Life is….
Summary
In this blog article I will show that we have made ourselves vulnerable to an evolutionary crisis of our human species by eliminating nature from our daily lives. Especially people living in cities do not stand a chance. The deterioration for us goes so fast that extreme urgent actions are required, especially in the field of bring green life forms abundantly back into our direct surroundings for food, environmental and energetic support. We already suffer the severest consequences and these will reach extreme peaks the coming decades. Key to it all is awareness and then strong action, fast. The good thing about it all is that we (who are left over after it all) come out stronger as a species with a leap in our higher consciousness that will affect the evolution of our species for ever. Chance is that after all that we will not be the most dominant species on Earth anymore but we will not see it as a problem either.
The article
On twitter (@jpclose) a brief discussion developed on the need of a circular economy and the symbiotic values of an energetic society. Now this may be gibberish for most of us but it all started when I suggested that local self-sufficient communities should use the following formula:
Talent + Energy + Purpose = Sustainable Progress + Abundance (Reciprocity)
The “energy” part that I refer to is the labor capacity, motivation and personal contribution of any member of our community. I did not refer directly to the origin of such living energy. But when the word “symbiosis” was used in relation to a “circular economy” I was challenged to put things into perspective, not just for me but also for all those people who were looking at a chain of remarks on twitter within the confinement of 140 characters. Who would make sense?
Symbiosis refers to a relationship between a host and user often also referred to as a parasite. But who or what would be a parasite? Is the human being a parasite of our planet Earth? We would be if we were some alien species that was mining resources away from the planet with the possibility of emptying it. But we have originated (for all I know) on this planet as a species and everything we have done so far (except some minor adventures into space) has been confined to our planet. So we cannot be referred to as a parasite from a material existential point of view. But this is maybe not entirely true. We do use material in a way that it is not circular to its origins. In that sense we would be a parasite, but does it matter? Yes, it does.
Let us look at the definition of “life” in the first place. Life (in a physical body) is built up out of matter (which comes from the planet Earth) and burns up energy to grow and remain alive. So the energetic part is symbiotic because it is used to grow and stay alive and is not given back to its origins. The material composition of a living being is given back in a circular manner to our surroundings when it dies. That material can be reused again, the energy used for life cannot. Not by that species anyway. It does have an importance in the chain of consumable dependencies, as we will see.
That is interesting. So if all life on Earth uses up energy without giving it back where does all this energy come from to keep us going? From the Sun of course.
But the sun throws her energy away anyway and we merely use it to become and stay alive as long as the Sun provides us with energy. This is hardly a symbiosis, it is an interesting usage of the waste of the sun yet we depend on it for life. The Sun is key to our existence from an energetic point of view and the Earth from a material point of view.
Yet we all know that just some sunshine and a heap of material does not come alive just like that. That would be a miracle. Yet at one time it did. Life was injected somehow to make odd combinations of material compositions that had unique living properties: the capacity to reproduce similar shapes and evolve into more complex forms eventually reaching the complexity of the human being. This is an extra-ordinary chain of events that was sparked off with the following formula:
Life = Matter (from Earth) + Energy (from the Sun) + Purpose (the “Why”?)
The energy of the sun is provided to us on a daily basis for at least a few billions years to come which gives us some guarantee of expectation for life to come. About the “purpose” of life we can speculate a lot of course, especially about that one single moment that energy and matter decided to come together with a pre-established and reproducible purpose. Once that had happened “reproduction” became one of the main evolutionary driving forces that eventually started causing the differentiation into different species.
From a mathematical point of view the expansion of matter through the absorption of energy of any source shows fractal patterns. This means that the same shape in phase of expansion reaches a point of collapse and, instead of disappearing, it reproduces itself in the same shape again but smaller. This means that material shapes in particular formats keep the same format by duplicating themselves into replicates. We see this happening in coastal lines, snow flakes, plants, etc. It is a natural process with a great deal of logic from a material point of view but it is not “life” yet, yet it may well be have been the basis for life. The step from fractal expansion (energy + pre-structured matter) to life can be explained by the appearance of a (sub)conscious “purpose” of reproduction.
