Daniel Schmachtenberger on the Three Civilizational Attractors and the Metacrisis

Discussion

Benjamin Life:

"Daniel Schmachtenberger has mapped the basins available to us better than most. His analysis provides a clear enough map of the current end state of the system to empower us to develop the right islands of coherence, the necessary nudges powerful enough to tip the system into the best possible next equilibrium. His starting observation is that exponential technology amplifies our destructive and our creative powers together, and that this twin amplification pushes our civilization toward one of two failure attractors.

The first he calls catastrophe: a cascading, decentralized breakdown, in which any one of a dozen runaway dynamics: ecological, financial, military, technological, is enough to crack the system, and the cracks spread. The second is dystopia: the centralized, total surveillance and control that arises precisely as the attempt to prevent catastrophe, binding every possible threat by binding everyone. The genuinely unsettling part of his analysis is that the obvious cure for each failure drives you toward the other. Flee the chaos and you build the cage. Flee the cage and you invite the chaos. The two failure valleys feed each other.

Which is why there must be a third attractor, a fundamentally different basin, neither collapse nor control. Schmachtenberger describes it as an antifragile, participatory civilization: one that grows stronger from its stresses, that distributes capacity and wisdom rather than concentrating them, that learns to metabolize its own risks instead of its own critiques. I believe Schmachtenberger’s third attractor is the valley Charles Eisenstein calls the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible. But it has another name, too. The ancient future.

But naming the basin is not the same as living there. What would it actually take to create the more beautiful world? Not a change of policy, and not even a change of values alone. It would mean a change in the grammar itself, a change in how change happens."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-ancient-future-at-the-end-of)