January 21, 2021

Accepting

(Denying)

“Face it, Accept it, Deal with it, Let go of it.” Venerable Master Sheng-yen

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin

Analyze West is a work of speculative fiction that psychologically analyzes Western Civilization in the form of a fictive character called West. With empathy, compassion, and humor rather than faultfinding and blame, it allows the reader to identify with West and in so doing to self-identify as the crisis system (Bhaskar). This expansion of our self sense to include the ways in which we perform crisis, is a necessary first step for conscious designing action. Without this step, we are designing from distance rather than proximity, from separation rather than wholeness. Working on the crisis from a position outside the crisis (maintaining subject object duality) just does not provide enough leverage.

The twelve-step program of recovery from addiction and compulsion owes its unique track record of success in large part to step number one - acknowledging that one has a problem (fact check needed). This “hitting rock bottom” is the foundation of many addiction recovery approaches. There is tremendous power in naming whatever is true about one’s present circumstances, no matter how stark or fearsome, no matter how entrenched. This is surrendering to whatever feels authentic about our experience. In surrendering to what is true, we relax our denial and make space for other interpretations of reality. Surrender makes whatever is stuck or dysfunctional an object of our attention. Letting go of denial can free up energy to move forward.

Reflecting upon the pervasiveness of addictions of all kinds suffered by individuals in the developed world, and thinking about individual addictions as a fractal of collective addictions, the twelve-steps provides a tangible analog for consumer society as we encounter the finite limits of our planetary resources. Having developed along a trajectory that treated crude oil supplies as unlimited we are living through a period of time where we are hitting “rock bottom” socio-economically. Further extending the metaphor, we find ourselves in a late modern society in denial about our sustaining of the unsustainable. The economic demand for crude oil sourced fuels is a symptom of a much deeper problem. In our consuming we are becoming consumed by desires that substitute for fulfillments of deeper inner needs. There is growing consensus evidenced by transition movements all over the world - that the challenge of our times is to move from neediness and dependence to resilience and liberation.

Building on a brief by UK-based permaculture designer and educator Rob Hopkins back in 2004, Louise Rooney and Catherine Dunne built on various hypotheses of societal dependency in order to establish the Transition Town model of societal adaptation and resilience. A decade later, the worldwide Transition initiative is now established as one of the most viral models of instantiated community prototyping to date. This model for transition to a post- “fossil fuels” society owes its success in large part to the strategic interweaving of psychological, social, and biological factors into the economic, regulatory and environmental contexts in which peak oil and climate change mitigation efforts are typically situated. By modeling and prototyping flourishing societies in real-time and at scale, Transition initiative principles reframe a crude oil-free lifestyle as qualitatively richer than present times.

The Transition initiative model not only inserts individual and collective responsibility into the equation, it comprehensively accounts for intangible factors such as cultural context, psychology and values without which no change initiative can take root. Building on a movement from denial, to acceptance, to change, it demonstrates the pairing of external lifestyle changes with internal transformational inquiry - necessary co- factors in successfully transitioning from dependence to resilience. Resilience is a byproduct of recovery from dependence for example in the relocalization of food, transportation, energy and economy. <Transitioning - Surviving>

Systems scientist and organizational learning authority Peter Senge’s thoughts are instructive;“Winston Churchill said “first we shape the walls and then the walls shape us” sounding very like ontological designing. In social systems these walls arise from our deepest and most unquestioned habits of thought and action. If these remain in shadow, beyond our awareness, little can change for we are always chasing after the manifest problems in front of us and not the habits and forces that compel us. Upon reflection, they start to be revealed along with the genuine aspiration for what truly matters.”

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