MettaModern Nations: A Pathway To Regenerative Politics

Explore proven pathway to a regenerative future for politics that can make our countries great in a different way, that fits the future and does not attempt to go back to a (mythic) past.

After The Dark, Light

After almost 30 years of deep study and the daily practice of transformation—from self to system—I have much hope.

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. Raymond Williams

Recent elections are a wake-up call to the woke and the educated, the jet-setters, digital nomads, and coastal elites that show just how many people are suffering—and how profoundly they are suffering—in Advanced Capitalism. The punishing cost of living. The inability to afford a home without working 10-hour days for 40 years (and even then, you won’t get a palace). The loss of hope for the comforts of the American/British/Italian/German (etc) Dream.

The reality is that for most people, household wealth has peaked, and most voters’ kids will be less well off than their parents for the first time in recorded history.

People are yearning, longing, and crying out for something more. Populists have really groked this fact.

Let’s heed the cry too.

Voters have never been swayed by ‘rational debate’. Only a genuine change in the way we do politics can prevent the march of the right… Only a far more decentralised, participatory democracy could resist the reversion to autocratic rule. George Monbiot

The Age Of Anxiety

It has long been clear, to me at least (brought up by Labour Party supporters in the UK with a Dad who was, for a time, a card-carrying member), that solutions from Left or Right that remain locked in the modern paradigm of disenchanted, rational liberal democracy will fail to solve the problems modernity has brought us.

We cannot solve problems from within the same consciousness that created them.

Progressives, the Democrat and Labour parties, must understand this fully if they are going to find their way back to power… and then actually solve the problems of modernity.

“A revealing chart that ran in The Financial Times showed that white progressives hold views far to the left of the minorities they champion.”

We live in an Age of Anxiety where techno-rational policies either haven't worked, don’t work, or people don’t feel they haven’t worked. Everything has been tried. People are still hurting. Even though the economy is doing well on paper, it feels like it sucks for most.

In California, a loaf of supremely average supermarket bread is $4. A carton of milk is the same. And that is in the low-cost supermarket chain!

Whether it is fears of being replaced or fears of climate breakdown, anxiety reigns supreme. Even if the data show employment is good and wages are rising, that inflation is heading down, and the stock market is booming, people don’t feel in their hearts, in their guts, that things are okay. This rising anxiety makes sense when we discover that 40% of Americans say they have skipped meals to cover their housing payments.

Most people intuit, even if they cannot express it intellectually, that there is something about Advanced Capitalism (some call it late-stage capitalism, clearly in hope) that does not work for most people.

Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions — the “establishment” — that most Americans distrust. As a party interested in competent technocracy, we lost touch with the anger people feel at government. As a party that prizes data, we seized on indicators of growth and job creation as proof that the economy was booming, even though people felt crushed by rising costs. Mark Peterson

Desperation For Different

From the New Deal to the Green Deal, modern rational politicians from all parties have tried time and time again to fix these issues, but people feel poorer than ever, more alienated, lonely, and without care. Institutions are crumbling. The social safety net is nearly non-existent.

Brown/blue/pink and even white-collar jobs are becoming less meaningful, less consistent, and feel less well-paid after years of inflation, shrinkflation, and price gouging.

Yet the stock market is on top of the world!

Healthcare in the US, which is the most expensive in the world, is failing. Education is expensive, and the financial ROI is unclear for many. The cost of living is exorbitant.

A majority of voters sense that yet more technocratic policies from within the system, designed by the experts and enacted by the fabled “Deep State,” are not going to cut it. They want different.

They want an American (or British) Dream that their parents or grandparents enjoyed, which now seems out of reach for almost everyone other than the coastal elites.

As Labour Party strategist Peter Hyman puts it: “To solve this? You need a disruptor. Someone who doesn’t go along with the stale, failed, norms of political discourse, someone from outside politics who can hack through the undergrowth even if in doing so he might offend.”

US citizens have voted for something different in the hope that it makes a difference to their everyday sense of struggle to stay afloat.

The way alternative movements are winning is not to speak policy wonk talk but instead speak to hearts that are hurting. They have found a way to make people feel great again. They have found a way to energize and animate way beyond their base… and to resonate with people's bodies as much as speak to their minds about policies.

