The Multipolar Trap

First Principles 2/3

We have to take concrete steps in our journey of making the planet a good place for everyone. But we cannot afford to waste time and energy on optimising towards some local maximum, simply because that will not be enough to get us where we need to be as humanity. To see the pattern of the wider landscape of the systems of systems we are embedded in, we must elevate ourselves beyond the systems - if only for a short moment - to make sense and understand the where, what, and how of the global maximum we want to achieve. In this sense, abstract is the new concrete.

This post will elevate our perspective beyond the current playing field and reveal some crucial patterns to the work we must do.

Our body uses chemical and electrical signals to coordinate the necessary functions to keep itself alive. Humanity primarily uses money and voting mechanisms as signalling functions to coordinate the necessary functions to keep itself alive. If we look at the nature of the predominant design patterns of these two signals, some interesting patterns start to emerge:

A FIAT currency backed by GDP (or similar measuring instruments) has two strong emergent forces. On the one hand, currency accumulates where it already is due to interest and rent. On the other, it forces economic actors to exploit the planet and the people to increase the profit required to keep the system alive. Both of these aspects dramatically distort the signalling potential of currency. A few (mostly) white (mostly) males hold the vast majority of the signalling power on the planet, while the humans in the consumer category are lured into buying stuff they neither need nor can afford.

Voting every couple of years for one option from a very limited set - as is the default in our current democracies - also has two major drawbacks. On the one hand, it traps the actors in a short-term marketing cycle that optimises and adversely selects truth and depth in the political discourse. On the other, a limited range of options is just that - limited. Pirate ships had a more democratic set up than most of our current democracies.

While neither of these two main elements of the multipolar trap we - as humanity - find ourselves in is news in 2021, we are still sorely lacking a set of solutions to allow humanity to open this trap and live a graceful life.

We believe that our approach and offer with MOTHERLAND can be one solution to this. In the coming posts, we will expand on how we expect this to happen. Stay tuned, foolish and healthy.

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Photo by Didier Chavier from Pexels