Paradigm splits
The past few weeks have felt like there was a bug in the operational system of my work. Despite by best efforts, nothing seems to be working or landing the way I had intended or anticipated. “There’s a worm inside”, we would say in my mother tongue.
And I kept thinking, ‘if I can just find the worm and pull it out, it’ll all be fine’. So I tried harder. I looked for the faults inside myself, went over every hiccup, wondered what I had missed or dropped or miscalculated and what might have been if I had said or done some other thing.
This is a normal response, often shaped by trauma. As Dr. Gabor Maté taught me, it’s much easier to internalise ‘failure’ than to locate the nebulous systems of power that created the brutal conditions of modern existence. If you point the finger at yourself, at least you have found someone concrete to blame.
Many of us learn how to internalise adverse experiences as children, particularly those in marginalised identities (which is the majority of people). This is because self-blame protects the power imbalances of the system as they are. We become complicit rather than rebellious.
So, I too depleted myself by trying to fix something that was never really broken. The conditions I’m working within (trying to do heart-centred consulting in the non-profit industrial complex) were simply revealing themselves more clearly and forcefully than before. Except it took me a long time to realise that.
Underneath all the efforting I was doing, the questions came tumbling down.
If this the systems around us are this resistant to change, have I been deluding myself by believing I could shift something meaningful from within?
What time is it in our collective process of change? How near to the precipice are we?
How do we prepare for what lies on the other side of this compression and stuckness we seem to be in?
The language of ‘polycrisis’, ‘system collapse’ and ‘apocalypse’ has gained much visibility in recent years. It feels resonant given the wars, genocides, climate disasters, political crimes and public scapegoating that have been dominating our news.
But these words can be misleading. We might be at the end of a cycle, but that doesn’t mean we’re at the end of the world. Similar things have, indeed, happened before.
Photo of thick black clouds with some pink sunlight reflected on some of them and a strip of light yellow sky visible underneath
Stories of collapse can invite fear. And fear invites attempts to control, numb or find someone to blame - which is exactly what I was doing, in my own small microcosm of existence.
A recent publication by the Meta-Relationality Institue greatly helped me understand this pattern in a deeper way.
In Clearing the Field: A relational protocol for navigating systemic unravelling together the authors frame this moment not as a crisis but as a culmination or a consequence of a system built on extraction, dispossession and control having run its course.
They explain this time through three interconnected stories:
The first story is about an imperial systems trying to maintain itself through increasingly coercive means such as territorial expansion, military occupation, AI surveillance and population control. “When legitimacy weakens and consent can no longer be reliably maintained”, the authors write, the forces of empire resort to coercive strategies in order to “prioritise continuity of dominance over collective wellbeing”. I think about this as the desperate last-ditch survival attempt of a dying system that, in doing so, reveals itself for what it really is and always has been.
The second story is about the instability of an international order that is seen as ‘natural’ but has in fact been largely constructed and maintained by the US through force, extraction, normalisation and the promise of eventual inclusion. “Development for some was made possible by dispossession, indebtedness, and instability for others.” When the central force of a whole system built around it starts to wobble, everything around it begins to shake.
The third story is about collective forgetting and structural erasure, which frames what is happening now as an anomaly rather than a turning point. Dominant narratives present our current world order as the final destination, the ‘end of history’ even, instead of seeing what we are living in as the continuation of “large-scale imperial formations” that have existed for hundreds of years. This makes this moment not a crisis, a bug in the system nor a temporary blip, but “a consequence of an imperial system reaching its limits”.
You could add more stories to this, such as the profit-making forces that have had many of us become convinced (against scientific evidence) that ‘human nature’ is to be selfish, greedy and uncooperative. Or the way in which social systems of domination such as racism, sexism, ableism etc. have successfully divided people and pitted them against each other, thereby weakening our collective capacity to care for each other and build alternatives.
Put together, these stories make clear that we are at a threshold from which things are coming into view that have been deliberately hidden, obfuscated or ignored for a long time. (The Epstein files revealing the international crime syndicate, which runs our world and uses child abuse as currency to gain and maintain power, is a good example of this).
The things we are seeing aren’t new, but many of us have not had access or may not have had to reckon with them before because of the protections afforded to us.
If we truly are at the edge between a dying paradigm and on the cusp of a new one, the question then becomes: how are we going to show up ?
This edge - any edge - is an incredibly difficult place to be in. It requires tremendous capacity, grace and compassion - both towards ourselves and each other.
It’s like performing some kind of splits across a terrain of deep complexity and uncertainty - two of the conditions humans are wired to wrestle themselves away from as quickly as we can.
Which makes sense, because complexity and uncertainty make us more vulnerable. That doesn’t mean it’s ‘wrong’ or that we can simplify or gamify our way out of it.
I’m seeing reactive responses to this in myself and around me all the time. These are defensive responses, which reinforce rather than transform the current order. They include things like:
Looking for a fix through more data, better technology or some other form of optimisation
Turning to a powerful leader who promises solutions, relief or redemption
Tuning out, numbing out and shutting down
Turning on each other and our against ourselves
Trying to find the villains, the victims and the heroes in what is a complex web of systems in which we are all implicated in one way or another
“As systems fracture”, the authors write, “lateral violence increases”. Think of the attacks on migrants, people of colour, women, trans people, disabled people and anti-genocide activists in recent years as reactions to this fracture, and a bigger pattern reveals itself.
All of this happens inside of our own bodies, too. In my case, I turned on myself and tried to find a ‘solution’ to a dynamic that is much less to do with my specific actions than with the system in which I operate being deeply destabilised and thus defensive and risk-averse.
“What quietly stops being true as conditions shift?”, the authors ask. Believing that I’m in control, even if it’s through self-blame, is certainly one of those things.
I had to remind myself that this is exactly the work that is needed right now - tuning in, connecting with ourselves and each other and building our capacity to act with more spaciousness and intention, even - and especially - under pressure.
Doing this kind of reflective work is not just about increasing connection and wellbeing, it’s to ensure we can actually build the world we long for from the debris of the one that is fragmenting.
I know it’s hard. Responsibility, restraint, commitment and patience aren’t popular qualities right now. But they are among the qualities we need to navigate this terrain.
For people whose bodies allow them to do the actual splits, it likely took a good deal of practice to get there. It may have been painful or uncomfortable at first.
Being split across two paradigms, one that requires hospicing and one that needs nurturing, the temptation to pull one leg back and stay firmly on the side of the edge that we know is understandably great.
But here’s why the ability to recognise our own patterns and how they mirror the systems we live within is so important:
“When people are unprepared for systemic unravelling, they are more easily manipulated, abandoned, or sacrificed.”
The goal isn’t to be tuned in 100% of the time. We will go in cycles, take turns, move forwards and then backwards and then sideways sometimes.
The point is to keep paying attention.
When I finally realised my own reactivity playing out, I took a break. I looked up, spent time with my nephews and listened to other people’s read on what’s going on in the world to widen my horizon.
The Clearing the field protocol reminded me that this kind of pause and reflection is “not to delay action, but to prevent actions that compound harm or offload risk onto those with the least protection”.
Tuning in is what allows us “to move together without reproducing the very patterns that are unravelling”.
So the work continues.