SUE's Blog

January 1, 2050

Report by Paddy Le Flufy on how initiating the Cosmolocal Capital Fund helped us transform society:

In early 2024, just like the world, I had an uncertain future. I had published my first book, Building Tomorrow: Averting Environmental Crisis With a New Economic System, 9 months before. While it had got some good endorsements, it wasn’t selling many copies and, most importantly of all, it hadn’t had any tangible impact.

At the same time, the Earth was heating up – the 12 months to 1 February 2024 were the first 12 months in history to be over 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average – and there was no indication we would transform society in time to stave off catastrophe.

I decided writing wasn’t enough – I had to put some of my ideas into action myself. I went for the most transformative of all: the Cosmolocal Capital Fund. At the time, the ideas of cosmolocalism already existed, and so did some cosmolocal networks. But the ideas were little-known, even among ecological economists, and the network structure had not been applied at commercial scale.

I found this strange, because to me the potential of cosmolocalism was clear: it’s an economic system, equivalent to the then-dominant capitalist system, because its structure creates a dynamic that drives forward development. But rather than the competitive dynamic of capitalism that drove us into economic growth, cosmolocalism has a collaborative dynamic that we now use to genuinely improve the world.

To begin seeding the new system, we began by setting up some cosmolocal networks: global networks that connect local nodes. The networks were independent, but joined through the hub organisation of the Cosmolocal Capital Fund (CCF). The CCF did much more than provide capital – in fact, at the beginning we did very little of that. Instead, we concentrated on setting up the networks as well as possible, to ensure they could seed a new system rather than get co-opted into the old. For example, including the Doughnut goal of aiming to ‘meet the needs of all within the means of the living planet’ in the Charters of the cosmolocal networks helped steer society into the Doughnut.

The whole structure was designed to be as collaborative as possible, and it enabled people around the world to cooperate and in doing so improve their local areas. For example, people throughout the clothing network shared their clothing designs, from t-shirt prints to dress shapes, and because the network included nodes all around the world, from Mali to Bolivia to the States, people everywhere could suddenly access a huge pool of styles and designs. As the network grew, there was a burst of sartorial creativity that was visible on streets around the world.

There was an upswelling of cooperation and creativity in many other areas. The information commons itself was developed as an open source collaboration. Collaboration was also essential to creating regional circularity. It’s hard to imagine, now that almost all our materials circulate regionally, but in the early 2020’s, most goods were shipped across the world, and incredible amounts of waste were created every year – plastic waste, e-waste, you name it – without ever being reused (until we started using vast quantities of it as a raw material in the 2030’s).

Getting from that immensely wasteful system to the current one, in which materials cycle so effectively there is almost no waste at all, necessitated a degree of cultural change. There was a huge amount of collaboration within networks, with nodes sharing their experiences of what did and didn’t work to encourage circularity. But the real breakthrough was the collaboration that happened between different networks, such as the way the community hubs network and the complementary currencies network combined to encourage and incentivise truly circular local recycling.

Another area in which collaboration had a massive positive impact was through the research & development network. Labs were set up around the world, all focused on building products that could be made in local-scale factories, with circular materials and minimal environmental impact. They shared their innovations and experiences, and then the lab network connected with the makerspace network, so that anyone who enjoyed tinkering could easily help design new commercial products, from furniture to computers. This made our material development a truly society-wide collaboration, and eventually resulted in the make-anything factories that are the basis for today’s create-on-demand material economy.

Of course, there have been many other important developments in recent decades – the newly responsible attitude to wealth and capital stewardship is one, and the One Planet Living Tokens monetary system is another – but I’m very happy to have had a role in moving society from the 20th century’s capitalist economic system, to today’s cosmolocalist system.

January 1, 2050: Dialogue at the Still Point of the Turning World

Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.

-T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

As the new year dawns midway through this 21st century, we return to gathering ourselves together again. Soon the sun will rise against the far horizon, and young mountains will radiate the ancient light. Few today will doubt the truth of this beauty, or the eternal meaning expressed therein. But there was a time, not more than thirty years gone, when beautiful truths passed away unrecognized; and history seemed a meaningless causal chain, emptied of purpose and untethered at every end. So truth itself became a distortion, and the world of humanity drifted into an age of self-destruction, which today we call the Great Perversion.

But now the story of our redemption unfolds across the stillness of time. The story of this great turning is what I want to recount. As the new year dawns, I want to recall how just one or two generations ago, a new cosmology dawned like a faint star, before bursting across the sky; and how beneath that light, humanity discovered something of what it means to heal.

To trace this transformation, I would like to begin with my own. But I cannot tell my story without first sketching the perilous condition of truth in that earlier time. Over the preceding century and into the present one, “truth” had become synonymous with the so-called “facts of science,” and scientific assertions commanded far greater authority than non-scientific ones. That such an evaluation was itself non-scientific bothered hardly anyone. The domain of truth had been conquered by science, and the unmistakable good that science had achieved for humanity made its supremacy legitimate.

The improvement of the human condition was the central aim of the First Enlightenment—the 18th century revolution of ideas, which elevated human life and dignity, and taught us to cherish equality and freedom. With the marriage of science and this humanistic agenda, the world became an inventory of physical objects, against which humanity partitioned itself and achieved great mastery. The alluring image of ourselves as invulnerable and set apart from Nature became a defining feature of modernity.

