In the midst of a macroshift.

“It’s clear that the financial system built on the mindset of the last few decades is unravelling.”

Quotes like these are increasingly common in the media. So what is the mindset we need to build the new system? In his prescient book Macroshift, Ervin Laszlo suggests what I think would be a good start.

From competition… to reconciliation and partnership

From greed and scarcity… to sufficiency and caring

From outer “authority”… to inner “knowing”

From separation… to wholeness

From mechanistic systems… to living systems

From organizational fragmentation… coherent integration

The book’s a fascinating read on the interplay of mindset and technology in the evolution of civilizations – which brings up another fascination of mine – the role of technology, social tech in particular, in shaping the new systems of our society. Watching the role of social media in the election campaigns, disaster response, and civic engagement has been fascinating and my explorations into ‘open’ point to this new mindset already at play.

Back to Laszlo, we are currently in what he described as the Critical (or “Chaos”) Phase.

Changed social and environmental relations put pressure on the established culture, placing into question time-honored values and worldviews and the ethics and ambitions associated with them. Society becomes chaotic in the chaos theory sense of the term. Society does not lack order but exhibits a subtle order that is extremely sensitive to fluctuations. The evolution of the dominant culture and consciousness – the way people’s values, views and ethics respond and change – determine the outcome of the system’s chaos leap (the way its developmental trajectory forks off).

This forking off is the daunting point in the history of civilizations. They either “Breakdown” or “Breakthrough”. With our civilization now on a global scale, we can’t afford to “Breakdown”. We’re in this thing full on now and these next months/year and are as Laszlo describes “critical”. What a time to be alive.