Filmed in 2011, this two-part documentary by veteran film-maker Jonathan Stedall tells the story of philosopher Rudolf Steiner’s remarkable life (1861-1925) and explores the influence of his ideas and insights on a whole range of contemporary activities – education, agriculture, medicine, social and financial issues, and the arts.
 
Stedall starts with a rather ontological question “Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?” and acknowledges that the visionary Rudolf Steiner, who planted in a generally backward environment seeds for the future, has given him so far the most profound answers. Stedall follows Steiner’s biography in part one and starts at the margins of the Austrian-Hungarian empire in what is now Croatia in order to elaborate on the main stations in his transformative life: Pötschach in Lower Austria, Vienna, Weimar, Berlin and finally Dornach in Switzerland.
 
The biographical account which is also an interesting document of cultural evolution during before and after WWI in Central Europe is blended with several interviews of people who have studied and practice Steiner’s teachings. We are introduced to the basic concepts of his educational theory like “unlearning what we have learned so far” or that physical dexterity in early childhood translates to dexterity of mind and thought in late childhood and adolescence.
 
We learn that Steiner invented eurhythmy, a dance like performance art, because he realized early on that harmonious movement is in modern societies rather the exception than the rule. Eurhythmy, which can also be applied as a form of psychotherapy heals through movement by overcoming the heaviness of the earth through rhythm. An interviewed teacher explains how these natural rhythms are tied to our emotions: Laughing is breathing out, crying is  about breathing in. I recall a nature documentation which I watched last year about the pairing dance of birds, in which the speaker said: with each synchronized movement grows mutual trust confirming that there is much more about communication than words in the entire animal kingdom including us.
 
Biodynamic agriculture, a forebode of permaculture and much of what is now summarized under the umbrella term organic agriculture, was Steiner’s late brainchild. He reinstated ancient farming calendars, which observed and understood the basic principles of nature at a time when modern farming techniques are only about to take hold of the industry. Steiner understood agriculture as a process to heal the earth. He was by any means far ahead of his time and would have probably burnt at the stake during the medieval inquisition for proposing to farmers to apply strangely prepared fertilizing mixtures called 500 and 501. He conceived them as medicine for the earth.
 
We are introduced to the Camphill Movement, which was founded in England during WWII by one of Steiner’s disciples, the physician Karl König. It is based on the anthroposophical principle that all life has value and therefore establishes in contrast to the holocaust an inclusive approach to education and work. Mentally and physically handicapped are embraced and made an integral part of society. We start to suspect that it is actually us normal folks, who receive healing through vulnerability and innocence.
 
Felix Koguzki, a Viennese herbalist who transferred an overview of the traditional central European plant knowledge to his friend Steiner, is shown at the brink of WWI as a dying species: hunter & gatherer generalists who had a wide knowledge of the local ecosystem. Its amazing to realize that this knowledge started to disappear already more than a century ago and that slow science – taking five minutes to look at a plant – is something that needs to be kindled in every child in order to instill and maintain awe for the natural world. How difficult has this become in our times when the natural world competes with the dopamine addiction generates by the cyber physical space.
 
We are left in part one with the impression that Steiner was a natural scientist like his 18th century forefathers Alexander von Humboldt and Wolfgang von Goethe who was moreover blessed and cursed with a mystical perception of the spiritual world. He tried to merge science and spiritualism and recognized early on that the increasingly dualist worldview of modernist societies conditions us to disregard the wonders of the phenomenal world and the miracles which hide beyond it.

Part two zooms in on Waldorf education and biodynamic agriculture. We are being told that children need to be given time to develop properly and that education is not about imparting knowledge but about awakening and nurturing what children already know. We learn that Steiner’s meta-philosophy was one of consciousness evolution and that karma and reincarnation can make us remember the true purpose of why we are here.
 
The president of the US anthroposophical society summarizes the challenges of contemporary education systems when he says that the great crime of our time is that the intellectual adult consciousness is pressed on the child in the name of performance and academic achievement. It is a crime because we deny the innate qualities of childhood at that time. We should be alarmed, because at what he describes of the American education system is meanwhile true all around the globe: The pressure on children through testing which started during the Bush era and continued throughout the Obama era gives no space to Waldorf education and thus no space to unfold their spiritual identity.
 
I recall a scene with my eldest niece who graduated two years ago from high school in small Austrian city not far from Vienna and not at all far from where Steiner spent his youth. During the months of preparation for the high school graduation, so she told me, one of their teachers tried a disturbing method of getting her pupils motivated. Most likely influenced by the results of recent PISA tests, which put 14/15 year olds into a globalized and industrialized format of skill and competence assessment, she explained them that if they would not work hard their jobs will be taken by Chinese of the same age.

Our education systems – no matter in which country – are to a large extent the result of competing knowledge economies. A systems theory perspective reveals that this competition is translated from the regime sphere which is dominated by the modern science-technology-power complex to ministries of education, from there to municipal education bureaus, from there to school principals, from there to teachers and from them directly into our children.
 
Instead of granting our children, whom we love beyond measure, a learning environment which enables them to unfold their innate nature, we put them into system which force feed them and turn them into automatons, who in turn become unhappy adults, obedient nation state citizens and loyal consumers. Waldorf education helps children to think out of the box. Its thus no surprise that Steiner’s philosophy is in conflict with existing power structures.
 
Waldorf education deals with what the children are by instilling a sense of trust into one’s own intuition through love and a sense of trust into society at large through collaboration. Traditional education systems deal with external demands of society and instill into our children competition and fear. Rudolf Steiner’s fundamental legacy is that he saw the world as it could be and not as it was. His path was then a lonely one, but we have arrived at a crossroad which makes it necessary that we listen to his message and act upon it. For the sake of ourselves and for the sake of those whom we love most: our children.
 
Official film synopsis:
http://rudolfsteinerfilm.squarespace.com/synopsis/
 

Readers of this blog know that I keep asking this question: what are we supposed to do if robots and algorithms take (most) of our jobs? For some it’s a blessing not having to work anymore; for others it is a curse. The real problem is though how to psychologically fill the void with meaning. I have predicted on different occasions that both secondary and tertiary labor markets will follow a similar trajectory like agriculture. Employment will tumble to below 2%. I have also predicted that craftsmanship and self-reliance agriculture have the potential to absorb much of the unemployment if we gradually prepare our youth for such a future instead of conditioning our children into office work of whatever kind. This view is only shared by a few contemporaries.

