The Inner Life of the Future

The Third Attractor, The Third Horizon, and the Third Reality

The viable future for humanity question is often framed as a search for ‘the third attractor’. I first came across this idea in a Daniel Schmachtenberger disquisition, but I have seen other versions of the same contention, namely that a corollary of any rational metacrisis analysis is that the two main default scenarios for the world over the next few decades are collapse and dystopia.

As the First Attractor of ecological collapse (in particular) intensifies and democratic institutions continue to fail to avert it or to deal with its social and economic impact on everything from death to hunger to health to migration to war, the Second Attractor of authoritarianism will grow stronger, the notion of a global community will be called into question, borders will close or be contested, and some combination of techno-feudalist economics, a surveillance society governed by AI and social credit ratings, and ambient militarism with indefinite catastrophic risk will reign.

But are we really condemned to submit to Moloch and watch as the human superorganism destroys its only home? I don’t think so. The contention is that we need a Third Attractor to avert the gravitational pull of the first two attractors, but because this is a rational analysis, if the case for the first two attractors being our default trajectory doesn’t feel true to you, or if you feel there are clearly more than three patterns of possibility, it’s exciting and imperative to explore why.

The Third Attractor is not fully specified or politically salient today, but nor is it terra incognito. For instance, Jeremy Lent has written and spoken about an ecological civilization, Joanna Macy refers to ‘The Great Turning’, Zak Stein has a vision of a Global Paidiea, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics acts as a third attractor for many, as does Hanzi Freinacht’s Listening Society, William Irwin Thompson outlines the contours of a planetary civilization of the sort intuited by Sri Aurobindo, Tim Jackson speaks of an economy of craft, care, and culture, Daniel Schmachtenberger speaks of a “wise digital open society” and has specified some of its design constraints. I kept all these ideas in mind when I wrote about the difference between our near-term goal to protect open societies and our longer-term entelechy.

Some feel that it is a mistake to make the third attractor too explicit. Envisioning and imagining based on existing cultural and conceptual reference points is likely to perpetuate problematic aspects of the status quo from which those reference points are derived. As Marcel Proust once put it, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Among people I know, I believe Bonnitta Roy, Nora Bateson, Ivo Mensch, and Mark Vernon all have some version of this view. While these four theorists all have distinct worldviews and epistemological dispositions, they seem to share an inclination not to be too quick to specify how the new world looks, for instance, new models of ownership (eg Indy Johar), The Civium (Jordan Hall), the future of money (eg Brett Scott), the quality of bioregional governance(eg Joe Brewer) or the nature of polycentric democratic accountability(eg Elinor Ostrom). Instead, there is a more oblique, subtle but perhaps ultimately more reliable emphasis on how the new world might feel with a greater emphasis on metaphysics (a new perception of time, a new view of causality, a direct perception of value, an appreciation for complex potential states in which a keener perception of latency becomes generative, and, intriguingly, aphanipoeisis - “an unseen coalescence towards vitality”. The third attractor might also be thought of more simply and profoundly as love, and that’s the basis of the strategy of one of Fetzer’s main funders, The Fetzer Institute who speak of “A spiritual foundation for a loving word.” It might seem too quaint at first blush, but who’s to say that love is not, after all, the answer?

The third attractor is not one idea, then, but more like a disposition not to give up on the future, and to relate to a desirable version of it in such a way that it is more likely to be brought into being. Here I would put a word in for Perspectiva’s recent work on Temporics and particularly Bonnitta Roy’s resolute argument about the asymetric quality of past and future time. This is complex terrain, not least because there is such a thing as hysteresis, but the fundamentally hopeful point is this: the future hasn’t happened yet. It is our ethical responsibility not to give up on it.

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Any viable third attractor will need inspiration from the imaginative possibilities of ‘the third horizon’. It’s important to grasp that the three-horizon model is not so much about the present, the near future, and the distant future, but in Bill Sharpe’s original formulation it’s about three main attitudes to the future, in the present.

Horizon One is broadly about a managerial approach to business as usual in the present and near future, and so much of modern commentary on our predicament is therefore a kind of triage: prioritising resources, solving the most immediate problems, and perpetual crisis management. There is also plenty of work underway on disrupting business as usual with the entrepreneurial spirit of Horizon Two, our field of adjacent possibility in technology and in culture. However, the best of such innovation is invariably coopted by hegemonic power and managed back into the logic of business as usual to shore up the status quo (‘H2minus’) rather than forging a path to a transformed future (‘H2 plus’). Green growth narratives are vintage H2-minus thinking, as is using universal basic income as a way to justify mass unemployment through technological innovation rather than as a premise to begin to reduce inequality and reorder power across society; and perhaps also the way human rights are legally operationalized to protect plutocratic interests rather than preserve human dignity or enhance human capability. I believe the inner development goals are also likely to be H2minus, but time will tell.

In one reading of the model, it is the visionary who lives in the third horizon (in the present!) who provides the inspiration and imaginative resources to overcome the coercive cooption and systemic inertia of horizon one on horizon two.

