The Threeness of the World (6/6)

The Meaning of 'Systems, Souls, and Society'

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets.

This is the sixth and final post in a series of inquiries into the threeness of the world, but it stands, falls, or wobbles all by itself.

The quick version of what follows is that I ask, in light of my prior and more general inquiry into threeness, what the particular expression ‘systems, souls, and society’ - Perspectiva’s foundational idea, means. I answer that it is a kind of organon - a tool to acquire, structure and use knowledge, and that although it works as a philosophical premise by offering a way of saying what the world is made of, and clarifying the different ways we know and value it, that’s not the heart of the matter. As an organon, Systems, souls, and society is best understood as a kind of antidote to failed theories of change that stem from relatively limited ways of knowing. The point of a threeness that foregrounds systemic understanding, soulful dispositions and societal struggle is to allow understanding, spirit, and power to coalesce in the requisite ways, to help us overcome endemic delusion and slay the conceptual zombies it gives rise to.

This is a long post - about twenty minutes for most. I hope I have saved the best for last, but please forgive me if it’s just too long. Sometimes you have to be allowed to geek out, and that can lead to obscure places. I am grateful for the extensive engagement on prior posts in this series and hope it continues here. I start with a little personal disclosure to contextualise the purpose of the series and the value of where it has led.¹

My colleague Tomas Bjorkman recently noted that over a decade of working together, he has observed that I have a curious quality: I regularly demonstrate the capacity to communicate clearly, but I often choose not to. Sometimes I follow up on a clear statement with something that challenges the clarity. It can feel like I give something understandable and take it away simultaneously, leaving people less comfortable than they might have been. This equivocal quality is probably why I have never made it as a business speaker, but I felt seen and touched by the observation, in a similar way that I appreciated when Bonnitta Roy said I “lead from my confusion”.

I find these observations weirdly validating. I want the reader to know that I would follow clarity into battle against most adversaries, but it’s no accident that we speak of how deep our love is, not how clear it is, and if there were ever a battle for control of the heavens, I would guard ambiguity with my life. Ambiguity, vagueness, confusion, mystery, aporia, potentiality and (joyous) struggle are where I find the taste of freedom most flavoursome. In chess, we sometimes say of an idea that seems brilliant but is likely to have a flaw that it’s “too beautiful”. I feel that way about clarity, too. You need enough of it, but you can have too much. I am suspicious of anything, particularly conceptual structures, that seems too clear because life has taught me to see such clarity as an epistemic persona - a kind of public performance of knowledge that is less than the whole story.²

The official name of the organisation I co-founded with Tomas a decade ago is Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society. I have led Perspectiva (the given name) since then, and the three-world premise has been at the heart of my professional life. For instance, my interview with Krista Tippett for the popular podcast On Being in 2019 had the title: Integrating Our Souls, Systems, and Society. You can also see below that it is one of our ten premises, and while they are all important, and all interrelated, it might be our most important.

In light of my desire for optimal clarity, I decided to ask myself if I really understand what systems, souls, and society means. This six-part inquiry can therefore be understood as the source energy of an organisation, ten years on, encountering and analysing the epistemic persona of the organisation, which must be a new genre of therapy. The aim, pace T.S. Eliot, is to return to where we started, and know where we are for the first time.

The general idea that we live in three worlds is an attempt to provide intellectual grounding and orientation to help make sense of what is happening in the world, while also becoming what Ursula Le Guin calls realists of a larger reality.

At first blush, the idea is that we live at once in an external world, an internal world and a shared world, and each of these worlds co-arises and influences each other, but they are also distinct in important ways, in terms of how we know and value them.

In slightly more detail:

• There is a world ‘out there’ - an objective exterior world of processes and events that can (in principle) operate entirely independently of human perception and is mostly the concern of natural science.

• There is a world ‘in here’ - a subjective interior world of consciousness, thoughts and feelings, full of emotion, meaning, and mattering; the concern of philosophy, religions, and psychology.

• There is (in most contexts) a shared world ‘between us’ and/or ‘for us’, an inter-subjective and inter-objective life of culture and ideas and institutions that forms a socially constructed reality and patterns of collective psychology; that world is of interest to social scientists and is the domain of politics broadly conceived.

