Jeremy Lent 02.25.18

Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-guest-jeremy-lent-022518/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vUEhXTmOTrY

(Sound of an elephant trumpeting)

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen, and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Jeremy Lent. He is an author and founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. The Liology Institute, which integrates systems science with ancient wisdom traditions, holds regular workshops and other events in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy is author of the novel Requiem of the Human Soul. Formerly, he was the founder, CEO, and chairman of a publicly traded internet company. Lent holds a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

So first, thank you for being on the program again, and second, thank you for your work.

JL: Thank you, Derrick. It’s always such a pleasure to be with you. 

DJ: Well, thanks. It’s a pleasure to talk with you, too. 

So today, you and I have planned on talking about how corporate capitalism, or the dominant culture more broadly, coopts everything. But before we get there, can you reintroduce The Patterning Instinct, both the book and the concept, because I’m sure that’s a concept we’ll be talking about through the rest of the interview. 

JL: The book itself is called The Patterning Instinct and it’s subtitled A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search For Meaning, which pretty much describes what the book is about. It looks at the different ways in which cultures have made sense of the universe, all the way from earliest hunter-gatherer times to our present day, and in fact, even looking out into the ways in which the kinds of meaning we make may affect the future, which I think is going to be really relevant to our conversation today.

So, the pattering instinct itself is what I describe as the kind of instinct that we humans have, that we have to a far greater degree than other mammals. And it’s really the identifying characteristic that makes humans unique among all other creatures. And it’s an instinct that works to drive us to find meaning out of everything around us. Think of a little baby who hears the sounds around her, and feels and touches everything. Nobody says to her “You’ve got to learn language.” But because of this instinct to pattern meaning into everything around her, she learns how to speak and how to become part of her culture. So it’s an instinct that humans apply from the earliest days, when we first had language, maybe a couple hundred thousand years ago or so; to look at everything around, like the stars, nature, what was going on, and try to make some meaning out of it, and create stories about the universe. 

And those are the underlying foundational structures of thought that led to different cultures, and ultimately led to bifurcation of cultures and to the culture that has become dominant today.

So today, of course, we use our patterning instinct in very different ways. But for all of us, it’s what we use to make sense of things. But what’s so critical is that it’s our culture that we’re born into that really shapes how we make sense of the world. So a big part of the book is helping us to recognize – it’s almost like an archaeology of the mind. Helping us to recognize where some of the things that we take for granted, where these ideas actually came from. Where the idea that maybe by recognizing them, we become more free to really question them, and perhaps even shift our values and our meaning-making to something that might be more harmonious for ourselves and for our place in the earth.

DJ: Thank you for that, and you’ve done a wonderful job of introducing, I think, the instinct in itself, and can you give – I’m going to say a silly example, and can you give examples of what you think are helpful or harmful patterns that we perceive. You can disagree with the words “helpful” and “harmful” too, that’s perfectly fine. I’m thinking of – obviously language is an example of the patterning instinct going right, that a child learns to speak, or that the parent knows that if the child is crying, that means there’s something wrong with the child and something needs to be fixed. 

And then I’m also thinking – and I don’t want to disrespect lucky socks. But one can – you know, if a baseball player is in a slump and then they get three hits and then they don’t change their socks and they wear the same socks the next day and get three hits again, they could end up wearing the same socks for the entire…

JL: I love it. 

DJ: Which may be – I mean, once again, I don’t want to disrespect lucky socks, but that may be a time where you’re seeing a pattern…oh, I know a great example, a better example, causation vs. correlation. You can go “Gosh, have you ever noticed that there are a lot firefighters at a fire? Firefighters must cause fires.” 

JL: Right.

DJ: And so you’ve got a pattern, but you’ve seen it backwards. 

I’ll shut up now, and can you talk about helpful, harmful, spurious, non-spurious?

JL: That’s great. We can go one layer deeper and looking at what you’re raising. And just think about what is a pattern in itself? Think for example about, like, you look at the night sky. There are gazillions of stars out there. And if anyone has taught you your constellations; basically every culture looks at those stars and they identify constellations, and that’s like a great example of patterns. But when you make a pattern you’re doing two things. You’re including certain things in that pattern, and you’re excluding the stuff that doesn’t fit in that pattern. And it’s part of the way our patterning instinct works. Once we’ve created that pattern, we think in terms of it, which means we keep looking just at the stuff that fits in that pattern. And other stuff that doesn’t fit in that pattern, we kind of ignore, until maybe it becomes so critically extreme that we have to change our pattern in order to include that. 

And so it’s important to realize that essentially any way in which we make meaning – and I love some of your examples, but any way we do that is never 100% right. Because by making the pattern we’re framing things, fitting some things in and some things out. The great example is to go back to language. Like you said, language is incredibly important for an infant to learn her own culture’s language. And what they found by a really sophisticated test studying infants is that as early as nine months, a baby has learned to notice the sounds natural to her country’s language and ignore those that don’t fit in that language.

We know that somebody who’s been born and raised in Japan has trouble distinguishing between “luh” and “ruh” sounds, which to us in English is kind of obvious. But because there’s no distinction about that made in Japanese, their patterning instinct wipes that out. 

What’s so important about that is when we look at the ways in which we make meaning out of the world today, or the way the dominant culture makes meaning out of the world, it does the same thing. We can look at a certain pattern and somebody in the dominant culture might see one thing, and somebody from a different cultural complex might see something completely different.

DJ: You know, a really great example of that in my own life is that I was raised, like most of us in this current culture, to believe that evolution, natural selection is based on strict competition, and it’s basically survival of the meanest. Fittest. And I remember when John Livingston – I read his book and then interviewed him. And he argued that evolution is in many ways based on cooperation and fitting into your niche in the larger community. When he first said that I was thinking “God, he’s crazy! That makes no sense at all!” And it took a few years for me to come around to see it. And now, when I look at the natural world, I see all these examples of cooperation more than I see examples of specific, strict competition.

I’m just saying I used to see it one way, and then it was through other people pointing out patterns that had never occurred to me that I was able to start seeing it differently.

JL: Yes. And what you are describing, as I see it, is actually one of the fundamental, foundational flaws of what our modern civilization’s worldview is based on. It’s not just something that relates to biology or evolution. It’s something that people have inculcated in their lives. And that’s the sense that somehow because of this belief that evolution works through this, what Richard Dawkins is famous for, calling it the “selfish gene.” That actually it’s okay for humans to be selfish. In fact, that’s one of the fundamental philosophical justifications for capitalism. Since we’re all selfish, just like the way the world works out there – evolution works through everyone, through each gene and every animal trying to do its thing and be as competitive as possible. So capitalism is basically like the most efficient way for humans to evolve their society. And it’s completely flawed, and yet it’s such a powerful way for people to justify the incredibly unfair and destructive economic system we live in now.

