Michael, I find your work fascinating and deeply meaningful. I recognize the vast amount of time you invest in your research, writing, and documentation.
I spent my career teaching English to community college students at all levels, from the very basic (write a correct sentence) to advanced classes for exceptional students. A skill I developed over the years was the ability to explain complex ideas in ways that were easy(ish) for all students to understand.
I invite you to consider whether I might have something to offer to the movement in this vein. I have been contemplating how I might be called to contribute to positive change in the world. Maybe making your work accessible to a less educated, less erudite audience would be helpful. Maybe not. I just feel called to mention this idea.
The ability to make complex things simple is one of the rarest skills in this space, and I mean that structurally. This is multi-disciplinary work, covering things like monetary architecture, consciousness evolution, ecological economics, and governance design. It only reaches those who need it most when someone with skills like you have can translate it without losing the structural claim. Your years of teaching at every level is exactly that training.
All of my work is open source, so anything that resonates is yours to take, rework, and publish in your own voice. If something is calling you to write, write it.
I'd also love to talk about whether there is a closer collaboration here. Sending you a DM.
Brilliant Michael, as always. Thank you for your deep research, committed vision, and your ability to convey this huge story with a lightness that makes it feel like an adventure unfolding!
The monetary system is approaching a classic thermodynamic bifurcation, as theorized by Ilya Prigogine. The collapse of the current regime will force a critical choice: either decentralized, bottom-up mycelial networks or a highly centralized, top-down digital authority. The system must select its path.
Yes. “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” - Ilya Prigogine
Prigogine's bifurcation framing is structurally accurate, and his book, "Order out of Chaos" has informed much of my thinking. The system is currently determining which attractor it will fall into. Both the attractors you mentioned are present and being actively constructed. Islands of coherence will fall one way and the rest will default the other way. Time will tell us which one becomes structurally dominant.
I'd add that the bifurcation isn't symmetric. The top-down digital architecture has roughly fifty years of legal, institutional, and infrastructural preparation behind it. The mycelial substrate has perhaps ten or at most twenty years of meaningful prototyping, and most of it operates in pockets the formal system has either ignored or actively suppressed.
Prigogine's framework doesn't tell us which attractor will win. It tells us the choice is real and that small fluctuations near the bifurcation point carry disproportionate weight. That's the territory we're in.
Glad to have you here. Your profile description is exactly what this moment requires. 🙇♂️
Another nice piece to fill out your total puzzle here Michael, thank you.
2 questions come to mind for me, listed at the end of each set up below:
1) Given all fiat currencies eventually go to zero on the one hand, and all human relationships have inherent value available to be co-leveraged into mutually productive means and ends on the other, how does your modeling account for the persistence of barter and hard currencies such as silver and gold across almost every culture exposed to them? Barter still exists almost everywhere, if you look close enough, and both gold and silver resist all efforts to be ignored or only rendered decorative.
In short, how do you see these forms of value exchange persisting, or not, on the other side of whatever is next?
2) Conscious emergence is more my native lane, so this question might be a little more interesting (or boring!) to you.
While cultural development can indeed be seen to occur over times your essays so clearly point out, individual development can only happen in the course of a lifetime. Further limiting any "higher" type of consciousness is the fact that all individuals start at zero, as Stone Age biological babies, and can only be developed in biological time and at the upper limits of their meaning-making capacities.
These meaning-making capacities are centered on and deeply held by what Robert Kegan calls the 3rd Order "Socialized Mind," as this is the center of gravity that allows Stone Age babies to be socialized into successful members of any tribe, any where on the planet, with all the operating protocols unique to that tribe-ecosystem fit. It is hard to grow above that level into the subsequent 4th Order "Self-Authoring" stage, and even harder and rarer yet to get to the 5th Order "Self-Transforming" stage.
The key part for my question is that even when insights from the highest levels are clearly explained and written out in ways easily validated by others AT that same level, the lower level individuals are fundamentally incapable of understanding them in any other way than at their own level.
For example, the Golden Rule of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a beautiful 4th Order reminder of human dignity and idealized reciprocity. However, when shared with a 3rd Order Socialized Mind level person, that person will nod in agreement and say "Right, do unto others as they have done until you," unknowingly turning it into a validation for revenge and consequences.
