Cordial World Project

This post is for the ones mapping coherence across the noise. For those designing with entanglement. For those weaving what systems forgot how to hold. You are not alone in this work of quiet transformation. #HOLOS #CivicIntelligence #CordialWorldProject

In a recent Frankly episode of The Great Simplification, @NateHagens asks a harder question than most: What does scale itself do to human behaviour when amplified by abundant energy? If winter is here, the real issue may not be energy descent, but whether our coordination capacity survives it. My offered response: nickcarus.substack.com/p/winter-is-he…

For those sensing something forming across silos, systems, and movements - this is for you. The Cordial World Project is just beginning to take shape. 🔗 Read the longform intro: linkedin.com/pulse/cordial-… #CivicIntelligence #HOLOS #CollectiveTransformation

@bourne_les @caitoz I think you need to explain what you mean by "one step ahead of nature". Are you implying that humanity is separated from "nature" - or that we're "masters" over nature? If so, the rest of us have much to fear if our corporate elites are thinking and acting upon such a premise.

@caitoz Well so far technology has kept humanity one step ahead of nature. That is a fact that no one can deny.

The unspoken premise of capitalism is that the world will be saved by sociopathic tech plutocrats like Elon Musk. The idea is to just continue the plan of infinite growth on a finite world until hopefully some tech company produces technology that makes such growth sustainable in a way that both (A) benefits everybody and (B) turns billionaires into trillionaires. This is, of course, a fantasy. As long as mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, you're going to see the interests of humanity and the ecosystem subverted by that pursuit. The belief that capitalism will rescue us from the ecological disasters it creates assumes that the blind pursuit of profit for its own sake will somehow possess the wisdom necessary to preserve the delicate ecosystemic context upon which human life depends while also ensuring that we all have a decent quality of life (as long as we work hard enough, of course). This is a religious belief. It's blind faith dogma, based on literally nothing other than one's desire to believe it. It ascribes a wisdom to the "invisible hand of the market" that is tantamount to claiming that capitalism is being steered by God. It's something people want to believe because the alternative is falling back on some form of socialist system to ensure our survival on this planet, which we in the west have been indoctrinated into reflexively dismissing. Market forces are not guided by wisdom, they are guided by greed and fear, and by the unresolved early childhood trauma of the Musks and Theils and Bezoses of this world. Capitalism is a great way to guarantee more production and consumption, but it is completely useless for curbing ecocide and restoring planetary health. As long as ecocide remains profitable under a system where mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit, ecocide will inevitably continue. What we need, then, is a completely different system. One where we move from competing with each other at the expense of our biosphere to collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem. Collaboration-based systems are inherently incompatible with the competition-based ones we live under today — but they are also the only way we are going to be able to continue living on this planet. And proponents of capitalism might here say "Aha! That's what you are missing! We're NOT going to continue living on this planet! Daddy Elon's going to take us all to Mars!" But that's kinda my whole point here. This is a baseless religious belief. Proponents of capitalism rely on the entirely faith-based belief that technological innovations will soon make it possible for limitless space colonization to occur, thereby enabling the infinite expansion upon which capitalism depends. But there is no scientific evidence that humans will ever be able to live outside the biosphere from which we emerged. The closest we've ever gotten are these glorified scuba excursions wherein astronauts pack up pieces of Earth's biosphere and suck on them for a while before returning to their planet's surface. Assuming this means we can colonize space and live permanently completely independent of Earth's biosphere is the same as assuming you can one day flap your arms hard enough to fly into the clouds just because you are able to jump. The assumption of space colonization as a reality in our future arises not from science but from the egoic delusion which pervades human consciousness that we are much more separate from our world than we actually are. The human organism is no more separate from its biosphere than a ripple in a teacup is from the tea. Assuming we can just pack up our bodies and permanently move them offworld is like assuming you can take a single ripple in a teacup and transport it into another cup of tea in a country across the ocean. Science simply does not understand the many different ways in which the human organism is interconnected with Earth's biosphere, and isn't anywhere close to understanding it. Even if it is technically possible to someday have us survive on another planet (or in floating space cylinders as per Jeff Bezos's plan) — and again it is a complete article of faith that such a thing is even possible — we have no reason to assume that we'll be able to attain this goal fast enough to avert ecological disaster here on Earth. The technology to adequately replicate our planet's living conditions to make human life and reproduction sustainable in the long term could be many centuries off, by which time capitalism will have long ago devoured the face off of this world. So it's the belief that capitalism will be able to carry us into the future is entirely faith-based and premised upon many unknowns and absurdities. We can keep clinging to those baseless superstitions hoping our evidence-free gamble eventually pays off so we never have to change ourselves, or we can move into a mature relationship with reality and start building something different together.