The world is comprised of the relationship between these three worlds, and the world changes as that relationship changes. We know and value each of these worlds in different ways, and they call for different kinds of inquiry, evaluation, agency, practice and protection. Perspectiva refers to these worlds as systems (exterior), souls (subjective), and society (inter-subjective and inter-objective). One can understand ‘systems' at many different levels of complexity, but a simple definition is that it is a set of elements in relationship within a boundary operating for some kind of goal. Similarly, ‘souls’ can mean many things, but in essence, the soul is about the individual experience of being alive. And ‘society’ is roughly the mixture of technology, institutions, practices and culture that characterise our shared world.

I used the example of climate change to illustrate this point in part two.

There is ‘the science’ which contends with greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and their impact on land, ice and sea; and food and water (systems). There is ‘the experience’ of climate change not only in terms of homes being burnt down or flooded but also in terms of widespread denial, anxiety, anger and/or guilt (souls). And there is something like ‘the politics’, which is about how the discussion impacts the economy and unfolds culturally, the relative salience of the issue, the justice of loss and damage, thousands of civil society organisations, the scope for international cooperation, the UN climate regime etc (society). All of the above is ‘climate change’, and these three worlds need to be in conversation, but they are different worlds, calling for distinct kinds of discernment and agency…

So that’s the idea!

Why not leave it at that?

Because, philosophically at least, it’s never quite that simple.

What follows might sound like white noise, but I share it to convey the sense of vigilance I experience, which might be a trace element remaining from my years as a professional chessplayer when I had to constantly monitor how my opponent might see the position differently. So I wonder, for instance:

Is there really an ‘out there’ and an ‘in here’ in the context of, for instance, Four E Cognitive Science, where the mind is embodied, enbedded, enactive and extended?

Does ‘systems’ really work to characterise the ontology of the objective world rather than merely as one way - the systems way - of knowing it?

And if an apparently ‘objective’ natural system like a nervous system can still co-arise with subjectivity, this is very different from a relatively inter-subjective education system, or a relatively inter-objective economic or political system, which means that ‘systems’ is doing some polysemantic acrobatics. ³

Even the self can be seen as a system comprised of micro sub-systems in a context of wider macro systems - does that not complicate the distinctiveness of soul as a placeholder term for that terrain? (What is the soul anyway?).

David Bohm even wrote of Thought as a system, and as I indicated when discussing Karl Popper in part three, thought manifests in books and institutions. And then Carl Jung, bless his cotton socks, believed in an objective psyche, which complicates the notion that our inner lives are inherently subjective.

Maybe we need the idea of God to help us transcend the ultimately false distinction between objective and subjective? (Is that what transjective is about?)

And does ‘society’ include both what is inter-subjective (eg culture) and what is inter-objective (eg technology or law) as indicated, for instance, in Ken Wilber’s metatheory and AQUAL maps, and if so, is that one world or two?

And why are there so many different maps of threeness from different disciplines and practices? Do they really map to each other and some underlying reality, or are they all pragmatically conjured, and incidentally threefold?

Welcome to my world. I am lucky to have these kinds of problems and not others, but it does seem to be my job to grapple with them. That’s what I have been doing in this series, and continue to do here.

***

I began with a general introduction to the metaphysics of threeness in part one, and I said the disquisition would inform various things, but I didn’t say why, so let me briefly do that now. The point of recognising the threeness of the world is about:

• Why we can’t buy love (because different worlds have different forms of value).

• Why technical solutions fail (because they often overlook adaptive challenges that are not about systems but souls or societies).

• Why money is ultimately a confidence trick (because it has no economic reality beyond socially constructed agreement).

• Why it sometimes feels like culture is running on empty (because we have neglected soul for too long).

• Why we should not seek to understand an individual in the way we understand a group (because while souls may evolve and mature, societies are defined by a wide range of emergent properties arising from the interplay of, for instance, race, class, institutions, technology etc).

• Why there are limits to systems thinking (because systems are often framed as being thing-like or machine-like, but often they are more like processes with psyches).

