Changing (the Shape of) the World
When you look at the word “world” long enough it itself falls apart, dissolves in meaning, a hard mutter, too many consonants packed into a crowded boat stern. The ‘rld’ throws the brain back to the time of cairns and charnal grounds, grievous, primordial eras this word has survived through. It’s an Old English car-crash of ‘wer’ and ‘ald’, together the weralt, the Age of Man, the world.
What shape is the world? Not the Earth, the spherical vessel we twist through the universe upon, no, the weralt, the world, what shape is it? And what is the difference between the two?
The Earth and the World
Earth is a physical place. It’s an objective quantity, one planet. The “world” is a matter of individual perception that varies from person to person. We use it to succinctly distinguish between the physical Earth and the conceptual sum of the Earth and all its occupants, collective concepts, history, and experiences. This separation of “Earth” and “world” is an implication of the change that conscious thought adds to a purely physical phenomenon of a rock in space. The “world” is (hu)mankind’s conscious projection of the Earth, and a feedback loop that incorporates past events in its present state, so that our current idea of the world is shaped by past people’s impressions of the same: we have learned our perception of the world from both what we perceive and by comparing to past ideas of the world, as we each understand them.
This difference in individual lived experience and understanding of past world-states accounts for the person to person variety in what the world means to them. Thought of as a binary, we describe people with lower level of education, understanding, or acceptance of world-states other than their own as having “narrow” worldviews, while those who incorporate a greater number of experiences as “worldly”. The word to separate physical from conceptual space is demonstrated in usages such as “the English-speaking world”, or fictional spaces like “World of Warcraft”. While in the phrase “anywhere on/in Earth/the world” are interchangeable, Earth wouldn’t work in either of the former.
So a “world” is a basket of spaces, its natural features, and associated ideas grouped by a category. When that category is external and well-defined (“the Western world”) this is all pretty well understood and communicated. But when we take ownership of the term, when we describe “my world”, or the oft-used royal-we statement, “the world we live in,” things get murky. We don’t readily understand what someone means by that, because we don’t ever know what the sum of their worldview includes. And so, necessarily, most attempts to change “the world” for the better are ill-defined between collaborators. Core misunderstanding of what “world” is to be changed have tectonically affected change movements throughout history (I’m looking at you, Russian Revolution). And any movement that leaves its baseline and endgame world-states ill-defined is destined to fail, as much as anything is destined to do anything.
Your Own Little World
So the important questions to me are:
What shape is the world in your head? What does your world look and feel like?
Where do you perceive yourself, as an entity, in relationship to the world? What is your own shape, size, and position in your mental world-framework?
Where do your perceptions of the world and yourself stem from? What roots your perception of the world, and how you relate to it?
To start with the last: Throughout every era of The Age of Man(kind), understanding of the world has been shaped by the media and technology available. So if your worldview is learned from pictographs, vs. oral history, it is going to be different, vs. written language, long-lasting ink, the printing press, published books, etc., all the way through to television, movies, the internet. These technologies each develop and proliferate over generations so the shifts in world-perception they engender does not occur in clean breaks. But incrementally, the average citizen’s worldview has shifted vastly in response to these evolving determinants. These media are “upstream” in the childhood shaping of our world, as the conveyors of the information we receive they dictate that information’s form.
In essence the breadth of information the average citizen has access to has increased exponentially, and we are still at the tip-top of a racing asymptotic curve, at least in the developed world. The ability to develop a deeper of the Earth and its systems has expanded greatly as well (though access to this ability remains unevenly distributed) through modern science, and the level of scientific information the average person can access deeply shapes each worldview as well. Even if an individual does not know exactly something works, say a TV remote, they do know that someone in the world does, else it wouldn’t exist. You also know you could understand it if you spent the time to develop the systemic knowledge of your TV remote. This presence of information contributes to a vast difference in how we perceive the world vs. how former generations have.
The Mesh Shape
So. If you are like me, what the default world feels like is a thick mesh, wrapping the surface of the earth like yarn. It is a mess of cross over and underweaving, in parts gridded but mostly a heatmapped snarl, following highways and landlines but also bursting like mushroom clusters around cities, all venn diagrammed in iffy circles of wifi tower chains and the gaze of satellites down upon it. It is thickly-layed, and shows blotted pulses in a rough sync like a cloud of lightning bugs, sparkling with individual predetermined action that looks random when gathered, unpredictable as waiting for the next water-torture drop, and somehow always building to the next big flush of light across the meshwork, a conglomeration across the lines, all together now.
