A Paradigm Shift of Paradigm Shifts
“We are living in what the Greeks called the “Kairos”-the right moment- for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principle and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
What Are We Up Against?
In this day and age of constant change, social commentators galore invoke paradigm shifts, often without appreciating the significance of what it would mean. While many others avoid speaking of it at all, in fear of being dismissed as trite. But the fact remains we are in the middle of a full-scale revolution of the mind, to borrow John Adams explanation of what preceded the American Revolution. That revolution of the mind is a freight train bearing down on us. But we are like that individual who is taking a selfie on the train tracks with the train appearing distant in the distortion of the smartphone lens. Then… Wham!
We won’t appreciate what it is until it becomes undeniable and unavoidable, when it all finally hits a breaking point — it happens slowly and then all at once. It’s not only the quantity of changes but the overall quality of their cumulative results, along with the unpredictable side effects and long-term consequences. It’s not just a single paradigm shift in this field or that. Our entire way of thinking about numerous issues, across the board, is shifting and possibly being transformed. But it’s understandable that most don’t appreciate what’s happening, as it’s not yet clear what might replace it. The old ideological framing and worldview is still dominant. As Thomas Kuhn famously explained, we are waiting for old scientists to die; similar to our waiting for old politicians to move on, one way or another.
We can go deeper about causes, but much of it is rather simple. For example, multiple fields of research are in the middle of replication crises. To put it simply, so much of the research that formed the basis of consensus opinion for decades or generations is now being challenged. Newer studies are in many cases not confirming older studies. And in some fields, it’s a large swath of studies being doubted, critiqued, and replaced. Much of what we thought we knew, upon which practices and policies were based, may turn out to be false, partly wrong, or misinterpreted. Yet this has yet to have an impact on mainstream thought, conventional opinion, and the public mind, much less elite politics.
A more specific case in point is the WEIRD bias, an acronym for: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (or the less flattering : Materialistic, Young, Self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, Sedentary). This is one of the underlying reasons for the replication crisis. It’s mostly WEIRDos doing the research with WEIRD subjects in WEIRD institutions located in WEIRD countries. But as research has expanded around the world, it’s increasingly become obvious that all things WEIRD are far from representative, sometimes extremely atypical, of most humans; probably even unrepresentative of most Westerners until late modernity.
The paradigm shift, from this perspective, is happening both in the WEIRD world and around the globe, among non-WEIRDos. But obviously, it’s most dramatically challenging for us WEIRDos because we might be entering a new period where the WEIRD itself no longer solely and hegemonically dominates or else where the WEIRD is itself changed. Speculations on that account will be limited here and only presented near the end. Mainly, we’ll stick close to the known and obvious changes, in considering the areas of study familiar to the author.
From the Last Time to Now
We’ll start off with a large sector of research and theory, that of the social sciences. It’s out of that broad field that the WEIRD bias was discovered and studied. And it might be noted that a replication crisis has particularly hit hard here. Social scientists often lead the way in determining problems, looking for resolutions, and developing new understandings. As an historical example, think of the early 20th century anthropologists, trained under Franz Boas, who challenged race realism with cultural relativism.
For some quick context, that Boasian turn happened during the last major ideological overhaul of society (John Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine). It was at the same time that Newtonian physics was challenged by quantum physics. It involved or followed from numerous developments, such as with evolution, genetics, etc; along with massive technological innovations that disrupted and redirected society. Western civilization was still lingering in the last traces of feudalism with most people still using horse-and-buggies and living in small rural communities; then appeared automobiles, telephones, planes, and soon rocket ships.
Yet right before the mass urbanization and industrialization at the turn-of-the-century, many leading experts declared that all major discoveries had been made. It was sort of an ‘End of History’ moment, and it was hard for people to imagine what would be next or that anything would be next. It was an end of sorts but only to the world they had known up to that point. We are still living in the aftershocks of that earlier period. One might even argue that the present paradigm shift as revolution of mind is simply the continuation and culmination of what was initiated back then. The whole past century has radicalized society, and we haven’t had a moment to catch our breath.
To key in on this line of thought, consider the bundle theory of mind. It’s a common understanding of the psyche in non-WEIRD cultures, from Buddhist countries to animistic hunter-gatherers. But in the West, it didn’t appear in writings until the late 1800s and soon was taken up by anthropologists. All these generations later, it has resulted in a number of powerful developments, from dividualism to 5E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enacted, ecological), with attempts to bring it all together (e.g., integral theory). A gauntlet has been thrown down. Our entire sense of human nature, such as hyper-individualism and the rational actor, is being questioned.
