Why do we need to change the stories we live by?

What kind of culture do you think would emerge from a culturally dominant narrative that goes a bit like this: Competitiveness and me-first thinking is part of human nature. We are the result of random mutations in life’s struggle for existence in a meaningless material universe on its steady decline towards maximum entropy. We live on a planet likely to be struck by a massive asteroid long before its sun goes supernova.

On the other hand, what kind of culture would emerge from a dominant narrative that suggested:

We are meaning seeking creatures, bringing forth a world through the way we relate to the transforming whole we participate in. We evolved over 14 billion years of universal history and 3.8 billion years of life’s evolution on Earth. Our human ability to speak, write music and poems, dance and sing and shape our environments evolved primarily by collaboration. We evolved out of collaboration with fellow humans and through collaboration with the life-sustaining whole that contains us. As beings with self-reflexive consciousness we are one particular expression of UNIVERSE becoming conscious of itself. As participants in life’s evolutionary journey of creating conditions conducive to life, we are capable of redesigning the human impact on Earth from destruction to regeneration.

Do you see, why we better change the story we live by?

By focussing on individual success rather than optimization of the whole, we see the world through a narrative of separation, rather than reminding ourselves of life’s fundamental interbeing

By the mind-made separation of nature and culture, mind and body, self and world we bring forth a world of competition for perceived scarcity. We isolated ourselves from the ground of our being and therefore aim for a science of quantities set for prediction, control and manipulation.

By acknowledging our participatory embeddedness and agency in this complexity we begin to see how life — all along — co-created abundance through collaboration. We can reconcile humanity with the rest of nature and begin to aim for a science of qualities and right relationships aiming for appropriate participation.

Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.

Medium: Blog with more than 280 articles

Related posts:

Zeitraum is a sound environment exposing the interrelation of time and space in acoustic communication and the implications thereof for music and sound art. The environment is composed of many…

Cada vez que te dejo retengo en mis ojos el resplandor de tu última mirada. Y, entonces, corro a encerrarme, apago las luces, evito todo ruido para que nada me robe un átomo de la substancia etérea…

Design systems require maintenance. Pega’s design system was originally put together in 2016 (Read about the development of the system here) and although the internal documentation had been updated…