To put it very simply (from a previous post) a visionary is a person with good ideas about the future. They might have qualities of the prophet or the designer, or the artist, but above all, they see something that offers others a sense of direction. Historically, a visionary was someone with anticipatory consciousness who could transcend and include the present moment by envisaging and articulating an inspiring form of life. They helped others believe in this ‘form’ to the extent that it began to be ushered into being. For its context, tenor, and resonance Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech is quintessentially visionary in this regard, even though it was specific to civil rights in a particular place and time. 

I believe we need ‘Big V Vision’ for inspiration and direction today. Just as creativity really matters, and creativity research refers to ‘little c creativity’ in a child’s drawing and ‘Big C Creativity’ in the breakthroughs of Einstein’s Physics, so it is with vision. There is ‘little v vision’ for one’s own life, for organisations, and for nations - that is all important, but there is also ‘Big V vision’ for possible futures for life on earth. Here I use the ‘big as significant’ metaphor. Big Vision might be huge in its understanding, but small, subtle, or oblique in its manner. Big Vision is as likely to lean towards the Yin as the Yang, and perhaps more likely, given most credible accounts of the future call for a reduction in aggregate energy demand, some version of what Nate Hagens calls The Great Simplification.

Without some vision that is worthy of our better natures and aware of our worse natures, it is almost inevitable that societal innovation becomes assimilated, rather than leading to deeper lasting qualitative change. Some call this vision a sacred canopy, some a new social imaginary, and others call it a new metaphysics. It sounds abstract, but it has very real effects. One major challenge of our times is therefore work and play of all kinds that speaks not just to triage in the first horizon or attempted transition in the second horizon, but to transformation inspired by visions of the third horizon, which means seeing beyond the existing form of society as it manifests in the present.

So here’s the conundrum: how should we understand the relationship between the third attractor as a motivating ideal or sensibility and the third horizon as an operational constraint and strategic imperative?

I think the naive view is that the third attractor is a kind of picture we can paint that will rally the eight billion troops of planet Earth to heroically cooperate to save our only home. Clearly, that’s not going to work, if only because of the impossible we. But if the third attractor is too subtle, rarified, or niche, it is hard to imagine it shifting incumbent power in a way that overcomes the H2minus vortex. So it seems the third attractor needs to be the optimal level of implicit and explicit so as not to be constituted by necrotic ideas but still tangible enough to be inspiring and resilient so that it can resist the H2minus vortex.

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This brings me to ‘the third reality’ (and, mercifully, the final conceptual structure of this post).

By third reality, I am referring broadly to the subjective interior, our experience of being human. This reality is broad and variegated and goes by many names: consciousness, soul, psyche, feeling, sensibility, taste, noosphere, spirit. The contention is that most visions of the future do not give adequate attention to the depth, potential, and scope of this feature of reality. Hence the title of this post: The Inner Life of the Future, and my book Spiritualise: Cultivating Spiritual Sensibility to Address 21st Century Challenges from 2017:

"I think of spiritual sensibility as a disposition towards reality characterised by concern for the fullness of life and experienced through simultaneous intimations of aliveness, goodness, understanding, and meaning. Those glimpses of wholeness and integration have a texture that is at once emotional, ethical, epistemic, and existential – the feeling of being alive, the conviction that something matters, the intuition that the world makes sense, and the experience that life is meaningful respectively. More substantively...cultivating spiritual sensibility is about deepening our engagement with questions of being(death), belonging(love), becoming(self) and beyondness(soul)."

Note that I am not referring to this third reality as the ‘ultimate reality’ becuase I firmly believe that just as our inner reality (consciousness) is real, material reality and social realities are also really real. This is not about reducing everything to a spiritual premise but rather including spiritual questions as generative of vision we can believe in.

But why ‘third’? At the most basic philosophical level, our world is comprised of three inter-influencing worlds in crisis that are different kinds of reality but part of the same overall reality.

There is a world ‘out there’ - an objective exterior world of processes and events that is mostly the concern of natural science. 

There is a world ‘in here’ - a subjective inner world of thoughts and feelings that is about consciousness and how it feels and manifests and matters and is the concern to philosophy, religion, and psychology.

And there is (in most contexts) a shared world between us, an inter-subjective world of relationships and an inter-objective world of ideas and institutions that is about socially constructed reality, and collective psychology, and is of interest to social scientists and concerned with politics broadly conceived.

As with all duos and trios, there is usually an underlying unity that is defined by them, and which in turn defines them (Everything is one, yes, but One is everything too).