Atomic science has taught me we are a wandering sea of different particles, separated only how we perceive feeling and the visible spectrum of light. The internet has taught me we are all connected, we can all talk all the time. Fossil fuel has taught me I can go anywhere on Earth in less than 24 hours. So all of this combined communicating and sciencing and ability to do these things combines to form my mesh-shaped perception of the prevailing world. And I, a miniscule dot within that, one small dim pulse. The satellite maps show me how painfully small I am.
It’s also bred in me a sense of security. None of our world’s basic technologies have a contingency plan. The global world system doesn’t have a ripcord built in. It’s own narrative is the scion of a unending progression, a lineage of ever-increasing human capability to communicate across distance more rapidly and repurpose what we’ve learned about the Earth into stable emitters of this technology. Despite the glaring system flaws that become more obvious as technology develops, the modern world’s lack of acknowledgment of its own logical end also shape individual worldview. As does social pressure. To suggest that technological advancement has become excessive or that prevailing society will go through drastic reformation as a consequence is anathema. To question this prevailing narrative of the world as a progressively more technological and more connected is to make oneself an outsider, and avoidance of such plays a role in reinforcing and incentivizing worldviews that align with the end result of modern values and technology, even if their composite components (systemic racism, imperialism, etc.) are highly questionable.
You in the World
Desire to not be ostracized, constant connection via the internet to more information than is ever possible for a person to comprehend, the ability to nigh-instantly travel across the globe, and the learned surety that all this is permanent. These are the ingredients of the default worldview, and imprint a smallness on each of us, an inborn implication that alone, we add up to exactly so little. That to understand the world is to understand your helplessness to change it for the better, because you are such a small part of it, there is so much more in the column of ‘not-you’ than ‘you’ to make any shift that would affect this worldwide whole is unfathomable. Your best effort is at best one more short-lived blip, lost in the forest of its kind. Even added to the efforts of others, this framework makes any individual effort seem negligible. As far as you reach, you can never touch the world’s walls, you know that or else you are a fool. The constant presence of more knowledgeable individuals that have come before weighs like a stack of never-to-be-read library book around your neck and becomes another normal, barely-felt component of why you think of yourself as small within the world. I’m not speaking for you, this is just if you’re like me. You feel all of these things and feel lost because of them. Your capacity to know has expanded massively, far beyond your ability to affect. And as the world has been fully mapped, there is a harder limit to what the world could hold— in ages before that limit was known, the world was unlimited. Now discovery can only exist a personal or highly scientific process.
Anyone who feels the malaise, the tandem intimidation and boredom, the paralysis of choice that is living in 2020, owes it to themselves to reformulate the concept of the world in their head, and turn that sense of discovery towards exploring what this new kind of world can mean for each of us.
So what is a better shape for the world, if not this all-encapsulating, global network? There is no right answer here, but you can do a thought experiment to see a different kind.
Thought Experiment
Think about where you live, your town or neighborhood radiating out from your bedroom. Now imagine that same community without fossil fuel, or any materials that needed fossil fuel to transport them there. How would food and water circulate? How would transportation and commerce occur? This is most likely very hard to answer, as our communities have become progressively more dependent on fossil fuel and global supply chains. But try to imagine it. What would your community look like if all it had to rely on was what it could produce and trade for regionally?
Essentially this would mean sourcing all of your sustenance within a few square mile radius, and without the convenience of fossil fuel or any equivalent infrastructure, generating that sustenance would require a far greater share of your time. If we were to jump to this world overnight, the modern notion of fun, satisfaction, leisure, etc. that we’ve developed would fall away instantly. So too would our ability to communicate and perceive the world around us through the internet, also fossil fuel-grid dependent. Thus the world you were a part of would shrink down to what was relevant for your survival and feasible for you to interact with.
This primitive level of existence is not the goal. But the scale of this world is— the point of this thought experiment is to regear the world in your mind into a small enough unit that you could tangibly effect. By seeing the community you are a part of as a system unto itself, the problems of changing the world become doable, finite. Because, and not to be all Chicken Little about it, that fossil fuel-free world is where we are heading. So by doing this reformulation to a local systems view, by doing this thought experiment while it is still just an experiment, you can develop both a healthier relation to the world you want to change and logical strategies to spend that energy positively. The specters of federal politics and international poverty trick organizers into believing they have to go big to make a difference that matters. That since the systems have scaled up and the problems have scaled up the scale of the solutionary effort must increase as well. I will argue that this is untrue. The path out is down, not up.
This is what this book is about: illustrating why and how undergoing this mental reorientation to viewing the world to be changed as a series of broken local systems is crucial to envisioning and building the next version of how these communities operate.
This post is a series of essays adding to lay out a personal political philosophy revolving around radically re-envisioning the local community as the units of our society. Go to the Table of Contents here or read more in the series:
3. Changing (the Shape of) the World