So I do think that’s one of the foundations. And in fact, I’ve gotten in hot water in the last year or so by writing articles about what I call “The dangerous delusions of Richard Dawkins.” People get so upset! A lot of them email me back and say “He doesn’t support selfishness. He’s really a good person and you shouldn’t attack him like that.”

And I totally believe he’s a good person. I have no real question about that. But he’s really been promulgating bad science that has been outmoded now for decades. And that science has served as a foundation for people applying it to economics, and capitalism, in a very false way. Even highly intelligent people. This is not something people do without thinking about it, and I think it’s very dangerous. 

DJ: What’s that line from the end of Casablanca? “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.” 

JL: (both laughing) Right. Exactly.

DJ: I mean I really agree with you on that. 

So before we go to how capitalism coopts everything, which you’ve really given us a good entré to, and I should probably take it but I want to do one more little parenthetical comment. 

Also, the world itself is so complex and there is so much information out there – like you said, there are bazillions of stars, and we have to choose some and leave out others in order to perceive “Orion the Hunter” or “The Big Dipper” or anything else. Life is so complex that it’s possible to project so many different patterns onto it, and even completely mutually exclusive patterns onto it, because the patterns that we can recognize are so less complex than the real world. 

JL: Yes. I think that’s true. And in a way that kind of leads into the way in which, if you look at the modern mainstream way of looking at the world, making sense of it. And ultimately it’s something I can identify as reductionism. It’s this way of saying, essentially, starting with the scientific revolution hundreds of years ago, some of the most brilliant minds would look at this complexity, and they’d say “We want to try to understand it.” And at the time, they were the progressive ones who were really moving things forward. And they’d say “In order to understand it, we need to break it down, think of it like a machine, and reduce it to its specific parts so that we can really understand how these work.” And so cut this out, look at this, separate it from that, and we’ll understand it better. 

And by doing that, looking at things by separating things out, thinking of them like incredibly complex machines, they did amazing things. They came up with this scientific understanding of the universe, leading to these amazing technologies, a lot of which we take so much pleasure from. Even right now, we have to recognize the fact that you and I are able to talk or share our ideas with people listening here, and through technology that only developed as a result of this reductionist approach.

But the thing is; they were so successful in what they did that they began to think that their pattern of separation that they were applying meant that the whole universe actually was that. They kind of mistook a particular technique for learning how to manipulate the natural world all around them and started to believe that technique was the actual reality. And by doing that, they lost the ways things connect. So one of the ways in which I think we have hope for the future is to focus our attention on the ways in which things connect up rather than the ways in which they’re separate. And that leads to fundamental shifts in our worldview. And I think it also relates a lot to the different ways in which earlier traditional and indigenous cultures around the world made sense of the world. They saw this kind of amazing distinction between, on the one hand, there’s so much disparate and incredible complexity to the world, but on the other hand, they sensed something unifying that pulled it all together. 

That was sometimes called the riddle of the one and the many. And many different cultures tried to come up with a story of the universe that incorporated the one and the many. And that’s something that our mainstream reductionist viewpoint has absolutely lost. If we want to get to a flourishing place we have to find that again. 

DJ: Yeah, I completely agree. And I’m thinking of a couple of things. One of them is that 14 years ago I wrote this thing – I was by a stream and I wanted to write about what a stream is. You know, when we give definitions, the definitions are, by definition, “this is here and this is there.” There is a square and there is a space inside the square and there is a space outside the square, and the lines delineate. And that’s real, that’s true. And then at the same time I wanted to define the stream by its relationships rather than by “here is the water, here is the bank.” Because I’d been talking to some people who really know rivers, and they were saying we misdefine rivers, because a river doesn’t really end at the bank. It reaches underground, and it’s also flowing under the bottom of the bank. And then where does the water end and the mist above it begin, the solid water? There’s this permeability.

And so that really helped me to try to start perceiving…where I am sitting is not in the stream. There is a stream and there is not-stream. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the boundaries between stream and not-stream are not quite so rigid as we believe. 

JL:  That’s so true, Derrick. And of course they’re related to the self. You know, another of these foundational views coming in our mainstream dominant culture, from a couple of millennia of western thought, is that the self is this fixed entity and that the self is completely separate from another self, and that the human self is separate from nature. And I think part of what we need to do is recognize, just like you were describing the river there so beautifully, that there is actually this really fluid interactivity. That, in fact, what I am as a self doesn’t end at my skin. Just physically, I’m absorbing things and putting things out there in the universe all the time. But even at a deeper place, in terms of this kind of connectivity, the things that I do, the things that I hear, everything that is affecting me and shifting who I am. Every single word, every single activity that I do out there puts out these ripples that become part of the world around us. And actually, once you begin to see the world in terms of connectivity, rather than separation, you begin to realize that there is no fixed self, that it’s amorphous, just like the river. And humans, in the same kind of way, are part of the natural world. Even as we’re destroying it, we’re also part of it in a way that makes it so much more complex. 

DJ: That seems to me a good place to transition into how the dominant culture co-opts everything. Because I agree with everything you’re saying. You put it beautifully and wonderfully. And then I have also seen people argue, then, for example, that because humans are part of the natural world, therefore the fact that humans are killing the oceans is O.K. and natural.

JL: Yeah.

DJ: If you want to, we can talk about that specific example, but what I really want to get to is that it doesn’t matter what idea we’re talking about – I mean, Christianity is such a great example. That you have – let’s pretend that Jesus is real for a second. It doesn’t matter if he was or not. He’s saying “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and he’s talking about all this peace, love, groovy stuff, and within 400 years, or 300, however long it took; you’ve got Constantine saying “Let’s go out and conquer under the sign of the cross.” And you have untold millions of people dying. Indigenous people given the choice of Christianity or death. 

It doesn’t matter. We can talk about love, or we can talk about this connection. But there’s this – it seems to me that you are the person, in the entire world, to talk to about how this patterning instinct leads to the cooptation of everything. Do you see what I’m trying to get at? 

JL: I do. I absolutely do. The book The Patterning Instinct really is tracing, almost like a detective story, tracing where, how this happened, from where humans first evolved to where we are now. And I do think that you can actually detect a few key stages. I’ll name them briefly, but I want to focus on the later stages. I don’t want to go into too much detail on the earlier ones. But there’s this stage when humans developed this advanced prefrontal cortex, giving us this patterning instinct, and developed language and stuff like that, giving us essentially an imbalance of power over the natural world. So even hunter-gatherers, who saw the world as like a giving parent, and saw themselves as being in harmony with nature, caused some of the greatest mass extinctions in all of the earth’s history. So we have to look at that as an imbalance created from humanity’s unique powers of this patterning instinct. 

Then the next big stage is when agriculture first arose, about 12,000 years ago, which caused a significant major separation between humans and nature and between humans and other humans, and ownership and hierarchy. And a lot of the things that we take for granted now are only really 12,000 years old in human history. 

