A Metarevolutionary Manifesto (Confronting Our Metacrisis)

A Metarevolutionary Manifesto (Confronting Our Metacrisis)

Value and Action are lovers, and this is a book about their relationship. In recognition of what some have started to call a metacrisis, there is a growing need for a higher-order revolutionary framework—one which isomorphically matches the growing complexity of our interconnected crises. This book proposes that we must first be metarevolutionaries before we can be effective in the revolutionary domain, much less the political and social domains of our daily lives. We live in a time of too-many-crises-to-count. They are all swirling in shared waters—blurring the edges between them. Because of this, there will be many varieties of crises and revolutions which are not specifically addressed in this book. But therein lies the metarevolutionary mindset: We are addressing all of these areas at once. Some readers may find it callous that some specific crisis was not addressed directly. Yet, please believe, all such crises (and their resolutions) are the subject of this book. This manifesto is not meant to devalue the things you care about by leaving them out, but to empower you with brand new tools and perspectives by approaching what you care about from new perspectives. The shift in perspective, namely, involves the movement from crisis to metacrisis, and from revolution to metarevolution. A metacrisis is a complex system whose elements are crises, and exhibits, as a unified whole, its own unique behaviors and properties beyond those found in its elemental crises. An animal is to an ecosystem what a crisis is to a metacrisis. A metarevolution is a nonlinear change—often a phase shift or metasystem transition—in the underlying conditions which constitute the foundations of all nonlinear change. It is a complex system whose holons are revolutions. It addresses the base layers of all crises, and it is revolution applied to the base layers of revolutions. A metarevolution leads in the direction of greater complexity and consciousness of, and coherence between, action-centers. It is a state of orientation towards a metacrisis as a unity, and a striving to address the deepest crises within it—in a way which does not simultaneously lead the metasystem as a whole into worse crises. So let us turn revolution upon itself and radically transform the underlying conditions of radical transformation. We will take on our metacrisis with a metarevolution, and also demonstrate metarevolutionary principles which will be applicable to any future metacrisis.