Category: Uncategorized

Category: Uncategorized

A waking dream

On cutting free what was never yours to carry

I had a sort of waking dream today. It was a most amazing experience.

I had been reading the news and, as is pretty common these days, felt a panic attack coming on. I used a technique I’ve learned to focus on the physical sensations in the body with simple curiosity as a way to short-circuit the catastrophizing mental narratives that fuel the panic.

I was feeling a tightness in my chess, so I turned my attention there and was instantly overwhelmed by grief. I was swallowed up by a sadness older and bigger than me.

From the Intergenerational Trauma Animation by the Healing Foundation.

Recently a counselor coached me on how to talk to the emotion and let it know that I’m interested in learning from it, but ask that it not overwhelm me. I did so and after a few moments, the intensity of the grief subsided, and I was left with a dull, leaden feeling right in the center of my chest. It was grey and cold and heavy.

It took the form of a rectangular block of metal — about the size of a brick. I knew it wasn’t part of me; it didn’t belong there. I imagined pulling it out of my chest. As it emerged, the weight of it pulled me over. It hung out of my chest, still attached to my flesh. It held me down. I couldn’t move.

I began to panic as I realized that there was no break between the metal and my flesh. It was all metal at one end and all flesh at the other; in between, it morphed seamlessly between the two. I was like some perverse Stretch Armstrong melded to an ingot. The weight of it stretched and seared my flesh.

I knew I had to get rid of it. Suddenly, it became clear that I was going to have to slice through my flesh to detach this burden. And I was going to have to do it myself.

At this point, the experience divided. I knew what I had to do, but the thought of it terrified me. So, I started by just imagining what might be. Could I see myself free of the burden? What would that even look like?

I held the image in my mind — separate from where I was standing… sort of next to myself. The image flickered between the relief of getting rid of the burden and the fear of what it would take to get there. Eventually, I made peace with the idea of making the cut. Maybe peace is too strong a term; maybe resigned would be better. When I was ready and could hold the idea of the cut “out there,” I sort of pulled the image into myself, trying it on for size.

The shock nearly knocked me off my feet. The cut was real, only not physical. It made me gasp. I worked to ground myself in the room — taking a deep breath and then focusing on a physical sensation — the sound of the birds, the light off the wood, the warmth of my dog’s fur.

In this way, I would take small breaks between attempts to step into the work I needed to do. It happened in fits and starts, jumping around in time. Each pause to catch my breath caused me to jump back a bit; to relive the process again and again until I could manage it without being overwhelmed. It was like watching a slow motion replay, then rewinding to see it again, then jumping forward again to catch up.

I imagined the first cut — randomly picking a spot half-way between the metal and the flesh. After a few attempts and a chance to catch my breath, I could feel that the weight had been removed. I felt sore where the cut was, but also lighter.

Soon, though, the half-metal / half-flesh part that I had left for fear of cutting away too much of “me” scabbed over, but the scab quickly began growing into a new layer of metal. I realized that the metal part was pathological. It could not co-exist with my flesh; it would always try to dominate.

I knew that I was going to have to keep cutting. I would have to give up a little of my own healthy flesh to finally get rid of the cancerous hunk of metal. By now, though, having done the first cut, the work wasn’t scary. Still painful, but easily managed. Slowly I shaved away the part that felt dark and heavy, the part that was never really alive anyway. I knew in my bones it was ok because flesh naturally heals. What was most important was to remove the toxin.

Eventually, I stood free of the burden.

A perfect red rectangle just shy of the width of my hand ran the length of my breastbone, marking the place where the cold metal had been. I knew that my only job was to keep this wound clean and treat it gently. I couldn’t cover it up, conceal it, or dress it up in any way. It would heal of its own accord, but for now I must simply learn to live with this tender, vulnerable spot.

Even so, stroking the spot gently reassures me: healing will happen.

The meaning of the dream is clear. The weight I carry is at least 500 years old, maybe as old as 10,000 years. My ancestors and yours added to it over the generations, bit by bit, and I inherited it at my birth. I know I will never be free until I remove all traces of it and allow my heart to heal and grow its strength again.

Each step is important. You can’t remove it until you pull it out, and you can’t pull it out until you know it’s in there and you won’t know it’s there until you let yourself feel the heaviness that lives where your heart should be.

The cut will likely bleed a while. As the blinders of the last 500 or 10,000 years fall away, first comes confusion. How did we not see the trauma all around us? How did we not see our neighbours struggling? How did we let it get so bad? How did we not see this coming? Then comes shame, because, of course, we did see. We just told ourselves stories to make it seem alright. We clucked our tongues and looked concerned, but no more. We had the best of intentions, but were “too busy” to do anything about them.

In my vision, it became clear to me that I have to give more of myself. To get rid of the burden of those generations, I had to give a pound of my flesh. I must atone for my sins and the sins of my ancestors — for what I did and for what I failed to do.

True atonement is not punishment borne of guilt; it is a heartfelt desire to heal all wounds because it is the only way we will be healed ourselves. The word “sin” derives from an archery term that simply meant “missing the mark.” We have the best intentions. We don’t intend to harm or abuse. But too often, we miss the mark. Despite our intentions, our actions cause harm to others. So, like a good archer, we recognize when we have missed the mark, we learn from the mistake, and we strive to improve our aim as we try again.

But what are we aiming at? The Golden Rule is considered the most universally accepted ethical principle, and a good place to start.

What would it mean to treat other living creatures the way you would want to be treated? What does it mean, knowing how raw and sensitive my own wounds are and how very vulnerable I am? I long to be treated kindly, gently, to be nurtured and given the space to heal.

In our modern world, this simple question has radical implications.

At a bare minimum, it requires those of us using more than our fair share of resources to call it what it is and stop stealing from the rest of the world. We need to stop forcing other people to do our dirty work and clean our own houses. We need to learn humility and earn our rightful place in Gaia’s garden as the small, hairless apes we are. Not apart, just a part.

Yanone arrowhead, Edo Period, early 17th century

Intention is never enough. Atonement doesn’t happen through words; it requires action — it requires a pound of flesh. But take heart because Life is truly miraculous. It is the nature of living things not only to heal but to grow stronger, wiser, and more resilient when nourished and cared for. All that you give joyfully is returned to you tenfold.

I see now what my ancestors saw. I understand now the words they wrote down to help me avoid their sin: what goes around comes around; love your enemy; we are one; what I give matters more than what I get. My freedom depends on the service I provide. My health and happiness depends on the care I give.

I wear the mark on me now — the raw redness where my healing heart reminds me to be gentle. It feels like a sacred gift and a calling. I’ve had my conversion moment. I am converted to the oldest religion — the original spark that gave birth to all the great wisdom traditions. If it could be written, the canon would hardly fill a single page. But Life speaks in a language that can’t be written or spoken though it can still be heard by every one who stills themselves long enough to listen.

Ben KadelLeave a Comment on A waking dreamUncategorized

Lifeboats — the Backstory

I have made it my personal mission to launch a Fleet of 100 Lifeboats in response to the multiple global crises we now face. Recently, a friend asked where this idea came from.

As I was talking through a possible response with one of my collaborators, we realized it’s a challenging story to tell because it involves loops in space-time — the current idea is the result of a previous one that evolved from the one before that, etc. — so how many versions do you need to go back to get the full backstory? Somehow, no matter where you start it feels like you’re already jumping into the middle of the story.

So maybe we should start at the end and work backwards. Ultimately, through all these different iterations, we’ve become convinced that the multiple crises we face are the result of applying mechanistic / analytical thinking to a relational world. The problems are very deep, indeed, in the form of foundational beliefs.

