Civilizational Collapse: We Need Anti-Rivalrous Governance
This week's recommendation features Daniel Schmachtenberger
Live Interview and Q&A Session with Ken Cloke:
Wednesday, March 9 at 12-2pm PST (3pm EST)
Join for the live recording of the inaugural episode of The Omni-Win Project podcast, where host, Duncan Autrey will strategize and dream, with his friend, colleague and mentor, Ken Cloke about how to create an omnipartial (anti-rivalrous) government and political system. Followed by a Q&A session:
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Key Takeaways:
We need a whole new system of democracy, one the world has never seen before.
We already have the tools to make participatory democracy a reality.
The meta-crisis is real and it has three parts: Rivalrous dynamics, consumption of the ecosystem, and exponential technological growth. We need a shift to omni-win culture to escape this trap.
Our current democracy asks people to vote yes or no on shitty propositions, creating polarization.
Daniel Schmachtenberger is one of my favorite thinkers these days. I think he’s the one who coined the term “omni-win,” but I still need to get proof of that. He frames the meta-crisis as a three-part crisis:
Rivalrous dynamics: We’re all competing to win and beat other people.
Subsuming of our substrate: We’re all gobbling up the environment to beat others.
Exponential technology: We’re getting better at gobbling up this world.
“Rivalrous dynamics” grabs my attention because I believe this win-lose situation is not going to work for us. We can’t keep on doing this win-lose politics, culture, everything. There’s a fundamental problem there.
Here’s a video from Rebel Wisdom. David Fuller is interviewing Daniel Schmachtenberger, who’s talking about the meta-crisis. I’ve transcribed it below if you’d rather read it. The clip I’m focusing on is 6:40-9:00.
“The paradigm shift is basically everything. We need new systems of governance. If we just, I mean, when we think about how much we love the word democracy, and we love the word democracy because it's better than tyranny, and it's better than the other, like really horrible systems that we've experienced at any scale.
But when Winston Churchill said democracy is the single worst form of governance ever created, save for all the other forms, what he was saying that was really insightful was that getting lots of humans to agree on anything is just a hard thing to do, and we suck at it and we've never actually done a good job at it. And this is a really flawed system. Now we like it because like we said, it's overcoming things that were even more problematic.
If you think about democracy for a moment, and whether we're talking representative democracy or liquid democracy using a voting currency or binary vote, fundamentally of a process of saying, ‘Okay, we can't get everybody to agree beyond a very small number of people,’ Dunbar’s number, tribe: You can get everybody to agree because they can all be in a conversation together. Beyond the level at which you can have a conversation together, you can have a few people control everything and they can be in a conversation together, some type of oligarchy or meritocracy.
But then you're like, no, we want most of the people to agree, at least. Right. That seems like a good idea. But somebody puts forward a proposition to do something that they think is important based on their limited sense-making that is never everything. That proposition, because it wasn't informed by comprehensive sense-making will always, in the process of benefiting something, also damage something else.
And so some people love it based on if what it's benefiting is directly relevant to them. And other people hate it based on if what it's damaging is relevant to them. You just created an inexorable polarization because you made shitty propositions and then ask people to vote yes or no binary on a shitty proposition.
So you notice people actually don't all get to contribute to the sense-making of what a good proposition would be. There's no kind of collective input there. There isn't even a generation of what would good mean here. And they, so really even their choice making is just yes or no on a frame that was already controlled.
And typically who's going to be able to even put forward a proposition if someone has vested interests? And so you're stuck with polarization in that particular system, right? So we need new systems of governance that are not any system of governance the world has ever done so far. There are systems of how do we individually and collectively make sense of what's going on, make sense of what we actually value, and how those values can be synergistically satisfied rather than in the theory of trade-offs with each other progressively better.
And how do we create designs that are optimal synergistic satisfiers? So that's a totally new thing governance-wise. We need totally new systems of economics. We need totally new systems of education, healthcare, all the way down to at an individual level a new basis for identity, values, our own individual sense-making, and choice-making.”
That’s just part of the full 30-minute interview. Daniel’s the creator of the Consilience Project, which is about helping us make sense of the world collectively.
I’m going to pull out a couple of things that he said. He talked about something I’ve noticed for a long time: This representative democracy system is cool, better than the rest, but it’s not working anymore. We expect representatives to have all the answers to our problems.
We look at their policies way ahead of time and expect them to become a reality. They aren’t creating these propositions with a shared sense, so they’re just not well-formed. It’s a serious problem: It creates polarization when you ask people to vote.
We’re creating shitty propositions: These aren’t the best ideas. How do we move toward that?
We need collective input. As politicians create these propositions, they should be listening to the affected people. That’s a core value for me, and it’s a core concept here in the Omni-Win Project. Some questions to generate that collective input:
What’s the question we’re trying to answer to?
Do we agree it’s an important question?
Do we agree that we have identified the problem?
What does better look like?
Can we have a shared understanding of what good means?
We have amazing dialogue and deliberative democracy tools, participatory democracy, and citizen assemblies. We know how to do this. While we need to commit to a new system of government that we’ve never seen before, we already have the tools to create it.
That’s what the Omni-Win Project will be about: Exploring all the tools and making sure people know about them.
Beyond our status quo bias, I hypothesize that people don’t know these tools exist. Or maybe they don’t believe they’ll work. That’s why we’re not clamoring for better systems for making decisions, better decisions for better processes. It’s why we’re not working on collective input or using all the tools for dialogue, conflict resolution, and conflict transformation. The things that everyone wants already exist. I have hope.
In the next essay, I will talk about being a pessi-optimist or an opti-pessimist. I really think that we can do this, and it’s not going to be as hard as it seems.
Here are examples of Participatory Democracy to check out:
The Philadelphia Citizen’s Ideas We Should Steal: Citizens’ Assemblies
Center for Collaborative Democracy’s Genuine Representation
The UK Government’s Innovations in Democracy Programme
If you prefer to watch your content, here’s a video on this essay:
You can find more information about the work I do in conflict transformation on my website: http://www.omni-win.com
You can schedule a call with me here: https://calendly.com/duncanautrey
Don’t forget to check out the rest of my posts as I discuss how we can work together to ensure we all win.
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