Plenty of other examples come to mind when looking around at today's political chaos here in the US. "No tolerance for intolerance" and "We hate hate" are two parody slogans that come to mind for much of the Left, as are any of the collapses of "Rule of Law" into a promotion of "Law & Order" and an easy willingness to "break a few eggs to make omelet" when authorities act outside of the law.
In short, powerful tribal mindset dynamics operating in all of us can and will bend any higher order principles to serve their needs, and for some more easily than others.
Anyhoo, given the above limitations on individuals to fully participate in any higher order cultural belief systems, regardless of clarity and intent, how do you see any emergent Mycelial Consciousness becoming relevant, interesting, helpful, or otherwise operating in the vast majority of "common folk" who are bound by their inherently Tribal operating systems?
Whoa, David! Two deep, substantive questions. Let me unpack as best I can.
On the first. The persistence of barter and hard money across cultures is empirically true, and I think you're pointing at something the standard reform-of-money framing misses. The Mycelial substrate I'm describing is one layer in a plural architecture. Different scales of human coordination require different forms. Barter handles dyadic spot exchange where ongoing relationship is not part of the equation. Mutual credit handles community-scale ongoing reciprocity where the participants share enough context to extend obligation without collateral. Hard money (gold and silver) handles storage of value across uncertain timelines and settlement between groups that don't trust each other yet. Some equivalent of fiat handles inter-bioregional and international settlement. It also operates as a membrane within a community, for example when a commitment can only be settled in fiat e.g. rates and taxes, or school fees.
The mistake every monolithic monetary system makes is trying to be all things at once. Material consciousness produced the assumption that one issuer should produce one form for all purposes. The Mycelial substrate is plural by design. Graeber actually documents this throughout the historical record. Even in periods dominated by credit money or commodity money, other forms persisted underneath. The actual monetary ecology has always been layered. What's new is the conscious design of the layered architecture. Until now it has emerged through power dynamics alone.
So on the other side of whatever comes next, I expect gold and silver continue to play their historical role as settlement medium where trust is low. As you pointed out, barter always persists. Mutual credit becomes the dominant substrate at community and bioregional scale because that's the scale where its design advantages compound. Some form of inter-regional settlement currency operates above that. The architecture is plural.
On the second question, which is the more challenging one. (I'll set aside for now my personal belief that babies are spiritual beings who know more than we give them credit for at birth and our education systems actually beat this knowledge out of them - a topic for another day).
You're right about Kegan's distribution. Most people operate at 3rd Order Socialized Mind.
Let me say first that the developmental constraint you've named is one of the things I am genuinely uncertain about, so what follows is provisional.
The architectural question is whether the substrate can be designed by people who can see what Material consciousness cannot, in such a way that it operates well for people at 3rd Order. What do I mean? People drive cars without understanding combustion. They use the internet without understanding TCP/IP. The substrate does the work that allows participants to operate at their own developmental level. Full understanding isn't required.
This may actually be where Mycelial consciousness has an advantage over Material. The current monetary system requires participants to navigate abstract contractual claims with anonymous strangers mediated by institutions they don't understand. That's a developmentally demanding architecture, yet we all participate with very little understanding. Tribal cognition at 3rd Order Socialized Mind handles relationship, reciprocity, local accounting, and visible obligation extremely well. Mutual credit at bioregional scale fits the developmental level of the majority better than the current architecture does. It returns the medium of exchange to the scale at which Socialized Mind is competent.
I'm not suggesting any of this is easy. The transition still requires architects who can see beyond what most people can hold. That is the move Steiner was making when he argued that the three spheres of society (cultural, political, and economic) need to be designed by those who can see their distinct logics, even though most participants will simply live inside the architecture without holding the structural picture.
What I'm uncertain about is whether the cultural infrastructure to develop enough architects exists in the time we have. Kegan's point applies here too. Building 4th and 5th Order capacity takes decades and requires conditions our current culture is actively eroding. That's a real risk to the timeline. The mycelial prototypes are being built. Whether they reach structural viability before the developmental capacity to build them gets harder to find is one of the open questions.
Thank you for both questions. The first I believe I had a clean structural answer for. The second one has me thinking. 🤔
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts above Michael, I appreciate it!
That second question is one I've been sitting with, chewing on, and otherwise exploring for quite a while now, with my responses changing over time for both external and internal reasons.