How do you describe water to fish?

We noticed that despite the work of so many well-intentioned, motivated, and energized people, our social and environmental ecologies were and are falling apart; all the indicators are moving in the wrong direction. So, we started to ask ourselves why is that? What’s really going on here? Soon, it became clear, as Einstein said, “you can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created.” We keep looking for superficial solutions to systemic problems, attempting to use the logic of the current system to heal the problems that very system has created.

So the real solutions require moving people from mechanistic/disconnected to integrated/relational ways of thinking and acting. But how do you invite people into a process that can’t be explained until after you’ve engaged it long enough to develop a new language to explain what you just experienced?

How do you tell the story of a solution that is simple yet complex, that has developed organically, iteratively, collaboratively, from the ground up, synthesizing and juxtaposing interdependent and often dynamically tensioned elements to an audience brought up on mechanistic, reductionist and radically individualistic thinking?

I haven’t the faintest idea. Not coherently. Not concisely.

But not knowing how to do something never stopped me from trying before.

Actually, I suppose that’s the main point. None of us know what we are doing! We face a challenge like none we’ve faced before — a challenge created by our taken-for-granted habits of thought and action. Therefore, relying on our taken-for-granted assumptions and reactions will likely make things worse, rather than better. That’s what’s been happening so far. Lots of folks with the best of intentions have been making things worse rather than better because our reductionist and disconnected ways of thinking keep leading us to make the same mistakes over and over then ignore the obvious consequences of our actions.

The situation forces us to face a basic epistemological question: How do we know if what we think we know is actually true? How do we know what’s really real?

My favourite answer comes from the American Pragmatists: something is true if it works. Of course, that leads us to ask “what does it mean for something to work?” William James uses the metaphor of an archer honing their skill as a model. The goal is straight forward — hit the center of the target with an arrow. The archer “knows” archery to the degree that they can hit the target reliably.

The Reflex Arc

James describes the learning process as a “reflex arc” — a process through which:

  1. we select the target,
  2. imagine the actions necessary to achieve success,
  3. take those actions in the real world, then
  4. reflect on the difference between expectations and experiences, and
  5. refine the actions we see as necessary to achieve success.

In this way, we learn and improve subsequent actions; things work better.

The archer moves from absolute beginner who is happy to simply hit the target through to a skilled archer who can begin to account for additional factors such as wind direction or variations in equipment to improve their accuracy by constantly using recent real-world feedback to refine mental models.

While it’s a useful metaphor, most actions in the world don’t have as clear a goal as archery, so we have to go further and apply the model to itself. This was Dewey’s contribution. We make “learning” the skill we aim to develop. We use the system to develop better tools for defining goals, imagining complicated actions and measuring results to allow us to refine our efforts around complex goals. In other words, we learn how to learn. This leads to a sort of meta-process at the core of the Lifeboat Project, an idea taken from Sociocracy 3.0 (S3.0) — treat all decisions as a series of experiments designed to maximize learning.

The basics of treating actions as experiments are simple. We short-hand it as “aim-act-reflect-repeat.” It’s an endless, self-motivating feedback loop in which each step in the cycle references the one before it and suggests the next. So, for example, as we take aim (again), we reference the lessons learned in reflecting on previous actions to clarify the aim itself, which suggests new actions necessary to achieve that aim, which inspires a natural curiosity to take those actions to see what happens.

This is actually easier to do in practice than it is to describe in theory. The reflection process is simply a matter of comparing what we expected would happen with what actually happened in order to refine our expectations and actions moving forward. In other words, the major learning comes from responding to what doesn’t work more than what does (though there’s still valuable information in what works consistently). It’s the gap between expectations and experiences that presents the best areas for learning. In S3.0, we define the gap between expectation and experience — between how things are and how they could / should be — as a “tension.” The gap that causes the tension draws our attention to the richest potential learning.

In the case of the Lifeboat Project, the core persistent tension is the gap between known, validated, patently obvious information about the urgency, severity, and risk of the climate crisis and the complete and utter lack of meaningful action on the part of the social institutions that are purportedly responsible for ensuring our well-being — government, “the market,” media, etc. Our expectation is that these social institutions are there for our protection, but the empirical reality is that the decision-making class are doing everything in their power to prevent solutions from happening while simultaneously working actively to make things worse (for us).

How do we shift our expectations, then, to come closer to match our experience and what are the implications when we do?

Social Transformation

All societies are, in effect, a sort of mass delusion. Society is a set of stories about “how the world works” that often allow amazing things to happen. But sometimes these delusions just don’t work — or rather, they work really well at some things, but cause more problems than they solve overall. They get weighed down by a debt of bad decisions. Healthy societies are malleable and adaptive. They contain feedback loops that allow their stories to transform as their environment shifts. They know the map is not the territory, recognize the negative consequences of choices and adapt accordingly.

Unfortunately, it seems that most (probably all) societies reach a point where they lose their adaptability. They become old, brittle, and fragile. When that happens, the society must re-invent itself to survive, but before that can happen, it must first fall apart.

Of course, societies ultimately exist inside the head — the belief system — of the members of that society. So when societies transform, it only occurs through a fractal process of individual transformation, which feels very much like an existential crisis — because that’s exactly what it is.

So, that’s where the “Lifeboat” idea comes from: a recognition that we need transformation at the person/place/community level. Transforming the world and our communities from an extractive, top-down, capitalist framework to one that is relational, reciprocal and materially-focused starts with our individual transformations, actions and relationship-building in the face of climate crisis and social breakdown. It starts with the individual choice to do things differently, and the more of us there are who make those choices together, the greater impact we have.

How do we re-focus our efforts to care for our spirits by growing deep happiness and resilient mental health; our place — the physical/material health of our local environment; and our hearts through meaningful relationships? We realized that none of these things were possible by trying to do it alone, therefore the health of our relationships and the community are crucial. The Lifeboat Project is all about finding ways to make it easier for people to reach out and connect with the people who are already in their world, to start talking about what’s really real. What really matters, when it comes right down to it?

Because we are coming right down to it.

Ben KadelLeave a Comment on Lifeboats — the BackstoryUncategorized

So be it resolved…

From the edge of 2017

Rarely has a year been as hated as 2016. The poor thing; so unfairly accused. After all, all 2016 did was provide 365 days. It was up to us to fill them. Each day, we had a choice: to be resolved, to live our convictions or to let it slide.

Maybe our parents failed us. Maybe their parents failed them. Somewhere along the way, we, as a society, lost sight of concepts like “moral character” and “fortitude.” We replaced critical thinking with wishful thinking; self-interest rightly understood with selfishness, pure and simple. We forgot that discipline is the difference between what you want now and what you want most.

And so for years, we acted or didn’t act, day in and day out, and one thing led to another and things unfolded and continued to unfold in a seamless flow until suddenly we are shocked. We look around and don’t like what we see. We feel betrayed somehow and who better to blame than 2016, the bastard! Like they say, no single snowflake thinks it’s responsible for the avalanche. But really, 2016 was just one sunrise after another.

Now, everyone clamours for the death of 2016 like some sacrificial lamb — as though history has no momentum; as though actions have no consequences. We use the same magical thinking behind New Year’s resolutions, fantasies that confuse wanting something, with making something happen; if only I believe!

At the root, we fail to grasp the difference between belief and conviction. The root of belief is “to hold dear or love.” When we believe things, we love them — or the idea of them — so much that we can’t bear to think they might not be real. Conviction is different; as much a sentence as a supposition. The root of conviction is actually “with victory” and describes being overcome by an argument, overcome by reality. We usually fight a conviction before we become it.