But soon Nature convulsed against the unrestrained self-indulgence of humanity. Destructive technologies proliferated and economies of consumption devoured the planet. Catastrophic warfare, plague, and ecologic collapse ravaged the world of humanity, and soon threatened even the wealthiest societies. Civil discourse deteriorated and moral confusion spread, until the deepening sense of emptiness and alienation finally conquered the human mind. During the years of the Great Perversion, humanity’s illusions of invulnerability became untenable, and the scientistic image of ourselves, prevailing over a meaningless world of objects, began to decay. Truth was no longer the undisputed domain of science and reason, but an instrument of political expedience. We found ourselves spiraling into the future, unmoored from any stable purpose.

This is where I will pick up my own story. For my life, like others during that time, was a manner of responding to this dim invitation—the ghostly call that beckoned from the horizon, to grasp a brighter meaning, to make a better life. I was raising two young boys, and working as a physician. As all parents do, I loved my children fiercely and wanted to embody for them the deepest truths. But what were these now? Though I never dreamed of undoing the triumphs of liberalism and science, I had nevertheless recoiled from the consciousness of modernity.

The hospital of my daily rounds resembled an industrial refinery flaming against the wilderness. With a decade of medical training, one could tame the wilderness and reduce its wild essence to an easily marketable commodity. For terminal illness had become a trial by ordeal, in which the accused willfully petitioned for time and control by means of their own anguish. An essentially human experience, which once inspired solemnity and grace, had been reduced to stains on the bedsheets. Some took this dehumanizing reduction to be natural, or preferable to any alternative; others found the whole display repugnant and humiliating. But everyone trembled in the face of illness and death; and when these frailties threatened, they lurched toward the shimmering mirage of invulnerability.

It was there, at the tortured intersection of these opposing pressures, that a new question formed like a diamond in my mind: What is the meaning of health for beings like us, whose death draws nearer each day? What is the meaning of health when the veil between living and dying is withdrawn? This is how the Great Work, which the world would soon labor forth, presented itself to me. This was the light that dawned on countless other horizons, too: an image of the whole that transcends our individual lives.

This bright image, which now glows in the background of our minds, was a cosmology of dialogue: a renewed understanding of ourselves as engaged participants in an unfurling universe; as agents of reciprocity, who always receive by intimation, and express by imagination, the meaning of existence; as willful phenomena of this universe, whose interactions with other phenomena are themselves expressions of purpose.

That the cosmology of dialogue dawned amid the upheavals of the Great Perversion seems unsurprising now, for this vision seized the modern conscience wherever it encountered vulnerability. Human fragility lurked everywhere then; but its paradigm instance, which hovered like a phantom over every anxiety, was the ordinary experience of dying. When terminal illness summoned the dehumanizing machinations of 21st century medicine, the choice between the un-being of death and the un-becoming of medicalized dying was a paralyzing one.

Day after day, in my encounters with this predicament, the diamond in my mind sharpened.  The criterion of health for the person dying—as we all are—could only manifest through a new kind of dialogue, which we were ill-prepared to embrace. We could only stumble toward new ways of asking: What is the meaning of health for beings like us, whose death draws nearer each day? What is the meaning of health for us, when the veil between living and dying is withdrawn?

For those who live dyingly, for whom the vanishing distance between being and un-being channels their becoming, the essential truths appear as visions of fullness, wholeness, belonging. Such are the essential values that determine our ways of living. For dying patients, these were the truths that illuminated the way beyond paralysis. These were visions of health.

Now, if this talk of “visions” no longer seems especially arcane, or “merely subjective,” we should recall that, prior to the great transformation I am recounting, such language could easily raise suspicions of credulity. While “visions of fullness” could always find expression in linguistic form (as images, stories, symbols, metaphors, etc.), they were inaccessible to the descriptive language that ruled modernity. What these visions defied, in other words, was the reductive, calculative language of science and the First Enlightenment, which aimed to designate objects with mathematical precision. On the other hand, for qualitative truths (which we are calling “visions”) to become active in the world—to find resonance and take shape, as the values that determine our actions—a more generative, constitutive, poetic mode of language had always been necessary. But preceding centuries had illegitimately devalued linguistic modes of this kind, which constitute truth by the very act of expression—that is, within the space of dialogue.

Still, if the Great Perversion proved that our strong allegiance to descriptive language could be self-destructive, this did not mean that a more generative, poetic language could simply replace the descriptive in the moment of crisis (nor would such a starry-eyed substitution have been tolerated). At the boundaries of medicine’s death-delaying powers, one could not just abandon outright the usual language of medical discourse; rather, that discourse had to be repurposed, reoriented toward a fuller vision of health. What was needed was a constructive integration of linguistic modes: a new descriptive-poetic language.

With the gradual development of this linguistic innovation in our encounters with dying, in our dialogues of shared vulnerability and interwoven meanings, the once incomprehensible notion of dying healthy became conceivable. Soon the new dialogue metastasized throughout our health care, until the meaning of health itself was transformed. Visions of fullness appeared as common truths: once constituted in dialogue, they transcended individual lives. The new image of health became an aspect of the Good for humanity, and then for the greater world.