Then the next big step came with the scientific revolution in Europe around the 17th century, and that’s where I want to begin to focus a little more, because along with that scientific revolution was this Puritan value system about the individual making wealth and using private property, like improving the land, was considered to be fulfilling God’s command on this earth. This became the fundamental value structure for the United States. Puritans and Protestants were some of the earlier people to invade and colonize the country and take it away from the indigenous people who lived here. I think we have to look at those underpinnings to get a sense of what’s happened right now, how those layers of thoughts arose. I think it’s around the beginning of the 20th century, late 19th and early 20th century in the U.S., that you see the rise of what’s become this massive global corporate takeover of humanity that we’re experiencing in the world today. 

So that’s from a big picture point of view, the way I see how things developed stage by stage to where we are now. 

DJ: I’m going to throw out a cynical statement that I say when I am feeling not particularly optimistic about the future, which is that sometimes it feels to me like humans spend a lot of our intellectual energy rationalizing our pre-existing, I’ll use a nice word, predilections? Rationalizing what we want to do anyway as opposed to actually thinking through a subject. 

There’s another thing here, too, which is I always think about how they ended chattel slavery in the United States in 1865. And then it didn’t take very long for the Jim Crow laws to be put in place. And then once they started getting rid of the Jim Crow laws, you have the prison-industrial complex arising. It’s like whack-a-mole. Every time you succeed in stopping one form – this relates to cooptation. I’m sorry this is such a broad and terrible question, but it feels like there’s a connection between this cooptation question and this question of underlying bigotries ending up manifesting again. And we can of course talk about this in terms of hatred of the natural world, too. 

One of the things that gets to me is that over the last 30 years the environmental movement has really been coopted from being about trying to save wild places and wild beings, into “sustainability,” by which is meant, by the sort of technotopians, sustaining this culture. So somehow the environmental movement has been coopted into serving the high tech system. So how does the patterning instinct relate to this – do you see what I’m trying to get at? How does it relate to this sort of constant cooptation? 

JL: Yes, I do. I totally get what you’re saying. It’s something I think we touched on when we talked last time, how even where we’ve seen major shifts in cultural norms – like you say, the great example is the end of slavery, which turned into yet another boon for capitalism. And then even in the last few decades we had a real shift away from patriarchal value structures, since the 1960’s and 70’s, and that’s great progress culturally. And yet somehow the capitalist system will just absorb any kind of shift that happens culturally and go: “Great! Let’s make this another way to start some new disruptive company that makes billions of dollars and destroys the earth in some new way.” 

I do think that in order to look at how that happens, we have to look at what are the underlying structures that enable it. When I look at what evolved in the last 120 or so years since the beginning of the 20th century, we see a couple of things. One is this implicit acceptance of the notion of the corporation as being an entity that is necessary and valuable in our world. Everyone thinks “Well, the only way things work is you have to have corporations doing stuff for us, and look what happened with communism. What a disaster that was.” As if the only two choices out there for the global economy, or for humans, to start to organize themselves, are capitalism or communism. And parenthetically, communism is just intent on destroying the natural world as capitalism, every bit as much. 

So when you look at that, you begin to realize – you can ask these questions. Why is it considered acceptable for this kind of artificial entity called a corporation to be created, to serve just the ends of making more money for its shareholders, with no other ethical obligation whatsoever? How can we allow that? And I think that is one of the – that’s become this sort of tenet of capitalism. That you have to allow these gigantic corporations and give them the power to do what they want to do. And I think that’s really one of the major things we have to look at. 

I wrote an article just a few months ago talking about – a lot of the time you’ll read the newspapers nowadays and some of the leading scientific thinkers will be talking about the risk of AI taking over, artificial intelligence. There’s this theory that we can try to develop an artificial intelligence that is there for humanity’s good, but there’s a risk that it can become so powerful that its goal can be different from humanity’s and it can end up destroying the world. There’s one futurist called Nick Bostrom who gives as an example “Suppose we develop a super intelligence with just the goal of manufacturing paper clips? And then it turns the entire earth into a giant paper clip manufacturing facility.” And that’s what they’re worried about. My article said, basically: “It’s already happened. Artificial intelligence has taken over and it’s called the corporation.” We created this structure, of our society, that gives this incredible power beyond any kind of political organization, beyond any kind of government, to essentially turn the world into a kind of paper clip, which in this case is commodifying the world, to create more and more shareholder value, as they call it. And returns to investors, by taking human activity, taking the natural world, and transforming it into the monetized economy. 

And that’s what’s out of control. And until we look at some of the structural levers to control that – that’s where it can take over everything, including environmentalist groups, as you pointed out. 

DJ: I think everything you said is completely brilliant. I love it. It’s so great. And I’m going to focus on maybe in some ways the most innocuous word, or maybe the most dangerous word, that I think you said in that whole beautiful commentary; which is that at one point you said the word “somehow.” Do you see where I’m going with this? 

JL: I do.

DJ: You were talking specifically about slavery. But slavery’s not the point here. The “how” of how this happened. The end of slavery somehow got turned into a means – became profitable, even more profitable for capitalism. And we can say “Somehow the corporation got hold.” What’s the relationship between that word “somehow” and your entire, big, beautiful book?

JL: I hear what you’re saying. Again, we look at the underlying value. The “somehow” is that we  live in a society whose roots are in western Europe and that has now become a global, sort of globally prevalent, which is based on the core values of competition. That humans are meant to be what they call “selfish maximizers” of their own financial needs. A society that applies status  to what somebody is earning, how much they’re consuming, how much they can be seen to be consuming, and that destroys some of the core values of what humans actually evolved to live according to. Things like community, connection. Connection with each other, connection with the natural world. Even connecting within ourselves. 

And I think that when we look at how slavery got coopted into basically a new form of capitalism, or how even some of the advances in social concepts of the last few decades got coopted into capitalism. It’s because those underlying values are still what people live their lives according to. Those are the rules by which people live their lives. Those are also the messages people get from when they’re infants looking at a television screen or a video screen all the time every day as we watch the news. The messaging that comes at us all the time is messages like “Humans are fundamentally selfish.” We’re meant to compete against each other and outdo each other. Our society is happy when it’s growing more. Growth is good. We can grow indefinitely. Don’t even think about any limits to that growth. And we can grow through this kind of notion of freeing, of freeing markets and freeing society so that wealthy billionaires can do whatever they want and ultimately that’s good for all of us because it enables more growth.

And these are some of the fundamental values that we have inculcated in us, and the rules according to which we live our lives unthinkingly. And both those values and those rules have to change for us to shift the trajectory of that. And they can change. It’s doable.

DJ: So what I’m hearing you say, the image that was coming to mind as you were saying all that is that there are layers. And these layers are going to be miscible some. It’s not just a bottom layer, but sometimes the bottom layer moves up through the next two layers. You have all these layers of beliefs and patterns. And you can have the pattern that says it is acceptable to enslave others, and that belief system, and then you can chip away at that. And so you outlaw slavery within a nation but if you still have the belief below that, that whites are fundamentally superior to African-Americans, and the belief that those with white skin are entitled to the labor and lives of those with other-colored skin, then you’ve gotten rid of chattel slavery but you’ve still got this pattern belief that those are, that they are entitled to their labor and lives.