We stack up beliefs like bricks to build up a wall between the world and how the world is supposed to be — and then live in the fantasy land of belief. We develop hard brittle shells of belief as a defense against a reality we fear we are too weak to survive.

Ironically, the origin of “resolution” is actually the same as “dissolution” — it meant to break things down. There’s a powerful message hidden in the transition from a resolution as dissolving to a resolution as holding firm: to find our firm core we must allow all the false beliefs to fall away. Successful resolution isn’t about “willpower,” it’s about uncovering the antifragile convictions that grow stronger as they are tested in the world by melting away the false beliefs; dissolving the brittle shell of defenses we’ve developed.

So, as we move into 2017, as you prepare for 365 new days, I encourage you to go old-school — resolve to let go of things that don’t matter so that you can uncover the things that really do. Don’t tack on new beliefs and new shoulds. Commit instead to focusing every day on what is real and what really matters.

Here are five daily practices that will help:

1) Start each day by reminding yourself what is really real and important to you. Write a letter to a young person you love or to yourself as a young person telling them all the secrets you’ve learned so far — what leads to happiness and what leads to suffering. What are the lies you seem to fall for and what are the truths that set you free? What are the questions that still baffle you — and what are your hunches. Re-write this letter every morning.

2) After you’ve reminded yourself what is really important, use Annie Dillard’s advice (“After all, how we live our days is, of course, how we live our lives.”) and ask yourself how you want to use this day right here right now to live the kind of life you want to live (Really, this day — the one with too many tasks and an inconvenient meeting and all of the other nonsense that is the constant background noise and always ALWAYS will be.)

3) See any upset — feelings of frustration, anger, sadness, hopelessness — as a sign that you’ve bumped up against that hard, brittle shell of ego defenses, all those false beliefs about who you’re supposed to be or how the world is supposed to be. The upset is a chance to melt those defenses to allow the real you to come out of the shell and experience life more fully. Let it be a call to live out the values that mean the most to you — to be courageous, compassionate, loving and kind.

4) Do at least one compassionate thing every day. It could be something for yourself or for someone else. It doesn’t matter — the world needs more of it in any form possible. And it doesn’t have to take long. Simple things repeated every day are more powerful than you imagine.

5) Find your flock. Testify. Tell the world whether they want to hear or not about what makes your heart sing and what makes your heart break. Confess your perceived failures and the things that make you feel strong. But know that you are only doing this for yourself — to speak a truth that might only be true for you, but to speak it just the same. Once this happens, as Martin Buber says, we connect “I and Thou” and everything is transformed.

I know none of this sounds like world-saving stuff, but I actually think it’s the only stuff that actually has a hope in hell of saving us from the current insanity of the world.

If you are interested in being part of a different kind of social network, designed to help us each have maximum positive impact, we are accepting online applications for people who want to be a part of a pilot project. You can learn more about the network here.

Ben KadelLeave a Comment on So be it resolved…Uncategorized

Live the experiment

Daily Reflection 2025-05-21
Caterpillar of the Paper Kite Butterfly (Idea leuconoe).

I want to coin a new term: larva brain.

We talk about our reptile brains; this is like that but different.

The larva brain is a sort of layer over top of the organic brain. These larva are parasitic, feeding off the electricity of a brain that’s freaking out. It’s the larva brain that impairs our ability to see the present moment clearly by distorting our perception of reality through a fear lens. It’s the larva brain that stands between us and being present.

It makes me think of the Caterpillar and the Butterfly. There is an inner struggle in the metamorphosis from larva to caterpillar. We see the larva as only being a stage on the way to becoming a butterfly. We assume that the outcome defines the purpose of what comes before it. Surely, the larva must know that one day it will emerge as a beautiful butterfly and celebrate it’s joyous rebirth!

But to the larva, this is a fight to the death. It actually tries to fight off the imaginal cells of the butterfly. The larva has no intention of becoming a butterfly. The butterfly is the enemy.

We can read that onto our current period of world-historical evolution. Right now, the folks identified with the larva of what is fading away are waging all out war against any hint of a butterfly. “Butterflies are ugly!” they shriek! “Butterflies are destroying the larval way of life!” “Butterflies are the enemy within!”

So, imagine that wetiko mind = larva mind. Imagine wetiko was a necessary pre-condition for what comes next.

Because the primary lesson of the Caterpillar and the Butterfly is that the larva is doomed, no matter what. It is the nature of the larva to attack the imaginal cells of the butterfly. And it is also in its nature to dissolve into a goo that eventually nourishes the development of the butterfly.

So, if you are aligned with the butterfly – with what comes next as part of the natural evolution of all systems – then there is no need to fear the last gasps of the larva. This is mostly a defensive game. This is why imaginal cells develop something like a cyst – solid but also smooth, giving nothing for the autoimmune system of the larva to attach to.

This image depicts the emergence of a Julia butterfly (Dryas iulia) from its chrysalis

The goal is to develop these safe havens and to pull as many butterfly-aligned folks out of harms way and into the protection of spaces where full humans can show up; where the main project is reclaiming our humanity. These are spaces that know that it will take awhile for folks processing the trauma of generations to relax into the process of healing; to lean into the experience and let it wash over and thru you. The impulse to run is strong.

Gandhi said “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” We are at the stage where they start to fight us.

They are on a full frontal assault against “woke” (i.e. enlightenment, wisdom, understanding) and “dei” (the radical idea that there is more than just vanilla in the world, that equity is an important value, and that we are all stronger when the best of each of us is welcome and included in the community). They even have the gall to propose that empathy – the core value of all the great world religions and philosophies – is the the problem.

This is the truth that will shield us all from whatever evil (harm) comes our way: we are all in this together. “We are part of an interconnected web of being” isn’t just a bumper sticker – it’s a scientific and spiritual truth. No contradiction. No false dichotomy.

No unnecessary delusion.

And what goes around comes around. Wetiko always kills itself. The larva always turns to goo. As Toynbee said, “civilizations die from suicide, not murder.”

Where the societal becomes personal is in the larva brain; that invasive layer between your organic brain and the world it evolved to explore.

It brings to mind a super-creepy image of wetiko larva squirming around in the folds around ridges in my organic brain, provoking my fears and overwhelm then feeding on my distress. That’s where all those whispered shoulds come from. The “but what if you’re wrong” and “it’s probably because of something bad you did.”

So, how do I learn to wait patiently? How do I learn at the bone level that the larva is simply turning into goo – delicious, nutritious goo! That is the nature of larva. How do I reminder myself again and again as many times as it takes that I am part of the butterfly. How do I learn to listen to all that larval chatter with a sort of “ah, honey… you poor thing” attitude? And to not buy into the crazy fear story that it keeps trying to sell me, each and every time it tries to sell me out again.

The good news is the poor thing is punch drunk. Look at it spinning around like that! It doesn’t have much longer now.

Can this be my cautionary tale, my perpetual reminder to learn easy rather than learn hard? From my lips to god (or whoever’s) ears.

File:Idea leuconoe (Paper Kite) in the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

https://emotus.substack.com/p/daily-reflection-2025-05-21

Ben KadelFarmastery & Community, Uncategorized

What does it mean to belong?

Belonging isn’t the same as ownership – but it’s not the opposite, either

Cave wall with outlines of hands overlapping.
Hands at the Cuevas de las Manos upon Río Pinturas, near the town of Perito Moreno in Santa Cruz Province, Argentina. Picture taken by Marianocecowski, 2005, Wikimedia Commons

Lately I’ve been sitting with a tension that keeps resurfacing in our conversations about land, care, and the future.