Here we stand, Human Beings, at the end of this evolutionary line in what we call “today”. We are individually alive by the union of matter and energy and remain alive by feeding ourselves with matter and energy stored around us in nature. We consider ourselves to be the “end of the food chain” and the “most modern version of an extraordinary line of evolution”. From an individual point of view our life is finite because for some reason we die. From an evolutionary point of view we do not die because we reproduce ourselves. So the purpose of our lives is still to remain alive through reproduction.
The human being has evolved with an extra quality added to the formula: Self-consciousness. The consciousness is a condition that made life create forms of matter + energy that reproduce in a conscious, preprogrammed way. This consciousness plotted in earliest genetics is complex and subject to intense studies of science. Yet the human being made it even more complex by enhancing the automation through self-reflection and self-consciousness. We are unique in asking ourselves “why”? Our purpose may still be reproduction but also adds to it the big question why we do this in the first place? So in essence we ask ourselves what life is?
From a simple biological point of life is the capacity to reproduce the same species over and over again. In the diversity of evolutionary patterns this ability has gradually differentiated itself into different species that compete with each other to find enough matter and energy to sustain its diversification. The purpose of reproduction enhanced itself with competition and with competition the quality of adaptiveness was introduced in the genetic coding of the consciousness. Life was getting more and more complex and so was the evolution of the composites in different types of species until we reach the human being today.
The self-conscious reasoning abilities of this species got it to become dominant over other species. Self-consciousness is for that matter a logical consequence of the evolution from a self-preservation point of view through conscious reproduction. It simply enhanced our options in a competitive, highly diverse, living world. It is not strange to assume that over time more and more species will cross the line of self-consciousness and in fact many already did. The competition continues and so does the natural selection through diversification and adaptiveness. So far so good. But now we have reached a point of important reflection. Our species has outgrown itself so much that it has become a competitor to itself. We have reached a point that we do not improve our chances for survival through our consciousness, we diminish it through over-competition and dominance. We are about to reach the end of our own evolution and disappear unless something else happens.
Let us go back to the formula of life: Matter + Energy + Purpose to become aware of the importance of it for our own sustainable progress as a species. What does the formula mean in our practical lives today?
Matter refers to the material building blocks of life. We need matter to grow, survive and reproduce ourselves. If we destroy matter in industrial processes that are not cyclic with our natural environment we gradually destroy our own building blocks of life. It is of key importance to use material for our sake in a reciprocal way with nature. In fact, our surroundings work that way already for billions of years and successfully. We, the human beings, have used materials for the benefit of our tools and wellness but forgot that we need it to survive ourselves. We have reached a point in our global size and lifestyle that this mis-usage of materials is causing stress in our quest for survival. In a circular relationship with our environment we would never pollute our habitat yet we have no circular relationship. We know from other species that over consume or destroy their habitat that they eventually kill themselves. We are in the process of rapidly doing so now.
Energy is needed to keep life together, grow and reproduce. The human being is not capable of producing energy itself so we rely on our surrounding for it. Sunlight is important but the living species surrounding us are even more. They are containers, storage places of sunlight as they transform the light into elements that we can eat and convert back into energy again to sustain our life. So when we destroy our habitat by building cities we in fact take away our natural conversion and storage of solar energy. Living green is important for our survival and we are eliminating it from our lives. People in cities have become totally dependent from energy sources outside the city. This does not just arrive through distribution of fossil energy (which is nothing less than solar energy stored through plants that transformed in a particular confinement where the energy could not escape into the environment) but also through the food distribution and supermarkets. The soil that is used for building dead cities cannot be used for natural energy capturing processes unless we do something about it. The cities tend to overheat causing deceases and behavioral problems among the human beings and lack the natural cyclic ability to sustain life in the cities through capturing and eating of energy. Everyone living in a city has made itself vulnerable from an evolutionary point of view by becoming dependent on energy from outside the city. Current cities hence will never be the basis of sustainable progress, yet will be the source of many humanitarian crises that people in cities will suffer. Placing solar panels in the cities will not help overcome the need we have to feed ourselves with living matter for the sake of the energy contained in it. Urban agriculture is far more important than solar panels.
