Sensemaking

All civilizations have fallen. Every one of them fell because the story it lived in was based on rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics. We now have a global civilization, and we have not created a shared story of value. We have not solved the generator functions that caused every civilization before us to fall.

That is the meta-crisis. And the only response that is viable is a New Story of Value.

A New Story of Value is a shared understanding about what is real and what actually matters. In order to generate coherent global responses to our global crises, we need a shared story of value.

Every Sunday, Dr. Marc Gafni teaches live, articulating that New Story week by week.

Look around. Exponential technologies and extraction models are depleting the earth of resources it took billions of years to create. Polarization defines the landscape. Every country competes against every other country. Within every country, everyone competes against each other. Even in our relationships it becomes me against you.

Underneath all of it is something deeper. We no longer have a source of value. We do not have a shared Universe Story. We do not have a story of human identity, a story of desire, or a narrative of power. We have a failure of frameworks.

This is the real root of existential risk. Every one of the risks to the planet that exist today traces back to a failure of intimacy, which is itself a failure of a shared story of value.

We live in a time when the purpose of life is no longer clear.

For most of history, the story of value came from divine revelation. God told us what was good and what was true. Then modernity realized that every religion had overreached and over-claimed, so it threw out revelation. But it was never able to establish a new basis for value. It simply assumed value was real. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Modernity took out a loan from the traditional world and never paid it back. And gradually the belief that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are real began to collapse. The belief that love is real began to collapse.

So the old stories of value no longer hold, and the New Story has not yet been born. That gap is what it means to live in a time between worlds and a time between stories.

We have been here before. The Renaissance was a time between worlds. The Black Death swept Europe and people had no idea how to meet it. In responding to it, da Vinci and Ficino understood they had to tell a New Story of Value, and that story became modernity. We stand at the same kind of threshold now. The difference is that the stakes are higher, the picture is bigger, and the way through to a new world is even more promising.

The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is linear time, duration, clock time. It is the rhythm of civilization, the seasons, the ordinary course of life. Kairos is something else. Kairos is a penetrable opening in the flow of time, a chink in the armor of Chronos through which the truly new can emerge. It is the time within time, the pregnant time, when the unimaginable is imagined and the impossible becomes actual. One hour is not worth the same as any other.

We are in Kairos now. A Da Vinci moment. A time of almost unbearable intensity, potential, and change.

When modernity threw out revelation, it deconstructed the very source of value, and it lost the basis for the good, the true, and the beautiful. What do you do if you grew up in a world in which value is not real? That collapse of value is the source of existential risk. Fragmented science and theory is now being translated into civilizational practice in ways that are degrading our humanity and endangering all life as we know it.

This is why re-establishing that value is real is the most essential work of this moment. It is the great reconstructive project, after all the deconstruction of postmodernity. Value is as primary in Reality as time and motion and space. You cannot get out of value. We live in a Field of Value.

The work is to evolve the source code: to tell a New Story of Value that does the hard work of integrating the best validated insights of the premodern, modern, and postmodern worlds into a universal grammar of value that raises all boats. This is the move from Homo sapiens to Homo amor.

This is not a regular podcast, because you can actually join live. You can be there. You can be in the chat box. You can be studying with a community of people online all around the world. That is what makes it so special.