What is the structural design that allows for most ease and access across populations and scales, yet does so in ways that unlike our current system, don't outsource all the costs and consequences or otherwise render them invisible to the user?
In other words, how to integrate the need for a certain degree of willing participation in the "total picture" even as the same total picture may be completely incomprehensible for almost all the participants?
Clicking out a level, it may even be the case that this kind of system is already operating at higher/spiritual levels that are invisible to (almost) all of us (almost) all of the time?
The chick growing inside the egg must use up all the yolk and grow to a size big enough to be able to crack the shell, and then only through the very struggle to break free can it develop the strength to stand up afterwards. Perhaps our current civilizational struggles are metaphorically equivalent, and all the mayhem is simply part of a larger coherent process?
That both feels right and not right at the same time, but I guess that's the nature of such things where "progress" is always an asymptotic quest?
Thank you ..I am new to your writings and its alot to absorb and I appreciate your knowledge and sharing ...are we assuming that the predator/dark consciousness group does not succeed with the Biodigital control grid and forced medical interventions ongoing .? It seems that they are hell bent on no one having choice ...does higher consciousness rise enough within the masses to override or glitch their plans .
Welcome to the work, Carmen, and thank you for sticking with it even when it's a lot to absorb.
You're picking up on the questions worth asking. I'll be honest about what I can and can't tell.
I can't tell whether consciousness rises enough in time. I genuinely don't know. What I can tell you is that a system built on pure top-down control, surveillance, and forced compliance is not evolutionarily coherent. It may win in the short term through coercion. It cannot sustain itself in the long term, because it operates against the patterns that make complex living systems durable. Elisabet Sahtouris's work on the maturation of species is the clearest articulation I know. Species and systems that survive, transition from competitive juvenile phases into cooperative mature phases. A system that doubles down on extraction and control at the moment its life-cycle requires maturation has chosen the brittle path (and that's historically how previous empires have collapsed).
That doesn't tell us how long the short term lasts, or how much harm gets done inside it. Those are real unanswered questions. What it tells us is that building the alternative substrate isn't optional, because it's what keeps the timeline of potentialities open. 💚
Michael, I find your work fascinating and deeply meaningful. I recognize the vast amount of time you invest in your research, writing, and documentation.
I spent my career teaching English to community college students at all levels, from the very basic (write a correct sentence) to advanced classes for exceptional students. A skill I developed over the years was the ability to explain complex ideas in ways that were easy(ish) for all students to understand.
I invite you to consider whether I might have something to offer to the movement in this vein. I have been contemplating how I might be called to contribute to positive change in the world. Maybe making your work accessible to a less educated, less erudite audience would be helpful. Maybe not. I just feel called to mention this idea.
What a generous note, Marian, thank you.
The ability to make complex things simple is one of the rarest skills in this space, and I mean that structurally. This is multi-disciplinary work, covering things like monetary architecture, consciousness evolution, ecological economics, and governance design. It only reaches those who need it most when someone with skills like you have can translate it without losing the structural claim. Your years of teaching at every level is exactly that training.
All of my work is open source, so anything that resonates is yours to take, rework, and publish in your own voice. If something is calling you to write, write it.
I'd also love to talk about whether there is a closer collaboration here. Sending you a DM.
Brilliant Michael, as always. Thank you for your deep research, committed vision, and your ability to convey this huge story with a lightness that makes it feel like an adventure unfolding!
Aaw, much appreciated, Will! I hadn't realized that framed as an adventure this all might be a bit easier to digest. Great observation, thank you!
The monetary system is approaching a classic thermodynamic bifurcation, as theorized by Ilya Prigogine. The collapse of the current regime will force a critical choice: either decentralized, bottom-up mycelial networks or a highly centralized, top-down digital authority. The system must select its path.
Yes. “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” - Ilya Prigogine
Prigogine's bifurcation framing is structurally accurate, and his book, "Order out of Chaos" has informed much of my thinking. The system is currently determining which attractor it will fall into. Both the attractors you mentioned are present and being actively constructed. Islands of coherence will fall one way and the rest will default the other way. Time will tell us which one becomes structurally dominant.
I'd add that the bifurcation isn't symmetric. The top-down digital architecture has roughly fifty years of legal, institutional, and infrastructural preparation behind it. The mycelial substrate has perhaps ten or at most twenty years of meaningful prototyping, and most of it operates in pockets the formal system has either ignored or actively suppressed.
