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Autistic Collaboration | Creating NeurodiVentures and equipping Autistic people for collaboration for lifeCreating NeurodiVentures and equipping Autistic people for collaboration for lifeAutistic Collaboration | Creating NeurodiVentures and equipping Autistic people for collaboration for life Skip to content Autistic Collaboration Creating NeurodiVentures and equipping Autistic people for collaboration for life Menu Home Deutsch Eλληνικά Español Français Íslendska Italiano Polski Português brasileiro About Projects Peer Support Oceania Africa Asia Americas Europe Human Wellbeing Autistic Culture Education Research Intersectionality and Neurodiversity Intersectional Safety Communication in Healthcare Collaboration Tools for the next 200 years Addressing Anthropogenic Climate Change Tools Local Livelihoods Resources Introduction to Autistic ways of being For Autists For Healthcare Professionals For Educators For Parents For Employers Dr. B. Educated Frequently Asked Questions Ecologies of Care Events NeurodiVentures Collaboration and Activism Divergent Minds Books AutCollab TV Join Us Support Our Work Ban ABA Autistic human animals – a factor in cultural metamorphosis November 26, 2024November 27, 2024 Jorn Bettin foundational, Invitation Autistic culture is a world of infinite diversity beyond the neuronormative imagination. Every Autistic relationship is unique, and many of us are traumatised. We need appropriate tools to invest in deeply understanding each other. Cultural metamorphosis requires radically reframing everything we understand about cultural adaptivity in terms of co-creating ecologies of care. Cultural metamorphosisAutisticHumanAnimalsRelational building blocksThe ability to extend trustShared understandingShared value prioritiesShared interestsComplementary interestsSexual preferencesGender preferencesRelational healthEssential sacred commitmentsUnique sacred commitmentsCommunication skillsEnergy managementSacred relationshipsFriendshipPartnershipRomantic partnershipTherapeutic relationshipsTherapeutic friendshipTherapeutic partnershipTherapeutic romantic partnershipToxic relationshipsToxic friendshipToxic partnershipToxic romantic partnershipJoin us! In the times we live in the demand for peer support and reliable emotional support routinely outstrips the available supply. This is reflected in overall mental health statistics, in the level of burnout, and we also see it in the quantitative and qualitative results of AutCollab Research. This article is motivated by the common reality of Autistic emotional exhaustion and lack of adequate peer support, as well as by the massive trust problems created by homo economicus. My writing, trying to make sense of the cruel dystopian world we have been born into, and trying to articulate potential avenues that allow us collectively to jointly co-create ecologies of care takes a lot of energy, in particular emotional energy. No one can do this alone. I certainly can’t and I don’t pretend I can. I need faith in humanity to write what I write, and this faith is based entirely on a small number of amazing Autistic human animals in my immediate ecology of care. For this I am immensely grateful every day. The modern world needs more intersectional solidarity across all dimensions, more dialogues, more transparency, and more compassion. In short we need to invest in deeply understanding each other, and this is what we are increasingly seeing on the margins of society. In the socially toxic world of homo economicus, many of the basic relationship building, maintenance, and repair skills have been lost or have become rare. To relearn these skills, we need an Autistic Relationship Manual (an ARM), connected to a helping hand and a compassionate heart, which can be only provided by our uniquely amazing Autistic peers. This article can be thought of as an ARM. Cultural metamorphosis Cultural metamorphosis is a radical form of collaborative niche construction that requires us to reframe everything we understand about the cultural adaptivity that is at our disposal at human scale.  Homo economicus has pushed all life affirming human cultures beyond the cut-off points of the anthropocentric bell curve. The hump of the anthropocentric bell curve has become a hypernormative cultural dead zone paralysed by sanctified institutionalised BS. Cultural healing requires the kind of deep and profound shift in trust from established institutions towards mutual aid and the community co-creation at human scale that indigenous Mexican scholar Yuria Celidwen talks about:  We need commitment, we need community. We need to create spaces of trust. But for that, there’s tremendous work that we need to be doing. But I don’t think that any of that work will be possible, should we not have that commitment–that commitment that no matter how challenging and tremendously difficult it will be to reckon with these narratives and to dismantle these narratives. Because seeing the horror in the eye of all these narratives that we live by comes with tremendous understanding. It will leave us very fragile, very vulnerable, and most, of course, are not willing to do that, because we don’t feel safe. But if we are able to stand the heat and create these spaces, if we commit to do this kind of work for the benefit of the planet, then we may be able to learn that we can fly. This shift in trust is already happening outside established institutions. It can only happen via self-selected and self-organising groups. I sense this is what we are already starting to experience on the intersectional margins of modern societies. The objective of the Autistic Relationship Manual is to get people to start talking again, to catalyse further intersectional dialoges, and to let go of unwarranted fears and unwarranted shame, whether this is due to trauma or inhumane hypernormative culturally imposed expectations. Metamorphosis back to human scale can be imagined as a cultural development stage for global intersectional and neurodivergent solidarity beyond the human, undoing some of the harm perpetuated in throughout the colonial and neocolonial era, at least for the generations alive today. In the context of cultural metamorphosis, Autistic human animals are the imaginal cells within human scale cultural organisms. Globally, there are a few hundred million of us, spread across all continents and bioregional ecosystems, and this number does not even include the many hundred million of otherwise neurodivergent human animals. Autistic human animals tend to be highly concerned about social justice and tend to be the ones who point out toxic in-group competitive behaviours. We assist each other in co-creating unique Autistic relationships, households, and human scale cultural organisms. We co-create our unique families in our own space and time. Yes, real change takes real courage. It shakes the very foundations of people’s understanding of the world. In difference to what Adam Curtis is hoping for, what we are seeing at the grassroots level are millions of beautifully diverse small green shoots at human scale. This is deep change, beyond any centralised powers of control. In the context of healthy egalitarian human ecologies, Autistic human animals are best understood as the agents of a well functioning cultural immune system within society. Autistic The unusual heightened baseline sensitivity profiles of Autistic human animals means that they have a reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance. Autistic human animals are unconstrained by culturally defined gender norms and have the capacity to relate deeply to other human and non-human living beings. Their sensitivity profiles limit their ability to think hierarchically and engage in transactional human busyness. In the hypernormative culture that dominates the modern world, it is hard to explain to non-Autistic people what the immersion in healthy Autistic culture feels like and what the development of healthy sacred lifetime relationships between Autistic people feels like. In mainstream society people don’t understand how Autistic human animals support each other, love each other, and care for each other in ways that go far beyond the culturally impaired neuronormative imagination. Human It should not require mentioning, but in the hyper-normative modern social world, it must be stated and emphasised that Autistic human animals are fully human. As humans we share an evolved capacity for developing and maintaining cultures and languages. These capacities allow humans to collaborate in flexible and complex ways based on shared intentions, a shared understanding of each other, and a shared understanding of our ecological context. Our capacities for culture and language allow us to establish and maintain commitments to each other and commitments across human scale groups. Such verbal or written commitments constitute an effective human scale cultural framework for coordinating human social affairs. Breaking our commitments makes us physically, mentally, and spiritually sick. Humans evolved this way. This is how we have become cultural organisms. Fully acknowledging this evolutionary heritage we must conclude: Every relationship is sacred. No one should ever be discarded. This also extends to non-human living beings. No life should ever be discarded. We honour Gaia by appreciating all the living food she provides us with by committing to nurturing and helping all those living beings that sustain us. Beyond our capacity for culture and language humans have an evolved capacity for pair bonding within the context of human scale groups, which can be understood as networks of sacred relationships, each of which encapsulates unique shared experiences. Animals In the anthropocentric modern social world, it must be reiterated that all human are animals. Just like all other animals, humans engage in sexual activities, and we do so in very diverse ways. As human animals, our capacities for culture and language have greatly increased the complexity of our sexual imagination, and this plays out in the infinite complexity in sexual behaviour and rituals that are found in different cultures. Please note that Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures have not “cornered the market” of cultural gender identities and sexual preferences. Attempting to impose WEIRD cultural norms on other groups is a form of neocolonialism. Similar comments apply to the cultures of all super-human scale groups such as modern nation states and corporations. Such modern legal fictions are incompatible with our human evolutionary history, and “universally applicable” social norms defined by such entities are causing untold harm on a daily basis. Acknowledging that humans are animals includes acknowledging the absolute cognitive and emotional limits shared by all humans. In terms of our cognitive and emotional capacities and limitations, we are all much closer to each other than most of us are ever ready to admit. Being conscious animals helps us regain some urgently needed humility, and should encourage all of us to honour Gaia on a daily basis. Relational building blocks Every relationship between humans is sacred, and every relationship is unique. There are no cookie cutters that work for everyone. However there are relational building blocks that can be used to articulate the unique commitments, preferences, and needs that define a relationship. The ability to extend trust The ability to extend trust is defined by the health of the ecology of care we are embedded in. Autistic human animals who are embedded in Autistic culture and a reasonably healthy ecology of care tend to extend deep trust, especially to other Autistic human animals. In our times this is an increasingly rare sacred gift, which is easily exploited in unsafe environments dominated by internalised ableism. Carefully nurturing and protecting these gifts is a collective responsibility within Autistic cultural organisms. There is beautiful work for us to do. Too many Autists end up isolated, in particular those who have a calling to be activists, who are so sensitive that they can not bear all the suffering in the world. No one chooses to be highly sensitive. No one chooses a calling. We are born this way. And we are fully human animals, with human needs. We are Autistic. We are not broken. To thrive we need to be embedded in a healthy ecology of care. Too many of us die completely misunderstood. Many of us remember dear friends who are no longer amongst us.  Deep mutual trust is a priceless collective asset that is increasingly providing healthy Autistic cultural organisms with a unique collaborative advantage over traditional family systems and organisational forms. Shared understanding Some level of shared understanding is a prerequisite for any relationship to even get started. For example in this context it helps to know if the person you would like to form a relationship with is an Autistic human animal, as this can greatly reduce the effort and energy needed for communication. Shared value priorities Most humans, even across cultures, share many similarities in values. What really matters for relational health is transparency and clarity about the relative priorities of the values that matter most to us. Shared interests Shared interests are part of the bedrock of relationships between Autistic human animals, much more so than between non-Autistic human animals, who tend to have much broader interests in topics shaped by the surrounding culture, and a less deep interest or understanding of the topics they are happy to engage in. When multiple interests are shared between Autistic human animals, it can result in unique friendships and romantic partnerships that go far beyond the limited neuronormative imagination of what is possible. Complementary interests Complementary interests are an optional part of the bedrock of relationships between Autistic human animals, more so than between non-Autistic human animals. Mutual respect and curiosity about complementary interests predisposes Autistic human animals towards collaborative niche construction and the formation of unique human scale cultural organisms. Sexual preferences Sexual preferences are an essential building block for all romantic partnerships. Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures have not “cornered the market” of sexual preferences. Attempting to impose WEIRD cultural norms on other groups is a form of neocolonialism. Relax! When two Autistic animals meet, be prepared to be surprised and delighted! Gender preferences Gender preferences are an optional building block for romantic partnerships with Autistic human animals. Hardly anything in the biosphere is binary. Yet the entire global digital edifice is built from zeros and ones. What could possibly go wrong? A substantial number of Autistic human animals identify as non-binary and have difficulty comprehending the concept of culturally defined gender norms for ways of pair bonding. Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures have not “cornered the market” of cultural gender identities. Attempting to impose WEIRD cultural norms on other groups is a form of neocolonialism. In wider society gender expectations represent a minefield for Autistic human animals. A substantial number of Autistic human animals are equally uncomfortable with the both binary genders and corresponding cultural behavioural expectations. I have no idea of what others expect from me or what to expect from them if they identify as one of the two default binary genders. Every relationship is unique, and develops in a unique way. Cookie cutters don’t make sense to me. Relax! When two Autistic animals meet, conformance with any WEIRD gender norms are often one of the least relevant aspects of the relationship. Relational health Every relationship between humans is sacred, and every relationship is unique. The health of a relationship can be defined as the absence of cognitive dissonance in relating to the relationship from the perspectives of both parties to the relationship. It is sufficient for one person in a relationship to experience cognitive dissonance for the relationship to become strained. The WEIRD modern social world many people were born into today has destroyed the collective ability for deliberation at human scale. As a result modern life is experienced as incoherent from the individual perspective, which is subconsciously attempting to generate coherence at human scale. When that process fails, nothing seems to make sense anymore.  The modern social world we live in can only be understood from the margins, because the very notion of sense making has been confused. This is no surprise, because our capacity for sense making operates at human scale. Essential sacred commitments There are no cookie cutters that work for everyone. However there are essential commitments that are part or the foundation of all healthy relationships. Availability – both parties are committed to a comparable level of their availability to the relationship, which is determined by level of intensity of the relationship, which in turn is shaped by agreed mutual commitments. Full transparency – both parties need are committed to full transparency across all aspects of the relationship, which are determined by level of intimacy of the relationship, which in turn is shaped by agreed mutual commitments. Of course full transparency means that some things may become impossible, and then one or more relationships in an ecology of care may need to evolve, including shifts in the circles of intimacy as needed. There is no need to discard any relationship. A binary all or nothing approach is a symptom of living in a toxic transactional culture. Compassion – both parties are committed to mutual compassion across all aspects of the relationship to an extent that reflects the level of intimacy of the relationship, which in turn is shaped by agreed mutual commitments. Fairness – both parties are committed to egalitarian norms of fairness across all aspects of the relationship. Conflict prevention & resolution – both parties are committed to promptly sharing and addressing cognitive dissonance when it occurs in any aspect of the relationship. Unique sacred commitments Beyond the five essential commitments, the foundation of every relationships is defined by further bespoke sacred commitments that reflect the uniqueness and the level of intimacy and maturity of the relationship. Jointly developing and evolving sacred commitment is an important part of collaborative niche construction that requires us to Communicate our needs and preference unambiguously Learn to respect the unique needs and preference of others Use dialogue to arrive at a point of shared understanding that eliminates cognitive dissonance for all parties involved If cognitive dissonance remains in a relationship, it indicates a difference in sensitivity profiles. Reflect on whether it is conceivable that preferences converge over time or whether the cognitive dissonance is sustainable on an ongoing basis – it likely isn’t. Therefore resolve cognitive dissonance by increasing your shared understanding, and rely on genuine compassion to adapt your preferences. The result is a unique relationship, defined by a unique set of mutual commitments and mutual respect. Communication skills Once relational health is understood in terms of absence of cognitive dissonance in a relationship, it becomes clear that all relationship problems can be analysed and understood in terms of communication failures. Such failures need to be addressed by mastering and applying the essential communication skills needed to co-create, nurture, and as needed repair relational health. De-powered dialogue – is the skill to engage in dialogue that remains free of social power dynamics, i.e. both parties actively avoid unilaterally imposing arbitrary demands or making use of coercive techniques. This skill can also be understood as the commitment to non-violent communication. Continuous dialogue in combination with commitments to transparency and compassion for each other allows almost all relationship problems to be worked out. Consultation – involves the practice of always asking the other party for advice before making any decision that may affect the other party or the scope of the relationship in a significant way. The practice of consultation does not imply an expectation that all advice received must be followed, it is best understood as a commitment to mutual learning and as a tool for activating the compassion needed to maintain the relationship. Conflict resolution – involves the consistent application of the conflict resolution strategies and tools that have been agreed in mutual commitments. In the case of reoccurring conflicts, it may be necessary to revisit and as needed update mutual commitments to avoid cognitive dissonance from becoming established. Open Space facilitation – is an essential skill when embarking on economic partnerships. Deliberation in open space is the foundation for omnidirectional learning, for arriving at consensus based decisions without generating cognitive dissonance, and it allows groups to address potentially wicked problems. Care circle facilitation – is an essential skill for the activation of compassion and related skills for reducing cognitive dissonance and restoring emotional energy levels. The social motivation of Autistic human animals is deeply rooted in the desire to share knowledge and in the desire to learn, and this has big implications for the communication protocols that are used in Autistic culture. Very similar to hunter-gatherer societies, egalitarian Autistic cultural organisms are highly expert in group deliberation and decision-making which respects both difference and unity. The topic of communication problems and failures in the context or relationships is broad and deep. It is complicated by internalised ableism, i.e. the communication habits for “success” mandated by homo economicus. Hyper-competitive cultures value abstract social status symbols more than developing a shared understanding. This leads to entirely predictable yet unavoidable communication challenges that define Autistic social experiences. Ambiguity and plausible deniability is essential to “win” in social games. The objective of clear communication and the desire to be understood gets replaced by a desire to be perceived in a certain way, and a desire to “influence” people in certain ways for personal advantage. When modern humans spend 8 to 16 hours per day in hyper-competitive work places and in consumer oriented digital spaces, ambiguous and deceptive forms of communication start to bleed into all aspects of life, resulting in a form of spiritual bankruptcy in which human spirits have been fused to the misguided fiction of homo economicus, resulting in chronic “normalised” cognitive dissonance. Energy management Our cognitive and emotional limits and reserves can be understood, quantified, and communicated in terms of energy spoons, for example by agreeing that 1 spoon = 1 hour of dedicated time. Human minds are the tools that connect the physical dimension of our existence to other living creatures, and to a rich internal spiritual world, which integrates our own perceptions into a seemingly coherent representation of the external world around us. Human minds can develop amazing capabilities, but at the same time, our cognitive and emotional capacities are limited. All our activities affect the levels of three complementary energy reservoirs: Our reservoir of emotional (relational) spoons Our reservoir of creative (internal) spoons Our reservoir of labour (physical) spoons The above diagram illustrates how these energy reservoirs are connected to dialogues, communication in open space, and routines in the physical environment to regulate emotions and stress. We recharge our creative and emotional (relational) batteries by exhausting our physical batteries We recharge our creative and physical batteries by exhausting our emotional (relational) batteries We recharge our emotional (relational) and physical batteries by exhausting our creative batteries Additionally Our emotional (relational) batteries can also be recharged when all participants contribute comparable numbers of emotional spoons to a dialogue or a dedicated circle of care Sacred relationships You have a full relationship driver’s license when you have established one or more lifetime friendships, partnerships, or romantic partnerships. Sacred relationships are the fundamental building blocks of life. This extends to all living beings that are part of Gaia. When it comes to relationships between humans, there are three different categories of relationships that we can trace back to our evolutionary heritage. Romantic partnerships are the pair bonds that originally served the purpose of sexual reproduction. Partnerships are the pair bonds that originally served the purpose of egalitarian resource sharing within the context of human scale bands of hunter gatherers. Friendships are the pair bonds that originally served the purpose of omnidirectional learning and mutual aid between human scale bands of hunter gatherers. Note that these categories intentionally avoid the arbitrary distinction between “work” and the rest of life, which has only been invented to make the inhumane fiction of homo economicus tolerable for large parts of our lives. The resulting alienation and required split in our daily modus operandi of social affairs is a major contributor to the so-called mental health crisis, alongside the human created metacrisis that now has become and existential threat for our species and for many other species. In this Autistic Relationship Manual (ARM) we define relationship driver’s license levels that can help us to incrementally relearn basic relationship building, maintenance, and repair skills and minimise human and non-human suffering during the unique cultural metamorphosis that is unfolding. Since all human relationships involve two people, certification at any level is incredibly straight forward, a particular level is reached if the two humans that constitute the relationship certify the level to each other.Certification of a learner license is a simple commitment to each other to learn from and with each other on the journey towards a full license.Certification of a full license is the set of all the commitments to each other that are reached after seven years on a learner license. Lived experience shows that any relationship that is still intact after 7 years is a lifetime relationship or has the potential to be a lifetime relationship. This holds for romantic partnerships as well as economic partnerships and friendships. The guidelines articulated in this article are based on more than five decades of lived experience, including the development of an organically growing number of lifetime friendships, a long term romantic partnership that got reconfigured into a local economic partnership, and over 12 years of nurturing and operating a cosmolocal egalitarian human scale worker coop, i.e. the collective experience of a lifetime economic partnership between close friends. The key to relational health is mastery of the relationship repair and reconfiguration skills needed to reduce and eliminate cognitive dissonance experienced by one or both humans in the relationship. Cognitive dissonance manifests in emotional pain. If allowed to persist it can become a chronic disease and a silent killer of a relationship. The three categories of scared relationships usually build on each other, i.e. a friendship can evolve into an economic partnership, which in turn can evolve into a romantic partnership. Evolution is ongoing, and transitions between categories can occur on both a learner license or on a full license, and in both directions, depending on whether the level of intimacy and depth of collaboration is going up or down. Across the board, along the journey so far, all relationships that completely expired and discontinued were relationships with institutions and humans trapped in the hypernormative world of homo economicus, i.e examples that illustrate the transactional and ultimately self-destructive nature of homo economicus. Mastery of relationship repair and reconfiguration skills allows mature relationships that have lasted at least 7 years to be maintained indefinitely. It is a matter of being able to identify and address cognitive dissonance in a timely manner, on an ongoing basis, and as needed to step up or step down the intimacy level of the relationship to eliminate cognitive dissonance. This relational approach to life is incompatible with the transactional cultural frame of homo economicus. Relearning and mastering the relational approach to life is at the core of the cultural metamorphosis that the human species is currently undergoing. Sensitive Autistic animals see and feel the pain of others, this compels us to help, this compels us to fight for social justice and for the overall wellbeing of Gaia. We see the trauma behind internalised ableism. We are in pain because we feel the pain of others. Within the modern world, hypersensitive Autistic human animals are traumatised from a very young age. In particular all children are exposed in Homo Economicus from a very young age, by well intentioned parents and educators, before we learn anything substantial about Gaia and the living world. This is possibly the most cruel, dehumanising, and life denying part of the modern world.  