Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

Are humans inherently selfish? We’ve covered research on this very show that says otherwise. But looking at the realities of wealth disparity, wars fought over fuel and casual overconsumption as the planet burns, it can certainly feel like our species must be somehow rotten at its core.

Our guest today has a different perspective. Author Jeremy Lent is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network, a global online community geared toward creating a better future for humanity. He argues that while our society’s current systems are exploitative and destructive, the natural state of humanity—and of the planet we live on—is one of mutuality and shared abundance.

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His latest book, Ecocivilization, is a deeply researched manifesto on the inevitable failure of our entrenched systems, as well as a road map for a radically sustainable vision for humanity’s next chapter.

Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us.

Jeremy Lent: You’re welcome. Looking forward to it, Rachel.

Feltman: So tell me a little bit about your new book. You say you aim to “change the operating system of the entire world.” Why don’t we start with what’s wrong with our current operating system?

Lent: Sure, so what does it mean to change the operating system of our world? What do I even mean when we talk about our operating system? And we can understand that really as the system that drives our economics and our cultural behaviors and our senses of norms that are so much part of our lives, we don’t even realize that it’s there. It’s kind of the implicit underlying set of assumptions that we collectively live according to, a little bit like a fish in water that never realizes it’s actually in the water.

And in our case this operating system can be traced back to the rise of modernism in early modern Europe in around the 17th century or so and its worldview, really, that was transformative and set the conditions for our world today. And it led to all the great advances in technology and science that we can all be incredibly grateful for.

And it also led to a shift in the understanding of humanity’s relationship with each other and with the rest of life on Earth. And it was one that really kind of got to look at nature itself as more like a machine and something that could be understood by breaking it down into its little parts. And there was this idea at the time from Francis Bacon of conquering nature, which was inspiring—it was almost underlay the scientific revolution that then took place.

But it led to the sense of humans being separate from the rest of living Earth—in fact, the rest of life itself really just being a machine and therefore being just a resource that could be exploited and extracted from as much as you needed. And that same worldview led to basically Europeans viewing the rest of other people as resources they could extract from, the rise of colonialism and everything that led ultimately to the rise of our global economic system today.

And ultimately, what my earlier work, as well as this book, shows is that this is a worldview that leads naturally to a sense that extraction and exploitation is actually a good thing and that, as human beings, we’re selfish, greedy people in a competitive world and the best thing we can do is recognize that and act accordingly.

But those actually have been shown in many different scientific fields to be basically illusory, not actually what science, in fact, tells us about what we are as human beings or what life is on this Earth. And this is a part of the way in which this book looks at shifting that operating system to one that’s actually more consistent with our evolved humanity, our evolved human values, that could lead more to flourishing than our system does today.

Feltman: Could you tell me a little bit about the sort of methodology that goes into your books? You know, where are you researching? Tell me how, how they come together.

Lent: Well, I’m somebody who does a ton of interdisciplinary research. But because I didn’t come from a particular discipline, it gave me the freedom to actually create books that are very multidisciplinary.

And really, if there’s a sort of a pattern in each of my books, it’s that I feel what I can bring to an ordinary reader is that sort of an accessible insight into some of the deep research which has been done in different fields but tends to be more niche and separated and compartmentalized rather than integrated to get a bigger overview of something.

Feltman: So tell me about where you found inspiration for, you know, this sort of new operating system that you’re writing about.

Lent: I found the inspiration for that in some of my earlier books. This current book I just wrote about ecocivilization, in ways it could be regarded as the third book of a trilogy ’cause these first two books looked at the sort of deeper layers: Essentially, where did we come from, as human beings? Where did this dominant culture come from—think what ideas we take for granted? And what are alternative ways to make meaning out of things?

So that very first book, called The Patterning Instinct, was more like a diagnosis, if you will, a history of the different ways in which humans have made sense of the universe, all the way from hunter-gatherer times to the present. And it shows how there have only been a few different shifts in really big worldviews in human history, from, like, a nomadic hunter-gatherer worldview to a sort of a cluster of early civilizational agrarian worldviews to the split in the last couple of thousand years between an East Asian and the Western worldview.

The follow-on book, called The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, is really where that alternative operating system, if you will, is kind of fleshed out. And it’s an operating system that is based, rather than on separation, the way I was describing modernism today, is actually based on a sense of deep interconnectedness. And interestingly, this is highly scientifically rigorous, that what we think is science, a lot of the time, it tends to be preconceptions that emerged in the 17th century or whatever and have become so permeated through not just popular culture but even scientific culture.

One simple example of that is the sense of reductionism, which is a great scientific methodology, basically initiated by [René] Descartes: like, cut everything into its smallest pieces to understand it better. But because it was so successful it almost became a victim of its own success and became what I call ontological reductionism, where people go, “Well, this is so successful, it answers so many questions that it must be the only way to make sense of anything in the universe, and any other thing must be wrong or invalid.”

But in the last 100, 150 years systems sciences, anything from ecology to complexity theory to all kinds of cognitive sciences—sciences of connection, if you will—have shown that, in fact, if you look at the connections between things, they can actually tell us sometimes much more about a system than just the actual details themselves. So it doesn’t refute reductionism as a methodology, but it says there’s another way of making sense of the world, too.

And what’s fascinating is that when you explore the implications of those different sciences, it leads to that recognition of this deep interconnectedness of all living stuff in the world, as well as humans with the rest of life, that Indigenous knowledge traditions, as well as Buddhism and Taoism and other East Asian philosophies, have always talked about.