@jgreenhall linkedin.com/posts/cordial-…

I’m going to throw a bit of a long ball here, but it seems timely. The AI discourse has stalled (and festered) because of at least two category errors. 1. AI cannot be properly governed by either the Market or the State. There is a lot necessary to establish this, but for now, I’ll simply propose it. Fortunately, we have been operating around half a millennium with an increasing blind spot that has led us to believe that these two were the only choices. They are not. The third category (and, as it turns out, the more fundamental) is sometimes called the Commons. It is this that is proper to governance of AI. (You might note the connection to AI unemployment). Another name for the Commons is the Church. Again, a lot is behind this, but here I’ll just say that unless and until we recognize this fact and, thereby, revive the proper form and responsibility of the Church, things will continue to unravel. So, yes, I’m a very much saying that the Church is the (only) possible way to govern AI. Look forward to this discussion! 2. AI cannot be aligned with humanity. What I’m about to say will be esoteric for those who are not familiar with the notions, but they are quite precise. AI cannot be aligned with “humanity” because alignment must be at the level of the Soul and “humanity” has no Soul. Fortunately, each individual human has a Soul, and so a fully peer to peer AI can be aligned. Intimacy and care at the very personal level.

#AI stands at a crossroads: Will it remain a tool of #corporate and #state control, or can it be stewarded as a decentralised, commons-based resource for the public #commongood? linkedin.com/posts/cordial-…

The west is a dystopian wasteland of moral degeneracy. Usually when you hear a white person talk about moral decay it's some wingnut denouncing LGBTQ rights or women's reproductive rights or whatever, but that's not what I mean. I'm talking about real things here. The real moral decay of our society is illustrated in the way all mainstream political candidates can openly support war crimes currently being inflicted on people in the global south without being immediately removed from power. The way monstrous war criminals of past administrations can endorse a liberal candidate without causing self-proclaimed progressives to recoil from that candidate in horror. The way you can have the two viable candidates for the world's most powerful elected position both pledge to continue an active genocide without instantly sparking a revolution. The moral degeneracy of this civilization looks like living lives of relative comfort built on the backs of workers in the global south whose labor and resources are extracted from their nations at profoundly exploitative rates, while raining military explosives on impoverished populations who dare to disobey the dictates of our government, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, and acting like this is all fine and normal. Being born into western civilization is like waking up in the middle of a massive lynch mob. Something terrible is happening, and everyone's going along with it and telling you it's fine and it's normal, and even if you're able to figure out that what they're doing is wrong in all the chaos and confusion you find yourself powerless to stop them, because the whole thing has so much momentum already and there are far too many people blindly caught up in the frenzy of bloodlust for you to make everyone change course. Even just continuing to live among them makes you complicit in their actions in many ways, but you have nowhere else to go besides this lynch mob town you were born into. So you just move to the fringes of the mob and share your objections with the few people who will listen to you. Our civilization is cruel and savage, but we compartmentalize away from its cruelty and savagery and laugh at our sitcoms and vapid comedians and make believe the worst things happening politically in our society are the mainstream culture war wedge issues that pundits and politicians prefer to keep us talking about. We live out our lives sedated by entertainment and social media and food and pharmaceuticals while genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and ecocide unfold all around us, thinking ourselves good and virtuous if we are kind to our pets and hold the correct opinions about racial justice and vaccines. If we as a society were actually good, none of this would be happening. Moral clarity would find all this intolerable, and would reject it and eject it by any means necessary. Which is why the powerful pour so much energy into keeping us all sedated and confused. A lot of power and wealth rides on our lack of moral clarity. There is much wealth to be gained by exploiting labor and extracting resources around the world. There is much power to be secured by murdering, starving and terrorizing any population which refuses to bow to the interests of the western empire. This is why the western empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised: because so much wealth and power depends on ensuring the west remains in a state of moral degeneracy, and that westerners do not regard the citizenry of the global south as fully human. I personally reject religion, not because I'm some fedora-wearing wanker who makes fun of people for believing in God, but because I reject all aspects of the profoundly sick culture I was born into. Because I don't resonate with religion I often feel myself pulling away from religious-sounding jargon framing the actions of the western empire as "demonic" or calling the US "the great Satan" — but at the same time I completely understand it. When I see the inside of a child's skull for the hundredth time next to video footage of IDF soldiers mockingly dressed in the clothes of dead or displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead or displaced children while western podium pontiffs pretend to believe the military they're arming has done nothing wrong, I do struggle to find adjectives strong enough to describe what I am looking at. Maybe "demonic" is as close as you can get, even if you don't believe in actual biblical demons. That's what I'm talking about when I say the west is a wasteland of moral degeneracy. The type of civilization which would allow its government to do things like this necessarily has a collective conscience that has been so warped and twisted by propaganda and self-interest that it's the same as not having a conscience at all. If you can't regard the vast majority of the population of this planet as fully human and equal to yourself, then morally speaking you're no better than the perpetrators of slavery and genocide we've been taught to judge negatively in history class. And that's the norm here. It's what we were born into. It's what we spend all our lives being trained to accept as normal.

