This (poly)crisis is our chrysalis

We’re being called to create a new world. Here are signs we’re doing it.

This post focuses on the metalevel, the big picture of our current interwoven crises and the paradigm shift that’s happening in our whole system because of that.

The specific examples I detailed in my ebook Hiding In Plain Sight: Evidence of Our Life-Aligned, Regenerative Culture Emerging  and my previous blogposts are like the trees that make up a forest.

This is a beginning look at the “forest” that’s already here and that’s showing up in perhaps unexpected places.

Here are just a few signs of our paradigm shift showing up as a new story that’s creating our new life-aligned culture and world.

In The Noise Is the Signal: A Behavioral Reading of Media Collapse, Johan argues that:

“The traditional media apparatus (newspapers of record, broadcast networks, official channels) has lost something more fundamental than market share. It has lost epistemic authority: the collectively held belief that these institutions can reliably arbitrate between truth and falsehood, signal and noise. . . .

“And here’s what behavioral science tells us happens next: When trusted systems fail, humans don’t return to chaos.  They create new ones . . .

"What most analysts call “media fragmentation” is actually an emergent distributed sensemaking network . . .  [that is] millions of people are building new systems to figure out what’s real, what matters, and who to trust…and they’re doing it in real time, across platforms, without waiting for permission.

“This isn’t disorder. It’s reorganization. “What we’re calling “media chaos” is actually a global protest against epistemic gatekeeping.

“People aren’t just upset about specific policies or politicians. They’re rejecting the authority of institutions to tell them what counts as real, important, or true. (emphasis added)

“Each of these is a behavioral refusal: a rejection of the claim that legitimacy flows from institutional position rather than demonstrated reliability.

“But here’s the thing: we can’t go back. The old system is gone. The question isn’t whether to restore institutional authority; that ship has sailed. 

“The question is: What new systems of collective sensemaking can we build from here? . . .

“. . . maybe,  just maybe, we can build something better than a system where truth was whatever powerful institutions said it was.”

Excerpts from the Biomimicry Institute’s 5 Key Characteristics of Nature-Inspired Startups: 

“Nature-inspired solutions draw directly from the natural world, adapting biological principles, ecological relationships, and other strategies honed by 3.8 billion years of evolution to tackle humanity’s most pressing environmental challenges.

“These ventures don’t just mimic chemistry, patterns, structures, or functions from living systems, they learn from nature’s way of solving problems. (emphasis added) They translate deep biological wisdom into innovations that are efficient, resilient, and regenerative.

“What unites these startups is a shared belief: that innovation and business can work more like ecosystems: adapting to feedback, optimizing for the long term, and creating conditions for life to thrive.” (emphasis added)

John Fullerton has a new book just coming out, Regenerative Economics: Revolutionary Thinking for a World in Crisis:

Regenerative Economics is based on the deceptively simple idea that an economic system should emulate the process and patterns that define all life. This science-based next evolution of economics explains the root cause of the polycrisis and promises a hopeful pathway forward, rooted in unseen potential and abundance. 

His radical (getting to the root of the matter) regenerative economics framework, which he has been offering in his courses, gives us an actually-accurate compass instead of new goals for creating the world we want to live in.

These are signs that we are beginning to shift to a different worldview, as examples of these quotes:

“Our job, our responsibility, as many native peoples know, is about how we learn to have peace with Earth. Not peace on Earth, but peace with Earth.”

— Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Cheyenne River Lakota Nation

“The Great Turning is not just a light at the end of the tunnel; it’s how we get through. ”

— Joanna Macy, In Her Words