“Until now, the evolution of Life has organized molecular processes into prokaryotic cells, prokaryotic cells into eukaryotic cells, eukaryotic cells into organisms and individuals into societies. The evolution of Life on this Planet has a direction. The evolution is moving towards ever wider levels of collaboration. The cooperators will inherit the Earth.” (after John Stewart)

On the other hand, our capitalist society promotes competition and individualism rather than cooperation. All doctors and psychologists could say that our physical illnesses and psychological dysfunctions are brought forth by the huge stress levels of struggling alone in extra-large societies. It is the stress to struggle alone for our survival. We are not biologically adapted to struggle alone.

We were used to live in communities, helping each other, protecting each other. We were used to live in cooperation inside our clans and tribes. But now we found ourselves alone, struggling alone. The super-human societies broke our tribes. And then broke our clans. And now even the small nuclear family is under pressure to be dissolved.

The dissolution of human cohesion is brought forth by the organizing principles of our society itself: It sustains competition and individualism, not cooperation and solidarity. We have to stop this tendency and frame our life toward higher levels of correlation and collaboration with others.

Humanity is in a bifurcation point! We have to be aware of this.

Our world is facing a deep social and ecological crisis. At such bifurcation points, living systems either evolve or collapse. In evolutionary terms, to evolve can only be towards increasing the degree of social collaboration and towards increasing the degree of individual adaptability.

It has become clear to everyone that we live in a VUCA world – short for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Therefore, a question is rising: How to better manage these VUCA world challenges? How can we better face the uncertainties of the future? The answer is clear: increasing our level of cooperation! No matter what challenges the future may bring, a group of people who support each other will be able to cope better. The key step to overcome our challenges is to increase the level of collaboration between us. This is what Butterfly-Communities Open-Project is all about.

Though everyone could envision the huge benefits of human fairness and collaboration, the barriers against cooperation seem insurmountable. So, almost everyone tends to look at individualistic life strategies as the only better ones. But a closer look of how Life has evolved on this Planet – as John Stewart already proven in his book, “Evolution’s Arrow” – shows that Life has managed to overcome a lot of barriers against cooperation, creating collaborative organizations over wider and wider scale and increasingly adaptable. The collaborative organizations emerged, survived, thrived and inherit the Earth because they have proved more competitive in evolutionary terms than single individuals, than non-cooperators. We have all the reasons to believe that Life will find its way further, as it has found its way so far. The next key milestone in Life’s evolution toward cooperation is our challenge and responsibility!

Our world is too torn apart by the divergent interests of each individual. We need to find ways to stop the dissolution of social fabric and to increase the level of cooperation and solidarity. We have to co-create around us communities with a shared worldview and a shared purpose. Doing so, we’ll be able to align the individuals interest inside our communities and then, to align the human communities interest with the Planet interest as a whole.

As individuals, we have to take further our “heroic journey” and “cross the first threshold” from individualistic life-strategies to collaborative ones. This step is a social and economic suicide, if we are going to take it alone, in the midst of our individualistic, merciless society. This “seemingly impossible step to take” is part of the barrier against cooperation that I was speaking about. It is much easier to take this step toward cooperative and fair behavior not alone, but with others. That’s way we propose the Butterfly Communities Open-Project – a social environment where we can take this step together.

We have a clear picture of the existential challenges we are facing.

Mankind is at a bifurcation point. It is important to understand this. At this bifurcation point we have only two options: either we consciously evolve and move further, either we refuse to understand what is happening, we refuse to evolve and, therefore, we will become increasingly irrelevant, dysfunctional and even destructive as individuals and societies.

Butterfly Communities is an open project where those interested in conscious evolution can find themselves. Here we can evolve together. We can prototyping together a collaborative society. We can support each-other. Together we can co-create an organizational culture based on collaboration.

But it is not easy to evolve, because it is not clear what you have to evolve and how you can do it: Butterfly Communities can become a living laboratory where we can search and find together what might be relevant to individual and social evolution.

What is needed for future evolutionary success? The barrier against collaboration is always the same: it seems that what ensures a future evolutionary success is not identical with what ensures a present thriving life. Certainly, if you choose collaboration (that is, what would be useful for future evolutionary success) as a single individual in the midst of capitalist society, it will certainly not prove to be a life-winning strategy. Butterfly Communities offers the chance that this evolutionary step further to be taken safely, in the middle of a human community that has chosen the same life strategy: fairness, reciprocity, collaboration.

People who choose conscious evolution will join this emerging community. Butterfly Communities will prove to them a safe environment where they will be able to express themselves authentically. Here, we can choose safely and will support each-other to evolve a higher level of consciousness. (For a clearer understanding of what Butterfly Community aims to be, see the Butterfly Communities; further readings: articles from Butterfly Communities, Cooperation, Conscious Evolution, Life Intelligence, Voluntary Simplicity Categories)

“The emergence of organisms who are conscious of the direction of evolution is one of the most important steps in the evolution of Life on any planet. Once organisms discover the direction of evolution, they can use it to guide their own evolution. If they know where evolution is going, they can work out what will produce success in the future, and use this to plan how they will evolve.” (John Stewart)

“Living beings can evolve without having any knowledge of the direction of evolution. The diversity and complexity of Life on Earth is testimony to that. Organisms can try to deal with the future by blindly making changes to themselves or their offspring and seeing how the changes work out in practice. But this takes a lot of costly trial-and-error, particularly when the future is complex or changes rapidly. It will not be a winning strategy for organisms whose competitors can predict future events and use this to evolve more effectively. The alternative is for organisms to guide their evolution by forming a picture of how evolution is likely to unfold in the future. They can try to find trends and patterns in this evolution that might impact their future chances of survival. They can then use these patterns to see how they must change themselves and the way they are organized in order to continue to be successful.” (John Stewart)