Cultural Symbiogenesis – it’s a mouthful, but it may offer humanity a way through our current 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 get back to this a little later, but first, I want to return to my minuscule 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 war in 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 common purpose and created a community-based local economy to uplift everyone.
That’s really what my book is about: showing you how to make this happen in your life and right in 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 and their organizations, really connecting across the silos that characterize our culture. At the time, I may not have been able to articulate how tribes and silos are a feature and not a bug in the Culture of Separation.
FROM SILOS to CONNECTING the GOOD
A radical claim: unless we solve the “silo problem,” we won’t be able to solve 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 problem because, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, society’s most vexing problems are interconnected at every scale.
They're interrelated and intrinsic to how the culture of separation operates.
And this 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’s rulers to keep us divided into warring camps. It’s a time-honored reality of separation, power, and dominance -- Divide and Rule.
It reminds me of the question Mahatma Gandhi asked upon returning to India from South Africa in 1915: How could the British, with only 50,000 people in India at that time, rule 300,000,000 million Indians without their cooperation?
We are facing an even more entrenched situation today, with a global empire with multi-polar national political factions, each vying for dominance – at the expense of the planet and all its inhabitants.
We have been separated into our enclaves based on politics, religion, worldview, and race – and kept in this matrix through endless consumer choices and distractions.
Many of us may rationalize that tribes and silos are so endemic to the human condition that there is no way other than to accept it – basically, separate silos are good for us.
Others try to work their way around it by building their networks to change the world without realizing that they have built their networked silos of people who think alike – and as I’ve discovered in my work, this won’t transform the mainstream.
Once I had my formative spiritual awakening (that I will get into in the book) and had an authentic experience of being connected to everything and seeing how everything was connected to everything else, there was no going back to the old consciousness.
I could no longer accept that Separation was the ONLY REALITY – so I have been on a fifty-year journey to solve the silo problem and share what I have learned with you and your networks.
It's been a question on my heart for decades: is there a way to evolve beyond the siloed mentality and structures and build new community networks that don’t follow the same pattern and themselves become silos?
The answer is YES, which I will share with you.
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 – how to align with psychological and spiritual aspects of our nature that will make us capable of being a UNITER, capable of holding space for a new community to be born.
THE STORY of the PASTOR and the PAGAN
Here is a story that I hope might illustrate how to go beyond tribal kinship to experience Universal Kinship, what I call Symbiotic Kinship – consciously going beyond our likes and dislikes 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, etc.) that were only into organic – what today we may call permaculture and regenerative agriculture.
Many of you reading this who are into regenerative projects may naturally only want to work with those who think like you. Still, as a long-term strategy, in my direct experience, it will only create another siloed echo chamber.
In our network, we ended up being radically inclusive, with producers and consumers, both conventional and regenerative, and 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, that’s 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, based on shared virtues and vision, can create this magic.
In this openness and engagement beyond silos, we created what may seem like surprising connections. I got to know an evangelical 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 on 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.
My role (and yours if you accept it) was to bring them together in a new CONTEXT, a new overriding common purpose -- growing and consuming more local food.
This singular focus on intentional mutual benefit to the community allowed them to put their differences in the background. They sat next to each other at our public network launch, and despite religious differences and values, they became colleagues and friends.
CULTURAL SYMBIOGENESIS
My question for those of us -- people, organizations, and networks – working for change is, are we doing it within an old cultural matrix of separation? Are we putting our new wine into old skins?
Truthfully, communicating about Symbiotic Culture is very challenging because it appears to be like any other project or idea in competition with other worthy ideas. That’s why I have spent the last two years writing my book to take you through a journey of awakening beyond the Culture of Separation, offering an ancient blueprint for creating a new world.
As with the Symbiogenesis of 3.5 billion years ago, where multi-cellular life emerged from single-cell life, today, human culture is evolving from single-silo into multi-siloed community networks – from a battlefield of winners and losers to a playing field where we all can win.
Just as many organisms in nature develop mutual partnerships (symbiosis) in times of challenge when their survival is threatened, I believe human society will come together today to deal with the great peril we face — by working together and sharing resources, knowledge, and skills for mutual benefit.
It may be hard to see now with all of the suffering within and around us, but this culture of connection is our future if we are to have one. 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.
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.
It starts with you, right where you live.
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.