WM Weekly: The system isn't broken.
Hello friends,
"The system is broken" is a phrase you'll often hear.
"The system is broken that's why our food and water supply is toxic."
"The system is broken that's why wealth gap is increasing"
"The system is broken that's why everyone's so depressed and isolated."
But the system isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it's designed to do.
These are symptoms of a deeper construct, one that generates these types of problems again and again, no matter how we try to solve them.
And it's not that the game is rigged against us.
It's that we're all playing a game with certain dynamics, each of them accelerating and compounding the harmful impacts of one another.
The result is an economic system that is destroying the conditions that life depends on.
A game that will lead to collapse.
This is Daniel Schmachtenberger's idea of the 'Metacrisis'
There are two dynamics you need to be aware of but there's a lot to distill, so we'll explore the first today, and next week, we'll explore the second, and what we can do about it.
The first dynamic: Rivalry combined with Rapid Technological Advancements
Scarcity forces us into zero-sum games.
"You must lose, so that I can win"
Every person, organisation, and country is incentivised to seek a competitive advantage, often at the expense of others.
It's this dynamic that leads to The Tragedy of the Commons.
What does that mean? An example explains it best.
Let's imagine you have a herd of cattle, and you share a pasture amongst other herders that can be regenerated if used sustainably.
Now the problem is that if you're competing over the same market, it always makes sense for you to add another cow. Why?
You get 100% of the profit from the meat and milk, but the cost (the overgrazing of the pasture) is shared amongst all the herders. So in the short-term, the benefit to you is huge compared to the cost.
And so everyone starts doing this, after all, it makes the most sense for each herder.
What happens then?
Inevitably, the pasture gets destroyed.
Everyone knows that this decision will eventually lead to the destruction of the pasture, but nobody can stop because if the pasture is being over-grazed, then it makes the most sense (in the short term) to maximise what you get out of it by adding more cows.
It's racing faster and faster towards the end of a cliff.
This is also what drives social media companies to pay millions of dollars to very intelligent people who's sole purpose is to increase the amount of time you spend watching a video on their platform (and it works on me).
They know that what they're doing will lead to a state of constant distractrion and coginitive exhaustion for it's users, but like our cow herders, they can't stop, because they're competing with other companies that trying to do the same thing.
Now, this dynamic has always existed. Rivalry is a natural part of human nature, and can be beneficial when it makes both sides better. But for most of our existence, the destructive capacity of rivalry was limited. Now however, with the ever-increasing advancement of technology and weaponry, the potential impacts are more far-reaching than ever.
So that's the first dynamic. Next week, we'll talk about the second dynamic, Complex vs Complicated systems. This is what makes us measure success in GDP, stock price, and profit margins and turn soil into 'real estate', fields into solar farms, and farms into factories.
But before that, I'll leave you with this to think about:
How can we create a new system that channels Rivalry and Technological Advancements towards the common good? How can we set up a win-win system?
Any ideas? Let me know
To a brighter future,
Wild Minds Community
PS.
Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Keivor, founder of My Little Farm and The Sovereign Village, for a conversation on building community sovereignty.
He walked me through how him and Laure started My Little Farm, some of the challenges they faced, what he would do differently, and what's coming with The Sovereign Village
These conversation are only available to our members within Wild Minds Network so if you don't want to miss out 👉 click here to join