“What we knew as true in politics, a lot of the normal rules we had, those are dead and gone. Now we have new rules, a new game to play.” Mike Noble, Independent Pollster in Nevada, Arizona and Utah

Before I explain more about what I mean and how it pertains to politics, I want to step back and explain the lenses and frames I am using to sense-make around this situation.

Birthing Bio-Transformation Theory

For twenty years, first alone and then together with my forever wife and business partner (and trauma-informed therapist and somatic healer/coach), I have been unfolding a theory for how transformation occurs in individuals, groups/organizations, and societies.

We called it Bio-Transformation, or Bio-T. It is deep, long, and broad, but we have simplified it into eight principles or lenses through which we can look at change, whether individual, organizational, or systemic. I am going to share some insights using a few of them. My books contain more breadth and depth, etc.

I’ve written many articles on how Bio-T can help us understand politics and political leadership. In this piece, I will return to one I wrote in 2016, as well as other articles I have written, such as this one for the RSA in 2017, that explores how we can move toward a alive and lively form of centrist politics that breaks from Clinton and Obama and Biden and Blair without losing the baby with the bathwater.

The modern experiment has served (most) of us for centuries, but it is failing and flailing. While the progressive elite is stuck trying to solve it with tools that created it — like carbon exchanges and regulation, AI, and automation — while enjoying upper-class lives in coastal idylls, alternative movements have sprouted up to help those feeling suppressed and oppressed.

Enter “The Transformation Curve”

When old and outdated systems start to become a mismatch to their reality—accelerated by the reality and our realization that there are limits to growth, externalities are not external, capitalism concentrates wealth in the hands of the rentier class—they start to fade and fail.

Collapse occurs. Right now, we are witnessing and experiencing the collapse of a stable climate (the Holocene), the promise of the American Dream, and even the suitability of a nation-state to govern land and people.

This doesn’t feel good. Chaos and crisis hurt the brain in the same places as physical pain. Research shows we prefer certain pain over uncertainty.

In these periods of breakdown, the conscious individual and the transformational leader must allow things to come apart without falling apart.

Even if they don’t know the answers yet, which they cannot do as if they do, they are just policies from the past, not innovations that unlock a better future; they have to hold themselves and their people in a safe space even as things crumble and collapse.

But most political leaders don't understand this. As I have written elsewhere, a Nike brand manager is likely to have had more personal development (coaching, meditation, yoga) and more professional development (leadership programs, executive coaching) than the ruling classes.

As crumbling, chaos, and collapse occur, unless people are led forward into an uncertain future with leaders who have embodied wisdom, the fear of uncertainty and loss (of status, respect, and meaning as well as income, wealth, and healthcare) will have many seek a way out of the transformation.

Anti-Transformation Tropes

I list a number of these “anti-transformation tropes” in my book Now Lead the Change: Repurpose Your Career, Future-Proof Your Organization, and Regenerate Our Crisis-Hit World by Mastering Transformational Leadership. A strongman (better certain loss of freedom than uncertainty). Make our country or company great again. An escape fantasy (to Ashville, to New Zealand, to Mars). Blame someone else.

Angry, anxious, and afraid—and without transformational leadership to guide them—citizens have made the choice to avoid the profound transformation that must come to modernity/capitalism and instead see if they can avoid the pain of change by voting in parties that promise a return to a simpler past and a way out of the deaths of despair, addiction, in-work poverty, and crime that are crippling so many communities.

Political parties across the world are offering to break the painful grip of Advanced Capitalism on people’s lives by returning to older forms of organization, governance, and power. They have promised to drain/destroy the “swamp” that people associate with their ills/

Citizens are hoping beyond hope that they can return to older forms of organization and use them to successfully navigate the complexities of a digital, globalized, and rhizomatic age rather than push forward, going “through, up, and out.” I think this is a mistake, but without understanding the logic of transformation, its hard for others to see this.

We need to adapt our political model, the Party model, and the democracy model to better fit the reality we are in now. For me, this means moving beyond the Operating Systems of Institutions/ Hierarchy and Markets/ Free Enterprise to embrace what comes next: collective intelligence, distributed power, mutual responsibility, and shared creativity/aliveness as we regenerate, collapsing cultural, social, and environmental systems.

This is a MettaModern society: based as much in community bonds, togetherness, and relational strength as it is the comforts and conveniences of capitalism.

The seismic, world-historical transformation is already occurring. This profound transformation, which will necessarily include the death/loss/release of many familiar aspects of modernity—cheap trinkets from China amongst them—could be made less brutal and accelerated by leaders who understand how to lead it.

