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A FREE series of talks/discussions

To inform and inspire our next generation who have to guide Humanity through the most consequential 25 years in our history

For concerned and curious minds aged 15-25
Many thinkers, philosophers and experts have concluded that humanity is heading for a dramatic transition. Even the UN talks of the certainty of near-term non-linear change.
This is much broader than global warming & AI. It also includes political, technological, economic, demographic, psycho/spiritual, agricultural, sociological, ecological, educational, moral, philosophical and existential crises.

There is no blueprint solution.

Instead, we need to:

UNDERSTAND in outline – many inter-related topics
QUESTION very deeply – established assumptions, conventions and categories
THINK very differently – with wider, more inclusive perspectives
FEEL very differently – with an embodied sense of inter-connection
For concerned and curious minds … at a critical time in their life’s trajectory

It is foolish…

… to wait for those in authority to save humanity

It is wise…

… take responsibility for finding your unique role in humanity’s transition

Subject Matter – Main Themes

Where we have come from

Five cultural transformations over 50,000 years

What we have become

Beings with the Power of Gods, but the Wisdom of Infants

What we are doing to ourselves

Environmental crises, authoritarianism, corporatism, the possible “AI singularity”, geopolitical fragility, gross inequality, psycho-spiritual and mental crises, biological and nuclear threats, ….

How we might survive

What is the nature of the next transformation, and can we conceive, gestate and birth it in time?

Where we’ve come from
History at three levels – including the gaps, uncertainties and apparent impossibilities that are normally glossed over

  • Cosmic History: according to particle physics, the Universe shouldn’t exist
  • Biological History: there is no explanation for the origins of life or consciousness
  • Societal and Civilizational History: we are here! But all past civilizations have collapsed

What we’ve become
Between them, the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution triggered unprecedented material and societal progress. But they but it also affected our worldview in dysfunctional ways creating terminal trajectories with no obvious “off” switch. We have become…

  • Theoretical Servants of Rationality
  • Unconscious Servants of Materialism (in both senses)
  • Systemic Generators of Risk
  • Gods of Technology but Infants of Wisdom

What we’ve created
The civilizational risks we’ve created include

  • Climate change, the Environment and the Carbon Pulse
  • AI, Artificial General Intelligence and the Singularity
  • Fractured Geopolitics, Financial Collapse and the Demographic Timebomb
  • The increasing normalization of Authoritarianism and Corporatism
  • …and many more

What we need to get our heads around
There’s a lot we could include here, but the essentials include:

  • Reconciling Philosophy (What IS), Science (How what IS BEHAVES) and Religion (What the Behaviour of what IS MEANS)
  • Understanding the societal dynamics that are driving us to dystopia (learning from Systems Theory and Game Theory)
What we must do
This is about conceiving, gestating and birthing a transformed humanity

  • Contours of a transformed humanity
  • Levels of transformation
  • The difficulty of describing what has yet to emerge
  • Ways of responding to the Metacrisis
  • Finding your role in Humanity’s Transition

Some specific topics that may arise

Depending on topics that arise and areas of interest of the attendees, there are many additional discussion points. Here some possibilities:

Click to open Topic List
  • Could AI destroy human life? Could it be conscious? Or will it “just” eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs? How do we respond to this dramatic disruption to our sense of what it means to be human and conscious?
  • It’s not so much that we need to align AI with human values: it’s that we need to align society with human (as opposed to financial) values.
  • Green New Deal or No Deal? Optimism and blind spots of the green energy transition.
  • “Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?” Moloch does it.
  • Utopia? No thanks – too drab, boring and impossible. We’re aiming to upgrade to PROtopia
  • The Enlightenment: The best thing and the worst thing that happened to humanity.
  • “From Finance to Flourishing”: the paradigm change needed to transform society.
  • Techno-optimism: is it delusional to put our faith in technology?
  • What should we try to do about our religious instinct? Eliminate it? Tolerate it? Or enhance it?
  • What is reality? Is it matter and does it matter? If you accept the latest ideas it changes everything.
  • Why philanthropic foundations created by the mega-wealthy will never make the changes we need.
  • Transforming education could be they key – like it was for Sweden in the 18th century. But the purpose of education also needs to be fundamentally reconceived.
  • Social Media, AI and the dismantling of our identities, of democracy and our sense of meaning.
  • How do we need to change our food production – taking into account animal rights, carbon emissions, artificial production techniques and our connections to nature?
  • How technology could fix energy, transport and food – and why it’s not enough by a LONG way.
  • The most dangerous invention ever: The Limited Liability Company
  • Personal development: Growing Up, Waking Up, Showing Up and Cleaning Up.
  • The Left’s Not Right: Civilizational chaos from brain imbalance.
  • Web3, Cryptocurrency, DAOs, NFTs: maybe transformative, maybe disastrous.
  • Systems theory and Complexity: should this be available at A-Level?

