I’m having a new thought tonight. I haven’t had time to work with it so it’s still very undeveloped, but I wanted to jot it down so I don’t lose it.

I’ve been so frustrated that we haven’t found a way to tackle all of the “converging catastrophes” we face. We haven’t found that crack that would let us enter into a new paradigm. The old paradigm is a sinking ship still trying to charge along at full speed, but all the while taking us all down with her. Stopping the madness seems impossible. How do you topple the system?  And not only topple it, but have something even better to replace it with?

Tonight the new thought has to do with not how to bring about change, but where to bring about change. I was thinking again about the land and the unique energy of each place. I was thinking about Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel, and how Diamond believes that unique features of the land brought about the domestication of animals, the rise of sedentary lifestyles, city-states, eventually colonialism, etc. When I read the book I remember being depressed—it made a pretty convincing case that the rise of Western society was an inevitable and very organic process of the earth.

Tonight I am wondering—if there were propensities held in the land which led to the rise of our Western culture, might there not also be propensities held in the land that might give rise to the next paradigm?

Are there places in this world which would be conducive to birthing the next paradigm?  Are there places which possess the right “personality” for that?  Are there places that are already small-scale success stories?  Are there places more conducive to evolving or expressing solutions?

I need to think about this more—not tonight, too sleepy. But if such places exist, we need to work with those places and help to expand the solutions so they can work globally.

What are the geological features that would birth of post-consumer, post-ego paradigm?

Or, another way to think about this would be to have every locale do an inventory of its “personality” traits and learn what part of the solution it might be able to give birth to. I’m sure each locale has its own particular strengths—each locale might have something to contribute to a global solution.

I’ve got to give this more thought.