So as long as that other layer still remains, it will find some new way to manifest itself. Am I understanding you correctly? 

JL: I think you’re describing it really beautifully clearly. And then you can keep going down those layers. Imagine what the world fleetingly felt like when Obama was elected president. And we can imagine even in a positive direction of some of those cultural norms going forward. Imagine a world where it’s generally agreed on that there is no difference between people based on the color of their skin. Where that kind of horrendous racial prejudice has become so weak that it’s no longer dominant in driving society. 

But as long as you still have some of these fundamental capitalistic precepts, which basically say that the right way for society to work is for people to compete against each other, and that there’s something intrinsically good about each person seeking their own end at the expense of others, because it leads to a more efficient society and a more efficient economy and that’s ultimately good for everyone. As long as those underlying implicit patterns of thought remain, we’ll still be in this trajectory towards complete collapse of our civilization and disaster for the natural world. 

So something has to shift where we look at these deep underlying values that our capitalist system is based on and make new rules up to control the corporations, based on a different set of values. And also instill – cause media to change so that those destructive values are not instilled in our children from the earliest times that they begin to make sense of things. 

DJ: So what I hear you saying now is that even if we were able to get rid of this overt racism – well, shoot: I just won’t exploit the African-Americans. Instead I will exploit the Syrian refugees who are coming over and are desperate for a job, or the people from Mexico. Or poor white people. Doesn’t matter to me, as long as it’s cheap labor. 

JL: That’s right. And that’s how the world currently works, so that – basically nations will compete against each other just to try to entice some corporation to open some new manufacturing facility in their country, to get the pollution and virtual slave labor just because they’re so desperate to compete in this marketplace where it’s the corporations that essentially choose what they do and essentially make their own rule books. 

DJ: So we have about ten minutes left. You have brilliantly, I think, discussed the cooptation. And can you now, for ten minutes, discuss the “somehow” of moving away from this, considering that those with this perspective own the major forms of media, considering the effectiveness of their propaganda. So somehow we need to change these values and help people – I love the line “Unquestioned assumptions are the real authorities of any culture.” And that’s one of the beautiful things that your book accomplishes, is that you help us to question some of these assumptions. So how do we do this, how do we somehow move people or help people move themselves to perceiving the world in these different ways? And that also manifesting in the real world? 

JL: Such important and profound questions, Derrick. I think the first place for each of us to begin is really looking at our own unquestioned assumptions, which is obviously hard to do. The very fact that they’re unquestioned makes them very difficult to even identify. Just like we were saying about the constellations. Once you see these constellations in the sky, you don’t even realize there are other stars out there to even look at. So I think that all of us have to look at what is it in our lives, what are the ways in which we’re choosing values, choosing what we do that has been ingrained in us as part of this dominant system and is destructive. 

And of course many people listening to this kind of discussion have already done a lot of that work and are aware of some of the fundamental things that need to be reoriented and have already changed a lot of things in their lives. And that’s where we have to recognize that because these big corporations own the mass media, it is so incredibly important for us to work on the power of the network, the power of our self-organization as human beings to relate to each other and to work together. Even if it’s below the surface.

You know, an analogy that I really love is this sense of, you know, in a forest, when you’re walking through a forest you can see the trees, and if a big tree falls down everyone can see that, you know what’s going on, but what you don’t know is happening is this mycelial network,  this fungal network, and below the earth the trees are communicating with each other. Well, they’re actually helping each other, and they’re actually using these networks to transmit carbon and different nutrients from one tree to another and there’s all this kind of communication going on, and that’s the thing that actually allows the health of the forest. And I think we, as humans, are involved in these kind of mycelial networks, through things just like what we’re doing today, these kinds of conversations with each other, helping each other become aware of what’s going on. And when we do that, I think what’s so important is to not judge others, to not make them feel bad about the ways in which they are engaging in destructive behavior. Because then that just leads to further separations. It leads people to close off. 

But to really connect with people’s sense of humanity, with their sense of kindness, their sense of these deep human virtues, of empathy and compassion, and really bring people into that mycelium network, invite them in to recognizing that we can do things in a different way. There are possibilities for us. And then begin to offer some possibilities, visions of what is possible. A world that is really different from the one we live in today. 

DJ: Well thank you for that. And we have like two or three minutes left. To sort of wrap up, do you have any workshops coming up? How can people learn more about your work? And also I’m going to throw in a joker here. As well as that, how can people move from the level of these personal mycelial networks to organized political action? And I’m sorry to drop the big one in.

JL: (laughing) I love that. I’ll try to get to all of that in two to three minutes. But thanks for that, Derrick. I guess first off, if anybody wants to connect with me and my work, a good place to begin is my website jeremylent.com. And if you want to look at a different kind of worldview that I’m talking about, one that can lead to a sustainable flourishing, I have another website to do with liology; liology.org, which you might find really interesting. 

Something that I do have coming up fairly soon: if anybody happens to be in Seattle, I’ll be in conversation with David Korten Sunday February 25th. Also in March, in Sonoma in California I’m co-facilitating a series of three workshops on just this issue, on transitioning culture, understanding the patterns and reshaping them for a flourishing future. So you can find more information on my website about that and if you happen to be in the area that would be great. 

To answer that bigger question: How do we, if we have these different values and we want to kind of plug in to what is possible – I do think it’s important to connect up with organizations that are out there, that are doing really important things to shift where we’re going. 

I’ll just give a plug for one that most people may not have heard of. It’s to do specifically with climate change but it works at a much deeper level. It’s called “Climate Mobilization.” You can find it at climatemobilization.org. And what I love about them is that they are recognizing that we are heading at an absolute existential crisis, and we can’t just be looking at incremental changes. And what we have to do is mobilize society. They use as a kind of metaphor; what FDR did after Pearl Harbor in 1940 in the U.S. Where he transformed society in order to face an existential threat. And that’s what we need to do to face our world now. I love the way that they’re shifting this kind of metaphor of meaning in a way that I think Americans even outside the environmental movement can get and understand.

DJ: Well thank you for that, and thank you for your work. And I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Jeremy Lent. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. 

Jeremy Lent 11.12.17

 

Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-guest-jeremy-lent-111217/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tq8ADhiJODo

(Sound of humpback whales)

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Jeremy Lent. He’s an author and founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth.

The Liology Institute, which integrates systems science with ancient wisdom traditions, holds regular workshops and other events in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy is author of the novel Requiem of the Human Soul. Formerly, he was the founder, CEO, and chairman of a publicly traded internet company. Lent holds a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

So first off, thank you for your work, and secondly, thank you for being on the program.

JL: It’s a pleasure, Derrick. Happy to be here.

