CivicEnlightenment

A quest to promote peace through societal understanding and inner awareness

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

23/ This was a lot. So feel free to AMA.

Thanks for tuning in, sending all my love and best wishes to you.

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

22/ Here is the full presentation if you're interested.

We'll be doing the second discussion of the Big Picture Mind @integrallife soon. And thank you to @CoreyWdeVos for helping with the video breakdown.

https://t.co/IPuzM22iSC

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

21/ Here's a link to an interactive version of the diagram.

https://t.co/RJAlsX97BD

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

20/ For example, our think tank @iametatheory thinks about reality as an evolutionary stack.

Here is a diagram of how of how we apply Big Pictures to evolutionary acupuncture points with specific social impact initiatives.

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

19/ You Are the Transformative Force

Humans are the only force capable of meeting the Transformation Age on its own terms. You are that important. Cliche, but literally true. The more seriously you take your profound importance, the more meaningful and impactful life becomes.

It seems like a lot, but you're far from alone. We're here to help if you need it.

https://t.co/9rGeec5fez

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

18/ Thriving in the Transformation Age: Building a Sustainable Commons

What can you do? Social-systemically: In a globally-networked world with massive individual diversity, the only way to preserve individual liberty amidst differing political values, but also solve for planetary-level coordination problems is to move towards a sustainable global commons. This will decentralize power and preserve freedom while encouraging innovation of coordination protocols (i.e., panarchical systems, full cost pricing, subsidiarity, resilient meshworks, etc.)
https://t.co/tAbz9AQGyI

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

17/ Thriving in the Transformation Age: Transformative Behavior

What can you do? Behaviorally: you either reproduce or transform the world with every choice, every word, every decision you make. "Be the change" is cliche, but it's also deeply true, because a system that is oppressive, dishonest, and ugly cannot reproduce itself without our assent. Taking this commit seriously frees you to reproduce or transform the world every day.

https://t.co/06NcBCcE97

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

16/ Thriving in the Transformation Age: Ethical Commitment to Serve

What can you do? Culturally and relationally: Commit to cosmic integrity, a far-reaching integrity founded in service to growing up, waking up, cleaning up and showing up so as to help others do the same.

https://t.co/iFTkJDMyQj

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

15/ Here's how. Thriving in the Transformation Age: Build a Big Picture Mind

What can you do? Psychologically: Start to build a bigger mind, one that gets free of the prison and partiality of narrower ideologies and gives you more freedom and self-reflexive autonomy. This is the foundation of the world we need, people committed to having a worldview big enough to make room for everyone. Where everyone else will grab a piece of the elephant, you will work harder to see the whole elephant.

https://t.co/OkyCalYeWN

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

14/ We need better elites.

This seems overwhelming because there's no way for most people to meet it with their current worldview and cognitive frames. But you can change that. There is a way to not only meet the era, but become big enough to lead others through it.

You are the better elite we need.

https://t.co/hBzigURauY

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

13/ Five tsunamis = One Metacrisis.

These five forces combine to describe a global, deep, interpenetrating "Metacrisis" that is profoundly impacting all aspects of human life.

This will continue. These five forces—
1. Ecological Anthropocene
2. Cultural-sensemaking Hyperreality
3. Spiritual Meaning Crisis
4. Techno-economic Singularity
5. Geopolitical Great Release
—will be the most important background context of every aspect of human life over the next several decades.

The metacrisis and its five tsunami-level forces since 2007 have and will continue to define the shape of the Transformation Age.
https://t.co/JgCyZBOkrJ

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

12/ The fifth tsunami is geopolitical: the US carries the world with it as it spirals into a "Great Release", a breakdown of an 80-year long geopolitical order.

Since 1945 the US has led an internationalist liberal global order. But as elites have abused US global hegemony to strip wealth from the middle classes, it has caused a populist reactionary backlash.

This breakdown of the US as a unipolar superpower impacts almost every aspect of life on Earth, and we move now through a decades-long period of serious disruption that is, at a systems-level, trying to repair the US's "strategic obesity" (i.e., its inability to respond to a changing world in any functional way).
https://t.co/Va3r2OD2pr

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

11/ The fourth tsunami is technoeconomic: we approach a technological Singularity.

