a social singularity?

"Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience." Joseph Cambell (Art by Michael Grey)

So where are our poets, the ones who will reveal the new mythology arising from the collective? Is there something to uncover? Cambell was sure it had something to do with the whole planet. Is there something arising now on earth that touches on the mystical side of essential experience?

It is clear is that something is happening in the social sector around the world from the grassroots. People are rising up, working, playing and in some ways fighting together in new ways. Following capitalism's defeat of socialism as an ideology that frames the way global society organize itself, we are left with "a new moral hunger," as Katherine Fulton describes it. "The social sector is reorganizing itself...literally acting its way into a new way of thinking....A social singularity."

Terrence McKenna, the controversial poet, philosopher and ethnobotanist wrote about this kind of human singularity as a future state. "It is possible to know the future," he said, "or levels of novelty that future states will fulfill by the happenstance of unpredictable events- to know where the road goes but not necessarily what the scenery looks like... toward the culmination of a human process... of tool making, which comes to completion in the perfect artifact... man- the final tool- a reorganized man that blasts itself into a new experience of itself."

My conversation today with a group of fellow socionauts circled around this new mythology, but admittedly could not encapsulate it. Its about redefining wealth. It's about social restructuring. Its a voyage many of us seem to be on yet our destination is uncertain. We did not discover this destination today, but we certainly articulated what it feels like. We seem to know where the road goes more or less, but we cannot define precisely what it will look like.

We looked for a savior, a hero and found no individual but many. We looked for a theater where the new mythology was being told, a new language, new pictures or symbols and found the anecdotal but nothing that encapsulated this new mythology. What we did find was "a hero with a thousand faces," emerging collectives of diverse actors seeking good through cooperation. Cooperation has traditionally been defined by tribes or nations. Much more often now an uncommon set of players is coming together to cooperate in pursuit of a more balanced social system.

At the same time we are in the midst of a technological breakthrough in the depth and breadth of our global communications. In the same way the first pictures of earth from space changed the way we saw ourselves -a shared horizon - the rise of a global communication network or membrane is providing incredibly detailed sensory awareness of earth and its people as a living system. Our lenses are so much more powerful. This new "membrane" augments our physical senses in interpreting how to act in the world. Nevertheless while we have invented the capacity to monitor the planet with higher resolution, there are no interfaces that make it easy to do so. Right now we are fumbling with the idea of consciously responding to the feedback we are receiving. What if, for example, all government data were freely accessible in real time enabling anyone to write software applications to better manage budget allocation, anticipate demographic or migration shifts or locating resources for disaster response.

This concept of a community constantly reinterpreting how it should act in the world in synch with a constantly evolving shared horizon is an important one.

This is consistent with research on termites by Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s that suggests, by analogy and reflection, a connection in the way cooperative networks of people operate: that the regulation and coordination of the building and maintaining of a nest (i.e. the planet) was dependent upon stimulation provided by the nest, as opposed to an inherent knowledge of nest building on the individual termite’s part.”

Like a termites nest, the collective action that emerges within the network is strongly influenced and inspired by the activities of what other members are doing and the overall shape of the network.

In the face of what many view as earth's darkest hours of violence, repression and climate change somehow the human species seems poised to act collectively to alter its course. There is no one directing this shift, it is the intelligence of the swarm reacting to a new image of its nest - the planet. This is truly mysterious. A higher level of intelligence is seemingly acting autonomously.

We can't quite put our finger on this. We can't quite articulate it in an integrative way. There is no nice neat encapsulation or symbology that we can run through the viral marketing machine. Its a force that moves on its own inspired by "insight"- a deeper form of wisdom that arises out of collective intelligence. It cannot be controlled or harnessed because it is so deeply interconnected with everything else. No one individual movement can define its core dynamics. Its a mystery.

Having just reread "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth," Bucky Fuller's prescient tome on integrative thinking, I leave you with this ...



paz
mark
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