itself anymore for recognition.
When we look at education in the societies of frozen or liquid ego’s we see big differences. The young ego’s in a frozen environment are taught (indoctrinated) to behave in a frozen state, learning certain rationalized tricks to fit into a preprogrammed format of societal evolution. In a more liquid environment we see that education evolves in a dynamic way, connecting the young rising ego’s directly with the dynamics of a changing environment. They learn to interact in a competitive way through the adventure of experimentation and feedback. In a liquid state we develop fully to the adult state of higher awareness, something that is much more difficult to reach in a solid frozen environment.
Current societies
Most societies today have evolved into frozen structures trying to control ego’s in a prefixed format. Those formats have become so rigid that they lack all flexibility to interact with a very liquid, ever changing universe. We see then that such structures break up, exposing the frozen ego to an environment that is fearfully liquid for them. Many frozen ego’s on the other hand have become aware of the unnatural state of their ego and search fearfully for a more liquid interaction with their environment.
They break loose and become the small flexible streams of new communities that further break the solid environment apart. We see this happening all over the world despite the powerful intentions of those who have interests in maintaining the solid state of control. We see the development of all kind of disorders by the blockage of the natural evolution of the ego. Without even being aware, the psychological, physical and emotional disorders produce severe instability in the solid frozen communities. People are wanting to break loose, sometimes not even knowing why, because of the sense of entrapment. The human nature is too complex and active to be locked up for a long period of time. The predominant state for sustainable progress of humankind is the one of liquid ego’s. We see different cultures, business enterprises and cooperative entities that show various degrees of frozen, liquid and gas like structures.
Breaking loose
From solid state to gas
Transformation
We are entering a natural phase of transforming from a predominant state of frozen ego’s into a new state of liquid communities. This is necessary to attend our underestimated relationship with the ever changing universe. We are part of that universe which predominantly is liquid, evolving in a spiral dynamic process that challenges new connections to appear and old ones to disappear. Our human awareness is an excellent evolutionary instrument for self protection through adaptiveness. When we block this we eliminate our adaptability and make ourselves vulnerable to unexpected circumstances.
The frozen state of human ego’s has however taught us many things too. It helped us to reach an average age expectancy that allows many to experiment life within the safe dynamics of singular gassy adventurous life styles, liquid adaptive communities and specialized frozen ego formats for highly specialized complex tasks. We have learned now that the human universe should consist of all three states that interact also dynamically. To achieve this we need to develop confidence in new societal formats where the logic of all states is acknowledged and supported. Like that we can create slowly a stable global human community based on safety, health, universal ethics and sustainable progress.
Sustainocracy is a first serious attempt to achieve such awareness and guide the frozen structures into liquid dynamics. AiREAS is a multidisciplinary community that combines structures of frozen ego’s with free individuals in a gas state of volatile interaction, creating a semi-liquid, purpose driven organization of thousands of people without any hierarchy or prefixed structure.
AiREAS is world’s first liquid ego structure for sustainable human progress
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 