IS: Being the systemic change
Upcoming events:
- Saturday May 31: IS Connection Call
- Sunday June 1: Community Hub 18.9
- Tuesday June 3: The Oasis
- Tuesday June 10: Collab-a-thon
Last week's newsletter was "Clarity" and last Sunday's Community Hub call was "Feelin' Good".
If we want to live in a more beautiful world, we need new systems that support us. Two things are true about change:
- Systemic change takes a lot of orchestrated energy to make a jump from one stable point to another.
- Personal change doesn't change the system, but does impact those we're in direct contact with, building potential movement energy.
So the theory of change of many sociocultural activists goes like:
- Enough people do inner work
- ??? Tipping point!
- System change happens
The memetic advocacy around tipping points, such as the 3.5% rule, in my opinion has some underpants-gnomes "and then magic happens!" flavor to it. But it could be true — when does it work that way?
That could be a long essay, but I'll try to keep this short. I want to point out that when there's ??? hand-waving, the most promising approach I can see is to zoom in (but not too much!) and reduce (but not eliminate!) the gap-jump between steps one and three by reducing the size of the system you're looking at.
Saying "zoom in" sort of seems the same as saying "do incremental change instead of big all-at-once change" and we're back at Gall's law of evolutionary iteration. But what I'm point out is reality is chunky and that this is formed by the system-stability points on the state-space landscape. Infinite incrementalism is just as imaginary as none.
So, we gotta "right size" the change — don't bite off more than we can chew, but don't just "raise our consciousness levels" and wait for magic. Okay, that sounds pretty sensible too. Top-down doesn't work. Bottom-up doesn't work. You need both working together to generate and deploy the energy required for a system change.
I've rederived a fair bit of change management theory here. But I want to hold this in our minds as we look at Liminal Web activism and change-making efforts. Do you think maybe we've overcorrected in pushing away from left-brained logical-rational Emissary modern conventional world and reaching for the right-brained sensory-holistic Master emergence of the new world? Yeah, and basically that points at Chapman's psuedo-pomo blockage of meta-rationality. But in metamodern scene terms, it reduces to something like "hey y'all, this scene is still too postmodern/green weighted, and isn't yet metamodern enough".
So I find myself pointing at another both/and here, another transcend-and-include, where yeah we gotta do the inner development and bottoms-up change AND we gotta be strategic and rational when appropriate. When is it appropriate? At the right system chunk size to metabolize the change energy. And that's metarationality in a nutshell, to intuit when when to switch between modes.
Successful system change needs to liberate the personal change energy, and the energy needs to emerge in the first place. If we've generated enough personal movement energy, how can we find the right system chunk to catalyze? That's the art of building an Intentional Society.
Cheers,
James