Venue, Dates and Times

These free meetings will take place at TBD

Dates and Times: TBD – 6×2-hour sessions, probably during the last 3 weeks of August

Booking Form

Register via the form below or contact me direct. (TO BE INSERTED)

Facilitator/Contact

All sessions will be facilitated by me, Alex Goodall. I’m the founder of http://Relevant.Education.

You can read my bio here or check my LinkedIn Profile.

If you have any questions or comments or prefer to book directly, please feel free to email, call or message me. alex@relevant.education     T: 07785-714 300 (I’m on WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram)

The material for the summer school has been curated from many books and online sources.

Examples of book sources
  • A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality (Ken Wilber)
  • The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One (Hanzi Freinacht)
  • Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two (Hanzi Freinacht)
  • Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (Kate Raworth)
  • The New Economics – A Manifesto (Steve Keen)
  • Rethinking Humanity: Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, the Lifecycle of Civilizations, and the Coming Age of Freedom (Tony Seba & James Arbib)
  • Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing The World (Anand Giridharadas)
  • Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership (Bill Torbet)
  • The World We Create: From God to Market (Tomas Björkman)
  • Bildung: Keep Growing (Lene Rachel Andersen)
  • Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society (Zak Stein)
  • Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy (Ken Wilber)
  • The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays (Owen Barfield)
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari)
  • Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies (Geoffrey West)
  • The Dictator’s Handbook – Why Bad Behaviour is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mequita and Alastair Smith)
  • The World For Sale – Money, Power and Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources (Blas & Farchy)
  • Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Donella Meadows)
  • Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (Peter Senge)
  • Complexity: A Guided Tour (Melanie Mitchell)
  • Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change (Prof. Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan)
  • Enlightenment Now (Steven Pinker)
  • The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Toby Ord)
  • The Web Of Meaning (Jeremy Lent)
  • Being a Human (Charles Foster)
  • The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow)
  • Evolution’s Purpose (Steve McIntosh)
  • A Brief History of Thought (Luc Ferry)
  • War and Peace and War (Peter Turchin)
  • On Tyranny (Timothy Synder)
  • Cynical Theories (Pluckrose and Lindsay)
  • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (Tyson Yunkaporta)
  • The More Beautiful World Your Heat Knows Is Possible (Charles Eisenstein)
  • The Essentials of Theory U (Otto Scharmer)
  • Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl)
  • Reality Blind – Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures (Nate Hagens & DJ White)
  • Global Catastrophic Risk (Bostrom and Cirkovic – Eds)
  • Entangled Life – How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Merlin Sheldrake)
  • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (Carlo Rovelli)
  • New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (James Bridle)
  • Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail (Ray Dalio)
  • Science Ideated: The fall of matter and the contours of the next mainstream scientific worldview (Bernado Kastrup)
  • More Than Allegory – On Religious Myth, Truth and Belief (Bernado Kastrup)
  • Signature in the Cell – DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Steven C. Meyer)
  • Metamodernity: Meaning and hope in a complex world (Lene Rachel Andersen)
  • The Green New Deal – Why The Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028 and The Bold Economic Plan To Save Life on Earth (Jeremy Rifkin)
  • The Future We Choose – Surviving the Climate Crisis – (Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac)
  • Bildung: Keep Growing (Lene Rachel Andersen)
  • Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Philip Goff)
  • The Human Story: A history of mankind’s evolution (Robin Dunbar)
  • Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (Matt Stoller)
  • The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (Iain McGilchrist)
  • The Master and His Emissary (Iain McGilchrist)
  • The End of the World Is Just the Beginning – Mapping the Collapse of Globalization (Peter Zeihan)
  • Where does money come from – A guide to the UK monetary and banking system (Ryan-Collins, Greenham, Werner and Jackson)
  • Megathreats: Ten Threats to Our Future and How to Survive Them (Nouriel Roubini)
Examples of online sources

There are too many resources to list here. A representative sample is on my Liminal Learning Portal