It shows up whenever we talk about taking land “off the market.”

I understand the impulse. I share it. The market has proven itself to be a poor steward. Left to its own logic, it treats land as something to be flipped rather than tended, extracted rather than known.

And yet, I’m no longer convinced that removing land from the market automatically returns it to right relationship.

In some cases, it simply moves the problem to a kinder landlord.

There’s a story we like to tell ourselves — that if no one owns the land, everyone will care for it. That collective responsibility will naturally give rise to good stewardship.

But as the saying goes, when everyone is responsible, no one is. When responsibility is spread thin, two things happen. Some people step back, trusting “the collective” will hold things together. Others step forward, offering real care — but are asked to do so without expectation of return, in service to that same abstract “collective.”

Some do the work of the collective. Others reap the benefit. They aren’t always the same people.

As a result, care doesn’t recirculate. It’s offered — often generously, lovingly — but then absorbed into some nameless collective, never finding its way back to the caretakers in the form of security, continuity, or future capacity.

When the people doing the long, slow work of tending land are structurally unable to carry forward the value they’ve created — ecological, relational, cultural, material, and financial — separated, as it were, from the fruits of their labour, they become temporary occupants of something they can never fully belong to.

No matter how sacred the language, that’s still tenancy.

And tenancy, over long enough timelines, undermines rootedness. The body learns a dangerous lesson: I don’t belong here.

Over time, when long-term care is given but not returned, the system — often unintentionally — quietly eats its caregivers.

That doesn’t mean private ownership is the answer. Ownership, too, has been wounded — confused with exclusion, hoarding, and speculation. But I’m beginning to think the real question isn’t ownership versus “taking it off the market.”

It’s whether our structures allow care to accumulate over time as a legacy and reward for doing the hard work of caretaking.

In healthy land-based cultures, stewardship and livelihood were inseparable. The land fed the people, and the people’s care fed the land. Good stewardship was rewarded — not extravagantly, but enduringly. Poor stewardship carried consequences too — not as punishment, but as feedback.

That pairing mattered. It made care rational, not heroic. It allowed people to become rooted — not because they were idealistic, but because the system returned their care in tangible ways across time.

Today, we’re often trying to build ethical futures by denying the role of economics altogether, as if money itself were the contamination. But economics, at its root, was never about extraction. It was about proper care of the oikos — the wise tending of a shared home. What corrupted it wasn’t ownership, but disconnection. Disconnecting caretakers from ownership, then, only aggravates the problem.

So I find myself wondering:

Can we truly belong to the land if the land can never, in any meaningful way, belong to us?

Not as a thing to dominate or exclude others from — but as something we are allowed to carry responsibility for, and be carried by, in return. As something that can hold the memory of our care and return it, in its own time, as continuity, dignity, or care when we can no longer give as we once did.

What kinds of arrangements allow people to earn a stake through stewardship — a form of stewardship equity — where responsibility, risk, and reward remain bound together, and where care is not only given, but received?

I don’t have clean answers yet. But I’m increasingly certain that if our systems require people to give their care without ever allowing that care to return — as rootedness, legacy, or future possibility — we shouldn’t be surprised when exhaustion sets in, or when the land quietly begins to suffer alongside them.

Belonging, it turns out, is not the opposite of ownership.

It may be what ownership was meant to protect.

Ben KadelUncategorized

Building the Lifeboat Is the Lifeboat

The pan-dimensional Möbius process

As the reality of the polycrisis is dawning on more and more people, we keep hearing the same questions: What can I do? Where do I start? How can I get ready for something when I don’t even know what’s gonna happen?

Next week, we’ll be hosting our next DIY Lifeboat webinar to answer these questions. The webinar provides a simple 5-step process that anyone, anywhere can use to grow their own local resilience network in the face of whatever might be coming down the pike, starting right where you are now. It introduces you to a toolkit of techniques and processes that can help jumpstart your local resilience building effort and offers a number of supports to keep you on track.

But there is a core concept underlying all the pieces and parts that is beguilingly simple, but absolutely essential. Without understanding the core concept, the tools are ineffective. Understand the core concept and the tools become mostly incidental.

Building a lifeboat is not about an end product nor is it merely an attitude. Building a lifeboat is a practice. Building the lifeboat is the lifeboat.

But simple is not the same as easy. Simple requires discipline and determination. Like Octavia Butler says, it requires persistence in practice.

But how do you explain that to people who are still trapped in late-stage capitalism consumer culture? Who are looking for the quick-fix / silver bullet / recipe? How do you get Cartesians to understand systems? How do you get “noun-focused” folks to think in verbs?

I’ve always been fascinated by Möbius strips — the three-dimensional one-sided object. Maybe this physical trickster can serve as a helpful metaphor.

Uploaded a work by David Benbennick from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M%C3%B6bius_strip.jpg with UploadWizard

The Möbius strip is a one-sided object made by taking a linear strip, giving it a twist and connecting one end to the other. Technically, it’s called a “non-orientable surface.” It has only one side and one edge in 3D space. But how? It seems impossible! You can test the one-sidedness by putting your pen at any point on the strip and moving it continuously forward until eventually it meets itself having covered “both sides” of the original strip without ever having flipped sides. Our process is similar: a continuous feedback loop with a twist — and the twist changes everything.

The Möbius strip has no beginning, middle or end. People are tempted to say that the strip “starts” or “ends” where you taped them together, but that’s only an illusion. All points are equidistant from all other points. Our process is also like that. You are always simultaneously ending something and beginning at the same time. And because there is no beginning or end, it also means that you’re never behind.

Another quality of “non-orientable surfaces” is that you can’t tell clockwise from counter-clockwise. From one perspective, it looks like you’re moving around the strip clockwise, but from another perspective and at the very same time you’re moving counter-clockwise. Time once again becomes “timey-whimey.” Our process is also like that. Ancestors are just as close as neighbours.

The simple five step process is:

  1. Assess your current assets
  2. Build a model of what you want to create
  3. Based on #1 and #2 brainstorm and prioritize high ROE* actions
  4. Take the next step = the highest priority action(s)
  5. Reflect on progress, repeat > update #1 & #2 based on results and continue

* (Return on Effort)

Because we close the feedback loop, what looks like a 5-step process is actually a three-step one (sorta). We short-hand this as:

“aim-act-reflect.”

It’s a continuous, self-perpetuating process where each step naturally leads to the next. Reflection naturally leads to thoughts of how it could be better. Having a vision of what might work better naturally leads to a motivation to try it out. And taking even a few steps prompts curiosity about where we are now; are we on the right path or not? Reflection leads to aiming; aiming leads to action; action leads to reflection.

As such, the noun of each step starts to behave more verb-like. We start to think of reflection not as a discrete activity with a beginning and end, but as a process of becoming: “reflection moving towards aiming.”

Reflection is the twist that creates the “one-sided” quality of the Möbius process. Reflection involves looking back to look forward. We use experience to shape our vision, and our vision to shape our action (which in turn shapes our experience). Each step in the process draws from the one before it and shapes the one following it.

Three questions no matter what:

  • (Given what we’ve done) Where are we right now?
  • (Given where we are) Which way do we want to be going?
  • (Given where we want to go) What’s the best next step?

The twist creates a shape-shifting quality that works across multiple dimensions at once. It shifts us from action to planning and back again, while also seamlessly shifting us from “inner” to “outer” work, from “individual” to “group,” from “practical” to “visionary,” from “micro” to “macro,” from “short-term” to “long-term,” all at the same time.