So far, metamorphosis is confined to millions of embryonic human scale sprouts growing in the compost heap of homo economicus, engaging in omnidirectional learning. Increasingly these sprouts are connecting, resulting in the evolution of cosmolocal networks of friends on the margins of modern societies. Friendship You have a full friendship license if you have one or more lifetime friends in accordance with your emotional support needs. Be honest with yourself and others when your friendship is at risk of expiring. A friendship only expires if you have allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join a circle or care for peer support in relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious friendships, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the friendship to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship. Partnership You have a full partnership license if you have one or more lifetime friends that you collaborate with on livelihood co-creation and egalitarian resource sharing. Be honest with yourself and others when your partnership is at risk of expiring. A partnership only expires if you have allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join an open space for peer support in partnership repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious partnership, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the partnership to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship. Romantic partnership You have a full romantic partnership license if you have one or more romantic partners that you share your life with in accordance with your emotional support needs and sexual preferences. Be honest with yourself and others when your romantic partnership is at risk of expiring. A romantic partnership only expires if you have allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join a circle or care for peer support in relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious friendships, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the romantic partnership to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship. Therapeutic relationships You don’t yet have the full relationship driver’s license if you are still on a learner license, i.e. you have yet to establish one or more lifetime friendships, partnerships, and romantic partnerships. As needed, join a circle of care to learn how to muster the courage to embark on a learners license for friendship or romantic partnerships, or join a creative open space collaboration to learn how to muster the courage to embark on a learners license for economic partnerships. Therapeutic friendship A therapeutic friendship is a form of learning by doing in which you incrementally learn how to co-create and nurture lifetime friendships to meet each others emotional needs. Be honest with yourself and fully transparent with your friend as soon as cognitive dissonance emerges. This is an opportunity for both of you to learn basic relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. The bedrock of all relationships is the ability to engage in deliberative dialogue to confirm a shared understanding of the shared value priorities and the shared interests that define the friendship, and then to articulate this shared understanding in terms of mutual commitments. As needed join a circle or care for peer support in relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious friendship. Therapeutic partnership A therapeutic partnership is an on-boarding process in which you incrementally learn how to co-create livelihoods and nurture lifetime egalitarian resource sharing partnerships. Be honest with yourself and fully transparent with your partners as soon as cognitive dissonance emerges. This is an opportunity for all of you to learn basic relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. A partnership only expires if a team has allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. Partnership health is maintained by operating an ongoing advice process on an ongoing basis regarding all decisions that can affect others in major ways, and by regularly meeting in open space to coordinate activities and as needed revisit priorities to adapt to changes in the wider ecological context. As needed join an open space for peer support in partnership repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious partnership, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the partnership to prevent cognitive dissonance and misunderstandings from building up. Therapeutic romantic partnership A therapeutic romantic partnership is a form of learning by doing in which you incrementally learn how to co-create and nurture lifetime friendships that include meeting each others sexual needs and needs for intimate affection. Be honest with yourself and fully transparent with your romantic partner(s) as soon as cognitive dissonance emerges. This is an opportunity for all of you to learn basic relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. A romantic partnership only expires in case you allow cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join a circle or care for peer support to learn about relationship repair and reconfiguration skills and, ideally jointly, explore how to apply these skills to your romantic partnership. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your romantic partnership, for example by learning how to articulate emotional needs, manage and regenerate your emotional energies, and jointly evolve the commitments that underpin the romantic partnership to eliminate any cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship. Toxic relationships Your relationships are at risk of becoming toxic if you don’t have a relationship driver’s license and are too afraid to embark on a learners license, yet still proceed to establish friendships, partnerships, and romantic partnerships. In this scenario you need to learn to be more honest and compassionate with yourself and the people you attempt to co-create relationships with. Be gentle with yourself. Don’t beat yourself up. You are a sacred Autistic human animal. You are part of Gaia, and there are always people who deeply care about all aspects of your wellbeing. You may just not yet be clear about who these people are or where or how to find them. It is when “relationships” become things to acquire and potentially discard that things become toxic. In the fast-paced hyper-competitive world of homo economicus the art of evolving, reconfiguring, and repairing relationships has been lost or is underdeveloped. Homo economicus takes a transactional approach to all aspects of life, and thereby it fully “normalises” economic and emotional exploitation. This traumatises hypersensitive Autistic human animals and sets them up for recurring exploitation and the disastrous effects of chronic cognitive dissonance throughout life. A commitment to activism, unlimited compassion for all living beings, and a seemingly self-destructive ability to extend and re-extend deep trust is the only healthy viable survival strategy. In a healthy society hypersensitive Autistic human animals help prevent the worst parts of our evolutionary heritage from overshadowing the strong uniquely human collaborative tendencies that distinguish us from other primates. To be clear, the emergence and prevalence of toxic relationships is entirely a cultural issue, it is an issue of extreme social inequalities, hyper-competitive social norms, and an issue of (neo)colonialism. It is not an issue that can be blamed on specific individuals. Many people live in seriously toxic cultural environments. The emotional pain of trauma prevents them from being honest with themselves and others. They know of no other patterns, and deep down shame is a big issue. Sadly, in the modern world, psychologically genuinely safe relationships have become rare. In a genuinely safe relationship there is no need to keep fears to yourself, or to feel ashamed to ask questions or articulate your needs. As needed join a circle of care to learn how to muster the courage and learn the basic skills to embark on a learner license for friendship or romantic partnerships, or join a creative open space collaboration to learn how to muster the courage to embark on a learner license and learn the basic skills for operating economic partnerships and egalitarian worker coops. Toxic friendship A friendship that is at risk of becoming toxic lacks one or more of the essential sacred commitments to meet each others emotional needs. Don’t lightly throw away your friendships! Learn how to repair, reconfigure, and upgrade your friendships before they become toxic beyond repair. Toxic partnership An economic partnership that is at risk of becoming toxic often lacks one or more of the essential sacred commitments towards egalitarian resource sharing. Embarking on a genuine economic partnership, especially with more than two people, is possibly one of the most difficult ventures that modern humans can attempt, as it involves unlearning all the toxic cultural assumptions that have been shaped by the religion of homo economicus. And yet, or rather precisely for that reason, it is becoming an increasingly relevant basic life skill within the compost heap of modern industrialised societies. To avoid partnerships from becoming toxic, it is necessary to learn how go through fire, to have difficult conversations that most people never dare to have, to either come out with all relationships intact at the other end, or to know how to arrive at a consensus about the relationships within the partnership that have become toxic beyond repair. In this process, all affected parties need to come to the table, and appropriate peer support from those with relevant lived experience needs to be in place to bear the emotional load. Toxic romantic partnership A romantic partnership that is at risk of becoming toxic lacks one or more of the essential sacred commitments to meet each others sexual needs and needs for intimate affection. Embarking on a romantic partnership is the second most difficult venture that modern humans can attempt, only slightly behind embarking on a (multi) lifetime economic partnership, as it involves unlearning many of the toxic cultural assumptions that have been shaped by the religion of homo economicus. Relearning how to co-create, nurture, and repair loving and caring romantic partnerships is becoming an increasingly relevant basic life skill within the compost heap of modern industrialised societies. To avoid a romantic partnerships from becoming toxic, it is necessary to learn how go through fire, to have difficult conversations that many people never dare to have. In this process, both parties need to come to the table, as needed with appropriate peer support from those with relevant lived experience, to bear the emotional load. In a genuinely psychologically genuinely safe romantic partnership there is no need to keep your fears to yourself, or to feel ashamed of anything that may have happened to you, that you may have done, or that you may feel. For Autistic human animals it is important to be fully aware of the beautiful infinite diversity and possibilities of Autistic relationships. This can not be reiterated often enough. We are not limited to the WEIRD culturally defined sexual preference norms and gender norms. Join us! Autistic, Authentic, and Autonomous ecologies of care beyond the human grow organically, at human scale, at a human pace, one trusted relationship at a time. Join us! The world in reality is a beautifully interconnected world, and it’s interconnected through many many layers. It’s interconnected through consciousness, which is why we are spiritual beings in human form. But the plants outside my window are spiritual beings in plant form. But the plant of the lychee is in lychee form, and the tree of the mango is in mango form. They are just different expressions of one spiritual interconnected consciousness in the world. – Vandana Shiva Leave a comment The ability to relate deeply is the inability to conduct transactional busyness November 22, 2024November 22, 2024 Jorn Bettin foundational, Invitation Underneath the surface of internalised ableism, no one wants to be seen and heard by many. Everyone prefers to be understood and loved deeply by a few, and everyone wants to love and help. This is what makes us sacred human animals. Continuous dialogues about commitments make life sacred. This is how humans create meaning for each other and with each other. This is the experience of life as a process of becoming. Commitments make us uniquely humanDeliberative dialogueCo-creating ecologies of care Following the recent article on the inability of many Autists to think in terms of social hierarchies, a timely submission for the next NeurodiVerse Days of Intersectional Solidarity in December 2024 landed in the AutCollab inbox: I’m the founder of a neurodivergent community and also a therapist and indigenous person. I’m interested in how to promote mutual aid within our community, when there is a lot of interpersonal trauma including difficulty with trust for many.  The social challenges described and foreseen in Guy Debord’s and George Orwell’s work have become a highly disturbing reality, especially for cultural minorities and intersectionally marginalised populations. Early indoctrination in the belief in homo economicus attempts to transform humans into soulless machines. In particular, for many Autists, and possibly for everyone, the more we have an ability to relate to other humans and non-human living beings the less we are able to conduct transactional busyness. Underneath the surface of internalised ableism, the following observation applies to all sober humans. No one wants to be seen and heard by many. Everyone prefers to be understood and loved deeply by a few, and everyone wants to love and help. This is what makes us sacred human animals. Commitments make us uniquely human There is one healthy way forward, which is accessible on the basis of mutual trust and shared values, which involves a shift towards shared beliefs that represent sacred commitments at human scale: Sacred commitments between specific people or across human scale groups can be verbal or in writing. They only scale up to the limited numbers of relationships that we can maintain. As needed we can jointly update these commitments to reflect evolving needs or constraints in the wider ecology we are embedded in. For those who identify as Autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category, especially agreements with family members, friends, and colleagues. The massive trust problems created by homo economicus, the implications of which are well explained by the combination of Debord and Orwell, are cultural beliefs based on what others have encouraged us to believe, including beliefs that we have absorbed from from our social environment subconsciously, i.e. beliefs for which we can’t recall the origin. For those who do not identify as Autistic, the majority of beliefs held may fall into this category. Unilateral commitments with ourselves act as our spiritual commitment to life and to Gaia. Breaking our commitments makes us physically, mentally, and spiritually sick. Humans evolved this way. This is how we have become cultural organisms. Bilateral commitments that are offered by one party are sacred invitations to others, as part our spiritual commitment to and recognition of the sanctity of all relationships with living beings. Both parties can make sacred invitations, and then they can be brought together, as needed via deliberative dialogue, in love and mutual respect and understanding, into the sacred form that becomes a spiritual commitment to each other. In contrast to the practices in the industrialised factory model of society, there are no simplistic cookie cutter commitments. Every commitment is tailored to a specific relationship, either with ourselves – and by extension with Gaia, or with others. By sharing the commitments that we make with ourselves and with others within our ecology of care, we are able to better understand each other, trust each other, and rely on each other. This is of course easier said than done when the wider cultural context is dominated by individualism and mutual distrust. Deliberative dialogue Continuous dialogues about commitments are a beautiful part of lived Māori culture. This is how we can all honour life and Gaia. This is what makes life sacred. This is how humans create meaning for each other and with each other. This is the experience of life as a process of becoming. Explicit social agreements beyond human scale have severe limitations. This is why Māori have to engage in the cultural practices of collective action they have developed. In hierarchically structured societies, agreements such as laws issued by regional or national authorities apply to large groups of people, and by necessity have been developed with limited input from those who are affected. Such agreements invariably cause untold harm that for the most part remains invisible to the authorities. Humans did not evolve to live in hierarchically structured super-human scale societies. Pretending that we can maintain such structures without causing untold harm is a form of anthropocentric hubris. Trauma is propagated between generations. We have to find ways of breaking the cycle without destroying those who are the most sensitive, who are the ones capable of nurturing ecologies of care not based on power and manipulation. The question of the evil of coercive power has been with me since I was a child. Coercive power is the root of all evil. Those who are capable of resorting to coercive power on a regular basis are the ones destroying and killing the entire planet. There is infinite timeless wisdom in the social norm against the emergence of any social power gradients. When civilisations erase that norm, unimaginable suffering unfolds. Autistic people often make sacred commitments to themselves at a young age to minimise cognitive dissonance. When we make sacred commitments to other people we often learn that not everyone honours their commitments, or rather we notice how many others seem to go through life without any genuinely sacred commitments or firm convictions. In the modern socially hyper-competitive world experience with the practice of de-powered deliberative dialogue is very limited. Life without sacred commitments is experienced as empty and meaningless. The religion of Homo economicus systematically generates lost souls, searching for meaning without a solid foundation that allows meaning to be found. Co-creating ecologies of care Sacred commitments based on a basis of deep mutual trust and shared values are the foundation of all healthy cultures. De-powered dialogue to deepen shared understanding is the tool to maintain and evolve commitments on an ongoing basis, along the way deepening love, compassion and mutual trust in a virtuous cycle, even through the most difficult times. All indigenous cultures know this. This is also what Māori culture is gifting to the world in these difficult times, which humans collectively have inflicted on Gaia in their culturally generated ignorance and arrogance. Peaceful protest and intersectional solidarity against all elite attempts to consolidate power Never handing over framing and interpretative powers with respect to indigenous rights to modern big government authorities Intersectional solidarity across indigenous rights movements, the neurodiversity movement, and the disability rights movement is at the core of healing from the cultural cancer that has caused the metacrisis. This is not theory, this is consistent with our lived experiences in depowered egalitarian worker coops. De-powered dialogue, omnidirectional learning, and consensus based decisions shape our daily practice. This experience was the first part of my healing in a world dominated by the religion of homo economicus.  Hunter-gatherers also engage in deliberative dialogue and reach decisions by consensus. It is beautiful. This is the art of living at human scale, as cultural organisms. De-powered deliberative dialogues in a safe environment co-created by shared commitments allow us walk each others minds. In these dialogues we share what think, how we think, and what we believe in. We can also do this in writing. The important part is the commitment to ongoing dialogue, to share our inner worlds with each other. Of course all of this is completely incompatible with the religion of homo economicus. Yet this sharing is what our nervous systems evolved for! It is no surprise that many Autistic people are continuously operating at or beyond their emotional limits. Furthermore, the more time we spend stuck in the digital world, separated by “interfaces”, the more the essential ability to extend deep trust has become an increasingly rare gift in our time. Our nervous systems are deeply connected. We are embodied spirits, everything is connected. Interfaces limit our humanity. They are non-living anthropocentric machines. We evolved to be fully present with each other. This is what we know and feel deep down in our hearts. Co-creating ecologies of care is sacred work. We can only do it together. Onwards! Leave a comment The inability to think hierarchically is the ability to think and live relationally November 18, 2024November 18, 2024 Jorn Bettin foundational, Invitation Many Autistic people have great difficulties to think of the world in hierarchical ways. From what we know about our evolutionary path as humans, this is a reflection of innate human collaborative cultural capabilities in combination with a much reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance on an ongoing basis, which in turn can be traced to uncommon sensitivity profiles that fall outside the bell curve of hypernormativity. Traumatised Autistic peopleAutistic cultureUnderstanding a cultural organism as a set of relationshipsUnderstanding the modern social worldWhere to from here?Human cultural adaptivity When Autists learn about the social expectations that are attached to participating in and operating in hierarchically organised structures of social power, we have difficulty comprehending that such structures are considered acceptable. We are consciously aware of the pain and the potential we harm we can cause by exerting social power over others, as well the pain and cognitive dissonance that we experience when authorities impose arbitrarily demands on us that are incompatible with our unique individual sensitivity profiles. Within the cultural frame of internalised ableism, the Autistic reluctance to exert social power over others is interpreted as a social deficit, i.s. as an inability to be entrusted with so called “leadership” responsibilities, and at the same time, the Autistic reluctance to submit to arbitrary social power is interpreted as a social deficit, i.e. as non-compliance, as disagreeableness, and as disrupting the “natural” social order. This explains why in the context of some concrete social situations Autistic people are dismissed as being “weak or incompetent leaders”, and in other social contexts and situations the same Autistic people are dismissed and punished for being “aloof, arrogant, insensitive, and inappropriately competitive”. In many cases, both conclusions are completely misguided. Instead, Autistic people are much better understood as vital parts of the cultural immune system of the human species. In the modern world Autistic people are well positioned to reimagine healthier collective ways of being and much healthier, human scale egalitarian cultural organisms. The modern world is dominated by the state religion of Homo Economicus, in which the majority of people experience social hierarchies as a “law of nature”, justified as needed by correspondingly culturally biased evidence from disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology, or Western psychology. The state religion of Homo Economicus is an outgrowth of a cultural heritage with roots in misguided anthropocentric interpretations of cultural frames found at the core of monotheistic Abrahamic religions. These interpretations have unfortunately risen to great heights in over the course of colonial and neocolonial history. Traumatised Autistic people Within the modern world, hypersensitive Autistic people are traumatised from a very young age. In particular all children are exposed in Homo Economicus from a very young age, by well intentioned parents and educators, before we learn anything substantial about Gaia and the living world. This is possibly the most cruel, dehumanising, and life denying part of the modern world.  