• Why spiritual bypassing is a problem (because power matters).

• Why it’s not enough to have a better conversation (because systems are not directly affected, and souls are rarely moved).

• Why we need different kinds of power (because we have lost sight of how to build adequate collective agency in the context of alienating systems).

*

In part two, there is a preamble to maps and territories that goes beyond the cliche that “the map is not the territory” partly because the territory is often comprised of maps. I make this case via Nietzsche’s formidable moustache, Aurobindo’s trustworthy beard, contributions from Latour and Bhaskar and why Ursula Le Guin’s desire to be “realists of a larger reality” is important. Recognising the threeness of the world helps us see the unsuspected political frontier at the map/territory interface, and it matters that our maps confer greater salience and relevance to the fullness of reality, including not just interest rates and data centres and the latest election, but also love, beauty, and all that jazz, including jazz.

*

In part three, there is an exploration of ontology and epistemology of threeness through five different justificatory systems that rely on threeness from within analytic philosophy(Karl Popper’s Worlds I, II, III), Cultural Anthropology(Harris’s Infrastructure, Structure, Superstructure), Social Ecology(Felix Guattari’s Ecosophy: environment, social relations, human subjectivity), Sociology(Margaret Archer’s Structure, Culture and Agency) and Metapsychology(Gregg Henriques’s Tree, Coin and Garden). This was a relatively technical post and involved some heavy lifting, but it ends with the case for moving beyond ‘descriptive ontologies’ towards generative ontologies:

There is a risk of cartology becoming cartophilia and then, imperceptibly, cartosclerosis sets in, and before we know it we are lost inside the map.

Descriptive ontologies focus on cataloguing, classifying, and analyzing existing entities and relationships. Generative ontologies seek to produce new realities. Both are required, and the former can even be a kind of training for the latter.³

A descriptive ontology says: this is how things are, we can see the world through it.

A generative ontology says (or rather enacts, enables, instantiates…): In light of how the world presents itself to us at the moment, here is how we can think of things, here, now, and for the purposes at hand (informed in some cases by years of metabolising descriptive ontologies). Generative ontologies are closely related to moral imagination which I have described before as perhaps being a sine qua non for the peaceful resolution of conflict. We have to see anew.

Systems, souls and society works as a descriptive ontology but as indicated below, I believe it can be a generative ontology, depending on how it extrapolated from.

*

In part four, there is an enquiry into the axiology of truth, beauty and goodness which loosely maps onto systems, souls, and society. I learn that ‘the big three’ does not derive from Plato but from the idea of ‘taste’ in the European romantic movement. I reflect on the importance of each of the value spheres (truth/beauty/goodness) and what Habermas believes follows for good communication in the public sphere. It seems to matter that truth, beauty and goodness are distinctive and that they are integrated. Here’s how I put it when considering if any of them are preeminent:

Truth says: “I am the basis of all human progress. I guard against the moral and aesthtic errors that create illusion. Without me, Beauty, you are seduction, propaganda, manipulation - a Nazi Rally. And Goodness, without me you cause great harm; you are virtue signalling and self-rightenousness - The Spanish Inquisition.”

Beauty says: “I motivate action and create meaning. I am the attractor, the elevation, the vitality, the beating heart of all that is best in life. Without me, Truth, you are cold, harsh and cannot even be experienced - a soulless concrete jungle built to specification. Without me, Goodness, you are boring, earnest, rigid, formulaic and dangerous - a paperclip maximiser that destroys the world.

Goodness says: “I am the point, the purpose, the reason. I need to guide knowledge and beauty because I am what makes life worth living. Without me, Truth, what’s to stop you being cruel and destructive, sometimes even in the name of progress - you are the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And without me, Beauty, you are empty, hollow, vain - the slaveowner’s suit, the autocrat’s palace.”

Scientists may lean towards truth, artists towards beauty, activists towards goodness. But they are all necessary….