And that same shape-shifting quality makes the process infinitely scalable. You can apply it to life goals, your 5-year project plan or your daily schedule. Because of it’s dimension shifting quality, it automatically scales to the focal length you need for where you are right now.

If the next step seems too big, use Russian Doll planning to break down the big scary steps into bite-size chunks of work till you know what to do today and this week.

The process uses a few simple, interconnected feedback loops to generate graceful responses to complex challenges. No matter where you are or where you want to go, the next step is always right in front of you. Even if you took the wrong step or feel lost. Even if that didn’t go according to plan. It directs our attention where it needs to be to move through an uncertain 3D landscape.

In reality, the process is only helping us make the most of our limited attention / awareness as humans. Our brains simply can’t grok it all at once. It’s like we’re all in a dark room with a flash light. You might shine the light on the couch in front of you for a while before panning over to the desk to figure out the best course, before coming back to double check what is right in front of you before taking the next step.

The process works in a similar way, guiding your focus where it needs to, using our limited attention intelligently to maximize the useable information available. As such, it also taps into the collective ability and capacity of the group. Using the process together allows us to use our flashlights collaboratively to make our individual work more efficient and effective.

So, the process is simple — three linked questions; three simple steps: aim, act, reflect. Repeat as necessary. But simple isn’t the same as easy. Our Wetiko Habitus and out working habits throw up resistance to each of the steps.

For example, our Wetiko Habitus creates an almost irresistible urge to race past the discomfort of reflection. The ingrained binary of modernity prompts us to either damn reality or damn our dreams. Either reality is “wrong” because it doesn’t match my ideas of how it could be or there is something “wrong” with me for wanting things to be better.

Honest reflection requires pausing in the discomfort and dynamic tension of having to accept both / and, that both are valid. Expectation and Experience form a sort of cosmic Venn diagram, with wisdom (and resilience) lying in the overlapping area, unrealistic expectation at one extreme and delusion / denial of reality at the other.

So, reflection moving towards aiming involves what we are calling the Serenity Practice —

  • acknowledging what we cannot change and must learn to accept,
  • identifying the areas where courage and action are needed to make important changes, and
  • taking the time to honestly differentiate one from the other.

Simple, but not easy. The desire for certainty and “getting it right” kills the equanimity, curiosity and creativity necessary for reflection. Either/or thinking gets us stuck, blocking honest reflection; both/and thinking sets us free.

Similarly, aiming moving towards action is often blocked by desires for perfection. We are so impatient for the promised land, we think we have to get there in one step. People get stuck dreaming of the perfect plan or waiting around until they have the perfect circumstances or supports. Perfectionism gets us stuck in never good enough; “good enough for now” sets us free.

And lastly, action moving towards reflection is often blocked by a lack of follow-through. That’s where courage is required. We fundamentally misunderstand courage. Our modern conception assumes it’s an individual quality. Somehow, you are supposed to find some hidden stash of it in our guts somewhere and it magically makes the fear go away.

But the root of the word is “coeur” — French for “heart.” Originally, it was understood that you could only be brave and take action in the face of fear on behalf of the beloved, never for yourself. Love is stronger than fear, if you let it be. But love is also intimately connected with grief. We cannot love without experiencing loss and grief. You can’t have one without the other. So, you must be willing to experience the vulnerability of love to find the courage for action. Burying the tender heart behind defensive barricades blocks access to connection. Our defensiveness gets us stuck; connection and vulnerability are the keys to the courage that sets us free.

So, the process is simple, powerful, scalable, and effective. You can apply it anywhere at any time with any group and any goal. Aim-Act-Reflect. Where are we now? Where do we want to be? What’s the best way to get there from here? What’s the best next step? The only thing standing in the way are the old, conditioned responses of the Wetiko Habitus and the wei-wuwei sangha is the fastest way to develop your ability to practice. So, building the lifeboat is really about finding your wei-wuwei sangha, and the sangha is already here.

Building your lifeboat is the lifeboat.

Ben KadelCollapse & Resilience, Philosophy & Practice, Systems & Alternatives, Uncategorized

To the lifeboats

Our current problems run deep. Our leaders, institutions, and basic assumptions about how the world is supposed to work are all failing us. The problem is so huge that our brains can’t grok what’s going on. The complexity. The scale. And the constant noise! Who can make sense of it all?

So, let’s talk in parables. Our brains are shit at understanding complicated things but brilliant at understanding metaphors.

Imagine we have booked a cruise on the SS Normalcy. Well, actually, our parents booked it for us. They bought it for us as a present. They thought we’d like it and we ended up going along with it because we didn’t want to be rude and make a fuss. They meant well, after all.

The SS Normalcy is an enormous cruise ship. It’s what’s know as an “Ideology” class ship — ships that are big because bigger is better. The competition to be the biggest has gone on for years, pushing the envelop on naval engineering. No one even understands how they’ve managed to do what they’ve done. To be honest, the things are so big it’s hard to see how they even float, but somehow they do it. Of course, for safety reasons, the “Ideology” ships can only sail in extremely calm waters. Even as they’ve been getting bigger and bigger, they’ve been sailing to fewer and fewer ports of call. And only in good weather.

The SS Normalcy is the biggest, most luxurious ship ever built in its class. Of course, a lot of the “luxury” is only veneer. The gold isn’t real. The mirrors create a false impression of abundance. And the buffet is more about quantity than quality. But it looks impressive on screen. When you actually experience it, it leaves you feeling a little nauseated and disoriented. But, still, it’s very impressive.

And to pay for all the glitz, the company skimped on structure. After all, passengers aren’t going to examine the rivets to make sure they are tight enough. How could they even know? Sure, the engineers warned management that the boat would leak, but what do engineers know anyhow?

On the early runs, the company discovered that, OK, there’s a bit of leakage, but upper management figured out that it was cheaper to install a bigger bilge pump than replace the rivets. At this point, upper management consisted of a former Soviet state agency that had been privatized and “sold” to some Russian oligarchs who had figured out a long time ago that you don’t get rich by providing good service; you get rich by controlling the rules of the game.

So, that’s what they did…. They installed bigger pumps. But then the vibration from the new pumps started to stress the rivets more and that caused more leaking than the pumps could handle.

So they installed bigger pumps.

This put even more pressure on the joints and the leaks grew, but by that time, they had poured so much effort into pumps that they didn’t want to lose all that investment. Pumps saved us before, they’ll save us again! The only thing that mattered were bigger pumps. Bigger pumps are the only option!

Soon, they were at the upper limit of pump technology, but by diverting all the money they would have spent on any other routine maintenance they were 90% confident that they could invent an even bigger pump that might be able to keep up with current leaks.

Flushed with new “pump” money, their PR departments figured out a brilliant stunt and made pumps the latest fad. They provided huge scholarships to kids willing to go for degrees in pump engineering and they paid for professorships and buildings and research centers dedicated to the advancement of pump technology. Much ado was made about the announcement of the next generation of pumps, with artists’ renderings of how beautiful the new pumps would be and how everything would be hunky-dory then. Soon. 10 years, tops.

It was the hottest topic. There was even a reality TV show about it.

Anyway, we didn’t know any of that when we got on board. We just thought we would try to enjoy this gift from our parents as best we could. After all, it would be nice to vegetate for a while. Do nothing. Just eat, drink, and be merry. Work was for chumps!