DJ: Thanks. And we will just, for transparency’s sake, say that this is the second time we’ve talked, because we did this before and technology screwed us, which is a theme we could talk about if you want. And it didn’t work. So we’re trying again.

JL: And I would just add on the plus side, it gives us the chance for some more conversation, which is always such a pleasure with you, Derrick.

DJ: Oh yeah. I want to think there was a Freudian part of me that made it so it didn’t work, so we could chat again.

So, the first question is: Your most recent book is called The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search For Meaning. Can you tell us what the patterning instinct is and why that’s important?

JL: Sure. We can think of the patterning instinct as the instinct that humans have to a greater degree than any other animal. What really differentiates humans and causes us to do all the things we’ve done on the earth over the last thousands of years? It’s really this patterning instinct. It’s an instinct to look at the otherwise maybe kind of chaotic world we see around us, and to pattern some kind of meaning into it. And we see that in, for example, an infant who’s just learning how to talk. Nobody teaches her. You’re meant to make sense of the words you hear around you. But she has this instinct to find meaning in this melee of sounds, and uses that patterning instinct to basically learn her language, and, importantly, her culture.

And the reason why it’s so important is that it’s that patterning instinct that leads humans to develop culture, and to make meaning out of the universe.

So, for example, when humans first looked at the whole universe, as they began to try to make sense of it, it was the patterning instinct that gave them some sense of spirits, and some kind of thing that drives their actions, essentially, which finally led to where we are today.

DJ: It seems like part of what you’re saying is that one of the things we do is attempt to, as you said, make meaning of the patterns we see around us. And how can that be – how can that be problematical? Not that fact itself, but how has that turned problematical? Such that, you ask questions – you say things like “our rampant consumerism is consuming the earth,” which is obviously true. Can you give me positive and negative examples of the patterning instinct?

JL: That’s a great question. How does it end up in the place we’re in right now? Really what the whole book is about is a cultural history of humanity’s search for meaning. It looks at the different ways that different cultures have patterned meaning into the universe. So really, this kind of consumer culture we’re in today is the most recent way in which originally European and then western civilization, which has now become global civilization, has formed some kind of meaning frames into telling us where our values should be at and what we’re meant to do.

But other cultures in history made very very different patterns of meaning out of the universe around them. For example, the early hunter-gatherers. The first kind of pattern of meaning, if you will, that humans around the world came up with, was to see nature as a giving parent, and to see humans as being part of this family of spirits, all around them. And that led them to have a totally different way of relating to the natural world, of relating to each other, than developed after that. That’s one example.

You get to see how, with the rise of agriculture, completely different patterns of meaning arose. And then you can begin to trace how, with the rise of big civilizations, like Greek or European civilizations, or Chinese or Indian, these different ways in which the civilizations make sense of the universe actually end up driving history, all the way to the present day.

DJ: So I want to ask you about how – I want you to be really really explicit about how the patterns you’ve been taught, the cultural meanings – okay, let’s back up. For me it seems that the world is so complex that it’s possible to see many different meanings. If you don’t mind me going on for a second, I’ve gotten in a few big arguments before with sort of Richard Dawkins-style, Selfish Gene evolutionary biologists. And I believe that evolution is more based on cooperation than competition, and we’ll have disagreements about this. And one of the things that really strikes me, and one of the places I always come to, is that the truth is that evolution itself is more complex than any model we project onto it. But it’s also so complex that we can project a bunch of different models onto it.

Do you agree with that, so far?

JL: Yes, I think that makes total sense, actually.

DJ: So what I wanted to ask you about is how does … give some examples of finding a pattern that might end up being ecologically or socially destructive. You already said hunter-gatherers, but be more specific about this.

JL: Maybe one way to sort of get at this might be, for example, to look at – imagine we’re in nature somewhere, and we see an animal, like an antelope, some kind of grazing animal go across our sight. Depending on what sort of cultural complex you come from, you can look at this in different ways and make totally different sense out of it. So, for example, that hunter-gatherer, forager, who looks at that antelope, might see potentially food. But also would definitely see a spirit. They would see a kindred spirit. And if they actually ended up killing that animal for food, they would have a sacred ritual to recognize the spirit that was part of that creature they were now consuming. That would be one way of making sense of the world.

A farmer, on the other hand, who has put up their boundaries and says “This is human and this is cultivated land and that’s the wild,” might see that creature as either, potentially a threat, you know. “I’ve got my crops and I’ve got to make sure that fence is really strong to keep that animal out of here.” So there’s this kind of separation between human and nature, which became a big part of the agrarian mindset.

And then a completely different example – you know, you mentioned Richard Dawkins. Richard or one of his kind of followers, if they were looking at that antelope, what they’d see is this incredibly, incredibly complicated machine. They wouldn’t even see a spirit. What they’d say is “This is this incredible, sort of sophisticated algorithm that these processes of evolution have created.” Richard Dawkins has actually said something like “When I look at a bat, I see nothing other than a very very complicated machine.” And nature is nothing but sort of bits of data.

So that’s a completely different way of framing sense out of something. And that’s one of the most important frames of meaning that our modern civilization has, that is causing so much destruction. Because it doesn’t look at nature as having any intrinsic value, any intrinsic spirit or reason to be, other than what kind of resource does it provide for humans to optimize in one way or the other?

DJ: And that reminds me of the line by the Canadian lumberman: “When I look at trees, I see dollar bills.”

JL: Exactly. And so to riff off of that for a minute, that leads to these very dangerous kinds of metaphors, of understanding how modern, even environmentalists try to make sense of the world. For example, you get a lot of people who really care about the environment, scientists who are trying to get those in centers of power to wake up and see the destruction they’re causing, and talk about this notion of “ecosystem services.” And if you read the environmental journals nowadays, it’s almost ubiquitous. So “ecosystem services” is this powerful metaphor. And these are mostly really awakened people trying to do good, and trying to get some sustainability. But as long as you see nature as this kind of, sort of like fitting nature into this monetized metaphor of capitalism, and saying “No, we have to treat nature really carefully, because what a great resource it is.” They can calculate “The oceans themselves add thirteen trillion dollars of value to the GDP, so we’ve got to take this seriously.”

So it’s kind of interesting how even progressive, caring, scientific understandings of nature can still fall into these dangerous metaphors, with potentially very dangerous entailments.

DJ: I was talking to a bunch of students at an Ivy League school one time, and the students were environmentalists, and several of them were really pushing this idea about how we have to put value on everything in nature, as you’re saying. And I said back to one of them “You know, I completely agree with you that we need to put value on everything. In fact, I was just talking to your parents before I came out here, and we were estimating your future value. Since you’re at an Ivy League school, we put your estimated future earnings at four million dollars. We think it’s going to be a little bit lower, but we went for that. So what I did is I went ahead and gave your parents six million dollars and they said I could kill you.”

JL (laughing) Exactly.

DJ: “And actually your parents were quite delighted with the deal because they’re getting an extra two million bucks out of this.”

