What kind of human does nature need?
Answering the question cultivates soil for human flourishing within planetary boundaries. A very important part of the answer lies in shifting from doing to being.
“What do you want to do?” The question has been driving my 30+ years of migration, both forced and voluntary. Looking back, the response to the question was often conditioned by fear.
Fear of losing home, money, job, legal status, power, partners, friends, things…. Fear of the known and of the unknown that turns human beings into labels has accompanied many of the choices and decisions I have made over the past three decades. But, when broadening the lens, I can see that my fears are just a tiny piece of string in the net that the culture of violence has extended over humanity. Physical, psychological, political, structural, and all other known forms of man-made violence are the driving forces dominating our societies and our relationship with nature.
At the heart of it lies the memory of mushroom clouds lifting over the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Generations have grown in the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction that gave the culture of violence an additional boost. It gave it the central role in assuring what John Stuart Mill considered the first thing civilization teaches us: obedience.
Having us trapped between the destructive reality of nuclear war and the political manipulation of Mutually Assured Destruction, our so-called leaders created a perfect condition for accelerated economic development. Fear of violence converted mankind into a resource for the pursuit of endless increases in financial profit, with no regard for the consequences of its externalities.
With the violence escalating globally and the threat of nuclear destruction looming over us, it is the Pyrrhic nature of hypothetical victory that keeps the fingers off the trigger. One side´s victory still means the end of both sides, but while our eyes are on the finger that is holding the nuclear trigger, they are off the Business as Usual. And that’s what the culture of violence is fighting to preserve. It is not our wellbeing and safety; it is keeping the wealth pump running to where it should: into the pockets of very few.
The threat of war escalating is a probability. Climate change advancing is our reality.
In the meantime, while military budgets are inflating, climate change mitigation and adaptation funding is nowhere near its pace. Why am I thinking of Fredric Jameson and his famous quote? «It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”
The nuclear tennis-match-rhetoric between the military superpowers has a dissuasive function. It keeps us obedient and away from unconditionally demanding imminent political action and resources to slow down, mitigate, and adapt to climate change. In the meantime, Business as Usual is a happy place where a happy few are piling up mountains of personal fortune, while stashing supplies into their six-star doomsday bunkers.
They are probably keeping an eye on one variable that does not fit the equation. We know that human leaders (no matter how idiotic they may appear) will do anything in their power not to pull the nuclear trigger. The Cost Benefit Analysis says that Mutually Assured Destruction is bad for Business as Usual. Death, it turns out, is bad for business and accumulating wealth.
However, no one is 100% sure that the Cost Benefit Analysis run by AI will always give that same result. At some point, the numbers may give a result where pulling the nuclear trigger is no longer MAD but a zero-sum option.
Fear of dying is inseparable from having a body.
No body = No fear
Nobody survives. Nobody, but AI.
Yes, I know it sounds gloomy, but how far from reality is it?
AI does not fear death. Epistemologically speaking, AI has all the right conditions to learn and know all there is to know about death. But it is lacking one single, yet fundamental, condition that prevents it from experiencing the fear of death as we do.
AI lacks bodily experience.
It is precisely the bodily experience that connects us to life.
It gives us the ability to experiment with fractal flourishing; a systems-thinking concept popularized by Jeremy Lent, describing a state where the health and well-being of every individual part of a system mirror and support the health of the entire whole.
Today we are collectively at the bottom of the Theory U where the Voice of Fear clings to past security and identity. We can overcome it by summoning the courage to step into the unknown. What makes the leap of faith easier is that the unknown is not really unknown. It is only forgotten.
The unknown is the mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships, which are life’s main operating feature. Two different species interact and both profit from the association. All life emerges, thrives, and prospers through the healthy natural balance between cooperation and competition. In human society, understood as an ecosystem, this translates to fractal flourishing.
It shifts the mindset from fearing mutually assured destruction to aspiring mutually assured flourishing.
The unknown is simply the forgotten nature of biological and ecological boundaries in which human beings are not selfish local entities but an interdependent, integral part of the whole, with an enormous potential to thrive under mutually beneficial symbiosis.
Cultivating and caring for fertile, healthy soils is a precondition for feeding humanity.
Cultivating and caring for healthy culture is a precondition for a flourishing humanity.
An inclusive culture of diversity, equality, justice and wellbeing is our social soil.
The soil for human flourishing is acknowledging that ‘The outward social structure is the result of the inward psychological structure of our human relationships.’
As we start presencing and letting the emerging future come, we begin to perceive what is trying to be born through our collective efforts. While stepping out of the death-threatening nuclear mushroom of mutually assured destruction into a life-affirming mutually assured flourishing, enormous power is unleashed. Once clarity emerges at the bottom, we begin the journey upward, into life-affirming, co-evolving symbiosis and away from a depleting mindset.
And although I say all this from the place of ‘one who plants the trees knowing that will never sit in their shade’, I don’t say it from the unknown. I state it from the place where aspiration takes over fear. From a place where I no longer need the answer to “What do you want to do?” Because what I only need answering is:
What do I want to be in this world?
Answering it means not living without fear. It means not letting the fear of short-term events distract me from the long-term aspiration, which is:
Being a life-enhancing property in a soil of Mutually Assured Flourishing embedded in the Web of Life. Where all doing must aim to take care of the soil.
Boris Matijas 