AI, quantum computing and other exponential technologies present extraordinary opportunities and the possibility of radical enhancements to human life. But they also present a profound risk of neo-Feudalism by leveling social mobility and returning wealth inequality to historic norms. One way or other, they will fundamentally alter much of human life in the 21st century.
https://t.co/NpirK9HNFo

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

10/ The third tsunami is psychological: we are in a Meaning Crisis, a deeply-felt sense of spiritual vacuity because we don’t know who we are and why.

Amidst a chaotic backdrop of adults who themselves seem totally confused—because they are—young people are faced with a choice to anchor their identity in a mythological theism, an arid modernity, or a narcissistic and nihilistic postmodernity. (There is a better, fourth choice.)
https://t.co/46xg9HCkus

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

9/ The second tsunami is cultural: the rise of Hyperreality has shattered our individual and collective sensemaking.

Hyperreality is a world where reality is obscured, and language and imagery create simulated faux-realities. The map is literally the territory in a world largely-indistinguishable from a simulated metaverse.

Hyperreality is also fertile ground in which to grow authoritarianism because simpler worldviews insist on simpler answers and try to use hard power to try to unwind evolved complexity to restore prior eras.
https://t.co/bbCrUYz655

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

8/ Five historic, paradigm-changing tsunamis are washing over us and all coming into phase right now.

The first tsunami is ecological, with the onset of the Anthropocene. Climate change and other ecological calamities get stronger as the Holocene of the last 12,000 years ended and the Anthropocene started, a term denoting that human influence is now the formative influence on Earth geology and ecology.
https://t.co/odbjT7Qasn

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

7/ So what does a BPM see today? The rise of a new Transformation Age.

As I said, the world evolves. So does society. The Information Age ended in 2007 (in my view). We have entered what sociologists call a “Morphogenic Society”, a radically new civilizational mode where change dominates stability, which creates cultural and social variety that threatens the shared social values that are the basis for social order.
https://t.co/yrQy4qsIls

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

6/ Find Big Picture Minds and follow them.

If you’re listening to people who are trying to see a world that is way more complex than the narrow worldview they use to explain it, you’re cooked. Following people w BPMs is one of the most critical things you can do to put a rocket booster on your mind.

This isn't to say that thousands of experts aren't awesome in their fields of expertise, just be aware if they starting moving to worldview-level philosophizing.

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

5/ Almost everything you know comes from only one (of three) levels of knowledge.

In addition to late-stage cognition, we also see knowledge emerge in stages of complexity, with more abstract knowledge emerging from and reorganizing prior knowledge. There are three main levels of knowledge now (and a fourth emerging just in the past few years):

1. Disciplinary: Foundational, narrow research and knowledge about reality. Classic science and most conventional knowledge lives here.

2. Interdisciplinary: Narrow knowledge combines to tackle broader, multifaceted fields. eg., much AI work lives here

3. Transdisciplinary: Sees all prior knowledge and finds the patterns that connect to create first scientifically-credible Big Pictures of reality. Very few people know about or operate from this level.

Each of these levels emerges and reorganizes how the prior is understood.*

*Think of how your 18 year old self has reorganized your thinking on something versus your 8 year old self: it’s a qualitative and fundamentally novel reorganization. This is a not-unrelated metaphor for what's going on above.
https://t.co/g45KeqgjEZ

[Robb Smith @RobbSmith]

4/ The world evolves into greater complexity, and right now most everyone is drowning in a "complexity gap".

The world evolves through emergent structures in human social and cultural systems that both drive, and are driven by, growing levels of human consciousness.

Right now we suffer from a chasm-like “complexity gap” where the masses, and even most of our elites, are in over their heads and drowning from this gap. Their minds can't meet the real complexity of the world; this is Einstein's correct observation about not being able to solve problems from the same level of consciousness that created them.
https://t.co/WGmZrQytG6