There’s a reason we need the big three, and there is also good (ahem) reason to think that none are really bigger than the other. The art of life seems to be about achieving balance between truth, beauty and goodness (or It, I and We). The balance is not about trade-offs in a zero sum game, but about navigating between lodestars of belonging that serve us best when we help them to serve each other well. We can almost see it in constitutional terms, an axiological separation of powers with checks and balances to keep us living well. (This point feels pertinent at the moment as the USA struggles to show the separation of powers is still an operative principle.)

*

In part five, I felt inspired to get to a deeper principle behind the value spheres and to consider an example of a shift from descriptive to generative ontologies outlined in part three. I decided to explore the metaphysics of ‘the law of three’ as detailed by Gurdjieff and Bourgeault, and pondered how it relates to fourness and ‘the law of seven’.

One way to see it is that that systems change is the affirming force (let’s change the world!) while the inertia of society is the denying force (let’s keep things more or less as they are) and what souls signifies is the frontier of interiority, and a kind of reconciling ‘third force’ (we need to see and feel and value and imagine differently). That is roughly how it felt to me and Tomas back in the day when we co-founded Perspectiva after our experiences at the RSA and the Club of Rome, where talk of systems change abounded, but few knew how to engage intellectuall and political with spiritual matters. If the problem is that the world seems stuck, because for instance the story of modernity has run out, then our chance of becoming unstuck, or allowing a beneficial transformation, rather than merely enduring collapse, may depend on a quality of spiritual insight. That insight could arise as if as ‘an independent variable’ that does not arise as an emergent property from the tension between systems and society but enters from somewhere else entirely (where exactly metaphysically, I don’t know, but let’s say ‘the imaginal realm’ for now).

Even among those who recognise the threeness of the world, some believe we need to act primarily in one world more than others - some say it’s all about changing systems, for instance by better aligning with ecosystems through Bioregional governance, or that we need new political systems to better regulate technology or that the economic system calls for better macroeconomics; others that it’s all about society, for instance by transforming democracy, media, or education, and some say it’s ultimately about spiritual qualities like beauty or love. There are many panacea-like ideas of how it works out alright, but my intuition is that all three worlds are critically important, and that ‘souls’ can be seen as primus inter pares, or first among equals, because it is closest in nature to the transformative quality of third force that is needed to shift inertia. Indeed, the classic paper by Donella Meadows on where to intervene on a system strongly implies this, in that she says the most effective interventions are about changing the goals of the system, and even more effective is changing the the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises. It seems to me like they can fairly be characterised as spiritual changes.

But that’s not so simple either, becuase as a metaphysical principle, threeness is not altogether stable or alone, and seems to implicate fourness, and maybe even seven too:

Where I have got to is that both threeness and fourness can be seen as descriptive and/or dynamic and they are part of some larger and more mysterious cosmopoeitic process that may or may not be sevenfold and is definitely beyond me. There is the trinity (the reality of God as a trinary relationship) and then there’s the law of three (a hidden law of creation) and there’s the quaternity (stability) and then there’s ‘the missing fourth’ (integration of whatever is neglected/ignored/despised including ‘the marriage quaternio’). It all matters, and it’s uneven in nature, which is why seven, potentially carrying different kinds of three and four, may be even more fundamental.

I prefer the dynamism of ‘the law of three’ to the descriptive quaternity, but I prefer 'the missing fourth’ to a complacent trinity. All these ideas need each other to make sense of themselves and each other. I do believe though that fourness arises from threeness in a way that threeness does not arise from fourness. And I believe threeness is connected to oneness in a way that fourness is not…⁴

**

This little odyssey into threeness has taught me many things:

First, when you are dealing with numbers as archetypal energies and markers of reality it is in their nature to cross-pollinate and move around. For instance, it helps to distinguish between descriptive trios and the dynamic law of three, but they are related. There is an overlap between ontology and phenomenology here that I didn’t appreciate before (and that is part of the bigger metaphysical picture). The overlap is not just between how things are and how we know and value them, but how we experience them. The nature and meaning of this overlap are slightly beyond me, but I feel is now more than I used to.⁵

