Chapter 1 — The Age of Crisis
The Age of Crisis
In a universe where human progress continues to lay the foundation for new understandings of reality and being, we are called to wrestle with how the moments we inhabit misalign with the nature of the universe. To claim that we exist in an age of crisis requires that we separate the immediate present from the rest of human history, which in some form or another has always been a struggle of overcoming challenges. Where present threats differ from those of the past is the scope and scale at which they threaten us. The momentum of crisis in the immediate present threatens both the individual and the collective with degrees of devastation best described by the apocalyptic predictions of spiritual philosophies long past. The age of crisis is not an inevitability, but when examined through the lens of our present trajectory, it is the path of least resistance. Overcoming it requires a realignment of human meaning and value in accordance with the single truth that dramatically contrasts our present narratives. We turn our focus onto what is, not what can be.
Throughout history, humanity has endured crises; however, our present moment is different. In past eras, we grappled with unexpected threats, immense in their disruptiveness and beyond our understanding. Plagues, volcanic eruptions, droughts, floods, and more all violently erupted, leaving us no wiser in the process. For most of our existence, the human species has been defined by challenges of vitality, grit, and survival in a comparably harsh and low-technology universe. For many today this is still the case. Past time experiences required reducing the whole human to a part human to meet the needs of the collective within the moment. That people do things they do not want to do is unsurprising—survival always supersedes the journey toward individual actualization. Now we find ourselves in the midst of an information revolution, where individual capacity and imagination are exponentially expanding in parallel with our collective knowledge and power. An era of connectivity is awakening us to the injustices of global organization that deny abundance to the many and benefit the few. Now we inhabit a moment where the demands for divisible humanity are no longer necessary. Through a reimagination of individual and global organization, we can develop systems that support the whole individual and in doing so align ourselves with the single truth.
I label our circumstances an age of crisis because it is not one specific happening but rather a culmination of failures that will propel our species into an era of darkness. All around us, we witness the decay of social, economic, and legal technologies that are inadequate to meet the needs of the moment. They reinforce past visions of the good that conflict with the rapidly evolving consciousness of both individual and collective humanity. These antiquated systems throughout the world define and facilitate interactions among people, organizations, and governments in ways that paralyze our ability to act. The systems themselves are furthering the crisis, which is why there is no hope of self-actualizing in the age of crisis by operating within them. What separates this moment from others is that we can clearly articulate that it no longer needs to be this way. We now possess the ability to redirect our focus, energy, and resources in coordinated, cooperative efforts that could radically realign our trajectory. If only we had the will. It is no small claim to label the moments we inhabit an age of crisis, but as we will explore, it is the most appropriate language we can use to describe the happenings on the horizon.
It is difficult to internalize the depth of the crisis on our doorstep because willful ignorance has become the most natural course of action for anyone seeking sanity within our shared time experience. We have come of age in a media environment where the highest priority is and always has been capital generation. The result has been the dulling of our humanity through a constant bombardment of hyper-sensationalized content. We were born into this world of greed, injustice, and violence, where the architects of these systems have infiltrated political leadership at all levels to stifle dissent. It is a world order we had no say in crafting, one that actively expands the crisis we seek to overcome.
In undertaking the practice and process of self-actualization in the age of crisis, we should expect resistance from those seeking to maintain it—for example, groups believing that the death and destitution of the vast majority of humanity is a small price to pay for the maintenance of personal power structures. It is a view of great separation, directly contrasting our understanding of oneness and the relational universe. To make matters worse, decades of propaganda ensure that some of the most fervent opposition to transformative action comes from those who would benefit most from it. Beyond the threat of physical death and violence, we suffer from a more prevalent erosion of meaning. It is a time experience of great consequence, one where radically different trajectories may take form depending on the decisions we make today. Self-actualization is a process of connecting the dots between individual and system to develop a bigger vision of the self. To do that, we must come to terms with our existing institutions and behaviors driving the crisis.
Some may dismiss the age of crisis as fantasy. It is a common claim that there is no better time to be alive in human history than the immediate present. Opportunities for innovation are rampant, and experimental culture and practice are taking hold in advanced nations around the world. Critics might cite the fact that extreme poverty has decreased steadily over the past few decades, dropping by over 30 percent since 1981.1 Unfortunately, the numbers don’t tell the whole truth, as the majority of reduction is isolated in countries such as India and China, which have undergone rapid industrialization. Data projections now suggest that the global poorest will stagnate at the bottom over the coming decade. The majority of the world’s poorest today live in economies that are not growing.* For example, the GDP of Madagascar has not increased over the past twenty years, and extreme poverty has grown at a 1:1 ratio with total population. Half a billion people face the prospect of remaining stuck in extreme poverty indefinitely under our present frameworks, including lack of stable access to food and water. For individuals journeying a path of material security and creative pursuits, the argument that it is the best time to be alive holds some weight. The networking of our universe brings opportunities for connection, collaboration, and learning previously unimaginable, empowering people to generate value and wealth within society in ways that are meaningful and gratifying to the individual participants. For those who find themselves within these time experiences, pathways to individual actualization are open in various directions.
What proponents of this narrative fail to consider is how even those maximizing benefit from the present organization still fail to unleash their fullest potential. Succeeding in systems that limit others may indicate individual ingenuity, but it does not align with the wholeness of human experience. There is no doubt that there are plenty of people around the world whose lives were better off in the past. Imagine a person who was living on shaky financial ground before the pandemic whose financial situation could now only be labeled as dire. What might a child whose entire life has taken place under the thumb of proxy wars in Syria have to say about now being the best time to ever live? What of the Palestinian child whose ancestral land was taken and home bulldozed without representation or compensation of any kind? Or the Ukrainian child whose mother and father are dead after a relentless assault on civilian housing stemming from global geopolitical conflicts—oligarchs fighting oligarchs? We cannot express the greatness of the immediate present without also recognizing the horrors; both form a single state of being within the moment. These event chains shape individual access and agency within the world to such a degree that they alter the fundamental experience of being. For many, the proactive diminishment of humanity is alive and well.
To say we live at the pinnacle of human experience is accurate, but it only seeks to distract us when shared in the context of dismissing the crisis. The ever-increasing wealth gap is directly correlated to rising mental and physical health problems in countries with extreme inequity such as the United States.2 Believing that now is the best time to ever be alive is highly egocentric, specifically to the opportunities we believe are available to us. When examined through the lens of the totality of experience in the moment, it is a denial of greater humanity for many struggling around the world. We cover our eyes and plug our ears so that we might not feel as guilty about how the same systems that elevate us project misery upon others. Embracing our oneness with the relational universe is the process of confronting that human experience can simultaneously exist in an era of extreme opportunity and crisis; the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. However, subscribing solely to the former misaligns the individual with the single truth and attempts to separate them from their connection to the relational universe. Overcoming the age of crisis requires a radical realignment of our beliefs, and that begins with having the courage to confront our circumstances for what they are. We must reject any platitudes that distance us from the reality of our circumstances so that we might lessen the burden upon our individual egos.
The specific challenges we collectively face in the age of crisis are vast, numerous, and complex. Many blueprints exist today for policies, plans, and investments that could redirect our course. Yet none are taking hold as we draw closer to the event horizon. The challenge that humanity must overcome is not one of information, intelligence, or even structural imagination. Self-actualizing in the age of crisis is a struggle for meaning. We all have our own reasons for wanting to avoid or accelerate the crisis. Whether the individual is concerned with their own life, the lives of their children and loved ones, or the unknown number of voiceless individuals yet to be born, the crisis brings misery without discrimination. As we’ll explore throughout the chapter, if we continue our present trajectory, the near future is a grim reality for many. Fortunately for humanity, we have been here before. Throughout history, great paradigm shifts have redefined human meaning and values to meet the needs of the moment. The age of crisis is an extreme threat, but if we equip ourselves with the knowledge of the single truth, we can approach the challenge without fear.
Our focus in exploring crisis centers around how our present circumstances and direction conflict with our alignment with the single truth. We observe the moment to ground ourselves in the scope of challenges we face, always considering how the systems surrounding us have shaped our ability to think and react to the very issues that threaten our existence. The age of crisis is occurring both within and outside of us, but our understanding of the relational universe helps clarify that they are the same happening. By aligning our beliefs and actions with the nature of the universe, we can create real and lasting change within ourselves and others.
Crisis of Extinction
There is no greater threat to individual and collective human prosperity than the crisis of extinction. It threatens our ways of life unparalleled in human history, except for the asteroid impact that almost wiped out our species about thirteen thousand years ago.3 We inhabit a struggle that holds within it the possibility to decimate our species, a domino effect of ecosystem collapse that will leave the vast majority without access to food or water and permanently alter the landscape of our plant and animal life. The result of this collapse will be conflict, inducing mass migrations, the continuation of existing wars, and the start of new wars. For many, violence and disease will follow, thrusting the vast majority of humanity into a time experience of desperation and struggle.
At any given moment, it’s difficult to know exactly how far our environmental crisis is accelerating because it just keeps getting worse. Our oceans are evaporating4, causing feedback loops that increase air humidity, warm the atmosphere, and further contribute to evaporation. This evaporation is coupled with oceanic overheating, which is devastating to marine and avian life.5 Early and declining snow melts are shrinking our lakes,6 resulting in increasing salinity that directly impacts the local climate and wildlife. Earth’s deserts are expanding,7 and over the past one hundred years we have lost as much forest as we had in the previous nine thousand years combined.8 Over the past fifty years, natural disasters have increased by order of magnitude, occurring ten times more frequently today than in 1960.9 Sea levels continue to rise as arctic glaciers melt at rapid speed,10,11 a change that will severely damage coastal cities around the globe and contain the potential to release dormant infectious diseases such as anthrax.12 Earth’s atmosphere now contains carbon dioxide (CO2) levels higher than at any point in the past 800,000 years. About three million years ago, Earth had similar amounts of CO2 in our atmosphere; the result was temperatures and sea levels about fifteen to twenty-five meters (fifty to eighty feet) higher than today.13 We are in the midst of a sixth major extinction, with recent predictions estimating that 70 percent of surveyed species will perish.14 It’s difficult to estimate how this eradication of life will impact humanity, but it is easy to understand how mass extinctions take a part of our humanity. The crisis of extinction is an expansive web of event chains collapsing upon one another and perpetually becoming worse than previous predictions.
To best frame the crisis of extinction, we must also recognize past and present ill actors. Over the past decades, many individuals and organizations have engaged in coordinated efforts to discredit the severity of the crisis through disinformation campaigns. For example, despite having evidence linking fuel burning to the rising levels of CO2 in our atmosphere, there is no shortage of corporate-sponsored “think tanks” actively churning out misinformation.15-27 Fossil fuel energy companies and investors have worked tirelessly over the past three decades to divide public opinion and purchase legislators to prevent meaningful political action from stemming the crisis. Popular media spreads information about how individuals might play a role in combating the climate crisis. Stop using plastic straws, recycle more, and travel less are just some of the many schemes concocted and popularized by corporate propagandists. They spin narratives highlighting the individual as a problem while intentionally omitting the root causes of our crisis. Today there are one hundred companies operating and eight now defunct organizations that are responsible for 70 percent of global emissions.28 Those who have engineered the crisis now seek to absolve themselves from the responsibility of solving it, instead attempting to create confusion and apathy. Critics of reimagining our spiritual connection with nature might argue that politics, not renewed philosophies of meaning and value, is the best pathway toward addressing the climate crisis. Nothing within the immediate present supports that claim. Global leadership is impotent, engaging in systems and power structures whose only function is to prolong and protect the established order. It should surprise no one that the same systems that invited the crisis of extinction to our doorstep will never be adequate to transcend it. What should be recognized as crimes against humanity is instead chalked up to the cost of doing business. The crisis of extinction forces us to confront the worst of our species, those who subscribe to systems of meaning and value that extend no farther than their personal accumulation of wealth. Now in the immediate present, we find ourselves deep in a hole that we have yet to stop digging.
The crisis of extinction will not impact everyone equally; the poor will undoubtedly suffer the biggest consequences. Impoverished rural communities around the world will struggle from changing weather patterns affecting crop growth and a changing landscape of animal food sources that will threaten their ability to sustain themselves. Those living in poverty within industrialized nations will suffer from a breakdown of already meager social services and a larger community increasingly unconcerned with the collective as they struggle to provide for their own families. Rising sea levels will damage coastal infrastructure beyond repair, removing access to readily available water, energy, and transportation, which will disrupt food supply lines for millions of people.
Consider also the impacts on indigenous communities who have played no role in the acceleration of the crisis. Indigenous Arctic cultures are grappling with rapidly diminishing food supplies as the seals, caribou, and other animals die out due to rapidly changing environments.29 Deforestation and segmentation continue to threaten native Amazonians’ ways of life, and glacial melts in the Himalayas are disrupting the water sources of many rural communities. It is estimated that 143 million people will need to flee their places of residence by 2050 in response to increasingly hostile environmental conditions.30 Those living in industrial societies will leave for more secure geographic locations, abandoning others to their fate. Many who consider themselves middle class will be in for a rude awakening as the cost of basic goods soar and many of their assets become worthless overnight due to some unexpected disaster. As we might imagine, these circumstances will increase hoarding, theft, and violence among sections of the populace with no alternatives. When basic material security is removed from millions, we will observe desperation become the primary motivator of human experience. It will become increasingly difficult if not impossible to collaborate toward a more transcendent vision of humanity when so many will inhabit circumstances of extreme insecurity. When we consider the crisis of extinction, we do so within the framework of the larger human condition, understanding that for many there will be no recovery from the material devastation they will suffer. The crisis will change who we are as individuals and collectively as a species, directing us away from transcendent struggle toward rudimentary survival.
