What do we mean by “Humanity’s Transition”?

In this months’ event, I thought it would be good see what we might mean by the term Humanity’s Transition.

Below are some ideas to kick off the discussion.

We (humanity) have started a major transition whose nature is uncertain. We are in a time between worlds. A liminal time. The default nature of the transition is a civilizational collapse. In the extreme, this could lead to the extinction of humanity. There is widespread agreement on this (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328722001768). The most obvious likely causes of a collapse are the consequences of climate change (already underway) and potentially AI. But there are many more paths, typically triggered by events with complex second-, third- and fourth-order consequences.

Mainstream thinking implicitly sees two scenarios: either civilization collapses - to a greater or lesser degree - or we (who, exactly, is this “we”?) avoid the worst of the dangers and muddle on pretty much as before.

But there are other, deeper and broader, perspectives, such as the idea that the only alternative to a collapse is a transition consisting of a breath-taking transformation covering all elements of our societies and our psyches. It will be driven by the conscious participation of segments of society that act from new, emergent ways of thinking. As Einstein said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”.

Inevitably, such a change cannot be sudden, nor utopian, nor globally uniform, nor right-first-time. In fact, there are many paths we could take, including a global collapse followed by a global transformation, or geographically localised instances of both. The key is how quickly any post-collapse transformation can happen: decades, centuries, millennia… or never.

So, the summary answer to the question: “What is Humanity’s Transition?” is:

• A time between worlds, leading either to a dangerous collapse of civilization, or to an exciting transformation of civilization enabled by emergent ways of thinking - or most probably (hopefully) both .

Discuss!

Background
A helpful 30 minute video which others have found worthwhile
"Humanity's Phase Shift, Daniel Schmachtenberger"

Keywords
humanity, environmental awareness, politics, philosophy, spiritual growth, economics, ecological economics, intentional communities, geopolitics, open sources, the commons, activism, idealism, capitalism, sustainable agriculture, religion, consciousness, inequality, enlightenment, education, autocracy, corporatism

----------------------------------
Image by KELLEPICS on https://pixabay.com/