JL: I love it. You really hit it. These are some of the dangers of metaphors essentially gone wild.

So to get back to the notion of what the patterning instinct does, what humans do, is because we kind of try to frame meaning into the world, the way we do that is we actually create core metaphors. And that’s something that the book uses almost like a frame of reference, to look at how different cultures made sense of the universe, is to look at these core metaphors that different cultures use when they try to understand nature, humanity, and what humanity is and how we relate to nature. And it’s key that from these core metaphors, entailments naturally arise. So we begin to think of things that naturally arise from that metaphor, whatever it is. But if we don’t understand what that core metaphor is, even with the best intentions, we can keep acting in ways that end up reifying that metaphor, potentially at the expense of what we really care about, in nature and in ourselves.

DJ: So be more explicit, please, about some of these core metaphors. Are you talking about the machine metaphor that Richard Dawkins would probably believe is not a metaphor, but how the world really is? Is that a core metaphor?

JL: That’s right. That’s one really powerful metaphor that the western world, the modern western world is kind of based on. So that leads to things like, for example, there are new ways of looking at how we deal with climate change. Again, potentially well-intentioned scientists who are kind of looking at how we’re out of control, and we’re going to surge past two degrees Celsius to hit three plus. Civilization will be at risk. So they say “Okay, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to engineer the earth.” So, again, using this metaphor of nature as a machine, they come up with this idea of geoengineering, and come up with these massive global projects to essentially try to fix things, to reduce the amount of solar radiation, or reduce carbon dioxide in the ocean, or wherever it might be.

So that’s one powerful metaphor. Another one that I sort of identify as the core metaphor underlying the modern western world view, is the idea of conquering nature. And that’s something that really arose from the scientific revolution in Europe, the kind of 17th century. And at the time, it was this incredibly progressive exciting clarion call, like “Oh, these amazing things we can do!”

If you think of nature as this thing that causes you disease and is dangerous, and that humans have this kind of heroic struggle to kind of make some kind of sense of the world from it, then the idea of nature is this rallying cry that allows you to think “Oh, we can help cure people, and we can do all this good stuff with that.” And that was a real inspiration for the scientific revolution. And it also, that conquering metaphor also helped the Europeans to feel they could just go around and conquer the rest of the world and that was completely okay. Like they were just fulfilling their White Man’s Destiny or whatever. And so you can see that as a core metaphor with its entailments, and contrast that, for example, with what you saw in traditional Chinese culture, where the idea of conquering nature would have been completely absurd and the very notion of it would never have arisen in anyone’s mind, basically.

DJ: Okay, let’s talk about different crosscultural metaphors in a moment, but for now can you talk about how these sort of core metaphors evolve within one culture? Can you talk about the evolution of the core metaphors of western civilization and how they have become more whatever it is they’ve become?

JL: That’s another sort of really big question there. As I did the research for this book, what I came to realize was that you have to sort of go and peel the layers and go deeper and deeper to try to get to this real core metaphor underlying all of the other stuff. So “Conquering nature” or “nature is a machine,” okay, but where did that come from?

So what I discovered was that really, starting with the ancient Greeks, there was a true cognitive revolution, if you will, in human thought. That for the first time, there was this sense of a dualistic universe that got seeded, and that Plato and other of the ancient Greek philosophers at the time, turned into this powerful way of making sense of the universe that’s been with western Europe ever since.

And so you might say “Well, what is dualism, what’s that got to do with conquering nature and all that stuff?” And so what dualism is, what Plato did the best job of defining, was that he looked at the universe as being not just one universe, but essentially a split universe. And what he saw was a transcendent dimension of the universe, that was outside of the material realm, where everything was perfect and eternal and unchanging and ideal. And that was where “ultimate good” came from.

And then you had the material world, which is polluted and changing and that’s where people died, and basically kind of a sucky place. And the idea of being in this material world was to try to get as close as we could to that ideal dimension elsewhere.

And he then saw the human being as paralleling that kind of split. So suddenly the human being got split into having a soul that was somehow within us and couldn’t be seen but was also eternal and in touch with that ideal universe. The soul was kind of imprisoned in this corrupt body, with things like sex and taste, and the body was going to die and get polluted. And this led to this amazing split in western thought, where ideas like, reason was the characteristic of the soul. And emotion was literally moving within our body, and that was considered something we wanted to rise up from.

So you got all these splits in thinking, and they got applied to the material world and the natural world, and a long time later with Descartes, he took that same dualistic thought and applied it in this really powerful way to the material world, saying basically humans are the only ones capable of thinking. Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Doesn’t that mean that animals have no soul whatsoever, that essentially they’re completely without value, without any meaningful existence? And so he was the one who first cam up with this idea of animals being pure machines with literally no soul to them. So if they were screaming in pain when he was conducting a vivisection, that to him would be no different than the sound a piano might make if you hit a key on it. It had no actual significance of suffering.

DJ: You know, all of this is why I hate philosophy so much. From the beginning, they’re taking some really important concepts, and then it seems like they always get the wrong end of the stick.

JL: I hear what you’re saying. You know, what’s interesting is, it’s kind of western philosophy that you’re talking about. Basically the West has so dominated its own thought structures, and seen that as the only kind of thought structure that exists. That even if you talk to a western philosopher, a mainstream western philosopher, they’ll say the only philosophy that really exists is western philosophy, because of the fact that it’s based on the sense of using pure reason. And it goes from there, and is based on logic and stuff.

Then if you look at Chinese philosophy, for example, you see a completely different way of making sense of things. And it’s based on this totally different core metaphor again, of seeing humans as an integral part of the universe, and the universe as being like this kind of harmonic web, where everything you touch resonated with everything else, and it leads to a completely different way of understanding the human place within the natural world.

DJ: So maybe you can help me with something. I’ve written so much about the issues we’re talking about, and there’s still a language trap that I fall into quite often, which is I will talk about my body, and that disturbs me, because that still is buying into that separation that I am not my body. Maybe I should be asking this off the interview instead of in the interview, but maybe you can help me with that.

JL: Actually, this is a great question, and it is something that I explore in the book to some degree. What it is, is because of this dualistic split, as you say, we’re all conditioned to grow up thinking that what, sort of, I am. Essentially, this thing I call “conceptual consciousness,” which is split from what you might think of as our animate consciousness.

So you might say, “What’s that talking about?” So our conceptual consciousness is basically the part of us that really thinks in a way that is more uniquely human, and involves symbolic thoughts and is capable of this kind of reasoning, and this part of the human consciousness, people like Plato deify. So that’s the soul, that’s our divinity or whatever. And they saw the rest of us as being not even worth taking seriously.

