Looking for the Rabbit Hole

“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” In The Matrix, Morpheus offers this choice to Neo, a chance to invert his world. For most people, this movie moment represents nothing more than a Hollywood suspense builder. But a very few know that the rabbit hole actually exists.

I first became aware of this hole when I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth. It wasn’t Morpheus, however, who introduced me to its existence. It was the late Professor

Donella Meadows. She didn’t show me the way into the hole or even where it was, but she did show me that it existed. And I have wandered the last twelve years looking for it. In the last two months, I dare to admit, I have finally found it - and it is changing my world too. Donella Meadows, member of the Environmental Studies Department, was one of the environmental movement’s great thinkers. She earned her PhD in biophysics at Harvard. But she didn’t sound like a scientist; rather she wrapped the cold algorithms of system dynamics in an artful, heartfelt paean delivered weekly in her syndicated column, Global Citizen, as well as many other writings. Her mission was singular: move our world toward sustainability.

Meadows was strong and could take the heat as she challenged hundreds of our society’s deep beliefs. And challenging people’s deeply held beliefs - what she called paradigms - provoked great resistance. No example was more memorable than the response to her 1972 worldshaking book, Limits to Growth, co-authored with Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens. Meadows wrote, “We could not understand the intensity of the reaction our book provoked. It seemed to us far out of proportion to our simple statement that the earth is finite and cannot support exponential physical growth for very long. We wouldn’t have guessed that that idea could generate so much surprise, emotion, complication, and denial.”

Some of the beliefs that she dismantled regularly include:

* One cause produces one effect.

* Improvements come through better technology, not better humanity.

* Economics is the measure of feasibility.

* Possession of things is the source of happiness.

* The rational powers of human beings are superior to their intuitive or moral powers.

* We know what we are doing.

* And of course, growth at any cost is good.

And she didn’t just write about beliefs, but about the nature of beliefs and how to change them for a sustainable future. In the essay, “Where to Intervene in the System,” Meadows identifies 12 leverage points (such as information flows, rules, and goals), with paradigm change in the number one position. She said, “People who manage to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.”

But hold on, there is a 0th item that tops the top: the power to transcend paradigms. It is a sort of Enlightenment when you realize that no paradigm is true, and you can move freely among different paradigms. That is, when you control big ideas and they do not control you. At the end of The Matrix, Neo transcends not only the robot-imposed paradigm of the Matrix, but his own human worldview as well. He could move freely among them both.

But I wasn’t as lucky as Neo. I didn’t even know where the hole was or what it looked like. I ended up stumbling into a lot of holes over the years, but none seemed like the bunny boroughs leading to the Enlightenment that I sought.

At Dartmouth I launched my career in environmental communications and international conservation. On campus I took Meadows’s Environmental Journalism class, published Sense of Place environmental magazine, and wrote many articles for Dartmouth publications such as a column in The Dartmouth called, “The Lorax.” I double majored in Biology and Government modified with Environmental Studies and went on the Biology FSP to Costa Rica and Jamaica. After graduation, I worked in communications as a naturalist at a Cape Cod wildlife sanctuary, as an exhibit researcher at the Smithsonian Institution, and then as a Peace Corps educator at the National Zoo of Costa Rica. Later I joined an international conservation organization in Honduras and Guatemala as a trainer of interpretive nature guides and park managers in ecotourism.

I didn’t find the hole in any of those places (not even the zoo), but I kept searching and focusing on education and training, knowing that the hole had to do with changing people’s views of the world and setting us on a track to sustainability.

The longer I worked overseas, the more I came to realize that ecotourism and education only address symptoms, not root causes. Although local people are often blamed for environmental degradation, they suffered from deep systemic causes. Power, land tenancy, and neocolonial economic structures drove local people to migrate, to lose their land, to chop trees, to suffer. They were pawns in a larger game of chess. And the grandmasters were people and systems designed to concentrate and wield power. I had finally found the rabbit’s hole: we needed to address the politics of power…

But if that answer seems somewhat disappointing to you, it was disappointing to me as well. If that were really the rabbit’s hole, why did I still ask, “What motivated the power wielders?”

So the search continued until last year when I went on a reading spree of big-picture books leading up to Daniel Quinn’s best-selling, Ishmael. Quinn took Meadows’ concept of paradigm, implicitly tied together most of the beliefs that she exposed, and connected the entire bundle to a single story. Quinn, through Ishmael’s lips, told our civilization’s story.