Today, of course, we easily recognize this same developmental pattern in other aspects of the Good; the sum of these is what has redeemed humanity. We recognize the dialogic pattern, for instance, in the image of ourselves as integral participants in ecosystems; in the evolution of our economies, from self-interested transactions of endless growth, toward the collective purpose of sustainability; in the decentralization of our governments, toward today’s smaller bioregional communities of face-to-face democracy.

Life’s most essential truths are those that emerge in dialogues like these, when we embrace our mutual precarity, our inescapable need for one another, our yearning to love and be loved. Essential truths are always inter-subjective, always constituted in dialogue. They are the co-determined meanings and values we discover in the common space between us—between ourselves and one another, ourselves and the wild Earth of which we are born, ourselves and our histories, countries, and Gods. In dialogue, we become living expressions of each of these; and in reciprocal fashion, each expresses us.

In the third decade of this century, we discovered what science had already shown; what the axial religions of the East and West had long insisted; and what the whole of human experience since the First Enlightenment had declared. If we are conscious beings, for whom values, meanings, and purpose are essential; and if we are born of this world, as phenomena of this living universe; then we must conclude that the universe—the totality of phenomena in time and space—is somehow conscious, and compelled by values, meanings, and purpose, which we always discover between us. Whatever will be its fate, will be our fate—and we will have participated in its becoming.

So from here, at the still point of this turning world, we look eternally toward the far horizon. For that is where the original light is always rising, and gathering us together.

The following is a direct manuscript from the titular seminar held in Harlem for the 2050 United Symposium For A Better World. 

“I just wanted to know my neighbor. 

Picture me, almost thirty years ago, with the world at my fingertips. I felt connected to the world through the guise of the internet. News from South Africa, celebrity gossip from that award show, or the latest food craze where we dunk desserts in fondue. Trust me, that last one was a revelation. But despite access to everything, I felt alone. I felt isolated. I didn’t feel safe in my surroundings. And I wasn’t the only one. A study done in 2023 showed that fewer than 27% of people ages 25-30 had fewer than six close friends. 15% percent said they had no friends at all. This statistic was up 500% from 1990. While we felt connected to the world because of what was available at the touch of a button, the perception around the world was that it was becoming scarier. The days of asking your neighbor for sugar were over. In fact, 34% of people claimed they didn’t know the people living next to them.

Think about that. A third of the people on this planet didn’t know a single person living next to them. Imagine what that would do to a person. You don’t have to imagine, we all lived it. In the United States alone, it was the era of distrust, the era of polarization, the era of being scared to walk down the street because we couldn’t trust anybody coming to our aid if we drew the short straw of luck. This led to violent outbursts, insurrections, and families breaking apart because they held different beliefs. The US versus THEM mentality. 

Everything changed when I decided to knock on the door next to mine. Sixty-three-year-old James McDonough opened the door, and I introduced myself. I was his neighbor, and I brought some cookies, and he welcomed me inside and offered me coffee. I had no idea what I wanted out of this, but I noticed he had a collection of pottery. My mother was also a potter, not by trade but by hobby, so we talked about that. It was a brief conversation, but it changed everything. In the hallway, when I went to grab my mail, whenever he would appear I would ask him about pottery. I would wave to him when I passed him on the street. When I ran out of cumin, he was the first person I asked before I ordered anything on Amazon. I was experiencing something that I had missed for a long time: community. 

And you know what happened next. Whenever there’s a good idea, you need to find a way to share it with the world. Enter TikTok. I know, I know! ‘Uriel, you said technology was isolating us.’ But when it is used effectively, it can make something that seemed so daunting, like travel or cooking, into something tangible. Something easily accessible if you just push yourself a little bit.  Using TikTok, I created a viral sensation – the Please Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Trend. I walked the streets of Los Angeles and introduced myself to virtual strangers. By showing you that fascinating people live right next door, it was easy to realize that our neighbors aren’t ones to be feared but ones to embrace. Now I wish I could take credit for that guy who just so happened to knock on Jerry Seinfield’s door. That was a stroke of luck. But it also popularized what I was talking about. Most of our neighbors are good people who feel just as lonely and unsure of themselves as you do. I say most because, for every door that led to a great conversation, some just slammed the door on your face. But the trend caught on. When companies count online interactions in the hundreds of millions, our trend hit three billion in just five months. 

But this was just the beginning. To institute change, change that can impact the planet, you take a social media phenomenon and you find a way to make it stick. You provide guidance. Sure, people were embracing the idea of knocking on one’s neighbor’s door and interviewing them. But what about the problems plaguing our neighborhood? What about the trash on our streets, the potholes, the guy who puts “We Sell Used Cars” on your windshield that you know will just wind up in the trash? There must be a way to address these and more, right? I turned to the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania. They had this fascinating article listing the five elements of a strong Democracy. The first was Social Cohesion- namely, that a society’s members recognize each other and are willing to collaborate. I know we were getting there on the first part, but the second part was still unknown. Could our neighbors be willing to collaborate? 