Prigogine's framework doesn't tell us which attractor will win. It tells us the choice is real and that small fluctuations near the bifurcation point carry disproportionate weight. That's the territory we're in.
Glad to have you here. Your profile description is exactly what this moment requires. 🙇♂️
Another nice piece to fill out your total puzzle here Michael, thank you.
2 questions come to mind for me, listed at the end of each set up below:
1) Given all fiat currencies eventually go to zero on the one hand, and all human relationships have inherent value available to be co-leveraged into mutually productive means and ends on the other, how does your modeling account for the persistence of barter and hard currencies such as silver and gold across almost every culture exposed to them? Barter still exists almost everywhere, if you look close enough, and both gold and silver resist all efforts to be ignored or only rendered decorative.
In short, how do you see these forms of value exchange persisting, or not, on the other side of whatever is next?
2) Conscious emergence is more my native lane, so this question might be a little more interesting (or boring!) to you.
While cultural development can indeed be seen to occur over times your essays so clearly point out, individual development can only happen in the course of a lifetime. Further limiting any "higher" type of consciousness is the fact that all individuals start at zero, as Stone Age biological babies, and can only be developed in biological time and at the upper limits of their meaning-making capacities.
These meaning-making capacities are centered on and deeply held by what Robert Kegan calls the 3rd Order "Socialized Mind," as this is the center of gravity that allows Stone Age babies to be socialized into successful members of any tribe, any where on the planet, with all the operating protocols unique to that tribe-ecosystem fit. It is hard to grow above that level into the subsequent 4th Order "Self-Authoring" stage, and even harder and rarer yet to get to the 5th Order "Self-Transforming" stage.
The key part for my question is that even when insights from the highest levels are clearly explained and written out in ways easily validated by others AT that same level, the lower level individuals are fundamentally incapable of understanding them in any other way than at their own level.
For example, the Golden Rule of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a beautiful 4th Order reminder of human dignity and idealized reciprocity. However, when shared with a 3rd Order Socialized Mind level person, that person will nod in agreement and say "Right, do unto others as they have done until you," unknowingly turning it into a validation for revenge and consequences.
Plenty of other examples come to mind when looking around at today's political chaos here in the US. "No tolerance for intolerance" and "We hate hate" are two parody slogans that come to mind for much of the Left, as are any of the collapses of "Rule of Law" into a promotion of "Law & Order" and an easy willingness to "break a few eggs to make omelet" when authorities act outside of the law.
In short, powerful tribal mindset dynamics operating in all of us can and will bend any higher order principles to serve their needs, and for some more easily than others.
Anyhoo, given the above limitations on individuals to fully participate in any higher order cultural belief systems, regardless of clarity and intent, how do you see any emergent Mycelial Consciousness becoming relevant, interesting, helpful, or otherwise operating in the vast majority of "common folk" who are bound by their inherently Tribal operating systems?
Whoa, David! Two deep, substantive questions. Let me unpack as best I can.
On the first. The persistence of barter and hard money across cultures is empirically true, and I think you're pointing at something the standard reform-of-money framing misses. The Mycelial substrate I'm describing is one layer in a plural architecture. Different scales of human coordination require different forms. Barter handles dyadic spot exchange where ongoing relationship is not part of the equation. Mutual credit handles community-scale ongoing reciprocity where the participants share enough context to extend obligation without collateral. Hard money (gold and silver) handles storage of value across uncertain timelines and settlement between groups that don't trust each other yet. Some equivalent of fiat handles inter-bioregional and international settlement. It also operates as a membrane within a community, for example when a commitment can only be settled in fiat e.g. rates and taxes, or school fees.
The mistake every monolithic monetary system makes is trying to be all things at once. Material consciousness produced the assumption that one issuer should produce one form for all purposes. The Mycelial substrate is plural by design. Graeber actually documents this throughout the historical record. Even in periods dominated by credit money or commodity money, other forms persisted underneath. The actual monetary ecology has always been layered. What's new is the conscious design of the layered architecture. Until now it has emerged through power dynamics alone.
So on the other side of whatever comes next, I expect gold and silver continue to play their historical role as settlement medium where trust is low. As you pointed out, barter always persists. Mutual credit becomes the dominant substrate at community and bioregional scale because that's the scale where its design advantages compound. Some form of inter-regional settlement currency operates above that. The architecture is plural.
