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Oppenheimer; The American Prometheus, Son of the Enlightenment and a Symptom of What has Gone Wrong

For the first time since the start of the COVID pandemic, I went to the movies and saw Oppenheimer on the wide screen, the way an epic film of this magnitude is meant to be seen. It’s based on the 2005 book The American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. For a biographical picture that’s about the man behind the hydrogen bomb, most of us know how the story ends from history books.

I’ve been fascinated by the Promethean myth since my college years, and it features prominently in my upcoming book to be published in early 2024. It differentiates between human intelligence (Promethean), and natural intelligence (Gaian). It is the former that must be nested in the latter if we are to overcome our developmental barriers and have a chance at addressing planetary challenges and be able to mitigate societal and ecological collapse.

As the myth goes, Prometheus was a Titan god who created man out of clay. He stole fire from Mount Olympus and gave it to humanity in the form of art, science, technology and innovation. This act of defiance angered Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods who punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, but due to his immortal nature, the liver would regenerate overnight. The regeneration symbolizes human resilience.

This mythical narrative is intended to show the dual nature of the binary world, the pair of opposites that came into existence when the universe was born. It is memorialized in the Promethean act of bestowing genius on humanity and the punishment he suffered for that bestowal. It is the yin and yang, the darkness and light that keep the cosmos in balance.

Prometheus creating man from clay

To me, Prometheus represents a pre-Anthropogenic form of arrogance of the modern mind that greatly ignores the delicate balance inherent in the pair of opposites. It still associates itself with the one-sided Western view of human exceptionalism, a fallacy that began when Enlightenment was handed down to those with less awareness of the binary nature of the universe; the politicians and the plutocrats who run the world. That one- sidedness has continued unabated with layers of complexity that have only contributed to our further departure from the original form of exceptionalism, that of nature. The scientific revolution and our modern mind sought to separate us from the natural order and make us superior to it. We saw the light and we saw that it was good and we dismissed the darkness. We also saw the good side of our genius, but dismissed its evil opposite. We built a modern civilization and a global economy based on those assumptions ignoring the fact that the unexamined opposite side of the binary universe does not go away, it becomes part of our collective unconscious that sooner or later will appear in our lives as fate.

The Enlightenment and Promethean intelligence represent the Orange level in the Spiral Dynamics model and stage five in Clare W. Graves’ ECLET model. Both models have eight, hierarchically ordered developmental stages which, along with Ken Wilber’s integral model are – in my opinion – quickly becoming obsolete. This is happening due to a general absence of Anthropogenic awareness within the models’ respective communities of practitioners. Our planet is going through epochal change that will render most of what we’ve known obsolete, yet like a frog in a slowly boiling pot we are not aware of the danger. In my new book, I make an effort to trigger that awareness and keep the original Gravesian model current by reinterpreting its content in ways that distinguish between the Holocene Life Conditions during which Beck and Wilber created their models, and the Anthropocene Life Conditions, for which my book will make the first attempt at keeping the model relevant. In my new work, I associate the model’s pre Anthropogenic intelligence with Promethean intelligence, and the Anthropocene with Gaian intelligence; the former acting as a trim tab for the latter. In other words, if we are to survive climate change and ecological collapse, we must subordinate human/Promethean intelligence to natural/Gaian intelligence.

If this shocks you, let me explain:

Many individuals who identify with Promethean intelligence see the dual nature of things, but others, especially those who are motivated by profit, or driven by Newtonian reductionism, don’t. Even the few who are conscious of the dark side are often prevented from speaking about it, especially after the symbolic fire in the Promethean myth gives birth to their genius inventions and the creation is handed over to those in power. More likely than not, those in power have no awareness of the dark side of genius, or don’t fully understand the power of the dark side. In the movie, Oppenheimer’s struggles with the dark side of the atomic bomb are on full display as he grapples with existential psychological and ethical issues while working on building it. In the aftermath of the bombing of Japan, he became an advocate for the peaceful use of the technology (attempts to mitigate the dark side), for which he was humiliated and discredited by those who held power over him.

