On Cultural Symbiogenesis
From Single Silos to a Multi-Siloed Network-Centric Civilization
(NOTE: This is a deeper update — originally published on November 7th, 2023)
CULTURAL SYMBIOGENESIS — it’s a mouthful, but it may offer humanity a way through our current spiritual AND evolutionary crisis.
It’s based on a 3.5-billion-year-old story of how separate species of single-celled life came together in a challenging climate and, through time, emerged as multi-cellular life -- including us. That’s single-cell to multi-cellular life in symbiosis.
Okay, that was quite a buildup. I will return to this a little later, but first, I want to return to my more recent twenty-year-old history!
FROM ANTI-WAR to PRO-LOCAL
I remember organizing a Local Living Economy Network in Northern Nevada twenty years ago in a polarized environment of seemingly endless wars. Back then, it was the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Instead of being anti-war or pro-war, we chose a radically different reaction, breaking out of the culture wars of the time – we championed
Pro-Local!
We left the battlefield of what I call the Culture of Separation and built a whole new community playing field ---- a Culture of Connection where it was irrelevant whether someone shared your politics or religion.
What WAS important was that we shared a Higher common purpose beyond our divisions while creating a new FUNCTIONAL CONTEXT -- a community-based local economy to uplift everyone.
That’s really what my book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation (the first two sections are Free on Substack), is all about — showing you how to bring this reality to your life, your organization, your networks, and your community.
Our first meeting was at a large fellowship hall of the First United Methodist Church in downtown Reno. For some, it was the first time they stepped into a church. The pastor at that church once publicly commented about me, saying, “Richard, you have built more bridges than there are in the Netherlands!”
It was a funny comment and a serious insight. He was referring to how I was building bridges amongst people, their organizations, and their existing networks -- radically connecting across the silos that characterize our culture. At the time, I wasn’t fully able to articulate how tribes and silos are a feature and not a bug in the Culture of Separation.
FROM DISCONNECTED SILOS to CONNECTING the GOOD
RADICAL CLAIM: Unless we solve the intrinsic “silo problem,” where we do our good work in isolation, we won’t be able to address any of the problems and issues we care about.
Unless we learn to connect across silos in new networked CONTEXTS, we won’t be able to solve any of our big problems because, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, society’s most vexing problems are complex – interconnected and entangled at every scale.
The Culture of Separation is incapable of solving these “wicked” problems—many of them existential planetary ones—because separation itself IS the fundamental problem.
And this ongoing division, the continual formation of what I call “tribalized silos” --- globally, all the way down to the grassroots -- is used against us by the prevailing system to keep us divided into warring camps. It’s a well-established reality of separation, power, and dominance -- Divide and Rule – popularized by Julius Caesar 2,000 years ago!
It reminds me of the question Mahatma Gandhi asked upon returning to India from South Africa in 1915: How could the British Empire, with only 50,000 people in India at that time, rule 300,000,000 million Indians without their cooperation?
Today, we are facing an even more entrenched situation, with a “global empire” dominated by multipolar national political factions, each vying for dominance at the expense of the planet and all its inhabitants. And even though humanity may largely agree about the world we want for ourselves and our children, until now we have been thwarted – paralyzed even – by the Culture of Separation.
We have been separated into our enclaves based on politics, religion, worldview, and other identities such as race, sexual orientation, and gender when the real challenge is the powerlessness and disconnection at the grassroots and accelerating economic inequality.
We have, until now, allowed ourselves to be divided and distracted by intentionally polarizing narratives and weaponized social media that evoke fear, anger, and anxiety. While we are offered a dizzying plethora of consumer choices, actually considering and adopting a new way of being is dismissed as outside the Overton window of so-called acceptable thought.
Many of us may rationalize that tribes and silos are so endemic to the human condition that there is no other way than to accept them. So we resign ourselves to the belief that separate silos are the only way we can operate.
Others try to work their way around it by building wonderful networks without realizing that they have built networked silos of only people who think the way they do – and as I’ve discovered in my work, this won’t transform the mainstream.