The crisis of extinction highlights how social systems organized around birth lottery project an unequal value onto individual human life. While the poor suffer the most, the wealthiest will bear the fewest burdens. Those with plentiful assets will retreat into their walled gardens in their well-guarded compounds situated on hundreds to hundreds of thousands of acres fully stocked with food and supplies. These compounds exist throughout the country, and in other nations, many are already well prepared for the impending fallout should we remain on our current trajectory. If the worst-case scenarios of the crisis of extinction play out, federal laws and municipal governments will likely falter, leaving little recourse for those without assets to organize around the redistribution of resources. In this scenario, society will revert to a feudal state. The wealthy prepper is better prepared than most, reinforcing a self-delusion in believing they can outlive or outlast the crisis. It is possible within our immediate present that aerial distribution networks, self-sustaining homes, and a network of wealthy friends may prolong the inevitable, but it is foolish to assume the rest of humanity will remain idle as an extreme minority continues to live lives of luxury while the rest descend into chaos.
Consider also what the climate crisis reveals about the present state of global cooperation. There has been some progress through institutions like the United Nations, but any solutions arising from the organization are fragile arrangements. Because all agreements are essentially unenforceable, they become easily disrupted, as evidenced by the departure of the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement in November 2020. It highlights a larger problem with multinational agreements: the power of the independent political actor to redirect and reshape past agreements based on personal preference. Today every nation attempts to advance its sovereign interests. The history of our species is full of tales detailing the fluctuation of power and resources, groups locked into never-ending struggles with other groups. Given that the present moment’s political institutions remain under the control of wealthy networks, the viability of these arrangements depends on alignment with the wants of economic elites. If a crisis presents a threat to the maintenance of existing power structures, we observe action, if not indifference. Solutions reached under this conflicting model of interest and action are always inadequate because the appropriate action requires a realignment of global priorities to redistribute resources to address shared challenges. The crisis of extinction poses a serious threat to existing power structures and those seeking to maintain them, but less so than the reorganization of individuals and systems in alignment with the single truth.
In many ways, the climate crisis is already robbing us of freedoms and behaviors we might otherwise undertake, further reinforcing our oneness with the relational universe. There is a growing trend among those in the age range of twenty to forty to avoid having children due to the extreme uncertainty of our future. Economic uncertainty is a persistent and growing threat, geopolitical relations exist in a state of perpetual war, and the systems governing society are captured by those with large swaths of private capital. Prospective parents are grappling with the gravity of bringing new life into a world that acknowledges the crisis but refuses to do anything about it. It forces us to prioritize actions we might otherwise not value and avoid aspects of our humanity we would ideally engage in.
Young children and those yet to be born will witness the extinction crisis unfold within their lifetimes and bear the brunt of the devastation while those responsible die out. We have chosen to damn the unborn to a struggle we do not yet comprehend the scope of. As individuals, we may feel powerless to create change because the vast majority of us do not have access to the levels of power driving local and global decision-making. In reality, we have immense power, but the systems governing our individual and group relationships do their best to nullify it. Nothing about our present arrangements instills confidence in our ability to overcome the crisis of extinction, which is why we direct our focus and energy toward organizing ourselves around new frameworks of meaning and value.
The crisis of extinction also presents a glaring lack of morality inherent in present-day humanity. Organizing large groups of individuals has always been a daunting task, but there is no excuse for the apathy and indifference of the present global leadership in addressing this challenge. Too many are too concerned with their political clout, fossil fuel funding sources, and antiquated ways of thinking about global organization to do what is necessary to avoid catastrophe. The effort needed to prevent the worst outcomes is akin to the national mobilization of economic verticals the United States implemented during World War II. During this time, the US nationalized several verticals of production and prioritized war efforts. Through this effort, the country realized its most productive era in history. Given the current corporate dominion of national governments around the world, a proactive mobilization is unlikely to occur before it’s too late, and when it does it will be disorganized and rushed. There are many possible reasons global leadership refuses to act when the extent of the crisis and the effort required to overcome it is already understood, but it’s an exercise in futility. What is certain is that our present institutions do not prepare individuals for circumstances requiring deep cooperation, collaboration, and, most importantly, courage.
Aside from the direct damage that will be caused by disingenuous approaches to solving the climate crisis, we must also consider the long-term ripple effects on our progress as a species. The climate crisis will inevitably stratify wealth, but it will also dramatically reduce the number of individuals able to leverage imaginative creation in their productive efforts. People who would otherwise have access to the resources necessary to develop analytical creativity will instead focus on survival. If our ability to contribute toward progress diminishes, so does the speed at which our collective time experience changes. Our biggest hurdle toward self-actualization in the age of crisis is recognizing our power to influence and guide it. However, neither of those can happen if the majority of people are thrown into a time experience of despair and chaos. We must address the crisis of extinction for the future of our species. It is perhaps the most significant obstacle preventing our individual and systemic actualization, but it also presents us with our greatest opportunity. Overcoming the crisis of extinction is a global effort that can unite us, but until now survival has proven an inadequate motivator to generate the energy needed to redirect ourselves. Coupling our desire to live with our journey toward transcendent humanity adds a spiritual element missing from the equation, a higher calling of unity and purpose that highlights what we already know to be true: We are greater than the crisis should we choose to be.
Doubt, Desire, Death, and Dogmas
We all understand aspects of the human experience in our own way. Parts of our humanity extend far back into our history, yet we feel them with full intensity in the immediate present. We have always struggled with the challenges of doubt, desire, and death. For the majority of the human time experience, life was brutish and full of unknowns. Over time we developed dogmas to distract us from our fears and persistent longings to be more than our circumstances allow. From various spiritual technologies sprung beliefs and practices intending to address these challenges. Personal rituals such as meditation, yoga, prayer, communal practices like fasting, war, and the ritual sacrifice of animals and humans all served to further human connection with the gods we created. These historical solutions were rooted in an immediate present far distant from ours. Today we understand that the available spiritual technologies offer no viable alternatives to the crisis and, in many ways, are leveraged to reinforce existing philosophies of meaning and value that have directed us toward the age of crisis. The crisis of doubt, desire, and death is, at its core, a crisis of spirituality. We must develop new answers to old questions, but to do that we must overcome deeply held dogmas. Here we encounter the paradox of the age of crisis. Systemic actualization is a way of organizing society that prioritizes individual actualization but requires society to pass a threshold of individually actualized people to build it. There is nowhere to begin but the end, leaving us with the challenge of creating both at once. To address the crisis of doubt, desire, and death, we must reimagine the systems of meaning and value that guide our personal philosophies and practice.
Doubt gives life to the imposter, an individual who, through a lifetime of conditioning, can never draw higher meaning from their efforts. It’s part of existing within a relational universe. We primarily measure ourselves through comparison. We are surrounded by institutions that imprint specific ideas about wants and their relation to our personhood, creating pathways of perpetual disappointment for many. We can never do enough to meet our expectations or the expectations of those around us. It’s not a question of capacity or will; it is the recognition that the vast majority grapple with their place in the world. The crisis of doubt results from inhabiting a universe of feedback loops that tell us we are not enough.
Doubt of being enough for ourselves and those we love drives us to escape. We inwardly retreat into an empire of imagined alternatives that we will never act upon. Doubt is the catalyst of cowardice, the delusion whereby doing nothing we remain safest from the nearly infinite potential failures that await us. Doubt is a form of ambivalence that denies one of the most consistent aspects of human experience throughout time: the sacrifice of the individual for family, tribe, and future.
We find it frustrating that others often do not meet our expectations, when in reality we expect them to relieve us of the questions only we can answer. How do we find meaning when everything we do creates new doubts within us? How often have you found yourself in a position where others believed in you, yet you still doubted yourself? We reject the radical potential dormant within us, denying what we know to be true because we are afraid to claim it as such. Our retreat is not illogical; our limited social protections ensure that the burden of failure for experimentation is immense. To stray from mindless obedience to the effort of creation is a path of hardship that can eliminate the material security of the individual if unsuccessful. Our experimental impulses are tempered by systems that prevent people from trying for fear of destitution. So long as doubting our abilities to create change is the path of least resistance in life, crisis will prevail.
Consider the doubt through our relationship with scarcity. The history of human civilization has been a persistent struggle for resources. Without them, we are insecure, a threat to ourselves and our loved ones. Our needs and wants have always expanded beyond the resources we have access to. For most of human history, the majority struggled to obtain rudimentary luxuries beyond sustenance. We have been subject to material scarcity for so long that it has become embedded in our understanding of the universe. It impacts our imagination of the possible and binds us to directions in life we would prefer to avoid. Our understanding of material scarcity as an innate part of existence helps us understand why we often question if we have enough, but nature denies us an equivalent instinctual rejection of too much. We try to replace our need for human connection with things, but they only ever temporarily relieve our doubt. Overcoming doubt coincides with our recognition of the fact that in the immediate present, material scarcity does not exist within the context of the past, and in the near future will likely not exist within any context we presently understand. It is within our present capacity to reorganize our economic, social, and political structures so that none suffer from a need for basic material security; it is in our power to redefine the human time experience to better equip the individual to overcome doubt in relation to their basic survival.
When we consider doubt through the lens of the relational universe, we do so while understanding that the luxuries of our immediate present are built on the back of imperialist conquest. Much of the historical progress of nations that brought us to this moment draws upon the efforts of colonizers and the wealth of the colonized. Intergenerational poverty warps the time experience of groups to a degree where conceptualizing the world becomes a self-reinforcing space of struggle and despair that opens up the possibility of doubt evolving into nihilism.
In his book Race Matters, Dr. Cornel West explores the concept of nihilism that has grown within pockets of Black communities due to the perpetual disenfranchisement they have been subject to. West argues that the oversaturation of market-inspired meaning overtakes the adoption of nonmarket values such as love, empathy, and service to others. The consequences of this consumerist indoctrination on those inhabiting permanent states of struggle limit the individual’s capacity to ward off self-contempt and hatred, resulting in the rise of an abandonment of hope for the future.55 Claims that nihilism is an easy excuse to avoid action discount the overlapping event chains that shape reality for those born into abject poverty. Self-actualization in the age of crisis cannot occur within social frameworks reinforcing class and caste.
Doubt can also take the form of inaction, procrastination, or redirection. When we consider all available options in the immediate present, we always have an opportunity to act in a specific direction. Sometimes the best course of action is active inaction, doing nothing in order to allow the surrounding happenings within our time experience to unravel. However, we should not confuse active inaction with the failure to imagine alternatives. In a world of manufactured comparison and artificial values, it’s easy for us to default to the value of no. No, that won’t work. No, it’s not worth the effort. No, this is fine. We are taught to prioritize stability to the degree that anything outside of the norm is threatening. As a result, we turn toward inaction as an unconscious expression of our doubt so often that it becomes natural. Procrastination draws from the same preconditions, an innate fear of our actions not being enough to satisfy our desires. Instead of harnessing the power of our creativity in the moment, we postpone action to delay confronting what needs to be done. Other times we simply redirect, giving up on a path we understand to be rewarding but deem too difficult to warrant the investment of focus and energy. The repetitive avoidance of focused action becomes habit-forming and eventually calcifies as our default response to challenges. We embrace ease as a virtue only to find ourselves perpetually dissatisfied and frustrated with the way things are.
Doubt is an inherent aspect of existing in a universe where our purpose is either undefined or inadequate. What if I am not enough? Why can’t I become the person I know I can be? If nothing I do ever satisfies me beyond a fleeting moment, what’s the point of doing anything? These questions about being are as old as humanity’s capacity to think about them. Now the single truth empowers us to reexamine these questions through a new lens. Perhaps this is why the struggle is more relevant now than ever before. We have always existed within structures that only further our doubt. The frameworks of living we are born into deny us the security and resources necessary for individual actualization and the fulfillment paths that come with it. We yearn to escape but are denied the opportunity by the web of systems surrounding us.
Doubt spreads within the individual, then it seeps outward to others. When sharing my efforts in composing this text with a friend, he asked why I would write a book that no one would read. The answer is to create and become more. Through this divine action, doubt is dissolved. Doubt is a crisis because it spreads like a plague by individual carriers who do not connect their pessimism of possibility with their interpersonal struggle of believing in themselves. It is only natural and in accordance with the relational universe that one who doubts their own capacity will doubt the capacity of others. Transcending the crisis is the active alignment of individual and system to produce a greater self. In doing so, we transform our struggle with doubt into methods and practices that support our overcoming it. We become more fearless with regard to the expression of our potential.
Desire is an appetite we can never satiate. What we have is never enough. More is always on the horizon, always beckoning us to leave the present behind to seek greater futures. Desire is the mutual catalyst of progress and inadequacy. Our striving for bigness is a perpetual struggle with our individual smallness. Desire is both a material and interpersonal crisis, but ultimately a struggle for greater access and agency within the world. We come to understand what we desire through our observation of others, often developing these conclusions by focusing on what we lack. This analysis through comparison is inherent to our inhabiting a relational universe, but it often generates new doubts within us, leading to expanding desires in a self-perpetuating cycle.
Desire is an insatiable aspect of existence as the individual experiences it. Various degrees of desire range from healthy to unhealthy, but the changing nature of time ensures that they are always there. For some, desires act as a source of inspired imagination; for others, impulsive self-destruction. We all experience desire in a variety of degrees and manifestations. The vast majority have always lacked the material security necessary to develop individual actualization. Those without access or agency become caught in the momentum of millennia, forced to inhabit roles within the universe that they had no say in crafting. For those living in secure material circumstances, desire takes the form of interpersonal relationships with oneself and the world. Desire is not inherently positive or negative, yet it is both for the individual. When we direct desire toward creation, we embrace divinity in its highest form. Allowing desire to direct our focus and energy is a sure way to cause untold harm to ourselves and our loved ones. From our present moment, it is difficult to imagine a human time experience free from desire. Even if we can self-actualize in the age of crisis and transcend material desire, our imagination will give birth to new needs and wants to drive us forward. Any beings advanced in their actualization to the point of transcending all desires is an experience so foreign to humanity that they would likely be indistinguishable from gods. Therefore, we must embrace desire as a permanent fixture of our being and explore how we channel it into a positive force within the human experience.
