Last time, we explored how civilizations are constructed through collective agreements — agreements encoded in our infrastructures, incentives, and institutions. We saw that these agreements, while appearing natural and eternal, are in fact changeable. The Roman Empire seemed eternal to Romans even as invaders were at the gate.
But recognizing that agreements can change is different from knowing how to change them. The transformation we face isn’t merely political or economic — it’s ontological. It requires a fundamental shift in how we understand what it means to be human on this planet. This shift is already underway.
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The Ontological Shift
Source: Wiki
ontology
A branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, existence, and reality. It seeks to understand the fundamental categories and relationships of entities within the universe.
An ontological shift can be seen as a transition from one way of understanding what exists or what it means to exist, to another, potentially radically different way of seeing and being. Changing one’s ontology involves moving from one conceptual framework about reality to another, which can have profound implications for how we understand and interact with the world around us. The existential crises we face today offer us an initiatory challenge and opportunity to transmute collapse into rebirth, an opening to reflect on and evaluate the ontological basis of our current civilization. And through this free fall between epochs of history, we are liberated to heal the wounds of humanity’s past and re-integrate ancient and nearly-forgotten ways of knowing ourselves and the world; a profound socio-cultural transformation from a worldview of fragmentation and separation to a worldview of interbeing and mutual interdependence; from a worldview of dominance and competition to a worldview of harmony and co-creation.
existential risk
Any event or scenario that has the potential to cause the extinction of humanity or the irreversible collapse of human civilization. These risks are characterized by their severity and the scale of their impact, which could prevent humanity from achieving its long-term potential. Examples of existential risks include nuclear war, catastrophic climate change, pandemics, and uncontrolled artificial intelligence.
interbeing
The understanding that our relationships are what make us possible, and that the health of these relationships determines the health of the whole.
A philosophical concept rooted in Zen Buddhism, notably proposed by Thich Nhat Hanh. It emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of all elements of existence. According to this concept, nothing exists in isolation; everything is interwoven and mutually dependent. This understanding informs ethical living, mindfulness, and compassionate actions, highlighting that our well-being is intrinsically linked to the well-being of others and the environment.
zero sum
A situation in which any gain by one party is exactly balanced by a loss to another party. This means that the total amount of resources, benefits, or wealth remains constant, and one person’s gain is another person’s loss. Zero-sum scenarios are often used in game theory and economics to describe competitive situations where the interests of participants are directly opposed.
This ontological shift is already underway all around the world, despite the appearance of stagnancy driven by the media and legacy institutions. Legacy institutions will hold onto their ontological assumptions far longer than the general public as the result of the massive edifices and sunk costs embroiled in the foundations of our current epoch, motivated by intrinsic incentives to maintain a status quo that disproportionately benefits those who have already enclosed and are extracting from the commons we share. But if you look beneath the surface into emerging subcultures around the world, a new ontology is already emerging and traditional indigenous ways of being and knowing are being revitalized. Those who undertake this courageous cultural transformation have already begun to discover new ways of being that integrate different cultures and value systems to meet the converging challenges of our present context.
Joanna Macy describes this transition as “The Great Turning,” a civilizational phase transition from an industrial growth society into a life-affirming society. Amidst this transition, Macy notes the three dimensions of The Great Turning as holding actions that slow the damage, analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives, and shifts in consciousness. While this thesis focuses more explicitly on an analysis of structural causes and the creation of alternatives, shifts in consciousness are often where deeply transformative changes first begin.
At the core of this ontological shift is a new story of what it means to be human on the planet we call home. While our most recent epoch of human civilization was formalized upon the underlying agreement that we are rational actors engaged in a zero-sum competition for scarce resources and dominance, contemporary biological, sociological, psychological, metaphysical, and complexity sciences tell a different story. These new and ancient understandings reveal that our relationships are what make our lives possible, rich and meaningful – and that the health of these relationships determines the health of the whole. An equally material and metaphysical insight, akin to the Buddhist notion of interbeing or the Zulu philosophy of Ubuntu, our collective futures are inescapably bound together.
“In a real sense all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...This is the inter-related structure of reality.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
Within this emerging ontology, humans reimagine themselves as intrinsically part of and responsible for the vitality of our planet, our communities, and our commons. We are transformed from passive citizen-subjects and consumers into active citizen-participants and stewards. Our sense of personal well-being, once limited to the lens of the isolated and fragmented individual, nuclear family, nation or ethnicity, is being challenged by our current existential civilizational crises to evolve into a more holistic perspective.
Civilization-scale decay, made visible through the crises of homelessness, addiction, mental health epidemics, wealth inequality, ecocide, and the proliferation of potentially dangerous exponential technologies like AI and gene editing, reveal that there is no refuge, no place in our globalized civilization that is insulated from the risks and impacts of existential civilizational collapse and deteriorating quality of life. While our fates have always been bound together, these runaway existential risks make our mutual interdependence visceral, obvious, and un-ignorable.