But another part of us, what I call our animate consciousness, is all the stuff of us that we share with every other mammal out there. You know, feelings and caring and needing to take a piss, or feeling angry or feeling part of community. All the other stuff that we feel around us. And in the West, that’s always been sort of split, and so we talk about “my body.” But in other traditional cultures, that’s just not the case at all. So the Chinese, for example, when they talk about the mind, they call it “xin.” And “xin” literally refers to the heart. So they see the mind, like the core of the human consciousness, as being actually placed in the heart. And imagine how that leads to different entailments right there, because the heart of course is something that responds to, you know when you get excited you can feel it beat more. And so it’s like this integral part of the body. So they just didn’t see that split, of “my body” in that kind of way.

DJ: This seems like a nice place to start asking you about your … about the Institute, the Liology Institute. Can you talk about that a little bit? First off, what is “liology”? And what does that have to do with everything we’ve been talking about so far?

JL: Liology is an integrated investigation, if you will, into the ways in which we’re all connected. Connected within ourselves, within the universe, and with nature. And the word itself comes from a traditional Chinese word, “li,” which literally means the principles of organization, the principles by which all the stuff of the universe connects with everything else in the universe. So you can see liology as being essentially an integration of the western word “ology,” like the study of, along with this traditional Chinese word “li.”

I established this institute some years back, really in response to the stuff I was seeing that we’ve just been talking about for the last half hour, this realization that the worldview that is mainstream and dominant right now, is leading us to destruction, based on its focus on separation, based on these kind of dualistic splits. And as I did the research for this book, something amazing came to me, that I began to look not just at things like traditional Chinese thought, but also in looking at modern science, I began to realize that all of modern science is not all following this reductionist, Richard Dawkins-style paradigm that we’ve been talking about, seeing the world as just a machine and our whole relationship with nature is just to conquer it.

But in fact, there’s a very powerful branch of modern science called “systems thinking.” You might know it as chaos theory, complexity theory, or just systems theory. And basically it’s the science of understanding the connections between things. And it’s every bit as rigorous and accepted mainstream as reductionist science. There are all kinds of prize-winning Nobel laureates from systems thinking too. But most people are unaware of how powerful it is. And the thing that I found so fascinating is that what modern systems science is working to study is the very same principles of organization that traditional Chinese thought understood so well, as they tried to understand how the universe worked.

So the idea behind liology is to explore this amazing intersection between modern scientific understanding of the world and traditional wisdom, and come up with a world view that is integrated. One that recognizes humans being embedded within the natural world, and one that’s also very rigorous scientifically, so it can’t be dismissed by modern generations of thinkers as kind of woo-woo or just sort of not valid. It shows from a scientific perspective as well as a traditional perspective how the true identity of who we are as human beings is this mind-body organism embedded within nature. And for us to flourish, nature has to flourish too.

DJ: Which is frankly kind of embarrassing that you and I both have to write books explaining that without nature, we’re dead. I mean, that’s just kind of sad and silly.

JL: It’s quite amazing, isn’t it? I mean, right to the place where you have people like Elon Musk now talking about how we’ve got to set up a colony on Mars so that we have this kind of contingency plan if we screw up the earth so much. Just such amazing idiocy to think that some sort of heroic technology is the solution to our problems, rather than just allowing the earth to be a flourishing place.

DJ: And I just read yesterday that Stephen Hawking is saying that we need to leave the earth too, because we’re killing it. This reminds me, the image that comes to mind is you’re burning down your own house and saying “Gosh, I think we’re going to have to move.” I mean, you could stop burning down your house.

But that leads to the question of how is it that these metaphors are so strong that they can compel us to actually wiping out the capacity of the earth to support much life, including ours, including possibly the oceans. We can argue about what might be left afterwards. But the real point is; isn’t it extraordinary that these metaphors are so incredibly powerful that they can influence us, even to this degree?

JL: That is just so true. And that’s where – there are kind of different layers to get at this really profound question that you’re asking. One, just from a cognitive layer, is what it’s so amazing to understand, is how as humans we are truly driven by the core metaphors that we buy into. Our worldview really is what makes us do what we do. That’s one of the lessons from this book, is that the course of history is based on these things.

And then to take that question to the next level, how did this “nature is a machine” or “conquer nature” metaphor get to be so dominant? And to trace that, we have to look at the way that the Europeans, empowered by this scientific revolution, empowered by this kind of sense of what they could do over nature, and this readiness to disrupt both nature and other societies. How they basically took this amazing destructive energy and applied it to the whole world. So over the course of a few hundred years, what was once a way of thinking that was limited to a small portion of the world became the sort of global dominant way of thinking.

But I think that maybe the most important way to look at this question is to look at how that has now transformed in the last century or so. And I think what we see when we look at that now is our world right now is dominated by the kinds of myths and ideas and the truths or untruths that the media puts out. And that media is dominated by basically global capitalist, these gigantic global corporations.

And so sometimes I think that what are the most important kind of entailments of these western metaphors of “conquer nature,” with this creation of the corporation – at first, it just seemed like a pretty simple, practical solution to a problem or whatever. But these are corporations that have been set up with the pathological optimization of simply increasing shareholder value, which means monetizing humans and the natural world to the maximum extent possible, with no other care about anything else.

So what’s happened is these powerful forces have begun to spread through the world regardless of what’s actually beneficial for humans, or nature, or any other creature other than this kind of abstraction that has been created, this notion of maximizing shareholder value. And that’s I think what we need to understand in our modern era, is that this has become so dominant that it’s really throttling the life out of the earth right now, and for no individual’s benefit other than some billionaire’s.

But ultimately what’s driving it is this abstraction of these kinds of corporations monetizing nature for no other reason than that’s what they were set up to do.

DJ: You know, this really reminds me of Lewis Mumford and his authoritarian technics. That some pieces of technology, according to Mumford, and I really agree with this, actually end up – we end up serving them, as opposed to them serving us. And that’s clearly what’s happening with corporations, they create this tool that ostensibly had a specific function, to build a bridge, to do whatever it is they’re going to do, and then like you were just saying, they end up basically controlling politics.

You know, I used to ask people at my talks if they believed that the government takes better care of human beings or corporations, and in all the years of asking that question, I never had a single person say “human beings.”

JL: Right. And of course, even to the extent that that was somewhat concealed by rhetoric in the past, with this current regime in Washington, it’s not even concealed anymore. It’s just absolutely explicit that we live, in this country, not just in an oligarchy but in a kleptocracy. It’s a group of people who are out there openly and explicitly working hard to steal as much as they can from the rest of the people, not to mention the natural world.

DJ: So let’s come back to the core metaphor. I think that’s so important. Two things: one of them is, it seems to me that one of the problems with the core metaphor that is dominating western civilization is that it gives those who believe it a competitive advantage, a short term competitive advantage over those who don’t, because it’s more efficient at creating weapons of war, such that if you believe that what you want to do with the forests of England or India or whatever, is cut them down and make warships, you will be better able to conquer somebody who believes the forest is a place to live and doesn’t make warships.

JL: I think you’re right. I think that is the story of how western – how basically a few countries in western Europe got to dominate the whole world, because of that dynamic you just described.

