Rufus Pollock – The Four Noble Truths of a Second Renaissance and the Metacrisis

We live in a moment of civilizational crisis and potential rebirth – what we could term a Second Renaissance. There are many terms associated with it: the great turning, metamodern, metacrisis, integral, teal, liminal web, GameB, regenerative and more.

This talk sets out the “Second Renaissance” as a framing for a) the present historical period, b) a new cultural paradigm or paradigms starting to come into existence, and c) the growing network of people who are acting to steward and accelerate its development.

The Second Renaissance is a response to the breakdown of Modernity: to the crises Modernity is driving and its inability to address them. Inherent to the Second Renaissance is the potential for the (re)birth of something radically different.

We argue that at the moment, the Second Renaissance is characterised by the following four premises which we term the four noble truths:

1) Real risk [polycrisis]: There is a real risk of civilisational collapse and large-scale destruction of life due to intertwined ecological, political, social, and meaning crises.

2) Root cause [metacrisis]: The root cause of these crises lies in the cultural paradigm of Modernity: in entrenched individual and collective ways of being, which are conditioned by Modernity’s logic and values.

3) Radical response: We are unable to address current crises through the logic and value systems that created and continue to drive them. We need responses that are radical in the etymological sense of going to the roots. That is, we need profound shifts in our ways of being, thinking, feeling, and acting: a new cultural paradigm.

4) Real possibility: A transformation of cultural paradigm is possible and is already starting to happen.

Rufus Pollock, PhD is an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner. He is passionate about finding wiser, weller ways to live together. He wants his child (and all children) to live in a world of love, abundance and wisdom.

He has founded several successful for-profit and nonprofit initiatives (and some unsuccessful ones) including Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datopian. His 2018 book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age and has been translated into multiple languages. His next book “Wiser Societies” is about the cultural dark matter that enables societies be wiser (and weller). Previously he has been the Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Shuttleworth and Ashoka Fellow. A recognized global expert on the information society, he has worked with G7 governments, IGOs like the UN, Fortune 500 companies as well as many civil society organizations. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. See https://rufuspollock.com/

And for first Second Renaissance White Paper, see here.