So while we destroy the habitat of other species we also destroy our source of natural energy for nutrition. We cannot survive with artificial food because we need also the energy contained in the living food that sustains our chain. We have a huge dependency on our environment and need to learn how to sustain a good balance with it. This introduces our next step in our evolution.
Purpose refers first to the micro formats of matter that became alive from a fractal expansion of matter + energy to some early genetic consciousness for the sake of conscious reproduction. The evolutionary pattern not only developed the format of the species into a diversity through competition and natural adaptiveness to new circumstances, it also got “purpose” to evolve. We started with a conscious drive to reproduce and gradually evolved into a state of competitive self-consciousness. Self-consciousness improved the chances of survival for those species that enhanced itself with conscious decisions on life expectations, the creation of tools and dominance over other species which evolved without self-conscience. We increased our chances with self-consciousness as we have seen over time, until we crossed the line of self-destruction.
The next step in the evolution of purpose is self-awareness. Dominance over other species is excellent for improved reproduction of a species but eventually one becomes dominant over itself. There is a point in time that dominance to sustain oneself crosses a line in which dominance needs to be combined with wisdom. We tend to have become so dominant that we cannot sustain ourselves anymore. Purpose hence enhances from competitive self-consciousness to awareness on sustainable progress in which we learn to value matter and energy in a new way for the sake of survival of the species.
Life is important to us and we have now all the understanding we need to sustain ourselves. We simply need to accept the new condition of our evolutionary state: higher awareness, and change our way of organizing ourselves from a competitive way into a adaptive way. This we see happening now around us. All the crises that the human being suffers in material and energetic sense only show us the way to a next evolutionary step in our self-consciousness. Our purpose in life is enhanced by understanding matter and energy for the sake of life itself to sustain our own life. Bringing back nature into our direct local lives is key in this process, redesigning our cities and lifestyles in line with our growing awareness of the need to balance our existence with our universe.
We now know what life is and simply need to learn how to live it to the full, including the next necessary evolutionary step. We need to change to live which brings us back to the newest definition of human progress:
Talent (awareness) + Energy (motivation) + Purpose (our evolution) = Sustainable Progress + Abundance (Reciprocity)
It’s the economic chain that kills us
Our fragmented society is built up in chains of economic relationships that compete with each other. To hold up those chains we need to grow to sustain our perceived welfare but in the process we take away all value out of our surroundings. Let us show this with some examples.
Fragmented focus on efficiency: Productivity tends to focus on just one product and concentrate on mass production through efficiencies. This produces a strong global centralization and standardization of product creation and assembly processes. Since the consumer’s end user price is under pressure due to open competition every shackle in the chain, from resource to production, assembly and distribution, is being squeezed, reducing value in chain. The resources are chosen to be the cheapest, the product is made as small as possible, the components are mass produced and shipped across the world for assembly in a mechanical plant preferably in low wage countries and then shipped across the world for distribution through retail or directly to the end user. The larger the volume (growth) the more efficiency one can build in the process by eliminating local content, human labor, etc. The products become cheaper, up to the point of throw away consumables but with a destruction of resources along the way and without precedence. The cheapest labor is even replaced by automation and distribution done in massive loads.
If you look at any consumable that you deal with in your daily life you will find that the local content (read labor, creative contribution, values) is reduced to an absolute minimum. The only labor may be the logistics and retail effort which can be done with people with the lowest skills, reducing cost price to a minimum and employing the lowest bidder on the verge of illegality.
