Informed by the old metaphysics of “conquering”, within Red, Blue, Orange and Green civilizations was always an inner structural contradiction between castes. There was a fundamental inner contradiction of our society, embedded in its organizing principles and codes of law. During the last two developmental cycles, we never managed to design a social organization able to enhance the cohesion of all citizens. Also, we never managed to design a social organization able to enhance its own evolvability. We design our societies as static, dogmatic, ideological realities.
As long as they were based on exploitation, it was necessary to be ideological. (What is ideology if not a way to “sell” or rather to impose a lie as truth?). So, in the face of an evolving environment, we have always collapsed. Because our societies from the beginning were designed not to evolve, but to remain static. It is the time to imagine and design social organizations that resemble a living being, able to sense its inner and outer environment and evolve accordingly.
One way or another, we are pushing the planetary ecosystem beyond its limit of stability. Pushed beyond its limits by different challenges, a self-organizing system reaches a bifurcation point. The planetary ecosystem as well as our human society both have already reached this point and will never be the same. What is driving this destruction is a kind of unconsciousness: the incapacity of self-centered consciousness to see the big picture and integrate all its complexity.
From now on, the societal collapse is inevitable. But collapse is not necessary bad news. There is no evolution for a system without some kind of collapse before. Life is a process that acts through diversification and subsequent reintegration of that diversity at higher levels of complexity. This “subsequent reintegration” process has two parts: first is the disintegration of the old state, followed by an evolutionary leap forward. The evolutionary leap forward is always informed by the buds of a higher order of integration, felt as a new revelation. As we will see in Appendix 5 (The butterfly metamorphosis), amid the caterpillar disintegration, it appears the buds of the new being of the butterfly. Our society resemble the caterpillar collapsing body and the new social structures that are appearing everywhere, bearing a new “metaphysical genome”, resemble the imaginal cells which start to unite themselves bringing forth the organs of the new Butterfly Society.
A crisis is not an unusual event on our planet. In fact, it is a very normal and very expected event. Nothing evolves without having before “a crisis”. The crisis is a bifurcation point, a time in a system’s life when the system’s ability to integrate the complexity of its divergent forces is overwhelmed. When old good solutions are not anymore good solutions, it is time to evolve or collapse. Jared Diamond gave us in his book, Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, some examples of human societies who manage to avoid a drastic collapse. Under the pressure of challenges, they managed to change their ways of organization in time, before to reach that point when their societies would have been collapsed to ruins. However, most human societies have failed to evolve and, as a result, have collapsed.
We, as living beings, want to survive and live. As holons, our main goal is to maintain our integrity. This integrity involves two components: first is to maintain our physical integrity (that is to live, to survive) and second is to maintain our moral integrity (that is to live according to our inner calling, to live a meaningful life). Joining the Butterfly Communities open-project, we could fulfill the two biological commandments related to our physical and moral integrity. Besides the more meaningful life brought by the co-creation of an enjoyable and moral social environment for us and our children, belonging to a community will be much safer from the survival perspective. Amid our collapsing society, we have the chance to be the pioneers of a new world. The evolution of Life on this planet has a clear direction. This direction is toward increasingly wider scales of cooperation. Understanding the pattern of evolution, we can choose consciously to align our lives to it.
Until now we were used to live atomized, with not so much concern about our society or planetary ecosystems. Nothing pressed us to think about “all of us as a Whole”. Now it comes the time to prioritize “all of us as a Whole”. We can not afford anymore to live individualistically. We have to find modalities to unite us amid our collapsing social and ecological environment. We need a common perspective and a common Great Work. This book, joining many others pioneers, is trying to offer both. The scientific understanding of the Living Universe offers, for the first time, the chance to gather all the humanity around the same founding story and a common “Great Work”, to co-create a human society as a living organism, integrated harmoniously into the planetary ecosystems.
We cannot build a future society without imagining it before. Butterfly Communities model is a sketch from which we can begin to prototype. It is an open-project we can join it as equal co-creators, with commitment and creativity. Butterfly Communities could be designed as holarchic communities that could come to life and start to sense their eco-social environment, respond, adapt, evolve, bringing forth a human civilization as a living ecosystem. Our collapsing society is the best place to evolve as individuals and communities. Even a small level of awareness is enough to understand that we are amid a generalized collapse and we have to evolve.
The global hysteria that grew up around a quite harmless virus shows crystal-clear that our hyper-centralized political system is not able anymore to deal with the challenges of our world. The same for our hyper-linked global economic system. Our world is collapsing. A collapse should be seen as the best moment for reinventing a new world. Dimitry Orlov, in his book Reinventing Collapse, presents us 5 stages of a collapse: 1. Faith in business as usual is lost; 2. Faith that the market shall provide is lost; 3. Faith that the government will take care of you is lost, 4. Faith that your people will take care of you is lost; 5. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost.
These stages are rather describing the subjective perception of a citizen, its degree of disillusion regarding the modern society. Depending on its experience, everyone could decide for itself where it is on this scale of disillusion.
After the coronavirus hysteria, the most of Europeans are collapsing until stage 3, losing their faith that capitalistic economy and “democratic” government are able to offer them a healthy social life and a future. Actually, it is the perfect stage from where a new legal/political/economic world could come to life. It is the time for us to reclaim our birthright of self-determination for us and our communities!
We want to break up with the legal/political/economic predetermination of our dysfunctional society. We want to craft a fair one, based on self-determination and collaboration. At the same time, we have to ensure that we’ll not fall under the stage 3. We need to strengthen our faith in the goodness of humanity, the faith that we will help each-other, that we will stand one for another.