A networked silo, while a step in the right direction, is really just one more beautiful “silo of siloes” in competition with other networked silos within the Culture of Separation.
Having spoken with hundreds of leaders over the past two years, I can point to more than ten global networks that believe they are building THE global network to bring other networks together. Whether they recognize it or not, they’re all in competition. This is totally understandable in a Culture of Separation.
Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not asking anyone to stop doing their good works inside of silos or bringing together like-minded silos into cooperative networks. The impulse to bring the threads of awakening and functionality together into whole cloth is a necessary step in what’s emerging.
However, the work of weaving and amplifying good works needs to take one more step and become “radically inclusive” so we can face our challenges using ALL our resources.
This understanding may be exceedingly difficult to accept, given how we are constantly bombarded with the idea that people we disagree with are our enemies.
That’s why the Ancient Blueprint I’ve been writing about is a unifying power that can unite us above and beyond our tribal differences and bring about humanity's heartfelt desire for a beloved community.
This largely “invisible” resource is the secret sauce in building an authentically inclusive Symbiotic Community.
The formative spiritual awakening I had at the age of 12, an authentic experience of being connected to a Transcendent reality where everything is connected to everything else, has given me the eyes and heart to see that this Culture of Connection is not only possible but also necessary.
No longer willing to accept that Separation was the ONLY REALITY, I have been on a fifty-year journey to “solve” the silo problem and share what I have learned — with you and your networks.
Here is the question that has been on my mind and in my heart for decades:
Is there a way to evolve beyond the siloed mentality and formal organizational structures and build new community networks that don’t follow the same pattern
and themselves become silos?
The answer is YES, and what has been largely missing in the general discourse about societal change is the “interior” element, the domain of religion and spirituality, which is often factored out as a “private matter.” While many social critics lament that our society has become more self-centered and materialistic, this discounts our universal human desire to serve something larger than ourselves.
Paradoxically, I’ve come to realize that this impulse is more significant and compelling than the desire to consume more and “die with the most toys.”
Now you may be thinking – something invisible and yet powerful enough to move structural mountains … I just can’t “see” it.
I can assure you that the proven power of the Transcendent in action is the essential ingredient and organizing principle for making real structural change in how we organize society. This book will show you how we can achieve this, connecting the inner and outer people and the communities they live in in a seamless, holistic manner.
In addition to sharing what I call an Ancient Blueprint to connect across silos so that we “Connect the Good” already happening in a local community, I will share something infinitely more precious and necessary for our next stage of societal organization – how to align the “interior” psychological and spiritual aspects of our nature that will help us become UNITERS, capable of holding space for a new “exterior” community to be born.
THE STORY of the PASTOR and the PAGAN
Here is a story that I hope might illustrate how to transcend tribal kinship to experience Universal Kinship, what I call Symbiotic Kinship – consciously going beyond our likes and dislikes, inviting “all the Tribes” to work together to create a more beautiful world.
I began building a Local Food System Network in 2005. Some folks thought we should only include agricultural producers (farmers, ranchers, etc.) and consumers (grocers, restaurants, food cooperatives, food banks, etc.) that were into organic – what today we might call permaculture and regenerative agriculture.
My experience showed me that we needed additional, expanded network-centric CONTEXTS that reflect the “spiritual regeneration” of both mindsets and “heart-sets.”
Think of it as the community emergence of a new networked “Superhighway,” really a new voluntary planetary superorganism that accelerates connecting the Goodness and Good Works already happening at every scale – starting with every person, street, neighborhood, and local organization and spreading to every enterprise, community, corporation,
nation on the planet.
This is a self-organizing emergent network, not run or controlled by any individual or separate organization!
Our Local Food System Network was able to hold space for Symbiotic Kinship because it was “radically inclusive,” bringing together ALL producers and consumers, both conventional and regenerative. The results speak for themselves. In one case, a conventional farmer who only grew one crop and sold it outside the area became the top organic producer selling directly into the urban areas.
This happened because we chose to include the entire real-world community. After all, the “real world” is where things ultimately must change. Our story – which you will read about in the book – offers practical proof of how a local people’s marketplace, embodying intentional mutual benefit, shared virtues, and vision in a field of Cosmic Love, creates this magic.