The repression of the dark side of genius is at the heart of how Promethean intelligence in the hands of those who hold power became the primary cause of much of the existential problems we’re faced with today, not the least of which is climate change. Today, we are dealing with the largest collective shadow in human history. It is the accumulation of the dark side of our binary world that we have ignored and externalized to our environment over the last five centuries. This darkness is so enormous, it has pushed several earth systems passed their carrying capacity making ecological collapse inevitable, and climate-driven events increasingly unpredictable and more devastating in scale.

Oppenheimer was dubbed the “American Prometheus” in the book that inspired the hit movie written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Credit: Heinrich Füger / Public domain / Wikimedia Commons / Ed Westcott

What the modern-day Prometheus has forgotten is that billions of years before he was enlightened, intelligence existed in nature that was embodied in another Greek deity named Gaia, the mother of all things. She is the primordial Goddess who emerged from Chaos and gave form to the air the sea and the land. She has evolved her earthly systems for billions of years and given life to billions of species, while balancing the pair of opposites through her autopoietic intelligence, and feedback loops accounting for the darkness and the light at every fractal level without exception and without ever having to repress one side in favor of the other.

Awareness of the dark side of Promethean genius permeates the entire movie. One of the highlights came half way through it when Oppenheimer showed the hydrogen bomb calculations to Albert Einstein, who simply asks: “what can it do?” Oppenheimer responded with: “It can destroy the world.” In the final scene they meet again and Oppenheimer says: “When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world.” Einstein asks: “What of it?” Oppenheimer responds with: “I believe we did.”

Climate change may not destroy the world as quickly as a hydrogen bomb, but it is just as deadly if we continue to ignore the dark side of existence. Addressing earth systems issues is a task that requires an end to our separation from and superiority over nature. Without returning to the fold of Gaian intelligence, human intelligence is doomed and it will be the primary cause that places the planet on the path toward a Sixth Extinction.

Millions of years from now, if there is an intelligence capable of reading the geologic record, it will likely find an anomaly that is unlike any other in our planet’s history; a creature with a big brain who walked on two legs and in a blink of an eye destroyed what took Mother Nature billions of years to build.

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Take My Job Please; AI and the Anthropocene

Published on Medium July 10, 2023.

If the Anthropocene Epoch that we have entered is about creating policies that keep us within the bounds of planetary systems, then a global unifying goal that seeks the systemic reduction of growth has to be our new North Star. The debate about the future of AI is part and parcel of that monumental shift in thinking. This long-awaited discussion about the role AI should play in our future has just begun, but unlike any other debate in the past, the voices that want to regulate it are much louder that those who want to advance it. Aside from the potential danger it presents to our mental health, democracy and global security, the biggest fear we have is that AI will render obsolete what remains of our professions. In other words, it has the potential to take away the endless number of jobs the capitalist system justifies and continues to create as an automatic extension of its ethos. The obsolescence of most of these jobs should be considered a good thing if we are to take seriously our new strategies of degrowth aimed at reducing our carbon footprint and the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources.

Having AI do everything for us — in the words of historian and anthropologist Yuval Harari — will bring an end to human history as we known it. While this may sound apocalyptic to many, it is a needed catalyst for the change we need. The end of history is the beginning of a future unbiased by it. It is one of the ways to bypass the inherently toxic aspects of our past that have defined the evolution of our mind and brought us into the climate predicament we’re in today. By transforming past quantifiable human endeavors into what will become the largest algorithmic utility, AI will play a crucial role in helping us survive our immediate future. This is a perspective that is currently missing from our conscious awareness that will free us from the biases of the past and focus us on a future based in Anthropogenic awareness.

The next phase of our human journey will be an extremely difficult one to navigate. As climate catastrophes increase in size and frequency, we will come to realize that we are helplessly at the mercy of Mother Nature that has become less merciful towards our species due to our actions that have forced the collapse of her different systems. What we’re coming into is a crucible of unbelievable meaning that we must cross if our species is to survive. Our future will barely resemble our past and we will go through decades of adjustemnts that are existential in nature. It is our collective passage through the dark night of the soul, a necessary metamorphosis that will bring us face to face with our past actions. It is our entire species being swallowed into the belly of the whale that brings us to our inner temple where we must die to our old selves before we can be born again. Without this painful transformation we won’t be empowered to jump into the next part of our human journey where we learn to live within our planetary limits.

