Ontological Intervention

The highest leverage point for system change

Last night, I went to a gathering on the Upper West Side for a new Leftist organization, Progressive International, that seeks to unite the global progressive movement. I appreciate what they are seeking to do. I donated to their cause. Their vision statement is full of noble ideals and principles. They aspire to a world that is: “Democratic, decolonised, just, egalitarian, liberated, solidaristic, sustainable, ecological, peaceful, post-capitalist, prosperous, and plural.” I recommend you check it out. If inspired, please contribute something since they are, like so many Leftist organizations, hampered in what they can do by a severe lack of funds. 

I often reflect on the failure of Leftist or progressive movements to succeed. I am sure that the vast majority of people in the US, for instance, would prefer to have free health care and excellent public education instead of a handful of ego-centric billionaires controlling our social networks, media, commerce, land, and resources. Personally, I would be very happy to make relatively extreme personal sacrifices as part of a collective mission to repair the damage we have done to the biosphere. But somehow, the collective will to undertake such a mission doesn’t materialize. Instead, we watch helplessly as billionaires build superyachts and underground Hawaiian bunkers while hungry climate refugees stream north. As a reward for our compliance and complacency, we get to screen dystopian zombie movies on Netflix and display ourselves to each other on TikTok. 

The major reason the Left has not done better is the massive funding differential. The enormously wealthy Right Wing operates many think tanks as well as covert operations (read Jane Mayer’s Dark Money for details). They’ve managed to mindfuck the public to an extraordinary degree. This has reached such a level that it is hard to imagine a counter-movement that could disentangle people’s thinking and turn off the paranoid projections. The extremism and idealism of the Left is, also, a problem: An Achilles’ heel that the Right has pounced on effectively, via the culture wars. 

I may be an outlier, but when I consider what we need to do to build a winning counter-movement at this increasingly critical threshold, I believe it begins not with any activist program or social ideology, but with ontology. This may seem quite abstract. Let me unpack it. 

According to the Dictionary, ontology is the area of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence. Ontology studies “how we determine if things exist or not, as well as the classification of existence. It attempts to take things that are abstract and establish that they are, in fact, real.” Materialism remains the dominant ontology among the Left and progressive community: “In philosophy, materialism is a monistic (everything is composed of the same substance) ontology that holds that all that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, everything is material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions.” This characterizes, generally, the progressive worldview, which remains post-Marxist in essence. 

In Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, systems analyst Donella Meadows considers “the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises” as the highest leverage point  for bringing about systemic change (actually, she places “the power to transcend paradigms” as one level above this, but, for reasons that will hopefully become clear, I think she is wrong about this). She quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson (one of my heroes): 

Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to … their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day … see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons…. It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas … would cause the most striking changes of external things.

Expanding on this idea, Meadows writes: 

The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an afterlife. We build skyscrapers, because we believe that space in downtown cities is enormously valuable. (Except for blighted spaces, often near the skyscrapers, which we believe are worthless.) Whether it was Copernicus and Kepler showing that the earth is not the center of the universe, or Einstein hypothesizing that matter and energy are interchangeable, or Adam Smith postulating that the selfish actions of individual players in markets wonderfully accumulate to the common good, people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.

You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing.

I wholeheartedly agree with Meadows and Emerson here. While it is very difficult to change the underlying paradigm of society as a whole, any society is made up of individuals. Those individuals can undergo a paradigm shift at any moment. When enough individuals have made a shift, society as a whole will follow. 

I’ve witnessed this phenomenon with psychedelics. When I published Breaking Open the Head in 2002, you could not speak publicly about psychedelics. They were ridiculed in the mainstream media and under extreme legal interdiction. My book helped inspire a cultural reconsideration. Journalists started writing articles about their ayahuasca experiences (often still seeking to maintain an arch tone of disdain, even while undergoing profound self-transformations). People started talking about it. The word got out. Now we have a massive, ongoing psychedelic renaissance. 

Our contemporary ontology needs to be clarified and coherently redefined if we are ever going to unify the collective will in a new social movement to transform this civilization before it kills everyone and everything on Earth besides amoeba and tardigrades.

We don’t live in a society that puts a high value on disciplined philosophical or reflective thought. Many people in the progressive world mix together materialist and mystical beliefs, without seeing any dichotomy. They may, for example, subscribe to reductive materialism yet feel some awareness of psychic activity such as telepathy or synchronicity. But the reality is that reductive materialism or physicalism is an obsolete belief system. It needs to be cast aside. 

As I explored in past works, a new way of understanding the nature of reality—a new ontology—has emerged in the last century, which we can call monistic or analytic idealism. I find this to be a crucial development which can transform our civilization’s underlying paradigm, and therefore, as a result, reshape our society as a whole.