So every product we buy is a debt to our own community since the local values have been eliminated. Where does our money come from to even have access to consumables if we hardly produce value locally? Debt.
Consequence driven: Our local community is consequence driven. What does that mean? If means that we organize ourselves in reaction to our lifestyle. Our roads need to be broadened to cope with logistics and massive civil movements of people trying to find labor elsewhere. Our health care needs to be organized to help us cope with consumer diseases. Our taxes regulations need to be sharpened to try to cope with all pollution and local criminality.
The costs of the consequences are covered by taxes on the consumer economy, hence the chain that has no local content needs to grow to cover the consequences. The debt increases to our local community that gets sicker and sicker by need of economic growth push. Consume as much as you can to finance the effects of overconsumption.
Government is responsible: The common public perception is that government takes care of everything. Indeed the complexity is seemingly so big that individual awareness that the public opinion finds it easiest to rely on formal structures than consider one’s own responsibility. The luxury of a world full of consumables is of course perceived as the greatest achievement of humankind and very difficult to relinquish. Why less if we are used and stimulated for more and more?
The consequences are related to the government who has absolute no authority or means to do something about it. That is why it reacts with bureaucracy and massive investments in consultants, simply because civil servants have no clue and do not wish to be confronted with a responsibility that they cannot carry. Decisions are made in decades where crises occur in matter of days. The only solution they can think of is to invest more in regulation, layers of bureaucracy, research documents and debt increases. It is easy to plan a bigger or new road. It is impossible to create a clean environment. The latter cannot be contracted as it requires the responsibility of society as a whole.
Solution: These chains hence are killing us and driving economies of growth into larger weakness of the same economies up to the point of instability and crisis after crisis. The solution lies in creating again local for local content transforming society in self sufficient communities cutting the ties with the chains. To do that people have to take responsibility and relinquish dependencies by creating their own securities and wellness. This is easier said the done yet we have no choice. Those communities that take the lead in such development face all kinds of problems that even require to restructure their legal systems, governance, etc. But it is worth it for the sake of peace and sustainable progress. Otherwise the chains of dependency will literally kill us as food, water, resources and even financials cannot be organized to sustain the living standards of the past. Now we have a choice, soon we have none.
“City of Tomorrow” game
Putting Planet, People, Profit, Passion and Progress into Practice
Recently we played the entrepreneurial “City of Tomorrow” game for the first time. In the STIR foundation we support the idea of integral human development as expressed in the chapters 15 and 16 of my free book last year, not just the rational side of it as our system is educating our children today. As Sir Ken Robinson so beautifully stated in his much applauded TED talk “the current education systems kill creativity” and Mitra shows in his “hole in the wall“, children have a much higher self-learning ability than our schools appreciate or even stimulate. Yet despite the famous anthropological and anthroposophical views and knowledge on the development of the human consciousness through spiritual, emotional, physical and rational experiences, the system remains the system, locked up in bureaucracy and self supporting prejudice.
We see that current educational formats serve a paradigm in which politicians see the human being as a little robot in the machinery of money driven/dependent economies of growth. Such robots need to learn how to behave like robots within a system, brainwashed about the importance of money, a job, debt, fashion, consumerism, the state, their dependence on the system, etc. The learn to calculate and write a letter but nothing about the importance of social relationships, feelings, spirituality, sustainability or responsibilities.
The paradigm that we support is totally opposite which is why both are difficult to match. The way a complex human society is structured in either paradigm differs enormously which is why the current educational system will sooner see our propositions as a threat to them rather than an opportunity. It is even worse than that. The current education system has no identity of its own because it is chained in dependence to the money which allows it to exist. This comes from central government which dictates the normatives that the schools need to comply with. So the education system has hardly any opinion of its own, just a hierarchy controlling that what is done is done according to the guidelines that allow them to stay alive financially. They are themselves expensive robots in a system.