I decided to host a community gathering – food, music, icebreakers to get to know not just the people living next to me, but the people of my neighborhood. Now I didn’t have the space to do this, I lived in a tiny, tiny, tiny apartment in Los Angeles. But I was within walking distance of a YMCA that was kind enough to let me use their basketball court.  I put flyers everywhere, I used my TikTok profile to share the news, and the first time I did it we got twenty people. Not bad. Were there more than twenty people in my neighborhood? Of course. But it was a start. Individuals realized that their neighbors had similar interests. I was into composting, I always wanted to try it, but it was expensive! However, after I found that four other households wanted to try it, we decided to compost and gather our funds together to hire a third party to collect our compost. These monthly hangouts included social events – pizza parties, game nights, arts and crafts. It bridged the gaps between the younger generation who were eager to learn crafts, and the elders who wanted somebody to listen to them. By the end of the first year, these “gatherings” cropped up all around the world. 

I saw “gatherings” in quotation marks because I realized quite early what these were. These were town halls. Harkening back to the colonial era, I essentially revitalized the town hall. A safe space for the community to gather, get to know one another and bring up concerns. When our community wanted to do something about the homelessness situation, it was simple to gather over a thousand signatures to send to your representatives. When a new business arrived in our neighborhood, they came to us and introduced themselves and that led to more business frequenting their store. Sometimes the best ideas come from the past, and this is an example of taking an old idea and revitalizing it for a new generation.

I would like to claim credit for changing the world, but I didn’t. I only showed people that they were not alone. And look at the amazing things that are possible when we aren’t afraid of the people next door, but see them as a person just like us. When I saw that this trend extended to El Salvador, The Netherlands, Japan, and even someplace like Egypt, I knew we were hitting something true about ourselves. Just as quickly as we can turn on one another, we can be pushed to embrace one another. And we saw a substantial decrease in loneliness across both genders. We saw a decrease in the perception that this world was a dangerous place. And when people believed that this world was safe, they also believed that it is a world worth protecting. I can’t claim credit for the wonderful technological and political changes that we have witnessed in the 2040s and are still seeing today. But I can take credit for pushing ourselves to find peace in strangers and to not make us so prone to knee-jerk reactions.. It is far easier to work through problems when we can see the other side as a human being.

We may just need someone to show us that it’s okay to knock on a door and talk to a stranger, though it never hurts bringing a tray of cookies. 

Thank you.”

How has it already been 25 years? Feels like we’ve been doing this forever, feels like we just started yesterday.

I don’t know how to tell you this, but it was ridiculously simple.

We just…started talking.

We took that paragraph from Ray Bradbury, you know the one about front porches?

Here, let me find it for you:

“No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong KIND of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches.”

–Farenheit 451

We took that and we thought, what if he was right?  Octavia Butler was right, and Huxley was right, and so maybe he was right, too. Maybe they don’t want us talking, maybe stopping talking has been the problem the whole time.

So we deliberately. Started. Talking.  We started by informing people.  We put that quote up EVERYWHERE.  

Everywhere.

Then we waited.  Then we started.

We put pallets and milk crates in our front yards, took that picture of the janky stage from the meme, the one that’s milk crates and plywood, and we built it, over and over, 2x4s and milk crates and pallets just set up in front yards with sheets of plywood nailed on top, old theater platforms rehabbed and clamped in place, whatever we had for free, or for cheap, and we made front porches.  People who had ’em, we gave ’em milk crates for stools, we fixed up old rocking chairs, nothing that we would cry over having stolen, we just kept replacing them.  That project that started putting benches back where the town tore ’em out? The Chattanooga Urbanist Society?  We borrowed their plans and put benches in, too, on the porches or out by the street, next to the sidewalk, with a little upturned five gallon bucket for a table.  We called it The Porch Project.  Landlords tried to complain and neighborhood associations got cranky, but we just kept going.  We went to the association meetings and put benches in the community centers.  We offered benches to churches for their parking lots.  We gave them to restaurants for outside their takeout windows.  We walked the good neighborhoods and paths, figured out how far about-that-far was, and put in benches there, too, right by the side of the unimproved roads.  Some of ’em got swiped but most of them got used.  We swung back through with little 2×4 tables and pamphlet racks with plans, so more people could build benches and tables.  One bench takes a handful of 8 foot 2x4s, or the equivalent in pallet wood and dumpster diving, and a few screws, and only a few cuts.  You can even do it with a handsaw if you’ve a mind to.

Now what happened with those porches and those benches was something else.  If there was a porch, now there was a place to sit and talk, out front, where people would see you and say hello.  You could put a basket of fruit out from your apple tree, or some canned goods you weren’t using, or whatever you wanted.  You could put up signs like “sit a spell” or ones like “don’t smoke here, please” or a butt can. 

First thing it did is kept people’s dogs pooping somewhere else.  No one wants you to watch their dog poop on your lawn.  But then it also meant saying hi to all the people with dogs, and then people got talking, so then they’d pull up for a minute, let the dog sniff around, perch on the crate or the box or the bench and chat, then people’d ask us to help build another bench.  Enough for two. 

Next thing, people know their neighbors.  Here, people would wave when they’re going for groceries.  Mrs Johnson, she lives right up the block, eighty years old, still marches down here for her twice-weekly bread and milk.  Sammy and the boys, they live down and around the corner, it’s got to be more work to come by with the kids than without, but they want their kids to know what it means to live somewhere with roots, so they come by, say hi.  