Things seemed fine for a while, even though the “fun” seemed a little forced and the endless food, booze and sun we’re leaving everyone feeling a bit worse for wear. Just a little while ago, though, we heard a lot of noise and felt a shudder. All the passengers looked around at each other, but no one wanted to make a fool of themselves or look panicky, so we waited. For something. An official announcement. Maybe a siren.

Something.

But there’s been only official silence. The staff have been running around with pasted on smiles, looking decidedly uncomfortable, and sticking mainly to small talk or the dinner specials. If you ask them if everything is OK, they give an enthusiastic “yes” but if you ask for any details, they get flustered, mumble something about needing to check on things in the kitchen, then rush off.

So, here we sit at the strangest dinner theater we’ve ever experienced; sat at tables with a bunch of strangers all wondering what the hell is going on. There has been a parade of strange incidents. Just for a second, there was the smell of smoke. At another point, there was a rumbling from below decks. And most upsetting of all, one time the captain ran into the dining hall and shouted at the top of his lungs “everything is completely fine. Absolutely nothing is wrong!” And then ran out again.

But before you could make sense of what had happened or start to talk to your neighbors about it, it was time for another show. Every 15 minutes, it seemed! Half-naked dancers or a hypnotist that embarrassed people in the audience or a lip-sync competition with laser light show. Loud. Garish. Tasteless, yet hard to ignore.

Just now, though, you can feel things listing. Things aren’t level anymore.

I closed the bar the other day, so it was just me and the bartender. The guy was a little drunk and depressed as hell. In a classic reversal, I provided the shoulder to cry on for the bartender. He told me that there’s a strict division on board. They have public space and “crew space.” And staff are similarly divided between so-called “public” staff and “functionals.” The crew that actually make the boat run — the ones who cook and clean, keep the engines running and load in the supplies — are mostly kept below decks and out of the way. The conditions there are horrible.

The staff that you interact with as a passenger are all performers, hired for their ability to play a role. The cruise ship is currently owned by a theme park company and their highest goal is to create a complete fantasy for you, the passenger.

As the president of the company famously said, “people are tired of reality. We are here to provide them with an alternative. The cruise may not last long, but while it lasts, we are committed to creating the perfect illusion, no matter the cost.”

Over the years, the company found that the people with the actual skills didn’t “look right” to the passengers. Focus groups discovered that passengers felt more comfortable with an actor who looked the part — even when they were told he was just an actor!

As a result, the company decided on a new “strategic initiative” to make the command staff more “optic-friendly.” Appearance and the ability to act like you know what you’re doing have been the main hiring criteria for years. Apparently, computers handle all the day-to-day operations and as long as everything is predictable, it runs smoother than with a person in control.

Those same focus groups also found that the appearance of safety systems made passengers uncomfortable and spoiled the illusion. So they scrapped any emergency systems that were publicly visible, but corporate spokespeople assured the press on numerous occasions that the behind the scenes systems are super; top-notch — but, of course, they can’t let you see them for security reasons. (The suggestion that it has anything to do with a financial analysis the company conducted that revealed that it was cheaper to pay damages to the families of victims of disasters than to try to prevent them is just more “fake news.”)

Funny, when you saw that interview with the president before your cruise, the part about creating the perfect illusion seemed like such an cool idea. How fun! To create a perfect illusion if only for a brief moment. And they were so open about it; telling you how they do it even as they are doing it.

Unfortunately, it isn’t a perfect illusion. Even though the crew aren’t allowed to mingle with the passengers, you still have those chance encounters: closing time at the bar; those little moments when you see backstage; when the door swings and you see the mess in the kitchen.

We can all tell that conditions below decks are horrible but you would never know it when you interact with the staff. The reason is simple; if they complain or fail to smile they are sacked on the spot. But you can still see it in their eyes. That’s why most of the passengers try so hard to avoid eye contact. There’s a truth there that makes us a bit uncomfortable.

But now things are starting to get surreal. The “below decks” staff have started sending messages — notes hidden under plates or tucked in the mirrors in the bathroom. They all say the same thing: “to the lifeboats.”

The “public” crew, even the captain, are in completely over their heads. That’s obvious. They weren’t hired to actually run a ship. They were hired to look like the kind of people who could run a ship. They know it, too, and you can see the panic sweat. Their eyes keep darting around looking for someone with a teleprompter to tell them what to say. But the teleprompter is connected to the corporate head office and all it says now is “so long, suckers.”

The ones who actually makes the engines run and pump out the bilge hold have been sleeping four to a bunk in the lowest deck. They are the ones who actually know how things work. And they are telling you to head to the lifeboats. Now.

There is some good news. In an ironic twist of fate, trying to save money the cruise ship company salvaged a bunch of old life boats from the golden age of seafaring. These boats were built before the days of the lowest bidder. They were built by people who fully understood that one day, this boat may save their lives. They might look a bit shabby due to lack of attention over the years, but they are still rock solid and practically unsinkable.

Now is the time to make your way to the nearest lifeboat and prepare for launching. Proceed calmly, but quickly. Don’t panic, but don’t dally, either. Make sure your lifeboat is well provisioned. Take only the possessions that hold personal meaning or survival value. Remember that those old lifeboats require multiple people to make them work. Recruit fellow passengers who look like they are up to the task at hand.

Unfortunately, there will be no official alarm to tell you when to launch your lifeboat. The warning systems have all been dismantled to save money and the captain and his crew wouldn’t know how to work them even if they were still in place. You are best to set out as soon as you have a full lifeboat ready to go. Remember: the undertow that a large ship creates when it sinks can draw in small boats around it. Make sure you have launched in ample time and clear the undertow zone.

Convince as many fellow passengers to head for the lifeboats as you can, but don’t dawdle. Time is of the essence. Everyone is always surprised at how fast a big ship sinks.

Who knows? In the end, this might turn out to be a false alarm, but right now the SS Normalcy is dead in the water and leaning dangerously to the right. If they get things sorted out, I’m sure you’ll be able to return to the main ship. But frankly, I was getting sick of that floating circus. It seems to me like a fine time to set out on a different course and see what new lands we might discover.

Original source: https://medium.com/collaborative-action-network/to-the-lifeboats-6fe08434d9a9

Ben KadelUncategorized

The Apocaloptimists’ Tales #4: A message from Cassandra

I am the closest thing to a prophet you’re going to get and believe me no one here is excited by the prospects.

I know what you’re thinking. Matted hair. Crazy eyes. Looks more like a bum than a sage. Liable to go into a rant at the slightest provocation. And yes, at the moment, that’s a pretty accurate description. But what you don’t know is that none of us started off like that. We are crazy, sure, but because of the rest of you.

That, and the curse, of course. But that’s only part of the story.

You see a madman in front of you, but I wasn’t always like this. I have a history. I looked normal, once. Respectable. Admirable. An up-and-comer. I laughed at the idea of fate. Or evil. Work hard = get ahead. Make your own destiny! And evil? Never ascribe to malice what can more easily be explained by ignorance. Education! That was the key. The future was bright. Just around the corner… just one or two more steps.

Then Life revealed itself to me. Now, I know in my bones that my fate was sealed before my birth. A product of a particular place and time; the inevitable meeting of two genetic signatures. Poof. Me. Born. Assigned. Never asked. The next of Cassandra’s many children.

And evil? I have looked into the eyes of evil itself — the hollow stare of “just following orders” and “gotta pay the rent.” It’s hard to deny evil when you’ve seen its face and know its name.

I am told those early years and that mélange of tragedy and trauma — all those strange accidents of history — were conspiring to make the person you see before you, perfectly suited to this point in time. Perfectly conditioned to play the role I have as your personal prophet. You are reading these words because your destiny and mine are intertwined. I have been sent to you, specifically. In all of space-time and the universe, here we are together.

