Getting Beyond Polarization #2—Climate Change As Teacher

I feel deep concern about how, with issues of every sort, people today are dividing almost immediately into polar camps. The concern ultimately relates to something of much greater significance than just the unpleasantness of discord. Polarization is getting in … Read More

Culturally Mature Perspective and the Climate Change Debate: How Asking the Wrong Question Results in Actions That Are, in Effect, Suicidal (an Update)

[In response to today’s extreme social/political polarization, I’ll be doing a series of articles that take front-page-news issues and address them from a big-picture, systemic perspective—from above the partisan fray. My intent with this series is not to get people … Read More

Looking Out Twenty to Fifty Years: An Extended View Helps Put Cultural Maturity’s Challenge in Perspective

In an earlier post that looked at the concept of Cultural Maturity’s big-picture significance, I briefly described a recent recognition that provides insight important to effective culturally mature advocacy. As I’ve finished up my new three book series and begun … Read More

The Radical Implications of a New Maturity in Our Relationship With Death — Long Form

One of the most significant new capacities that accompanies Cultural Maturity changes is the ability to engage limits in more sophisticated ways. Of particular importance, we become better able to recognize that some limits are inviolable. Nothing more defined the … Read More

The Radical Implications of a New Maturity in Our Relationship to Death

A new, more mature relationship to limits represents one of Cultural Maturity’s defining characteristics. In my writings, I’ve given special attention to one particularly ultimate example: our human relationship to death. Never in the history of the species has looking … Read More

Beyond Culture as Parent: The Radical Change that Gives the Concept of Cultural Maturity It’s Name

To fully grasp what culturally mature awareness and leadership ask of us, it is important to appreciate what ultimate defines it. We can think of Cultural Maturity in terms of today’s increasingly demanding challenges and the greater sophistication needed to … Read More

Ideology, Complexity, and Myths of Limitlessness

Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future The language of complexity provides a particularly helpful frame for understanding the gift that confronting inviolable limits ultimately gives us. Confronting limits successfully makes complexity newly visible, and specifically the more “living,” … Read More

Whole System Relationship—Limits to What One System Can Be for Another

Adapted from Cultural Maturity—A Guidebook for the Future Cultural Maturity confronts us repeatedly with limits inherent to what any kind of system can be for another. Such limits are themselves not new, but Whole-Person/Whole-System relationship requires a level of conscious … Read More

Kinds of Limits

Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future: Below I’ve divided new limits into five broad categories—physical/ environmental limits; economic limits; limits related to leadership and governance; social/psychological limits; and limits inherent to our modern definition of progress. These … Read More

Money as Ideology: Bringing Culturally Mature Perspective to the 2008-2009 Financial Collapse

What caused the 2008-2009 financial collapse? Simple greed and incompetence? The unfortunate “perfect storm” confluence of economic cycles, globalization, and other hard-to-predict factors? Yes, yes, and yes. But something deeper was also at work. Understanding this more fundamental ingredient in … Read More