Once I had kids coming by I had to have you know, cookies, carrot sticks, snacks.  Kids always want snacks–any kind of feral animal, really, snacks are the way to their heart.  

I never expected to stay here, but one thing and another and then here we were.  

What with everyone talking to everyone, there were bound to be arguments, fights, that’s why people stopped in the first place–didn’t want fights and didn’t have time.  So we put up fliers, offered classes at the community center, about how to talk.  Sometimes it was just a poster: What If You Asked For What You Need?

or Tell Them You’re Nervous.  Sometimes it was more.  We brought benches to the parks and started conversations by the dog zones, conversations about conversations.  Just, guerilla communication lessons.  

And more snacks.

What started as a couple of people with some pallets and plywood became a movement.  We gave free workshops at churches and mosques and synagogues and covens.  We kept teaching people.  

At first it had to be invitation only, or you had to stumble across it, like those apps that get big by being secret.  

Once it was getting attention then we set up a website with information and a form.  We connected with Skip the Small Talk and Meetup and local small businesses and restaurants.  We gave it away, gave it all away, connected with the Human Awareness Institute and with YES World and kept teaching people.

And we kept building porches.  Some folks got permits and made real porches.  And then they’d give away their milk crates to the next family.  Enclosed porches, some people even opened them up again, put on screens and big casements and shutters.  People who didn’t want porches did front gardens, or hellstrip parks, or little free poetry boards.  

And then what?

People developed relationships.  And they ran for office.  And they joined those neighborhood associations and saw the people they’d been chatting with.  They grew more food and fewer lawns, which meant they had to trade tomatoes and zucchini come summer.  

They started to take care of each other.  And the governments changed.  We didn’t know if it would work, but it did.  The porch project spread, even into the places with twisty tall roads and no sidewalks.  They noticed, after a while, how lonely they were.  They couldn’t put sidewalks in, but they could have afternoon tea, and close the road for half of Sunday.  

It seems like a small thing, doesn’t it, just talking?  Even just becoming neighborly again after all those decades of closing things up.

But what happened next is it spread out of the city.  It spread to the suburbs.  It spread out, even into the strip malls.  More benches.  More bushes.  Just appearing like they’d always been there, too many to stop, and people saw how nice it was.  People putting down their phones.  People forgetting to check for the bus until it was pulling up.  

It was like Meetup, but in real life.  Garden centers put in chairs and coffee stations, like bookstores do.  Libraries had benches outside, too.  Set up for talking, not just for solitude.

You know, Thoreau said in his little cabinat Walden Pond, he had, “One chair for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.”  We figured enough room for three people, well that was enough to HAVE society so it was enough to CHANGE society and BUILD a better society.

Then, small town people said “we were doing this all along, why do you think you’re so fancy” and we said “show us how it’s done” and they stopped taking out the benches and started putting them back in, the one on the town hall porch and the one outside the post office and the one outside the general store and the one by the school.  

And so we went back to the cities and put benches in by grocery stores and malls and when they filled up with people sleeping, people were so in the habit of talking that they just talked right to each other and found some better places for folks to sleep.  

And we kept showing people about how to be real and still be kind, and how to notice you’re getting mad before you throw your beer at someone, and then we started getting town councils to meet with each other next door, like neighbors but make it a town.  Whole councils, no agenda, just spend time together.  

With communication skills.

And pictures of their gardens and their grandkids.

And snacks.

And it didn’t always work, but it worked a hell of a lot of the time.  A lot of the time.

National news picked us up, but by the time that happened every major city had a..not even a chapter, just a bunch of porch projects off and running.  People hiring each other.  People trusting each other.

It changed a lot of things, little things. Who people sold their houses to. Where people bought stuff.  How people got hired.  Who people gave second chances to.  What they asked for from their politicians.  Who became politicians.

What came down, that really mattered, I think, was fear.

People were scared of what they didn’t know, and they were scared of not having enough if times got hard.

The more they knew each other, and trusted each other (in cases where their communities cared for them) the less scared they got, the more willing they became to rely on each other.

And, with the internet, people whose communities didn’t like them still had better skills and build better non-local communities.  They had friends on the internet who were still a drive away, or who still sent doordash when family died.  

The more people had that, the more it became a cultural default. The more it became a default, the easier it was for them to think of that as a right that everyone should have–that kind of care–and then to imagine a world where the government would provide it, not just for them but around the world.

And that’s what did it, I think.

Care and communication, that’s where it started.  Porches. Benches. (Snacks).

That care meant we learned from each other, about plants and trees, about each other’s traditions and needs and grandchildren.  That care meant we wanted everyone to have a nice neighborhood.  It meant we wanted everyone who needed healthcare to get it, which meant more beds in rehab centers and more housing first and more people getting food so they could eat.

It meant when elections happened we wanted to take care of everyone. The communal will shifted.  

But we still had to contend with the megacorporations, which had been granted an odd kind of personhood, and had no empathy to appeal to.  There was no bench-building between companies held by investors, built for profit and profit alone.