We are social creatures inseparable from the larger world and enmeshed in what some call ‘hyperobjects’ (vast coherent systems that have thing-like qualities), and the implications are profound, sometimes politically incorrect. This new view — first embraced by left-wingers — prioritizes systems, structures, conditions, and environments; and so challenging many varieties of reified abstractions, ideological realism, essentialism, and determinism. Related to that, the social sciences, allied with other fields (e.g., neurocognitive studies), have also played a central role in bringing new light to political science. Having emerged out of recent decades of research, consider an intriguing constellation of factors:
Low ‘openness to experience’, high ‘conscientiousness’, collectivism, conventionalism, conformity, conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), dark personality (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism), high inequality, vertical collectivism, dominance hierarchies, inequities, chronic stress, transgenerational trauma, disease epidemics, disgust response, threat reactivity, conservation-withdrawal, sickness behavior, behavioral immune response, parasite-stress theory, regality theory, mean world syndrome, media violence, anti-social behavior, mental illness, moral health, etc.
Our way of understanding politics specifically and society generally is simplistic and, in many ways, plain false. That would require us to fully face what scientific research is showing us. We are so easily influenced and shaped by external conditions, and epigenetically this might include all that influenced the generations before us, possibly upwards of a couple of centuries. Even limiting the focus to what influences us in our own lifetime, we are barely beginning to come to terms with such things as linguistic relativity and media studies (rhetoric, advertising, perception management, indoctrination, propaganda, nudge theory, cognitive biases, etc); or rather the average person is clueless, as the Machiavellian elites are growing quite advanced.
It also has diverse implications for healthcare and public health. The biophilia hypothesis, based on much supporting evidence, posits that humans require natural environments and have evolved to be attracted to them. This links environmental health to human health, and some of the abovementioned factors (parasite-stress theory, behavioral immune system, etc) link physical health and public health to ‘moral health’ (pro-social behavior and mental health). This is a reinterpretation of health as a greater wholeness; hence functional and holistic healthcare that treats the human body as a system and as part of systems; with the individual inseparable from the world around them.
As such, individualized medicine treats each person according to their unique set of conditions, and so takes in account supposedly ‘external’ factors that allopathic medicine ignores. All of this has come up, for instance, in studies of Alzheimer’s. Dr. Dale Bredesen and many other researchers are now using a multi-pronged approach, in realizing Alzheimer’s isn’t a single disease but an overlapping of different factors that must be understood on a case by case basis. The problem is that it’s almost impossible to get funding for this approach, as the present for-profit scientific model is based on isolating single factors such as a pharmaceutical.
The same constriction comes up in nutrition studies in isolating single nutrients, what is called ‘nutritionism’. Whole foods, however, contain complex nutritional matrixes where multiple nutrients interact in ways not always predictable by studying each nutrient separately. And of course, foods are part of entire diets and food systems, also environments. Diet has been shown to be a powerful intervention in numerous diseases and health conditions (metabolic diseases, autoimmune disorders, cancer, mitochondrial dysfunction, etc), including psychiatric disorders and neurocognitive issues (Christ Palmer, Brain Energy; & Georgia Ede, Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind). Nutrition studies is another field in a replication crisis, and it’s magnified by the challenge it poses to official dietary recommendations and hence the profits of big biz that lobbies to establish those public policies.
The Larger Perspective
The stakes are raised still higher if we broaden our scope of human health, especially with globalization and climate change. If the entire planet is a hyperobject, as a coherent and integrated system of ecosystems, then the Gaia hypothesis is a plausible and compelling understanding of the biosphere (i.e., the whole is greater than the sum of its parts). This kind of view was difficult or even impossible to imagine until we had a photograph of the earth from space (by the way, some astronauts, when they first looked back on earth, had something akin to mystical experiences). No one before had seen the whole earth in a single view. With an ever more interconnected world, the collective reality of a shared world is, instead, becoming hard to deny. Yet our society is still structured as if it weren’t true, as if we are isolated bodies and isolated countries.