Our embrace of the relational universe is as much a perspective of radical empathy as it is a heightened sense of awareness of our circumstances. Buddhists are correct in acknowledging the relationship between desire and suffering. The misalignment of our expectations with the reality of our moments perpetually frustrates us. This is equally accurate for happenings inside and outside our spheres of control. Confronting the crisis of doubt, desire, and death may only ever be a temporary quest, one that has many beginnings and endings but is never complete. Do not begin your journey toward transcendence with the false hopes of overcoming that which defines being human.
Our struggles with desire also manifest in our relationships with others. We inhabit inward empires in our personal time experiences, an isolated self that is one among many. As individuals, we can never genuinely access others, no matter the length and maturity of our relationships. A remoteness imbued with otherness denies us the depths of connection we desire. The individual’s desire to be loved is infinite, but their capacity to love is finite. So, we always find ourselves in a permanent state of impermanence that conflicts with our ability to overcome ourselves.
The crisis surrounding desire is not that we experience it, but that the organization of our societies actively exploits it. By prioritizing transaction as the primary form of engagement with others, we have opened a Pandora’s box of manipulation that preys on our basic instincts and maintains a narrative that there are no alternatives, conditioning generations into an ethos prioritizing the fulfillment of desire through material goods. Within time experiences of material scarcity, these belief sets naturally trended toward exclusivity and otherness. Large sections of humanity correlate individual value with a material surplus. In other words, we feel terrible when we’re out of work or lacking resources. The struggle for survival is a creeping death that many track using numbers on their banking app. Whether or not there have been valuable aspects of these belief systems to date is irrelevant to our exploration. In our immediate present, it is clear that they are encouraging the behaviors driving us toward crisis; therefore, we need to focus on developing our powers to redirect the trajectory of our journeys. All forms of organization promote specific beliefs and values within the individual inhabiting them. In an informational universe, everything influences everything else. When the values spread through public systems no longer meet the needs of the moment, they must evolve. Maintaining the status quo is a choice to continue marching into an oblivion of our own making.
Consider the present systems surrounding education, work, and our conduct in life. The exploitation of our desires typically centers around the worship of power. We are taught that a greater life lies within our quest for power. Accumulation is the primary objective. Knowledge, position, wealth, affection, and more are framed as contests where individuals must prove themselves worthy. If we were considering the worship of power in a vacuum, we might argue that it is not all bad; the drive to improve one’s own circumstances is a positive trait of humanity. This may be accurate for specific circumstances. However, when considered through the lens of the immediate present, we can observe countless instances of power worship mutating into the domination of others.
The most perverse form of power worship is displayed through the denial of the roles that doubt, desire, and death play in shaping society. Consider the legal organization of society that enforces laws at varying degrees and intensity based on economic class. Our worship of power shapes what we consider acceptable and unacceptable injustice, placing the humanity of some on a pedestal far beyond others. The changing nature of time impacts everything, including the core struggles of the human experience. When the systems surrounding the individual promote the denial of these challenges through the retention of a status quo, our individual and collective progress toward self-actualization is corrupted.
Death has long been a fear of the living. For most of human history, physical death carried a significant risk of extreme pain. Take, for example, violence from animal and human predators, agonizing and inexplicable diseases, and injuries that progressively worsened due to a lack of medical knowledge and technology. These scenarios and many more have imprinted a primal fear within us that haunts our expiration. Today those with means can extend life well beyond what would have been their organic expiration, yet they remain unable to escape death. Perplexingly, our manipulation of death does nothing to redefine our purpose in living. Is the extension of life a worthy undertaking when so much of our experience slowly diminishes our humanity?
Competition is the defining approach toward human progress within the immediate present. The systems that frame learning and productivity set expectations of a universe where others are our adversaries. While progress takes many forms, it is no coincidence that those in positions of great power often view people and other groups with contempt, as others to be overcome in a quest for greater personal glory. Although each individual carries unique burdens of diminishment, many share the experience of living a life full of small deaths through our daily interactions with the world. Sometimes these moments are in our control; other times they are not. It is a distinction less clear-cut than we would prefer. Within frameworks of progress rooting competition, the small death of others is often considered part of standard operations. Maybe in moments long past this was a necessary way of framing our interactions. Resources were scarce, and the technology to manipulate them was rudimentary. But in an age of untapped abundance, it is a failure of imagination that harms us all.
These struggles of power perpetuate through a narrative of maturing into adulthood. We are taught that work is not supposed to be pleasant. We learn to accept the erosion of our capacity through a slow death as a natural and necessary part of life. We’ve made great strides toward advancing the complexity of our work, but it’s questionable how much of it can be defined as meaningful. For many, there is no alternative option but to embrace this narrative because their survival directly intertwines with their ability to produce. Now in a time of radical interconnectedness, we confront the reality that stability and survival can never be adequate rewards for the decimation of our spirit.
Combating the slow death inherent in present-day experience requires freeing ourselves from productive repetition outside of our creative pursuits. Repetition can take many forms, but the most relatable is types of work: occupations where productive activity is limited to the repetition of a highly specialized task, like working on an assembly line or in data entry. Repetitive work diminishes us for several reasons. First, it quickly becomes mindless, and over time it dulls the individual performing it. For the majority of our population, survival needs override our desire to reject the erosion of mind, body, and spirit associated with performing machine-like tasks. Second, these occupations are not stable. Jobs requiring low knowledge specialization pay poorly, are highly competitive, and are most often automated, ensuring that employers view the individual as a disposable commodity. More complex examples of repetitive work share the everyday struggle of the looming specter of automation that will eventually replace anything repeatable. The crisis surrounding interpersonal deaths within our occupations is that redirection is possible, but the majority lack the necessary access and agency to transition.
Exploring the crisis of death highlights our disconnection from the relational universe. Birth and death are not separate events. They are a single happening within an individual event chain. It is natural to celebrate a beginning and mourn an end, but the opposite is also valid. Death is a bitter pill for many because as we draw closer to the inevitable and question ourselves and our paths on this journey. The present-day dominant spiritual technologies reinforce a belief that human divinity exists only beyond death. Spiritual salvation through the ascension into heaven is just a complex form of worshiping death. We are told we are visitors, destined to be judged based on the character of our journeys. This framing of divinity ignores the single truth and the relational universe.
Self-actualization in the age of crisis requires us to think beyond the binary, embracing the power within our moments to redefine life as a method of conquering death. If we consider our interactions with others and the world around us from the perspective of an informational universe, we can observe how everything impacts everything. Every individual time experience is infinite in its potential within the moment and well beyond. Consider how many alternatives exist in our relationships with each other. Saying and doing certain things instead of others always sets into motion specific event chains that cascade well into the future and can never be undone. Each momentary choice breathes life to new realities for the individual and collective, an infinite flow of information carving through space like a fungal network searching for food. Denying life’s continuity beyond death is a form of willful imprisonment, an active limitation of the individual and the radical destiny they have yet to express.
Overcoming the influence of dogmas is a significant challenge we must embrace in order to self-actualize in the age of crisis. A dogma is an unchallengeable understanding to the person embracing it but an obvious falsehood in a universe of perpetual change.
Dogma can take many forms. They can be scientific, political, historical, or most commonly religious. To believe that any idea is beyond improvement is incorrect, but it is woven deeply into our personas and systems. Critiques of dogmatic beliefs are often met with fierce rebuttal because for individuals subscribing to them, they are more than just ideas; they are identities. Believing anything to be beyond change contradicts all knowledge of our universe. That dogma exists is a crisis because it is unnatural, yet it still thrives. All dogmas must be overcome and rejected in their entirety because a self-actualizing society recognizes them for what they are: means of manipulation to dominate a population. Convincing an individual that a belief is so radically important that it should override all others is a direct path to extreme power concentration that typically benefits a small minority. Dogmas perpetuate the crisis of doubt, desire, and death by actively programming our minds to embrace narratives that are neither accurate nor definitive. Nowhere is this more apparent in the present day than our clinging to outdated spiritual technologies.
Our obsession with death is understandable given the seemingly infinite unknowns humanity confronts in every form of time experience we have undergone. It is difficult for every generation to comprehend the past of those who came before because the frameworks for constructing consciousness vary significantly between generations. We all share our being born into a world we had no voice in creating. Our journey begins with a prolonged period of total vulnerability, formative years in our interpersonal and analytic development. For some, it’s a place of encouragement, exploration, and security. For others, it’s a space of fear, aggression, and insecurity—negatives compounded by an institutional infrastructure that provides no means of escape. Humanity is constantly locked in a struggle of trying to make sense of the world with extremely limited information. During some moment in our distant past, we began observing patterns in nature and the stars, and so began our journey into pondering our existence.
Cults worshiping nature became tribal religions, with gods varying between regions. It was commonly believed that gods coexisted among others by serving specialized functions until the idea of a single supreme creator developed in Zoroastrianism. Judaism, which initially embraced the concept of regional religions, adopted this idea and took it a step further by claiming their god was supreme to all others. Despite differences in contexts, all spiritual technologies share the purpose of reinforcing a specific moral order. Today, the spiritual technologies with the most followers are the monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam.56 A core tenet of these faiths is the transformation of death from an inevitable unknown into a form of salvation. Framing death as the moment of judgment makes sense in a time experience of relatively slow change and brutish conditions. It is a concept likely created to prevent widespread nihilism in a hostile universe. Today, the idea that paradise and the highest expression of our being lies beyond life is incompatible with our knowledge of the single truth and our oneness with the relational universe. Self-actualizing in the age of crisis requires that we let go of the spiritual artifacts that do not serve us. The idea of ascending into heaven after death is innately hierarchical and similarly legitimizes the organization of society.
Organizing meaning and value around the idea of salvation after death avoids responsibility in the moment. It places the ultimate reward of a life well lived into a future we can never experience. Our inherited time experience crafts the idea of heaven beyond Earth into a dogma that demands we deny death its due. It asks us to ignore the fact that when the individual dies they take nothing of this experience with them. Centuries of aligning our moral codes and actions around these texts have shaped our worldview of what is possible and real. There is a core conflict between the idea that divinity exists only outside of this world and our reality of it being a part of us now. Every moment of awareness is one of immense possibility, to be determined by the direction of our imagination, focus, and energy. We observe the evidence all around us in our exponential universe. Now is the time of creation. When we share experiences with others, we embody imagination, changing the shape of the world together through our interactions and efforts. Positioning nirvana as perpetually out of reach creates a culture of escapism. There is always something better on the horizon, so we never awaken our powers in the present. Self-actualization in the age of crisis recognizes that divinity resides within the moment. Our journey to become more human is one of becoming more godlike. To do this, we must reject the old prophecies of salvation after death in favor of fully expressing our divinity within the moment.
Overcoming death in the age of crisis is the process of confronting it as the inevitability it is. The practice of self-actualization provides no answers to death because none are needed. Death is death. By embracing our end as a continuation of our beginning, we dismiss the dogmas surrounding salvation after death. In doing so, we give immense power to our present time experience—to life. We reject the feel-good narratives of why a miserable life under the thumb of oppressive people and circumstances will ultimately lead to paradise. Self-actualization in the age of crisis is our shared journey in the creation of a new salvation mantra, one that recognizes every human being as a source of infinite potential and creativity, transformed by circumstance immediately upon entering the world. To transcend death is to redefine life, to celebrate, encourage, and organize ourselves around the latent potential of every individual. We achieve immortality through our contributions to the world, echoes that reverberate on well after our physical expiration. Those who contribute more toward collective progress extend themselves beyond time. In many ways, it is the same resurrection narrative humanity has embraced throughout its existence, except now we demystify and distill it into an actionable vision.
The quest for immortality of the flesh through scientific means is in many ways a fool’s errand, centered around an individual whose ego has overtaken their sense. We seek to prolong decay, and for what? The changing nature of time ensures that our ever-evolving consciousness will continue to develop new concepts of what it is to be. To this end, those with the means to leverage these age-defining technologies seek to hold onto a power they cannot possibly possess. At a certain point, this individual becomes a burden on society, refusing with all their might to allow ancient visions of the good to die and give space for new ones to flourish. Our focus on giving more power to life redefines individual value and capacity. We embraced divinity for what we know it to be: the alignment of the internal and external infinities within the moment. Leveraging this foundation, we develop new sets of practices and systems to guide our individual and collective journeys toward transcendence.
A major obstacle in achieving systemic actualization is that our dogmas surrounding death and salvation bleed into many other facets of our lives. All religions give us the frameworks for defining who we are, what we can become, and our place in the world. Salvation religions define the individual as less than God, less than pure, and subjected to a place in the world beneath true peace and happiness. They reinforce these frameworks by embedding indomitable faith as a core aspect of the philosophy. Perhaps most offensively, salvation religions empower insiders to create narratives of what God is and is not, an absolute falsehood fashioned purely for power maintenance and an extreme expression of individual ego that disregards our shared oneness with the relational universe. Hierarchy worship is embedded into these spiritual technologies that encourage subservience in different directions and permeate the institutional arrangements of our immediate present. The idea of submission to a divine being as favorable to the individual naturalizes absolving personal power. Historical religions have long provided a foundation for the exclusion and dominion of others as right and just. In this, the monotheistic religions could just as easily be classified as political technologies, often working together with other established regimes to solidify power without regard for human life. The popular monotheistic faiths encourage absolutism in beliefs that trickles into all aspects of being. This type of subservience starkly contrasts with the vision of humanity inspired by the single truth. It encourages a form of individual and collective being inadequate to transcend the age of crisis. Our efforts turn toward creating a new spiritual philosophy that enhances the individual instead of belittling them.
The salvation religions have long conflicted with our scientific knowledge, but now in the light of the single truth we understand their shared imaginings of creation to be false. From a universal perspective, there is no beginning or end. We exist within an infinite continuum of universes. If such a physical infinite could ever begin, it is so far beyond our comprehension and measurement that there is no reason to even consider it. Inconsistencies with our collective knowledge such as this further solidify why these spiritual philosophies offer no alternative to crisis. We cannot overcome the systems and people that dominate our being if we worship the same things as they do.