But what we could change was politics.  Towns and states became the proving grounds as we began to insist on conversations with the politicians who enacted the will of the corporations.  We built our benches there–outside the offices and the statehouses.  They refused to come to the conversations we were having, so we brought our conversations to them.  We made conversations an expectation of election.  We made the bench the symbol of true representation.  The benches were already familiar, recognizable.  They were already in towns everywhere, they were already outside general stores and schools, and in parks and down by the rivers where fishing was only half the plan.  

We asked our politicians to come to the bench.  Come to the Bench became our rallying cry.  Come and talk.  Come and answer.  Come and be heard.  Come and listen.  Bench hours replaced office hours.  Shelters sprang up over benches as the weather turned again.  Come to the bench.  We haven’t seen this representative at the bench.  Where are they?  Come to the bench.  

Benches and ballots, the movement grew.

Meanwhile, benches and porches (remember porches) became a place for plants.  Benches in apartment lobbies and across the street from steel and glass edifices that refused people a place to sit.

Benches on country lanes, nothing but corn and soy for miles.  

Benches in strip malls.

Benches, finally, in the halls of Congress itself.

In other countries, the benches were often already there.  Less work to get people talking; less work to get politics to align.  The international councils were next, people gathering online from around the world, together pressing their governments and communities forward.

The thing is, when people know each other as people, the compassion comes.

And when people know everything as their siblings–even the plants, even the rivers, even the salmon and the stones–the compassion calls for a kind of depth that brings us forward.

The world came forward, slowly, together, the only way it can.

Porches.
Benches.
Snacks.

We started
with talking.

January 1, 2050

Holy hell, we did it.

It’s been 30 years, a full Saturn cycle, since the COVID pandemic appeared in 2020. Saturn, planet of time and form, is just 22 days short of re-entering Aquarius, one of the great humanitarian signs, and the second third (or quarter?!) of my life has been filled with a journey that has led to the eve of my elderhood. Global cooperation is no longer a pipe dream, but a reality. Somehow, in less than 30 years, we managed to alter the frequency of our planet.

I’m grateful to have played a part. In the early 2020s, a few years after the start of the pandemic, I moved my Millennial self from California to Nebraska, where I could start healing and grounding with some freedom from the constraints of the relentless capitalism that permeated that age and building my own foundation. Everyone wondered how I’d ended up in the Midwest, thousands of miles away from the people and places I knew.

The fates moved me along that line of geometry. “No choice!” as one of my teachers would say. Throughout my twenties, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but when I met destiny, I knew it. I remember sitting in a cafe in Los Angeles one weekend, scrolling through a list of “jobs of the future.” One job in the search results was a memory surgeon.

I’d scoured every job on the career sites, and I’d found a few candidates. 

But a memory surgeon? I was hooked.

At the time, I didn’t understand the significance of being a memory surgeon. Now, in 2050, I recognize that my encounter at the cafe was no accident and that I was wired to alter the collective psyche. A coach, confrontational activist, and comedian, I now recognize that my participation in the rebalancing of the world was as a memory surgeon—one who altered the collective memory and helped to maintain the integrity of us all through the power of forgetting.

I have always been paying attention to collective problems, studying anthropology, politics, and neuroscience. I was always reading and analyzing essays on art and propaganda, learning about the anatomy of the body and brain, or actually applying them in the field and telling stories about our culture to alter behavior. Somewhere I knew there was an off-switch in a world that was always on, always chasing, and rarely still or understanding.

Like a nerve in the brain, how could I find and flip that switch?

Toward my late 20s, I recognized the switch is all around us, and the key to flipping it is knowing how to apply the right levers. As I saw the world change, particularly in the years leading up to and including the year 2020, I kept noticing three problems keeping our planet in chains, and found myself asking three questions to point to what I could do about it:

Problem 1: There was a huge gap between humanity’s aspirations and development.

I’ve often said that we don’t rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our development. Many people, locked in fear-based paradigms, didn’t even have high aspirations and were locked in deeply limited views of what was possible for humanity and the earth. Those who had the aspirations frequently didn’t have the scaffolding or resourcing to pull it off. For us to complete the task, the vertical had to get horizontal, and vice versa. The people with the highest ideals and levels of consciousness had to get on the material plane and the people with the most material consciousness had to be introduced somehow to higher principles.

How could we create sustainable scaffolding for the development of humanity? In my case, it was empowering, connecting, and positioning a diverse network of leaders who were unified in their message, and from there, simply pointing and directing people to where they needed to go. There’s no way that I could have lifted the world on my shoulders, but I had the right story and I could give people the option to choose. The American scientist and author B.J. Fogg says that B = MAP (behavior is motivation + action + prompt). By formulating this at a large scale that was easy, obvious, and attractive for a variety of characters and communities, we started to shift.

Problem 2: There were major gaps in most people’s perceptions and worldviews.

Of course, herding a “wide variety of characters and communities” was no easy feat. At the time, most of the population held worldviews that were not integrated, that were fragmented or divisive. Polarization was rampant, creating a missed opportunity that turned everyone’s potential contribution, in the face of complex system stresses and breakdowns, into a source of dysfunction, animus, hatred, and backsliding toward collective division and separation.