Part of our continuing obtuseness is because the old interpretive framework can’t explain what is going on and why it’s interconnected. We are largely still operating under the simplistic and superficial materialism of Newtonian physics, as it previously was believed that quantum physics only operated at the micro level, not at the macro level of ecosystems, species, and physiology; and no one is thinking what might it mean to consider a quantum biosphere. The presently developing field of quantum biology is blowing up this centuries-old bias in science. It turns out bodies are intricate systems that receive, store, and transfer info, energy, and light; as part of intricate systems entangled within the environment; and all of it uses quantum principles and mechanisms (quantum tunneling, superconductors, etc). This is at the same time that we are developing quantum technology, such as quantum computers that will be immensely more powerful. Imagine a quantum interface between humans and machines.
As one can begin to sense, this goes far beyond mere obscure debates among scientists and scholars working in academia and private labs. The sociocultural changes and implications will be profound, even based on much simpler examples of progress. Moving us toward decentralization, technological innovations are making possible local, smaller scale production of various goods and necessities: alternative energy, 3D printers, laser cutters, aquaculture, etc. Still other technologies will be transformative in other ways: automated machinery, self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence, etc; plus various new forms of immersive and integrated technology that will ever more unobtrusively blend into society and human experience.
Some of the changes, though, will just be a shift in understanding, possibly affecting our sense of identity and reality. Old shibboleths are being knocked over, and it could cause moral panic and culture war in a way all the rest couldn’t do alone. In the United States, we are only now coming to the undeniable truth that our national government is a banana republic. In It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, the reputable researchers Norman Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann proved beyond all doubt that Congress only acts according to elite opinion, no matter the reason their constituents voted them into office. Multiple international measures have concluded the U.S. is a compromised or partial democracy. This knowledge hasn’t fully spread and sunk into the American psyche. We are still going through the motions as if it were a fully functioning democracy at the national level.
In the past, people may have doubted that American democracy came close to its own idealistic rhetoric. But there is a massive difference in having it undeniably proven or at least powerfully doubted. It’s similar to what is going on in Biblical studies and religious studies. If it seems more distant to our everyday experience, the cultural punch the latter offers could send our society reeling. There is growing evidence that Jesus Christ likely never was a historical figure (or at least there is no way to prove it) and, whatever the case may be, the mythological accretions are so immense that there would be no way to discern what might or might not be the historical reality behind it (Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus; & Robert M. Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems). But this doesn’t necessarily imply we are moving into a post-religious age of secular scientism and an atheist majority.
It’s true that so-called ‘religious nones’ is the fastest growing demographic in this area. But most of the people claiming no religion still state they maintain spiritual and supernatural views, including a belief in a God, gods, or higher spiritual force/principle. What it does likely mean is that there is no future for fundamentalist and literalist Christianity, in spite of big biz media’s penchant for giving an outsized voice. What people are moving away from is organized religion, particularly mainline churches, as polls and surveys show that distrust toward big religion is as strong as distrust toward big gov, big biz, and big media. Americans are turning toward personal and interpersonal meaning, rather than institutional authority. Either Christianity will adapt an approach that is individual, egalitarian, open-minded, theopoetic, imaginal, etc; or it likely will be replaced by other religions, maybe entirely new ones or new syncretic forms (as happened, in the ancient world, with cults like Christianity). That trend is already fully manifest in other Western countries.
This cuts to the core of not only Anglo-American culture but all of Western civilization. What we are feeling right now, for the few of us noticing, might be the slight tremors that occur right before an earthquake. The tectonic plates are grinding against each other and, as one might suspect, about to let loose. If so, the ground beneath our feet will be moved and the whole world around us will be rearranged or toppled. But the point is that it’s not only about one thing or another. Admittedly some of these paradigm shifts could be doozies, even if limited to a single field. Still, any one of these changes alone wouldn’t necessarily make much difference in the big picture or rather it would be manageable.
Those protecting the status quo have been effective, over centuries, in putting everything back in place, after each period of disruption. Every technological innovation, cultural shift, or ideological development is integrated back into the social order and often used to reinforce it further, if modified to varying degrees. At some point, though, the level of change is simply too vast, comprehensive, and totalizing. And if another world war comes along, the reordering process unleashed could be beyond anything that has happened before; particularly considering how decades of top secret science and technology would appear in an instant. One of these days, it might truly be the End of History; a true stopping point of what came before that sets us off in an entirely different trajectory.
A Larger Perspective on What is Changing
What might make this an extra potent mix is that there is so much else also changing at the same time, with many dominant paradigms under threat not having to do with science at all. Everything is being destabilized all at once and all across the world. That is obvious with one thing we briefly mentioned, climate change. There are different climate patterns and increased weather extremes. In many parts of the world, this has led to worsening droughts, famines, wildfires, floods, resource competition, civil conflict, international wars, refugee crises, etc. This is putting immense pressure on the geopolitical order, quite likely pushing us ever closer to World War III, which could really rearrange our world.