In the public sphere, we speak a great deal through data and science about the external world, and through media and politics we navigate the shared social world, but we rarely look for political or civilizational renewal in the depths of souls or the heights of our spirit, and yet that third kind of reality is a kind of frontier, especially for those who are mostly unfamiliar with it. And it matters not only for its own sake but because it is inextricably connected to the other two realities. For instance, if there is to be a great simplification, and the ends of society are not profit and growth, it matters that the inner world is a much more interesting place than many seem to realise…

But we must beware of spiritual bypassing. The point is not ‘we must be spiritual or else’, nor is it ‘if we are spiritual all will be well’. The word spiritual has a history, and a politics. All sorts of terrible things happen in the name of the spiritual - torture, abuse, the works. The point of highlighting ‘the third reality’ is that subjective encounters with an objective reality that includes subjectivity may well be a precondition for geopolitical renewal. And I believe that point is established by the claim that our metacrisis is ultimately a matter of multi-faceted delusion. How to bring spiritual perspectives, practices, and experiences into our futurology is vexed, but it should be a matter of cultural renewal rather than political coercion.

This three-world perspective is described by Perspectiva in our tagline as systems, souls, and society, but a similar notion is also outlined in different ways in Sociology by Margaret Archer (Structure, agency, culture) and Marvin Harris (Infrastructure, Superstructure, Social structure), in philosophy by Karl Popper (World I, World II, World III), Jurgen Habermas(technical, interpretative, emancipatory knowledge interests) Guattari (Environment, Mind, Society) and in practice by Dave Snowden (Assemblages, Agency, Affordances) and Indra Adnan (I, We, World) amongst others. Even Ken Wilber’s four quadrant map of reality can be thought of as three main aspects of reality because the distinction between objective-interior and objective-exterior, between the ‘it’ and the ‘its’, can be combined with some loss of granular coherence, but without significant loss of intelligibility or explanatory power.

It would be wrong to say such theorists are all saying the same thing because they come from different disciplines, they may not share worldviews or motivations, and many make one of three worlds first among equals, but they are all working to establish first principles and they alight on a remarkably similar philosophical pattern. In Perspectiva language, the relationship between systems, souls, and society is the world and the world changes depending on how that relationship changes.

And yet we’ve already seen that this relationship is prone to inertia and the H2minus vortex, parlty because change initiatives are often met with counter-vailing change initiatives that keep things more or less as they are, and partly becuase without spiritual perspective broadly conceived, it is not easy to fundamentally transform our minds. Kegan and Lahey have turned this insight into a framework and methodology called Immunity to Change. At a societal level, the widely quoted statement that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” comes to mind. There is a general sense of stuckness. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And yet the vector of that sameness is not peace and progress, but collapse or dystopia.

In a distilled post about ‘The Great Turning’ in 2009, Joanna Macy put the challenge as follows:

“Structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want and how we relate to Earth and each other. They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality—and that shift is happening now, both as cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening. The insights and experiences that enable us to make this shift are accelerating, and they take many forms. They arise as grief for our world, giving the lie to old paradigm notions of rugged individualism, the essential separateness of the self. They arise as glad response to breakthroughs in scientific thought, as reductionism and materialism give way to evidence of a living universe. And they arise in the resurgence of wisdom traditions, reminding us again that our world is a sacred whole, worthy of adoration and service.”

The point here is not just that our chance of improving the relationship between systems, souls, and society depends a great deal on tending to our souls, though that is fundamental. There is also a more explicitly spiritual dimension to the argument (James Hilman makes a usual distinction between soul and spirit) that takes us beyond cultural strategy into direct contact or encounter with reality. In Ever Present Origin, Jean Gebser describes this sensibility as follows:

“A mere interpretation of our times is inadequate … This new spiritual reality is without question our only security that the threat of material destruction can be averted. Its realization alone seems able to guarantee man’s continuing existence in the face of the powers of technology, rationality, and chaotic emotion. If our consciousness … cannot master the new reality and make possible its realization, then the prophets of doom will have been correct. Other alternatives are an illusion; consequently, great demands are placed on us, and each one of us has been given a grave responsibility, not merely to survey but to actually traverse the path opening before us.”

When Gebser says “This new spiritual reality is without question our only security that the threat of material destruction can be averted” he is referring to a new kind of consciousness of the sort that is still nascent in a cultural sense, but is evident in many visionaries and pioneers, and beginning to be worked out at a philosophical level, for instance in Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things.

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I feel I am just getting started with this argument about the inner life of the future, but have to draw this morning's post to a close for now so that I can get some lunch and get on with my day…

The initial implication seems to be that if we want a third attractor that is neither too explicit nor too implicit we are only likely to find it in the third horizon (albeit in the present) and we are only likely to find it there with something resembling a spiritual sensibility in ‘the third reality’. That sensibility may be quite subtle and it might look and feel quite different from what has gone before; while also co-arising with new forms of social and ecological practice.

I think this inquiry leads to the case for innovations in eco-social-spiritual praxis that work to make consciousness relevant, grounded in an understanding of power in our historical and cultural milieu, and informed by cutting-edge theory. Perhaps that’s what the organisation I lead, Perspectiva is up to, at least in principle, though I had never quite seen it this way until now.

What do you think? Does this make sense? More importantly, does it feel right?

Or am I just getting high on conceptual structures again?