Especially if such early exposure to Homo Economicus is combined with social power dynamics in patriarchal and otherwise abusive family systems, children are severely traumatised. In such a context all children are at great risk of developing harmful trauma coping mechanisms, and this of course includes Autistic children. Due to the unusual baseline sensitivity profiles and reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance of Autistic children, it makes sense that traumatised Autistic children are more likely than other children to develop a deep distrust of all humans, to the point where they become unable to extend deep trust to anyone, including their closest family members. Such highly traumatised Autistic children end up completely isolated. Their coping mechanism can be understood in the same way as the harmful coping mechanisms exhibited by traumatised people who are not Autistic, including bullying and extreme attempts at exerting control over family members, and thereby perpetuating inter-generational trauma. Autistic people are no less and no more likely than others to perpetuate trauma, and those who do, tend to differ from other abusers in terms of their reduced ability to maintain cognitive dissonance. This means their controlling agenda is completely open. Usually their desire for social control is limited to their immediate family system, and does not extend to the wider social sphere. Much more often, due to their unusual sensitivity profiles, reduced inability to maintain cognitive dissonance, refusal to participate in social games in wider society, as well as refusal to submit to arbitrary unjustifiable demands from social authorities, Autistic people end up at the receiving end of bullying and other forms of abuse. The level of early childhood trauma experienced by many Autistic people can severely impact their ability to extend trust to others and develop intimate relationships. Luckily this has started to change since the invention of the Internet, which has enabled Autistic people worldwide to connect and learn from each other. The Internet enabled many of those who were unable to relate to culturally “well adjusted” people to find, connect, and develop lifelong relationships based on compatible sensitivity profiles. Sadly some positive developments have been compromised by the rise of profit-oriented commercial social media in the public sphere, with all its well known polarising and traumatising effects, including the active and deeply misguided encouragement to develop “super-human scale” social networks of “friends”. Many Autistic people can’t help but viscerally feel the trauma and the pain they see, cutting right through all the layers of internalised ableism that others may have developed as a protective shield to cope in a cruel and dehumanising social world. Our compassion with all living beings allows us to nurture unique relationships, and heal communities in ways that that have been suppressed and forgotten in hypernormative, life denying cultures. Autistic culture In recent years, thanks to innate reluctance or inability to participate in social games, Autistic people have shifted and are increasingly shifting towards genuinely human-scale online spaces for cosmolocal community co-creation, peer support, and egalitarian relationship building on Autistic terms, beyond the influence of the dominant culture of Homo Economicus®. The Autistic inability to think hierarchically turns out to be the ability to think and live entirely relationally. We see this in the level of interest and growing participation in the human scale Ecologies of Care support model, and in the growing worldwide interest in the egalitarian NeurodiVenture worker coop model for engaging with the external social world. In the hypernormative culture that dominates the modern world, it is hard to explain to non-Autistic people what the immersion in healthy Autistic culture feels like and what the development of healthy sacred lifetime relationships between Autistic people feels like. In mainstream society people don’t understand how Autistic people support each other, love each other, and care for each other in ways that go far beyond the culturally impaired neuronormative imagination. NeurodiVerse : human scale cultures created by neurodiversity within the human species(a) the universe of NeurodiVentures(b) the set of all neurodivergent people Our evolving web of relationships, mutual aid, and peer support initiatives is best understood in terms of emergent Ecologies of Care beyond the human. There is the saying that “It takes a village to raise a child.” The Autistic Authentic Autonomous translation of this saying is “For an Autistic person it takes a human scale Autistic family to feel loved and alive.” Most Autists are not born into healthy Autistic families. We have to co-create our families in our own space and time. In a healthy culture Autistic children are assisted in co-creating their unique Autistic families, but in our modern civilisation this cultural knowledge has been lost and is suppressed. In many indigenous cultures children with unique qualities are recognised, given adult mentors with similarly unique qualities, and grow up to fulfill unique roles in their local community, connected to others with unique knowledge and insights, perhaps even in other communities. If we are embedded in an ecology of care, we can thrive and share the pain and the joy of life. Understanding a cultural organism as a set of relationships In Autistic culture we understand a human scale cultural organism as a set of relationships, recognising that all humans have cognitive and emotional limits. We therefore intuitively know and deeply appreciate that small is beautiful. There is a human scale that is comprehensible, intimately integrated into Gaia. Beyond this scale, we intuitively understand that cultural institutions amount to anthropocentric hubris, especially if such institutions are shaped by permanent hierarchical structures of social power.  As humans we have the ability to appreciate the interdependencies and the beauty of the diversity of the unique and complementary relationships within every healthy cultural organism, including all the richness of interdependencies with other cultural organisms. All healthy relationships contribute to the wellbeing of the cultural organism. There are no permanent social power differentials, and no particular relationship is more important than any other. Furthermore, in a healthy cultural organism, there is a reasonable backup for any relationship that is potentially critical for group survival. The self is a product of relationships. Anyone who has ever felt completely isolated knows this. Then the world shrinks to the relationship with oneself. But no one is completely isolated. We are all part of Gaia, in relationship with Gaia. Imprisonment in isolation, including isolation from Gaia, is an unimaginably cruel form of torture, a violation of a sacred human right. Social isolation in an urbanised environment is much worse than social isolation in a natural environment with access to plants and animals. In fact, being integrated into Gaia is a sacred right that applies to all living beings. So-called “individual” wellbeing is a derivative of the health of all the human and non-human relationships a person is involved in. What really counts is relational health and communal health at human scale. Understanding the modern social world The modern social world we live in can only be understood from the margins, because the very notion of sense making has been confused. This is no surprise, because our capacity for sense making operates at human scale. When a culture has destroyed the collective ability for deliberation at human scale, life is experienced as incoherent from the individual perspective, which is subconsciously attempting to generate coherence at human scale. When that process fails, nothing seems to make sense anymore.  “The Con : Fusion of Debord & Orwell” into which everyone alive today in the modern world was born, was succinctly articulated in 1986. There is not much constructive to be learned from a growing cancerous mass that is destroying all cultures. All we can do is analyse the symptoms of the cancer, i.e. we can analyse and describe the dissonance between theory and practice of the institutions of our society. But this ability to recognise and describe cancer is far from being an ability to “cure” it. Below are three sources that describe different aspects of the cancer that are perpetuating paradigmatic cultural inertia. The legal engineering behind the power of capital, explained by Matt Kennard. The government machine that backs capital with raw violence explained by Jeffrey Sachs. The cultural diseases that emerge if the limitations of human scale are not understood as the sacred bedrock of cultural organisms explained by George Tsakraklides. George Tsakraklides does not make any mention of scale, but accurately describes what happens when anthropocentric hubris comes to dominate globally: The idea that a small group of individuals can form a “government” that represents the best interests of its people, has been one of the biggest leaps of faith humanity ever took. Arguably, as our societies grew, we had no choice but to form these governments ••• The pooling of resources in practice often meant the accumulation of these resources within the hands of the few ••• Governments significantly expedited the exhaustion of resources, widened inequality to previously unimaginable levels, and alienated almost every citizen, who sooner or later felt the cold, heartless hand of indifference and discrimination from the very people who had been elected to “represent” them ••• It doesn’t take much effort to argue that government represents neither people, nor a privileged class of humans. It represents, defends, and protects the entity behind every single one of humanity’s decisions: money and wealth ••• Despite being an abstract, mechanistic, non-DNA based entity, money behaves very much like a life form: it too needs to secure its future existence, which it does by pursuing profit. Through the creation of money, humanity unintentionally gave rise to a new life-form which eventually parasitized it.  The role of government in this symbiosis has been, and remains, to be a puppet.  ••• Like any biological life form, they (governments) will do anything to survive.  It was a mistake to create institutions which attained so much power and autonomy that they eventually became super predators of society.  Both government and money behave as selfish life forms which need to survive and procreate.  The popular perception that governments exist to “maintain order” is as false as the definition of order itself.  Order of what? For whose benefit? At what cost?  Order is open to multiple interpretations, rules and prohibitions which become vehicles for societal control.  Order is the favorite word of fascists •••The most dangerous aspect of all forms of government and power is that they despise change.  They want to keep everything the same: the same economy, the same players, the same mistakes.  This is how they ensure that their sponsors will not be unseated from positions of power.  The downside of this is that the most serious existential threats are only ever addressed at the level of pantomime theatrics •••If anything, governments are effectively Reality Management Authorities, servicing the need of the most powerful to maintain social narratives which control the production and distribution of wealth.  Governments are the visible manifestations of the psychonomy, enabling the most controlling, psychotic and unstable personalities to thrive and attain leadership positions ••• A successful leader today is more of an ideological chameleon than a mission-driven decision-maker.  Their most critical skill is masterfully dancing around the bullets of the psychonomy’s crossfire, pretending to be a peace maker ••• By managing people and agendas and keeping the wild jungles of the power ecosystem from closing in on them, politicians can secure their tenures as sitting representatives of the corporatocracy •••Stubbornly protecting their corporate bosses, governments simply hasten and amplify recurring convulsive episodes of economic and social seizure.  The wealthy elites have been consulted.  The PR agencies have been briefed.  And the casualties have already been selected, before the guns are fired •••Governments can easily be classified as existential threats.  Their dithering, inertia, inaction and procrastination create all of the horrifying conditions for small, once addressable issues to grow and one day become terminal, impassable predicaments.  Because of their inability to handle change even when it knocks on their door, RMAs are incapable of addressing the worst type of change: an existential threat.  In the face of a polycrisis, RMAs will typically avoid, deflect, distract and postpone, while at the same time weaponize the crisis for propaganda.  As looming threats grow, the government will spend all of its energy to do what it does best: reality management •••The priority of politics during an existential threat has always been to create, curate, and broadcast narratives which regurgitate the lies this civilisation desperately needs to keep calm and carry on living its fantasies.  When a collapse begins to register, it is already too late. This is because collapse is only the very last stage in a long process; a stage which, however, is irreversible: it can only be observed and endured.  As the crisis enters free-fall, the RMA goes quiet: leaders literally disappear, retreating into their pre-built bunkers and golden parachutes. Social services vanish, silence falls across the political spectrum, and the public is abandoned.  The government who we all thought would come to our rescue, was indeed merely a glorified PR machine ••• Following so many failed COP meetings attended by all these RMAs, it would be delusional to nurture even the slightest bit of hope in any government to solve the existential threat of the climate crisis and civilisational overshoot •••From the much larger Gaia perspective, authority and power are meaningless human constructs. The only authority and power on this planet belong to nature, and physics. I agree with the conclusion. To sum up WEIRD paradigmatic inertia in one sentence, I frame the “iron law of social design” as follows:  The universal iron law of social design: everything is allowed to change – as long as the established structure of social power is maintained or strengthened. I have witnessed this dystopian hypernormative law play out in many corporations and large government departments. Where to from here? Humans are part of nature. We have evolved to operate, survive, and thrive as cultural organisms at human scale, especially in challenging / marginal environments. We still have this capacity, but it has been eclipsed by a global cultural cancer. So, when cultural reforms are futile, what options do we have for re-booting healthy cultural organisms? The cancer can not be reformed, but there are many little sprouts of new human scale ways of being emerging in the cultural compost heap. The dying process of a cultural cancer is the unavoidable metamorphosis we are undergoing.  Some of the inmates of dying institutions may consciously choose to jointly exit, and metamorphise into a life affirming organism, or they may eventually be forced to leave involuntarily by the social circumstances. In the former scenario the emerging human scale organism may, amongst other things, offer palliative care for the dying institution from the outside – i.e. assistance with exit path for the remaining inmates, alongside the provision of new life regenerating gifts as part of Gaia. This is a kind of life affirming logic that is not accessible via the dystopian logic of Homo Economicus.  Biologists who have not read broadly enough about our cultural evolutionary past, i.e. biological and cultural anthropology, tend to extrapolate from other primates, and arrive at the confusion of humans with Homo Economicus, ending up discounting human imagination and the innate collaborative tendencies that distinguish us from other primates. The most compelling biological metaphor I have found to date to gain a sense of what might play out in the realm of culture is the metamorphosis of a developing insect. Life is fractal.  Metamorphosis is one of the most profound restructurings of a biological organism. As humans we are far too limited in our abilities to foresee exactly how such a pattern maps and is already playing out in terms of human cultural organisms. However, transposing the steps of metamorphosis onto modern human cultures suggests a path that includes:  A non-growing developmental stage for human scale groups to seek a safe space, and as needed construct a protective physical/cultural shelter for the group. Internal collaborative niche construction to develop new internal functional structures and external functions that are adaptive to the anticipated cosmolocal ecological conditions going forward. Cultural reproduction. The final stage would be the adult, or ‘imago’ form of a human scale group, where new external and internal functions are fully operational, and able to feed the group, including reproduction of the group culture. This would not need to involve physical reproduction, but rather knowledge and skills transfer to other cosmolocally related human scale group, and especially groups within the same bioregion experiencing comparable ecological conditions. As established super-human scale institutions decay and become unreliable, not dissimilar to what is the case in many so-called “less developed” countries, individuals and small groups will inevitably stop entrusting their entire livelihoods and lives to such institutions, and gravitate towards some expression of the rough pattern outlined above.  Of course we have no way of predicting when and where such developments will emerge. What we can do is to offer education to prepare communities for this possibility in a life affirming way, reiterating what Joseph Tainter observed in his seminal work in 1988. For the majority of an oppressed and impoverished population so-called “collapse” of dysfunctional and resource intensive institutions can be a liberating experience. This of course assumes that communities are educated and equipped with locally adapted subsistence level life skills. This presents WEIRD countries with an overdue opportunity for radically new forms of cosmolocal collaboration with communities in the Global South. As part of the global metacrisis that Gaia is facing, the populations in WEIRD countries will increasingly experience a need for education in subsistence level life skills – a kind of proactive “development” assistance in reverse, and a re-balancing of the extreme levels of global and in-country social inequities and injustices that dominate the entire modern world. Metamorphosis back to human scale can be imagined as a cultural development stage for global intersectional and neurodivergent solidarity beyond the human, undoing some of the harm perpetuated in throughout the colonial and neocolonial era, at least for the generations alive today. Human cultural adaptivity Our best bet is to relearn and remember everything we can muster about the cultural adaptivity that is at our disposal at human scale.  This requires the kind of deep and profound shift in trust from established institutions towards mutual aid and the community co-creation at human scale that indigenous Mexican scholar Yuria Celidwen talks about:  We need commitment, we need community. We need to create spaces of trust. But for that, there’s tremendous work that we need to be doing. But I don’t think that any of that work will be possible, should we not have that commitment–that commitment that no matter how challenging and tremendously difficult it will be to reckon with these narratives and to dismantle these narratives. Because seeing the horror in the eye of all these narratives that we live by comes with tremendous understanding. It will leave us very fragile, very vulnerable, and most, of course, are not willing to do that, because we don’t feel safe. But if we are able to stand the heat and create these spaces, if we commit to do this kind of work for the benefit of the planet, then we may be able to learn that we can fly. This shift in trust is already happening outside established institutions. It can only happen via self-selected and self-organising groups. I sense this is what we are already starting to experience on the intersectional margins of modern societies. As part of co-creating health cultural organisms we are uncovering and documenting knowledge that is useful for human scale groups, engaging in omnidirectional learning between emerging theories and cosmolocal practices, learning by doing, and heading into an uncertain but much more life-affirming collective future at human scale, sharing all our joys and pains of life in ways that have been systematically denied by the life destroying logic of Homo Economicus. The following clip from an Adam Curtis’ interview has aged well. Certainties we can count on: Humans have cognitive and emotional limits. Implications: Small is beautiful. There is a human scale that is comprehensible, intimately integrated into Gaia. Beyond this scale, cultural institutions amount to anthropocentric hubris.  The last human won’t be a capitalist. This list is evolving, contribute your observations at the next NeurodiVerse Days of Intersectional Solidarity! There is no recipe book. There are only timeless life affirming human scale values and our innate capacity for relational thinking. Onwards! Leave a comment Healing – Resisting internalised ableism November 10, 2024November 12, 2024 Jorn Bettin education, healthcare 🔊 Listen In the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) world we live in what philosopher Guy Debord attempted to describe as The Society of the Spectacle. The reality presented to us via the media and public social media has been engineered to fit the exacting standards of Homo Economicus®. All the people alive today in Westernised countries, i.e. all the people in WEIRD countries and in the countries aspiring to WEIRD standards, have been born into The WEIRD Spectacle of internalised ableism.  Internalised ableismIndoctrinationHealthy human scale cultural developmentInstitutionalised learning disabilityFull economic eclipseHealing Internalised ableism The less WEIRD a country, the lower the fidelity of The Spectacle, and the more there is still some room for life beyond The Spectacle. I have lived all my life in The Spectacle, in the ruins of the WEIRD empire. I also call it the WEIRDT empire: Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic Theatre. Everything in this theatre is about perception – there is very little substance or connection to the biophysical and ecological context outside the theatre. The institutions of the WEIRDT empire pretend that all aspects of life can be categorised and understood in terms of normality – by the hump of the bell curve. But the living planet does not conform to anthropocentric normality, it is chaotic, it is beautifully and awesomely diverse. Like many neurodivergent people, I am highly sensitised to the language people use, in particular to the semantic possibility space that is created and bounded by the use of specific terms and by the conscious avoidance of other terms. In WEIRD politics the language of economic growth and war dominates. Growth economics is a euphemism for neocolonialism, genocide, and ecocide. Only 100 years ago, barely anyone was writing about the “need” for “economic growth”. The most deadly wars today are economic wars. Social inequalities, in particular unequal access to high quality healthcare and lack of access to healthy ways of life result in a rise in chronic diseases, a several-fold increase in the risks of global pandemics, and in the premature death of millions. My Autistic mind compels me to reduce cognitive dissonance. If I leave cognitive dissonance to fester, it promptly generates migraines or other symptoms of physical disease. Via my work, usually in the transdisciplinary context of small groups of people with complementary domain specific expertise, I have learned to ask clarifying questions and to ask for examples, and zero in on potential misunderstandings and ambiguities. This co-creates bridges of shared understanding across discipline and domain boundaries, which are essential for anyone who attempts to do anything that (re)connects us to Gaia, i.e. to the sacred living world beyond The WEIRD Spectacle.  