To reject death in favor of life is no small task, but the rewards are significant. I share this from the unique personal perspective of someone who was resurrected by modern medicine early in life. When I was twenty-two, I contracted a severe case of bacterial meningitis, an infection that causes rapid swelling around the brain and spinal cord. Within twenty-four hours, I went from feeling completely normal to being quarantined in a hospital room. The white blood cells fighting the infection in my spine were over one hundred times their standard quantity, and I was told that my spinal fluid was “thick” because of it.
My parents were told that the prospects of survival were grim, and even if I did survive, I would most likely be left with permanent disabilities. While I don’t remember much of the first week, I vaguely recall that the pain generated by the pressure on my brain was excruciating. After four more weeks in the hospital and months of physical therapy, I went on to make a full recovery. In any other time experience I would be dead, but the collective progress of humanity extended life where death had staked its claim. As you might imagine, such an intimate encounter with death at a young age forever changed my perspective on life. To know death intimately is a disturbing but ultimately freeing experience, one that unbinds the individual from the illusions of security we believe we possess. It is possible to know this freedom without being subjected to a near-death experience, but only if we choose to frame our understanding of it around what it is instead of what we want it to be.
The crisis of doubt, desire, and death is spiritual in nature because it forces us to confront the failure of historical religions to address our struggles with these aspects of humanity within the immediate present. Like all technologies, religions bear a timestamp of their creation that they persistently project unto the world. As the human time experience progresses, these spiritual philosophies attempt to shape the individual to be something completely out of context with the immediate present. Today, most practitioners of traditional religions pick and choose which dogmas to embrace. It’s a hypocritical yet understandable approach, given how deeply their source texts conflict with the nature of our reality. We overcome this by developing an alternative spiritual philosophy that practitioners can embrace to its fullest extent without shame or ambivalence to the values they are asked to embody, one that embodies change at its core, recognizes itself as a creation, and facilitates its own evolution when necessary.
The single truth and the relational universe provide a framework of spirituality that recognizes the powers inherent in all. By abolishing hierarchies of divinity, we remove the possibility of weaponizing spirituality as is so common today. When we focus our intents and efforts on maximizing the individual’s potential, we empower expansive freedom. We enjoy time experiences that encourage experimentation and invention, spaces of creativity where an individual connects with the divinity of the moment through the direction of their focus and energy. When we base our spiritual philosophies on the principles of our experimental potential, we negate the legitimacy of righteousness and any attempts to force specific lifestyles onto others in the name of the divine.
Perhaps the greatest struggle with doubt, desire, and death is our denial of the three. Dogmas of faiths developed over millennia make it convenient to turn a blind eye to apparent inadequacies within the present. Now we face choices similar to those humanity has answered in our past. Do we possess the courage to choose transcendence in the face of the age of crisis, or will we continue our march into oblivion? In embracing the divinity of the moment, we reject the power of doubt, desire, and death over our time experience. If we consider the possibility of a supreme intelligence, we do so only within the context of our knowledge within the immediate present. The most likely and logical conclusion is that if there is an omniscient divine creator it is not beyond us, it is within us, the embodied infinity of imagination in alignment with the single truth of perpetual change. We are it, and whatever powers such a being might possess will be within our grasp in the future.
We can transcend our dogmas but may always be subject to doubt, desire, and death. Our objective is not to eliminate these aspects of our humanity but to reimagine and reshape how individuals grapple with them. We accomplish this through the organization of our legal, economic, and social systems alongside our personal practice. The crisis of doubt, desire, and death represents a diminishment of the human spirit that we have undergone for so long that we mistake it for fate. It is not. In many ways, our pursuit of alignment with the single truth is a reinterpretation of the resurrection themes popular in a wide variety of past mythos. We embrace transcendent rebirth in the form of developing the capacity to surpass all known limitations. Our individual and shared rebirth defies death. With the force of mythological deities past, we become what we once worshiped.
Billionaire God-Kings of the Twenty-First Century
As the collective works of our environmental scientists continue to prove correct, the resulting biodiversity collapse will alter human ideals surrounding resources and abundance for centuries. The aftermath will rapidly disrupt economies and ripple into a collapse of nation-states around the world, resulting in a great divide. This permanent expansion of a global underclass will swallow individuals and families who presently believe themselves materially secure into inescapable poverty traps. The great divide is the catalyst for a paradigm shift in human classification, splitting humanity into two distinct classes and ending whatever meager opportunities presently exist for upward social mobility. It is an end of illusions that will rapidly awaken the masses to class consciousness, emerging into the nightmare. Our situation today results from a long series of event chains spanning human history that share the common theme of extreme wealth concentration. Most of us misunderstand the billionaire class, which is critical to their power maintenance. We must expel the illusions, creating new narratives to better visualize their roles in our society and reject the structural and social value of the existence of the economic class.
We know how extreme wealth inequality impacts the power of a government to support its people in times of crisis. The United States has the most billionaires, and it is the only country where record-breaking31 election spending is growing exponentially,32 ensuring that candidates embracing corporate support and agenda have an extreme advantage. We know that the COVID-19 pandemic significantly increased wealth concentration at the top while devastating the financial security of many. During the first ten months of the COVID-19 pandemic, billionaires increased their personal wealth by over 38.6 percent; the top fifteen billionaires saw gains of 58.7 percent, and some saw wealth increases as much as 500 percent.33 During this same period, 73 million people lost their jobs,34 approximately 100,000 small businesses closed,35 and 29 million adults reported being food insecure. Minor redirections of wealth through taxation, federal spending, and direct citizen compensation could have prevented mass suffering, but these options were never even considered by those with the power to implement them. This inaction catapulted the United States to number one for confirmed cases and deaths from the virus. We observe in plain sight how the systems we organize humanity within value capital above individuals. Extreme wealth concentration directly conflicts with self-actualizing in the age of crisis. It ignores the latent potential of individual time experience, betraying our obligations to nature and our oneness with others to maintain existing power structures.
Like our favorite sports team, politics and the economic policies that arise from them can be a projection of power in an otherwise powerless existence. We use the language of freedom to defend our own enslavement. Human history is full of narratives about society and resources that shape how we think about the distribution of resources today. Powerful wealth holders crafted elaborate frameworks detailing how markets should behave and then built industries around the spread and support of this knowledge. Common economic theory is propaganda, evangelized by economists whose professional objective is to maintain the power structures supporting the ultra-elite—whether they’re aware of it or not. The study of economics is not the study of economies. It is the study of theory.
The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis shared, “The only way to make the economic model work is if we assume there is no such thing as time and space.” Through the lens of the single truth, the economic models only work if humans aren’t involved. Laws arising from these theories always favor specific groups. In our immediate present, much of economic law serves no function other than further disenfranchising poor people. Consider how fiscal penalties like fines directly discriminate against the poor in terms of relative wealth extraction. Or how credit scores, which directly impact an individual’s ability to access vital services, credit, and housing were introduced as recently as 1989. In the middle of a plague, the wealthiest country on the planet spent a year debating how little they could offer their citizens, while other advanced nations were quick to enact guaranteed basic incomes. Our struggle with the politics of the billionaire class is that long histories of conquest and propaganda have crafted narratives of money that have misled generations. Letting go of our dogmas surrounding value and wealth is vital to overcoming the age of crisis.
Why is it that despite the overwhelming evidence of extreme wealth concentration, there is not a more fervent resistance among the general populace? We see social unrest increasing around the world, but it still lacks support from those whose participation would significantly tip the scales in favor of reorganization—the middle and upper-middle classes. Their inactivity often results from apathy or illusion. Apathy because they simply cannot be bothered to focus on the greater good. They believe their personhood and that of their loved ones to be secure, that they might somehow be able to leverage their small fortunes to secure themselves in the event of global collapse. It is an illusion most often built upon generations of privilege coupled with the convenience of ignorance that allows individuals within these time experiences to remain blind to their surroundings. Perhaps they simply choose not to believe the severity of our circumstances; it’s much easier to stay the course if one pretends they are not headed into the stormy chaos on the horizon. If the age of crisis is left unchecked, the middle class will be decimated. In an exponential universe, humanity’s linear thinking leaves individuals ill-equipped for rapid change. We have no alternative frameworks for thinking about the world outside of extreme wealth concentration because it is all our species has known since the advent of agriculture. This inheritance encourages our mindless embrace of systems we know to be inadequate for overcoming what awaits. Like a long line of dominoes caught in the momentum of collapse, when a threshold of destabilization is reached, many who are presently looking the other way will face an intense storm of consequences.
Consider also that extreme wealth inequality has tangible impacts on the human condition. As income inequity rises in communities, we can observe direct correlations to decreases in trust between individuals,36 declines in mental health, increases in mental illness rates of community members,36 increased drug use,36 increases in obesity rates,369 and decreases in youth educational performance.36 The fallout of a crisis will have negative impacts primarily on poor and marginalized communities around the world. Supply chains will break down as the crisis of extinction rapidly reshapes food and water resources worldwide. The dramatic rise in the prices of vital goods ensures that basic survival goods become significantly more expensive. As we might expect, civil unrest will grow.
An individual or family struggling with having enough food to eat is not going to respect past philosophies of law and order from a time experience no longer relevant to them. How the global poor will be treated during the crisis will not surprise anyone paying attention. The events will be used to further politicize and demonize social support programs by political puppets looking to create a new artificial enemy to capture the majority’s attention. Now more than ever, people see through these narratives, but is there enough time for this shift to have an impact? At this moment, it is still unknown. For the wealthiest living high above the clouds, not much will change; the crisis will only serve to further consolidate their wealth and power. When the environmental crisis reaches its threshold, these individuals will retreat into their walled gardens. Stockpiled with food, resources, and mercenaries, they will attempt to ride out the storm of anger and desperation that will envelop the majority struggling to make sense of the new world. The age of crisis threatens drastic shifts in how we define the haves and the have-nots in society, a narrative crafted by the few to ensure misery for the many.
This moment in history is unique because we have all the tools and resources necessary to solve these problems. Radical redirection is both possible and plausible within the existing resources and productive capacity of humanity right now. What we lack is imagination and willpower spread throughout the collective consciousness. The age of crisis exists and will continue to exist because of our inability to see beyond what is—unless we choose to change. No individual or group is to blame for our moments, but history will reflect poorly upon those who actively resisted the empowerment of collective humanity in order to further their selfish fantasies. To be born into dynastic wealth is not a sin; all of us are subject to the inheritance of a specific time experience. However, the individual misaligns themselves with the single truth and the relational universe when they assume the mantle of narratives they know to be true or just. You can have wealth and power while simultaneously understanding how luck and social frameworks have empowered you over others. You can invest your money in organizations, people, and causes that create genuine good in the world or squander it on vanity and luxury. What separates those embracing the single truth from others is what they do with the knowledge. Do they act in accordance with oneness, or do they sow seeds of division for the sake of greed? To deny the need for individual and collective reorganization in alignment with the single truth furthers the crisis.
Understanding how the crisis will rapidly accelerate wealth disparities helps illustrate the severity of outcomes that await humanity if nothing changes. Now we turn our attention to a more structural framing of the billionaire class. If we consider the time experience of the individual billionaire, we can better understand the realities they inhabit. Billionaires today exist in a universe of cosmopolitan information inputs. They are largely unburdened by the nation-state and operate beyond the scope of law imposed on the global majority. It is not uncommon to see those with immense capital, such as private hedge fund managers, intentionally break laws because the penalties the government will impose on them will pale in comparison to the revenues to be made. Rules and laws that apply to others are simply not applicable to the individual billionaire. Each individual must ask themselves, is this the justice they desire? Our present systems allow people to opt out of our laws through an economic engine promoting labor exploitation. Unsurprisingly, those who succeed in capturing immense resources in the American financial scheme are often unconcerned with the crisis and its impact on others. The economic ecosystems guiding our behavior encourage viewing the individual as a widget whose value is measured in the form of productivity.
Self-actualization in the age of crisis requires redefining wealth and power because our present systems actively resist equal access to agency and opportunity. Is there any hope of instilling class consciousness in the general population? Yes, if we can create the right language. Facts are not enough—that much is evident to anyone paying attention. We need something better, a way of thinking about billionaires that is more than just numbers. By crafting a better story, we can help others understand why our current laws support the destruction of human beings around the world.
One of the first myths we have to dispel is that being anti-billionaire is the same as being anti-luxury. For the vast majority of humanity, there is no apparent difference between a million and a billion dollars. Either amount would allow them to fulfill their wildest fantasies; the desire for anything more is created only through having extreme excess. It’s a mental block reinforced by the narrative that we’re linear beings in life, death, and earning. For many, the time spent laboring has a direct relation to income. For the average individual, the exponential increases in wealth that billionaires experience is hard to relate to. When someone with a linear perspective of labor and earnings thinks of a billion dollars, it translates into the ability to access things they need and want without worry, something we all desire. They might then project this same framework of labor and earnings onto the billionaire. The idea is that we should all be free to reap the rewards of our labor, no matter our present circumstances. This logic fails within the context of exponential growth and compounding capital returns that place the billionaire’s fortune far beyond any achievable amount of material luxury.
Over 88 percent of billionaires possess fortunes of multiple billions.37 Some quick math shows us the impossibility of billionaires having any concerns related to wants or needs. Imagine you could spend $1000.00 per hour on material goods. If you never slept and bought things every hour of every day, it would take you one million hours to spend your first billion. Divide that by twenty-four hours per day, and it will take 41,116 days to spend that billion. Divide that by 365 days, and it would take 114 years of spending $1000.00 every hour—without sleeping—to spend your first billion dollars entirely. We’re not even counting the interest earned on the money each year. The fact is that they simply could not spend that amount of money on themselves even if they tried. Material needs are something for petty millionaires to worry about.
Billionaires live far beyond the realm of material needs and wants. This, in itself, is no crime. As a collective, we should believe in and work toward bringing every individual beyond basic material needs. By removing survival-related barriers, we free up tremendous amounts of creative focus and energy for billions of people. At present, this level of material security is something the vast majority of the population can only dream of.
