Beyond Modern Culture’s Paradigm of Collusion/Collision
While processing the experience of having lived 50 years in Modern Culture, I have discerned that successful Modern Culture game players play within a contextual spectrum of Collide or Collude.
At the high end of the Collision spectrum, literal battles are waged as people (including people acting as Nations and Corporations) run in to the opinions, territories, attitudes, beliefs and rules of others. Arguments and altercations lead to breakups of partnerships, projects, companies, families, tribes, religious groups, countries, united national ally groups and even fracture peace movements. Or they lead to Collusion.
On the Collusion spectrum, people — including people acting on behalf of others, such as parents, politicians, ambassadors, CEO’s and company managers — run around each others opinions, territories, attitudes, beliefs and rules.
Another way of describing this game is: War/Surrender.
I was lucky to have grown up on the outskirts of Modern Culture. My parents, born as white South Africans were already, by the time I was born, looking for other possibilities. The pain of owning that their privileged upbringings had cost countless black and coloured people great loss fuelled them.
In Canada, ironically, I grew up in privilege afforded by the losses of countless Natives.
Some wars are more subtle, woven as they are of collision and collusion.
My ability to discern the context of Modern Culture, after having been ‘educated’ into seeing it as all there is, came from moving onto the edge of it and looking back.
Where have I gone that isn’t Modern Culture?
Territories I visited over the years have included spiritual communities; I practiced Indigenous Traditional Spirituality, and was initiated into an ancient Yogic lineage. I studied and used Permaculture to create localized food gardens, experiment with creating closed systems, and rewired my brain to see ‘waste’ as ‘resource’.
I carried, birthed and raised four children at home, until their desire for children’s culture turned them toward school and I let go, though I continued to use unschooling practices.
I learned about and used natural medicines, experimented in Gift and Sacred Economics, ethical non-monogamy, and both centralized and de-centralized self-governed circles.
I developed my own maps, distinctions and processes as I experimented with emotional healing.
On these adventures I encountered many edge workers. I started to discern various ways a person could be plugged into Modern Culture, even those who appeared to have unplugged. I became a student of unplugging. I became more and more plugged in to Gaia, Mother Earth.
Still, the pain of running into and around the opinions, territories, attitudes, beliefs and rules of others, especially other edge workers, because of my expectations that I wouldn’t, fuelled me to reach further beyond the edges.
At last, after decades of seeking, I found a gameworld where people had long been daring to build a context radically different from the Collision/Collusion, War/Surrender context of Modern Culture.
The group I found is experimenting with commitment that is fuelled like none others I have encountered. We call ourselves Possibility Managers, among other things.
The gameworld of Possibility Management is contexted in Radical Responsibility. Colliding and Colluding still happen, but without the kinds of consequences that occur in Modern Culture.
For example in spaces of Radical Responsibility, colliding almost immediately leads to people asking for — and holding space for — Emotional Healing Processes, and to creating and doing new experiments designed to empower less collision.
When Colluding happens it occurs as collaborating, while each person is ever more centered in their own authority, and are on each other’s team about it. When collisions occur, more Emotional Healing Processes and experiment spaces are created.
I have become convinced, after about 3 years of studying and using the distinctions, tools, processes and thoughtmaps of Possibility Management, that the people and practices of this gameworld make possible a critical degree of unplugging from Modern Culture. They also empower the integral plugging-in to Gaia that makes Next Culture possible.
Next Culture is emerging where Possibility Managers are creating it.
Many Possibility Managers, including myself, have become keenly interested in finding other people and groups who have been at work on the edgy edges of Modern Culture. We want a directory to exist, and we want to expand collaboration to empower more unplugging from Modern Culture.
My commitment is fuelled in part by fear of the unknown and of not having more collaborators around in the part of the world where I like to live: western Canada.
I am also fuelled by the ecstasy of high level fun happening as I collaborate with other brilliant humans to learn to live without high tech, without being at war or adapting. Creating the consequences of less ecosystem collapse, less relational collapse generates intense joy. Enjoyment of life further expands when neither grief, rage, nor ecstasy need be held in. When they can be used for collaborative healing and creation.
I am fuelled by conscious rage about how it goes for mothers, children, men and other-than-humans in Modern Culture, while human ignorance and pretending run rampant. The bulk of humanity lives as if on a suicide mission, physically dismantling, rather than energetically plugging in to the human life support system that created us: Gaia.
My fear, used consciously, gives me possibilities about going ever further into the unknown, wide awake beyond the edge of the edge.
My sadness helps keep me fluid, grounded and connected with those with whom I experiment, and with Gaia.
I ask you: are you an edge worker?
If so, do you have collaborators who empower you to heal and experiment your way out of collision and collusion?
If so, I want to hear about you and your projects. Maybe you can become part of the directory-in-progress, it is called Experience Archiarchy.
In any case, may you, and your relational spaces be empowered to shift evermore from Collision/Collusion toward radically responsible creative collaboration.
Love, Nicole