The question will be in future not only how to make a living, but how to survive in the most elementary sense without generating more heat. A cynical upside from a labor market perspective: humanity will soon be reduced substantially and the problem might solve itself. The era of the Anthropocene implies that we target a 5˚Celsius temperature increase, which will lead eventually to the 6th mass extinction. Some people like Elon Musk prepare themselves and work on our species’ survival on Mars. Nathaniel Rich writes in the August edition of the New Yorker magazine gloomily that all this wouldn’t have been necessary. He claims that between 1979 and 1989 (American) scientists had understood the impact of fossil fuel on the planet and had succeeded to convey these findings to decision making politicians. America was then humanity’s cutting edge and American humanity failed.
 
There is no point in telling an American that some people elsewhere have figured things out earlier. Illuminated British author Aldous Huxley wrote already in 1962, only a year before his death, the essay The Politics of Ecology. More than 10 years before German-British economist E.F. Schumacher published Small is Beautiful, Huxley boils down the complexities of our species in only a few pages and puts all the blame on greed and fear. If you want to understand the cause of climate change and global warming, this is one of the most authoritative (and shortest) sources.
 
I get increasingly irritated by all these negative articles, no matter how well they are researched or how many thousand words they contain. Rich’s essay is as long as a book. A book about the science of climate change and global warming. A book about US and global politics reacting to the message of science between 1979 and 1989. A book which fails to connect the underlying psychological dynamics with the environmental consequences. A book which severs the link between information and action as educator Neil Postman famously said. We don’t need more of that.
 
Journalist Georg Diez asks in the German weekly Der Spiegel in reply to Rich’s essay why the extinction of humanity stirs only little interest. His smartest answer is simply that a species’ biological extinction is a problem too complex to understand. I believe quite on the contrary that Bill Mollison, the co-founder of permaculture, was absolutely right, when he said: Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple. Climate change is not about explaining the scientific complexity of its causes but about putting forward a simple solution that people can work with.

So, why does humanity show only little interest in its own demise? A simple rule of communication answers this question as sound expert Julian Treasure explains in his brilliant TED talk how to speak so that people want to listen. Avoid the seven sins of speaking (gossip, judging, negativity, complaining, excuses, lying, dogmatism) and follow the four golden rules (Honesty, Authenticity, Integrity, Love - HAIL). In short, don’t be negative, but share a positive vision.
 
I admit, I am not good in this either. I have a tendency towards dogmatism and my writing could often be shorter and much more upbeat. Anyway, its good to be reminded that hailing brings the message across. This insight is nothing new. Hailing has a great track record. Think for a second of the New Testament. Its four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John do not deliver Hiob’s twitter, but an evangelical gospel, i.e. good news. The root of the word evangelist is classic Greek εθανγελιον | euangelion, which literally means to announce the good. In periods of despair, and only then, people listen to the good, the true and the beautiful. Otherwise they play Warcraft, watch Poltergeist or read the FT.
 
What we lack is a positive narrative of our own collective future - the dark side of humanity has already been described in all clarity by Aldous Huxley and many others. We know all too well that there is something utterly destructive in our nature and that there is no point to either explain the environmental consequences in all scientific detail or the regression of civilization ruled by a power hungry elite. What we need is a shiny storyline which appeals to our mystic subconscious, guiding us like a lantern out of our cave. Postman was absolutely right, when he compared the present machine age with the past of the dark Medieval Ages. We need a miraculous myth which peels off the apathy and ignorance that has settled on our minds, skins and in our hearts. We need a myth that changes gear from negative thinking to positive action.  Don’t despair – do something! Jasmine Lomax posted today on LinkedIn. Yes! But what?
 
I have tried to think about a positive path like many others when I wrote about Genuine Growth last year. The concept of consciousness growth instead of economic or material growth, respectively the two of them in a healthy balance still makes sense, but it’s like Erich Fromm’s thinking far too abstract in order to be absorbed by a significant part of the global population. Psychologist Wilhelm Reich explains in The Mass Psychology of Fascism that humanity at large is not moved by thoughts, concepts or ideas, but by subconscious mysticism. How did the WWII fascists tap into this force? How can it be harnessed in the 21st century for life instead of death?

Some people are trying hard since WWII to set best practices to follow. There are writers and film makers like Leopold Kohr (The Breakdown of Nations, 1957), his student E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful, 1973), Paul Hawken (Blessed Unrest, 2007), Colin Beavan (No Impact Man, 2009), Shelly Lee Davis (Planeat, 2010), Andy Couturier (The Abundance of Less, 2010), Lee Fulkerson (Forks over Knives, 2011), Helena Norberg-Hodge (The Economics of Happiness, 2011), Nils Aguilar (Voices of Transition, 2012), Cyril Dion (Tomorrow, 2015), or Kurt Langbein (Time for Utopia, 2018) who show in their work how we can turn this ship around.
 
Their work features concrete solutions and taller than life individuals who have contributed in different disciplines over the last few decades to the shape of a yet fuzzy solution. There is the biochemist and nutrition scientist Thomas C. Campbell finding evidence that animal based protein causes cancer; or cardiologist Cladwell B. Esselstyn who showed in long term studies that a plant based diet can stop and even heal coronary and cardiovascular disease, the #1 cause of death. There are activists like the founder of the transition network Rob Hopkins who understands like few others the force of a positive story and the power of local communities to bring such a story to life.

In reviewing some of the “transformation” work produced since WWII, I make two important observations. Firstly, early pieces like The Breakdown of Nations, The Politics of Ecology, The Limits to Growth or Small is Beautiful, focused on abstract concepts and ideas derived from economics, sociology and political science. The mushrooming – mostly – film work of the visual 21st century can though be broken down in two groups: the first continues to focus on concepts, the second tells stories which are pegged to a person.
 