The historical narrative of work is that effort equals security and prosperity. Work hard; do well. It’s something we were taught by our schools, media, and parents alike. We’re surrounded by information streams reinforcing beliefs about a meritocracy that never truly existed. Unsurprisingly, one of the most common responses defending the billionaire class is “People should keep what they earn.” Our earlier example demonstrates that applying a linear relationship between work and prosperity cannot accurately be used when describing the billionaire. Their relationship with money is exponential; their capital radically expands itself through legal and financial instruments inaccessible to the majority of humanity. We want our traditional narrative to be true, and in some respects, it is, but not for the billionaire class. It is perhaps the most common misunderstanding about the capitalist system of production. Anyone working to earn money, even the small business owner, is not a capitalist. A job that trades focus and energy within the time experience for money is just selling labor. A capitalist is an individual who generates capital through their existing monies in the form of assets and investments.
The delusion that we can all be capitalists is one of the biggest lies the American narrative relies on to keep a struggling population docile. It is a powerful belief that convinces many in lower and middle economic classes to defend billionaires. We want to believe that one day, through hard work and dedication, we too can be free of material scarcity. Linear wealth creation is often associated with manual labor, but it bleeds into almost every position in every major organization. We often hear pundits describe distinctions between unskilled and skilled labor as a catchall to contrast types of work, but in reality, all labor exerts some form of skill. We’d all prefer that our houses be built by expert construction workers, our pipes fixed by plumbers, our teeth be fixed by credentialed dentists, and that our medicines be developed by those with advanced understandings of chemistry and human physiology. Even the most commonly targeted professions, such as entry-level labor or food service, require a great degree of time management and sociability.
Language matters in an informational universe; it influences our thoughts and feelings about circumstances. In our efforts to realign humanity around the single truth, we should avoid classifications that diminish one group for the benefit of another, especially when the majority within these groups have more in common with each other than they do any billionaire. More ultra-wealthy individuals built fortunes from work in the new knowledge economy than from any other industry in human history. In the past, strong unions supported and protected manual laborers, ensuring a more equitable distribution of resources throughout organizations. Through effective political propaganda and a never-ending supply of politicians willing to sell out their constituents, the power of unions within the immediate present has eroded significantly. Today, job security is an illusion, replaced by corporate layoffs to support big executive bonuses. Our old idea of work broke its promise to the people, and with it, the idea that time and earnings correlate consistently.
Defending the billionaire class through the idea of wealth incentivizing progress is another concept we need to lay to rest. In A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright, summarizing John Steinbeck, wrote, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”38 It is a self-defeating narrative reinforced through vague notions of patriotism, justice, divinity, and plenty of propaganda. The idea that Americans are blind to class narratives would help to describe the political agendas of the past fifty years, but it isn’t true.
In his book Class Attitudes in America, author and professor Spencer Piston wrote, “The belief that most Americans do not support downward economic redistribution is one of the defining myths of our time.” Evidence drawn from twenty-five years of election surveys strongly suggests that the general populace favors wealth redistribution through programs like universal health care, Social Security, and even means-tested programs such as Earned Income Tax Credits. Consider the popularity of political candidates like Bernie Sanders, whose campaigns highlight the immense disparities between the ultra-wealthy and the rest. Spencer concludes that the American public consistently fails to understand who will come out on top of new proposals and laws. Ambiguity about who benefits from policies dramatically reduces support for the programs. Politicians predictably use the confusion to redirect popular attention and continue the work of their wealthy sponsors. The idea that we have large sects of our population actively voting against their best interests is both true and false. No one is intentionally voting for self-harming policies, but our political and information systems deliberately deny individuals the information necessary to make informed decisions.
Wealth commodifies our shared time experience. Capitalism, a primary form of organizing society, treats human beings as something to extract value from. It is a system created by those with wealth for those with wealth, and it’s dishonest to pretend that the majority can participate. For the majority, capitalism is a system of siloing. It forces the individual to express mastery in a direction they may not prefer and creates jobs that add no value to society outside of spreading the system’s influence over our lives. When we view our time experience through the lens of the single truth, we understand that capitalism is more than an economic system; it is a framework of information inputs that warps individual realities to fit a specific narrative. It shapes desire and consumption alike, encouraging behaviors that are widely acknowledged as poor foundations for the self-actualizing individual. By centering ourselves around ideas of access and agency that fetishize individuality, we remove reliance on collaboration that has historically been proven to be the greatest source of human ingenuity. Participating in these systems brings us no closer together; more often it drives us apart. At their worst, these systems shape a vision of humanity that is always wanting, buying, and upgrading—avatars of waste.
The digital era brought with it the idea of users as products. You can use the service for free in exchange for the gradual manipulation of your beliefs and preferences. Consider the cancerous nature of the advertising industry, growing at all costs and unconcerned with the destruction left in its wake. Individual time experiences take shape in accordance with others. Prolonged exposure ensures that young and old alike adopt characteristics promoted by the philosophy of consumption, such as vanity, greed, and desire. To be born into this world is to be bound to its institutions; the individual cannot escape if they lack the means to remove themselves altogether. Economics and the culture of exchange attempt to leverage capital to build trust between individuals, but money is a poor social glue. Our relationships with others are primarily transactional in a system where the individual is rewarded by creating surpluses with their transactions. In other words, the most direct pathway to progress under these institutions is to extract value from others. Binding the ideal of generating a surplus to the majority of human interactions limits the scope of our creations. We prioritize that which can be capitalized over that which might make the most significant contributions to our individual and collective lives. It is a framework of exchange that is antithetical to the single truth and our oneness with the relational universe.
Designating wealth generation as our primary transactional function also leads to the all-too-familiar trend of institutional decay. A start-up, full of energy and imagination, creates new public behaviors through new ideas, efforts, and inventions. After a long journey, the founders are ready to move on. The only viable options today are going public or selling, opening up access to company shares and exponentially increasing personal wealth. The most common result of the rapid expansion of investors is that companies stop innovating and start financializing. Making public offerings the most direct path to group economic freedom ensures that the most successful pieces of our social puzzle worsen over time. Wealth cannot be the pinnacle of human pursuit; it is unworthy of the effort. A self-actualizing society must reshape human incentives. We should make it clear that the journey of systemic actualization is not attempting to take away any person’s ability to live comfortably and securely, nor is it an attempt to deny individuals the ability to create and distribute their innovations. It is not an effort to remove an individual’s ability to pursue excellence. Systemic actualization is embracing that our collective powers can only be enhanced as far as the systems governing our lives will allow.
We have reviewed wealth from the perspective of luxury and understand that all billionaires exist in a time experience far beyond needs and wants. Now we will explore how we can best visualize the concept while being far removed from it. The best way to think about billionaires is by comparing them to medieval kings. Kings inherited large land estates generating taxation revenues. On the king’s land, their language was law, binding the fate of everyone around them to their whims. Their legitimacy was spread through the narrative of the divine right of kings, the idea that the hereditary passing of the crown took the process of selecting a supreme leader out of human hands and left the decision to a god. Kings, therefore, had no responsibility to represent the will of the public, nobles, or any others. While the collective majority no longer believes in the divine right of kings, many happily defend the billionaire as if they were different. We cannot frame the billionaire only as a holder of extreme amounts of capital. Billionaires are individuals who have the legal rights to large productive networks within society. We can think of them as a small group of unelected kings, each with a high degree of control over a specific vertical of society. Present examples include owners of digital town squares, scientific agriculture, material distribution networks, weapons, and energy production. These unelected kings have the final say in decisions impacting societal verticals, including who may access them and when. Where kings of the past were limited to currencies of precious metals—and therefore finite in their generation and accumulation—the billionaire owns a limitless fiat currency that multiplies itself. Their ability to spend and leverage capital allows for the expansion of economic and political power limited only by their imagination. What was true for kings remains true for billionaires: extreme wealth concentration provides tremendous power to direct society undemocratically.
The concept of kingship is rooted in a distant time experience. Compared to today, most peasants lived a brutish life of toilsome labor and no available social systems to better themselves. They were confined to work their lord’s land by legal bindings they had no say in crafting. Escape or resistance from these systems was often met with death. Similar to the present-day state, the power of kings primarily resided in their monopoly on legal violence, extreme wealth concentration, and hereditary ownership. Power structures were absolute and uncompromising.
The most significant risk to the stability of entrenched powers was the plotting of other wealthy nobility, as the speed of information was slow enough to prevent a large-scale peasant revolution. Changes in power were often due to extended military campaigns and only resulted in a new figurehead claiming divine privilege. When we consider the economic power of kings and billionaires, we must take into account that medieval wealth concentration would be comparably worse than today because so many living in poverty died young. Humanity has evolved somewhat as many countries presently provide suites of social safety nets. Today we dismiss the idea of monarchy as an effective form of government and realize that assigning absolute power through birth lottery has proven to be a disastrous choice for empires. Yet the billionaire still exists and has plenty of defenders within the peasant classes. We have traded one king for many, each who can dictate specific aspects of our lives.
The poor and the rich alike are subject to the law of attraction; individuals tend to group with those of like mind and status. Kings of all ages were tightly networked with other rulers, extending their power far beyond capital. It’s easy to forget that World War I began as a feud between three ruling cousins. King George V of Great Britain, Czar Nicholas II of Russia, and Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany were related, sharing the United Kingdom’s Queen Victoria as a grandmother. Over fifteen million people died in this familial dispute, a steep price to pay for the whims of nobility attempting to change lines on a map. Just as the relationships of these kings were unknown to their subjects, so too are the relationships and actions of present-day billionaires hidden from the majority of humanity.
In the United States, 78 percent of multi-billion-dollar companies share at least one board member with another company on the list.39 These power networks dramatically enhance the reach of the individual billionaire, who can influence the fate of many social verticals through connections. We can consider the merits of these power alliances by asking ourselves a simple question. Is it possible that an extreme minority of the population, holding a disproportionate majority of global society’s wealth, might act to preserve their personal interests, even if it means causing harm to the majority? We’ve explored how billionaires have been funding misinformation about the crisis of extinction for personal profits. We have a single concrete example that provides an answer. Our present systems of meaning and value encourage some to resist the necessary changes for human transcendence in order to maintain personal wealth and power.
Consider also the dominant role billionaires play in controlling information streams. Today we struggle with the perpetual consolidation of our media in the hands of increasingly fewer controlling entities and individuals. Information is curated and manipulated to elicit specific reactions and responses from the general populace, bordering on blatant propaganda. We see them stoke fears and anxiety regularly, openly favor specific political candidates and policies, and actively avoid discussions of substance regarding individual and collective transcendence. Perhaps most vile, these outlets serve as effective tools of division. They understand implicitly that a population turning upon itself is blind to the puppet masters pulling the strings. The billionaire, like the king, seeks primarily to maintain their influence. But, unlike kings, billionaires operate from the shadows. With much of the public remaining clueless about their involvement in funding various anti-public well-being advocacy groups, they are free to promote whatever disastrous ideas they support. In a world of cooperative billionaires, the nation-state is powerless to help its people. It becomes nothing more than another system of influence manipulated by those with means.
Past and present monarchies have always been supported by religious reference. Egyptian Pharaohs framed themselves as the embodiment of Ra, the sun god. Theodosius made Nicene Christianity the state church of the Roman Empire in 380 CE with the Edict of Thessalonica.40 The tradition of churches supporting kings and kings supporting churches continued throughout the medieval era, creating two distinct types of political powers in the world. The monotheistic salvation religions are inherently hierarchical. These spiritual technologies center around the worship of an omnipotent being whose influence and judgment remain beyond human comprehension. They frame the individual human experience as lacking the divinity and wisdom necessary to fully recognize their latent infinity.
Under the influence of these systems, humanity has programmed itself to believe that the universe and creator are separate entities. Over millennia we have made a false connection true. Now we bear the burden of rejecting a widespread concept that directly contradicts the single truth and our oneness with the relational universe. Religious and spiritual hierarchies pave the way for mortal hierarchies. Centering a spiritual technology around a distant, omnipotent being naturalizes the injustices of extreme wealth inequality, a power so great yet so unreachable that the average individual must simply obey. Connecting political dominion to religious dogma naturalizes the arrangements people are born into, corrupting our time experiences and stifling our power. In a world of abundance, it is divine will to have the majority born into abject poverty. Just as the divine right of kings claimed supernatural intent in birth lottery, so do the present politics of religious organizations seeking to end collective social investments. Here we identify the need for spiritual transcendence as a means of self-actualizing in the age of crisis. The philosophies of meaning and value available through the popular religious organizations of the past actively support the organization of society in such a way that drives us toward crisis through the hierarchical nature of their beliefs.
Today, many understand that the billionaire is no more divine or righteous than the peasant. We could easily interpret their actions to be less so if we judged their efforts through the lens of the greater good. Still, the nature of hierarchy persists as a natural force in our minds. Some might argue that hierarchy is natural and necessary, citing examples within distant forms of animal life in an attempt to demonstrate the biological significance of these structures, the idea being that humans will always be subject to rigid hierarchies of organization and the best we can hope for is to grow and excel within them. It is accurate to claim that hierarchies exist in nature, but it is intellectually dishonest to ignore the plentiful examples of practiced egalitarianism in animals41 and humans.42 Humanity has been organizing itself around collaboration for much longer than it has a hierarchy.
Agricultural society and the hierarchies that arose from it represent about 4 percent of the existence of modern humans. Our reliance on farming tied us to the land, bringing with it the possibility of good and bad harvests. Surpluses allowed communities to specialize and militarize members of their society, which came in handy during years of scarcity when raiders would be more tempted to attack. For the vast majority of our existence, the human time experience has been highly cooperative in both individual relationships and collective organization. Hierarchy and specialization are examples of individual and collective adaptability to circumstances. As we have in the past, humanity must embody a more expansive imagination of the possible in order to meet the needs of the moment.
To argue that any system of organization is ideal and not subject to change is also false. The single truth teaches us that nothing supports the idea of a static universe of ideal states. Strict economic hierarchies have brought the crisis to our doorstep but are proving inadequate in helping us to overcome it. The self-denial of our ability to change and adapt when necessary is a rejection of our power. By surrounding ourselves with these arrangements before birth and after death, we give grossly unequal power structures the same legitimacy as universal laws.