On the second question, which is the more challenging one. (I'll set aside for now my personal belief that babies are spiritual beings who know more than we give them credit for at birth and our education systems actually beat this knowledge out of them - a topic for another day).
You're right about Kegan's distribution. Most people operate at 3rd Order Socialized Mind.
Let me say first that the developmental constraint you've named is one of the things I am genuinely uncertain about, so what follows is provisional.
The architectural question is whether the substrate can be designed by people who can see what Material consciousness cannot, in such a way that it operates well for people at 3rd Order. What do I mean? People drive cars without understanding combustion. They use the internet without understanding TCP/IP. The substrate does the work that allows participants to operate at their own developmental level. Full understanding isn't required.
This may actually be where Mycelial consciousness has an advantage over Material. The current monetary system requires participants to navigate abstract contractual claims with anonymous strangers mediated by institutions they don't understand. That's a developmentally demanding architecture, yet we all participate with very little understanding. Tribal cognition at 3rd Order Socialized Mind handles relationship, reciprocity, local accounting, and visible obligation extremely well. Mutual credit at bioregional scale fits the developmental level of the majority better than the current architecture does. It returns the medium of exchange to the scale at which Socialized Mind is competent.
I'm not suggesting any of this is easy. The transition still requires architects who can see beyond what most people can hold. That is the move Steiner was making when he argued that the three spheres of society (cultural, political, and economic) need to be designed by those who can see their distinct logics, even though most participants will simply live inside the architecture without holding the structural picture.
What I'm uncertain about is whether the cultural infrastructure to develop enough architects exists in the time we have. Kegan's point applies here too. Building 4th and 5th Order capacity takes decades and requires conditions our current culture is actively eroding. That's a real risk to the timeline. The mycelial prototypes are being built. Whether they reach structural viability before the developmental capacity to build them gets harder to find is one of the open questions.
Thank you for both questions. The first I believe I had a clean structural answer for. The second one has me thinking. 🤔
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts above Michael, I appreciate it!
That second question is one I've been sitting with, chewing on, and otherwise exploring for quite a while now, with my responses changing over time for both external and internal reasons.
What is the structural design that allows for most ease and access across populations and scales, yet does so in ways that unlike our current system, don't outsource all the costs and consequences or otherwise render them invisible to the user?
In other words, how to integrate the need for a certain degree of willing participation in the "total picture" even as the same total picture may be completely incomprehensible for almost all the participants?
Clicking out a level, it may even be the case that this kind of system is already operating at higher/spiritual levels that are invisible to (almost) all of us (almost) all of the time?
The chick growing inside the egg must use up all the yolk and grow to a size big enough to be able to crack the shell, and then only through the very struggle to break free can it develop the strength to stand up afterwards. Perhaps our current civilizational struggles are metaphorically equivalent, and all the mayhem is simply part of a larger coherent process?
That both feels right and not right at the same time, but I guess that's the nature of such things where "progress" is always an asymptotic quest?
Thank you ..I am new to your writings and its alot to absorb and I appreciate your knowledge and sharing ...are we assuming that the predator/dark consciousness group does not succeed with the Biodigital control grid and forced medical interventions ongoing .? It seems that they are hell bent on no one having choice ...does higher consciousness rise enough within the masses to override or glitch their plans .
Welcome to the work, Carmen, and thank you for sticking with it even when it's a lot to absorb.
You're picking up on the questions worth asking. I'll be honest about what I can and can't tell.
I can't tell whether consciousness rises enough in time. I genuinely don't know. What I can tell you is that a system built on pure top-down control, surveillance, and forced compliance is not evolutionarily coherent. It may win in the short term through coercion. It cannot sustain itself in the long term, because it operates against the patterns that make complex living systems durable. Elisabet Sahtouris's work on the maturation of species is the clearest articulation I know. Species and systems that survive, transition from competitive juvenile phases into cooperative mature phases. A system that doubles down on extraction and control at the moment its life-cycle requires maturation has chosen the brittle path (and that's historically how previous empires have collapsed).
That doesn't tell us how long the short term lasts, or how much harm gets done inside it. Those are real unanswered questions. What it tells us is that building the alternative substrate isn't optional, because it's what keeps the timeline of potentialities open. 💚
Thank you Michael🌼. I just read the Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer and shared it at a bookclub with 7 other women✨