This is the sort of news the world doesn't need right now. Let's work and pull together to ensure our combined agency creates even louder and more compelling voices to change doubting minds, amplify the mission and accelerate progress. Together we can build a more Cordial World.

@CompassionComUK @drchatterjeeuk @andywilkins

Julian Abel @CompassionComUK is dedicated to improving health of people & places via social connections, reducing health impacts of loneliness & loss. Come, meet him at our conference compassionate-communitiesuk.com/conference2024/ . Whilst you wait hear him with @drchatterjeeuk youtu.be/CUHYmbfHEVw?si…

"Civilizing the #State displays three segments: how we got this systematic crisis from #political and #economic powers; what alternatives we can learn from divergent #communities; and, finally, the inception of the Partner State." #Empowering the #Commons with @mbauwens

Many congratulations @OnionCollective team and to everyone involved at #Watchet. Inspirational! #Frome can take heart that hard fought #community driven projects like this can win through against profiteering traditional developments. Let's go for it @MaydaySaxonvale team!

🏆 The winner of Client of the Year 2023 is @OnionCollective for East Quay, by Invisible Studio and Ellis Williams Architects The community-funded project has been commended as an uplifting model for community-led regeneration: ow.ly/pC4t50PYBwm Sponsored @OfficialIbstock

@CormacRussell In advance of us speaking later this month @CormacRussell, I would love bringing to your attention the incredible ground-breaking vision for the #Frome community vai the @MaydaySaxonvale development. It has #ABCD all over it! maydaysaxonvale.co.uk

Ask how you can create more space for communities to create what they want.

As this may be my last share on here, can I cheekily ask for RTs pls? A blog pondering hierarchy, trust and connection. Begrudgingly likely to be sharing on LinkedIn instead in future. @OJGarling @RachelMWay @BrendanFMartin @tobyjlowe @John_A_Wade neighbourhoodcares.wordpress.com/2023/10/13/fro…

And to solve the #crisis in our #democracy, we must come together as a global #community, heal our differences, and confront the full nature of our #existential crises.

An on-point @algore. "This is not a time for moral cowardice. This is not a time for surrender and reckless indifference to the fate of #humanity". "We have to solve the #democracy crisis in order to solve the #ClimateCrisis".

Been #systems #thinking all day today, contemplating how we can mitigate #humanity's #existential #risks. Now watching the awesome #ArcticMonkeys at #Glastonbury with the huge crowds all coming together around their #common #values. Life really is simple. #Music heals.

@labenz @FLIxrisk Many thanks @labenz for sharing this and bringing it to our attention!

Do you have a plan to support humanity's long-term survival & flourishing? The Survival & Flourishing Fund, by Jaan Tallinn & @FLIxrisk, plans to award up to $21M this Sept! I'm honored to be a "Recommender" Applications due June 27 Spread the word! survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2023-h2-ap…

Hold on to hope. Optimism can change how a situation feels Image: instagram.com/naturallife

#StorytellingMatters #ArtisticExpression #Empowerment

The #transformative power of #storytelling and #art cannot be underestimated. They provide invaluable insights into the impact of #power on our lives, offer a roadmap to counter the destructive influence of irresponsible and corrupt authorities on our vulnerable societies.