It is on the other side of that transformational journey that we begin to replace the mandates of growth with the virtues of de-growth. It is on that other side that we begin to place human exceptionalism in the proper perspective that nests it in natural exceptionalism that strips way its frivolous reductionist nature. It is on the other side that we return to being one with nature and end the madness that made us think we’re superior to her or separate from her. It is on that other side where we replace monotheism with deep ecology and where planetary survival will not be subject to the naiveté of the democratic process. And yes, it is on the other side of the darkness that we will come to realize the capitalist system unconsciously spawns the seeds of its own destruction while its newly anointed captains of industry, the AI engineers continue to falsely believe that their narrow focus on power and wealth is as an ecosystem onto to itself.

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Reflecting on 2022, Remembering 2016, and Predicting the Unpredictable

In May of this year, our community lost one of its founding pillars, my friend and mentor Don Edward Beck, the genius who brought forth the work of Clare Graves that made all this possible. Don’s work in applying Spiral Dynamics and the Gravesian framework to issues of geopolitics, global inequality, and climate change are unmatched among his peers. It is the passion with which he approached these issues that have made me a believer in the possibility that Spiral Dynamics and Graves’ seminal work can change the world. This entry is dedicated to Don’s memory and the gift he gave the world which keeps on giving.

I haven’ t had the time this year to write my full end-of-year Gravesian assessment of macroeconomic and geopolitical issues. As I take a break from working on my next book, I wanted to share some of the topics I’m writing about which make for an executive summary of the year in review. Most of these pressing issues have been with us for a while, and seem to have either gotten worse in 2022, or have reached an inflection point from which there seems to be no return to the old normal. Most of these matters are existential in nature and we will continue to face them well into 2023 and beyond.

To me 2022, was a toss-up between these five major existential forces that behave like complex systems and are moving at different speeds and in different forms with different content that will continue to threaten our future for years to come: 

  1. The continued decline of the virtues of democracy around the world and the rise of autocratic leadership.

2. The continued realignment of the global economy based on value system congruence and compatibility as we experience more stress with supply chain issues, recession, inflation, sovereign debt defaults, asset devaluation and untenable levels of debt in Western economies.

3. The acceleration of planetary destruction due to the effects of climate change that continue unabated.

  4. Putin’s war with Ukraine that now seems to be at an inflection point that could involve NATO and a wider engagement as the US and Europe commit to providing the Ukrainians with more sophisticated weaponry. 

5. This one is a bit more detailed due to its ubiquitous and stealthy nature. The digital world that seems to be the largest technological catalyst of the Green system, continues to disrupt the non-digital world in a stealthy way and at an exponential rate. It is removing the filters and the editorial scrutiny that was housed in the hierarchal structures of the non-digital world. It continues to be a catalyst that spreads misinformation and radicalization with utter indifference to institutions and the rule of law.

Meanwhile the creators of Green technologies in Silicon Valley have shown no sign of letting up in their contempt towards the non-digital world as they continue their march to fully disrupt it. As they do that, they continue to line their pockets by selling our personal data, allowing hate speech and misinformation to go unchecked while thumbing their noses at our clueless regulators and our weak and obsolescent institutions. 

My call for a Smart Government, one that is designed from the Second Tier of values has not changed in over a decade of writing these assessments. Only Yellow systemic intelligence can address these issues, but sadly these calls continue to fall on deaf ears.    

Geopolitics on the Spiral – Six Years Later

I wrote this piece before Donald Trump took office six years ago as the 2016 end-of-year assessment of geopolitics. It offers a Spiral Dynamics analysis of the value systems that were present in our geopolitical alliances and institutions and the people who led them. While I overestimated Trump’s Red stamina and his competence for full Alpha Red leadership, Putin has proven to be exactly the Red Alpha leader I describe in the piece. 

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Speaking Gaian Truth to Economic Power