A Very Brief History of Civilization

Imagine a tribe 10,000 years ago that invented a remarkable style of agriculture. The techniques would become the most productive in history, generating surpluses unlike any humanity had seen before. Awash in calories, the tribe experienced a population boom. Soon it could no longer fit its new numbers comfortably in its space, shouldered up against surrounding tribes. With more people to feed, the tribe launched a campaign to acquire more land. As they took that land, they cultivated more food and their population increased, so they needed more land (what Meadows called a “positive feedback loop”). Their neighbors were indeed impressed - less by the new technology than by the conquering addiction their agricultural neighbor had adopted.

Before long the agriculturalists had engulfed their neighbors, largely hunter-gatherers, silencing their complaints and their cultures. Over the next several thousand years, the fortunes and failures that evolved from this single culture would become our own today.

You might recognize these facts from the Agricultural Revolution that took place in the Fertile Crescent, modern day Iraq, but you won’t learn this version in school. It is not a story that many people in our civilization are ready to hear.

What our society has taught us is very different: before the Agricultural Revolution, there were just brutish, primitive tribes, wandering through the harsh and short life of hunter-gatherers. Then, 10,000 years ago, the “really important” human history began. With the birth of agriculture, humans started the inevitable march of civilization building, technological and social development, launching them toward their destiny of eventually taking control of the world God had created for them.

Daniel Quinn traces how this “totalitarian agriculture” spread across the planet, acquiring ever more land for its crops and people. After several thousand years, its adherents believed that this way of life was the one right way to live, justifying squashing cultures and the biological community. From this lifestyle a new vision was born, one that drives our civilization, both East and West, in planetary conquest. Unfortunately the resulting overcrowding has precipitated wars, plagues, corruption, economic collapse, revolts, and suffering of Biblical proportions.

All this has come about because our universal society is living out a story, one that describes the creation of humanity, its destiny, and what it must do to get there. Quinn cites that this culture is just one of ten thousands, and it started so recently in human history that it is almost laughable to anyone standing on a ladder high enough to see back 200,000 years to the birth of Homo sapiens or three millions to the birth of humanity (H. habilis). There is another way to live that is both compatible with the biological community and sustainable - a way tested by countless millennia. If you read Ishmael and its sequel, The Story of B, you can learn about this alternate way.

Stories and Paradigms

Quinn’s books link the power of story with systemic paradigms. A paradigm, at least the one understood at the bottom of the rabbit hole, is a complete internally consistent narrative of how a culture sees its place in the world. It is a cosmology, a mindset, a worldview, a creation story, a mission, and a culture’s destiny all mixed into one. It is an invisible prison.

The idea that each culture acts out an unspoken screenplay, as if manipulated by the hand of a disembodied Adam Smithian puppeteer, seems hardly believable. It is even more unbelievable that there have been ten thousands of worldviews in human history and 99.99% of humans alive today belong to just one. And this paradigm, this theatrical script, is embedded so deeply in our collective mind that few ever realize that the story exists.

This story drives our environmental and cultural destruction, feeding population growth and a devouring economy. Nevertheless, most social and environmental change programs deal with symptoms: erosion mitigation, alternative energies, poverty reduction, and pollution control. Their efforts, at best, can only slow the environmental and social sacrifices the story demands. As Daniel Quinn says, Vision is the flowing river. Programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede the flow.” Only a change of vision can redirect the flow away from catastrophe and toward sustainability.

A medley of people talk about and work on humanity’s global behavior and ways of bringing about a sustainable worldview. They work in ecological economics, world modeling, strategic planning, alternative energies, spiritual revival, and other fields. But few people actively target this one story to change it and its army of fundamentalist paradigms.

As Paul Veyne said, “If you don’t see what you don’t see, you don’t even see that you are blind.” Many people perceive that there is something wrong with the world, harbor only a fuzzy notion, but they have not seen the fully articulated story that Quinn has woven based on solid paleontological, historical, evolutionary, and system dynamics evidence.

I have begun my networking, continue my research and writing on the topic, and hopefully at some point will begin speaking as well. I just recently re-designed my web site for the upcoming challenges of Worldview Change (www.jonkohl.com).

I am preparing myself psychologically for the resistance I will encounter along the way, the same kind that the Limits to Growth authors met when they challenged people’s paradigm of growth. Both Quinn and Donella Meadows believed that changing our culture’s paradigm is the only real way to save the world as we know it. Others have gone before, such as Darwin, Galileo, and Adam Smith. Hopefully others will follow. As Meadows wrote, “It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.”

Jon Kohl is a freelance writer who graduated from Dartmouth in 1992 with a double major in ecology and government modified with environmental studies.