On an individual level, rising average heat exacerbates anger, aggression, conflict, and violence. Higher average temperatures also mean greater spread of invasive species, disease-carrying pests, pathogens, and parasites. Then higher population levels of parasite load and pathogen exposure, as research shows, ratchets up the average measures of conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism, and collectivism; while dropping measures of liberal-minded ‘openness to experience’. The recent global pandemic surely played a pivotal role in the resurgence of the far right, including neo-fascism. And COVID-19 has permanently altered so many aspects of society and behavior, probably having impacted psychology and personality.
Another large-scale factor that causes unpredictable craziness is high inequality. We now have the highest level of inequality in American history, at the precise time of the greatest inequality in world history. It’s not only poverty, economic desperation, and shit life syndrome that causes mass derangement and dysfunction. Excess inequality alone makes almost everything worse, even for the wealthy: anti-social behavior, violent crime, mental illness, addiction, fantasy-proneness, public distrust, and on and on (Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Inner Level; & Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder). When it gets bad enough, either something forces equalization in the socioeconomic order or it’s all leveled through collapse (Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler).
Yet even as one might think everything is just getting worse, much else has dramatically improved over the past century. Average IQ worldwide has skyrocketed, along with literacy and education rates; and that has corresponded with a decrease of interpersonal violence, with what’s called the moral Flynn effect (Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature); if state terrorism, slow violence, etc is a different issue involving other causes (e.g., inequality and social dominance orientation). A major response to the last turn-of-the-century disruption was political reforms of public health, public education, etc. By the mid-20th century, the U.S. had a fully functioning social democracy, upon which the middle class American Dream was built. But then it was defunded and dismantled.
That is the background for where we are at in this moment, involving a prior tumultuous and transformative period of parallel paradigm shifts in science, technology, politics, economics, culture, and worldview. There is a living memory of a once progressive America that elicits nostalgia (e.g., the popular tv show Happy Days having been set at the end of a half century of successful and popularly-supported municipal socialist rule in Milwaukee). It’s what many Americans think the way the country should be, with present inequality and corruption as the deviation from the perceived norm. In spite of all the problems we face, Americans have not become cynical, though distrustful of major institutions.
Over time, Americans have steadily turned ever more liberal and leftist, progressive and social democratic; now with of across the board in politics and media. As we are in the middle of a mass transformation, a populist mood is demanding reforms and improvements. Generally, there is a restlessness to the population, sometimes explicit outrage. However uninformed is the public, most people grok the world is changing and something new is required. Yet the supermajority hasn’t yet come to realize it is a supermajority, specifically of a left-liberal variety.
One of most central of paradigm shifts to happen will be when ‘public knowledge’ arises. In social science, public knowledge refers to when not only people know what they know but also know what others know and know that others know what they know. It’s an informed mutual awareness in the public mind that can form into a public identity and hence political will, out of which protest movements and revolutions can form (e.g., Populist Era). What is finally forcing that public knowledge into existence is the social media that has overturned corporate MSM hegemony. In directly speaking to others, the previously voiceless are realizing they’re not alone and isolated. That could be the greatest of paradigm changes. A genuine democratic sensibility could emerge from it.
A slow transition in public opinion can be seen in other ways, even less noticed but more structural. More of the younger generations are choosing to not get drivers licenses and to not own cars. Instead, they prefer to live in larger cities and metropolitan areas that have available public transportation, ride-sharing services, taxis, bike lanes, multi-use trails, etc; and also to live within close access to shopping, entertainment, and basic needs. Yet car culture remains fully established, as the older generations grew up with it and won’t give it up, while they’re alive. The effect of changing attitudes could require a half century or longer to play out.
There will be much resistance to new ways of urban lifestyle, as it challenges or even threatens the established identity and social order. We take car culture as the norm and most people, at present, would find it impossible to imagine a world without widespread vehicle ownership, though it’s only been around since the post-war period. It could disappear as quickly as it appeared. One suspects we might already be on the tail end of that era. There have been few things more definitive of late modern American culture. That kind of paradigm shift wouldn’t only alter infrastructure but culture and mentality, an entire way of being in the world and relating to others.