Second, it seems to me that most forms of threeness have a kind of intra-relational and womb-like intimacy in that oneness can be felt through threeness and vice versa; mother, baby, pregnancy; reader, reading, read; seer, seeing, seen; listener, listening, sound. This pattern seems to stem from an emergent vitality at the heart of reality; one is always already two even when it is observed as one, and two is always already three because of the generative reality of the relationship within itself. Three is not always already four, but it is latently so, and typically becomes so. We need threeness to perceive that unity and relationality are co-constitutive, and it seems to me that the movement within and between three points is the minimal viable pattern of creation. My time thinking about threeness has led me to feel that a fundamental feature of reality is that it is in utero, in the process of being born. While the world does follow certain laws of unfolding, it is fundamentally nascent and unknowable, even, I suspect, to God.

Third, talking of processes, this inquiry into threeness has not committed to any particular metatheoretical take on the world, like process-relational philosophy, but maybe it should have. The qualms I raised earlier about not being sure if there really is a world ‘out there’ or ‘in here’ as such, are fundamental. The more I think about it, the less clear the distinction between subject(ive) and object(ive) becomes, and the harder it becomes to separate, for instance, systems and souls. Perhaps ‘systems, souls, and society’ is better understood as the name for a multi-dimensional reality-forging process that is, say, inter or transpoeitic in the sense that is at once about autopoeisis or self-making (systems), cosmopoeisis or world-making (souls) and sympoeisis or making-with (society). Maybe. It feels like a stretch.

***

Slide designed by Kylen Preator.

Only now can I really comment on what systems, souls, society means, and it is more aout participation than representation.

While it helps to see the three worlds as clear and distinct phenomena, mostly we live in and through their relationship - we are defined by and participate in that threeness (which is also a hidden oneness, a blooming of twoness, a proto-fourness, and hidden sevenness!) to such an extent that to separate the three worlds feels risky. We should not place too much emphasis on an attempt to know the world by accurately representing it, and not enough on what it feels like to understand life by participating in it.

To fully develop the point is beyond our scope here, but I can put it in terms of John Vervaeke’s ‘four Ps’ as ways of knowing. The three worlds work particularly well propositionally; they help us know that the world has these different qualities that are known and valued in different ways. The three worlds idea also helps with perspectival knowing, knowing from, because even when we pronounce on objective and inter-subjective/objective things, we do so from a particular subjective vantage point - and the point of most models of threeness is to say that the subjective realm is legitimate, and irreducible to the objective. And it can even help with procedural knowing, knowing how to, for instance, think about the world from first principles, knowing how to know and value in different contexts, how to think about different kinds of phenomena, how to orient towards a problem. So it’s useful on all those terms.

But what if our access to understanding and truth is primarily about participation? While propositional knowledge is mostly about the objective world, and perspectival knowledge is mostly about the subjective world, and procedural knowledge is mostly about the inter-subjective and inter-objective worlds, as we participate in the world, these things constantly co-arise; and participatory knowing is mostly about a world that is better understood, again in Vervaeke’s terms, as transjective.

Transjectivity might seem like gratuitous jargon, but it is a necessary term to get us away from subject/object dualism. A conversation, for instance, is transjective. It is subjectively experienced and has objective coordinates - not just time and place but notes of what was said, and it takes place in an inter-subjective (eg culture, language) and inter-objective (eg an institution) context. But the field we participate in, the process we are part of, is not a bit subjective, a bit objective and a bit inter-subjective/objective, it is all of that co-arising and co-constituting each other - it is transjective.

**

To deepen this point would require returning to work I began in my PhD in 2005-2008, where I first encountered the idea of enactive cognition. For instance, in The Embodied Mind (1997, p141) Varela, Thompson and Rosch say this:

By treating mind and world as opposed subjective and objective poles, the Cartesian anxiety oscillates between the two in search of a ground.

In a wonderful short book called Ethical Know How in 1999 (p7) Varela builds on the alternative view:

At the very centre of this emerging view is the conviction that the proper units of knowledge are primarily concrete, embodied, incorporated, lived; that knowledge is about situatedness; and that the uniqueness of knowledge, its historicity and context, is not a noise concealing an abstract configuration in its true essence. The concrete is not a step towards something else: it is both where we are and how we get to where we will be.

