“If we were just looking at the caterpillar and we didn't know it's going to become a butterfly and we were looking at its getting bigger, and it's eating everything, and it's not pollinating anything... we would predict that it eats itself into extinction.
Except at a certain point it gets rich enough blood chemistry that it triggers this movement into the chrysalis.
It starts to dissolve, and it gets reorganized at an amino acid level into something that now pollinates the plants that the caterpillar decimated across these vast spaces, and helps the evolution of the whole system.”
Daniel Schmachtenberger
“Buckminster Fuller once famously said: “don't try to fight the existing system or fix it. Just build a new one that obsoletes the old system, and that has the right characteristics”
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Short clip (2 min) of a fascinating interview with social philosopher and systems thinker Daniel Schmachtenberger, in which he cites the transition from caterpillar to butterfly as an example of a profound phase transition like the one humanity is facing. You can watch the full interview (30 min) at the bottom of this post.
Dear readers and followers of A Biosphere Project,
I am in the process writing a blog post about the global climate disasters this past summer.
In this post, I also indicate (once again) that this climate crisis is not even the biggest problem we face (see the essays “Let Us Not Talk About the Climate Crisis Any Longer, Part 1 and Part 2).
It is a symptom of a larger underlying crisis that includes just about everything of what we call 'civilization': technology, energy, agriculture, education, trade, the technology of 'fungible tokens of optionality' that we usually call 'money', the rivalry between nation-states in a world of increasingly scarce resources, but also worldview, philosophy, information and communication, media and 'collective sense-making', polarization and disinformation and so on and so forth.
All those crises added up are also called the 'metacrisis'.
Looking at the convergence of all these crises, one can easily get the impression that it is 'game over', and that there is no way we are going to be able to formulate an answer to all these simultaneous crises of civilization. Yet there remain many reasons for optimism and for hope.
Someone who has thought about this like no other is social philosopher, futurologist and systems thinker Daniel Schmachtenberger. With unflinching clarity, he brings all aspects of that “metacrisis” into focus, and above all, he can also analyze like no other how all those aspects are interrelated and can only be successfully addressed if we keep them all in view at the same time when formulating solutions and policy options. Because otherwise our solutions to a problem in one domain will create even bigger problems in the domain we left out.
I've already featured Schmachtenberger in the musings, in ‘Is a Tree Worth a Trillion Dollars?’ and ‘The Most Important 25 Minutes of Your Life’.
He will be featured more, as he is one of the leading thinkers on the challenges we face.
You would think such a person would become extremely pessimistic from studying so many existential crises, but Schmachtenberger is not. Also because he continues to see many solutions and answers, just at different levels than are usually addressed today in the current public dialogue about these challenges. And from the overview he has through his decades of interdisciplinary research, he can also see connections, evolutions and possibilities that are still out of sight for most of us. And like many other systems thinkers, he sees the current convergence of crises as a ‘phase transition’, the often violent and destructive transition from one stable state to a new stable state at another level. But that phase transition will require the participation of all of us - we should not expect that our current political system will be able to bring it about, because our current political system is part of the systems that will have to change beyond recognition. And so it is desirable that we all begin to feel connected to the collective in a new way, rather than thinking that someone else will fix it.
In the above two-minute excerpt from an extremely interesting interview, Schmachtenberger takes as an analogy the transition from caterpillar to butterfly. Something of which we all know that it happens, but don't realize enough how destructive that process is at first (and how unpredictable that process may seem to the observer based on the caterpillar's behavior).
I think it is an extraordinarily useful comparison, and one that reminds us how the apparent destructiveness of a lot of processes in our world still hold the possibility of a transition to a different balance and a more beautiful world. If you see how destructive the behavior of the caterpillar is initially, and how that caterpillar then slowly disintegrates into a pile of blubber in the cocoon, you would never expect that out of that chaos a butterfly can emerge, a creature that is not only beautiful, but also extremely important and useful in the ecosystem of which it is a part.
Below you will also find the entire interview from which this excerpt was taken. The interview lasts 30 minutes and is very warmly recommended. A lot of people call Schmachtenberger one of “the most intelligent people on the planet,” and I tend to agree. You do have to be present with all your attention and not try to rush this in between things: Schmachtenberger's thoughts move forward like an arrow, and he makes connections and associations that are extraordinarily illuminating as you begin to see the panorama he sketches in his inimitable way. Lots of things are touched on in these 30 minutes, ranging from the crisis of civilization to the need to start changing our sense of identity and our place in the had of our biosphere at the deepest level.
If some superior extraterrestrial intelligence were to land on Earth and kindly, firmly and with great understanding (as for a rebellious teenager) point out to us all that we are doing wrong, it would possibly sound pretty much like what Schmachtenberger usually tells us.
This and other interviews with Schmachtenberger will be covered more in this blog, as Schmachtenberger is now one of the people who can sum up the totality of the challenge we face like no other. And above all, he also continues to project a message of hope and a vision for a brighter future. He is no doomsayer: his clear analysis of the major problems and challenges we face is always accompanied by an equally clear analysis of what is ours to do.
Find more info, interviews, essays and videos on Schmachtenberger's website.
Schmachtenberger is also the founder of the “Conscilience Project,” about which a bit more another time.
Thanks for reading and watching, until the next episode,
All the best to you,
Filip
The full interview with Daniel Schmachtenberger (30 min)
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