In this openness, engaging, and convening beyond silos, we facilitated what may seem like surprising connections. I got to know an evangelical Christian pastor, who happened to be an elder organic farmer with a fantastic permaculture farm behind his church. Another friend was a self-proclaimed neo-pagan who ran a school for regenerative agriculture.
These two would never have met in a million years because they traveled in different circles and inhabited seemingly opposing silos. Under “normal” circumstances, they probably would have mistrusted, maybe even disliked, one another because of ingrained prejudices.
My role (and yours if you accept it) was to bring them together in a new CONTEXT, a new overriding shared Higher purpose AND growing and consuming more local food.
This singular focus on intentional mutual benefit within the community allowed them to put their differences in the background. They sat next to each other at our public Local Food System Network launch at a local restaurant, and despite religious differences and values, they became colleagues and friends.
Societal polarization can be transformed in this straightforward manner — it's not about having a dialogue or conversation about differences but instead a proactive community-building effort around what we have in common that makes the difference.
CULTURAL SYMBIOGENESIS
My question for those of us—people, organizations, and networks—working for change and a better world is:
Are we acting within an old cultural matrix of separation? Are we putting our New Wine into Old Skins (old and obsolete frameworks)?
Truthfully, communicating about Symbiotic Culture is very challenging because, at first glance, it appears to be like any other project or idea competing with other worthy ideas.
That’s why I have spent the last three years writing my book, which I hope will take you and your network on a journey of awakening beyond the Culture of Separation. It offers what I call an Ancient Blueprint, an underlying pattern we can use to create a new world, starting in each community.
To that end, I will teach you how to convene and facilitate regional Symbiotic Societies, which are really “Cultural Recovery” groups — whose purpose is to bring the Spirit of intentional mutual benefit to an entire region.
This is made real by weaving the threads of Goodness and Good Works already happening in communities, nonprofits, churches, businesses, and local government into a new “whole cloth” power for social transformation – a parallel cultural change movement.
This can be done without having to build a traditional formal organization that would take a lot more time, money, and human resources -- or be seen as a separate silo in competition with other silos.
Instead, I will help you create a new category of network “organism” that self-organizes seamlessly into a series of powerful multi-hub distributed networks of people and organizations. It is a new way of life that is self-giving rather than self-serving and doesn’t require a huge time commitment on the part of anyone.
In my personal experience and that of the sixty-five-year-old Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka, what makes these networks successful is that they create a way of life that works better than the old competitive pattern.
This sentiment was captured by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman in their groundbreaking book, “Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future,”(2009) when describing our Conscious Community Network —
“Richard Flyer’s” communal matrix offers a largely invisible infrastructure of relationships that support individual, community, and planetary health. Flyer suggested, ‘By connecting the dots between like-hearted people who want to uplift themselves and humanity – people found within every local community and in all social groupings – we release the creative intelligence to grow a new society from within the old.”
As with the biological Symbiogenesis of 3.5 billion years ago, when multi-cellular life emerged from single-cell life, human culture today is evolving from single-silo into multi-siloed community network-centric structures—from a battlefield of winners and losers to a playing field where we all can win.
Just as many organisms in nature develop mutually beneficial partnerships (symbiosis) in times of challenge when their survival is threatened, I believe human society will come together to deal with the great perils we face — by working together and sharing resources, knowledge, and skills for mutual benefit.
It may be hard to see now, given all the suffering within and around us, but this Culture of Connection is our future if we are to have one. It’s a society where mutually beneficial relationships and collaborations amongst diverse groups of people, from family to neighborhood to community, nation, and planet, will become the norm.
This could happen more quickly than we may think, as these new network-centric organizational forms are based on an underlying universal pattern that can be reproduced anywhere and everywhere.
Because of that, they can emerge in thousands of communities at the same time, which is what I call Fractal Community Empowerment.
Essentially, humanity is moving into a new Symbiotic Age, and I am inviting you on this journey to accelerate the impact you’re already making in the world.