I was fortunate to have been exposed to the foundations of logic, i.e. the foundations of philosophy, and then studied mathematical thinking tools for four years before becoming exposed to the commercial world of The Spectacle. Indoctrination By the time I was born, the anthropocentric WEIRD Spectacle manifested in terms of neocolonialism. It is fascinating to look back and reflect on how effective the indoctrination is. I grew up as a WEIRD alien, immersed in less WEIRD cultures within the ruins of the British Empire. This left cracks in my WEIRD indoctrination, and later it helped me to put my education to good use in terms of critical thinking tools and habits. George Orwell had a somewhat similar background to mine in an earlier time. The above biographical clip is worthwhile listening to – ignore the embedded cringe-inducing commercial promotion. The conclusion is directly relevant to our times. Once we appreciate that even our “educated” Western scientific worldview is not free from ideological bias, we can develop a better conceptual model of how individual and collective human belief systems and related bodies of knowledge evolve. It is helpful to distinguish the following categories of beliefs and related knowledge: Beliefs based on scientific theories backed by empirical evidence that we are intimately familiar with. Such beliefs may be affected by paradigmatic bias and the quality or bias inherent in the supporting evidence. We need to be cognisant of corresponding blind spots in our understanding of the world when applying such beliefs in our reasoning. Only a small minority of our beliefs fall into this category. Beliefs based on scientific theories backed by empirical evidence that we are not intimately familiar with. Such beliefs may be affected by paradigmatic bias and the quality or bias inherent in the supporting evidence. We have no idea of the potential blind spots in our understanding of the world when applying such beliefs in our reasoning. In the few cases where the theories have been developed by trusted friends and colleagues within our personal competency network, we can decide to rely on their understanding of the limits of applicability and potential blind spots. If we are “educated”, a sizeable minority of our beliefs fall into this category. Beliefs based on personal experiences and observations. We know that no human can maintain more than 150 relationships with other people, and that all our assumptions about the lives and needs of humans are based on the very small set of people that we relate to. For those who identify as autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category. By definition, we don’t understand all the people that we “don’t relate to”. Thus, making any decisions that potentially affect the lives of many hundred to several billion people without explicit consent of all those potentially affected (a daily occurrence in government institutions and corporations), must be considered the pinnacle of human ignorance. Beliefs that represent explicit social agreements between specific people regarding communication and collaboration. Such sacred commitments can be verbal or in writing, and they only scale up to the limited numbers of relationships that we can maintain. As needed we can jointly update these commitments to reflect evolving needs or constraints in the wider ecology we are embedded in. For those who identify as Autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category, especially agreements with family members, friends, and colleagues. In hierarchically structured societies, agreements such as laws issued by regional or national authorities apply to large groups of people, and by necessity have been developed with limited input from those who are affected. Such agreements invariably cause untold harm that for the most part remains invisible to the authorities. Humans did not evolve to live in hierarchically structured super-human scale societies. Pretending that we can maintain such structures without causing untold harm is a form of anthropocentric hubris. Beliefs based on what others have told us and what we have been encouraged to believe by parents, teachers, and friends, … and politicians and advertisers, including beliefs that we have absorbed from our social environment subconsciously, i.e. beliefs for which we can’t recall the origin. For those who do not identify as Autistic, the majority of beliefs held may fall into this category. All categories of human beliefs are associated with some level of uncertainty regarding the validity and applicability to a specific context at hand. A belief in the universally competitive nature of humans clearly falls into the fifth category. When beliefs related to neoliberal ideology are reflected in laws (category 4. above), they are internalised as cultural norms by large parts of the population, and when the externalities of hyper-competitive profit maximising behaviour hit with full force, Homo Economicus® has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was employed for 13 years before I could no longer bear to be part of The Spectacle of the corporate world, which is an Orwellian world of social perception management. The Spectacle is not survivable for sensitive neurodivergent people who are unable to maintain “quasi unlimited” levels of cognitive dissonance on an ongoing basis. WEIRD indoctrination and enculturation in cruelty and violence goes very deep. I remember being taught at home and in school in the 1970s that animals can’t have “thoughts”, and that any feelings or consciousness they may have are not in any way comparable to human lived experiences. This was taught to us as “science” in biology classes. To top it off, in middle school we learned how to dissect dead frogs and we were given live laboratory mice to conduct experiments with. It tells us something about so-called WEIRD “normality” that such experiences remain etched into our memories, and that we can’t ever unsee or unlearn them.  Deep down we know we are part of Gaia. This is why we enjoy immersing ourselves in the natural world. This is why we are able to build mutual trust with non-human animals, including wild animals. Living beings recognise each other as being part of the sacred cycle of life. We know that each living being enjoys being alive and enjoys exploring the world. Of course as humans we most deeply relate to animals that are roughly human scale – it is at that scale that we can communicate, and, if we take the time, build genuine relationships across species, from domesticated animals to wild birds, octopuses, fish, and mammals of all kinds.  When animals eat other animals, it is only to cover their basic survival needs. Humans have the same inhibitions. We evolved to know intuitively that all lives and all our relationships are sacred. The human capacity for culture and spoken language evolved on top of this biological backdrop. This is something that to this day is not part of the WEIRD indoctrination system – because it clashes with the WEIRD neocolonial narrative of technological progress.  The WEIRD indoctrination system makes sure that all children are indoctrinated in Homo Economicus® from a very young age, before we learn anything substantial about Gaia and the living world. This is possibly the most cruel, dehumanising, and life denying part of WEIRD cultures.  The pill of Homo Economicus® is sweetened by punishing children with rewards for compliance. In this way children learn to collaborate only to compete.  “Pay for merit, pay for what you get, reward performance. Sounds great, can’t be done. Unfortunately it can not be done, on short range. After 10 years perhaps, 20 years, yes. The effect is devastating. People must have something to show, something to count. In other words, the merit system nourishes short-term performance. It annihilates long-term planning. It annihilates teamwork. People can not work together. To get promotion you’ve got to get ahead. By working with a team, you help other people. You may help yourself equally, but you don’t get ahead by being equal, you get ahead by being ahead. Produce something more, have more to show, more to count. Teamwork means work together, hear everybody’s ideas, fill in for other people’s weaknesses, acknowledge their strengths. Work together. This is impossible under the merit rating / review of performance system. People are afraid. They are in fear. They work in fear. They can not contribute to the company as they would wish to contribute. This holds at all levels. But there is something worse than all of that. When the annual ratings are given out, people are bitter. They can not understand why they are not rated high. And there is a good reason not to understand. Because I could show you with a bit of time that it is purely a lottery.” – W Edwards Deming (1984) If we learn about Homo Economicus® before we are encouraged to listen deeply to our intuition, and before we learn about Gaia and collaborative ecological niche construction within and between species, then we are primed to view any other narrative that deviates from or that contradicts Homo Economicus® with suspicion. In the commercial digital world of Homo Economicus®, where the very means of communication have been seized by corporations, and where universities have become dependent on corporate funding, it has become easy to sideline the growing body of scientific evidence that contradicts Homo Economicus®.  Since we are immersed in information overload, evidence such as what we know about the innate collaborative inclinations and sense of fairness of human toddlers and about the pivotal role of highly egalitarian societies in the evolution of the human capacity for language and culture does not even need to be hidden. It is completely sufficient for algorithms and institutions to deprioritise such evidence. I am learning that not only have humans lived in highly egalitarian human scale bands for most of 300,000 years, but also that such bands maintained ongoing collaborative and dynamically evolving relationships with other bands across large bioregions, routinely coming together for omni-directional learning. Amongst other things such gatherings also allowed new groups to form. Apparently it was common for families or individuals to join another group. Important to note the absence of a hierarchical super-structure between groups, and the dynamism of ongoing relationships between groups. All of this fits well with my own experience with egalitarian human scale worker coops, and with the interest from other small groups of neurodivergent and disabled people in adopting a similar model, including ongoing collaboration between groups. We still have access to all our innate collaborative capabilities. If we care to listen to our guts, hearts, and minds, we can (re)learn everything we need for co-creating ecologies of care beyond the human. The ripples of collaborative niche construction and intersectional solidarity are spreading. More and more small cosmo-local bands of marginalised people are coming together to catalyse intersectional solidarity. Actually, the WEIRD empire is not in control. Gaia has a perfect 10,000 year track record of clamping down on anthropocentric empire building attempts, making room for new forms of life to emerge from the compost heap. She is probably asking herself in some planetary language that is beyond human comprehensibility: Can this species recover from cultural cancer? Data from climate science and biodiversity research gives us a glimpse of Gaia’s language. Healthy human scale cultural development At least some of the developmental patterns of cells and organs within insects seem to translate to the developmental stages and metamorphosis of healthy human cultures. The world of insect metamorphosis is amazing. The big cycle of life within Gaia is fractal, very similar phenomena reoccur at very different scale and in different contexts. In this case patterns at level of cells and organs within a metamorphosing insect seem to reoccur at the level of human scale cultural development. The more I learn about this topic and weave it together with anthropological evidence, and with experiences from worker coops of neurodivergent and otherwise disabled people, the more I get the impression that Homo Economicus® relates to a cancer that has arrested the development of human cultural organisms at the larval stage, resulting in a perpetual production of growth hormones.  Humans need to (re)learn how to stop perpetuating hierarchically structured systems of social control, striving for infinite growth like a cancer. We also need to (re)learn how to reproduce and evolve peacefully, along the lines of what we know about the ongoing lifetime collaborative relationships and some of the amazing conflict resolution strategies practiced within and between hunter gatherer bands.  The global mono-cult is an empire that has the developmental maturity of a teenager. An individual human that keeps eating like a teenager will become morbidly obese, develop chronic diseases, and end up dying prematurely.  The Pentagon Wars is the favourite movie of one of my former Autistic colleagues who spent many years in large government departments. This movie, which is based on a true story, is a good illustration of the teenage stage of cultural development in WEIRD societies. Given all the deadly wars that are in progress and that have been stoked for decades, this movie is too painfully close to reality for me to genuinely enjoy. We need to learn how to deactivate the growth hormone of Homo Economicus®, which is capital constructed as interest-bearing debt. Gaia is showing us all the examples we need for fully rejoining the sacred cycle of life.  The challenge of deactivating the growth hormone of Homo Economicus® is not a new one. It is an instance of the same Homo Empire® challenge faced by the inmates of the warring states in what is now China over 2,000 years ago. Hence my appreciation for the timeless wisdom embedded in Daoist philosophy. All indigenous cultures honour Gaia. They all operate on time horizons that span at least 7 generations into the future, and draw on collective knowledge and wisdom that extends at least 7 generations into the past. How does this compare to the WEIRD addiction to quarterly results and infinite growth? Every human is a uniquely valuable repository of lived experience and insights.Dialogues are uniquely valuable, they allow us to walk each others minds, and via clarifying questions and other thinking tools, we converge on shared understanding and shared mental models for specific domains or experiences. Linear language is a poor communication tool, but dialogue transforms it into a very powerful communication and collaboration tool.  Of course dialogues only catalyse shared understanding when sharing freely and honestly, and it fails miserably as soon as one or both parties have any hidden self-serving agenda – which is the default in the world of Homo Economicus®. This is why I am incapable of buying into the competitive “logic” of markets. Institutionalised learning disability Institutionalised social power is the privilege of not needing to learn, it leads to collective stupidity, it is a form of collective learning disability. Markets invariably generate collective stupidity, because by definition participants have incentives not to share unlimited amounts of information. By definition, unconstrained markets are the anti-thesis of collaborative niche construction. There are encouraging signs in some less WEIRD, and more communally oriented societies. By WEIRD standards Japan is an economic basket case, with a shrinking and ageing population, and a GDP growth that is probably averaging around zero over the last 20 years. We need to hear more stories from the less WEIRD world to understand what modern life can be like in a context of shrinking economic busyness, shrinking population, and correspondingly shrinking ecological footprint. Such examples illustrate how the growth hormone of Homo Economicus® can be deactivated. The referenced example also illustrates the significance of small scale autonomous local communal decision making, which is the opposite of the centralised models that still operate in the ruins of the British Empire. There is no need at all for glorious leaders. Acknowledging the extent of the cultural cancer is going to be hard for some people to swallow. Patriotism and professionalism are key ingredients of fascism. Too many professionals have “only been doing their job” and have been following “orders” or “best practices” for too long, without listening deeply to their innate ethical compass, which has been systematically and thoroughly suppressed by the WEIRD indoctrination system. The biggest fears of Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled people relate to unmet healthcare needs, their work environment, their parents, and disrespect by healthcare professionals. Data from our participatory research shows the large overlap and the intersectionality between Autistic communities, and the LGBTQIA+ and Disabled communities. Results from our survey on psychological safety and mental wellbeing indicate that the biggest fears of Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+, and Disabled children – and especially those who also belong to cultural minorities, relate to classmates, parents, and teachers. 97% indicate often or always having anxiety, and 80% indicate often or always feeling depressed. Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve over the course of our lives. 85% of neurodivergent adults often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, and over 60% often or always feel disrespected and unsafe. Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by alignment between our sensitivity profiles and the ecology of care we are embedded in (or not). Advocating for a “better” command and control hierarchy is no solution, it only sows the seeds for yet another empire building attempt. Collectively we can work towards revoking the social license for maintaining and strengthening life destroying powered-up institutions. Sensitive Daoist thinkers saw this clearly over 2,000 years ago. The documentaries by British film maker Adam Curtis are also excellent educational resources for those who have the stomach to face the reality of toxic cultural inertia. Full economic eclipse In-depth discussions of Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation and Century of the Self should be part of every high school curriculum, and they should be mandatory menu items in the curriculum of medical schools and all other institutions entrusted with any aspect of human wellbeing. Acknowledging reality is only the first step. Economic eclipse is a product of many decades of WEIRD indoctrination and propaganda. Gaia is nowhere to be seen: Economic eclipse has been causing untold harm for decades, and it inevitably ends in economic collapse. As we are collectively moving out of full economic eclipse, the beauty of Gaia as well as the delusion of hypernormality is revealed. Sobering up is going to be painful for the addicts who remain in denial. Capital is not a hand that feeds, it is a drug that kills. Gaia has nurtured and fed humans for 300,000 years.We need commitment, we need community. We need to create spaces of trust. But for that, there’s tremendous work that we need to be doing. But I don’t think that any of that work will be possible, should we not have that commitment–that commitment that no matter how challenging and tremendously difficult it will be to reckon with these narratives and to dismantle these narratives. Because seeing the horror in the eye of all these narratives that we live by comes with tremendous understanding. It will leave us very fragile, very vulnerable, and most, of course, are not willing to do that, because we don’t feel safe. But if we are able to stand the heat and create these spaces, if we commit to do this kind of work for the benefit of the planet, then we may be able to learn that we can fly.– Yuria Celidwen This is the voice of Gaia, exposing the life denying doctrine of Homo Economicus®: We deeply appreciate the wonder of life, and we can clearly see the global mono-cult for what it is. We are fully human. We are alive. Knowing a bit about all of the above may help you to remain sane, and to see, enjoy, and where possible, nurture the growing cracks in The WEIRD Spectacle. Most importantly, we must acknowledge that we can not regain sobriety alone, in self-isolation, and we can only relearn to be fully human at a scale that is compatible with our biological cognitive and emotional limits, neither at smaller scales, nor at larger scales. Healing Healthy cultural organisms do not consist of: Isolated individuals Atomised nuclear families Incomprehensibly complex groups and institutions The world in reality is a beautifully interconnected world, and it’s interconnected through many many layers. It’s interconnected through consciousness, which is why we are spiritual beings in human form. But the plants outside my window are spiritual beings in plant form. But the plant of the lychee is in lychee form, and the tree of the mango is in mango form. They are just different expressions of one spiritual interconnected consciousness in the world.I’ve studied quantum theory. We realised that the particles in the world are really not the basic reality. The basic reality is potential and energy, and it’s only when you try and measure it, then it shows up as a particle, or it shows up as a wave, but the reality really is that which connects, the non-separability problem. My PhD thesis was on non-separation, non-locality, and quantum theory. We knew [this] 100 years ago in physics, and yet an obsolete physics of more than 100 years ago is being used to shape and and divide a very interconnected world. So dualism today is not just epistemologically so wrong, it is not just ontologically so wrong, it is spiritually just not the right way to think of the world, but it is now becoming a threat to human life, preventing people from living with each other in diversity with love. And that’s why we have to spread the message of non-dualism, of interconnectedness, of oneness through love, and we have to be the practice...All cultures had economies but it wasn’t the first organising principle, it was a byproduct of good living… Where did that wealth come from? It was an economy, but it was not an economy of extraction. It was not an economy of domination, it was an economy of living. If you go to the roots of the word economy, economy according to Aristotle is the art of living. Our civilisation has very deep spiritual foundations, and through spirituality you know that the diversity in the world is really different expressions of the same oneness… Let all the beings flourish… – Vandana Shiva The relational nature of the big cycle of life is obscured as long as long as we attempt to define cultural organisms as groups of people or even groups of living beings beyond the human. Wherever you are, most of the inmates at the grassroots level are humans trying their very best. Appreciate those who are able to see and attempt to widen the cracks in The WEIRD Spectacle, and tread carefully when confronted with the institutionalised internalised ableism of Homo Economicus®.  Leave a comment Understanding your Autistic child September 18, 2024September 20, 2024 Jorn Bettin education, foundational, healthcare 🔊 Listen In the current Aotearoa New Zealand Autism Guideline the existence of Autistic culture is not mentioned with a single word. Understanding Autistic people and Autistic culture is still a secondary concern. Civil society activists and child rights’ defenders from around the world are now joining together to create the Rights-Centric Education network. Some compare Autistic life in a hypernormative culture with living life in Hard Mode. We have a long way to go until Autistic culture is as acceptable as gay & lesbian culture. Understanding Autistic cultureDo we buy into the cultural narratives that surround us?Do we buy into the competitive framing of evolutionary processes?Healthy Autistic collaborative niche construction Understanding Autistic culture Understanding Autistic people and Autistic culture is still a secondary concern. A few days ago I had a look at the latest edition of the Aotearoa New Zealand Autism Guideline. Whilst the document mentions the importance of ethnic minority cultures, the existence of intersectional Autistic culture – in analogy to the cultures that exist in LGBTQIA+ communities – is not mentioned with a single word.  