(2020-03-15) Hall Situational Assessment Right Now

Jordan Hall: Situational Assessment: Right Now. The story of the unfolding meta-crisis (Long Emergency) that we have been watching for the last decade has become enormously more salient over the past few weeks.

We are in the middle of a Great Transition from one attractor to another. Meta-systemic dynamics like the 2008 Financial Crisis (Credit Crisis 2008) (and its child the European Debt Crisis), Brexit, the 2016 Donald Trump election and the present Covid-19 crisis are all examples of and symptoms of that Transition.

I. Major Threat Vectors

Medical System Overwhelm

Resource depletion.

Panic buying

Cash depletion. 70% of the U.S. population lives paycheck to paycheck.

This cascades both into civil unrest and into deeper, longer term economic harm. Note. Civil unrest here does not necessarily mean looting. A well organized “rent / mortgage” strike is a perfectly plausible (and possibly necessary) event. This will move cash depletion risk into financial system risk. Be careful lest the cure is also the poison.

Supply chain overwhelm

Civic infrastructure overwhelm. Reduction in capacity of police, EMS, fire leads to increasing gaps in civic infrastructur

Pile-on and copycat events. Anyone who has been thinking about dropping an asymmetric attack (particularly biowarfare and cyberwarfare) might see this as a high leverage moment

Continuity of governance.

Financial System Collapse.

Authoritarianism

Multi-Polar Traps [Political].

Multi-Polar Traps [Geopolitical].

Super-fragility [Whole].

II. Opportunity

Learning. As mentioned at the top, this event provides a uniquely rich and salient opportunity for learning.

we are now faced with increasingly intense consequences under growing complexity. And the dawning reality that the governance structures (see Blue Church) that have been making our choices for us for the past 70 years are not well designed to address these kinds of problems.

So what do we get to / need to learn?

Systemic Fragility

It is possible to have both abundance and anti-fragility. Hopefully this year we will begin to learn how to get there.

Decentralized Sensemaking. Many, John Robb foremost among them, have noticed that networks have done a vastly better job of making sense of the unfolding meta-crisis than official channels (e.g, the “main stream media”)

Decentralized Agency.

Our legacy institutions are, for the most part, doing their level best to serve us. And in many cases they are succeeding. But as we saw in 2008, both the wisdom and integrity of their choices can often leave much room for improvement. The current crisis is much more complex and is unfolding quickly. We have now both an opportunity and, plausibly, necessity to upgrade our collective decentralized agency and to solve problems together.

The more we learn how to quickly use our capacity for communicating with nearly anyone in the world in multiple modalities (text, audio, video, symmetric, asymmetric) to orient our attention to the right information, people and projects and then to support coordinated action, the more we can move that agency from the old 20th Century hierarchical bureaucracies that currently run the world to much more flexible, adaptive, nuanced and intelligent 21st Century “self-organizing collective intelligences” (SOCI) that can fully respond to meta-systemic dynamics.

How do we do this?

Theory First

Six Steps:

Upgrade your Sovereignty

Upgrade your Discernment

Upgrade your Integrity.

Subject to your own Integrity, support others in their Sovereignty, Discernment and Integrity.

Orient your own and others attention to those who have shown (to your Discernment) the most Sovereignty, Discernment and Integrity and the most capacity in supporting others therein.

Build individual and collective skillfullness in all of these things

From Theory To Practice

First order is to try and point the right people to the right problems, then to point the right people to the right developing solutions, then to orient everyone to the resources they need.