So a big recognition from all of this is that in the sort of modernist worldview we assume there’s a absolute split between what science tells us and wisdom traditions, and we can respect wisdom traditions and spiritual traditions and all that stuff, but there’s something that’s not scientific. But a lot of what my work explored in that earlier book The Web of Meaning is that split is, in itself, a made-up mythology, if you will, of modernism.

Feltman: Would you give us a brief encapsulation of ecocivilization as a concept?

Lent: So ecocivilization really takes that sense of interconnectedness I was just describing and then explores, “What would it look like if our entire world system was built on that ontology?,” essentially. “What would it look like if we actually developed a system that was built to set the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerated Earth?,” which probably many, or most, people around the world would say, “Well, of course we should have a system that does that.” But in fact, we actually have a system that does the opposite.

Feltman: Mm.

Lent: It’s a system that extracts and exploits and is designed around what’s been called a wealth pump, essentially, that sets the conditions to suck wealth, essentially, from the work that people do in the rest of life to a very tiny elite at the very top.

And a big message of this book is that this different kind of world, this ecocivilization, is not some faraway utopia, but it shows that there’s actually the ideas in different domains of society for us to look at, to understand and then build on.

Feltman: Could you give us some examples of that?

Lent: Well, one maybe good way of looking at that is around corporations, which right now dominate the global economy. And if you look at the 100 largest economies in the world today, roughly 69 of them are actually transnational corporations rather than nation-states. And corporations have been designed not to actually use their efficiency in everything they do for the benefit of people but for the benefit of shareholders. And that’s one of the bigger reasons why we live in a world today that seems so suboptimal for so many people.

But what people are not aware of is that there’s other ways to organize big entities. An example, then, is a huge cooperative conglomerate in the Basque Country in Spain called Mondragon. And Mondragon is the size of a large transnational corporation. It’s one of the biggest, most successful corporate entities in Spain.

It’s multiple different industries, employs something like 80,000 people, but it’s designed as a cooperative. The profit it makes is for its own employees. And there’s a very, very tight pay ratio between the highest-paid and the lowest-paid people in the entire company. The highest-paid CEO has no more, like, than six times the salary of the lowest-paid person in any of the companies. And of course, in corporate America it’s almost, like, thousand times ratio between that.

Feltman: Mm-hmm.

Lent: And that’s an example which almost no people realize that you can actually organize these complex enterprises. It can be done not just according to a for-profit motive.

Feltman: Well, so I’m sure that you get a lot of pushback on these ideas as, you know, perhaps being naive, and you and many scientists we’ve talked to on the show make the very strong case that in terms of sort of what is innate to humanity, you know, we are a collaborative species, that the sort of status quo is a very artificial, recently imposed status quo.

But in terms of, you know, other ways that people might say that this is pie in the sky, saying that, “Well, sure, it might be sort of the way the world is meant to operate, but we’re so entrenched in these systems, it’s naive to think we could change them,” what do you say to that?

Lent: Well, the best way to understand that question is to think about where our system is headed right now and what that means about the whole concept of what is realistic.

So many scientists have been looking at the unsustainable way in which our whole dominant civilization works right now and have been putting out huge publicized warnings to the world. There’s a group in Stockholm called the Stockholm Resilience [Center] that has mapped out what are the nine different parameters of a safe operating space for the Earth today. They spent years and years calculating what those are: things like greenhouse gas pollution, the acidification of the oceans, etcetera. And in seven of those nine cases we have blown through the barriers for the safe operating space. Even the [United Nations] secretary-general says we’re on a path of “collective suicide.”

So when you have so many different scientists putting out these warnings, you could say that looking at incremental changes for a system that is careening out of control and assuming that making a few incremental changes here and there will actually make the difference we need is actually the most unrealistic set of assumptions that we can do.

So what I’m offering in this book is actually consistent with what, in the planning world, is a methodology called backcasting, which starts from a different point of view. And the way backcasting works is: rather than saying where we are right now and what’s doable next year or whatever, it says, “Where do we want or need to be in the future in order to get to a world where people can flourish, where people can actually be born into a regenerated world and live lives of fulfillment?”

Once we’ve understood what’s needed to do that, then what backcasting does, it says, “Okay, now that we understand where we want to go, what are the steps we need to take from where we are right now to get to that place?” And the reason backcasting is an important methodology in this respect is we still go back to where we are now and take steps, but it may lead to a different set of choices and steps that we take right now to get towards, start moving towards that better future than if we were simply following what seems to be the most doable thing right now.

Feltman: And so what can everyday people do, the concrete steps that people can take?

Lent: One of the most important things people can do is begin to recognize this, basically, myth that believes that we have to outcompete, that everything is a zero-sum game, and we basically live in a rat race, and the only smart thing to do is to look out for number one.

As human beings we did evolve in this different way, to be cooperative and to work together. And the way we actually get true pleasure is in community, is with those around us and feeling cared for, feeling respected by others around us and actually contributing to that collective flourishing.

Once we begin to reorient around that, we don’t have to get some hero idea that we’ve got to change the world ourselves. But by working with others collectively to actually put things right, even in our local way, is a very powerful way to begin that shift and really to be acting, along with millions and millions of people around the world, towards making that better future for all of us.

Feltman: That’s all for today. We’ll be back on Friday with a conversation about how humans and machines have evolved together, from cuckoo clocks all the way to ChatGPT.

Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.

For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!