The second observation is related to how increasingly difficult it has become to craft a positive scenario for our common future in spite of the overwhelming scientific evidence that we have one or two decades left before shit literally hits the cosmic fan. It is exactly under this pressure of moving into a no-escape bottle neck that messages become more focused and less abstract. A big threat is thus also a big opportunity.
 
These observations provide a second answer to the question why humanity shows only little interest in its own demise. Yes, we are flooded by media with negativity. I just recall last week meeting a friend of mine in a brunch place. It was one of the few times a year that I got myself exposed to the telly which covered there pretty every wall. CNN broadcasted in an endless loop footage of flooding, storms, bush fires, drought intercepted with interviews of scientists and environmentalists predicting with wide eyes and intense gestures worse things to come. 
 
With such visual messaging on our hard drives it’s pretty sure that we go to sleep with nightmares and do everything to let the reality not emerge from our subconscious into our daily lives. What would happen if we did? We would need to stop and change our way of living in the here and now. And that’s just a too crazy idea. Let’s continue to buy Gucci bags, Starbucks coffee in plastic cups and travel to Palau for a diving weekend. Some day when the flood comes, we need to run anyway. Why not delay until then? This is when procrastination and self-design become a question of survival.

The second answer to why we do not heed the negative messaging is that we fear that things are being taken from us and are desperate to listen to a personal story which tells us the opposite. This is also an explanation why dirt poor people are generally described as being happier than wealthy ones: they have nothing to lose. For many, especially in the emerging nations of Asia, the newly found material wealth is difficult to deal with. Why should I restrain myself if I only got the chance to indulge a little while ago? I truly understand the culprit of the situation for Chinese and Indian consumers (almost half the world) who would just like to have a few more years of modern affluence. But a look into societies which have long been blessed and cursed with the gifts of industrialization confirms that we hang on to material consumption and compensation no matter how long and how many generation we had plenty of it all.
 
The so-called happiest man on the planet, biochemist and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, once said that although we want to avoid suffering, it seems we are running somewhat towards it. And that can also come from some kind of confusions. One of the most common ones is happiness and pleasure. But if you look at the characteristics of those two, pleasure is contingent upon time, upon its object, upon the place. It is something that -- changes of nature. Beautiful chocolate cake: first serving is delicious, second one not so much, then we feel disgust.
 
The truth is though that we have conceived, designed, assembled and manufactured an infinite number of chocolate cakes and the consumer is never bored or disgusted. We might return to the famous Viennese Sacher once in a while, but in between we have hundreds of choices from chocolate brownies to white chocolate praline cupcakes. And if we get bored of chocolate, there is a jungle of sensory stimulation waiting out there. Ordering a new car is such an experience even though MIT tells us that we have reached global peak car: which brand, which model, which color, which seating. I talked a while ago to a designer of the Porsche online configuration system. I can only tell you that decision fatigue got me in an instant. Some people spend though much time if not all their life in such consumption mazes to avoid boredom or run risk that somebody else might make a choice for them.
 
The consumer is in a processing loop of how to satisfy the next want which is generally created by the sensory stimulation of advertisement which correlates to an epidemic of deficient self-love. What we need to learn is how to sharpen the triple focus (inner, outer and other) as psychologist Daniel Goleman described the attention to the most sincere and urgent needs of the self, others and the environment. Want and need are two different things, like pleasure and joy. A want is something superficial and short lived, a need is something deep and lasting. I might want a quick fuck, but I actually need a healthy relationship. I might want an industrial chocolate bar, but I actually need a healthy, self-cooked and balanced meal. I might want a sports car, but I actually need a decent bike to exercise purposefully. The interesting observation is that mostly what we need is good for others and the planet too, while what we want destroys us and our environment.
 
To most of us this is nothing new, but still it’s so difficult to change. Why is that? I said before that the second answer to why we do not heed negative messaging is that we fear that things are being taken from us and are desperate to listen to a personal story which tells us the opposite. Cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin explains why: Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information. Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations. Some neuroscientists believe that nearly every conscious experience is stored somewhere in your brain; the hard part is finding it and pulling it out again. Sometimes the information that comes out is incomplete, distorted, or misleading. Vivid stories that address a very limited and unlikely set of circumstances often pop to mind and overwhelm statistical information based on a large number of observations that would be far more accurate in helping us to make sound decisions about medical treatments, or the trustworthiness of people in our social world.
 
In short: numbers suck, but stories rule, numbers confuse while stories enlighten. Our brains want the hero’s journey, but media delivers horrifying statistics and dooms scenarios. Levitin continues to explain that our modes of thinking and decision making evolved over the tens of thousands of years that humans lived as hunter-gatherers. But instead of concluding that we need more and better stories to memorize things that matter – or maybe just one grand myth which clears the data jungle - he concludes that our genes haven’t fully caught up with the demands of modern civilization and continues to write a substantial book about how to overcome our evolutionary limitations.

We will never overcome these evolutionary limitations, because there are none, unless one has the Faustian desire to strive for all-encompassing God-like revelation. No matter whether he strives for the control of life expectancy, an enterprise’s executive board or an intimate relationship. Human beings are just perfectly fine as they are, but what Levitin suggests is to turn us gradually into cyborgs. He paves like historian Yuval Harari in Homo Deus the road for a sick transhumanism instead of providing a vision for how our ingenious mammal brains can - collectively and individually - make sound decisions.
 
Disney’s 2016 smash hit animation movie Moana told us such a hero’s journey and grossed USD 645 million at the global box offices. A Hercules like demi-God takes the heart from the Goddess of Life (Te Titi) and turns her into the Goddess of Death (Te Ka) bringing draught, infertility and devastation to the people of Maui. It is Moana, daughter of a tribal chief, who trusts her intuition and defies tradition by bringing the forgotten ancestral skill of wayfinding back to life. She heads out into the oceans to restore the heart of Te Titi and her courage is eventually rewarded with the world being put back into balance.

Be A Real World Hero
 
There are solitary warriors like Joan Elizalde, who carry this positive vision of a better future deep in their hearts and act according to their intuition. The Spanish marine biologist lives since a few years with his wife and their toddler son in Shanghai, where he has registered Green Steps, a company which provides outdoor education experiences. Elizalde believes that we can build better societies by reconnecting with nature and through nature with ourselves, others and the planet.
 
