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We talk about the path for major change to cope with climate and its related issues. I think we need to expand our senes of what major change can look like. I find myself having, for example, to think about new speculations in neurology, epistemology, and ontology. For example:
Daniel Little in his very comprehnsive and interrestin blog and books, Understanding Society, writes
“Ontology and Government
What kind of things do we need to hypothesize when we refer to “government”? A government is made up of actors—individuals who occupy roles; who have beliefs, interests, commitments, and goals; and who exist within social relations and networks involving other individuals both within and outside the corridors of power”
Excerpt From A New Social Ontology of Government: Consent, Coordination, and Authority
His vocabulary indicates an atomistic approach: society is made up of individuals. The contrasting view is not easy to state. It goes something like a society and it's history is a swirl of atmosphere that determines everything that can happen within it. Memes are more like storms in the atmosphere than like the bricks that make a building. There is a current that flows through people and for each person the flow, like swimming on the edge of a river, is more powerful than their individual contributions. If you take a great thinker like Plato, Shakespeare, or Enstein, Mozart of Picasso, their contribution is in the context of the flow of the historical moment and its current (pun alert) culture. Such people pull some of that flow into themselves, alter that flow and let it back out. To the extent that this way of thinking about thought is correct, it suggests that the way we think about altering the future should be quite different than a logical attack on isolated points and also suggest that things could change faster than the more static picture of individuals with atomistic thoughts implies,
Along with the shift is another: we talk about links and nodes but if we think of a node, not as a dense point, but as a smear of uncountable neural and bain liquid stuff immersed in the flows of the historical moment it again suggests that the approach to change is not rifle like but more like a snowball fight. Playing with our assumptions and metaphors is suggested.
from blog post at douglasscarmichael.substack.com