This realization is the basis for a kind of sacred civics as a transcultural, transreligious, and transpolitical understanding of our mutual belonging and mutual responsibility. This emerging civic virtue exists at the immanent substrate of our material reality, not needing to leverage any metaphysical claims to bind our culture and systems to an ethical foundation of care, reciprocity, and mutuality. Scientifically and spiritually, our individual survival and thriving are increasingly bound together by either the game theoretic lose-lose or all-win reality of the meta-crisis’ runaway feedback loops. While many of our current systems reinforce an ontological frame of anti-social and ecocidal competition, our capacity for self-destruction, accelerated by the emergence of exponential technologies, requires a transformation in our fundamental relationships between self and other to reflect our new understanding of the interdependent nature of reality. By facing the reality that “rivalrous dynamics, multiplied by exponential technology, are inherently self-terminating,” we confront the existential mandate for humanity to evolve into a non-rivalrous, mutually responsible planetary species.
Drawing inspiration from the Buen Vivir movements in Bolivia and Ecuador as well as the Gross National Happiness Commission in Bhutan, we can see systemic implementations of this ontological shift towards inter-being and commons stewardship. Particularly in the Buen Vivir model, institutionalized in the Bolivian and Ecuadoran constitutions, well-being is described through an indigenous understanding of the mutually reinforcing relationships and scales of well-being, integrating individual, familial, communal, and ecological health. While these constitutional and governmental applications of an ontological shift have been difficult to reinforce due to the lingering effects of extractive multinational corporations, they offer a vision of an alternative approach to systems of governance and economy based on a new way of being.
civic virtue
The personal qualities and behaviors that contribute to the effective functioning of a civil and political society. It involves the dedication of citizens to the common welfare of their community, often prioritizing the public good over individual interests.
commons
Resources that are shared by a community and accessible to all its members. These resources can be natural, such as air, water, and land, or cultural, such as knowledge and public spaces. The concept of commons emphasizes collective management and stewardship, often involving informal norms and practices that ensure sustainable use and equitable access.
Ontological shifts begin within an individual’s beliefs, coalescing into social agreements and norms. Thus, no one can choose to make an ontological shift on our behalf. A new world only emerges when we choose a different way of being, courageously stepping outside of the confines of the unhealthy societal agreements that define many aspects of our current paradigm. Beginning in small pockets or “islands of coherence” which evolve into “systems of influence” through network effects, this emergent worldview will gradually develop its own culture, institutions, incentives, and infrastructures that “make the old system obsolete.” As such, embedding this ontological shift into explicit new social agreements, formalized through the design of new open civic systems aligned with the life-centric principles of pluralism and mutually interdependent collective agency, becomes an existential imperative for the continuity of human civilization and perhaps Life on Earth. This simultaneously cultural and systemic intervention is an essential strategic leverage point or “trim tab” to shift our planetary macro socio-economic order. In this context, civic innovation can be viewed as the emergent creative impetus driving us to imagine and build the foundations of what could be called a “life-affirming civilization.”
islands of coherance
Small, localized areas or systems within a larger, chaotic environment that exhibit a high degree of order, stability, and functionality. These “islands” can influence the broader system by serving as models of coherence and potentially catalyzing wider systemic change. The concept is often used in discussions about social, ecological, and organizational systems to highlight how pockets of stability and innovation can drive transformation in larger, more complex systems.
network effects
The phenomenon where the value or utility of a product, service, or platform increases as more people use it. Essentially, the more users there are, the more beneficial it becomes for each user. This can create a positive feedback loop, where increased usage attracts even more users, further enhancing the value.
trimtab
Buckminster Fuller used the term trim tab metaphorically to illustrate how small, strategic actions can create significant change. Just as a trim tab on a ship or aircraft can adjust the course with minimal effort, individuals or small groups can act as trim tabs within larger systems to influence and steer them in new directions.
The ontological shift from separation to interbeing isn’t abstract philosophy — it has practical implications for how we design and build civic systems. In our next chapter, we’ll explore what civic innovation actually means in this context, and how “islands of coherence” can grow into “systems of influence” capable of making old systems obsolete. We’ll also introduce the emerging Decentralized Civics (DeCiv) movement and the concept of cosmo-localism.
Series:
Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift ← This Chapter
Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics
Chapter 5: Our Crisis is a Birth
Chapter 6: The Three Attractors
Chapter 7: A Post-Tragic Protopian Audacity
Chapter 8: Open Civic Culture
Chapter 9: Open Civic Systems — Architecture & Transformation
Chapter 10: Open Civic Systems — Design Principles & Living Systems
Chapter 11: Our Choice