How might we help more people expand and restore their perceptions to be unique and differentiated, but whole? Besides partnering with fellow 360° thinkers and getting practical—sharpening our edges to include all the levels of the “spiral” which came before, not just in theory (philosophers love theory!) but in practice—I also started teaching about this activist goddess who was excluded from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and our psyches and our society at large. I thought, if Marianne Williamson began taking notice by reading an article alone—if that article could answer so many of her questions, who else would need to know about her? So I set about making Eris famous. And through her methods, I began to show people how they could learn to value and appreciate the entire spiral of humanity—to project a little less and to see things as they really are a little more.

Problem 3: Most of the world’s problem solvers were disenchanted and tired.

The problem creators had plenty of energy to keep the status quo. But the problem solvers? Boy, they were tired. Many of them lived lives of martyrdom and struggle, instead of the coolness, passion, and freedom that was theirs. With everyone, including those with spiritual sensibilities, feeling tired and joyless, I knew there had to be a way to help us discover life amid all the harsh realities and painful difficulties we had to face (Eris is a tough cookie and she requires it!). I knew there had to be a story, a transmission, an energy, that would get the blood flowing again, a reminder, a nudge in the direction of resilience amid a cataclysmic era.

How might we offer people the Whole Truth underneath the challenges of a world moving through a metacrisis of epic proportions? Well, I started doing stand up comedy (in rooms with clean air and far-UVC, which few of us had in the early 2020s). High-frequency, exorcist comedy for spiritual folk that somehow didn’t scare away people from other tribes. “There’s something about this person I don’t understand, but I’m not looking away,” these people thought. And while I was cracking alien spiritual jokes, the underlying message you could feel in your bones was, “Wake up. It’s time for a new era.”

How I Did It: Empowerment, Connection, Humor

I had known from the beginning, when I was tuning the collective psyche in East Asia, that my genius was to provide 360° perspectives in the service of life, and my mission to protect the balance of life through the promotion of integrative philosophies. As a trickster tricks people into higher truths, so I became a content creator, ironically leaving Los Angeles to set up my studio, softbox, and DSLR and talk, teach, laugh and cry my way to global cooperation.

I never thought that I would be able to do it by teaching or by being funny, or that funny was going to alter memory. As I evolved from talking my way out of difficulties to talking my way through them, I realized the same was true for the metacrisis. We couldn’t talk our way out of the metacrisis, but we could talk our way through it. And as a shapeshifter, I could choose to stay in the shadows or use my skills to help people alchemize darkness and create light. My only function was to transmit, to transmit well, and to transmit correctly.

It took a huge amount of work, but it was all worth it. I set out on a course of study and practice, to integrate everything I could get my hands on — especially things that seemed in opposition — and transmit that gestalt of worldviews so others could, too. I learned everything from how to win at capitalism (you mad?) to astrology to deep history to the great religions, not just on a theoretical level but at a deep level of practice so I could live it and teach it. I figured that if I could merge everything we had experienced as an evolving consciousness — to be an open vessel and then synthesize it — I could tune more people into the frequency that would change the world. I’d disrupt and shatter paradigms, and in time, help people experience the blessed rebirth of absolute consciousness.

Years earlier, I was sitting with my friend in the car, crying, saying, “I think I’m gonna have to say some things that are going to upset some people.” I sure upset many people in the last 30+ years. But as I grew, how things changed — it wasn’t either/or anymore, but both/and. I could upset and comfort people, challenge them and support them, give them this perspective and that — and because of it, nothing could stop the expansion of consciousness. I lived all the extremes in the Tao of paradox. I transmitted and gave leverage to the expansion of consciousness by growing down, bringing the higher consciousness into practical form.

I am a coach, a writer, and a speaker. I have always dealt with the invisibles, the things you can’t see or touch. But what I’m most shocked and delighted about is that all I needed to do to change the world was to be myself. As I took my light and laughter into the right networks and pulled the right levers, we saw the collective consciousness turn.

That’s the part I played: enabling new routes through perceptual transmissions, doing it well, and making those transmissions attractive and so damn funny. The second 30 years of my life have been about honing and amplifying this message. Really talking to people with a mythology that reflects the reality of who we are and where we’re going. When the message hits the heart, it absolutely alters the frequency of the collective. That’s why my work is called Spoken Generation: when the right message strikes, you will never be the same again.

I am a 58-year-old comic who began with drama. A person whose life began with tears and who turned it to laughter not to escape the drama, but because I encountered the 360° Almighty and became Whole. For me, it was a transmission, a philosophy, an approach that unified all these fragmented pieces, along with a bit of good marketing, that did the trick. And through my practice, lived example, and teaching the mechanics of evolution at scale — with a mic and a quiet apartment in the Midwest — I would give more people a taste of the bigger story.

Sue – I really appreciate all the work you do to inspire big conversations around how we can collectively save our planet and humanity. Thank you for all you’re doing!

–

It’s January 1, 2050. We’ve saved humanity and as a result, we’ve saved the world.

This story begins in the 2020s, the decade when the AI revolution first took flight, heralding in an era of optimism for the future.

Many of our most brilliant minds were focused on advancing AI to align with human values and ushering in the promises of new industries and job opportunities, a leap in human longevity, and a clear path towards solving climate change.