It’s about the practical application of authentic Spiritual Power in real life —
bringing Heaven to Earth.
It is deeply rooted in our individual and communal spiritual life and power, dedicated to mutual benefit and connecting the good, and uses network nodes of intersection to facilitate and accelerate connections while spreading goodwill throughout the system.
I am heartened to know that this approach has worked in the past, is working now, and can work in the future. We can point to our success in Reno and the ongoing success of Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka. I am convinced that the seeds of this counterculture are already sprouting in 50,000 villages, towns, and cities around the world.
It doesn’t require creating a new project, a separate silo in competition with other beautiful siloes. It's about becoming a space holder for all of these threads of community and weaving a whole cloth movement.
It does require a new type of consciousness – New Wine – and a network-centric organism to connect the dots and connect the good in any given community as the “New Skins,” the context, and the container.
It requires recognizing the reality of that largely invisible power, Love, which is not just a metaphor or nice sentiment. It is a tangible power we can share, that multiplies like loaves and fishes, that begins with one person – as it did with me in Reno – and spreads virally through new nodes of intersection.
I remember a community member coming up to me and saying, “Wow – this Local Food Network spread so rapidly. How did you do it?”
“I didn’t do it,” I said. “WE did it. I held the space for it to happen, and the entire community occupied that space.”
It starts small and gains momentum as it is adopted in a community – because not only do these networks provide material benefit, but they also speak to a largely unaddressed spiritual need to reconnect -- with the Transcendent, with each other, with the web of life, and to our authentic selves.
I invite you to participate in a lived experience that will help you achieve the breakthrough we all hope to see in the world.
It starts with you, here and now, right where you are.
Here are some chapters from my book covering some of the stories and concepts shared in this post.
Chapter 6, Part 1 – Start of Building a Virtuous Economy Story (Local Living Economy)
https://richardflyer.substack.com/p/building-a-virtuous-economy-a-local
Chapter 7, Part 1 – Start of Conscious Community and Local Food System Networks
https://richardflyer.substack.com/p/the-conscious-community-network-and
Chapter 10, Part 1 and 2: -- Seeking the “Holy Grail” - of Community Building
https://richardflyer.substack.com/p/seeking-the-holy-grail-of-community
Introduction and Recovering Our Connection to the Transcendent
https://richardflyer.substack.com/p/seeking-the-holy-grail-of-community-e48
Bringing Head, Heart, and Hands – through Connections Gatherings and Self-Awareness Begins at Home
Birthing the Symbiotic Age: an Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation
Book TABLE OF CONTENTS
https://richardflyer.substack.com/p/birthing-the-symbiotic-age-table
Is it time to build a parallel society? The story of Sarvodaya Shramadana
https://richardflyer.substack.com/p/isnt-it-time-we-build-a-parallel
That all sounds great Richard. There seem to be more and more similar visions coming up all the time. I've been on the Board of the Transition Network, , was a founder member of the Open Coop, and like organisations like the Collaborative Technology Alliance, the Post Carbon Institute the Pachamama Alliance, the Collective Impact Forum, and I get invitations to online and physical events all the time promoting and training people for this. vision Yes, the key is people actively working together for people and planet, in an organised way. I like Stafford Beer's Viable Systems Model for the structure of a bottom-up culture, and also Elinor Ostrom's work on traditional commons and how they work. See also my website, https://earthconnected.net/ and my book, eGaia, Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through communications (free eBook version on my website), which I'm sure overlaps massively with your vision. There is a section in it "The Five Billion Year Story", that traces the evolution of life with symbiosis as a primary mechanism and has a chapter on "The Cooperative Ape: the early human story".
What projects and organisations do you see that give you the most hope, that are most aligned to your thinking? If this message resonates with you, perhaps we can have a video chat to meet and share ideas and plans.
Yours in hope, Gary Alexander (garyalexand@gmail.com)
There are a number of movements around the Nation and the World recognizing and trying to promote these idea, particularly as it seems like a spectrum of challenges and conflicts ascendant in the greater world of late - all of which will require radical cooperation, not extreme competition to overcome.