I joined him last weekend guiding an unorthodox team building workshop for Life Solutions, a local water filtering manufacturer. When I arrived with our six year old son, I found a dozen participants in a hidden area of the Wusong Wetland Forest Park in the far North of Shanghai. Dressed in blue company polos they were picking plastic waste from the Yangtze shore and filled their bounty into large white flour bags. In between breaks Elizalde shared with the participants key numbers and key facts about plastic, an omnipresent material of which we don’t know enough.
 
In the face of a completely polluted shore in the midst of an ecological protection area one number stuck with me in particular. Elizalde explained that only 4% of plastic waste stays on the surface, 96% has already sunk to the ground of rivers, lakes and oceans, where its decomposes into ever smaller particles. Plastic is though forever and only breaks down mechanically into smaller units like stone or shell breaks down into sand. It never really changes its chemical composition. As such it enters the food chain and consequently our own bodies. The life cycle of plastic shows that how we treat the environment is a reflection of how we treat ourselves. Aldous Huxley captured this interrelatedness of the self and the planet eloquently in The Politics of Ecology:
 
Ecology is the science of the mutual relations of organisms with their environment and with one another. Only when we get it into our collective head that the basic problem confronting twentieth-century man is an ecological problem will our politics improve and become realistic. How does the human race propose to survive and, if possible, improve the lot and the intrinsic quality of its individual members? Do we propose to live on this planet in symbiotic harmony with our environment? Or, preferring to be wantonly stupid, shall we choose to live like murderous and suicidal parasites that kill their host and so destroy themselves?
 
The 2016 documentary Plastic Ocean tells us that only six countries generate 70% of all plastic waste in our oceans. China generates the lion share amongst these and it is the Yangtze which discharges its 6380km of solid and fluid waste into the China Sea exactly at the location where we were collecting plastic. I remember our 2013 hike through Yunnan’s Tiger Leaping Gorge on the upper Yangtze, when I realized that the white dots which I spotted in the river from far above were not wave crisps but plastic floating downstream towards Lijiang. Back in 2002 when I hiked there for the first time, the river surface was clean.
 
Shanghai’s Wusong park is of tremendous geostrategic importance to understand China’s impact on the world as a consumer nation. It sits at the confluence of China’s longest river, the Yangtze, and Shanghai’s mightiest river, the Huangpu. Standing here and gazing far out into the Yellow Sea where huge ocean vessels are busy shipping their freight, I wonder how much waste both these rivers, one being the largest of the world’s most populous nation, the other being the largest of this nation’s most populous city, carry every day, every minute, every second out into the open ocean; the Yangtze all the way down from Tiger Leaping Gorge.
 
Sun Yanhong, a Life Solutions sales manager, captures the challenge which both China and the world has to face. “I am embarrassed by Joan. He is a foreigner teaching us how to clean the shores of China’s mightiest river. Why haven’t we learned this so far and what will happen if we continue to pollute the Yellow Sea?” Joan replies instantly: “Nature doesn’t know borders or nations. This ocean is as much mine as it is yours. We need to cooperate and it doesn’t make a difference who teaches whom how to save our planet and thus future generations.”

Coming back to the past, present and future of work, I conclude that there is so much work waiting in our immediate environment. If we ask ourselves what we can do today, then collecting rubbish is certainly one job that needs to be urgently done. We can start with spending half a day of our holidays as trash hunters & gatherers as we did earlier this year in Thailand, and we can institutionalize such activities at home on a monthly basis. The future of work might be artisan craftsmanship and self-reliance farming, but at this point we need millions of people to help clean up the world. And we need those who do it without expecting a capitalist reward in exchange.
 
I wrote on another occasion that the two mightiest nations on this planet ought to transform their armies into waste squads and allocate their defense budget to environmental causes instead of pouring oil into the fire which causes climate change. Such decisions are beyond the grasp of the ordinary man, but refusing and reducing waste certainly is something we can do on a daily basis. Engaging in the purposeful action of cleaning up our environment helps us to understand why it is necessary to refuse inappropriate consumption and simultaneously decrease the need to consume.
 
It sounds unbelievable, but if we truly try to understand the interrelatedness between ourselves and the planet, it is no surprise that by giving our time to the planet, we actually do something for ourselves. We will be rewarded with a strong feeling of purpose and probably even beyond that with ideas of what our individual future of work could be.
 
Contemporary Education Paradigm & Parents’ Responsibility
 
If we take our children starting from age 4 on such clean ups, we moreover teach them early on, what the consequences of inappropriate consumption are and ingeniously let them feel that a sense of community and an attitude of collaboration decreases our materialistic greed. This is not learned in the form of intellectual understanding, but by so called neuro-markers of good memories, which can be retrieved in multiple ways: smells, sounds, words, pictures, shapes, faces, stories from a just a half day out at the Shanghai shoreline collecting waste. 

Our competitive knowledge economies have installed education systems which gear our children as smallest units in such economies towards competition. It is though competition which increases consumption and loneliness, while collaboration can not only resolve environmental, but also social problems. As parents we can put our offspring on track to develop a true sense of belonging if we repeatedly participate in clean up events. We bond with our children and with strangers through a joint act of meaning, while we alienate ourselves from our children and from the planet if we continue to be tied to our screens and the satisfaction of our wants.  
 
Most parents, I have realized, don’t really know what to do with their kids. They are in this constant battle of having to supervise and make competitive their offspring while wanting to enjoy their own often sparse time off. The nuclear family has turned into a mini gulag generating maximum GDP growth, because every product and every service has to be purchased by ever smaller family units. We support our economies at the expense of our children who have to pay the bill in less time with their parents and being completely brought off course from  a fulfilling profession and life.
 
This is why in particular in Shanghai cram schools and after school classes are flourishing in a way other industries can only dream of. Recent IPO’s of such privately held companies are evidence of an utterly sick development. Despite class hours having doubled since I attended elementary school, we pressure our little ones into even more classes. We fail to see that what our children need is not more supervision, but only a bit of purpose and lots of community. If there is purpose, then leave the child alone as Tom Hodgkinson wrote in the parenting must read The Idle Parent. Tell them where to go, but let them go alone. The true problem is: we don’t know anymore where to go. We have lost the skill of wayfinding. 