A few pages later (p18) he suggests this is becoming a new orthodoxy:

Cognitive science is waking up to the simple fact that just ‘being there’, immediate coping, is far from simple or reflexive. Immediate coping is, in fact, the real ‘hard work’ since it took the longest evolutionary time to develop. The ability to make intentional, rational analyses during breakdowns appeared only recently and very rapidly in evolutionary terms.

By breakdowns he’s referring to moments where habitual functioning and automatic processing breakds down, and we need to assemble for ourselves a new (micro) world. This can happen at many scales, and it is another way to understand the nature of the metacrisis, which is partly about our apparent inability to co-create an intelligble shared world.

This seems a useful place to begin to end this series, because I now feel something similar towards the organon of systems, souls, and society that I feel towards the concept of metacrisis, namely that when you allow yourself to exhaustively make sense of it, you can also transcend your need for it and your attachment to it. Just like metacrisis, ‘systems, souls and society’ is a very useful conceptual tool, but the form of understanding it points towards is one that is more about unmapped terrain we are called to participate in, than a reification of the map.

That makes me wonder if this has all been worth it, but perhaps there is no way round but through.

***

So, where does that leave systems, souls, and society? I think it leaves me with my own version of Albert Einstein’s line from a lecture called ‘Geometry and Experience’ in 1921:

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain;
and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

I feel the same way about any given description of threeness. No matter if you are Habermas, Archer, Popper, Wilber or any other great theorist, any given accont of threeness never does justice to reality, and nor should we expect it to.

I now see the value of systems, souls and society as useful for offering an approximate description of reality from first principles, a framing device for conversations, and a way to help avoid certain pitfalls. And the language works for me. It’s ‘systems’ as opposed to ‘stuff’ because that is ontologically and epistemically sounder and reflects an underlying process-relational philosophy (processes and systems and relationships are not the same but they are conceptually kindred). And it’s ‘souls’ as opposed to ‘mind’, becuase I want to invite spiritual practice and metaphysical exploration. And it’s ‘society’ as opposed to culture, because I want to capture the interplay of the intersubjective and the interobjective, to do justice to technology’s influence on society, and the realities of how power operates.

The overall pragmatic purpose of speaking of systems, souls, and society is not just philosophical then, but educational and ultimately even political. The three world orientation informs the discussion of The H2 Minus Vortex, which is our societal immunity to change seen through the prism of the three horizon model, in which innovation in the second horizon typically lacks the requisite third horizon vision and second horizon method to escape the clutches of incumbent power in the first horizon.

I cannot even summarise that whole argument here, but the point is that on closer inspection, political immunity to change often arises because inertia hides within neglected context. Most of our change processes operate on one or two of the worlds but rarely all three together, and the inertia and the countervailing motion usually lies within the features of the world we are not adequately attending to.

We urgently need to develop an H2plus curriculum - to clarify what and how we need to learn so that our efforts to transform the world are genuinely transformative, and not coopted into the status quo. Perspectiva is working on that now, and looking for support of various kinds to do so.

It seems to me that any such curriculum needs premises that help us avoid the vortex. And writing this series has allowed me to see that the systems, souls and society organon is not merely a philosophical premise, but it is also creatively generative because it acts as an antidote to pervasive immunity to change.

With systems, souls and society in mind, then, any good H2plus curriculum will be:

• Beyond systems change - because systems won’t change until we realise they have souls.

• Beyond spiritual bypassing – because the realities of power cannot be wished away.

• Beyond narrative fixation - because we ourselves need to become the story.

• Beyond crisis declarations - because it is time to perceive and think generatively.

To take these briefly in turn:

Beyond Systems Change: A statement from Robert Pirsig’s classic multi-million copy bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (p104) helps to clarify why we need to get beyond ‘systems change’:

The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality that produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

This subtle claim highlights why so much talk about ‘systems change’ is frankly bogus. Until we can see that systems are awash with emotions and epistemologies and suffused with an implicit metaphysics, there is little hope of really changing them. Again, we need to stand back, but also look within and see beyond.

