Read my site (& your world…) with some of these questions in mind
it could help

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People get into trouble with believing the stories we make up for ourselves.  It’s so easy because consciousness presents them to us as fact.   If we then get attached to our stories we find it hard to change them as new facts have to be added.

It may then be embarrassing, and need to be worked out with others who also agreed with them.

To change that we’d need to stop being embarrassed about asking the “dumb questions” about things left unexplained. That hesitancy to question “the story” seems to be what allows them to diverge ever further from the truth.

It seems to be why in a world of interesting and caring people, as individuals, we develop ideologies that so sharply conflict with each other and with the nature of the world we live in. It’s quite hard to get to the truth when people are embarrassed to mention it, and we become socially committed to lots of conflicting stories.

What let’s people ask obvious questions without embarrassment is mostly internal, but obviously made worse by social pressure or having simple questions avoided for embarrassment becoming increasingly embarrassing. What helps make sense of why important truths can be naturally embarrassing is realizing we have “two realities”, material and mental worlds that operate quite differently.

Our minds make up such attractive stories it effectively hides the depth of our ignorance about the complex natural world from us, though. That leaves us trying to explain nature as revolving around our minds, a constant source of real embarrassment, I think.

Our perceptions work by our thoughts and feelings, but nature works by continuities we mostly don’t see. They clearly work differently from how we think though, so both are quite real.

Healing that separation seems to begin with seeing it as an active learning process of rediscovering our “maps” for life as a way of keeping them true. Just as our social patterns are constantly changing, so are the material processes of nature. If we don’t notice the two are diverging further apart, then everything we think we know becomes only self-justifying, and so untrue.

So… A compact way to say what’s happening is that this split between our two realities has been growing ever wider, and now at the point of driving the world mad, as we all can see, for three fairly obvious reasons:

1. The world has changed so much with our increasing human presence, many of our old stories no longer make sense for how to live on earth.
2. All our financial, government and business institutions are designed around a story of everyone benefiting from endlessly faster expansion and change in how we use the earth, making problem #1 far worse.
3. Together #1 & #2 are causing a “multiplication of languages” for how the world does or should work, that conflict with each other and make coherently responding to change impossible.
4. So… though people generally find themselves and others, individually, to be never more congenial and caring, all over the world, we now find our group ideologies diverging to become great self-defeating conflicts over how to use the planet.

What I found is a new scientific method for closely watching what I don’t know about nature’s true stories, watching them change. It helps a learning process to see what you’re missing, but doesn’t do the cultural work of understanding what change in nature and ourselves should mean to us.

It only lets you see things happening that evidently are changing your world. If you’re not embarrassed by the natural world behaving differently from our explanations, seeing it raises good questions about what it might mean, so people’s new stories can better fit the changing reality of how to live on earth.

Two of the most widely believed principles of “how to get along” that once worked in the past but are now rapidly undoing our chances of survival as a complex society on a verdant earth are:

1. the idea of using investment to multiply investments. Investment is what continually remakes the shape of economies, but now investing in ever bigger and faster changes is directly creating “a train wreck” of conflicting and confused interests all over the world.
2. the idea that improving profits with efficiencies creates resources for the future. It actually creates *new access* to the resources of the present… not new resources. The actual effect is to accelerate #1, and so also the rate of resource depletion instead.

Where does that leave us? With questions that we shouldn’t be embarrassed to ask, like why don’t the main questions get asked? Where this challenge to us comes to an “end” is with a world culture that keeps creatively changing, if it survives. It might well not given the circumstance of extreme overshoot, and widespread avoidance of questions about our story and reality moving apart.

Survival would mean cultures and economies continuing to experiment with new ways to live and use the earth, …but in balance with our capabilities and nature’s. Otherwise, going ever further out of balance, human culture would unavoidably “lose it” both mentally and physically.

History seems to show that lots of other complex societies have fallen prey to this same trap and not survived.

– see also: What Wandering Minds Need to Know, read the Natural Economies posts here, or search my site for discussions, like on the part of this that Keynes noticed.
– original draft of this page NutShell1