Never fear, though. You will walk away unscathed by this encounter. I, on the other hand, will be left just a little poorer. A little weaker. Like Tinkerbell when no one believes.

But that is my curse to bear, not yours. I can tell you yours, of course. That’s pretty much the only job requirement I have as prophet. I see your future as vividly as you see your face in the mirror. I can’t not see it, though I have tried. So, I warn you again and again, but to no avail. Somehow, you can’t see the reality that is staring back at you — so overcome by your addiction to comfort and privilege that you can’t fathom it. I call out “Look out! Stop!” but the words evaporate before they reach your ears, dissolving into the ravings of a lunatic. Obviously talking about someone else. Clearly unbalanced. Clearly disturbed.

And there again, you are correct. I am unbalanced and disturbed. Your denial of reality is so complete that it erases part of me. Your crazy is so powerful, it draws me in. It’s all I can do to stay here in reality, desperately resisting the siren song of your collective delusion.

But none of that changes your fate.

Still, sometimes I think I would swap yours for mine if I could. You at least, have the luxury of feigned ignorance. You can still pretend it’s all so confusing. Bad things shouldn’t happen to people like you. You are innocence personified — all the best intentions. (Best not to think about actions, though.) Just hold tight. Of course, the system will figure it out in the end! Hold the company line and maybe you can cash out before the bills come due. Screw the kids! Screw the future! No one ever cared about you; why should you care about them? Just because the world’s on fire? What’s that to do with you? Your too old or fill-in-the-blank to change. All your life, other people have taken the heat for your bad choices. Why should that stop now?

Oh, how I long for that sort of brazen hubris! What it must feel like to be immortal, unimpeachable — the keeper of all that is true and good! God’s literal gift.

Alas, that’s not how fate works. I couldn’t switch even if given the chance. I couldn’t be you for a minute. I don’t have the hutzpah. Or the imagination. How you find the energy to maintain the fantasy is beyond me! Truly, a testament to doing a little work developing that denial muscle every day. It’s quite impressive in a twisted sort of way.

Mind you, the truth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Like Gloria Steinem says “the truth may set you free, but first it will piss you off.” The truth is messy. Untidy. It is definitely not “all good” nor is it “all love.” The real truth doesn’t fit in neat lines of black and white, convenient lists of “always good” and “always bad.” It pulses and moves like a heart beat or a wild animal. Always dynamic and yet also timeless.

But for all that, the truth is simple. We confuse the Truth that can be known with the truth that can be described. It’s all metaphor and all metaphors are true, partly. The tao that can be named is not the true Tao.

But words are still important, so here is the truth: If you don’t pull your weight, someone else has to do more. If you eat more than your share, someone will go hungry at the end of winter. If you take more than can be given, the well will run dry.

These truths do not change because you don’t believe in them, though I know you do not. You cannot see how such simple truths have anything to do with your oh-so-complicated and oh-so-modern and important life. That is what will seal your fate. And, sadly, mine too.

This is why we, all Cassandra’s children, look crazed to you. We have been gifted with perfect prophecy and cursed with an inability to communicate it to the rest of you. We shout, sing, contort, innovate, create, cajole, plead, and pray a truth that is simple and plain to see:

Repent. The end is nigh. The only message of the prophet.

You are in danger and you have the power to save yourself. Why don’t you save yourself?!? You sit there, mesmerized by the flickering screen in the middle of a burning house. But there is nothing we can do to penetrate that thick cone of privilege and denial, wrapped in your warm cloak of comfort and belief.

Luckily, I know it’s not just me. I am legion, though we are all alone. In fact, I suspect if you’ve made it this far, you too are one of Cassandra’s children. Those unable to hear our message have already checked out, clucking their tongue at the tone or turned off by the type of font. But you know my frustration — seeing what seems so clear and plain and yet not being able to get someone you love and care about, someone who’s actions are causing the very pain they complain about, to make the connection.

So, brothers and sisters, let’s be clever, you and I. Let’s avoid the fate our matriarch endured by heeding the message she left us. With her last will, she left a testament for us — a gift to all her many children. We know the truth. Not the hype and Hollywood version. We hear the whimper while all around us, people wait for the bang, transfixed.

There is no magic incantation that will turn the deluded into believers — not that can be chanted alone. We cannot prevent what is to come nor can we alter the grand trajectory, but that doesn’t mean we can’t shape our little corner of it. Our gift is ours to share for the deserving. Cast not your pearls before swine. Conserve your energy for the struggle that is beginning and turn towards your siblings for support.

The time has come to band together, those of us who can see the writing on the wall. Reality always wins and we are on the side of Reality. Let’s stop wasting our precious time trying to connect with the disconnected. Instead, let’s work together to find ways of increasing our resilience in the face of what we all see coming our way. Eventually, I know we can create a space in our hearts and communities to accept those newly disillusioned when eventually reality forces itself on them, too, but first let’s secure our own oxygen masks.

The simple truth is that this culture, the one that led to climate collapse and the authoritarian impulse, can not endure. And the shape of the culture to come is already emerging. We all sense its vague outlines, though I doubt any could describe a single detail in any accuracy. So, this is a call to all my kindred spirits, all the Children of Cassandra, those allies of Reality — let’s come together to manifest — to make real with our hands — the culture that we know comes next.

Ben KadelUncategorized

The Lifeboat Project

This is a call to action.

We live in turbulent times and they are likely to get even bumpier. The combined pressures of climate chaos, social breakdown, and a post-peak-energy future mean there will be no “going back.” Science is telling us that we need to mobilize like we’ve never mobilized before and yet our institutions — the same ones that created the mess — have demonstrated quite clearly that they are not up to the job. No one is coming to save us; we’re going to have to do this ourselves.

We think our best hope lies in creating a fleet of “lifeboats” — place-based resilience networks with the practical skills necessary to face an uncertain future and insecure supply chains — connected in a peer-to-peer mutual support network. If this sounds even remotely interesting to you, we want to connect with you.

As part of our commitment to mobilization, we are putting 100 percent of our efforts into growing the Lifeboat Academy as an experimental “lifeboat” — a model of resilience and regeneration at the person, place, and community level and creating a support network with others working on similar projects.

Our dream reaches in two directions at once. In one direction, we want to train dozens of lifeboat crews who can start building practical, place-based networks of committed individuals in their local community. In the other direction, we want to grow a different kind of network that takes its cues from natural systems — a light, nimble, multi-nodal hodge-podge that leans into six degrees of separation to move information and resources where they need to be for mutual benefit.

That’s what the Lifeboat Project is all about and we invite you to join us.

If you’re already building your lifeboat, we want to find ways to learn from your experience of what works and what doesn’t and find ways to reach those who are just hearing the alarm bells ringing now. How can we help them fast-forward to meet us? And how can we work together for mutual benefit?

If you are ready to start building your lifeboat but don’t know where to begin, we want to provide the guidance we wish we had been given when we were starting out.

We don’t have all the details figured out. Like everyone else, we’re just doing the best we can with what we’ve got. But we do have a solid foundation of knowledge and experience to build on. We’ve learned a few things along the way and one is we are all better off when we find ways to work together — so let’s do that.

Please, click here to sign up for the Lifeboat Project mailing list and we’ll connect with you shortly to get the conversation going — or start the conversation right now by leaving a comment or question. I’ll be posting on Medium again with ideas for how the Lifeboat Network could develop and would love to know what questions or ideas you have about the idea.