Today we recognize kingship for what it is: a method of assigning absolute power based on luck. Nothing is more out of our control in the universe than being born. We can only ever be where we are. While a comparative few are born into extreme means, the majority enter the world lacking a secure familial ledger. Propaganda channels keep us believing that their hard work is a path to freedom, but for the majority, no amount of effort will ever compare to being born lucky. That is not to say that the individual is incapable of transcending circumstances; quite the opposite. But if we’re going by the numbers, it is no secret that being born into a network of wealth radically reshapes the possibilities available. There is no more significant impact on an individual’s life than being born. The role of class and caste systems have always defined human capacity throughout history. We have always had, and always will have, groups of insiders and outsiders. It is the nature of our gathering together. What is not natural is the degrees of disparity. To that end, we reject luck and birth lottery as a viable form of social organization.
The debate over whether or not billionaires should exist is the same question as whether or not kings and queens should be the de facto rulers of the world. The similarity of these questions explains why the extreme wealth of the moment doesn’t receive a much more radical opposition from the majority. The human time experience exists within a long history of ultra-concentrated resources. The governing systems have legally, morally, and spiritually justified most of it. It is not unfamiliar to us for others to have much more. While times have changed, many themes surrounding human organization remain the same.
Because kings controlled swaths of land and people, they could exploit value through natural resources within their control. The changing nature of time and information eliminates the physical boundaries that would otherwise limit billionaire power. Today, billionaires typically control verticals of society through direct ownership, indirect ownership through large shareholdings, purchasing politicians, or the fiscal sponsorship of nonprofit and political action groups pushing agendas that would further the billionaire’s power. A king had two methods of obtaining the title: birth or conquest. They made rules and laws to leverage their relationships in order to solidify power over time. Billionaires come to be through a variety of circumstances. Some create real value for global societies by solving big problems, providing great services, and more deeply connecting us to one another. Others obtained their wealth without contributing to the productive agendas of society, such as through high finance or birth inheritance.
How the billionaire obtains their wealth is of little relevance to overcoming the age of crisis. Like kings, the billionaire possesses the power to leverage their capital to bribe and coerce those who seek to limit their power. We can recognize the value of individuals creating great wealth through innovation while still rejecting the political and legal power of being a billionaire. To accurately classify the billionaire class, we judge humanity not as a story of individual competition but as a collective effort toward progress. Today, many industries exist as independent parts of a whole, all controlled by individuals with personal agendas. Core social verticals such as energy, housing, health care, and others move in different directions at different speeds. It’s a way of organizing society that allows independent groups to dictate how society will progress. Given that most mature organizations exist in a state of financialization, profit always demands a higher priority than innovation and service. Like a body where every organ makes its own decisions, the collective systems may accomplish their objective, but they will not be as effective as they would be by collaborating. Vital verticals of national and global society are under the control of unelected individuals whose influence and decisions are independent of any nation-state. The age of crisis forces us to question if they should be. Figures 4A and 4B illustrate why forcing collective human progress into the singular format of private control creates artificial stagnation. Specific progress pillars cannot advance without the advancement of others. The prioritization of private and independent control of vital social verticals denies humanity opportunities for advancement.
The relationship between king and billionaire begs the question, are luck and divinity different? If they are different, then we must stifle the power of the billionaire class. We believe luck is a weak foundation for global security and social organization. Reimagining the laws governing stakeholdership and stifling the power of capital become the only logical path forward, not because the billionaires are inherently bad people, but because our current laws prioritize a modern kingship that disregards the majority in favor of an extreme minority. The philosophy supports the view that the universe is our shared experience. Together we empower ourselves more than any single visionary can. Therefore, social organization that gives thousands more power than billions is incompatible with self-actualization in the age of crisis.
If they are the same, then everyone deserves to be exactly where they are. After all, it is undeniably true that every moment since the big bang has led to this very word. Our experience is one of absolute present, creating futures moment by moment. If all luck is the act of or influenced by a higher intelligence, then there can be no questioning our current conscious coordinates. A convenient logic if you’re free from need, but it fails to take into account the squandering of human potential that occurs when we allow birth lottery to determine individual access and agency. This belief is most often rooted in dogmas surrounding outmoded ideas about divinity. Our error is in trapping universal intelligence in a static historical perspective. Those believing that luck and destiny are the same will support the present wealth disparities as the natural order.
As always, there is a third alternative. Luck and divinity can be both different and the same – the same because our current laws make it a reality. The United States is entering an era of wealth inheritance that would make kings jealous. Rules the significant majority have had no say in crafting force us into dominated states, denying the majority access to their higher selves. As we explored, billionaires are above the law as the layperson experiences it. We have the political power to dismantle the billionaire class, but our elected representatives lack the will and are often captured by the interests we seek to overcome.
Luck and divinity are different when billionaires exist under separate reality frameworks than kings, just as the rest of us do from medieval peasants. Their success is not wholly luck-based, and some have made positive contributions to our general welfare and species advancement. At the same time, many of our greatest changemakers have reaped the benefits of birth lottery as well, having parents who could provide them with start-up capital inaccessible to the majority of the population. In an ideal world, the billionaire is a product of a system that rewards creativity and focus, qualities we should encourage and reward in society. In reality, those with extreme means prioritize their personal interests above the health and well-being of the collective. It is possible to reward imagination and innovation while simultaneously limiting the power success provides.
Ultimately, the separation of luck and divinity is necessary to fully embrace the single truth. Aligning ourselves with the nature of the universe requires maximizing empowerment for all individuals so that they possess the access and agency to seamlessly change the direction of their lives. It will be impossible to reorganize national and global societies to the ideal degrees without wealth and power redistribution. The single truth and our oneness with the relational universe exist in direct conflict with the idea that some omnipotent force determines our place in the immediate present and we should therefore embrace it without question. To deny our power to change is to deny the divinity we know to be true. So long as the billionaire class exists in a positive feedback loop of wealth and power building (more wealth builds more power builds more wealth), billions of people will remain unable to fully express their latent imaginative potential.
The solutions we’ll explore to overcome the billionaire god-king’s dominion of the present revolve around combining decentralized social institutions alongside new forms of personal practice and belief. Given our history of power and resource concentration, we understand that breaking its hold over society extends beyond redistribution. Individually, we must adapt and spread new philosophies of meaning and value that reject the levels of wealth and power concentration presently apparent as morally wrong and an affront to collective humanity. Economic redistribution is the most commonly cited solution, but by itself it’s a bandage too small to address the wound. The realization of systemic actualization as an integral part of our individual actualization aligns us with the single truth and lays a foundation for unleashing our latent potential.
Billionaires, like kings and gods, are always what we choose them to be. Ultimately, a more transcendent form of living requires individual choice. We change the universe by changing ourselves. Our technological prowess has laid the communication and information networks to move beyond what was. We can never truly be free within the global caste of economic class. Like the gods and kings of the past, billionaires will become historical relics, and humanity will be better for it.
Elected Misrepresentation
The crisis of elected misrepresentation is the recognition and exploration of why the presently available forms of governance are inadequate tools concerning organizing collective humanity to self-actualize in the age of crisis. We can begin with a question. Is the American democratic experiment failing, or is it working as intended? The answer is both. It is failing because we inhabit a society of rampant inequity and low economic and social mobility. The institution has failed to evolve with the changing nature of time.
It is working as intended because the US form of representative democracy has always been a political technology designed to serve the wealthy. All governments are legal technologies intended to serve specific groups and often accomplish these goals by excluding others. Our journey toward a more transcendent humanity forces us to question why that is and what may be done about it.
While political processes around the world are rife with corruption, our focus will remain on the United States. There are many weak democracies in the world, but the US is unique in that it is especially vulnerable to ill-intentioned actors through its design, while at the same time being the dominant global power. The process of politics as it is expressed today is a propaganda technology designed to divide and distract the masses. Participants at all levels are generally unconcerned with the policy demands of the public, as evidenced by their voting records. It is a system designed by and for the wealthy, who, through their sponsored candidates, craft policies to further interests favoring their specific groups with little to no concern about how their actions will impact others.
Through the collaborative efforts of the ultra-wealthy and private media corporations, the political process in the United States shifts individual focus away from issues and onto identity. Politics is framed through the lens of duopoly, a competition between opposing political teams not unlike professional sports. Spectacle is the intent, and we eat it up. The individual is encouraged to pick a side, as if there were any ideological differences between either of the parties. In reality, there is no political alternative in the United States. The two popular parties represent the same corporate agenda while taking slightly different positions on a handful of fringe social issues. Our electoral process ensures that whoever is selected by insiders will win, and even when these plans go awry, the end results remain the same. For example, every presidential administration since 1974 has actively transferred wealth from the poor and middle class to wealthy elites. This is unsurprising when we consider that most lawmakers in the United States are millionaires.47 By slashing social services, cutting taxes on the wealthy, and actively promoting the falsehood of trickle-down economics, our elected leadership consistently sells out the working class to corporate interests. Despite this, many Americans willingly participate in the farce and in doing so develop imaginary enemies of the other.
All forms of government reinforce specific ways of being. In theory, democracy intends to provide equal say in shaping national direction to all participating individuals. In practice, the world democracies are organized as slight evolutions of monarchies and could be more accurately described as representative oligarchies. Throughout the world, democratic experiments are failing, disrupting, and disempowering the people they are intended to serve. At the time of its establishment, the United States democratic republic was a revolutionary concept of what the human experience could be outside of the rule of a king, a nation composed of smaller sub-nations (states), each representing a place for experimental ways of living. Elected representatives would meet together to work on policies, programs, and legislation that would help further the interests of the citizens they represented while putting the nation’s greater good first. The initial idea of electing representatives to enact democracy was necessary given the size and population distribution of the United States at the time of its inception. It was a time experience of slow information development and spread where the majority practiced sustenance labor, making the required physical presence for decision difficult. Compared to the available forms of governance, the idea that individuals could select someone to represent their shared interests at the national stage was a major improvement over monarchs who had little concern for public desire and opinion.
For all of its innovative qualities, the political technology of representative democracy made a great effort to maintain and further class hierarchies. The United States was designed to be a property-owning democracy, existing to serve the rights of capital holders while actively excluding large swaths of the population, such as people of color, women, and White men who did not own property, from participating in the governance process. The founders were some of the wealthiest citizens in the United States at the time and for the most part were in strong alignment about the preservation of their personal wealth and power. Their support of social hierarchies was strong enough to determine that branches of our present governmental models should prioritize the protection of landed elites.
On June 26, 1787, James Madison told the Senate, “They [the landed interests] ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.” That the preservation of a specific group was legally prioritized over the majority of others sheds light on the root causes of our crisis of elected representation. The system was never intended to be equitable or blind in its distribution of justice. When we consider whether or not the present systems of representative democracy can act as catalysts for a more transcendent human experience, we do so within the context of their origin points. All legal innovations over the past 240 years are slight evolutions of the root, incremental improvements that ultimately exist to serve the same original intent. Here we identify why the present form of US representative democracy is inadequate to help humanity transcend the crisis. All possible institutional innovations remain isolated by the scope of the founding documents and in doing so continue to reinforce division and inequity as a means of social organization.
This is further evidenced by the organization of the federal government, which, through its design, is intended to slow and stifle change. Representative democracy in the United States is rooted in two core principles: slow government and the division of power. Slow government is intended to act as a failsafe, preventing rogue actors from dramatically shifting the systemic power balance within a single term. It is principally a conservative idea, actively supporting the maintenance of the status quo and stifling change. Consider that in the present day, US laws are very easy to make but extremely difficult to repeal. Over time, this compounds into layers of unnecessary bureaucracy that serve only to entrench existing power structures and limit opportunities for transformation. It also encourages lawmakers to abuse laws for their personal advantage, such as leveraging information to trade stocks before legislative decisions are revealed to the public. This blatant corruption exists because the mechanisms to stop it are extremely difficult to enact. In theory, the separation of powers is a viable and ideal component of democratic governance. However, in practice, we can observe that it creates an impasse; lawmakers are unable to effectively break ties. Today we see the separation of powers primarily used to stagnate progress, even when a specific party possesses unified control.
We can consider the example of what happens when a bill passes in the House of Representatives but fails to pass in the Senate. At this point, the bill is essentially dead in the water, and the people it intended to serve are left without recourse. It creates a political culture where passing new legislation almost always consists of material concessions for the wealthy but rarely anything more than moral concessions to the poor. Obstructing the elevation of the majority is the most bipartisan effort our legislators engage in. The crisis of elected misrepresentation is as much an issue with the failings of our leadership as it is a critique of the system itself. How can humanity transcend the crisis when the vehicle available to us resists change by design?
Overcoming the crisis of elected misrepresentation is necessary to transcend because governments define the laws governing our relationships with each other. Nowhere is this more evident than in our economic law. The politics of modern economics is a tug-of-war between two opposing viewpoints, one being increasing support for markets through the loosening of federal guidelines, restrictions, taxes, and the elimination of social safety nets, and the other being the expansion of redistributive social protections, more heavily regulated and segmented markets, and increased taxes on the wealthy to reduce capital supply.
These two opposing philosophies create a pendulum where each consecutive administration works to reverse the direction of their predecessors, the sum of which results in stagnation. Consider also the increasing inequity stemming from our economic arrangements that has been ignored by congressional leadership. From 1979 to 2020, US productivity increased 61.8 percent while wages only increased 17.5 percent.48 During the thirty years prior, productivity and wages grew in parallel, increasing 118 percent and 107 percent, respectively. The recent decline is due to the continuous weakening of labor rights in combination with a loosening of regulations on corporations. Today the price of these market-first policies is evident, as much of the US population struggles to keep pace with the rising costs of living while our wealthiest are earning billions more per year. We are told to believe that “our side” is fighting for what’s right and protecting our interests. In reality, one side is transparent about its favoritism toward wealthy elites while the other’s primary objective is to humanize the policies of their adversaries through performative moral concessions. What is apparent is that neither of the two parties possesses any real insight into alternative visions of markets that would better serve the elevation of the collective.
