I was reading
Six Degrees last night, about how many civilizations fell due to drought (e.g. the Mayan). These societies were structured appropriately to the environment they evolved within, but were not structured to be able to adapt to significant and frequent enough perturbations such as drought. Their society lacked the ability to a) model or imagine future scenarios such as repeat megadroughts and b) adapt society structure to be able to handle such scenarios.
ERE1, from one framing, is about modeling future scenarios that the individual might face (economic disaster, local 'natural' disaster, social destabilization, food supply interruption, personal health issues, etc) and adapting a personal structure (personal financial situation, location, skills, buffers, relationships, health and fitness) to be able to handle such scenarios.
If we stop there, the downsides are mostly obvious (or at least we've discussed them enough that they feel obvious at this point): it can feel isolating to be a solo ERE1 practitioner; any individual or household can only handle so many or so powerful of perturbations before it succumbs, being just one household; what about friends, extended family, neighbors, community? Is the ERE1 household supposed to sit there and watch while others get hacked to pieces by unfolding environment? That doesn't feel good.
I was listening to the Nate Hagens podcast the other day, the
fourth conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger. It's really good. The point I want to bring in here is this:
Schmachtenberger makes the case that when humans broke out of purely genomic evolution, the unit of adaptation that was responding to selection pressures became the coordination ability of groups of humans PLUS their tech stack (agglomeration of skills and knowledge with respect to physical infrastructure; flint knapping, brain tanning, persistence hunting, basket weaving, cordage, canoe building, firemaking, ironwork, the wheel, irrigation canals, animal husbandry, the radio, the internet, etc) PLUS what he calls their superstructure by which I think he means something like group-shared paradigm, cultural goals, etc.
Social coordination ruleset + tech stack + paradigm.
Implicit in what he's saying is that the individual isn't what evolves in adaptation to unfolding environment, it's
groups of humans, this unit. Individual tech stacks and paradigms die with the individual. Group-coordinated tech stacks and paradigms pass down and evolve through time in communication with unfolding environment. And this can happen very rapidly.
One way to think about ERE2 is how to create these evolutionary group units, and what might these group units look like? Since the nature of the groups is evolutionary, and how exactly environment (climate, political, social) is going to unfold is a bit of a guessing game, it's probably only worth attempting to envision what these units might look like upon first 'going holon', achieving (semi?)-autonomous emergent-behavior status. Once a unit achieves this state, then it will evolve in response to unfolding environment and we don't have to worry about it anymore. It's been spun up and is responsible for itself now, including it's own self-authoring and visioning.
The imaginal challenge is, what does it take, what does it look like, to get to that initial point?
An extra motivation is that at the moment, the individual ERE1 components are reliant on the environment existing close to the way it now does. I think. This community relies on the internet, on-demand printing, most of us rely on a very industrial-consumer tech stack, our financial systems rely on the economy not being a total crater, etc. Yes, each of us as ERE1 individuals are much better suited to deal with serious perturbations than most people, but then we die of old age or whatever and that's it. There ERE
community is fragile.
This strikes me as a prime motivator for talking about ERE2. At some point, the knowledge that I'm probably all right for now isn't good enough. My O2 mask is on, neat, good for me, but a bunch of people around me haven't even yet figured out that they're sucking super thin air and should probably grab a mask. And the only way we're all not going to die soon is if enough people on the plane get their masks on, so we can work together to figure out what the problem is and either patch the hole in the fuselage, or figure out how to glide-land the plane in the jungle and start building a little community there, or whatever needs to be done.
I have some more specific thoughts on what an ERE2 unit might look like but it needs more time in the oven.