Part of car culture was the ideal of the independent and autonomous individualistic driver who was free to do as they pleased, with no social obligations or mutual responsibilities. It went along with mass urbanization and then suburbanization, with all the people who escaped tight-knit communities and ethnic enclaves that were sometimes judged as insular, parochial, conformist, and oppressive. Individualistic fantasies aside, that car culture was heavily subsidized by government and propped up with externalized costs, and ever more people are realizing that fact. The individualism of the propertied self is being weakened on other fronts as well.
For centuries and maybe millennia, there was declining use of psychedelics (a.k.a., entheogens or ecodelics). Particularly with colonial trade and modernization, numerous addictive stimulants became widely available and eventually replaced the older indigenous psychedelic use, including in Britain and Europe (). We have research that shows different psychoactive substances have varied affect on not only experience of reality but also personality. The hyper-focused and narrow-focused egoic consciousness might not have been possible without the psychologically rigidifying effect of addictive stimulants (); with a variety of pharmaceuticals having unknown and unpredictable influences (). But with the reappearance of psychedelics, now with research being legalized again, we might be poised to return to an older bundled mindset or simply looser and more flexible mental boundaries (e.g., higher rates of ‘openness to experience’).
The paradigm of hyper-individualism is no longer affordable and, in reality, never was sustainable right from the start. But hyper-individualism might also be less compelling and attractive than it once was, for many reasons. It’s probably no accident that there are new emerging theories about how our humanity is expansive, interconnected, and enmeshed (5E cognition, quantum biology, Gaia hypothesis, etc). Recent scientific research supports this greater view of human nature that is in and of the world. But the larger revolution of mind, framing the paradigm shift of paradigm shifts, will take time as it spreads over generations. Various factors could speed it up or slow it down, if at this point it seems near inevitable, maybe far beyond the point of no return. One might suspect that we are closer than not to whatever is coming.
A Commentary on Implications
No matter the evidence, it could be interpreted various ways. There is a lot of cynicism in the air right now, as it feels like our society has been stuck. We are metaphorically in a situation like the end of the Ice Age. Everything is still cold and covered in ice and snow. But as it thaws, the meltwater has backed up behind vast damns of ice chunks and debris. Eventually, that damn will break and flood everything downstream… just not quite yet, however close we may be. That feeling of everything clogged up and held back causes cultural and psychological malaise. While others, in sensing the impending radical changes, respond with anxiety and fear, with moral panic and prophecies of doom.
As for we the author, we take a different tack. Though a short-term pessimist, we are a long-term optimist. That is to say we realize that everything is likely to get worse before it gets better. All of us have trying times ahead of us, such as a looming world war that could be the doozy of doozies. Even if global military apocalypse could be avoided, periods of mass disruption are never easy. The last time around, the uncertainty and discontent sent much of the world reeling into totalitarianism, from Stalinism to Nazism. It sure seems like we are heading down that road again, which is all the more reason we should be paying attention.
Silly liberal-minded intellectual that we are, we’d like to believe knowledge somehow does matter. At the turn of the 20th century, late modernity was still largely a new phenomenon. But we WEIRDos are old hats at it at this point, aren’t we? One would like to think that the public and the elites could learn from past mistakes. Maybe it goes deeper than that, though. We aren’t yet at the point of learning from the past century or so of problems because we are still mired in them. It’s not yet in the past. That is sort of the point we were making. For example, in spite of more than a century of quantum physics, we are still acting as if the world operated according to Newtonian physics. It takes a long time for such paradigm-shattering knowledge to be accepted, assimilated, enacted, and operationalized; so as to simply become enculturated as the next ideological realism.
Besides, it’s never a linear process of rational debate. It doesn’t matter who is proven right. Those defending old paradigms can sometimes cling to power for surprisingly long periods after their ideological worldview was proven false and defunct. That goes to another point in the above analysis. It’s not only that there is another paradigm that offers an understanding of systems, structures, conditions, and environments (a more leftist view, by the way). That paradigm will have it’s effect on us largely through the changes it has on those systems, structures, conditions, and environments. The world around us will change and so we will change.
Such initial changes will happen simply because they are useful. Those in power will likely be as clueless as the rest of us about the larger and longer implications. Besides base self-interest, elite motivations will be about immediate pragmatism, mostly involving minor changes here and there, in responding to public problems as they become a public crisis. We are likely to enter another period of policies of public good, such as economic populism and public health reform. This won’t likely be caused by the persuasion of public intellectuals, bleeding heart liberals, and radical leftists. Maybe like the climate change crisis, the public health crisis will start to effect the bottom line and even the plutocrats will realize they’ll have to deal with the costly and crippling problems.