There are major improvements in the updated guideline since we started our campaign towards a comprehensive ban of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) and all related forms of “conversion” therapy, but the primary focus is still centred on so-called “behaviours of concern”. This puts all the social pressure on either changing the behaviour of the Autist, or on changing the local micro-environment of the Autist at home, in education, and at work. All of this is woefully inadequate to prevent a hypersensitive Autist from becoming overwhelmed, depressed, and disillusioned with life in our hyper-normative hyper-busy industrialised society. Modern societies offer only a very limited number of “socially acceptable” life paths for Autistic people. The few healthy life paths that might be viable are mostly out of reach economically for the vast majority of the population. In the 400+ page Aotearoa New Zealand Autism Guideline, the following paragraph sticks out: Autistic children and young people will need to be taught the unwritten rules of the school life, such as what to do where, when and with whom. These rules tend to change depending on the circumstances and autistic children and young people will not usually be able to generalise what they have learned to different situations. Even autistic students with less obvious support needs may not understand things that others may know intuitively. This gets close to the heart of the problem in our society. It frames the issue in terms of Autistic deficits – in the “good old” and convenient pathology paradigm! We live in a deeply troubled society where there is no consistent set of “unwritten rules of the school life”. The “rules” are not only context specific, but “the appropriate context” is usually dictated by so-called “authorities”, and these authorities are entitled to “change the written and unwritten rules” at any time, usually to protect their position of social dominance. Here is my Autistic philosophy / approach to life, which took me more than five decades of lived experience to be able to put into somewhat appropriate words: collaborative niche construction = creative collaboration committed to nurturing life, to minimising suffering beyond the human, consciously constrained by human cognitive and emotional limits, and by the biophysical limits of the Living Earth – the organism that is the source of all life, capable of joy and suffering like all other living beings. It took me over four decades to figure out that the “unwritten rules of the school life in industrialised societies” amount to: anthropocentric progress = creative collaboration to compete, unconstrained by human cognitive and emotional limits. On the one hand, as children we are taught to share and be nice to people – these are the spoken and written explicit rules, but on the other hand, the (re)actions we encounter in our social environment incrementally teach us the above “unwritten rule” of powered-up hierarchically organised so-called “civilisations”. Of course no official “autism guideline” will ever spell out the horrible unwritten rule in this clarity, because this would expose the dehumanising house of cards of this so-called “civilisation”. Autistic culture rejects the “unwritten rule” of powered-up “civilisations”. In earlier times Autists where known as Daoist philosophers etc. They were recognised as having unusual life paths that collided with the views of the dominant “authorities”, but they were not pathologised! The dominant parenting / education / indoctrination system severely traumatises and breaks the spirit of many Autists. This results in traumatised Autists who are tormented by internalised ableism. Then modern society blames these Autists for “behaviours of concern”! The trauma inflicted by the unmentionable “hidden rule” is not mentioned in any mental health guideline or in the Devil’s Sadistic Manual (DSM). I am crying as I write this, as I have read so many horror stories of lived experiences from Autistic people, and as I know how much all the Autistic people in my ecology of care are struggling. The latest Aotearoa New Zealand Autism Guideline is good example of how to use “positive” language and a behaviour-centric approach to skirt around all the fundamental social problems – which are of course political. Autistic people are now recognised to have motivations and some right to self-determination. Maybe we are human after all? But it is obvious that in many cases the assessments and judgements of professional “authorities” and care givers are the dominant perspectives. It can’t be emphasised enough that even though Autistic ways of being are diverse, this does not mean that there is no Autistic culture. Autistic people form communities. Autistic people need to be embedded in healthy Autistic culture to thrive. The cognitive dissonance caused by the “hidden rule” of powered-up civilisations is literally killing many of us – we know this from the suicide and mental health statistics. Our friends at ICARS have produced a report (data from the UK) that reveals what is actually going on in our society in terms of restraints and seclusion. There is similar data from schools in Australia gathered by Autistic activists. All of this is consistent with our global participatory research into the cultural and psychological safety of Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent children. Civil society activists and child rights’ defenders from around the world, who have been engaged in educational practice that prioritizes the rights of young people, are now joining together to create the Rights-Centric Education network to implement a so-far-not-implemented UN Proposal to establish a Rights Based Quality Assurance System for Schools, beginning with a Declaration calling for practices of education be overhauled to ensure Child Rights in Education are respected, protected, and fulfilled. Compulsory (i.e. Imposed) Education emerged in the 1700’s in an era where Children were seen as chattel, and it had to be publicly funded because it was targeting people who weren’t going to pay for an education they did not choose. Nothing much has changed in education in spite of social perceptions having evolved from seeing children as chattel, to objects of charity, to objects of rights, and finally the recognition (at least on paper, in 1989, with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) that children are the subjects of their own rights.While there has been much work done on the Right TO Education – and there is indeed a problem with many children still denied access to education – hardly any attention has been paid to Rights IN Education. Consequently many violations are routinely perpetuated on children in the name of education. These violations are commonplace in state schools, private schools, and homeschooling – and because they are mainstreamed, most people don’t even realize that they constitute violations.– Rights-Centric Education: Kinder Republic (Pvt) Ltd, Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka; Lada Center, Republic of Slovenia; Riverstone Village, South Africa; Autistic Collaboration Trust, Aotearoa New Zealand; Uniting for Children and Youth, Canada; Flourishing Education, UK. We have a long way to go until Autistic culture is as acceptable as gay & lesbian culture. If the words Autistic and autism in the latest Aotearoa New Zealand Autism Guideline were replaced by gay & lesbian, there would be a public outcry. How about “early intervention” for “behaviours of concern” of gay & lesbian children? We are facing very similar struggles to the trans communities, only we are still further behind in gaining acceptance. The psychological idea of mirroring is too often dumbed down to socially appropriate verbal and non-verbal expression of emotion, which really just signals that someone seems to be listening, but which is no reliable indicator of genuine shared understanding. Certain conditions need to be met for mirroring to reflect shared understanding and genuine compassion.  It is only when/if listener has had any comparable lived experiences that may result in a similar emotional state or experience that the speaker/communicator can feel genuinely understood. This is what Autistic people focus on. It is not enough “to be listened to”. We want to feel understood, and we are not convinced that this is achievable by verbal and non-verbal expression of emotion alone. Linguistically, the words used in a story attempt to communicate one or more frames, i.e. the active mental models and emotional state of the communicator. To be effective, mirroring by the listener needs to reflect back a story with frames that have some overlap with the frames of the speaker/communicator. And as Quinn points out in the above video, this is not about outcompeting each other, it is about showing a genuine attempt of understanding, with an implicit invitation to the speaker/communicator to offer clarifications in case the listener has misunderstood the essence of the story. The listener may also respond with one of more clarifying questions to a story before offering a comparable experience – and this is not to be confused with a dismissal or downgrading of the story. Lastly, the listener may respond by admitting that they have never experienced anything that seems remotely comparable – and again, this is not to be confused with a dismissal or downgrading of the story. All of the above makes sense in a setting of psychological safety, where two people trust each other, and where the intent of communication is to learn from and with each other, and to assist each other – which is the innate human impulse of naive toddlers who have not yet been socialised by the cult of homo economicus. But we live in a transactional society dominated by mutual mistrust. In the competitive logic of homo economicus, the “naive” Autistic attempt of offering compassion and assistance often backfires. And that sits at the core of the Double Empathy Problem documented by Autistic scholar Damian Milton. The motivations of Autistic people are routinely misunderstood. And conversely, Autistic people often fail to take into consideration how the competitive logic of homo economicus reframes all that is being said in the minds of culturally “well adjusted” listeners.  To add to the complexity, isolated and traumatised Autistic people whose spirit has been broken, who are not embedded in a neurodivergent ecology of care, may come to the conclusion that no one can ever be trusted, and end up behaving in ways that are comparable to the ways in which other highly traumatised people behave. How does all of this play out in terms of Autistic life paths? The answer can be deduced from the answers of two closely related questions. Do we buy into the cultural narratives that surround us? Based on the daily lived experience of the Double Empathy Problem, it should not come as a surprise that almost by definition Autistic people don’t buy into or don’t fully buy into the mainstream cultural narratives that surround us. This can take many forms. Many of those who find supportive Autistic community and mutual support become passionate advocates and activists for social change. Many committed environmentalists and climate activists identify as Autistic. The list of examples of openly Autistic activists is long, and the list of not-openly Autistic social activists is even longer. Many of us end up in burnout for a range of reasons, often connected to the cognitive dissonance imposed on us by a hypernormative society governed by the unmentionable “unwritten rule of the school life in industrialised societies”. In the interview below Professor Guy McPherson outlines the aggregate effects of the “unwritten rule”. Unsurprisingly his conclusions are not very popular in wider society amongst culturally “well adjusted” people. I don’t agree with all of Guy McPherson’s conclusions, mainly because my estimate of the limits of human cognitive abilities is lower. Therefore I am less convinced about the claims we can make about what the future holds for the human species and the other living beings on this beautiful Living Planet that gave birth to all of us. At the same time, I have more faith in the ability of the Living Planet to heal itself, and more faith in the potential that unfolds when humans (re)discover our capacity for collaboration at human scale. Whether humans are still around in 200 years is anyone’s guess. What matters in my book is that we can strive to minimise human and non-human suffering. Along the way we can aim to minimise the depth of the current mass extinction event, regardless for how long the human species continues to be around. Struggling together, and appreciating every day in small life-affirming cosmolocal ecologies of care is the beauty of collaboration at human scale. Do we buy into the competitive framing of evolutionary processes? Those of us who have had the good fortune to gather some experiences within a genuinely life-affirming and de-powered cosmolocal ecology of care are no longer able to accept the toxic notion of homo economicus as so-called “human nature”. Neurodiversity activists point out that there are many human natures. Every human is unique, and throughout life accumulates uniquely valuable lived experiences. Furthermore, framing evolutionary processes in terms of collaborative niche construction instead of competition is grounded in what we know about the collaborative tendencies of human toddlers. The sacred cycle of life includes the joy of birth, the art of living well, and the process of dying and nurturing the living planet in good company. In contrast to the global mono-cult of capitalist patriarchy, this timeless wisdom is well understood within the Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist philosophical and spiritual traditions. The framing of life in terms of collaborative niche construction is much more compatible with Eastern traditions, with Joseph Tainter’s pioneering analysis of patterns of civilisational collapse, and with indigenous cultures, all of which understand the planet as a regenerative system of relationships between living entities. Healthy Autistic collaborative niche construction Collaborative niche construction is the evolutionary process of reducing cognitive dissonance, a process of omni-directional sensing and learning, which can only emerge in an adequately de-powered, non-overwhelming, and life affirming, i.e. holotropic and syntropic environment. Quinn Dexter has produced excellent explanatory videos on so-called Pathological Demand Avoidance, elaborating on how the Double Empathy Problem often plays out. There are very good and compelling reasons why many Autistic people are drawn towards Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent collaborations, and at least somewhat reluctant to engage on neuronormative terms. Life is not a performance! In small societies without abstract formal authorities, everyone learns from everyone. The relational complexity of life, and the effects of the current de-humanising economic paradigm can’t easily be condensed into words. We need good Autistic and neurodivergent company to co-create unique ecologies of care based on sacred relationships and mutual aid at human scale. One of the commenter’s on Quinn’s video on deconstructing PDA compares Autistic life in a hypernormative culture with “living life in Hard Mode” in a video game. The Autistic Collaboration community grows organically, at human scale, at a human pace, one trusted relationship at a time, in the form of self-organising small groups that collaborate on specific initiatives, contributing to the wellbeing of Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent and intersectionally marginalised people. Join us for the NeurodiVerse Days of Intersectional Solidarity in October! Leave a comment Being part of the Earth in good company – our shared humanity August 24, 2024September 5, 2024 Jorn Bettin foundational The human capacity for language serves to improve understanding and trust, fostering collaboration instead of competition. This contradicts capitalist interpretations of evolution and supports the notion of human collaboration. Society’s hierarchical structure and wealth creation methods perpetuate exploitation, leading to societal sickness. To heal, we must rediscover faith in humanity and focus on building trustworthy, life-affirming relationships within human-scale ecologies of care. Being humanBeing part of a healthy cultural organismAppreciating the timeless patterns of human limitationsDenying the timeless patterns of human limitationsLiving in a sick, addicted cultureBeing aliveBeing part of the living planetHaving faith in the living planetHealingFurther reading on WEIRD cultural bias Being human Framing evolutionary processes in terms of collaborative niche construction instead of competition is grounded in what we know about the collaborative tendencies of human toddlers. The notion of life as a competitive game only found its way into the science of biology by interpreting Darwin’s theory of evolution through the cultural lens of capitalism. The complementary perspective of life and evolution as a cooperative game as described by Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) was largely ignored in so-called “developed” capitalist societies throughout most of the 20th century. Through the lenses of evolutionary biology and cultural evolution, small groups of 20 to 100 people are the primary organisms within human society – in contrast to individuals, corporations, and nation states. The implications for our civilisation are profound. Humanity is experiencing a phase transition that is catalysed by a combination of new communication technologies, toxic levels of social inequalities, and existential crises. It is time to put ubiquitous global digital connectivity to good use, to curate and share the lessons from marginalised perspectives, and to reflect critically on the human evolutionary journey and on the possibilities and limitations of human agency. In the book The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale I argue that becoming conscious of human cognitive and emotional limits, and recognising that these limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may allow us to embark on a path of radical energy descent. The journey of exponentially accelerating cultural evolution presented in this book covers several hundred thousand years, from the origins of humans right up to the latest significant developments in the early 21st century, as outlined in this article. I wrote this book to equip communities and individuals with conceptual tools to create good companies that are capable of pumping value from a dying ideological system into an emerging world. Lulu (paperback)AutCollab (ebook) Being part of a healthy cultural organism The human capacity for language would not have given us any adaptive ecological advantage if it did not primarily serve the purpose of improving our ability to understand, trust, and rely on each other, such that every human in a cultural organism to some extent contributes unique capabilities and lived experiences to the cultural organism. Healthy cultural organisms do not consist of: Isolated individuals competing against each other Atomised nuclear families Incomprehensibly complex groups and institutions In fact, the relational nature of the big cycle of life is obscured as long as long as we attempt to define cultural organisms as groups of people or even groups of living beings beyond the human. The very notion of groups of living beings makes no sense. Humans and all other conscious beings make sense of the world in entirely relational terms. If we care to pay attention, we even relate to the food we eat and to many things that in the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) world are not considered to be alive. The extent to which we feel healthy, well, and alive is a direct reflection of the health and aliveness in all our relationships, and the extent to which we are able to minimise cognitive dissonance across all our relationships. We do not arrive at values and preferences in isolation, but within our dynamically evolving social context. Values are best understood as a second order cultural process, the derivative that emerges from our attempts of minimising cognitive dissonance across all our relationships. The “self” is a WEIRD cultural artefact that denotes the “sovereign” individual, an abstraction, which according to neocolonial / neoliberal dogma, we should value above all else. It is much healthier to understand the self in terms of our deeply held values, which are the product of our lived experience in the ecology of care that we are embedded in – which may or may not be in a healthy state. In a healthy ecology of care our values are closely aligned with the values of those we engage with on a daily basis. In an unhealthy ecology of care, our values may be shaped by the cognitive dissonance and the harm we are exposed to. Some of our values may then be consciously chosen in opposition to harmful experiences we have had to endure. If our ecology of care remains unhealthy, our values may eventually compel us to develop healthier relationships in a different social environment. Appreciating the timeless patterns of human limitations Our society has been constructed such that certain forms of exploitation are deemed acceptable / legal / necessary and such that other forms of bullying are deemed as unacceptable and illegal. Upon closer examination the boundary is an arbitrary one. Laws and social norms in industrialised societies are shaped by the metaphor of society as a factory and the metaphor of people as machines more than most people realise. WEIRD education is focused on turning playful and curious children into self-conscious individuals in a competitive world. Most of WEIRD psychology is concerned about developing a healthy “self” that is prepared to engage in the WEIRD game of “earning a living”, in competition with other self-conscious individuals. Increasingly WEIRD medicine is about treating the long-term effects of the chronic stress experienced by self-conscious individuals who are no longer embedded in a healthy ecology of care. In the digital technoverse, biological life is perceived as becoming irrelevant. The unhelpful industrialised metaphor of “human biological machines” confuses first-order effects (the innate human inclination towards mutual aid and collaborative niche construction) with second-order effects (culturally transmitted “normalisation” of social power gradients). Specifically, all societies that construct money as interest bearing debt and endow money with a quasi-ubiquitous fungibility to enable economic activity rely on the following four economic drivers or ways of “making money”: Creation and lending of money for a return on investment: We use interest-bearing debt issued out of thin air by banks to prime the economic pump, and to provide professional bankers with a reliable source of significant income. Speculation with land and real estate, and allowing people to inherit money: This enables people to “make” more money through lending for a return on investment, similar to banks, only that the means of individuals are more limited. Hierarchical structures of organisations that offer extreme monetary rewards at the top: This encourages people to systematically take credit for the work of others to get to the top. Creation of pyramid schemes that allow people to “extract value” from the work of others: This endorses and encourages harmful behaviours which benefit the individual over the group. The common theme across these economic drivers is the willingness to exploit other people for personal gain, including the audacity to take personal credit for the results of others or for the results achieved as part of a team. Such exploitative interdependencies between people are considered “normal”, and bizarrely, we consider anyone who is able to survive comfortably by extracting money from other people as “independent”. The four ways of making money are justified by a myth of meritocracy and circular reasoning – that people with a lot of money have “earned” the money and are entitled to a “fair” return on investment to cover their “risk” when lending some of it to others. Realistic paths to “success” involve career climbing in hierarchical organisations or the related option of the creating and running a more or less legal pyramid scheme. People with an intact moral compass tend to learn the hard way that all their attempts of investment, running charities or entrepreneurship only strengthen the status quo and amplify the economic inequalities. It is easy to see that honest people, and especially Autistic people, are systematically disabled in modern society, economically as well as socially, as many social norms are adaptations to the dominant economic paradigm. Autistic people continuously work at the edge of their performance limit, which is often much higher than what non-autistic people are capable of sustaining, whilst not making a fuss about it. This invites exploitation. The social model of disability explains two of the most disabling aspects of being Autistic. To a significant extent Autistic experience can be described in terms of the downstream effects of: A much reduced capacity to maintain cognitive dissonance, including the inability to maintain hidden agendas over extended periods. Hypersensitivities, including in the social realm. We find ourselves in a hypernormative global civilisation, with an anthropocentric performance-oriented culture and deep hierarchical structures of social power. It is revealing that the English language uses one word – perform – to refer to two different actions: To begin and carry through to completion; do. To take action in accordance with the requirements of; fulfill. To enact (a feat or role) before an audience. The more competitive social power games a society allows, the more the meanings of these concepts converge. Performance becomes an obsession to conform to externally evaluated criteria. In a highly competitive social environment in which some people are celebrated in terms of their “net worth”, and in which more and more experiences are commodified, mediated by purchasing power, life is no longer experienced as an ecological process, it is transformed into a performance before an audience that is measured and rated according to social expectations that are increasingly codified in and evaluated by abstract algorithms. The conception of “intelligence” baked into Western culture and orthodox economic ideology is anaemic. “I do believe we have to start thinking imaginatively about systems that are fundamentally differently organized. Shifts do happen in history. We’ve been taught for the last 30 to 40 years that imagination has no place in politics or economics, but that, too, is bullshit. I think we need a rebellion of what I call the “caring class,” people who care about others and justice. We need to think about how to create a new social movement and change what we value in our work and lives. People have a sense of what makes a job worthwhile; otherwise, they wouldn’t realize that what they’re doing now is bullshit. So we need to give this more articulation, and we need to unite with other people who want the same things. That’s a political project we can all get behind.