Systemic problems can only be dissolved by systemic solutions rooted in love. We must shed the old and together lovingly imagine and build something new.
We are burdened with so many massive systemic problems right now: racism, global warming, pandemic, patriarchy, lack of clean water, hunger, homelessness, addiction, obesity, loneliness, colonization, pollution, extinction...it’s a long, impossibly heavy list that just keeps going.
The thing is, it might be impossible to “solve” any of these problems in isolation. But the good news is that redesigning whole systems, while it is a big task, has the potential to dissolve most of these problems at once.
We can see so many broken parts of our world. We have an understandable impulse to hold up the often bloody shards and shrapnel we find at our feet or in our own flesh and shout or weep, “This is broken! We have to fix this!”
The problem is when we hurriedly try to glue the pieces back together.
We live in a computer/machine age. We tend to think of things as non-living computers and machines that we can build and repair. There’s a break? Add enough heat to bring it to its melting point and force it back together. Rip out the broken wires and replace them. Bring in a specialist who can use the right tools to replace the broken glass.
But what if we’ve been looking at this with the wrong lens? What if our world is made up of living organisms at every scale?
What if, instead of rushing to try to melt, wire, and glue every corpse back together, holding onto its decayed flesh as long as possible, what if we could accept the life and death of systems? I’m all for fighting for life and healing broken systems whenever possible. But at a certain point, when all the king's horses and all the king's men can’t put Humpty back together again… What if we see what the peasants and women have to say?
Many of those of us who are not in positions of contemporary power (i.e., dominance, mechanical force) have had to learn to accept the reality of life and of death. We have had to learn how to live without believing that we are the ones in control. This position can gift a different kind of power. A peace. A comfort in accepting both one’s smallness in one’s place in the world and at the same time, the importance and capacity of the difference one can make in one great life.
Good systems are living systems. When a system is no longer characterized by life: growth, loving exchanges of information, reproduction, diversification, stability, adaptation, progressing, and evolving with an individuated spirit...it’s dying or has died.
Death however is not an end. In the natural world, death is necessary for life. With time, the forest floor breaks down even the largest trees and dissolves them into nutrients for the next generation. The forest is healthiest when small fires regularly burn through to clear out weak parts and convert them into ash for fertilization.
We can embrace the death of great and weak things. We can use our collective discernment to decide which particles are worth feeding the next generation. We can be grateful for the good in a system that has died and grieve it’s passing. We can be grateful, too, for the things it showed us we don’t want. We can grieve the pain it left and transform unwanted forms into something better.
And in the moments we find ourselves like the caterpillar, our structure completely liquified in our own cocoon, let us not panic and try to force ourselves backward into our last known system. Let us accept the forward evolution of life. Give ourselves the time to completely dissolve all that needs to be dissolved. Lovingly exchange with one another to discern what kind of new, previously unimaginable shape will let us fly.
If we can embrace the patterns of life, growing, adapting, sharing ideas, and start imagining new structures that take more of the Jobs-to-be-Done approach, I believe we can design systems that resolve most if not all of the biggest problems all at once. If we can lovingly ask ourselves and our neighbors (at every scale)...
What do the people here need to flourish?
What does the land here need to flourish?
How can we design systems that get the entire job done?
...we can co-create and evolve a diversity of new systems, each with their own appropriately individuated spirits, that move life forward.
I think it will require totally different ways of approaching the built environment (including agricultural practices). As the literal, physical structure of our culture, our built environments are the embodiment of our current ways of thinking. They tend to be minimally examined accretions manifesting our subconscious and are massively responsible for the pollution, extraction, and isolation we suffer and that causes so many more problems.
How can we move past racism while redlining, systemic poverty, and white flight remain? While here in the South, our identity of “Southern” architecture still looks like a set of Gone with the Wind, complete with people of color cleaning up and tending the grounds? How do we have opportunities to get to know and love our neighbors when we spend most of our lives in isolation moving our soft selves between shells of cars, garages, and homes of suburbia or fearfully out in the unnamed masses of city life? How do we heal our bodies and planet when our meals are depleted, genetically modified, processed, and shipped from across the planet? How do we listen to women and people of color when the system is set up to only function when they do what’s expected of them with little to no compensation. We live in system after system of isolation, domination, and extraction.
But as Alain de Button observed in The Architecture of Happiness, the opposite can also be true: “We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need—but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need—within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings, and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.”
These same exoskeletons we inherited (and perpetuate) can also be a key to consciously creating systemic healing and evolution because it is here where our collective values take form. Together, ideas, spirit, and body, can be living.
There is so much potential to heal and create living systems that connect us with ourselves, each other, and the natural world. When the very structure of our society holds us to this kind of connection, it becomes much harder to pollute. Much harder to take advantage of another. Harder to ignore the hurting.
Our old wineskins are bursting with today’s new wine.
May we not panic as the old wineskins are bursting right now. May we let go of the old. And together generate new and flexible structures, containers, and systems to hold ourselves in a better iteration. Systems born of loving exchanges with one another. Asking how we might meet our needs and that of the planet and other living organisms. Structures that will hold us in the shape of the most beautiful world we can imagine. Remembering that when even one of us loses, we all lose.