Short and Sweet: Why World Views? - Musings and Meditations

Lake Balaton, Hungary, April 2025

Dear friends,

Let us first turn the above question around: why short and sweet?

This, of course, refers to resolution number six in the recent blog post ‘New Year’s Resolutions’: the intention to strive for conciseness and brevity in this blog from now on.

This is really a serious challenge for me, but one that I am taking on with determination!

Brevity means, in concrete terms: a maximum of 1200 words, whereas posts have been at times three or four times as long. Only in the essays will I allow myself to be more verbose.

Back to the original wording of the question: “Short and Sweet: Why World Views?”

Why do I now want to focus on worldviews, metaphysics, beliefs, and philosophy of science in a blog that was supposed to be about the ecological crisis?

Those who have followed this blog over the past year may be able to reconstruct the trajectory my musings have taken, from more traditional ecological themes to a more (science-) philosophical quest regarding our collective worldview.

But here, in a concise format (as promised), I will once again give a (very) condensed summary of some of the key points in that reasoning. A bit like the summary of the most important themes at the end of a chapter in a lengthy course. A list, in fact. Handy for memorizing! You can look up this list again later if you lose track.

Here we go:

• Over the past six years, I have intensively researched many aspects of the ecological meta-crisis and gathered information on various aspects of planetary boundary transgression, the economic logic of infinite growth and increasing extraction, the whole panorama of planetary overshoot, and so on.

• I came to the conclusion that currently, nowhere in the world is an adequate response being formulated to these challenges, and that no political measures are being implemented that come anywhere close to what will be needed to prevent a civilizational collapse and the collapse of global ecosystems in the not-so-distant future. Optimism about a “Green New Deal” or “eco-modernism” and the like is misplaced and not based on data and biophysical realities. We cannot expect our political institutions to initiate the necessary systemic changes, as these institutions are too closely intertwined with the economic systems that will have to change so radically. On the contrary, we are already seeing many policy commitments, which were already far too limited, being scaled back at national and international level in the face of international tensions, political instability, and economic doom scenarios.

• The transformation that our entire global techno-civilization will have to undergo is the greatest transformation since the industrial revolution and, in fact, even of a much greater order than that revolution. Just about everything will have to change completely: agriculture, trade, transport, the monetary system, the relationship between labor and income, our ideas about social security and solidarity, migration, and so on and so forth. Everything will have to be rethought from the ground up. There is no quick fix or techno-solution. Nada, nein, njet, nope, non.

• Since these major transitions will not simply be initiated by our political institutions, it will be necessary to facilitate them to arise from the bottom up, in a process of global social synergy and emergence. Everyone is invited to be part of this, because everyone can help determine what our future will look like. This transition can and must take place in a spirit of peacefulness, solidarity, love for our world, openness, and curiosity, not out of fear and the resulting aversion to change or hatred of the strange and unknown.

• When asked how likely it is that such a transition will actually take place, most people will probably answer: “no way”. There is a kind of despondency, pessimism and even apathy in our society, and a general disbelief that a change for the better is still possible, which may help explain the passivity of many people.

• This disbelief has a lot to do with—you guessed it—our worldview: the overarching collection of belief systems, ideologies, and ideas that determine what we consider to be real, what we consider to be possible or impossible, what we allow ourselves to think, what we reject in advance as contrary to what we consider to be common sense (common sense is often a veiled term for an unrecognized aspect of a worldview).

• The worldview or paradigm that dominates secular industrial society and helps define our political-economic system is that of materialism or physicalism: the set of assumptions that assumes that only matter and measurable fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravity, weak and strong nuclear forces) really exist, and that everything else is imagination or wishful thinking. In this mechanistic worldview, everything proceeds according to predictable physical cause-and-effect sequences and there is no meaning or significance to be found. Human existence is also inherently and ultimately meaningless in this paradigm (see Dawkins, Dennett, Hawking et al). A materialistic and mechanistic worldview is, however, destined to end badly for a global civilization, just as people who fundamentally live in self-hatred and find their own life meaningless will most likely not create a beautiful life path for themselves and their environment.

• A change in worldview, meaning in the overarching set of beliefs about ourselves, about the world, and about life itself, will therefore be indispensable if we collectively want to find the strength and conviction to help bring about the necessary transitions in the world. A different worldview will enable us to perceive possibilities other than those to which our perception is currently limited by our worldview. Science is now also pointing the way to a new worldview or paradigm that will no longer be materialistic. A worldview that also gives our humanity and our consciousness a whole new place in the hierarchy of things. This post-materialistic science is based on rigorous scientific research and data, which can enable us to construct a new form of shared worldview that can transform our civilization, as scientific insights have done in the past.

• Science is certainly not the only path to knowledge and truth, but it can be a reinforcing factor in the paradigm shift that is coming and that will be necessary to develop a different way of being in the larger organism of which we are a part, our biosphere. This new worldview can also initiate far-reaching transformations for the better for each of us personally.

So, that's it, in a nutshell! This list is, of course, almost hilariously compressed given the complexity of the subject, but I will return to all these things very often and explore all aspects further, trying to explain them in an accessible way. 

You can already find a lot of information about post-materialist science on the ‘Science and New Paradigm’ page on the website of A Biosphere Project .

In this series of Musings, I will be giving the floor to many representatives of post-materialist science in the coming period!

To be continued!

Thank you for reading, and until the next episode.

All the best to you,

Filip

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