– David Graeber Denying the timeless patterns of human limitations Adam Becker, who has written a good book on the way engineering is practiced today, sums up the overall culture as: “Shut up and calculate!” This attitude to technology design has become accepted practice in most domains of engineering, and especially in the domains of machine learning, finance, and financial engineering. This is a culture of normalised denial. Gary Stevenson does an excellent job of explaining the systemic nature and the lived reality of wealth inequality and social power gradients: What is wealth? – Gary Stevenson What is wealth inequality? – Gary Stevenson The normalisation of the harm caused by social power gradients and powered-up relationships is the terminal disease that plagues all empires. Since we live in the context of the convulsions of dying empires, it is important to understand the cultural dynamics that are unfolding. Social power differentials have a strong addictive potential for those who the system enables to wield social power over others. Wielding power via asset ownership is especially addictive and dangerous, since the power wielded is often indirect. Often the asset owner is insulated from the consequences for those at the receiving end of power by several levels of indirection, making it easier for the asset owner to remain in denial. In the discipline of economics denial and obscuring harm is institutionalised and legitimised by refering to harm as “insignificant externalities”. Addressing wealth inequality is not enough to heal all the human and non-human suffering caused by the energy and resource intensive ways of life that have been enabled by the exploitation of fossil fuels. Eliminating wealth inequality without a fundamental shift in our values and in the cultural practices that define our daily lives, without a radical reduction in consumption and a radical shift in the ways that we relate to the living world will not reverse ecological overshoot and the sixth mass extinction. We are currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate. Even slowing down busyness significantly will not be enough. An equal distribution of wealth in an energy hungry materialistic consumer society will still wreck the planet. The modern addiction to convenience and consumption comes in many different flavours. More is always better. Quantity is what counts. Quantity can be commoditised. Quantity can be sold as progress. Quality is systematically discounted by the religion of the invisible hand. Enough is no longer part of the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) vocabulary. The most obvious candidates for commodification and addiction: Material consumption Work Substances and foods Sex Gambling Entertainment, including “news” The not-so-invisible hand is explicitly involved in ensuring that all these aspects of modern life are packaged in formats that maximise addictive potential. This civilisation is finished. Rather than playing around with yet another “better” configuration of powered-up institutions, perhaps we are better served by practicing de-powered dialogue, and by learning how to de-power all our relationships – without asking any so-called authority for permission. The revolution will not be nudged! Living in a sick, addicted culture In our hypernormative society neurodivergence takes on a political dimension. Framing neurodivergence as pathological allows ideas from neurodivergent people to be dismissed as insignificant – simply because they are ideologically inconvenient. In an interview a few years ago George Lakoff mentions his experience with John Nash, pointing out that John Nash had been working on co-operative game theory, and that this was a major reason for him being sidelined and locked up in a psychiatric institution. I have been co-creating and working with formal and informal models of human collaboration in a broad range of domains for over thirty years. All along, the market based competitive models used by economists never made any sense to me, as they assume a level of cruelty and lack of compassion beyond what I could imagine. Developing and applying competitive models of human “collaboration”, i.e. “shutting up and calculating” would literally hurt my brain. For a long time I did not realise the extent to which homo economicus acts as a very effective filter that guarantees that only adequately indoctrinated and compliant disciples of the god of the invisible hand gravitate to positions of power. Homo economicus has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is a collective hypernormative cultural choice, not a law of nature. The modern play book of anthropocentric civilisation building rests on the following frames: All of life is a competition, which is framed as evolution. Humans are declared to be superior to all other life forms, therefore we are declared to be more competitive, i.e. more evolved, which is framed as intelligence. For human groups larger than a household to collaborate, it is essential to control human behaviours by constructing hierarchically structured abstract human institutions with coercive powers, which are framed as authorities. Anthropocentric hierarchical structures of coercive powers and addictions to exercising such powers are justified by framing them as meritocracies – entitling small elites to make decisions that affect many thousands, millions, or billions of people and other living beings. Effective coercive control over humans and all other living beings is deemed to be desirable – it is framed as progress. Within the anthropocentric frame of progress, the right to earn a living, i.e. the right to exist, is framed as the freedom to submit to the authority of powered-up institutions, and in return being able to meet our emotional and bodily needs by choosing options from menus pre-configured by the institutional landscape. The option to choose specific members from the elite class to head some of the pyramids of institutionalised social power is framed as democracy. The option to establish non-democratic powered-up institutions, and to profit from such pyramid schemes at the expense of others is framed as the god of the invisible hand of the market. The busyness, stress, addictions, energy use, waste, and ecological harm generated by the freedom to submit to authorities and consume from pre-configured menus is framed as economic performance. The refusal to submit to authorities and consume from pre-configured menus is framed as being uncivilised, underdeveloped, primitive, or illegal. What could possibly go wrong? The first element in the stack of ten anthropocentric frames above is the product of the cultural bias of the religion of economics. The innate collaborative tendencies of human toddlers that have not yet been fully socialised contradict the assumptions baked into homo economics. Replacing homo economicus with what we now understand about the human species radically transforms all the frames for understanding cultural evolution. A frame of collaborative niche construction allows human potential to contribute to rather than extract from the living planet. A production/consumption paradigm for what an economy is is a guarantee for ultimately destroying the planet and each other. Even when you talk about degrowth, if you’re working within that paradigm, you’re essentially doomed. We need to break away from that paradigm entirely. Care and freedom on the other hand are things you can increase as much as you like without damaging anything. So we need to think: what are ways that we need to care for each other that will make each other more free? And who’re the people who are providing that care? And how can they be compensated themselves with greater freedom? To do that we need to like, actually scrap almost all of the discipline of economics as it currently exists.We’re actually just starting to think about this. Economics as it currently exists is based on assumptions of human nature that we now know to be wrong. There have been actual empirical tests of the basic sort of fundamental assumptions of the maximizing individual that economic theory is based on, and it turns out that they’re not true. It tells you something about the role of economics that this has had almost no effect on economic teaching whatsoever. They don’t really care that it’s not true.But one of the things that we have discovered, which is quite interesting, is that human beings have a psychological need to be cared for, but they have an even greater psychological need to care for others, or to care for something. If you don’t have that you basically fall apart. It’s why old people get dogs. We don’t just care for each other because we need to maintain each other’s lives and freedoms, but our own psychological happiness is based on being able to care for something or someone. – David Graeber, From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes, 2019 Being alive Humans have only survived in the face of much stronger top predators in various ecosystems by being able to collaborate, and by using symbolic language to better understand each other’s intentions and to coordinate our actions. Yes, eventually we displaced the top predators in all ecosystems, and we became the most prolific primate on the planet. But this would have been completely impossible if symbolic language had evolved primarily to allow us to engage in fierce competition with each other, and to deceive each other. To better communicate how all these topics fit together, I have embarked on another book curation and distillation project. The overarching theme could be described as ‘The psychology of human scale ecologies beyond the human’, but I also want to highlight the key element that holds together all the threads, which has been systematically eroded in Westernised societies: the notion of trust, including the role of trustworthy, sacred relationships within the context of human scale ecologies of care beyond the human, resulting in the working title ‘Trust in Human Scale : Ecologies of care beyond the human’. The biological evolutionary heritage of our capacity for culture and symbolic thought and language is directly linked to – and dependent – on our ability to fully trust each other in life and death situations. Generalising to an ecological context beyond the human, Janine Benyus summarises the evolutionary process of life as follows: In the natural world the definition of success is the continuity of life. You keep yourself alive and you keep your offspring alive. That’s success, but it’s not the offspring in this generation. Success is keeping your offspring alive 10 000 generations and more, and that presents a conundrum, because you cannot, you’re not going to be there.What life has learned: To take care of your offspring 10 000 generations from now. So what organisms have learned to do is to take care of the place that’s going to take care of their offspring. Life has learned to create conditions conducive to life, and that’s really the magic heart of it. Life creates conditions conducive to life.– Janine Benyus The book will build on the foundations laid in the book on the beauty of collaboration at human scale that I collated in 2021, covering the scope outlined in the sections below. Being part of the living planet There is no shortage of small human scale initiatives that re-conceptualise human societies in comprehensible, compassionate, and life affirming ways. The world in reality is a beautifully interconnected world, and it’s interconnected through many many layers. It’s interconnected through consciousness, which is why we are spiritual beings in human form. But the plants outside my window are spiritual beings in plant form. But the plant of the lychee is in lychee form, and the tree of the mango is in mango form. They are just different expressions of one spiritual interconnected consciousness in the world. I’ve studied quantum theory. We realised that the particles in the world are really not the basic reality. The basic reality is potential and energy, and it’s only when you try and measure it, then it shows up as a particle, or it shows up as a wave, but the reality really is that which connects, the non-separability problem. My PhD thesis was on non-separation, non-locality, and quantum theory. We knew [this] 100 years ago in physics, and yet an obsolete physics of more than 100 years ago is being used to shape and and divide a very interconnected world. So dualism today is not just epistemologically so wrong, it is not just ontologically so wrong, it is spiritually just not the right way to think of the world, but it is now becoming a threat to human life, preventing people from living with each other in diversity with love. And that’s why we have to spread the message of non-dualism, of interconnectedness, of oneness through love, and we have to be the practice...All cultures had economies but it wasn’t the first organising principle, it was a byproduct of good living… Where did that wealth come from? It was an economy, but it was not an economy of extraction. It was not an economy of domination, it was an economy of living. If you go to the roots of the word economy, economy according to Aristotle is the art of living. Our civilisation has very deep spiritual foundations, and through spirituality you know that the diversity in the world is really different expressions of the same oneness… Let all the beings flourish…– Vandana Shiva Collectively we can tap into a wealth of knowledge and timeless indigenous wisdom. Having faith in the living planet Lived experience in nurturing and maintaining mutual trust at human scale is the key ingredient for being at ease in a seemingly unpredictable world. Being able to rely on each other is at the core of the evolutionary heritage of our species. Mutual trust is a biophilic ecological phenomenon of emergent local predictability that is not limited to humans. In a dynamic ecological context, enduring relationships of mutual trust constitute the ingredients of a life affirming ecology of care that is integrated into the regenerative cyclical flow of life. Mutual trust is the priceless currency of living systems. Healing Healing starts with rediscovering our faith in humanity. The sacred cycle of life includes the joy of birth, the art of living well, and the process of dying in good company, and thereby giving back nutrients to the living planet. The neurodiversity, disability, and indigenous rights movements are part of the cultural immune system of human societies, responding to the mechanistic, hypercompetitive, and rule based approach to social arrangements imposed by the learning disabled mono-cult with a holistic social justice approach. We heal by following our heart. We reduce cognitive dissonance by being human – by sobering up, by rejecting the life denying mono-cult, by seeing the beauty in all living beings. Along the way, instead of abusing the discipline of mathematics to shut people up, and to calculate ever more perverse ways of out-competing each other, we can rediscover and revive the much older framing of mathematics as the beautiful art of explanation, within a collaborative frame of omni-directional learning. Below is a good example, also highlighting the inherently collaborative nature of mathematical discovery. Whether A♾tistic dreamers are able to establish alternative ecologies of care beyond the human is no longer up for debate. We have nothing to lose. We deeply appreciate the wonder of life, and we clearly see the global mono-cult for what it is.  We are A♾tistic. We are fully human. We are alive. Further reading on WEIRD cultural bias Sowing the seeds for ecological and intersectional communal wellbeing Autistic people are not for sale The massive cognitive and emotional blind spot at the core of modernity Understanding power and de-powering Coherent theories of human ways of being From pseudo-philosophical psychiatrists to openly Autistic culture Collaborative niche construction The continuously shifting justifications for pathologising non-conformists Include all Conversion Therapies in Legislative Ban The purpose of human cultures Reclaiming the essence of humanity Replacing control with ecologies of care Autistic people – The cultural immune system of human societies Active disablement of minorities 3 Comments The massive cognitive and emotional blind spot at the core of modernity August 20, 2024August 20, 2024 Jorn Bettin foundational 🔊 Listen In our modern world the notion of tribalism is associated with many negative connotations, and especially with tribal bias, which is assumed to be an undesirable trait. A closer analysis reveals that the modern bias against tribalism is the result of conveniently sloppy research and a collective cognitive and emotional blind spot related to the collaborative potential of networked egalitarian human scale cultural organisms. The trouble with tribalismThe cognitive and emotional blind spotImplicationsMutual aid and compassion in the here and nowDe-powering The trouble with tribalism The article Tribalism is Human Nature (2019) in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science illustrates the perspective from which the Western discipline of psychology engages with tribalism: Although tribal loyalties inspire many noble behaviors, they can impel humans to sacrifice sound reasoning and judgmental accuracy for group belonging and commitment. In other words, tribal loyalties can lead to tribal biases…If beliefs are held fervently, compel strong emotional displays, or are costly to hold, they might function as honest (and thus trustworthy) loyalty signals. Perhaps perversely, dogmatism and resilience to contrary evidence likely enhance the persuasiveness of the signal, because they show that one is strongly dedicated to the group’s ideology in spite of potential consequences (e.g., being wrong about a difficult to answer question)…Sincere beliefs generally lead to better and more zealous arguments than cynical hypocrisy. Therefore, people are motivated to favor and believe information that promotes their group’s interests and to resist information that opposes their group’s interests because it makes them more persuasive proponents of their group’s cause…Humans are tribal creatures. They were not designed to reason dispassionately about the world; rather, they were designed to reason in ways that promote the interests of their coalition (and hence, themselves). It would therefore be surprising if a particular group of individuals did not display such tendencies, and recent work suggests, at least in the U.S. political sphere, that both liberals and conservatives are substantially biased—and to similar degrees. Historically, and perhaps even in modern society, these tribal biases are quite useful for group cohesion but perhaps also for other moral purposes (e.g., liberal bias in favor of disadvantaged groups might help increase equality). Also, it is worth noting that a bias toward viewing one’s own tribe in a favorable light is not necessarily irrational. If one’s goal is to be admired among one’s own tribe, fervidly supporting their agenda and promoting their goals, even if that means having or promoting erroneous beliefs, is often a reasonable strategy…We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group—not even one’s own—is immune. Refreshingly, at least the conclusion is broadly compatible with anthropological evidence, and the article does acknowledge several beneficial aspects of tribalism. The introductory sentences of the article however point towards a cultural bias in the premise underlying the researchers’ understanding of human evolution: Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that were not. Therefore, selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be “tribal,” and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most salient forms of modern coalitional conflict and elicits substantial cognitive biases. The highlighted assumption is a product of the internalised ableism commonly found in the science of biology. Only culturally well adjusted people in hierarchically structured empires understand the entire living world as inherently and primarily competitive, and have trouble imagining genuinely collaborative relationships between groups. Around the margins of empires, we find no shortage of examples of egalitarian collaborative cultural environments, even though in our current time, the majority of humans do find themselves trapped in a social landscape of powered-up institutions. Egalitarian collaborative groups operate highly effective conflict resolution strategies that prevent conflicts from escalating rather than on a naive denial of conflict. Furthermore, the outlined reasoning about the ways in which beliefs within and between tribes play out lacks depth and nuance, by completely ignoring the role of human diversity within tribes and by glossing over the distinct ways in which different categories of beliefs shape human cultures. For example, persuasion by others is not necessarily the main source of beliefs. The negative connotations of tribalism only materialise when tribes expand beyond human scale, or when tribes that have not developed a culture that nurtures egalitarian relationships between groups run into each other in resource constrained environments. Humanity can no longer afford tribal warfare at any scale. This insight is not new. There is no shortage of counter examples. Cultures that genuinely appreciate human diversity are well equipped to adapt to changing conditions, by establishing collaborative, egalitarian relationships between groups – with neurodivergent non-conformists from various groups establishing and maintaining the unconventional connections that catalyse the dialogue between groups. In other words, tribes that don’t dehumanise non-conformists are well equipped to benefit from the cultural exchanges within the inter-tribe networks of non-conformists. This is consistent with what we know about the diversity of human evolutionary history, but this knowledge is only very rarely acknowledged in modern hyper-normative societies that are powered-up by super-human scale corporations and nation states. The cognitive and emotional blind spot More than 250 years of life in industrialised societies that no longer offer visceral experiences of being an integral part of a human scale cultural organism that operates an ecology of care has created a big cognitive and emotional blind spot: Abstract group identities (such as brands, nation states, etc.) dominate the social landscape. Relational group identities are limited to tiny “atomised” nuclear families, which are far too small to serve as viable survival units. The analogy of the development of a cataract is a good metaphor – modernity makes us blind to our humanity and to the wonder of the big cycle of life. Experience with human scale cultural organisms is now limited to small pockets of indigenous communities and to those who have (re)discovered the art of collaborative niche construction in egalitarian human scale worker co-ops. In the Venn diagram of the acceptable cultures within the Overton window of the global mono-cult, indigenous, Autistic and other neurodivergent people are the complement set – they all reside on the slippery slope that runs all the way from “undesirable” to “non-human”, with “unacceptable” in the middle. Implications The implications are obvious to all those who live outside the hypernormative Overton window: Lack of experience with de-powered dialogue and deliberation in Open Space – the assumption that power dynamics are at work in all social interactions, leading to feelings of social isolation. Diffusion of toxic power dynamics into nuclear family relationships, leading to a lack of experience with nurturing and maintaining trustworthy relationships, amplifying feelings of social isolation. Experiencing human relationships to be even less reliable and trustworthy than the anonymous interactions with corporations and national governments – many people entrust Google with more information than their life partners. Ubiquitous real and perceived social power dynamics, prompting an obsessive focus on the WEIRD independence of the individual “self” – to some extent even pathologising healthy levels of mutual aid and interdependence at human scale. A hypernormative culture dominated by abstract institutions rather than by relational ecologies of care, resulting in a complete lack of experience with egalitarian relationships between human scale groups, hence all the negative stereotypes associated with tribalism. A feeling of paralysis and hopelessness, feeding the growth of the cognitive and emotional blind spot – modernity makes us blind to our humanity and to the wonder of the big cycle of life. Proliferation of addictive behaviours, to compensate for unmet emotional needs, which are as essential for our wellbeing as our needs for nutritious food and clean air. A current small scale example from the Civil Aviation Authority in Aotearoa New Zealand illustrates how these implications impact many workplace cultures. The top comment on this report hits at the larger cultural problems, which are in fact not limited to this country: This is not unique to CAA, most government agencies/departments have poor management and force good people out. It appears to be a New Zealand issue: Ministry of Justice Ministry of health Ministry of Primary IndustriesDepartment of CorrectionsAuckland councilsjust to name a few.And people are quitting in waves even at a time when jobs as hard to come by.I see it everyday and deal with it myself. Toxic workplace cultures are common throughout the global mono-cult. They represent the visible tip of a toxic culture that runs through all aspects of modern life. It is no accident that books such as ‘The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture‘ by Gabor Maté are popular. Mutual aid and compassion in the here and now AutCollab participatory research into cognitive dissonance shows that many Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people are “experts” at beating themselves up for making mistakes or for repeatedly being taken advantage of by those who have less scruples in playing the “normal” competitive game of homo economicus, which prioritises “successful” perception management over honesty and integrity. Once we understand the full effects of the toxic institutional landscape on all participants, and combine it with timeless Daoist wisdom, we are well advised to assume that everyone is doing their best based on their unique history and sensitivity profile, which includes the priorities of the values that they live by. In a competitive environment the priorities of the values that culturally “well adjusted” people live by usually differs from what they openly disclose. We can accept this source of cognitive dissonance as a fact, without blaming the individuals, and without assuming that everyone plays the “normal” competitive game, so that we retain the ability to extend trust to others. This approach allows mutual aid to flourish in the cracks of the global mono-cult. I adopted the approach of not blaming individuals many years ago. This has kept me going over the decades, even during the dark times. It enabled me to repeatedly re-engineer my environment to what I was learning about myself and my environment. It does not make life painless, but not beating ourselves up, and at the same time extending compassion to people who are products of a toxic system, without engaging in futile debates with those who are not ready to learn, saves a lot of energy. This is energy we urgently need to move beyond survival mode, to re-engineer our environment, and to make the big changes that genuinely reduce cognitive dissonance and heal the living planet. By design, competitive cultures and especially digital social media trap us in futile debates and exploit our frustrations. Minimising exposure is essential for human wellbeing, in exactly the same way that wearing masks in public indoor spaces is essential for minimising the risks of catching COVID and other airborne diseases in this era of global pandemics. This podcast by Rangan Chatterjee points people in the right direction, but as so many pieces of self-help advice for persisting in survival mode within the established institutional landscape, it stays clear of addressing the wider social issues. I always come back to W Edwards Deming’s brilliant synopsis of “collaboration” in a competitive social context: “Pay for merit, pay for what you get, reward performance. Sounds great, can’t be done. Unfortunately it can not be done, on short range. After 10 years perhaps, 20 years, yes. The effect is devastating. People must have something to show, something to count. In other words, the merit system nourishes short-term performance. It annihilates long-term planning. It annihilates teamwork. People can not work together. To get promotion you’ve got to get ahead. By working with a team, you help other people. You may help yourself equally, but you don’t get ahead by being equal, you get ahead by being ahead. Produce something more, have more to show, more to count. Teamwork means work together, hear everybody’s ideas, fill in for other people’s weaknesses, acknowledge their strengths. Work together. This is impossible under the merit rating / review of performance system. People are afraid. They are in fear. They work in fear. They can not contribute to the company as they would wish to contribute. This holds at all levels. But there is something worse than all of that. When the annual ratings are given out, people are bitter. They can not understand why they are not rated high. And there is a good reason not to understand. Because I could show you with a bit of time that it is purely a lottery.” – W Edwards Deming (1984) I know that I can only keep cognitive dissonance down to survivable levels if I am embedded in a small trustworthy ecology of care that rejects the cult of homo economicus and that is committed to collaborative niche construction. De-powering Incrementally (re)learning how to nurture trustworthy relationships is a process takes time. There is no secret sauce that can accelerate the process of nurturing mutual trust one relationship at a time. Watch out for snake oil vendors in the fast-paced world of easy 10-step programmes and other silver bullets. Attempts of establishing a thriving cultural organism can easily fall short of expectations due to a lack of experience with deep trust, which acts as a catalyst for organic growth up to human scale. The process of on-boarding newcomers into a human scale cultural organism gets easier once three or more people have formed a core circle of deep mutual trust, for example by jointly operating a worker co-op over several years. We can all contribute towards a global knowledge commons about experiences with egalitarian relationships between human scale groups – this is the path towards culturally adaptive strategies that strengthen communal and ecological wellbeing, building on available experiences within indigenous societies, worker co-ops, chosen extended families, etc. Collectively we can tap into a wealth of knowledge and timeless indigenous wisdom. We need commitment, we need community. We need to create spaces of trust. But for that, there’s tremendous work that we need to be doing. But I don’t think that any of that work will be possible, should we not have that commitment–that commitment that no matter how challenging and tremendously difficult it will be to reckon with these narratives and to dismantle these narratives. Because seeing the horror in the eye of all these narratives that we live by comes with tremendous understanding. It will leave us very fragile, very vulnerable, and most, of course, are not willing to do that, because we don’t feel safe. But if we are able to stand the heat and create these spaces, if we commit to do this kind of work for the benefit of the planet, then we may be able to learn that we can fly.