Populism, or its like, will keep winning unless progressives work out how to safely and effectively take the nation on a journey of profound transformation—without arrogantly already knowing what the final solutions will be—and get people excited by the hopefulness of adaptation, innovation, and transformation.

Opening To Breakthrough

In terms of Bio-Transformation and The Transformational Curve, when an old system is breaking down (as all must eventually), and the signs are showing up as pain from mismatches, leaders must open to what is possible even if they don’t have the answer yet; which they won’t that's why its called innovation/ transformation.

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create. William Blake

It is this energy — variously called poiesis, imagination, creativity, ecstasy, a “subliminal uprush,” or (gaining popularity), Divine Eros—that is needed to go beyond the breakdown and have and hold onto a breakthrough. Another name for this energy in business and leadership is purpose. This is not a dry technocratic mission statement or policy platform but a live and deeply love-fuelled connection between our gifts and the pain of others.

The rub is that this means allowing what we could call “non-rational” forms of thinking, which most often feels like a different sense of energy in the body, that brings with it the insight, intuition, and imagination leaders need to bring the newness and novelty that the system needs to adapt, transform, and regenerate.

I detail how to go about doing this in my book Switch On: Unleash Your Creativity and Thrive with the New Science & Spirit of Breakthrough. In it, I share how many world-famous artists and thinkers—like Isabelle Allende and Claude Levi-Strauss—try to put into words the ineffable experience of having future-forging ideas be birthed through one without rational thought getting in the way (although craft and techniques born from disciplined study and practice is needed to embody it and embed it into the world.)

It is aliveness itself, bringing with it ideas somehow “from the future”—what physicist David Bohm called the Implicate Order—that can restore harmony at a higher state of complexity and allow for much-needed adaptation and, ultimately, regeneration in the Explicate Order (the concrete world we can measure).

It appears human beings are the only known organism, or algorithm, that can usher ideas from Possible to Actual Worlds by conscious choice. To do so, we must be ready to give up the comfortable notions, the noble lies of Plato, before we receive the bold ideas and innovations that fit and forge the future. We have to be able to break things without breaking people, trust, and tolerance—all of which is possible if we understand how to lead innovation and transformation.

Understanding this elemental insight into how disruptive/transformative change happens, transformational leaders can envision—increasingly by collective/decentralized processes rather than hierarchical/elitist genius—what Complexity Science calls “strange attractors.” These phenomena “pull” a system into a new, more integrated, and high-order state.

The leader, or more likely the leadership team, can then lead, as servants and stewards, their people toward this attractor, paying attention to their very real fears and experiences of loss as the old breaks down and the new breaks through. This is a politics of “embodied wisdom” and not Ivy League smarts, of insight-led innovation and not ideological purity, and of heartfelt care and not heart-enflaming culture wars.

Progressives, heirs to the rationality of the Enlightenment, struggle with all of this. I did, too, for years, as a skeptical Brit and Cambridge-educated scientist and philosopher of science.

That all changed after I a) designed and led hundreds of serious innovation projects and systemic change programs for major organizations and witnessed this “uprush” of more fitting novelty arise, time and time again, when we create the right conditions for it to emerge in a group, b) coached thousands of leaders to have breakthroughs and witnessed emergence happen time and time again, c) took the contemplative sciences and daily (spiritual) practice seriously and learned how to experience and guide cognitive and somatic awareness within myself and others; and d) deep-dived into the psychological/behavioral sciences, wisdom traditions, and complexity sciences—particularly as they pertain to creativity—to make sense of it all.

That’s how Bio-Transformation came about.

I wrote about this journey in Spiritual Atheist: A Quest To Unite Science And Wisdom Into A Radical New Life Philosophy to Thrive In The Digital Age.

Is There Progressive Eros?

We have always experienced the most scathing, sneering, and cynical reactions to our work leading significant innovation (for Fortune 100 companies) and transformation projects—inspired as much by intuition and imagination as data and analysis—from the wonks, journalists, and intellectuals of the Left. My contemporaries, of course. The believerss of the Right tend to be far more accepting, ironic as that may be.

This may be because so few do tangible, entrepreneurial innovation or engage in serious personal or systemic transformation. This is why smarts are necessary but not sufficient for breakthrough outcomes. Neurological research suggests control, prediction, and analysis biologically block the brain network we need to access to be imaginative, inspired, and innovative.