What could follow, at least in the U.S., is another optimistic period of Progressivism. An unintended side effect is that better (i.e., less stressful, sickly, and oppressive) conditions won’t merely lessen disease rates but alter neurocognition, personality, and behavior. There will likely be a corresponding increase of the dual personality trait of ‘openness to experience’ and ‘intellect’, intelligence and divergent thinking, mental health and pro-social behavior; along with decreased conservative-mindedness, vertical collectivism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation, and dark personality (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism). Or at least that is what research indicates (e.g., behavioral immune system).
As the present elite like to hoard wealth and resources, they will initially direct most improvements toward their own lives and toward their families and communities. So, it’s possible we could see the clearest signs of greater moral health first among the elite. We might get a better quality of politicians; that is to say fewer psychologically traumatized and cognitively compromised, morally depraved and socially dysfunctional souls like Donald Trump; instead possibly replaced by political reformers akin to the two Roosevelt presidents. Healthier elites would be more supportive of public health, potentially leading to a virtuous cycle of overall betterment.
That does seem to be what happened last time. In the early 1900s, even the elites themselves were beginning to worry that there weren’t enough elites left who had what it took to rule wisely and competently (). The reason so many major politicians and monied interests finally came around to taking public health seriously was because they realized it was harming their own class and so threatening their continued power. If the public came to question their abilities, their legitimacy would be doubted and challenged, maybe overturned. Interestingly, it was Theodore Roosevelt who, having been a sickly child, improved his own health and then, as a politician, sought public health policies. The mood right now feels similar.
The revolution of mind will likely happen diffusely and from multiple directions, forming as much or more from the bottom-up as the top-down. Even when elites overtly make political decisions that effect us all, they are often simply reacting to those larger changes and often unconsciously, as they too are creatures of their time and place. Typically, politicians are simply following lockstep with changes that have already happened in public opinion and popular culture. Think of how the Democratic leadership, such as Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, were still publicly denouncing same sex marriage rights (or at least triangulating with the religious right) years after the American majority had already been on board; only to finally relent to that public position much later.
The supposed ‘leaders’ are usually following trends in the larger society, however much they like to take credit for finally doing the right thing, what they should’ve done much earlier while dragging their feet. Much of the knowledge that will inform public policy in the coming decades was established long ago, sometimes already having taken hold as expert opinion and consensus. That is the challenge. That quantum physics is how reality operates is one thing. But to recognize that quantum physics, as quantum biology, has profound implications (lighting, EMFs, circadian rhythm, etc) on humanity would require the total overhaul of our society. As with all the rest, the changes will happen in minor ways and slowly build up, until finally the elite are forced to acknowledge it. The paradigm shift of paradigm shifts is mostly trickling upwards.
Let’s end with a real world example from this town, Iowa City, Iowa. In the mid-20th century, the downtown had become rundown. In the 1970s, there was a movement to revive the local economy and draw people back to downtown businesses. The city government built a pedestrian mall, which essentially became a park in the heart of the city. Over time and continuing into the present, this project of beautifying the downtown has further included constructing seating and planters filled with plants and trees along many of the streets, but partly by sacrificing parking spaces. This was part of shifting attitudes about what a downtown should be, and also maybe some level of recognition that nature is important to human health and happiness.
In supporting the biophilia hypothesis, studies have proven the importance of greenery and green spaces (greater calmness, focus, healing, etc), and the collective effect on our society of enacting that understanding could be profound, but it’s quite likely no one involved in the local government has any direct awareness and familiarity with that research. More likely, it is knowledge that has slowly filtered out through various individuals and organizations. Practices get established and, as they do have positive effects, they gain popularity. Then city planners, city managers, and city councilors end up following the example of what is being done in other cities. It becomes trendy and so it spreads further.
The scientific expertise underlying it all is important, but it’s not ultimately what is driving the changes. Most people, even well-educated political leaders and highly-trained bureaucrats, rarely make their decisions based on careful research and rational analysis of all the available evidence. Ideas spread by meandering pathways throughout a culture, rarely ever acknowledged for the potential they contain as seeds of powerful transformation. They don’t represent any conspiracy to change the world toward some specific ideological agenda and sociopolitical vision. Yet, piece by piece, the world becomes something entirely new and different (e.g., that made modernity possible). Paradigm changes can take on lives of their own, as memetic forces.
