Creating Allies and Building WorldViews

So far we've discussed what it takes to put together management plans, but we haven't spoken much, if at all, about taking action to see those plans through. Obviously given the crisis we find ourselves in, effective action could easily be considered the most important part of this problem.

Recently (December 2021) I did a google search to find books on taking action and found lots of books speaking to the in-action that exists today around this crisis and plans to get around it. How to Save Our Plant, As the World Burns, and How to Avoid a Climate Disaster being just a few of the titles. Obviously then if you want to know what should be done it isn't my rambling thoughts you should be reading.

But, as I have a habit of doing, all of this reading got me thinking about underlying causes for the situation we find ourselves in and how we get ourselves out of a rather self destructive loop. Many of the books out there demanding climate action focus (rightfully so) on what needs to be done immediately to prevent us crossing a point of no return. But my question is - why are we here in the first place? And more importantly, what can we do to make sure we don't end up here again? Here, my mind quickly turned to evolution.

Cultural evolution that is. In my mind (and this is 100% an opinion) the state of our society at any point in time is the result of the cultural pressures that define the "survival of the fittest". In other words if you want to understand why a culture is the way it is - i.e. what kinds of values, organizations, infrastructure, etc. it has - you have to look to what causes one thing to be able to outcompete another. Competition is at the root of everything, whether we notice it or not. Just the fact that two kinds of organization or idea exist in the same niche means that there are backers for each that are effectively competing for their space to exist. What ends up winning is determined by the nature of the forces of competition.

So what drives this competition? Where is the source of its energy? Well for culture it comes back to people. For us in a capitalist republic the people of import are the ones who vote with either the dollar or the ballot. They are the ones who power the ultimate fate of corporations, governments, and values. If people stop paying for the goods or services rendered by a corporation, that corporation will cease to exist. If voters choose to not re-elect an official, that official loses their seat. To be clear, this is not to say each individual has the same power as the next, votes mean different things depending on where you live and who you are, and money is obviously very far from evenly distributed, but the principle still stands - the voter, by dollar or by ballot, underpins the forces of competition and therefore the direction of culture.

Yet having the power is not the same thing as wielding it. People buy things and vote on the basis of their worldview (values and sense of how the world works). Yet that worldview is constantly changing as people have new experiences, absorb new information, and just generally keep on living. And given that a single dollar or ballot isn't going to change anything on its own, it is the trends in world views (cast into the unbiased distribution of voting power) that really defines the competitive forces in our culture. In other words, it is those who influence and build world views that are actually wielding the forces that shape cultural evolution.

Given this admittedly very philosophical calculus we arrive at the following conclusion. The reason our society exists at it does today, the reason we are in this self destructive loop, is because the entities winning at building world views that turn into voting action (with dollar and with ballot) are not ones with long term interest in the health of our society. If we want action to be taken effectively we need to be winning at building world views within our cultures.

So how to do this? Well I once read a very interesting book on the lifecycles of trends (the name of which I'm unfortunately forgetting now, but if I ever remember it I'll be sure to come back and cite it here). One of the major lessons I took away from it is that the majority of people don't take on views or behaviors that are viewed as new or strange - instead they need to see others taking those same things on successfully first. In other words action happens along a gradient - you start with people who are predisposed to toward that action and then work your way along the gradient until you eventually get to the intractable. Framed like this taking effective action is therefore about finding allies at your particular point in the gradient and then facilitating them in moving everything along to the next step in the gradient.

So imagine this. Imagine a platform where stewards with new management plans, and therefore some new worldview to build, start by going and getting matched with people who are predisposed to take that kind of action. In other words, they're able to easily find their trendsetters. Then imagine that that same platform facilitates a kind of teacher - apprentice relationship where these new allies are trained up and facilitated by the stewards to become mentors and activists themselves. Then once the first group of people are trained up, they can get matched to people relevant to them, one step up the gradient, who they can now mentor. Rinse, wash, and repeat. In this manner we'd be able to facilitate the creation of new components in the cultural worldview while also avoiding the problem of overwhelming our activists because the matching could be specific enough to target the kinds of problems our allies would really enjoy and be effective at rather than throwing every problem out there at them. And as a plus this platform wouldn't need to be biased toward a particular point of view. Instead it could just be a means for training up well educated, well supported advocates of various ideas which could then compete more equitably. Or at least that's the thought.

Well it turns out I already had this idea and so, for a more in depth notion of what this would like, in one particular case, turn here: https://www.thetide.online/post/scaling-green-turtle-conservation-through-a-professional-network But, to summarize:

1. The nature of world is defined by the forces of cultural evolution

2. And in a capitalist republic those forces come in the form of votes - by dollar or by ballot

3. Those votes are wielded according to the worldview of the voter, which means that the worldview builders are the ones wielding the forces of cultural change

4. We're in the state we're in because those who care about our long term future are not the current winners of worldview building

5. But changing worldviews is all about finding allies in the gradient from accepting to intractable, and then facilitating those allies in moving the ideas and actions along the gradient

6. So what if we made a matching/facilitation platform that could match mentors to mentees, facilitate their development, turn prior mentees into new mentors, and then allow for a snowball effect?

This is project Mycelium.