Beyond Spiritual Bypassing: While it’s important to get beyond ‘systems’ as entirely exterior phenomena, it is also possible to go too far the other way, and many do. It is true that Perspectiva believes it is a time for a turn towards our interiority, and – when life as such is in peril - to contend with the nature, meaning and purpose of life on earth. That emphasis can make it look like we believe the world’s problems are ultimately spiritual, but that’s only part of the truth. The challenge now, as it has always been, is to find the discernment to connect spiritual discernment to political realism. In this respect we are inspired by MLK’s famous statement that power without love is “reckless and abusive” but love without power is “sentimental and anaemic”, and that “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”

Beyond Narrative Fixation: The H2plus curriculum is also ‘beyond new story” which is lazy because (to mischievously paraphrase something Gandhi didn’t actually say) we must be the story we want to see in the world. Insofar as we need a new story, we have to not just create it but forge it, become it, and live it. We may fancy ourselves as the authors of our lives but we are also characters in an improvised historical drama. The kinds of stories we need today have not happened yet, and they only arise from our actions, as Joe Brewer puts it well in a relatively neglected three-minute Katie Teague video: Living into Being.

Beyond Crisis Declarations: As we free ourselves from our attachment to crisis (at its most literal, metacrisis means ‘after crisis’) we start to pay more and better attention to what crisis thinking may unhelpfully perpetuate or occlude. For instance, we may start to attend better to what Bonnitta Roy calls ‘complex potential states’ and Nora Bateson calls Aphanipoiesis. These are different ideas, though I don’t think it’s entirely incidental that they both come from women, and both draw attention to the value of what is latent, unseen, and yet perceptible through the kinds of subtle and appreciative inquiry that are precluded by the ‘I-can-fix-it’ crisis mentality.

I might also draw attention to Jeremy Johnson’s intellectual leadership on integral consciousness, Karen O’Brien’s fractal perspective on the challenge of scale. I already mentioned Joe Brewer’s seeking to regenerate bioregions, but there is also the ‘doomer optimism’ of Jason Snyder, who transcends and includes intellectual puzzles in the act of planting trees and growing his own food. I’m also informed by Iain McGilchrist’s detailing of why relationships are prior to relata, which is consonant with Karen Barad’s agental realism and intra-action, which apparently inspired Bayo Akomalafe’s notion of ontological mutiny, part of which is refusing to be entranced by crisis. And although I have yet to explore her work with the care it deserves, Chiara Bottici begins to put the non-dual perspective to work in her writing on Imaginal Politics.

These approaches all feel relatively free of crisis-thinking, and yet none of them are naive about the scale of the challenges we face. Moreover, all of these perspectives and initiatives can be thought of as in some sense ‘non-dual’ in which the mind and the world, the subject and the object, are at once separate and united, and somehow reciprocally constituted. This is deep terrain, but the version I understand best is the (Iain) McGilchrist Manouevre, which refers to “the non-duality of duality and non-duality”.

For my part, I believe the case for The Flip, The Formation and The Fun flows directly from the understanding of systems, souls and society, but that’s another post.

**

We’ve come a long way, but it’s dinner time in Putney, life has different plans for me for tomorrow, and while I could take a few more hours to edit, I need to draw a line.

I think where I have reached is that threeness is fundamental, but I am less sure than I was about what ‘fundamental’ means.

My closing reflection is also a kind of benign suspicion, namely that the world is not in fact three, or four, or seven, or two, or even one, or any other number.

Reality contains mathematics, and numbers may well be archetypal energies. However, the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.

The true nature of reality is ineffable. The true nature of reality is ineffable. The true nature of reality is ineffable.

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Full Series:

The Threeness of the World 1

The Threeness of the World 2

The Threeness of the World 3

The Threeness of the World 4

The Threeness of the World 5

The Threeness of the World 6

1. Many readers have kindly shared their interest in various kinds of threeness, so let me give a brief nod to a few things that I had to leave out. I am aware of Charles Sanders Peirce’s distinction between Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, and I am grateful to Michael Horner and Eric Shaetzel for their generous comments after my first post, both of which highlight Peirce’s deeper commitment to three as an organising principle for thought.