400 years of capitalism has created a strange conflict of infinitely more material wealth at the expense of planet and people by focusing on profit and competition. Post-materialism will need all of us to maintain appropriate and fairly distributed material wealth in addition to a push for spiritual growth by focusing on purpose and collaboration. It is the responsibility of each parent to turn around this spaceship Earth by showing our children these, well, not really new, but lost coordinates. It doesn’t take politicians or corporate leaders for this. It only takes self-leadership. Be a Moana and trust your intuition for wayfinding.

Wayfinding and System Blindness
 
Why do we not we not react to the 6th mass extinction? The story of Moana gives us a more complete answer than Spiegel journalist Georg Diez whom I quoted earlier saying that a species’ own biological extinction is a problem too complex to understand. Psychologist Daniel Goleman, known by many for his bestseller Emotional Intelligence, wrote in his last book about the Polynesian art of wayfinding, which is beautifully explained in the Disney animation: piloting a double-hulled canoe with only the lore in your head, traversing hundreds or thousands of miles from one island to another. Wayfinding, he writes, embodies system awareness at its height, reading subtle cues like the temperature or saltiness of seawater; flotsam and plant debris; the patterns of flight of seabirds; the warmth, speed, and direction of winds; variations in the swells of waves; and the rising and setting of stars at night. All that gets mapped against a mental model of the where islands are to be found, lore learned though native stories, chants and dances.
 
Ancient lore is the integral understanding of and ultimately surviving in an ecosystem, which is handed down from the elders to the next generation. As the world has industrialized we have lost our local ecosystems and deal with a global ecosystem. We have lost our lore and are rendered blind to the system at large. Goleman elaborate furthers: Through human history, system awareness – detecting and mapping the patterns and order that lie hiding within the chaos of the natural world – has been propelled by this urgent survival imperative for native peoples to understand their local ecosystems. They must know what plants are toxic, which nourish or heal; where to get drinking water and where to gather herbs and find food; how to read the signs of seasonal change. […] Native lore has been a crucial part of our social evolution, the way cultures pass down their wisdom through the time. Primitive bands in early evolution would have thrived or died depending on their collective intelligence in reading the local ecosystem: to anticipate key moments for planting, harvesting, and the like – so the first calendars came into being. […] But as modernity has provided machines to take the place of such lore – compasses, navigational guides, and, eventually online maps – native people have joined everyone else in relying on them, forgetting their local lore, like wayfinding.
 
Goleman continues to give a neurological answer why we are not able to react properly to the 6th mass extinction. In addition to mismatches of our mental models and the systems they presume to map, there are even more profound predicaments: our perceptual and emotional systems are all but blind to them. The human brain was molded by what helped us and our forerunners survive in the wild, particularly in the Pleistocene geological epoch (roughly from 2 million years ago to about 12k years ago, when there was the rise of agriculture). We are finely tuned to a rustling in the leaves that may signal a stalking tiger. But we have no perceptual apparatus that can sense the thinning of the atmosphere’s ozone layer, nor the carcinogens in the particulates we breathe on a smoggy day. Both can eventually be fatal, but our brain has no direct radar for these threats.
 
Its not just perceptual mistuning. If our emotional circuitry (particularly the amygdala, the trigger point for the fight-or-flight response) perceives an immediate threat it will flood us with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which ready us to hit or run. But this does not happen if we hear of potential dangers that might emerge in years or centuries to come; the amygdala hardly blinks. The amygdala’s circuitry, concentrated in the middle of the brain, operates automatically, bottom-up. We rely on it to be on the alert for dangers and tell us what we need to pay urgent attention to. But our automatic circuitry, usually so reliable in guiding our attention, have no perceptual apparatus or emotional loading for systems and their dangers. They draw a blank.
 
“Its easier to override an automatic, bottom-up response with top down reasoning than it is to deal with the complete absence of a signal,” Columbia University psychologist Elke Weber observes. “But that’s the situation when it comes to dealing with the environment. There’s nothing here in the Hudson Valley on this lovely summer day to tell me the planet is warming.” […] But unless you live in the Maldives or Bangladesh, it seems far away. The dimension of time is a huge problem – if the pace of global warming were accelerated to a few years instead of over centuries, people would pay more attention. But it’s like the national debt: I’ll leave it to my grandchildren – I am sure they’ll think of some solution.
 
At one time, the survival of human groups depended on ecological attunement. Today we have the luxury of living well using artificial aids. Or seem to have the luxury. For the same attitudes that have made us reliant on technology have lulled us into indifference to the state of the natural world – at our peril. So to meet the challenges of impending (global) system collapse we need what amounts to a prosthesis of the mind.
 
We are at a crucial junction of cultural evolution. Local ecosystems have mostly vanished, so has local lore. We have entered a global ecosystem and need to craft a global lore, if we want to survive. We do not act upon the threat of the 6th mass extinction because we lack a sensory system to perceive it as a threat. It’s a bit like meta-procrastination. You know that you have to do something to make a relationship work, but you put it off until it eventually breaks apart.  In fact, there is no difference between a global, a local or even a family ecosystem. They are all made up of human beings as their most impactful actors and all human beings whether a few or billions obey the same biological algorithms, namely instincts and emotions.

Take the Easter Islands for example. It is widely acknowledged that a pretty sophisticated culture thrived on these faraway islands for several hundred years until the depletion of natural resources led eventually to the decline and almost extinction of that civilization. Why did this happen? There are several theories, but in line with recent discussions on the Anthropocene, we should acknowledge that not Polynesian rats but human hubris was the root cause of this ecological and social disaster.
 
According to oral traditions recorded by missionaries in the 1860s, the island originally had a strong class system, with an ariki, or high chief, wielding great power over nine other clans and their respective chiefs. The high chief was the eldest descendant through first-born lines of the island's legendary founder, Hotu Matu'a. The most visible element in the culture was the production of massive statues called moai that some believe represented deified ancestors.
 
