Some Basic P2P-Inspired Reflection on Cycles

Discussion

Michel Bauwens:

"Some of you are surely aware that I am building several new directories (databases) in the P2P Foundation wiki, one on broad macrohistorical interpretations (Civilizational Analysis), one on the operation of cycles (P2P Cycles) and on on Patterns and Pattern Languages.

I have recently tried to organize my insights on the basis of three ‘complex systems’

• The material systems of the climate and the environment, to which human systems must respond, and which have created the need for a civilizational response (see the wiki section ‘Thermodynamic Efficiencies)

• Human systems themselves, how groups and societies react to such challenges (challenge and response)

• And how we make sense of all of this , i.e human systems of understanding, or as I would argue, levels of consciousness.

It has recently dawned on me how important cycles are in all these developments. Ascending and descending phases of cycles are literally everywhere. In matter (movement and pulsation of the star systems), in biology, but also even in human thought itself (Sorokin). (I just purchased a book that documents the cyclic nature of culture and human thought across 8 civilizational spheres).

Are these cycles going anywhere ? Here we have 3 options:

1) our future is entropic and the cycles are descending (this is the ‘traditionalist’ view, that claims this was the view of all traditional civilizations)

2) are the cycles essentially static (eternal return, no progress), i.e. there is no real regress nor progress, just an eternal return of the same

3) are the cycles in some way cumulative.

To be honest, I still believe in the third option, which results in seeing cycles as spirals, i.e. yes, there are ascending and descending phases throughout reality, but there is also novelty and accumulation. Which really means that we need to see human evolution as ‘spiral dynamics’.

The universe <is> entropic, as far as we know, but humanity creates, along with the entropic damage, also overall a rise, across the cycles, of an ‘extropic’ nature (neguentropia as Stiegler calls it).. The universe is huge, even though we live in an isolated system that allows energy to enter our solar system, but not really new matter. So yes, eventually we will hit that solar limit, but perhaps, we can go beyond it, though right now, we must seek to survive a descending cycle, and come out of it managing a more ‘steady state’ system that can permanently live within the planetary boundaries. The most logical sequence is that we need degrowth objectively (which doesn’t mean impoverishing the working classes at the behest of elites,, just a realistic use of matter and energy, using mutualization for optimal allocation), to arrive at a economy which is materially in balance, but geared towards immaterial, relational and spiritual deepening.

There is no question in my mind that we are in a descending phase of the human cycle, which also means that ideologies of doom and descent become the norm, and I cannot claim I am immune to this myself. But this is not the end of history, nor the end of human kind, although we may come out of this cycle with substantially reduced numbers.

And here is where the ‘pulsation of the commons’ comes in. Most human jurisdictions based on market and state formations, are essentially growth, conquest oriented, i.e. extractive, <always> reaching beyond their limits until they reach a descending phase. And each time, that has created a reaction towards mutualization, i.e. a revival of more local commons institutions to protect and regenerate exhausted bioregions, until paradoxically the very existence of these generative dynamics create the condition for a new expanding phase.

We have now reached global limits, which means localized regeneration is no longer possible without global protection. This is what we mean by cosmo-localization, and the means to reduce the human load is, as it always was, mutualization. The difference is that today, we can no longer stay in the cycle itself.

This means that everything is really up for grabs:

• The ‘civilizational’ response, to create complex coordinated societies to dominate natural cycles, is itself no longer appropriate. We need a participatory response with the web of life. This is not a return to indigenous organization, but there is certainly a lot to learn from it.

• The Axial Age, the large scale adaptation of human consciousness to the requirements of civilization

• The next phase of the spiral will be the realization of a planetary steady state. It could be conceived as a ‘Fourth Stage of Civilization (after the mythological, alphabetic, and industrial forms), and it will require a Second Axial Age adaptation/transformation of human consciousness, enhancing our capacity to ‘live within the cyclic limits’. The current proxy war in Ukraine, which pits western maritime ‘democratic’ rentier capitalism against the state-sovereign Eurasian continental alliance, pits extractive models against each other, none of them sufficiently generative to offer a long-term solution.

• While internally inside the systems vying for hegemony, reactive politics leads to identitarian hysteria on one side of the aisle, aiming for a ‘biologically’ divided group distribution of resources against the interests of the working majorities (a ‘spiritual destruction’ of the egalitarian/universalist human spirit and the positive achievements of the Enlightenment) and a return to pre-Enlightenment ‘dhimmitude’; on the other side, the state-sovereignist national-populist, mostly in denial of environmental limits, contributing to a material dead-end.

So we need political expressions that:

• Recognize the need to revive the commons and mutualization, in a cosmo-local framework

• Are aligned with the human needs of the working majorities of the population and defend a culture that is able of human reproduction and care

Can rest on a new ‘cognitive’ “elite” of servant leadership that can carry these values against those that align with the forces of material and spiritual destruction, and that only be ‘commons-aware’