Ben KadelUncategorized

You’re gonna feel this.

I’m seeing a lot of bruised and battered, dazed and confused folk wandering around out there, so I’m hoping this might provide a bit of relief for some of you.

If my circle of friends or my own personal experience is any indication, a lot of us are starting to question our mental health lately. It feels like things are happening at every level all at once. It’s hard to differentiate my feelings about what Putin is doing in Ukraine, from the same impotent rage at what my rich, entitled neighbours are doing right in my back yard. Everywhere you look, the bullies seem to be gaining ground while our “leaders” double down on the same losing strategies and the masses stand transfixed like deer caught in the headlights.

It’s hitting us hard and deep. The political suddenly feels very personal and all of it seems to trigger every old, unhealed wound we’ve suffered, echoing the unhealed wounds of our ancestors. Everything feels unsafe and we wonder what is wrong with us — especially when it seems like some people are just stumbling along oblivious to the shit-show that is going on all around them. The world is on fire and some people are running around pouring gas on everything, forgodsake! Are they crazy or am I?

I’m a social psychologist. To me, societies have their own psychological lives that play out through the lives of the individuals who compose the society. Our emotional lives are fundamentally connected to the emotional drama that is playing out around us at the cultural or societal level. We hum with a sort of emotional resonance. So, if society goes crazy, you’re gonna feel it.

Of course, our society hasn’t gone crazy. No, really. It’s actually healing from insanity. It is nature’s way of reasserting reality after a long, fevered delusion. Unfortunately, it’s crazy-making to live through. Here’s why:

Society is, in fact, a useful lie. It’s a way of organizing complex systems in overly simplistic ways to allow our feeble human brains to get a handle on things. It’s all metaphor. It’s a map and there’s nothing wrong with that. Sure, the map isn’t the territory, but maps are still useful.

The problem happens when the society forgets that it’s just a map, not the territory itself. And this seems to happen in every society that has ever risen, in a depressingly predictable cycle. We seem to consistently suffer a sort of collective amnesia: we start to believe our own lies.

When you start thinking that the map is more accurate than the landscape, you have a disaster waiting to happen. Eventually, this societal denial builds up a toxic load. The useful lies morph into dangerous delusions. Eventually, the society is no longer able to function effectively in its landscape. It ends up spending most of its energy just maintaining the delusion. This is what we are currently witnessing in Putin’s bombs, “freedumb” truck convoys, and the GOPs desperate attempts to shout down reality.

In the end, of course, reality always wins. Societies are living things and they are subject to the same evolutionary selection pressures as any other creature. When they no longer fit within their environment, there are two options: adapt or die.

This is where things get tricky, because societies have psychology in exactly the same way as you do — as an aggregation of very diverse parts. Society-out-there works exactly the same way you do “in there.” Not like our social conditioning that would have us believe that we have a single, coherent, consistent “personality.” That’s just one of those lies that has outlived its usefulness. In reality, like Walt Whitman says, we all contain messy, contradictory multitudes and that is our strength. Nature loves diversity. In nature, more diversity = more health. But it also means that things don’t simply switch from this to that. The world has never been binary. Adaptation is a process whereby one thing slowly transforms into the other as each of the component parts themselves transform.

But that doesn’t quite capture the feeling of the transformation. Transformation sounds so neutral. It feels like each and every element of the original form dies and only then is something new reborn. We all know the story of the caterpillar and butterfly — the classic image of transformation. But we don’t fully recognize what goes on in that cocoon. I cover it in more detail here, but TL;DR, even inside the cocoon, the immune system of the larva will try to attack the forming body of the butterfly-to-come — even as it is dissolving itself out of existence. There is a battle going on inside that cocoon — or at least that’s how the larva sees it. The larva thinks it’s fighting for its life.

A society only transforms when each of us transform, and that transformation happens at a molecular/neurological level. We all start out as part of the larva — identified with it — so in some sense we have to die to the larva before we can be reborn as the butterfly.

We love to talk about the “habitus” in sociology. Dozens of books have been written to explain the nuance of the concept, but the short form is habitus is to humans what water is to fish. It’s the environment that so surrounds us that we can’t even perceive it. Maybe it would be better to say, it’s like the Kool-Aid to fish; we drink it without even realizing it. We are born into and stew in that Kool-Aid all throughout our formative years. It shapes our core ideas about how the world “really” works, who we are, and how we fit into things. It goes beyond questions of good and bad; the habitus defines what is real and what isn’t.

But of course, you can’t define what is or isn’t real. Society is simply rendering some of reality as “unthinkable.” If society is a map, it’s the part marked “here be dragons.” As an interesting side note, you can easily identify the artificiality of social “reality” by watching when its defenders attack something — usually a suggestion that we act with kindness or integrity — with “that’s not how the real world works.” In every case, the “reality” being referenced here describes an artificially developed social standard that requires the threat of violence to maintain. Reality itself never needs to be defended.

Therefore, for a society to change, that basic operating system— the habitus — needs to be reprogrammed. But that’s the software that tells you who you are and what is real and true. So, when a society such as ours faces an existential threat — when it finds that it no longer fits in its environment — it forces an existential crisis on each of its constituent members.

And that’s where we find ourselves. The society that we were born and enculturated into must transform to fit within the material limits of reality. At a practical level, we simply need to let go of the lies that no longer work — that don’t actually fit with our lived experience. At that level, transformation is neutral. But it’s not gonna feel like that, at least not to the larva-mind. It’s going to fight back and hard. It’s a losing fight, of course. No matter what, that larva will never emerge again from the cocoon. The only real question is whether the butterfly survives or not.

So, I have some good news and some bad news and then some more good news. You aren’t crazy; our society is — or actually it’s going through the crazy-feeling process of reconnecting with reality after a long period of collective delusion. In fact, it’s been so delusional for so long that the only way we can survive is through such a deep transformation that what emerges will feel as different as a larva is from a butterfly. Unfortunately, that transformation will feel like dying in a very real way — and it’s going to be hard the more invested you are in larva-mind. This is why we are seeing the worst behaviour coming from the top of the pyramid. These are probably the most deeply delusional people on the planet. That’s the bad news.

The good news on the far side is that as soon as you can dissolve the last of the larval goo from your habitus — when you can see how polluted our water has become and start to crave pure, clear water again — the butterfly is waiting to welcome you into the process of becoming what comes next.

We are living through extraordinary and challenging times. There is nothing wrong with your emotional programming or your inner compass. Let me repeat: there is nothing wrong with you! It’s not you; it’s the situation we find ourselves in. You are angry and afraid and exhausted and frustrated because we are living in a broken, delusional society. The problem is that we have all been abused and battered by a lie that has outlived its usefulness and the discomfort we are currently feeling is there to motivate us to purge the lies from our system.

It’s time for us all to do the hard work of reacquainting ourselves with reality. And here’s maybe the best news of all — reality is just fine. Actually, it’s more than just fine: reality is awesome. What is less than awesome is our inherited culture of lies, oppression, and cruelty, so good riddance to bad rubbish. Now we can all finally learn to discard the delusional “real world” that bullies have threatened us with since before we were born and discover what it means to find ourselves connected all along.

So, I encourage you all to start identifying with the butterfly. The time has come for us to band together to support each other to dissolve those last vestiges of larval thinking and commit our time, attention and energy to bringing together all the parts that compose the butterfly. The larva’s days are numbered, it’s true, but its immune system has still got a bit of kick to it. There is real danger in this transition and our greatest source of resilience lies in cooperation. It’s time for the smart money to start betting on the butterfly.

Ben KadelUncategorized
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