Now, there are some scientists who claim that tribal chiefs insisted on their right to erect massive stone sculptures to worship ancestors. Even common sense tells us though that worshipping ancestors in such a public manner serves only the single purpose of consolidating power structures. The moai were built to show the tribal chief’s status not only to their subjects but also to the afterworld in a similar manner like the great Xian terracotta army.  I will never understand why we visit such monuments in awe instead of disgust about the sickness of our species.
 
The multiple-ton-heavy moai required lots of timber logs to transport them from the respective quarries to where they were eventually put up for display at the island’s coastline. The consequential deforestation induced a collapse of the isolated and fragile ecosystem. I have heard and read this explanation of why the Easter Island civilization disappeared already several times. What I have never heard though is a psychological explanation.
 
If we look again at Maslow’s pyramid of human needs, we see that status is a higher human need, which is a few levels above the biological needs that secure the survival of a species. Nowadays, we might live in a global economy and we might use a wider variety of resources than those available on a small island, but as human beings we still operate according the same psychological principles as our ancestors on the Easter Islands did. We buy big cars and build grand mansions because of status. National governments maintain large armies and finance ambitious scientific projects because they want to show their power and international rank. We are not motivated by purpose or survival, but by an excessive focus on other human needs.
 
The solution – then and now – is self-design and thus a disengagement from the economic and political paradigm which we are embedded in. We have to realize that each one of us is a small, but important unit of the system at large. If we choose to focus on survival needs instead of esteem needs, we do now what is in our power to turn the ship around. We moreover teach our children new coordinates towards a system of behavior which makes them fit for the future.  

“In preparing for a battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  General David D. Eisenhower’s famous quote could well be the bottom line of Daniel Levitin’s brilliant treaties on how we are supposed to organize our minds in the face of drowning in the 21st century sea of information. Reading this book is indispensable, but you might very well find it useless.
 
As the author notes by rephrasing Neil Postman’s famous quote: Information has become separated from meaning. The sheer volume of available information and it being rendered in a message not comprehensible to the hunter & gatherer brain which longs for storytelling and physical experiences instead of STEM examinations and binary codes, make information useless. The same is true for this book and the author misjudges the reality of what his readership is capable of. Despite confirming that small libraries are much more useful than larger ones, he concludes this popular science title with more than 400 endnotes and this comment: Listing every paper I read would make the endnotes section ten times longer, and far less useful to the general reader. I think it was Huxley who said that completeness is not nothing to add, but nothing to take away. 
 
Levitin is one of the foremost cognitive psychologists on this planet, an accomplished musician, a high end business consultant and in general a polymath. He lays out a plan in this book on how we are supposed to organize our lives and does so with astonishing eloquence and erudition. Strangely though, he writes already in his introduction that we organize our minds in different educational disciplines to deliver ever higher levels of achievement, to provide an edge in a world that is increasingly competitive.
 
The Organized Mind Lacks Wisdom
 
I honestly enjoyed reading this book despite its scholarly style, because it is throbbing with so much information and knowledge. But at a certain point I kept asking myself if it doesn’t lack essential wisdom. A question kept recurring to me: Can we really burden all of humanity with the information structuring techniques of CEOs, extreme athletes or genius musicians, or is this just too much for an average person? Shouldn’t we shift the focus from being a psychologist who analyses the improved functionality of the human brain to the perspective of the sociologist who captures the picture at large to understand what causes the information overload and if this suffering is indeed necessary? Levitin appears as a physician or mechanic applying the perfect understanding of a machine (in this case the brain) to conduct a complex surgery on the sick mind, but fails to understand the etiology of this epidemic information overload.
 
I wish Levitin would have written a book which takes the burden off the average person (like Tom Hodkinson took the burden of parenting from my shoulders) instead of writing a book which tells people how to become as effective as a fortune 500 CEO. It tunes into the general dissonance of our competitive knowledge economies, which lack harmony and cooperation. Levitin sets a tone which goads the reader into a mindset of wanting better brains despite confirming that our brains are not made for such enormous amounts of information: Its helpful to understand that our modes of thinking and decision making evolved over the tens of thousands of years that humans lived as hunter-gatherers. Our genes haven’t fully caught up with the demands of modern civilization, but fortunately human knowledge has – we now better understand how to overcome evolutionary limitations.
 
Levitin comes thus across as yet another scientist who seems to prefer a transhumanist future over humankind at peace with its mammal nature. He puts his reader on track to desire a gadget here and an implant there to become at least by means of artificial improvement as competitive as the most successful members of society. By doing so he joins the atheist visioning of academic writers like historian Yuval Harari, who described the future of neural enhancement in his last book Homo Deus.
 
The first humans who figured out how to write things down around 5000 years ago were in essence trying to increase the capacity of their hippocampus, part of the brain’s memory system. […] We are [since then] off-loading a great deal of the processing that our neurons would normally do to an external device that then becomes an extension of our own brains, a neural enhancer. […] Once memories became externalized with written language, the writer’s brain and attentional system were freed up to focus on something else.
 
Henry Kissinger mentioned in World Order which was written in the same year as The Organized Mind, that philosophers and poets have long separated the mind’s purview into three components: information, knowledge, and wisdom. The Internet focuses on the realm of information, whose spread it facilitates exponentially. Ever more complex functions are devised, particularly capable of responding to questions of fact, which are not themselves altered by the passage of time. Search engines are able to handle increasing speed. Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before. Levitin fails to acknowledge that it is more wisdom what we need now, not more successful people who can organize more information in a shorter time to survive in an ever competitive society.
 
Missing a Solution for how to Teach Children
 
A close look into Levitin’s table of content reveals that there is a lack of organization, a blind spot or even a big question which he was not able to answer when structuring his work. I don’t want to sound critical. I would have never been able to bring together this vast amount to data and studies which Levitin has managed to pack into this book. He deserves full credit therefore. The three part structure reveals though that there is something missing. Part I provides a brilliant introduction to the history of cognitive overload over the last 5000 years and explains the neuroscience of attention and memory. Part II explains in five chapters how to organize our homes, our social world, our time, our decisions in moments of threat and danger, and the business world.
 
