Paradigm splits
The past few weeks have felt like there’s been a bug in the operational system of my work. Despite by best efforts, nothing seems to have been working or landing the way I had intended or anticipated. It felt as if “there’s a worm inside”, as we would say in my mother tongue. And I needed to find it.
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 something different.
This is a normal response, and one often one shaped by trauma. As Dr. Gabor Maté taught me, it’s much easier to internalise ‘failure’ than to locate the nebulous system of power that has shaped your experience. If you point the finger at yourself, at least you have found someone to blame.
Many of us learn to how internalise as children, either by our parents, caregivers, educators or wider society, particularly those in a marginalised identity (which is the majority of people).
So instead of being with the reality of plans gone astray, I depleted myself by trying to fix something that was never really broken. It was simply revealing itself more clearly and more forcefully than before.
The language of the ‘polycrisis’, ‘system collapse’ or ‘apocalypse’ has gained much visibility in recent years. It certainly feels resonant given the wars, genocides, climate disasters, political crimes and public scapegoating that have been dominating our news.
But these words don’t tell the full story. 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, which invites attempts to control or numb or find someone to blame. Which is exactly what I was doing, in my own small microcosm of existence. And it took me much longer than I thought, given the work I do around aligning values and behaviours, to spot the pattern.
But a recent publication by the Meta-Relationality Institue greatly helped me get there. 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 build on extraction, dispossession and control.
They explain this 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 such 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 seen as ‘natural’ but 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 dominating force of a whole system built around it starts to wobble, everything begins to shake.
The third story is about collective forgetting and structural erasure, which frames what is happening 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 or a temporary blip, but “a consequence of an imperial system reaching its limits”.
We 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. divide people and pit them against each other, thereby weakening their 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 blurred for a long time. (The Epstein files revealing the international crime syndicate using child abuse as currency is a good example of this).
The things we are now seeing aren’t new, but many of us may not have had to reckon with them before.
So then the question then becomes, how are we going to show up at the edge between a dying paradigm and on the cusp of a new one?
This is an incredibly difficult place to be in and one that 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 possible.
I’m seeing reactive responses to these conditions in myself and all around me. These are defensive responses, which reinforce rather than transform the current order, and include things like:
Looking for a fix through more data, better technology or some other optimisation
Turning to a powerful leader who promises solutions, relief or redemption
Tuning out, numbing out and shutting down
Turning on each other and trying to find the villains, the victims and the heroes in what is a complex web of systems in which we are all implicated
“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 the system in which I operate being deeply destabilised.
I had to remind myself that this is exactly the work I am here to do - to support people to tune in, connect with themselves and each other and build their capacity to act with more spaciousness and intention, even and especially under pressure.
Doing this kind of reflective work is not only about increase wellbeing, it’s to ensure we can actually build the world we long for from the debris of the one that is fragmenting.
For people whose bodies allow them to do the splits, it probably took quite a bit of practice to get there. It may have been painful or uncomfortable at first. 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 and intentional 100% of the time. We will go in cycles, take turns, move forwards and then backwards and then sideways sometimes.
But when I finally realised my own reactivity playing out, I took a break. I expanded my horizon, spent time with my nephews and tried to make sense of what’s going on in the world.
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”.