The closest the Left has got to tapping into animating forces that can compel hearts, inspire minds, and reorder worlds is 1) the heady brew of historical materialism—feel the Bern!—that tends to become static, statist, and Stalinistic in control; and 2) Wokeism, which has become a Kafka-esque parody of itself—hey, let’s defund the police even though crime is spiking—and has unleashed a reactionary backlash that has been leveraged for much gain.

Voters can always tell — and it really comes through in how politicians speak — what concerns are deep and driving for candidates. You can tell when Donald Trump talks about immigration he really cares. Like, he really cares about it.

Neither of these can cut it. Most people care far more about inflation than about identity. I wrote this piece about the clear and present dangers of identity politics on the Left. It sees it as a form of tokenism that has caught progressives eating themselves, arguing over who is more righteous. I say that as a fan of Foucault and a believer in everyone’s right to identify however they like.

Righteousness kills Eros!

[On the left, t]he result is an agenda often expressed with a judgmental arrogance, and based around behavioural codes – to do with microaggressions, or the correct use of pronouns – that are very hard for people outside highly educated circles to navigate.At the same time, our online discourse hardens good intentions into an all-or-nothing style of activism that will not tolerate nuance or compromise.

Progressives must find their way back to Eros as it arises today. The Left has run out of ideas for how to solve for modernity and how to move beyond Advanced Capitalism because they are stuck in the rational paradigm that created the problems and have lost access to the ecstatic, the embodied, and the poetic that causes breakthroughs to arise.

Progressives need to learn how to honor and use data, evidence, and science but without crushing, diminishing, or dismissing the fruits of intuition, insight, and imagination that come from turning inwards and entering the Transformation Curve.

Socialism in life demands a complete spiritual transformation in the masses . . . Social instincts in place of egotistical ones, mass initiative in place of inertia, idealism which conquers all suffering.” Rosa Luxemburg

The Left is stuck in technocratic disenchantment just as it needs more aliveness, somatic intelligence, and creative flow. Aliveness rarely lives in spreadsheets or sustainability strategies. It lives in daily practice, in dance, in love and love-making, and in reverence for nature and for all life.

Progressives must find their way back to the life force within and between us, what Spinoza called the Conatus. Eros, rooted in nature and embodied in wisdom, is the beacon that progressives need, especially the younger generations.

Going Back To The Future

The Left tried Eros in the 90s. It tried it in the 1960s. It was tried in Weimar and back in the time of the Romantics. But all these movements collapsed in on themselves when they allowed the sensual to corrupt being of service, their libido to undermine their leadership. Eros needs much discipline to wield as a steward of transformation.

More serious and successful integration of the sublime was made by John Ruskin in Unto This Last—which inspired the birth of the Labour Party in the UK and Gandhi’s work in India, and by Leo Tolstoy in The Kingdom of God is Within You. But these movements were crushed under the weight of (sometimes historical) materialist thinking and technocratic, evidence-based policies.

I also recently discovered this amazing speech from FDR in 1932, in which I interpret that he totally understood the need for Eros-driven innovation and experimentation at the societal level; the need to Rethink, Remake, and Regenerate America, not to Make It Great Again, and the requirements of a truly transformational leader to steward this process for the people:

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it:  If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.  But above all, try something.  The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.

We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely.  We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.  We need the courage of the young.  Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you.  May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in us to that remaking!

True Eros—brotherly love (and I mean love, not like or respect), an embodied sense of reverence for nature, communitas—is the only force other than Thanatos that can hold us together as a new order is birthed and an old order collapses. It is also the force that sparks the new ideas needed to regenerate any system.

Across many Indigenous traditions, this alive, dynamic, and reciprocal relationship with nature, the cosmos, and each other is what unleashes and unfolds the ideas we need to regenerate failed, failing, and fading ideologies and the systems that crystallize around them.

Unless progressives get and integrate the aliveness—whether we call it Eros or poesis—then such failures will keep on happening. Over and over again.

 The truth is the Democrats lost people – head and heart. They failed at being good technocrats (the head) with high inflation and open borders. And failed at telling a story in which struggling working families could feel seen and heard (the heart). Peter Hyman

But don’t worry. MettaModern politics does not mean we need New Age nonsense. There is no need to dress as a hippy, join a sex cult, take medicine plants, get all ‘conspiritual’, or lose our reason and discernment. We can keep all the gains of science and modernity as long as we don’t privilege scientific knowledge over Indigenous Knowledge and reason over non-rational ways of knowing and sensing the world.