So far so good. I couldn’t think of a better way to structure these two parts. But while Levitin goes into very details of how to organize our lives, e.g. by explaining at extreme length how emails can be efficiently handled, he covers in part III what we have to teach our children and “everything else” superficially. Its telling that he writes about the power of the junk drawer in the same section, which addresses in my humble opinion the most pressing question of all: how to save our children from this insanity.  
 
Part One

1. Too much information, too many decisions: the inside history of cognitive overload
2. The first things to get straight: how attention and memory work

Part Two

1. Organizing our homes: where things can start to get better
2. Organizing our social world: how humans connect now
3. Organizing our time: what is the mystery?
4. Organizing information for the hardest decisions: when life is on the line
5. Organizing the business world: how we create value

Part Three

1. What to teach our children: the future of the organized mind
2. Everything else: the power of the junk drawer

 
Educator Neil Postman understood the true challenge with societies suffering from information overload in all its clarity already back in the 1980s. In a 1990 speech titled Informing Ourselves to Death he argued that our society relies too heavily on information to fix our problems, especially the fundamental problems of human philosophy and survival, that information, ever since the printing press, has become a burden and garbage instead of a rare blessing.
 
According to Postman’s speech, "the tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."
 
Levitin adds the chapter of what we ought to teach our children to the junk drawer, because he has on the contrary to organizing our business world or our homes no answer to this question. He understands the neurological science, but isn’t able to connect the dots. He writes that children are more likely to want immediate gratification, and they are less likely to be able to foresee the future consequences of present inaction; both of these are tied to their underdeveloped prefrontal cortices, which don’t fully mature until after the age of twenty (!). This also makes them more vulnerable to addiction.
 
Education is though not only about what we teach children in school, but about the frame conditions in which we bring them up. Raising our offspring in an addiction culture will result in lots of addicted adults. Levitin recommends to strengthen so-called foundational concepts and habits of mind. They are mental habits and reflexes that should be taught to all children and reinforces throughout their high school and college years.
 
Training children in these habits, but letting them grow up in a culture which is an addiction mine field makes Levitin look like a Don Quixote and makes me recall The Matrix: we need to be taught critical thinking and sound habits of mind, there is no doubt about it, but as long as we live in a culture which places each individual already in its early childhood years into an addiction cocoon, which grows thicker as we grow older, it won’t be possible to construct a sane society. 
 
Levitin contradicts his recommendation of teaching foundational concepts and habits of mind in the very same book, where he writes only a few paragraphs earlier that the primary mission of teachers must shift from the dissemination of raw information to training a cluster of mental skills that revolve around critical thinking. Teachers who succeed in doing so must be wizards of neurology able to change the human brain development. How are we supposed to teach children critical thinking, if the very brain region for critical thinking, the prefrontal cortex, is not yet fully evolved and is under permanent attack to be rendered useless by excessive screen time, sugar floods and many other habits of consumption which civilization pressures us into? 
 
Neil Postman compared contemporary society [of the 1980s and that’s even more so true today] to the Middle Ages, where instead of individuals believing everything told to them by religious leaders, now individuals believe everything told to them by science, making people more naive than in Middle Ages. Individuals in a contemporary society, one that is mediated by technology, could possibly believe in anything and everything, whereas in the Middle Ages the populace believed in the benevolent design they were all part of and there was order to their beliefs.
 
Critical Thinking vs. Subtle Trust
 
I wrote in the beginning that Levitin is a polymath. Reading his biography I was truly in awe about his life trajectory and the self-confident decisions he made. He is in every aspect himself an organized mind and an exemplary CEO – at least in regard to shaping his identity and self. He studied applied mathematics at MIT, dropped out, pursued a career as musician, sound engineer and record producer, only to return to university in his thirties. He completed a fast track PhD in cognitive science at Stanford and one must wonder where the energy, motivation and above all the financial support came from. It might have helped that Levitin is the son of an accomplished businessman and university professor, and a hyper-productive novelist, who survived the holocaust;  indicating an upbringing in an non-religious Jewish-American environment which endowed Levitin with an excelling nature and outstanding conditions of nurturing. The Organized Mind was dedicated to Levitin’s parents “for all they taught me.”
 
Whenever I read nowadays a non-fiction book, I ask myself by what the authors were driven and from what perspective did they start off. Why did they spend literally hundreds of hours researching and writing and from which point of view did they look at the very subject of the book? Levitin was without doubt born into one of the sunniest places on this planet. He did not only grow up in sunny California in the boon years of US economic growth, but was blessed with abundant material support. Starting from such a high level of living standard and accomplishment, one is easily tempted to raise expectations and desire more.
 
I can’t say anything about the emotional and spiritual support Levitin received from his parents and his extended family, but it seems to a certain extent that his search for the perfectly organized mind is the result of growing up in an atheist environment, which must have been influenced deeply by the ordeal his Berlin born Jewish mother underwent after fleeing Europe and starting a new life in the US. I believe it’s important to observe that Levitin makes not a single reference to how the spiritual outlook of a person or the emotional baggage of one’s family affects the structure of the mind; neither does he mention with a single word how our nutritional habits shape what we think, and yes, what we are.
 
A few months ago, I wrote an essay about the neurology of faith, love and hope and arrived at the somehow mystic interpretation of Juvenal’s quotation mens sana in corpore sano, i.e. a healthy mind rests in a healthy body. My interpretation was spiritus sanctus in corpore sano, i.e. a saint spirit rests in a healthy body - if, and only if, the mind opens itself to the guiding force of God. I recall now yet another quotation from writing teacher Julia Cameron, which is related to this train of thought: Be alert, always, for the presence of the Great Creator leading and helping my artist.
 
Both quotations indicate that there is yet another force at work in organizing information and making it available at one’s fingertip. It’s a force which is beyond the understanding of our little minds which are restricted by the limitations of our petty and fearful egos. It is the mind at large as Aldous Huxley called it in The Doors of Perception. Levitin somewhat knows about this mind at large as he quotes Albert Einstein who said “The greatest scientists are artists as well.”, but he adds it to the last chapter in his book: Everything Else – The Power of the Junk Drawer.

