Every week, I produce a short bonus video exploring the key ideas raised in the podcast interview. This video covers how to tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools, inspired by this week’s episode with Asher Miller on Creating Complex Solutions.
“Coming from a systems perspective, you need a diverse approach to solving a problem like the climate crisis and you need multiple things happening at the same time, converging, and interacting together, to create something that's equally complex as the world that we live in, and also to battle the complexities of the world that we live in.
“Maybe what's happened in the past is that we failed to understand that the tools that we use the beginning cannot be the tools that we then continue to use. So you can tear down the master's house, maybe with the master's tools, but then if you're going to rebuild, you definitely have to use something else.
“That that ties into what we know about the beginning stage of systems, so that explosive growth. For that explosion to happen, perhaps it would be violent, it typically is. But then to reach a period of stasis, it's very, very different. Even if you look at ecosystems. How ecosystems create and use energy during a period of stasis versus explosive growth is extremely different, and I think what happens is we get stuck in explosive growth.
“We don't quite know what to do with all of that energy which then devolves into violence. And then rather than getting into the complexities of whatever it is that we are trying to build, we end up throwing up a mirror image of what came before: another oligarchy, another form of capitalism.”
Bonus | Creating Complex Solutions