The Big Switch

February 27th, 2023

A BEHAVIOR ALTERNATIVE

There is a survival mode and a development one.

When we think that the short-term goal is survival, we are programmed to act individually and competitively.

Fly or fight. Physiologically, our body pumps blood to the limbs so that we can survive by fleeing danger or fighting it.

When we understand that we are in development mode we are able to expand our individual horizons, empathize, collaborate and think collectively.

The physiology of this state makes our body pump blood back to our viscera and brain which helps us develop physically, emotionally and intellectually

From that standing point one thing becomes extremely clear.

Nowadays, What people build is what companies, enterprises and corporations won’t.

Profit above all is much more related to fight or fly than development mode. It is the famous culture of fear.

On the other hand, Bitcoin is one of many examples that there are models, frameworks, businesses, and money to be made out of cooperative and distributive paradigms. Assets and hierarchy structures we don’t frequently see in tradicional enterprises.

Such social and economic disruptiveness comes most frequently from people’s actions and collaboration rather then tradicional for-profit competitive companies.

At the end of the day it’s just a matter of which side of the narrative you wanna dedicate yourself. As a consumer based society, demand/offer paradigm, you can choose either to opt into unconscious, coercive, excluding models, tools, services, institutions and initiatives or support a more direct and efficient way of transferring and distributing knowledge and wealth.

For instance, you can, as a shallow example, choose to buy from the local farmer who will very likely be some who takes good care of its land, productions system and contributes directly to development of its family and community instead of a giant supermarket who has no specific owner and where a small group of controllers accumulates most, distributes little and harms environmental and social systems.

At the end of the day, it’s just about a way of life and mindset that got very widely spreaded and accepted despite of also being very inefficient and self destructive as if you did not have an alternative, a option where deeper understanding of the inter-depended scheme of nature itself teaches us a better way to organize ourselves as a keystone species. Biomimetics is a very good starting point to understand how we can get inspiration on nature-based 13 billion years old solutions and prototypes.

The better the system is the better its participants are. Cleary not what we see in our current societies.

In an bizarrely asymmetrical system there will always be clash instead of balance.

Shall we abandon “power over” structures and incentivize “power with” one’s?!

Proof that there already is an alternative paradigm:

Janine Benyus