To many people, being organized means “a place for everything and everything in its place.” This is an important principle for organizing files, tools, objects in the home and office, and so on. But its equally important for our organizational systems and infrastructure to allow for fuzzy categories, for things that fall through the cracks – the miscellaneous folder in your filing system, the junk drawer in your kitchen. This indicates that Levitin doesn’t know what to do with God or spiritual organization in the same way as he has no idea of what we need to teach our children. Either he doesn’t know or the scientific dogma doesn’t allow him to write explicitly about it.
 
This might all sound as if I don’t appreciate Levitin’s work. I sincerely do, but I don’t think that his conclusions will solve the problems which humanity currently faces, in particular it won’t solve the most crucial question: what to teach our children? I say this, assuming that the reader agrees that we have done something wrong in the past, looking at environmental and social destruction all over the planet. Training our offspring to be even more competitive won’t be the solution. As His Holiness, the Dalai Lama said: The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kind.
 
While successful people tend to neurotically organize their intellectual mind and their material environment,  while they hold tight onto their critical linear thinking, healers, storytellers and lovers are guided by subtle trust and the ability of letting go. Levitin knows about this and strangely enough concludes his book - after dissecting like nobody else before him how we organize the phenomenal world – with faith: The key to change is having faith that if we get rid of the old, someone or something even more magnificent will take its place. My wise wife puts this into even simpler terms: 旧的不去新的不来, i.e. if the old doesn’t go the new won’t arrive.
 
Many of the world’s problems – cancer, genocide, repression, poverty, violence, gross inequities in the distribution of resources and wealth, climate change – will require great creativity to solve. Levitin suggests non-linear thinking and the daydreaming mode are much underestimated qualities of human problem solving and one is again tempted to read between the lines that this is the way how a cognitive psychologist writes scientifically about how God manifests himself in our minds. Levitin quotes once again Einstein saying Imagination is more important than knowledge and continues every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from, but avoids an answer to the question which is pregnant throughout his last junk drawer chapter: what is the source of creativity and imagination?
 
It is strongly recommend to read on this account My Stroke of Insight by neurologist Jill Bolte-Taylor. The accomplished brain scientist experienced a brain stroke at age 37 and witnessed how her left hemisphere, the one which is responsible for our linear, task-positive thinking and which is thoroughly analyzed by Levitin, shuts down. What she is left with is her right hemisphere and although she enters a near death experience she realizes that there is something more at work than her small mind and fearful ego.
 
If we want to solve the world’s most pressing problems, we need to remember two things. Firstly, Levitin’s most central thesis, that the twenty-first century’s information problem is one of selection. Secondly, that it is not us who can make this selection. Levitin writes, that there are really only two strategies for selection in the face of this [information flood] – searching and filtering. Together these can be more parsimoniously thought of as one strategy, filtering. And the only variable is who does the filtering, you or someone else. When you search for something, you start out with an idea of what you want, and you go out and try to find it.
 
I have come to the conclusion that whenever I go out and try to find something that I end up being overwhelmed by the multitude of choices to make and the amount of information to digest. Since I have submitted my life to God and the great filtering system of the mind at large, I feel like I have entered a smooth operation mode which reduces the amount of information organization. I organize only what is necessary for the next days, because I can trust that somebody else takes care of the journey and its destination. Levitin’s work has scientifically confirmed that I am on the right track. Subtle trust rules over critical thinking; but we need both. Otherwise we either turn paranoid or superstitious and naïve.
 
One might add to this on a cynical note that Levitin is not a very critical thinker. He writes 400 pages in small print, which would turn out to be at least 600 pages in standard font size, about many interesting details. He is completely ignorant though of political realities, when he refers to the 9/11 incident or the Iraq war. One wonders if he is naïve or if his position in one of the most respected universities on the North American continent force him to avoid the truth about the US war against its own citizens and the economic growth paradigm behind war against other countries.
 
Useless But Indispensable
 
If I started with this review by saying that reading this book is indispensable, but you might very well find it useless, I would like to confirm for those who are not interested in cognitive psychology that this is most likely true. Levitin makes though a few very wise remarks on the last two pages, which are useful to everybody. He writes: One’s junk drawer, like one’s life, undergoes a natural sort of entropy. Every so often, we should perhaps take time out and ask ourselves the following questions:

• Do I really need to hold on to this thing or this relationship anymore? Does it fill me with energy and happiness? Does it serve me?
• Are my communications filled with clutter? Am I direct? Do I ask for what I want and need, or do I hope my partner/friend/coworker will psychically figure it out?
• Must I accumulate several of the same things even though they’re identical? Are my friends, habits, and ideas all too similar, or am I open to new people’s ideas and experiences?

 
Getting organized can bring us all to the next level in our lives. It’s the human condition to fall prey to old habits. We must consciously look at areas of our lives that need cleaning up, and then methodically and proactively do so. And then keep doing it.
Every often so, the universe has a way of doing this for us. We unexpectedly lose a friend, a beloved pet, a business deal, or an entire global economy collapses. The best way to improve upon the brains that nature gave us is to adjust agreeably to new circumstances. My own experience is that when I’ve lost something I thought was irreplaceable, it’s usually replaced with something much better. The key to change is having faith that if we get rid of the old, someone or something even more magnificent will take its place.
 
Let’s hope that we find that key to get rid of greed, capitalism and economic growth. There is something much better waiting for us. To find the key it helps to declutter radically in the material, intellectual and the emotional world. Free our children from force-fed education and trust that the last two decades of research on the science of learning have shown conclusively that we remember things better, and longer, if we discover them ourselves rather than being told them explicitly. Zen masters speak in riddles because they let the disciple set neuro-markers on his own; and thus the cup must be empty to be filled.

Levitin writes in the introduction that this is the story of how humans have coped with information and organization from the beginning of civilization. If information selection is the challenge of the 21st century as he concludes in chapter 9, we need to ask how we can reset our way of thinking from linear to nonlinear; from many individualized and isolated to one centralized and connected computing unit. It is in particular chapter 8, which requires a follow up, because it does not answer what it set out to do: describing the future of the organized mind and what to teach children. And above all, it won’t be enough to follow up with yet another academic analysis. What humanity needs is a story it understands.