Let's Go Wild
#160: 12 July 2026 Metacrisis
The second portion of the Preface draft for “Unsealing Our Past: Ancestral Time, Quantum Reality, and Rejoining Our Living World” for your comment.
These are troubled times. I don’t claim they are exceptional; most of history has been a series of crises that push social evolution. However, the “Modern” technological milieu that has evolved over roughly four hundred years and is based on Newtonian ideas of “resources” and mechanical, material solidity in a cold, dead Universe is not just structurally unsound, but also coming apart due to the abundant inconsistencies, predicaments, and conundrums that are completely fracturing this model. I will use the term Modern throughout UOP, using it to point to not just the technology but also the phantom wealth it relies upon. Digits in a bank’s computer storage, shared ownership of companies via stock certificates, allowing one’s monetary or asset value, whether rich or poor, be one’s source of identity and self-worth; this is not real. Real wealth is grounded in healthy relationships, healthy communities, and healthy Nature. I will refer to this as “Wild”, which reflects what Modern refers to as our uncivilized, savage, human past.
The metacrisis is a crisis of meaning and purpose within the global, and particularly the Modern, 21st century world that includes all the predicaments we face at the levels of infrastructure, social structures, and the superstructures of human civilization. I point here to the complexities of Modern life, not the complications. Complications are linear; they are amenable to remediation via a series of steps. This is how most people address most problems, and that’s sensible in most cases. It’s a two-body problem: too hot? How do I cool? Too dumb? How do I get smart? In either case, here are the steps…. One example is using slide rules to calculate the most efficient path for any spacecraft – “a path that used the least amount of fuel, avoided other solar system bodies while in flight, and ended with a landing in a pre-designated location. You don’t have to have taken an orbital mechanics class to know these equations are not simple. The Earth’s atmosphere provides drag. The weight of your rocket changes as you burn fuel to leave that atmosphere. The Earth is rotating. You don’t want to hit the Moon, but the Moon keeps moving! Thanks to all of these complications, and many others, the related computations are done numerically.”[i] It is a step-by-step series of calculations where the variables are replaced with numbers and the location of the object relative to two bodies can be known without having to calculate the entire voyage from start to finish. This is the essence of a two-body problem.
Complexity is a three-body problem; the third issue engenders complexity not complication, and it is the aspect that transforms a problem into something that can’t be solved linearly with a series of steps or a slide rule[ii]. It demands a change in consciousness, a new way to understand the root cause of the issue which then guides the changes needed to heal or transform rather than fix. When we add a third body to the calculation, there is no known formula that works. Instead, we have to run the moment-to-moment calculation from a starting time/location forward or backward, until we get to the moment in time we are curious about. That first flight to the Moon was a two-body problem. How do clouds, humidity, and sunlight affect the climate (not weather) ten years from now? That’s a three-body problem.
Crises of meaning are not new to our species, nor would everybody reading this essay identify as having a personal crisis of meaning. However, two things are different in our current Modern culture. For the first time in human history, the crisis is global, where a plurality of humanity aligns with political, economic, cultural and spiritual beliefs that are no longer producing sustainable outcomes. Because of the global nature of complexity the stakes are exponentially more grave. Modern is based on long-tail supply chains, increasingly difficult to extract natural materials for production, and every increasing energy demands. Each of these elements introduces a fragility that must be protected from disruption even as the ability of small events to trigger chaos also increases.
Just as in a three-body problem, the metacrisis is an emergent property of complex human systems that is even larger than the sum of its constituent parts. As such, any solution must draw upon the myriad complex issues and meld them into a realistic whole solution. For instance, interventions for climate change or clean energy performed in semi-isolation, will not be long-lasting in the way we wish - as in the analog “putting out the fire, but leaving the arsonist at large”. Most people only think in complications, in two-body mode. A few of us think in three-body mode. We naturally track multiple streams of information and insight simultaneously, finding meaning in the connections between fields rather than focusing primarily on depth inside any single one to the relative exclusion of others. We process these different fields (bodies) in parallel, not as a silo. This is appropriate given that the world is truly complex; no matter how complicated it might feel. I have spent my entire life translating my complex “three-body thinking” into “twenty-line” serial explanations of complications so others could try to follow along — and something true was always lost in that translation.
What follows in this book is intentional, for the parallel processing just mentioned, to plant flags in many of the streams running simultaneously in various fields. We will center the conversation on the concept, “I See You”. It points to seeing each person as vital to the human ecology, to the tribe, and to Nature itself. Diversity, yes; Nature does not do monocultures for very good reasons, sustainability being one. Each person brings some gift, some talent, and some energy to every relationship and community they are a part of. Once I understand you, your gifts and talents, my responsibility becomes seeing you clearly in an evolutionary, supportive way? I feel my best when I know I am fully seen and heard. As a social creature, as we all are most relaxed within relationships where we are accurately allowed to share our talents, being truly seen and acknowledged is our perfect state of being.
[i] https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/qdtarchive/women-in-science-hidden-figure-katherine-johnson-nasas-human-computer/
[ii] In 1953 Katherine Johnson, earned a spot as a “human computer”, performing the challenging work of complex, multivariable computations, work which required incredible focus and attention to detail, at what is now the Langley Research Center in Hampton. As one of the first batch of employees hired by the newly-created NASA, she worked alongside and under Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn, whose efforts are highlighted in Margot Lee Shetterly’s recent book and the feature film, Hidden Figures. NASA used a computer to calculate Alan Shepherd’s orbital mechanics; he insisted that Katherine check them with her slide rule.