The Invitation Into MettaModernity

I cannot tell you what lies at the end of the Transformation Curve that modernity is on. Nobody can. I can just teach folk to trust in the truth that a complex living system has the adaptive and regenerative capacity inherent in it to bring about its own unfolding into what comes next.

This is why I am full of hope today. I know that if we stay on the Transformation Curve and don’t try to escape its logic, the transformation will come. Just remember the Bio-T motto: before we rise to thrive, we must release into peace… grief, despair, pain, trauma, technocratic solutions, rational obsessions, and many of the comforts and conveniences of modernity.

Before we get the new, we must be courageous enough to relinquish the old, no matter how terrifying it feels… without running away from the edge of chaos, trying to escape from the frontlines of transformation, and stopping this most natural of processes.

Don’t shoot the messenger. I like my comforts and conveniences too.

One place I see Eros arising in progressive circles is in the regenerative movement: a loose affiliation of generally leftist people who have seen the light in nature, in indigenous wisdom and knowledge, and in daily spiritual practice without the trappings of New Age spiritual materialism and conspiracy theories.

Regenerativity sees the connection with nature, with life itself, as the central organizing principle for unfolding what comes next. It is concerned more with grassroots projects, regenerative agriculture, social enterprises, and proactive community groups at the hyper-local and bio-regional level than it is with grand politics in outmoded nation-states.

I have written a series of articles on some of my very emergent views on regenerative things if you want to go deep.

The reality is that no matter who won the election, neither side has the ideas, the spirit, or the leadership capacity to lead us through climate breakdown and economic collapse. Because of the historical construction and current incentives of two-party politics in the USA/UK, neither party is going to solve our very many and rather major problems, no matter who is in charge.

We have to build it and unfold it ourselves in our everyday (inner) work: how we show up as friends and neighbors, how we earn/spend, how we volunteer, how we parent. This means stepping up as local community leaders, impact entrepreneurs, and

We have to lean into and lead to what comes next ourselves, whether in Congress or in our community, whether as a founder or activist. We have to step up and lead ourselves towards a regenerative future through our communities, consumption, co-living, and what we choose to do with our careers.

This means acting in a “cosmolocal” way: focused on making concrete change happen locally, in the communities and places we exist in and rely on for life, without losing insights and imagination fed by global connectivity and systemic intelligence.

Wielded without grip, imagined without ideology, the Eros of connection — to nature, to our purpose, to communitas — will bring with it (her?) all the ideas we need to move beyond the trappings of modernity to embrace what I have dubbed the MettaModern.

Toward Irridescent Centrism

With the turn to the light (within), to life in and all around us, we can rise to thrive in complexity and chaos with what I have dubbed an Irridescent Centrism.

We bring together the seeming opposites of Left and Right not into a degenerative populism (of left or right), or lowest common denominator and beige Bidenism —which we have seen fails to cut it in those complex and crisis-filled times into a lively and alive blend of personal responsibility and mutual aid, entrepreneurial passion and collective stewardship, and technological innovation and nature-based thinking.

The only way forward is to open to the future, to open to aliveness, and to cultivate what comes next together. To achieve this, more progressives and more progressive politicians have to understand what transformation entails and then develop the capabilities of transformational leaders—including holding safe yet strong spaces as we together hospice modernity—or the body politic jerk back to make X great again through strongmen, fascism, and racism.

As you unfold as an artist, just keep on, quietly and earnestly, growing through all that happens to you. You cannot disrupt this process more violently than by looking outside yourself for answers that may only be found by attending to your innermost feelings. Rainer Maria Rilke

From the lens of Bio-Transformation, our current challenges are an invitation to initiate ourselves into the next stage of our own development and, if enough of us travel the path together, the next stage of development of human society.

Time For Initiation

Here is the blueprint of the initiation experience as I have witnessed and studied it:

We can, and we must, lead ourselves and others to go “through, up, and out.” It is the only way forward.

The center can hold, and we can hold it safely within our soma and between us in a reciprocal and interdependent relationship.

We can allow things to come apart and steward their reorganization into more adaptive, complex, fitting, and regenerative forms.