DJ: And also it has to do with those core values, even without the physical differences in the world. Because let’s say you and I are neighbors and you hav a set of morals where you believe that one should not steal from one’s neighbors, and my morals are such that I believe that I can steal from anybody I want, including my neighbor, as long as you don’t see me; then the chances are really good that at some point a lot of the things that were in your home are going to end up in mine, based on our having different core values.

JL: Yeah, and that’s so interesting. There’s kind of like a subtheme that you see in my book, the question of how do these sort of different dynamics evolve in different cultures? What’s so interesting is that if you look at the cultures that hunter-gatherers had, for basically 95 plus percent of human history, it was an absolutely egalitarian culture. And you had these bands where no one person would become the big chief and do just what you described. So you might ask, well, how did that happen? Oftentimes people call that the free-rider problem, people who study this in evolutionary psychology and things like that. And the free-rider problem is exactly what you just described; how do you stop this one person from taking advantage of the community and blowing it for everyone?

And hunter-gatherers had a whole set of very sophisticated community dynamics they used to engage in to prevent that. Basically what it was all about was that if some male, it was always a male, got to be too big for his britches, they’d use things like mockery, basically sort of bringing him down to size in ways that the community could keep him from getting out of control.

But that got blown apart with agriculture, because when people started to settle down, and started to have possessions, the inequalities got to be so big that they overrode those old traditional hunter-gatherer dynamics.

But I think that we can learn from that. And if we look at where we are today, you know the irony is that the vast bulk of human beings don’t like what they see going on. They believe in decency, they believe in a sense of fairness. They don’t want to see a few billionaires take all the power away from the rest of us. They want to see their neighbors live in dignity. But they’ve been trained to believe there’s nothing that we can do about it.

And I do think the sources for hope come from ways in which we can connect up with each other, and to propagate new approaches to value that relate ultimately to core human attributes. You know, to that sense of fair play and community. And I think that we do see a lot of those things going on right now. One example is; on the one hand we see Trump, this misogynist-in-chief, spouting his hate and sexism and racism, and then we see what’s recently been happening with the “me too” response to Harvey Weinstein. And you see this amazing power of grassroots people connecting up, saying “We’re not going to take this shit anymore. We’re going to do something about it and we’re going to share our common humanity with each other.”

And that underlying force sometimes does give me a lot of hope in the face of what could otherwise be despair.

DJ: We’ve got six or eight minutes left, and I’m going to throw three questions at you, which you can either take or ignore, or do whatever you want with.

Well no, actually I’m going to throw one at you first. Before we started recording, we also talked about the question of hope, and we talked about how does one find hope, and then I said to you something that somebody said to me 20 years ago; this great activist came up to me and said that sometimes she feels like the only things that keep her going are rage and sorrow. And then can you pick up our conversation from there, and say what you said to me before, which I thought was really moving.

JL: What occurred to me was something I had come across just recently in this great book Daniel Pinchbeck has written, called How Soon is Now? Which looks at the same kinds of issues that we’re both discussing here right now. And he quotes somebody who refers back to that old Joseph Campbell quote, that I bet a lot of listeners know, where Joseph Campbell said, “Well what you need to do in your life is follow your bliss.” And when we look at what’s going on in the world right now, and as activists we say “What the hell can we do about this?” the new riff on that quote is “Follow your heartbreak.”

And when I read that, that moved me so profoundly, because that is exactly where it’s at. The deepest connections we have are being pulled apart by our destructive society. And for us to really have the biggest impact on trying to take that back, take life back, it has to come from our core heart and soul, like “Where is that heartbreak?”

Because it gets tiring after awhile and you can get really demoralized in the face of so much bad stuff that seems to come piling on. But when you’re really feeling that heartbreak, that really drives to a sense of meaning in what we’re doing.

DJ: Now I want to ask the last two questions. One is “How do we currently change these core metaphors? How do we shift them toward nondestructive ends before this culture kills the planet?” And the other question would be “how do people get more in touch with your work aside from reading your excellent book The Patterning Instinct? Can you tell them how they can connect to the Liology Institute?

So those are the two questions. On a global scale, how do we change the core metaphors, and then how can people connect to the Liology Institute?

JL: Thank you. Yes, I think that is the key question. How do we change from where the world is going right now? And I do think that there are alternative core metaphors for us to connect with. And that’s where the book kind of leads us, is to recognize that we could see, rather than this kind of split universe, where nature is this kind of machine, both from modern systems thinking and from traditional insights from indigenous societies and traditional Chinese thought, we could recognize that the world is actually more like a web of meaning, and this place where everything connects with everything else. And if we then focus on that sense of connectivity as what is truly meaningful, that begins to have implications for every single thing we do in our lives. We can begin to see, even within ourselves, we can look at that connectivity and move away from that split, mind-body dualism we were talking about before, and really begin to honor our own feelings and move into a place of integration of all the different things we’re feeling.

And that integration itself can lead us to take the suffering we get when we see all the terrible things that are going on around us, and move that towards a sense of engagement with community. And when we look at that sense of connection in terms of what it means as human beings, it’s really about moving based on human connectedness, recognizing that humans are really all one connected family.

And so rather than focusing on the separations; our community vs. other communities; or our country, America First! vs. the rest of the world; western ideas vs. fears about Islamic extremism; all these places of separation we have; recognizing the shared humanity that we all have. That actions based on that are ones that can lead to a sustainable society. And then finally is the connectivity with the natural world, even seeing that humans are not separate from nature.

Back at Cop 21 in Paris a couple of years ago, there were some signs there that I just loved, which basically said “We are not defending nature. We are nature, defending itself.” Once we recognize that sense of connectivity all around us, all the different actions we do can be based on a fundamentally different metaphor from the one that our corporate-driven society is destroying the world with.

And to answer your final question, and thank you for that, certainly if you’re interested in finding out more about the themes about the patterning instinct, or just more about my work in general, you can visit my website at jeremylent.com . And if you’re interested in this framework of liology, this kind of integrated framework that could really offer a sustainable future for humanity to flourish on this planet, again, just go to liology.org . You’ll see a lot about the institute there and the kind of values that we’re promoting there.

DJ: And I know you also do workshops at the Liology Institute. Do you have any workshops coming up?

JL: We’ve just finished workshops for this year. I do twelve over a six month period here in the Bay area. We explore what it means to be connected. So things like we take a particular theme, some of them coming from traditional Chinese thought, some of them coming from systems ideas, and explore what that means in terms of our own lived experience and our own way of relating to the world. We have things like guided meditation and traditional energy practices, like Chi Gong, as well as some dance and discussion. And so I don’t have any of those coming up now until next year. But if you’re interested in those – I’m going to probably explore doing some of those through webinars too. So if anyone is interested in finding out more about that, just get in touch with me through liology.org . The contact form is right there, and I’ll let you know if we have any kind of web-based workshops coming up next year.

DJ: Well thank you so much for your work, and thank you for being on the program. I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Jeremy Lent, this is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.