Earlier, we explored how the billionaire manipulates our political discourse, but given how inseparable capital is from US politics, it requires further examination. In 2010, the US Supreme Court voted in favor of the Citizens United case, equating money to free speech and empowering organizations’ unlimited spending on political elections. The ruling stated that organizations do not have to reveal the names of their donors, providing financial anonymity and ensuring that the public would not have access to information regarding whose agenda a candidate was serving.
In the months following the decision, money spent on political elections from anonymous sources increased over one hundred times.49 Politics has always had a problem with corrupt officials, but the legalized bribery in the United States supports practices commonplace in the authoritarian nations our leaders so often criticize. A 2014 analysis demonstrated that wealthy elites and lobbying groups supporting business interests have by far the largest impacts on the direction of policy-making in the United States. Citizens and public interest groups have “little or no independent influence.”50 The predictable results of these arrangements are a federal leadership full of candidates supporting policies that are harmful to and unaligned with the best interests of their constituents. Financialized elections also prevent grassroots challengers from emerging because the money frequently flows from federal to state elections. An individual passionate about people-centric policy rarely possesses the capital necessary to compete in county, state, or federal elections. In summary, the political technologies in the United States and those operating within them consistently reinforce the national direction toward favoring monied interests instead of the collective good.
The crisis of information, truth, and trust impacts the national political direction. Ongoing propaganda campaigns funnel through various information channels to distort public opinion. Funded by the same individuals and groups funneling money into our elections, the average American is subject to a web of misinformation so expansive that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to separate fantasy from reality. This is especially true in America’s most impoverished and undereducated regions, as explained in Thomas Frank’s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas. “You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before . . . It’s like a French Revolution in reverse, in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.” Nine out of ten states with the lowest education rankings have representatives who consistently vote for policies that support the elimination of social spending programs such as education. Six out of the ten states with the lowest education rating also are the poorest when measured for median household income.51
There is something fundamentally wrong with a representative democracy when constituents regularly vote against their material interests, especially during moments of increasing struggle and insecurity like our immediate present. It is important to avoid focusing frustrations on the victims, many of whom are products of informational universes that offer no alternatives. Their state and federal representatives, however, are participants in the willing disenfranchisement of those they were elected to serve. These propaganda campaigns instill a vision of American democracy as an unchanging, natural phenomenon frozen in time and immune from revision, promoting beliefs denying the complete malleability of our laws and institutions. In a universe governed by the single truth, everything is subject to change. The crisis of elected misrepresentation requires that we unite a majority around a transcendent philosophy of meaning and value that prioritizes the individual divinity of all. Without it, we have little to no hope of reimagining our methods of self-governance.
At the root of overcoming the crisis of elected misrepresentation is embracing our present forms of representative democracy as legal and political technologies subject to challenge and change. We must be critical of their flaws in a collaborative effort to imagine more for ourselves and the other. We must eliminate any personal attachments with our individual identity with a specific political group or system, knowing full well that these ideals only serve to enslave us to our creations. Self-actualization in the age of crisis is a journey of reimagining humanity in a new image, free from the constraints of a past we had no choice in crafting. The presently available forms of governance and those inhabiting them offer no realistic opportunity for transcendent progress. They exist to serve the specific purpose of furthering the interests of a select few and are in large part responsible for driving us toward the age of crisis. Democracy is the ideal in accordance with the single truth and the relational universe, but we require one that is truly by and for the people. This option is not available, so we must create it. To do that, we must reject what is for what will be.
Productivity and Participation
Productivity has been an integral part of the human time experience since long before recorded history. It facilitates the movement of objects and ideas by organizing collaboration to solve problems. Our methods of being productive have progressed rapidly over the past 25,000 years, leaping from nomadic foraging networks to virtual assets in the blink of a universal eye. As our time experience progressed, what we valued and how we valued it evolved, but the central idea of productivity remains the same. We focus our efforts on creation and exchange; we give to get. A social contract developed during a time experience of limited resources and significant disparities in individual access and agency. Now we’re progressing toward an era of accessible abundance, but historical ideas about individual contribution still dominate the ethos of the moment. The crisis of productivity and participation is a misalignment of the traditional understandings of labor and contribution to the evolving consciousness of humanity as a result of our technological ascendency. We are more than our circumstances allow us to be but remain shackled to these processes for lack of a better alternative.
Participation is one of the primary sources of human meaning. We connect with others to share information in an experience of mutual expansion of the self. The way we define participation has always been a matter of circumstance. Rules of societies past and present form frameworks for how we think, act, and imagine alongside others. Over the past twenty years, our technological progress has broken barriers that have separated our global population for millennia, networking us together to form new layers of intelligence we have yet to fully understand. Deeper connection and meaning are growing within us but struggle to take form under the weight of present systems. Self-actualization in the age of crisis is a process of reimagining our relationships and responsibilities regarding productivity and participation. There is no limit to the forms it may take. The individual should possess the power to ensure that the direction of their productivity and participation is both meaningful and at their discretion.
Work and technology intertwine. They always have and they always will. The human time experience ensures that our productive activity as individuals and organizations is forever bound to the resources at our disposal within a given moment. Every new innovation opens new directions to express our creativity. Each empowers us to develop entirely new experiences for ourselves and others. If we consider this within the context of our oneness with the relational universe, we observe how our technological progress is merely another direction of self-replicating information. In many ways, we are the directors; in many others, the full scope of the consequences of said progress is out of our control and beyond our realm of comprehension.
The economic verticals that direct our productivity and participation today are organized so that the majority of the benefits go to the few while the losses are spread amongst the many. This extreme imbalance continues to increase. Our political leaders laud free markets as the pinnacle of human freedom while simultaneously propping up the failing industries of their corporate sponsors. We have long been propagandized to form emotional connections for or against specific forms of economic arrangement. Why? Because it maintains the existing concentrated power of the few. Right now, we are choosing to limit ourselves. Single market maximalism also encourages a permanent underclass, and its preachers are always those who benefit the most by resisting change. We must stop worshiping our creations. To naturalize them is to ensure that many remain unable to transcend a time experience of permanent struggle. This is easier said than done given the persistent propaganda the majority are exposed to, but aligning ourselves with the single truth and the relational universe requires a more experimentalist approach toward the organization of markets.
The crisis of productivity and participation recognizes the distinct divisions of labor of the present. Some groups lack the ability to meaningfully contribute toward bettering society and themselves. A lack of ability in itself does not designate a crisis, but when combined with a lack of vital protections and opportunities for the individual to redefine and redirect their journey, many find themselves trapped in cycles of inescapable poverty. It’s easy to observe displaced individuals from the outside and comment about their lack of grit or foresight but doing so is extremely shortsighted. Technological progress will continue to eliminate traditionally secure employment; machines will replace routine tasks of all levels of expertise. The crisis of participation highlights how an ever-increasing number of people are denied access to the necessary resources to develop themselves to meet the needs of our moment, further contributing to the expansion of our existing citizen underclasses and the ills that come with it.
An unavoidable aspect of our expanding advancement is a change in the fundamental nature of work and productivity, the primary drivers of our abilities to interact and exchange. Over the past thirty years, the nature of work has undergone a dramatic shift. In the past, industrial mass production models where workers performed specialized and repetitive tasks used to be the most accessible forms of employment. It was a moment where the average individual was viewed as an extension of the machine. Individuals were expected to specifically perform routine tasks without room for deviation or experimentation. If you could work in one assembly line, you could work in any of them, giving rise to mobile workforces. The ideal worker during this time experience was someone smart enough to operate the machines but lacking the skills necessary to become more. Mass production assembly lines are a form of labor demanding obedience above all else.
When countries adopt this type of work, they actively spread the cultural ethos through education systems and information channels. Eventually, corporations purchase the political sway necessary to outsource these manufacturing jobs overseas to labor markets paying lower wages, claiming less taxes, and often employing measures that would be otherwise illegal, such as child labor. Globalization dismantled all aspects of career security within professions, requiring the performance of machine-like tasks, placing many into time experiences of radical insecurity that they have yet to overcome. Now we can observe the inherent problem with developing our productive capacities around repetitive specialization. It is a form of productivity that leaves individuals perpetually vulnerable to disruption and offers few alternatives to apply the skill set elsewhere.
Contrast that to our immediate present. Today’s most valuable employees combine deep technological knowledge, analytical capabilities, and cooperative problem-solving to automate and create. As a result, these occupations offer the individual the most opportunity for creative fulfillment and financial reward. What separates these two forms of work is the inherent power of the worker. In the past, the individual was a disposable extension of the machine; now they are the vital imagination, powering its direction.
This experience of industry erasure takes many forms. Technology advancements such as scientific precision agriculture and policies favoring large corporations have crushed the small family farmer, many of whom are struggling to pay down large debts—let alone generate profits. In the past, small farms provided about half of the food Americans ate; now they are responsible for a steadily decreasing third.52 Advancements in renewable energy technologies ensure that solar and wind produce more energy for less, having already rendered coal and an entire industry of miners obsolete.53 Oil and natural gas are next on the list, industries verging on obsolescence that remain propped up by political puppetry. If we were exploring the crisis ten years in the future, we would be highlighting professions such as bookkeepers, lawyers, accountants, data entry, and many more as examples of how technology transforms repetitive tasks.
Our crisis is one of opportunity, or our impending lack thereof. Technology continues to split work and people into two major categories. The first consists of many who have already lost access to productive opportunities and living wages and others joining them shortly, as more complex repetitive occupations become updated and automated. The second category consists of those who have a form of work that takes time, effort, and the capacity to continuously learn new things. Individuals bring unique knowledge to every encounter, compounding experiences earned by solving complex problems collaboratively. The most in-demand individuals within the immediate present are sought after as much for their ability to quickly learn new things as they are for their existing knowledge. Everyone is capable of this type of work, but many lack access to the educational and training systems necessary. The crisis of productivity and participation is rooted in the fact that political leadership refuses to address the issue, preferring to pretend that it simply does not exist. This problem isn’t purely across generation lines; many young adults suffer the same fate. If we don’t make significant changes to the types of education and training infrastructures we offer for the collective, this trend of vastly disparate skills and opportunities will continue. When we consider the challenge through the lens of the single truth and the relational universe, the crisis of productivity and participation results in a significant squandering of our individual and collective potential, diminishing our divinity in the process.
The most advanced form of work in the immediate present is within what is commonly referred to as the information or knowledge economy. A knowledge economy is an economic system where work requires highly skilled labor that is easily transferable between organizations. Like our previous example of the assembly worker, the skills people working in the knowledge economy develop are not organization-dependent. Unlike the assembly worker, participants persistently learn, experiment, and create in a cooperative problem-solving environment. The most obvious example is expert software developers who command high salaries but are free to pursue productive activity in a wide variety of verticals.
Central to the knowledge economy is the ability of organizations to highly customize the inputs and outputs of productive activity without requiring standardization. The future of work demands individuals capable of doing specific tasks without needing to conform to a set way of doing them. A blend of innovative experimentation and productivity creates a form of employment drawing from humanity’s most powerful resource, our imagination. Historically scientific advancements helped drive progress in productive activity and often occurred outside of corporations. Today we can observe how, within the knowledge economy, production becomes a vehicle for scientific progress. An example would be new products and services that utilize machine learning. Each innovation builds upon advances in information technology while simultaneously pushing the envelope for what is possible with every new iteration.
Another example would be the increasing efficiency of 3-D printing, which allows people to go from ideation directly to creation, saving significant time and resources for prototyping and developing material goods through third parties. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we are bearing witness to the infancy of replicator technologies that will be able to arrange matter on a molecular level. Both scenarios describe processes where the work of production and scientific discovery become intertwined, fundamentally redefining the nature of the labor involved. In the past, the only opportunity for companies to make leaps of progress was on the backs of technological or scientific breakthroughs outside of the organization. Today, many of these breakthroughs are created from within, developing a self-perpetuating process of innovation that eliminates the concept of diminishing returns. The interweaving of productivity and imagination, a way of organizing ourselves and our society, will profoundly impact our material and immaterial progress.
Adding new technology to an organization that views human labor as cheap, repetitive work and follows traditional organizational hierarchies doesn’t create a knowledge economy company. We could use any big-box retail conglomerate as an example. They have the capital to invest heavily in new practices and procedures, but no amount of technological innovation can act as a substitute for a business model that views human beings as cheap, disposable widgets. If an organization lacks the internal process to maximize the creative potential of the majority of its staff and chooses instead to rely on low-cost labor and external innovation, then they are not a knowledge economy company.
When we apply our understanding of the changing nature of time, we might imagine that the knowledge economy is the natural trajectory of our technological advancement, a form of individual and systemic organization that occurs in parallel with our progress and will continue to spread through global economies, ushering in a new era of productivity and participation. Unfortunately, we know that’s not true. Knowledge economy companies exist in many economic verticals already but are isolated at the top of their respective industries. The market arrangements of our time have warped the impacts of this economic transformation into an aggressive power consolidation empowered by the continuous leveraging of network effects.* Consider how major platform companies presently operate. They provide free services in order to track, catalog, and manipulate the user base through algorithmic advertising. Social platform companies rely on outdated intellectual property laws that do not classify a user’s data as their personal property. They sell information that they do not pay for and should not have ownership of. This challenge is compounded by a geriatric leadership class that does not understand the language and concepts of the rapidly evolving information technology space. The most popular material goods platforms exert monopolistic control over many market verticals, and small- and medium-sized competitors with higher fixed costs cannot compete. When routine work is required and a machine is unavailable, the labor is often outsourced to countries where individuals labor for fractions of their worth. Many of our most powerful knowledge economy organizations have become rent extractors. Their main value proposition is that many smaller companies cannot afford to avoid using their platform. This intersection of inadequate laws governing access to the knowledge economy and a political class whose primary objective is to enrich themselves amplifies our crisis by preventing the actions necessary to spread this new form of work throughout the world. It is a failure to take advantage of what is already here, powered by the few who benefit the most from the existing arrangements.