– Yuria Celidwen Join us! Leave a comment Sowing the seeds for ecological and intersectional communal wellbeing August 16, 2024September 5, 2024 Jorn Bettin foundational 🔊 Listen Many scientists don’t acknowledge the extent to which their disciplinary paradigms are influenced by the cultural frames of the colonial era. The so-called mental health crisis is a symptom of a terminally diseased institutional landscape. Neurodiversity and disability activists have been collaborating on coherent theories of human ways of being. Collaborative niche construction is the evolutionary process of reducing cognitive dissonance. Completely normal ways of feeling unwell and distressedInternalised ableism in the science of biologyReframing life in terms of collaborative niche constructionThe big cycle of lifeOmni-directional sensing and learningTaking stockTowards ecological wellbeing Completely normal ways of feeling unwell and distressed The many ways in which atomised nuclear families depend on abstract institutions is considered normal, and all those who depend on assistance from others in unusual ways are pathologised. The following interview with Eva Henje conducted by our friends at Local Futures outlines the alienating and dehumanising social experiences created by the global mono-cult that defines the institutional landscape that surrounds us: Social power can be understood as the privilege of not needing to learn. As we live through the current human predicament we are well advised to understand capitalism as a collective learning disability that actively contributes to human and non-human suffering. Michael Guilding offers a coherent and comprehensive explanation of how modern society and all earlier powered-up empires are based on the systematic hijacking of the evolved human fear response. Michael Guilding’s explanation also reminds me of what a capitalist/investor once explained to me as “normal” or “human nature”, i.e. that people are driven exclusively by two forces: fear and greed. I suspect that this sad attitude is quite common amongst those who have navigated themselves into positions of social power within the mono-cult. Traumatised populations driven by fear and greed are the culmination of the industrial factory model of society. This is a world of programmable “human biological machines” – the ultimate negation of the wonder of life. Internalised ableism in the science of biology The normalisation of internalised ableism runs deep. Even well known biologists perpetuate the unhelpful industrialised metaphor of “human biological machines”, confusing first-order effects (the innate human inclination towards mutual aid and collaborative niche construction) with second-order effects (culturally transmitted “normalisation” of social power gradients), which are only present in dehumanising societies that are deeply troubled and sick. In species with complex cultures, including whales, elephants, and humans, the naive distinction between two evolutionary survival strategies summarised below highlights the limitations of the paradigm used by some biologists and ecologists: r-selection: On one extreme are the species that are highly r-selected. r is for reproduction. Such a species puts only a small investment of resources into each offspring, but produces many such low effort babies. Such species are also generally not very invested in protecting or rearing these young. Often, the eggs are fertilized and then dispersed. The benefit of this strategy is that if resources are limited or unpredictable, you can still produce some young. However, each of these young has a high probability of mortality, and does not benefit from the protection or nurturing of a caring parent or parents. r-selected babies grow rapidly, and tend to be found in less competitive, low quality environments. Although not always the case, r-selection is more common among smaller animals with shorter lifespans and, frequently, non-overlapping generations, such as fish or insects. The young tend to be precocial (rapidly maturing) and develop early independence.K-selection: On the other extreme are species that are highly K-selected. K refers to the carrying capacity, and means that the babies are entering a competitive world, in a population at or near its carrying capacity. K-selected reproductive strategies tend towards heavy investment in each offspring, are more common in long-lived organisms, with a longer period of maturation to adulthood, heavy parental care and nurturing, often a period of teaching the young, and with fierce protection of the babies by the parents. K-selected species produce offspring that each have a higher probability of survival to maturity. Although not always the case, K-selection is more common in larger animals, like whales or elephants, with longer lifespans and overlapping generations. The young tend to be altricial (immature, requiring extensive care). It is fascinating that the above definition refers to whales and elephants as examples of ‘K-selection’ without mentioning that these two species, not unlike humans, have an advanced capacity for culture, including the capacity for transmitting cultural norms across generations. The assertion that in such species “babies are entering a competitive world” is a projection of Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) cultural bias onto other species. To date no one has been able to ask whales or elephants about whether they experience the world as competitive or collaborative, and even much less so to receive an answer to this question! Only culturally well adjusted people in hierarchically structured empires understand the entire living world as inherently and primarily competitive. Around the margins of empires, we find no shortage of examples of egalitarian collaborative cultural environments, even though in our current time, the majority of humans do find themselves trapped in a social landscape of powered-up institutions. Many scientists don’t acknowledge the extent to which their disciplinary paradigms are influenced by the cultural frames of the colonial era. The so-called mental health crisis is a symptom of a terminally diseased institutional landscape. Vandana Shiva correctly identifies capitalist patriarchy as the cultural disease that is framing the entire living world as inherently and primarily competitive. Reframing life in terms of collaborative niche construction In order to appreciate the significant role that culture can play as part of evolutionary processes of gene-culture co-evolution, and to arrive at a deeper understanding of evolutionary processes, we must replace the misguided notion of K-selection. At the very least, a less culturally biased and more nuanced understanding needs to distinguish between: c-selection: On the one extreme are species with a capacity for culture that are highly c-selected. c is for compliance. Such a species puts only a small if any investment of resources into the development of new cultural knowledge and wisdom, and instead prioritises the production of adults that are well adjusted to the established culture. Such species are generally not very invested in protecting or rearing babies that do not seem to fit into the established cultural milieu. Often, the young are indoctrinated and expected to fend for themselves within a framework of abstract cultural institutions. The benefit of this strategy is that the emotional load of caregivers is significantly reduced, and everyone is encouraged to still produce some young, even if ecological conditions are deteriorating. However, each of these young has a high probability of mental unwellness and mortality, and does not benefit from the protection or nurturing of a caring parent or parents. Offspring in c-selected cultural species grow into replaceable, culturally well adjusted members of society, and tend to be found in ecologically degraded environments. Although not always the case, c-selection is more common in large scale societies, such as modern industrialised societies. The young are expected to become fully independent individual members of society.C-selection: On the other extreme are species with a capacity for culture that are highly C-selected. C refers to Culturally adaptive, and means that the babies are entering a culturally diverse world, in a population at or near its local carrying capacity. C-selected reproductive strategies tend towards heavy investment in very few offspring, and tend welcome the discovery of new cultural knowledge and wisdom. Such species are generally invested in protecting or rearing all babies, even those that do not seem to fit into the established cultural milieu. C-selected cultural species encourage offspring to learn from the established cultural milieu, but even more so, from the ecological environment, and as a result have a higher probability of survival to maturity in times of rapid ecological changes. Although not always the case, C-selection is more common in small scale societies, like whales or human hunter gatherers. The curiosity of the young is nurtured in a diverse relational ecology of care, and the young are encouraged to engage in collaborative niche construction. A framing of evolutionary processes that includes r-selection, c-selection, as well as C-selection strategies offers a more coherent explanation for the observed diversity within and between cultural species. The proposed ‘rcC-selection paradigm’ for evolutionary processes also encourages biological scientists to acknowledge that a purely biological and genetic categorisation of species demotes all the social sciences and all so-called non-scientific ways of relating to the world to being less “significant” for understanding the living world. The naive ‘rK-selection paradigm’ obscures a [hypernormative] cultural bias against biological diversity, and especially against human cultural diversity. In the talk referenced above, Vandana Shiva reaches the same conclusion. She points out that the life denying ideology of capitalist patriarchy can be traced back to Francis Bacon, the father of Western science, to the British men who formed the East India Company, and to Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, and that this shaped the cultural milieu in which Charles Darwin grew up. In species with a capacity for complex culture, ecologically stable environments with abundant sources of food can incrementally tip the balance towards c-selection over the course of multiple generations. But this strategy only works as long as the environment remains stable. c-selection can fail rapidly and abruptly if the environment becomes less predictable. Conversely, highly dynamic and unpredictable environments are favourable to C-selection strategies. The human capacity for language and cultural transmission over many generations, together with what we know from archaeological and anthropological research, as well as from more recent written historic accounts, tells us that human societies exist on a spectrum of C-selection and c-selection strategies. C-selection strategies, i.e. adaptive cultures, have allowed humans to survive through ice ages, and may be the key factor that has assisted humans in displacing other primates in most bioregional ecosystems. Conversely, the ability to adopt c-selection strategies, i.e. hypernormative cultures, have enabled humans to build empires and large scale societies in which human cognitive capacity is diverted away from communal survival, and towards exploitation of abundant resources and social competition. The rich diversity of small scale cultures, including the visual symbolic representations and cultural values that survived and thrived in the Australian continent for 65,000 years, points us towards the collective creative human potential and towards the deep ecological understanding that has been systematically obliterated and suppressed by capitalist patriarchy. The big cycle of life In a dynamic ecological context, enduring relationships of mutual trust are not only more stable than abstract indicators of social status, they also constitute the ingredients of a life affirming ecology of care that is integrated into the regenerative cyclical flow of life. Mutual trust is the priceless currency of living systems. The sacred cycle of life includes the joy of birth, the art of living well, and the process of dying and nurturing the living planet in good company. In contrast to the global mono-cult of capitalist patriarchy, this timeless wisdom is well understood within the Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist philosophical and spiritual traditions. Hindu cosmology for example conceptualises the entire cosmos and all of human history terms of cyclic ages, i.e. in terms of four ‘Yuga Cycles’, which is in stark contrast to the anthropocentric WEIRD conception of human history as a linear arc of progress, perhaps punctuated by a few setbacks along the way, to accentuate the framing of life as a competitive struggle. The framing of life in terms of collaborative niche construction is much more compatible with Eastern traditions, with Joseph Tainter’s pioneering analysis of patterns of civilisational collapse, and with indigenous cultures, which all understand the planet as a regenerative system of relationships between living entities. All cultural species that maintain dominance hierarchies and abstract forms of social status are diverting energy from the regenerative cyclical flow of life towards head-to-head in-group competition and the suppression of diversity. The dying process of terminally diseased institutions is only a perceived disaster from the viewpoint of elites who are addicted to social power, and from the viewpoint of the abstract institutions that represent these elites. Omni-directional sensing and learning “Collapse” of spurious cultural complexity is a liberating experience for most. Over the course of the last 25 years, as part of a concerted effort of exposing the internalised ableism that is keeping entire societies locked into suicidal paradigmatic inertia, neurodiversity and disability activists have been collaborating on coherent theories of human ways of being. Cultures in which it is a taboo to draw attention to culturally prescribed cognitive dissonance are life denying cultures. Deeply troubled cultures. Most people in Westernised cultures are not driven by greed, but the toxic cultural environment ensures that the vast majority is driven by fear. Those who find the courage to acknowledge their fears are tortured by cognitive dissonance. Lived experiences from our participatory research: What is the biggest source of cognitive dissonance in your life? I feel like I don’t deserve to be treated in the way in which I’d treat other people. I often help strangers but would feel distressed if one offered to help me (and would politely turn down the offer of help, most likely). I would be unable to fire someone due to economic reasons, but if I was fired for those same reasons, I’d accept it and would feel sad and scared, but that it’s okay for me to be treated that way. Even when I do help people, I worry that I do it for the “wrong” reasons, so I didn’t know how to answer some questions. For example, I give money to homeless people and chat with them. I “feel really good” about this because I know that the money means they might be able to afford something they need, and that being spoken to is likely at least a bit humanising in a world which dehumanises them. Despite this, when I give money and chat to homeless people, I beat myself up after and tell myself that I’m only doing it because I’m virtue signalling or want to feel good about myself, even if I know deep down I do it because I want to be helpful and want people to be safe and feel cared for. Even if I did do it to feel good about myself, then at least that person would have some money they probably need. It’s hard to remember that, though. Even writing this is uncomfortable, as my negative self talk says that I’m only writing it to parade how “good” I think I am. Wealth inequality and class differences that have no logical justification, having to accept that poor people suffering is normal even when it’s entirely avoidable. Society expects that I should be able to ask for help whenever things get a little difficult but asking for help leaves me feeling very very unsafe and likely to be betrayed and have my request used against me as a weakness. In healthy cultures our capacity to detect cognitive dissonance catalyses collaborative niche construction, and contributes to the co-creation of ecologies of care. Collaborative niche construction is the evolutionary process of reducing cognitive dissonance, a process of omni-directional sensing and learning, which can only emerge in an adequately de-powered, non-overwhelming, and life affirming, i.e. holotropic and syntropic environment. In recent years I have become increasingly intrigued by ai (shorthand for ant intelligence) as opposed to the hype of AI. ai is an awesome form of externalised collective intelligence beyond human comprehension. Some ant species can leave pheromone trails that can last for days – which I can confirm from personal experience, while others produce a pheromone trail that only lasts 10 minutes. Unintentional experiments from my kitchen reveal that once an ant has located a food source, that it only takes a few hours for a fully functional ai food logistics system to become established. On this planet ai goes a long way to ensuring that no food goes to waste. We could learn from that. It is worthwhile listening to Bayo Akomolafe. I think he seriously underestimates ai, but he does a wonderful job of making Autistic ways of being and relating accessible to a neuronormative audience. Taking stock This year (2024), August 1st was Earth Overshoot Day, announced by the Global Footprint Network. This is the date when humanity’s demand on natural resources exceeds Earth’s capacity to regenerate them in a given year. We are currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate. The Ecological Footprint Calculator is a useful tool for exploring our own ecological footprint and the huge disparities between the huge footprints of elites and the vastly smaller footprints of the majority of humans. Daoist philosophers have warned humans for over 2,500 years that all forms of social power over others corrupts. Ignoring this warning has led to the current human predicament. Rather than playing around with yet another “better” configuration of powered-up institutions, perhaps we are better served by practicing de-powered dialogue, and by learning how to de-power all our relationships – without asking any so-called authority for permission. The revolution will not be nudged! Towards ecological wellbeing Becoming conscious of human cognitive and emotional limits, and recognising that these limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may help us to fully appreciate the wonder of life. Creating light, where all you could see is darkness.– Sofía Gómez Uribe There is no shortage of human scale initiatives that re-conceptualise human societies in comprehensible, compassionate, and life affirming ways. Collectively we can tap into a wealth of knowledge and timeless indigenous wisdom. We need commitment, we need community. We need to create spaces of trust. But for that, there’s tremendous work that we need to be doing. But I don’t think that any of that work will be possible, should we not have that commitment–that commitment that no matter how challenging and tremendously difficult it will be to reckon with these narratives and to dismantle these narratives. Because seeing the horror in the eye of all these narratives that we live by comes with tremendous understanding. It will leave us very fragile, very vulnerable, and most, of course, are not willing to do that, because we don’t feel safe. But if we are able to stand the heat and create these spaces, if we commit to do this kind of work for the benefit of the planet, then we may be able to learn that we can fly.– Yuria Celidwen … and you can only do it with the help of friends who keep you safe. I don’t have a death wish, I have a depth wish.– Stig Pryds We are currently co-creating a comprehensive support model for Autists and otherwise neurodivergent and intersectionally marginalised people that is grounded in our collective lived experience, informed by what we are learning from the results of our ongoing participatory research.  1 Comment Neurodivergent nervous systems and sensitivity profiles August 4, 2024August 5, 2024 Jorn Bettin foundational, healthcare 🔊 Listen Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve over the course of our lives. 85% of neurodivergent adults often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, and over 60% often or always feel disrespected and unsafe. Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by alignment between our sensitivity profiles and the ecology of care we are embedded in (or not). Development and evolution of human nervous systemsCults vs healthy cultural organismsThe reality of internalised ableismCultural and psychological safety in workplace settings Culturally “well adjusted” employeesEmployees from marginalised population segmentsNeurodivergent employeesThe neurodivergent childhood experience in our “civilisation”The adult neurodivergent experience in our “civilisation”The human sense of agencyCognitive dissonanceRediscovering our faith in humanityDr. B. Educated – ResearchFeeling Safe – SurveyFeeling Safe Growing Up – SurveyCognitive Dissonance in Our Lives – SurveyIntersectional Safety – Experience ReportsSafety in Healthcare – Experience ReportsInclusive Communication in HealthcareSafety in the Workplace – Survey Development and evolution of human nervous systems Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve over the course of our lives, shaped by the following factors: Sensitivities that are encoded epigenetically, at least some of which may be the result of traumatising experiences in earlier generations. We now know that childhood trauma can affect the sensitivity profiles of our nervous systems across multiple generations. Sensitivities that result from childhood trauma due to the internalised ableism we encounter in our social environment, especially from caregivers, peers, educators, and health professionals. Sensitivities that result from further trauma due to the cultural mainstream we are immersed in, i.e. due to the “normalisation” of many forms of violence, bullying, and neglect within social norms, laws, workplaces, healthcare settings, default family structures, anthropocentric religions, and dehumanising economic ideologies. Persistent positive experiences (over months, years, decades) in the social and ecological environment beyond the human that allow us to feel understood and loved, i.e. experiences with non-judgemental animals and people with compatible sensitivity profiles – such positive experiences allow us to incrementally let go of internalised ableism, and they teach us how to nurture trustworthy de-powered (non-coercive) caring relationships with other living beings. Laws and social norms that are deemed to be applicable in large (“super human”) scale societies can never be a substitute for trustworthy caring and loving relationships. By definition such laws and social norms are formulated in ignorance of our individual sensitivity profiles and individual life circumstances. Cults vs healthy cultural organisms Large scale anonymous social environments are inherently traumatising, as they involve many interactions between people who know very little or nothing about each other. In contrast, over time, small “human” scale social environments minimise interactions between people who know nothing about each other. Healing involves collaborative niche construction with others who are committed to nurturing shared understanding and de-powered ecologies of care beyond the human in egalitarian human scale environments. Healthy social ecologies allow us to develop a positive relationship with our sensitivity profiles. The laws and social norms that emerge and evolve in egalitarian human scale cultural organisms are attuned to a specific ecological context rather than being shaped by abstract institutions in far away places. All non-egalitarian social environments, irrespective of scale, have all the characteristics of a cult. So-called “civilisations” based on hierarchical structures of coercive power are no exception. All empires are based on a myth of cultural superiority – including normalisation of institutionalised forms of violence, bullying, and neglect. The laws and social norms that emerge and evolve in cults are primarily concerned with the perpetuation of specific hierarchical structures of coercive powers and violence, and much less with human and non-human wellbeing. The only difference between smaller cults and the social power structures within modern corporations and nation states is scale. The reality of internalised ableism The extent to which people consciously experience their social environment as a traumatising cult depends on their level of internalised ableism and their ability to maintain cognitive dissonance over months, years, and decades – which in turn comes back to our individual sensitivity profiles. AutCollab participatory research reveals that many Autistic and intersectionally marginalised people experience the dominant culture they are embedded in as highly traumatising. In our hypernormative “civilisation” marginalised population segments are routinely at the receiving end of internalised ableism. In contrast, those who consider themselves to be culturally “well adjusted” experience the dominant culture as relatively “safe” – they have internalised the behavioural patterns of homo economicus. Cultural and psychological safety in workplace settings For the experience in workplace environments, our global survey results show that non-marginalised employees experience the culture in typical workplace settings as “normal”. In contrast, employees from marginalised population segments feel much less safe and welcome at work. Over 40% of employees are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with “superiors”, and over 25% of employees are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with peers. Our survey results include large numbers of responses from marginalised population segments. This explains the stark contrast between the overall aggregate results (below) and the corresponding numbers for those who consider themselves culturally “well adjusted” (in the following subsection). Culturally “well adjusted” employees Amongst the employees who consider themselves to be culturally well adjusted over 20% are not entirely relaxed when engaging with their bosses, but more than 90% are at ease when amongst peers. Employees from marginalised population segments Amongst employees who identify with one or more marginalised population segments, over 50% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with “superiors”, and over 25% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with peers. This raises serious questions about the concept of “normality” in modern industrialised societies. Neurodivergent employees Amongst employees who identify as neurodivergent, 70% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with “superiors”, and over 40% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with peers. The differences between these responses and the responses of those who consider themselves culturally “well adjusted” are stark. Internalised ableism in the workplace is an undeniable reality. The neurodivergent childhood experience in our “civilisation” The experience of being at the receiving end of internalised ableism starts at a young age in powered-up family structures and education environments. Amongst neurodivergent children, 90% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self at school, and close to 70% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self within their families. Furthermore, over 90% of neurodivergent children often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, over 80% often or always feel disrespected, and over 70% often or always feel unsafe. As a result, over 70% of neurodivergent children often or always distrust family, friends, and classmates, and around 80% detach emotionally in order to cope and survive. Over 90% often or always experience anxiety, and 80% often or always feel depressed. The adult neurodivergent experience in our “civilisation” The experience of being at the receiving end of internalised ableism continues into adulthood, into all aspects of our lives – unless we consciously choose to opt out of the hypernormative and traumatising life path of “modern civilisation”. The ability to opt out depends on the extent to which we are embedded in a healthy ecology of care, the establishment of which can take decades. For many the ability to opt out remains out of reach. Amongst neurodivergent adults, 70% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self at work, close to 60% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self within their families, and over 45% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self amongst “friends”. Furthermore, 85% of neurodivergent adults often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, and over 60% often or always feel disrespected and unsafe. As a result, over 35% of neurodivergent adults often or always distrust family, parents, and friends, and over 60% detach emotionally in order to cope and survive. Over 80% often or always experience anxiety, and 50% often or always feel depressed. The human sense of agency Our sense of agency is a human scale phenomenon that emerges from de-powered dialogues within healthy trustworthy relationships. Our research shows that most neurodivergent people don’t have many healthy trustworthy relationships, and therefore have very limited opportunity to engage in de-powered dialogue. Our “individual sense of agency” is the feeling of being understood, respected, and cared for, and the experience of actively contributing to group decisions without being subjected to coercive forces. Healthy cultures understand agency as a collaborative human scale phenomenon rather than as an individual attribute or an attribute of abstract super human scale institutions. In a healthy non-coercive environment Autistic learning styles avoid over-imitation, and thereby help to reduce spurious cultural complexity. The competitive “individual sense of agency” postulated by the ideology of homo economicus turns out to be a misguided myth that is incompatible with our scientific understanding of human cognition and the relational ecology of life. The acknowledgement that human agency operates within a collaborative frame, and is inherently not scalable to super human scales without causing untold harm, is in direct conflict with the progress myth of industrialised societies. Clinging to the anthropocentric myths of technological progress and meritocracy that form the corner stones of modern industrialised societies is arguably the biggest obstacle towards greater levels of compassion, ecological wellbeing, global intersectional solidarity, and paradigmatic cultural adaptation within a context of ecological overshoot on a finite planet. Cognitive dissonance Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by the health of the ecology of care we are embedded in, by our sensitivity profiles, and our (in)ability to resolve cognitive dissonance. These elements are woven together at human scale. Our individual sense of wellbeing is a reflection of communal wellbeing, i.e. a reflection of the health of all the relationships that constitute our sense of “self”. Cognitive dissonance surfaces whenever human emotional limits are reached. The catch is that those humans who are capable of considering themselves to be culturally “well adjusted” have a capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance that seems nearly unlimited from an Autistic perspective. The extent to which the toxic cultural environment of the global mono-cult has created a hypercompetitive atmosphere in which institutions are almost exclusively concerned with perception management, is revealed by our research into the cognitive dissonance experienced by intersectionally marginalised people. Rediscovering our faith in humanity Recognising that cognitive and emotional limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may allow us to embark on a path of intersectional solidarity and healing on the margins of society. It is only within nurturing, small ecologies of care beyond the human, that we can (re)discover our faith in humanity and our faith in the healing powers of the big cycle of life, which is far beyond human comprehensibility. The beautiful diversity of Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent sensitivity profiles constitutes the human cultural immune system that can guide us back towards healthy, life affirming cultural organisms. Small is beautiful. Along the way we can offer: compassionate exit paths for the inmates of dying institutions, many of whom are addicted to the convenience of the unsustainable industrialised way of life and various forms of social status, as well as palliative care for the institutions of the mono-cult. It is encouraging that more and more young people are discovering that an energetically de-powered and less materialistic life is beneficial for our physical wellbeing, and that a socially de-powered life at human scale is essential for our mental wellbeing. Given the current state of ecological overshoot, the path ahead includes unavoidable human and non-human suffering. Becoming fully aware of human scale limitations not only helps us to minimise suffering and cognitive dissonance, it also reintegrates us into the sacred cycle of life via trustworthy relationships beyond the human. Dr. B. Educated – Research The vast majority of healthcare professionals are ignorant not only about Autistic culture and Autistic ways of being, they are also ignorant about the prevalence of complex trauma amongst intersectionally marginalised people. Encouragingly, committed allies of the neurodiversity movement, such as Dr. Zoe Raos (Te Āti Awa), a gastroenterologist in Waitematā, Tāmaki Makaurau, are starting to speak up about the lack of cultural and psychological safety for Autistic patients and colleagues. Feeling Safe – Survey This 5 minute anonymous survey (fourteen questions) is conducted by the Autistic Collaboration Trust and is sponsored by S23M. Feeling Safe Growing Up – Survey This 5 minute anonymous survey (fifteen questions) is conducted by the Autistic Collaboration Trust and is sponsored by S23M.  Cognitive Dissonance in Our Lives – Survey This 8 minute anonymous survey (25 questions) is conducted by the Autistic Collaboration Trust and is sponsored by S23M.  Intersectional Safety – Experience Reports This research programme depends on the breadth and depth of lived Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent experience that we can draw on. Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent and marginalised people are invited to contribute their lived experience. Safety in Healthcare – Experience Reports We invite everyone – including you, whether neuronormative or neurodivergent, to support our education efforts with reports of your lived experience in healthcare settings. As needed you can remain entirely anonymous to protect yourself from further harm. Inclusive Communication in Healthcare Neurodivergent and otherwise marginalised people often have specific communication preferences, and in some cases, are only able to communicate in one or two specific modalities. In this research project we are collecting examples of both inclusive and marginalising forms of interactions encountered in healthcare settings. You are invited to contribute both negative and positive scenarios, comparing scenarios that you had hoped for or expected with the scenarios that you actually encountered. Safety in the Workplace – Survey S23M is maintaining a unique global database of anonymous baseline data on psychological safety in the workplace via an ongoing online survey. The data is of particular interest for neurodivergent people and other marginalised groups who are experiencing bullying and more or less subtle forms of discrimination at work. You can contribute to this important ongoing research by participating in a 3 minute survey, and by encouraging your friends to participate. Leave a comment Ecocide® – Clearance sale! Buy now. Pay later. July 28, 2024July 31, 2024 Jorn Bettin foundational 🔊 Listen Corporations are best understood as externalising machines that perpetuate a landscape of psychopathic institutions that are exclusively concerned with perception management. As life on this planet is being liquidated, more and more humans are engaging in collaborative niche construction, retreating into human scale cracks within the dying mono-cult. Externalising machinesThe war against lifeCultural and ecological cracks in the dying mono-cultHealing from the religious trauma of the global mono-cult Externalising machines The 20 year old documentary The Corporation, based on first hand experience reports and interviews with corporate CEOs, investors, and bankers, provides an excellent overview into how the ideology of capital powers corporations, linking the core of the logic of capital to the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Corporations are best understood as externalising machines that perpetuate a landscape of psychopathic institutions in which humans are forced into abstract cookie cutter roles prescribed by the global mono-cult of neoliberal economics, and are no longer understood as collaborative biological living beings that form highly adaptive human scale cultural organisms that are integral parts of the planetary ecosystem. The social ecology created by corporations shapes and influences the actions of  tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists,  bankers, investors,  politicians,  employees,  and consumers. The war against life Cancerous growth of corporate externalising machines has been at the core of colonialism, and over the last century, has expanded into all corners of the living planet. This is not about “climate change”; we agree with the judge on that. It is about murder. At scale. Forever. And that is a bad thing, a very bad thing, an evil thing. When the United Nations recently said we have two years to save the world, that they are not being “melodramatic,” that economies will be “devastated,” they mean it. Not in some distant future. In the next 10 to 20 years, that’s what 1,000 public statements have said. It’s what 10,000 peer-reviewed papers have said. It’s coming. It is what it is. At some point, you’ll be stepping over body parts on the way to work, going “well, you know.”– Roger Hallam Life on this planet is being liquidated. Corporations are engaged in a war against biological life. In stark contrast to the narratives of all the corporate feel-good PR, the ecological destruction of externalisation machines is growing, rapidly, resulting in extinction rates that are several thousand times higher than the background extinction rate over the last several million years. This state of affairs is not helped by governments that have not only bought into the mono-cult of neoliberal economics, but that also find themselves in an institutional landscape that completely lacks any concept of a scale aware precautionary principle, such that effective regulation is never able to catch up with the speed at which corporate externalisation machines are liquidating the living planet. In industrialised societies governments find themselves in the role of pretending to be “in control”. The more stratified societies become, the more the state religion of the belief in the God of the Invisible Hand allows the desires of capital rather than the needs of communities to shape policies. The example below refers to the distribution of political party donations in Aotearoa. Technology corporations and management consultants gladly assist governments in the pretend game of “managing the economy”. Since the Cold War empires have increasingly shifted their focus from overt conventional war to economic warfare and psychological warfare. Cultural and ecological cracks in the dying mono-cult On the margins of society, AutCollab participatory research is showing very high levels of cognitive dissonance. The extent to which the toxic cultural environment of the global mono-cult has created a hypercompetitive atmosphere in which institutions are almost exclusively concerned with perception management, is revealed in the lived experiences of intersectionally marginalised people: Are you able to identify the biggest source of cognitive dissonance in your life? If so, what is it? Having to work for corporations when I hate everything about them. The relative privileges i have compared to so many people, even just within the trans community (and among neurodivergent folks), which allow me to diminish the struggles i do face. The fact i just continue to keep going day by day, literally having to shove down how overwhelmingly sad i feel that so many people are in dire situations without their basic needs and exist in warzones and witness so much horror and we are all expected to be ‘business as usual’, the ‘world doesn’t stop’ just because of the genocide of groups of people. I extend that sadness to nonhuman animals as well, and the dissonance i have to erect as the signs of animals’ lives being diminished as insignificant are always present, as are visual reminders on a constant basis (ads, restaurant overflow) of the sheer amount of torture and death undergone to both humans and nonhuman animals every single day in order for ‘convenience’ and a semblance of ‘normalcy’ in operation. these signs, from fast food chains being everywhere, to billboards, streaming ads and even convenience store displays, makes an inescapable pit of mental anguish—we hide the human suffering of the society and world around us through propaganda campaigns and literally pushing those of us who suffer the most out of sight and punish them if they do exist so publicly. but the window-dressings of animal products merely hide the conditions of their existence—the sheer amount of death is not a concern… i do my best by being vegan and avoiding products that contribute to the horror of the industry, but… The former dissonance, the dissonance of the suffering of fellow humans across the world, is a concerted effort by power to set up the dissonance. The latter is one i have to self-erect or i will fall apart over time. So i gave it a bit more space to fill the air. Both are heavy burdens, and trying to discuss how heavy it all is is met with a level of hostility for caring too much, being too bleeding heart or being told i cannot possibly have the capacity to actually care about so many beings suffering in the world. So it has that as an added weight. I want to add: i am considered low support needed, tho i am in process for assessment for autism right now. I work a full time job and rent, i have a little cat, who i feed the best quality wet cat food (meat; cats are obligatory carnivores) i can so that the sacrifice for that meat lends to the best health. I can drive. otoh, i have not taken a proper shower since 2017 and sponge-bathe uncommonly; i do make sure my clothing is clean, which goes a long way. it is really hard for me to do basic tasks on routine. still, it is hard for me to be genuine and admit that i struggle, that i am disabled in some ways and that i need help in others. i think in part it is because of how much suffering we see around us and in media—almost as if by design, with an economic system that hinges upon ‘well, you’re ok, because at least you aren’t in that situation’ in the backs of everyone’s minds to keep people on the routine of ‘normal life’ as if everything is fine. And of course, making us compete with resources to seek aid and help. So we can all just contribute to and get chewed up and spat out of the machinery, while people across the world have their plights scapegoated to show how lucky we are despite complaining so much. (Free Palestine) Planning for retirement and congratulating people for having kids and pretending the future is fine while the planet is quickly roasting to death. I work as a professional staff member at a university and academic staff expect to be treated as gods, yet are blind to the caste system the work in. As well as that, their critical thinking skills are sadly lacking in areas that do not involve academic areas of research and yet they insist all decisions are made by academic staff. Universities are a remarkably dysfunctional kind of organisation. Asking for help from strangers or authority figures. Behaviourism. The ethical quandary of empire and its pervasive programming and my conflicting need for others and need for solitude.  Probably me and people with different political beliefs also within some of my relationships. Since money is disconnected from the real value of many physical quantities and services, and this is deliberate, I should feel much richer than I am financially. But I don’t. Fortunately, I’ve been able to live on little money for part of my life and educate myself at the same time. However, both the competition for money and fame makes me sick. Plus, the domino effect of it all is that you have to prove you have enough knowledge to belong to this pyramid scam, by spending time and resources to get a higher level (a degree). If you learn outside the system, even if you excel, it doesn’t “count”. Pressures of society, partner etc. To work and parent and be in control. Everyone expecting you to be ok and cope when you are not ok and really struggling to cope with most aspects of life. The biggest source of cognitive dissonance for me is valuing social justice, compassion and equality but being paralysed by my disabilities, anxiety and inability to help sufficiently that I end up not doing anything. The disconnect between what people say and do: I don’t know if neurotypical people know how much their actions belie their words. Living under capitalism and neo fascism as a queer, disabled, autistic person. I frequently have to weigh my own needs, desires, and abilities against the material realities of a society that doesn’t value me. The fact that I’m supposed to be able to fake being happy or to be able to fake liking someone. Other people seem to consider this normal and easy. For me, it is impossible. Healing from the religious trauma of the global mono-cult More and more humans are engaging in collaborative niche construction to retreat into healthier human scale cultural and ecological cracks within the mono-cult. Becoming conscious of human cognitive and emotional limits, and recognising that these limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may allow us to avoid the fate of earlier civilisations, and to embark on a path of radical energy descent. The evolving web of relationships, mutual aid, and peer support initiatives on the margins of society is best understood in terms of emergent Ecologies of Care beyond the human. The journey towards a healthier relationship with the ecologies which we are part of starts with the most powerful tool at our disposal, the introduction and consistent use of new language and new semantics. A production/consumption paradigm for what an economy is is a guarantee for ultimately destroying the planet and each other. Even when you talk about degrowth, if you’re working within that paradigm, you’re essentially doomed. We need to break away from that paradigm entirely. Care and freedom on the other hand are things you can increase as much as you like without damaging anything. So we need to think: what are ways that we need to care for each other that will make each other more free? And who’re the people who are providing that care? And how can they be compensated themselves with greater freedom? To do that we need to like, actually scrap almost all of the discipline of economics as it currently exists.We’re actually just starting to think about this. Economics as it currently exists is based on assumptions of human nature that we now know to be wrong. There have been actual empirical tests of the basic sort of fundamental assumptions of the maximizing individual that economic theory is based on, and it turns out that they’re not true. It tells you something about the role of economics that this has had almost no effect on economic teaching whatsoever. They don’t really care that it’s not true.But one of the things that we have discovered, which is quite interesting, is that human beings have a psychological need to be cared for, but they have an even greater psychological need to care for others, or to care for something. If you don’t have that you basically fall apart. It’s why old people get dogs. We don’t just care for each other because we need to maintain each other’s lives and freedoms, but our own psychological happiness is based on being able to care for something or someone.  – David Graeber, From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes, 2019 Onwards! Join us! Leave a comment Post navigation ← Older posts Your language Your support keeps us going! EDUCATION Scheduled courses → Register Active courses → Access workspace Ended courses → View outcomes Very refreshing to take part in CPD catering to different learning and communication styles. It was the most fun I’ve had in CPD this year! The course book is beautiful.Dr Sarah Bernard FRACP, Australia Search Search for: You can join our team of translators to help us review and improve the translations. ARTICLES Autistic human animals – a factor in cultural metamorphosis The ability to relate deeply is the inability to conduct transactional busyness The inability to think hierarchically is the ability to think and live relationally ESSENTIAL READINGNurturing healthy Autistic relationshipsHypernormative Culture Awareness MonthOrganising for neurodivergent collaborationLife without the false God of NormalityAutistic human animals – a factor in cultural metamorphosisIn search of psychological safetyAutistic mutual aid – a factor of cultural evolutionFrom pseudo-philosophical psychiatrists to openly Autistic cultureThe massive cognitive and emotional blind spot at the core of modernityPanel discussions towards a ban of all forms of conversion therapiesAlliances Powered by WordPress.com. 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