KOSMOS LIVE Podcast | Joe Brewer on Cultural Design and Midwifing a New Era
KOSMOS LIVE PODCAST SERIES Preparing for Profound Change
This podcast series, Preparing for Profound Change, explores the shifting global landscape and offers strategies for coping with what lies ahead. Economic turmoil, climate chaos, political upheaval – these may seem like forces to fear, but in fact offer us deep opportunities for transformation. Balancing a sober understanding of the of the collective challenges we face, with heart-centered response, calls for deep awakening by individuals, communities and societies. Our guests share their personal practices, strategies, and insights to help us manage our strong emotions and step forward to play positive proactive roles during these troubling times.
What skills, competencies and capacities will be most valued in the new world? How can our own inner practices keep us free from anxiety as we prepare body, mind and spirit for profound change?
Episode 5 – Joe Brewer on Cultural Design and Midwifing a New Era
AVAILABLE September 4th, 2017
Joe Brewer is a change strategist working on behalf of humanity, and also a complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, and evangelist for the field of culture design. Joe is working to bridge the vast body of scientific knowledge about cultural change with the efforts of practitioners around the world to help guide humanity toward resilience and well-being.
“How is possible that we can create a future that collectively no one wants? It partly comes from us being unable to see the larger systems we’re embedded in and partly has to do with this developmental history of 10,000 years of war, conquest, and empire building that has only really reached saturation at the planetary scale within the last 50 to 100 years.”
“Collapse is not like what’s shown in Hollywood movies. Collapse doesn’t happen in 10 to 15 minutes of violent outbreak in a movie scene. Collapse happens across decades to hundreds of years. The Roman Empire took about 300 years to collapse. This Western, industrial civilization is already in the process of collapsing. The United States as an empire is already past its peak and going into decline. If we recognize that collapse is longer timescales than we normally think about and that it’s already underway, this allows us to let go of the feeling that we need to stop it from happening because we can’t stop it from happening, but at the same time, collapse doesn’t mean total annihilation of all things. Collapse means this system goes away and there’s a silver lining to that.”
“If I were to say it succinctly, even though the succinct explanation doesn’t really get at it, I would use the words of the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson when he says that we need to become wise managers of our own evolutionary process. A great deal is known about the competition and cooperation between different species and ecosystems. There’s this huge body of knowledge about these things, but generally speaking, when humans get together to solve societal problems, we don’t apply an evolutionary framework to dealing with things like public policy.”
“We have ecological expressions of culture that are fit to local landscapes, and some will prove to be resilient and others won’t, and we can’t know ahead of time which ones they will be, but whichever ones are resilient will have embodied within them the natural intelligence of nature to be successful in the new environment, and if they are networked, they can spread that learning as intelligence to support the decisions of other communities, so these culture design labs are a network of communities that become self-aware of their change process so that as they become resilient or they don’t, learning happens across the network, and if they’re successful, the network survives. Or said another way, humans don’t go extinct, that we manage to discover how to be resilient in the new environment.”
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Links for this Podcast
Joe Brewer’s Blog
Highlights:
Culture Design Labs — Evolving the Future
Becoming Midwives in the Great Transition
You Pay More Taxes Than Exxon Mobil
Guiding the Evolution of Cultural Sciences
In Kosmos Journal
The Predicament of Knowledge: A Challenge for Culture Design
The Cultural Sickness Needs to be Named
What If It’s All Connected? Humanity and the Global Crisis
Mentioned in this Podcast
The Rand Corporation: The Think Tank That Controls America
Credits
“For those of us who want to be designers of change in this time…” Chilling words for those who can still hear. Who wants to be a “designer” of change? How sinister. Designs are plans, requiring technology or at least a sense of techne which is employed to manifest and carry out those plans. Who gets to decide what plans and how to carry them out? Some will probably be thinking: “we will.” The technocrats have already gained too much ground, in establishing the means by which we live our lives today — our lives which are controlled by them and their overlords. Didn’t Rudolf Steiner warn about the Ahrimanic forces working through technology? Kosmos likes to raise the name of Steiner readily enough for its wown purposes, it seems, without engaging the shadow that keeps lengthening in the room as the sun sets.
The “vision” offered in this short film is typically utopian in its carrot-dangling promise of the “good” to come, which the disembodied voice says should be allowed through a “grieving process” — as the few who know better will take the helm… is that it? The technocrats, directed by the progressives, who have always had the greatest investment in control, and were touting eugenics 100 years ago. Only those who agree and offer their sheepish, good-natured complicity will be allowed to remain among the survivors in time, as worthy fellow travelers in this grand human project…. yes?
In the end, each of us is alone — that is our only hope for true freedom — and not within a collective unity which is oppressive. One has to finally approach the meaning that will become clear when a properly real grieving is carried out for the loss of community itself, which will always enslave and compromise rather than liberate and affirm. After all, enlightenment is a bitch, isn’t it? Yet mass enlightenment, all at once, is impossible. Many think there is no “evil” that cannot be reformed, but instead the good hidden within should be embraced and brought out. But let’s shift the quotation marks: evil has always been real, and easily, deceptively working through “goodness” is one of its greatest achievements.
Richard Grossinger, raising one sagely eyebrow, said that the evolution of the universe itself could not escape the appearance of the worst monsters — the serial killers, rapists, child molesters, holocaust psychopaths — as part of the process. But are those really the “worst,” rather than all the rest among us who naturally do not come to mind? And, even more important or necessary than grieving: who will babysit the monsters?