Automation and the changing nature of work isn’t a new idea, so we might ask ourselves if it’s worthy of being labeled a crisis. After all, history tells us that the most advanced forms of work have changed on several occasions and societies have found ways to adapt. The widespread expansion of progress disrupts common ideas about economies, wealth, and work. Where our present moment differs from history is our lack of available shortcuts to transition. In our past, pathways existed to rapidly shift workers’ focus and energy from one specific task to another. Sailboat operators learned to operate steamboats, small-scale farmers became factory workers, and scribes learned how to type.
Technological advancement didn’t require huge leaps in capacity, only slight redirections in instruction and obedience. Today we face a much more significant challenge. The nature of work has shifted in such a way that this time, there are no shortcuts. The analytical creativity necessary to thrive in the new, most advanced forms of work requires years of training, a commitment to perceptual learning and discovery, and the interpersonal skills necessary to cooperate with others in solving large, complex problems. Much of the educational structures throughout the world have yet to transition into forms of learning to prepare people for these types of productive experiences. Instead, these structures remain focused on learning methods centering around memorization and regurgitation that are inadequate for addressing present-day needs. This results in an ever-increasing divide in our labor force between those who can participate in the most advanced forms of work and those who cannot.
Our evaluation of our economic divergence wouldn’t be complete without considering the small business owner. As of 2017, 47.1 percent of the private workforce of the United States was employed by a small business, which comprise 99.9 percent of all US businesses.54 Presently. the small business environment is in a state of flux, with the pandemic permanently altering the landscape. Nevertheless, our desires to forge our own paths will continue; therefore, we need to consider how the crisis impacts entrepreneurs.
Self-employment spans a wide range of technical and creative entrepreneurship, including people with “gig” economy jobs like ride-sharing or delivery services. Self-employment can be an enriching experience, ideal for a self-actualizing society. Unfortunately, for many today, starting a small business is a significantly worse option than taking on a job for wages because of the price of failure and our legal organization surrounding the gig economy. The price of failure for any small business owner is serious financial struggle, a real risk when providing to a family. This barrier to participation is due to America’s weak system of social safety nets. The US prides itself on being the land of opportunity, but it is clear that the narrative only refers to those who can afford to take risks. Without expanding our rights to systemic protections, we will always limit our abilities to solve problems and imagine innovations. In doing so, we deny many the opportunities for creation. Systemic actualization is a process that will greatly empower small business owners.
In times of increasing uncertainty, gig economy work continues to attract participants who have no alternatives. This type of labor is a form of entrepreneurship facilitated by large platform companies where the worker is given a considerable degree of flexibility at the cost of traditional employment benefits and protections. It is promoted as a path to personal and financial freedom, framing the agreements in ways that seem beneficial to the contractor. The allure of controlling one’s work hours conveniently glosses over how these arrangements are forms of self-employment where the worker bears all the risks and none of the benefits of entrepreneurship. Attempting to resist these grossly unequal labor arrangements is always met with well-funded resistance by the benefiting organizations. Gig platforms supporting contract work will always support economic and legal structures that disproportionately favor existing capital holders at the expense of the people doing the actual work.
Although these trends are disturbing, they will become much more extreme soon. The pandemic is speeding up the implementation of automation technologies in response to the risks and restrictions surrounding crowded workspaces. Under the right legal frameworks, the automation of routine tasks can be one of the best things that have ever happened to our society. The alternative option of confining all productivity to a single set of existing laws of property and contract supporting the expansion of crisis ensures that only a tiny fraction of our population will own the machines, determine their uses, and reap the benefits of our collective progress. Participating in transaction economies requires two or more parties with adequate resources to exchange. As we continue to automate production and service worldwide, we will face an oversupply crisis. Machines will not be purchasing any of the goods they create and will not order any of the food they serve. American economics, as we understand them today, has always been about workers being able to participate in the market directly with the wages they earn. If our modes of production do not offer people the resources necessary to exchange, there can be no functioning system of economic participation.
We stand at a unique crossroads in our history. In the past, we had to apply technology to a purpose; at this moment, we’re rapidly developing technologies that can apply themselves. These problem-solving machines multiply our capacity to transform beyond anything we ever imagined possible. The future of humanity is one of persistent automation, one that embraces the attitude that no individual should be forced to do the work a machine can do. We are freeing the individual to focus on developing mastery in the direction of their choice.
The crisis of productivity and participation is, at its core, a lack of alignment with the reality of our circumstances. In the United States and around the world, people are ill-equipped for the future of work. The systems necessary to teach and train them do not exist. Technology continues to advance, increasing the gap between people who can contribute meaningfully to society and those who cannot. There are several negative systemic and interpersonal consequences to our current trajectory, ensuring that those unable to contribute to these new forms of labor will find themselves in destitution. Circumstances will only further radicalize populations and sow distrust in establishing a global cooperative society. It is the crisis most central to our present understanding of being, reshaping how we connect and help each other. It is a battle between those supporting the dominion rule of wealthy elites over the general public established 244 years ago and those who reject its grasp on our fates. The technological ascendency we are experiencing gives us the power to create a decentralized society of abundance, but only if we can create the systems necessary to support it. If not, humanity’s individual and collective power will remain bound to a time experience where it cannot be expressed.
Information, Truth, and Trust
The crisis of information, truth, and trust results from organizing human interaction and information flow around transactional relationships. Humanity has long struggled with how to best leverage available information within a relational universe. The evolution of our communication technologies has empowered faster and more effective communication than our ancestors imagined possible. Yet the majority of these innovations have been developed with the intent of encouraging transactions. Next-generation connectivity platforms have adopted the same playbook as similar technologies past; capital dictates what messages are spread to whom. Throughout human history, our relationships with others and the systems surrounding us have been fragile because there is always a risk of subjugation when interacting with them. Today these relationships are eroding more rapidly. We are losing trust in others, our institutions, and ourselves. Here we examine the depth of the crisis of information, truth, and trust to identify root causes and misalignments with the single truth and the relational universe.
The crisis of information, truth, and trust is not a recent phenomenon; however, its impact on the individual has dramatically accelerated over the past thirty years. Media outlets have always been a tool of corporations and political parties. There have been few, if any, points in our time experience where Americans were receiving unbiased news. As the mid-1800s journalist William Gienapp explained, “The power of the press consists not in its logic or eloquence, but in its ability to manufacture facts, or to give coloring to facts that have occurred.” Journalists preferring to create narratives instead of reporting on them have long shaped individuals’ beliefs. By the mid-twentieth century, wars, regulations, and bipartisan consensus on social protections led to a more objective presentation of the news in the United States, a trend that began reversing with the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.43 Afterward, commercial news networks quickly transformed into propaganda centers seeking to continually push the boundaries of belief within their audience to better capitalize. Before the advent of social media, these channels were somewhat restricted. Not everyone could access them via their providers, and content aired at specific time frames that could be easy to miss. Following the exponential growth of communication technologies, news shifted to a distribution model favoring optimizing content for virality. This method of information distribution intends to draw emotion from sensational headlines and increase clicks. it’s a method of information distribution that seeks to prey on emotion to generate profit.
This sensationalist approach has an inherent flaw: the boundaries of what is shocking and attention-grabbing must be continually pushed in order to remain effective. The result is an increasingly rigid polarization of the population.44 Information channels train the individual to view others as different and threatening in order to sow collective discord. A focus on differences prioritizes a handful of fringe issues while intentionally avoiding the root causes of why material struggle continues to spread. Corporate news has become synonymous with disinformation and division, straining our ability to tell reality from falsehoods, resulting in widespread erosion of trust in information sources.
Over time, these narratives fester into manifestations of dominion ethos where anything beyond the scope of individual preference is false or fake. Through the perpetual stoking of fear and anxiety, they create a perpetual boogeyman of those with alternative visions of the good. Over time, the narrative becomes more than an information stream; for many, it becomes an embodied identity. Companies are profiting from creating time experiences where the individual actively works against their personal health, economic, and political interests under the guise of defeating an invisible other. It is an immoral and manipulative process that is willing to harm the many for the material and political benefit of the few, a shortsighted approach to profiteering that disregards our oneness with the relational universe. This proliferation of rigid systems of belief and value conflicts with our understanding of the relational universe, driving us further out of alignment with the single truth.
History teaches us that when the individual time experience exists within a state of scarcity and anxiety, authoritarian leaders are a likely outcome. Our present observations show us that even if authoritarianism doesn’t take hold, it leaves a residue that will attempt to reform itself. Authoritarianism fuels itself through the manufacturing of otherness. It preys on fear to create hate. It is a form of political power that attracts desperate people looking for an escape from their own personal hells, pawns in a game they do not realize is being played.
Authoritarians and their followers decry criticism as stifling their freedoms of speech and expression. The philosopher Karl Popper addressed this through his paradox of tolerance. “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”45
Authoritarianism will expand if the crisis of information, truth, and trust is not addressed through individual and systemic reform. This is further accelerated by our continued descent into the age of crisis. Circumstances where an increase in vulnerable and insecure individuals will occur are almost certain. There is a possibility that some form of authoritarianism will always pervade human society. Opportunistic individuals preying on the destitute to gain personal power aren’t new occurrences in human history. Eliminating the idea entirely is unlikely, given the nearly infinite potential divergences of information in our universe. Limiting its spread is within our power, but only if we are willing to choose alternative forms of organization. This requires creating and implementing systems to develop and nurture the individual’s empathic and intellectual capabilities to a point where they easily reject these ideologies. At the same time, we must consistently revisit our definitions of what is and is not acceptable public speech by law. There is nothing inherently freeing about the open oppression of others so the individual may benefit; to deny this is to empower it.
Consider how social media has changed the information streams we consume daily. For most of human history, the process of receiving new information was incredibly slow. Oral traditions were memorized and spread from generation to generation. For most of our history, the written word was only accessible by a relative few until the invention of the printing press. Even then, it took longer to create and distribute content than it did to consume it, creating a bottleneck in the process that curbed oversaturation.
Today we struggle with the opposite challenge. We are inundated with information to the degree that it distracts us from genuine engagement. Dissemination of content is completed through precise algorithmic targeting; individuals are considered nothing more than profiles to be modified. Our most popular social media platforms operate under frameworks where the primary intent is to manipulate us into acting in ways that serve them. These platforms leverage click-bait media to incite our emotions and targeted product advertisements to encourage us to consume more in these heightened states. These platforms narrow the information we receive that conflicts with our present worldviews while deepening access to content aligning with our existing beliefs. This, in itself, is not a terrible thing; we often prefer engaging with like-minded individuals and groups. However, the price we pay to connect with friends is subjecting ourselves to a model of profiting rooted in information delivery methods that allow advertisers to shift our thoughts and actions ever-so-slightly. We now understand that these behavioral changes are real and measurable46 but occur gradually, so the change in our perception seems almost natural. The crisis of information, truth, and trust spawns from the systems we rely on to expand our humanity through their reinforcing of philosophies of meaning and value that diminish us. Consumerism is a cancer of the human time experience.
The crisis of information, truth, and trust calls into question the very nature of the human experience. Why are we so malleable? Since the dawn of our existence, the individual has taken many forms, constantly adapting and adjusting to the needs of the immediate present. Collectively, we have forgotten more things than any one individual could hope to master in a lifetime. Humanity’s ability to change is our most defining characteristic, which is unsurprising given our inhabiting a universe governed by the single truth. As observers, we embrace knowledge and change our beliefs and actions accordingly. Inspired by our infinite imaginations, we develop a more expansive humanity by expressing our powers of creation to transform the world around us. Our divine powers overshadow an inherent struggle of being one with the relational universe. Information continually shifts our understanding in a specific direction; sometimes we notice, and other times we don’t. At times we embody knowledge, beliefs, and habits that pull us away from the visions we establish for ourselves. The state of insecurity an individual inhabits within a given moment impacts how vulnerable they are to influence in directions conflicting with views and visions they hold dear. We begin to embody the information we consume. After a certain threshold, we become it, directing our focus and energy toward creating its vision and encouraging others to do the same. Our old self becomes lost to a past we can never access. This explains why so many today living in states of fear, anxiety, and anger toward others are those who have been disproportionately impacted by the crisis so far. The crisis of information, truth, and trust reveals our shared vulnerability for what it is: an inescapable part of being within a relational universe.
The human being is in many ways a primal clay, able to reshape itself to reflect its surroundings. We are most powerful when we are actively directing this change through our focus and energy. We are weakest when we are caught in the wave of our time experience, unaware of our power and absorbed in information streams unworthy of our attention. We will always have a crisis of information, truth, and trust within systems of organization that prioritize transaction as the highest form of cooperation. Institutions that allow and promote the proactive confusion and manipulation of the populations they intend to serve warp our time experiences in ways out of alignment with the single truth and the relational universe. We must overcome this crisis because within it, we are increasingly impotent to collaborate around transcending it. Our development of new spiritual philosophies of meaning and value is rooted in a deep trust in the other. To establish that trust, we must reconsider what is and is not acceptable within the verticals of society that connect us to one another.
Points of Reflection: Chapter 1
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The environmental crisis and the ensuing extinction of species will devastate a significant majority of our global population. Several groups are proactively furthering our descent in order to profit.
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Our legal arrangements support rigid hierarchy as the dominant form of global organization. This is rooted in the hierarchal spiritual philosophies that guided their foundation.
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The few at the top of the pyramid proactively maintain these systems through the capture of our political institutions. They own both the productive networks and the systems designed to support their revision.
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For many, the opportunity to productively participate in society is presently unavailable. Our present methods of developing individual and group capacity ensure that this trend will continue to exclude more people if we do not actively change them.
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Our systems of change exist in a state of capture. They only serve to further what is.
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The combination of these crises and a lifetime of propaganda channels is developing individuals who are insecure in themselves, others, and the systems surrounding us. We want to be more but lack the frameworks to do so.
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Our greatest challenge lies in overcoming the dogmas that have dominated our philosophies of meaning and value. Central to this is the abandonment of the belief that death is a pathway to some inaccessible paradise. Divinity is found only within the moment.