So we are not seen as a threat to the educational content (who cares?) but for their financial continuation. That is why the system remains closed to all influences from outside, even common sense.
Transforming from one complexity to another
If we cannot change the system we can in fact stand next to it. We should never forget that even the most locked up human organization consists of people. And individually people do become aware of the need of a new society and other ways of education. Some, not all, are willing to use this personal awareness and influences to take action within the structures in which they are employed. They become the internal transformative hero’s that link already with change and seek internal opportunities that make a difference.
We positioned our initiatives on human awareness right at the place where the young adults would leave school to start their life in the real world. Our program is called “entrepreneur of your own life“, linking the increasing requirement of entrepreneurship in the old money driven economies with the self-leadership and sense of responsibility in the value driven society that we are trying to develop. We asked the high schools to allow us to give their students a view into real life with a bit of our counselling. It is also in the interest of the school to pay attention to this even though they find it difficult to let the real world enter their world. When we propose to provide a low cost bridge through our game they become enthusiastic.
We had done one of such days already before in a multicultural setting trying to show the tremendous opportunities of cultural diversity in a community if you choose to make the best of it together. It had been a great day . Now we were facing a highly technical setting with 500 students in two groups.
One of the coaches, Jules Ruis, suggested to make the day into an adventure and the students into hero’s. Overnight he developed a simple game but with great educational value. It was based on economics but could easily and secretly be changed into buddinomics by me.
The ingredients of the game are:
- a large bunch of students 17+ years old
- technological innovation companies that show their innovations
- coaches that carry specific information
- a bunch of camera’s
- a value system in exchangeable cards
We played that day with about 200 students that started without knowing much more than that they would have to collect information at the stands of the enterprises and the coaches that walked around as wild cards. They had been teamed up with people from different years, whom they did not know personally, and the elderly student was made team leader.
They had to assemble the team, work together towards the end of the day, trying to figure out what they had to do to win? During the evolution of the day and every encounter with a coach the complexity of the game would rise, requiring the teams to perform and place the product exhibitions and information into new perspectives.
Watch the filmbook (in Dutch) of the day here
The end of the day was spectacular from an awareness point of view. It was amazing for us to see how self-leadership and adaptability got these youngsters on their way and how fast they managed to adjust their views with new input. At the end of the day they were allowed to present their views in public and with cameras present. For the highest years present the presentations were key because they were invited to continue the game for another year. Their prices:
- a job
- a scholarship
- a starting capital for a new business
The effects of the game had not just affected the students. The high school had become so motivated that it started to open up for reorganization and further partnership with the foundation and others. The game will be played now at least twice a year and every year again with all the students. While we do so we are going to step up the challenge every time inviting the students to deal with real life complex problems within the simulation of the reality of the game.
The business enterprises also started to readjust their activities and organization inspired by the game. Most found each other during the game to partner up in purpose driven ventures. They also committed to further invest in the initiatives led by the foundation and based on local for local cooperatives between government, technical innovations, education and science, social innovation.
And even the local government representatives were so enthusiastic that they proposed to open up their structures for more student involvement and participation. At the end all participants will become partner and judge of the final game of all students: defining their own city of tomorrow, based on their own home town and for which they can take responsibility themselves with what they have learned at school and are triggered to learn by placing their knowledge into their daily reality, simulated in complexity by the game.
The entire process is sponsored by the partners to maintain our independence and avoid any client/supplier relationship or chain dependencies. This way the game can be purpose driven in which the virtual reality transforms into reality.
Expanding our ambitions:
On 12.12.12 we now wish to play the game for 4 consecutive days in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) with students from all over Europe. The game will then be called “Europe of Tomorrow” giving already away what the main topic of the event will be. The game will be combined with an international congress on sustainable progress. It will again be great fun to see how our young adults will react to the modern reality and eventually change the world through their own new levels of consciousness and adaptability.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 