With the dawn of a new AI-powered reality, an equally damming future loomed — one where runaway AI became misaligned with humanity. We saw Misalignment Museums pop up around the globe, warning us of the perils in the form of sobering tributes from AI to humans that read Sorry for killing most of humanity.

“Trend carefully on the way to the promise land,” these museums cautioned.

And yet, the real undercurrent of danger was rarely spoken of among the AI community: aligning AI with humanity’s intended goals assumed that we had the right goals in mind. In the century following the Industrial Revolution, we saw a significant shift in societal values, prioritizing economic growth and technological advancement above all else. Rather than focus on the long-term well-being of our civilization, we were rewarded for short-term gain and wealth accumulation.

The reality was that the goals that AI was being aligned to did not universally benefit humanity — most of all, not our collective psychological well-being. While we’d raised the baseline for our material worlds, our inner worlds were more dysregulated than ever. Without a realignment in humanity’s true values, we were on a fast train headed towards a new world order that would enslave humans to AI.

Psychology up until then had focused on curing the pathologies of anxiety and depression, attempting to move us from -1 to 0. While this work was absolutely critical, we spent little time considering what happened once we reached 0. It was not enough to simply pursue arriving at baseline — what about moving from -1 to 1? That path was going to look entirely different. Reducing suffering was just the first step of raising the bar for our existence.

The bleak truth was that as we edged towards the birth of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), we found ourselves devolving into mass disembodiment, struggling to even make our way to baseline. We traded our humanity for professionalism, tying our identities to our productivity levels and dissociating from our purest ambitions in exchange for high status promotions and salary raises. “Just one more promotion and raise until I’ve made it,” we told ourselves as we developed email apnea, computer vision syndrome, and tech neck. Our bodies were keeping the score, fighting bouts of chronic illness as we competed in games that didn’t serve our flourishing.

—

Up against a world that had become exceedingly out of touch with our human nature, I convened a group of dreamers, writers, builders, and educators to reimagine what human flourishing in the 21st century would look like — first by seeking collaborators through my Substack, More Myself. We got to work on breathing life into a future for humanity and the advancement of becoming more human and psychologically resilient. We strove to save humanity from itself by finding our way back to ourselves, enlisting AI to help.

We knew that building this world started from within. The first step was reducing human suffering by leveraging the help of AI to make inner work more accessible than it had been in the old paradigm, programing AI to help deprogram ourselves.

In the early days, we used emotional work tools like Thyself, Refract, and Hidden Premise Finder to get back in touch with ourselves. We knew that by doing “the work,” we would reconnect with freer versions of ourselves after a lifetime of getting caught up in the same rat race that society ran on.

With the help of AI emotional guides, we began resolving inner conflict that plagued us and started transitioning our ambition fuel sources from dirty fuel (a lack of worthiness and a desire to prove ourselves to stoke our ego) to clean fuel (an alignment of our ego, soul, and will).

We found that when we operated from a place of baseline worthiness and enoughness, we had the capacity to tap into our most genuine desires and become far more ambitious than ever before, betting on ourselves to be the ones to save humanity rather than tie ourselves to more prestigious and high earning jobs in the short term.

With our commitment and focus to redefining human flourishing in the 21st century, we wrote, organized, educated and led a movement from the ground up. We educated people on why reconnecting with our intuition was so critical to our well-being and ultimately saving the world. We organized movements like tech sabbaths to remedy the polarization brought about by Web 2, championed a resurgence of town square gatherings by bringing communities and neighbors together in person, partnered with companies that were bringing the conversation around prioritizing our metabolic health to the forefront, and created reference points for what more intentional living looked like in modern day. All of this made possible as we freed up our most precious resource, time, by outsourcing non-essential tasks to AI, enabling us to scale our small and ambitious team to lead a collective awakening.

Grassroots change emerged as narratives were rewritten — it rose upward grabbing the attention of people in power. As we-the-people became more deeply in tune with the world we could live in, we demanded sweeping changes from our leaders, starting with their psychological well-being.

It had become abundantly clear the leaders that held high offices at the national and global level made economic and political decisions that caused immense suffering, all driven by their egos and a lack of attunement to our collective well-being.

While historically, there was no physical or psychological fitness test administered to high ranking officials and Commander in Chiefs, we-the-people demanded higher standards for our leaders and implemented requirements for baseline introspection work for those who held the fate of our lives and humanity in the palm of their hands. Rather than voting in politicians for their party affiliation, we began to vote for those who had the interest of humanity at the top of their agenda.

—

As leaders across the world turned inward, they realized just how much suffering their rhetoric and policies had caused, vowing to use their power for more collaborative partnerships across the aisle in their respective countries and with other world leaders. Their efforts in transitioning their ambition sources to clean fuel led to positive sum polices and programs at the planetary level.

As this work happened, a new reality emerged in the 2030s: without cooperative efforts across the world, AI would rise to the top of a new world order — it was only a matter of time. The fate of humanity hung in the balance. Rather than continue to strive towards world dominance, our world leaders united around enacting policies that put our planet and humanity above individual countries thriving at the expense of others.

In the end, all it took was being on the brink of extinction caused by the very thing we had created. With unified world leadership and collaborative efforts in transforming AI to work for humanity, Misalignment Museums became relics of the past.

And there you have it. We saved the world by first saving ourselves.