In some ways, it is criminal of me not to make more of this, but then I have also been unable to say much about Hegel, or to compare the Christian Trinity with the Hindu Trimurti nor reflect on whether Islam or Judaism are religions that don’t relate to threeness in the same way. And I would love to have reflected on the three gunas too, and how Tamas might relate to the metacrisis, and understanding Rajas might help diagnose the h2minus vortex, and how Sattva might relate to Third Force, but I just can’t do it all, at least not now…In passing though, I would also draw attention to some other helpful comments by David Macleod, x2, Terry Cooke-Davies, Jesus Martin-Gonzalez, Meg Salter, Suzanne Angela, and Barry Johnston-Spooner.

I should also give a nod to Rudolf Steiner’s idea of social threefolding, and Matt Segal’s essay and talk that details it. Steiner seems to have been a kind of unsuspected anarchist (of the Carne Ross variety) and his detailing of the differences between the economic, political and cultural realms does a similar kind of work to systems, souls, and society, while also clarifying different kinds of value and agency that arise from this view, so I hope to return to it at some point.

I also neglected to spend time with Forrest Landry’s Metaphysics, which includes an argument for ‘fundamental triplication’. I hope to get to that when my appetite for threeness returns.

More generally, I apologise for the myriad trios I neglected to mention!

2. I didn’t see that notion of epistemic persona coming (this is why we write…). In general, the persona is our image, a confected mask for the self to help us conform to societal expectations, project status, and fit in. That persona is different from the real self, which is less socially mediated, less of a performance, and more like a miasma of conflicting thoughts and feelings that we keep relatively private. While a scientist, teacher, or doctor has to assume an epistemic persona to present themselves as authority figures, even when they are full of doubts, or if they cross-dress at home, own an illegal pet python, and go bungee jumping at weekends, that’s not what I mean here. I am referring to the epistemic persona of a concept or framework - the ostensive clarity it offers that masks underlying obscurity. “The free market” has an epistemic persona (it’s not actually free), “democracy” has an epistemic persona (it rarely amounts to rule by the people), and artificial intelligence has an epistemic persona (it’s more to do with data than ‘intelligence’). In general, to have a persona is socially necessary and not a moral fault, and for a conceptual structure to have an epistemic persona does not necessarily mean it is unsound - only that it is a presentation. The idea that concepts have epistemic personas helps to disclose that language can never confer completely solid ground. Any clear answer to almost anything rarely seems so clear after a few subsequent questions.

3. In case it sounds like I am knocking systems understanding, I warmly reccomend System Failure by Jake Chapman, which had a big impact on my thinking when I first read it over a decade ago. The classic paper on systems intervenion by Donnella Meadows is also a kind of essential reading.

4. After writing that post I remembered the idea of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ as a way to acknowledge shadow and creating wholeness by shifting the frame from threeness (back and both sides of stage or screen) to fourness (talking directly to the audience, acknowledging the viewing/viewed dynamic as part of the scene). This was a major feature in House of Cards, where it is relatively serious, but it is also used to comic effect in sitcoms like Miranda, and it’s used with great artistic subtlety in Fleabag (there are worse ways to spend nine minutes of your time than watching these fourth wall breach highlights).

Threeness is lighter and more nimble, agile, dynamic, while fournness is sturdier, more reliable, but also heavier. They both matter, and they are both reflective of time-bearing and time-limited processes. I am reminded of a query in Milan Kundera’s extraordinary work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

Kundera is not quite asking if we should choose fourness or threeness, but I do read it that way now, and my answer is: both, but with a slight preference for threeness.

5. I am reaching beyond words here; yet it can feel like the descriptive ontology of threeness flows into a pragmatic epistemology of threeness that flows into a deep axiology of threeness that flows into a generative phenomenology of third force, which, as we learned in part five, is about the three becoming a fourth in a new dimension, and it is all oneness on stilts…. That process keeps going, and gradually invites in a new cycle of threeness, perhaps as part of a law of seven, which appears to go beyond a naive “everything flows” cliche by inviting in and necessitating human agency at certain precise moments in an intriguing way…