The System Within
The Club of Rome
Earth4All Deep Dive Paper 17
May 2024
The system within:
Addressing the inner dimensions of sustainability
and systems transformation
Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity, a Report to The Club of Rome, offers system change pathways to avoid ecological and societal collapse through ‘extraordinary turnarounds’ in key policy areas.
The material aspects of the global crises we face are well understood: energy systems, dangerous emissions, biosphere destruction, food security. Less well understood is why, despite having the policy instruments, the technologies, and the resources available to address them, we are not responding effectively. This paper provides a perspective on system change that reaches beyond – or rather, within external structures and strategies, to the human mind that built and maintains them. It calls urgently for attention to the underexplored inner dimension of system change.
That inner conditions have played a central role in creating and maintaining our current crises seems in one sense too obvious to mention, and yet this fact is too often absent from high-level solutions analysis.
- The deep cultural narratives underpinning extractive and exploitative behaviours.
- The shifting values and evolutionary impulses underpinning escalating consumerism.
- The rise of individualism and fragmentation of collective identity.
- The biases and emotions that drive our political behaviour.
All are forever present and active, pulling the levers of our ‘outer’ world. And as vested interests are more than aware, they are susceptible to influence. As a matter of course we allow commercial and political forces to manipulate the human inner world in ways directly contributing to our polycrisis.
But as wisdom traditions and science unequivocally show, we are also capable of understanding, nurturing, transforming and maturing our views, qualities and capacities in ways that support the flourishing of the whole. The inner, then, is not simply an elective complement to system change approaches, but an inseparable, primordial and unavoidable aspect of human-made systems themselves. It is written through every ‘external’ structure and interaction and as such, in the language of Donella Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth, represents a deep leverage point for change. Indeed, while consideration of the inner has become lost amid more structural concerns in recent decades, it was integral to the vision of The Club of Rome, with inner change seen as foundational to necessary structural transformation.
While ambitious policy levers are much needed, sustainable change hinges on integrating material interventions with consideration of the human inner dimension: reckoning with the deep collective structures of thought foundational to failing systems, and nurturing the inner capacities necessary to overcome barriers to collective action and structural transformation. This paper highlights the overlooked inner dimension of system change, and supplies systems thinkers with the language to advocate for psychological, social and spiritual factors crucial to sustainable solutions. It discusses worldviews, mindsets, values, identity, religion and spiritual sensibility, reaching down to love and cultivating the heart, as root drivers of cultural behaviour. It considers their interaction with psychological and behavioural tendencies, and the transformative inner capacities that can be cultivated to intervene at deep leverage points. It explores ways of including the inner that can support more holistic views, models and interventions; giving the psycho-socio-spiritual conditions for collective action due consideration in the complex picture of system change. Finally, it introduces existing initiatives leading the way in integrating inner and outer dimensions of system change. Humanity’s future wellbeing depends on restoring agency in this neglected inner domain.
ACCESS THE PAPER: https://www.clubofrome.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Earth4All_Deep_Di…
WATCH LAUNCH PRESENTATION: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_yhNDQUEEc&list=PLSVaEtHMi2FOhcW2N_Lr0… (over 1 hour)
Last updated 20 July 2024
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