Taking A Leap
One of the toughest things about writing posts like this is the vulnerability. Not that I’m not decent at sharing stuff, but some things are harder to share than others.
As far as the sharing goes, the background check investigator for my second clearance investigation when I was in government (they happen every five years) asked a friend of mine (that’s part of the process) if I had any big, deep secrets. “Nope,” my friend said, “She’ll tell you anything you want.” The background investigator laughed and said “Yeah, she’s the most open person I’ve ever investigated in over 20 years of this.” So there’s that.
Still, there’s stuff I hold back on. I don’t talk much publicly about how hard it’s been to get this new nonprofit here up and running. Part of that is because I don’t want the focus to be on that: my struggle. But part of it is that it’s just hard to talk openly about really hard, uncomfortable, terrifying stuff — especially when you’ve put your heart and soul into it.
So today I’m taking a leap. Today’s leap is really in sharing my own life vision and mission — something that is deeply personal. I updated it last week on March 1; a day that is sacred to me for more reasons that I can list. It goes back decades.
Sharing it is one leap of many; but we have to take a zillion leaps to move the really huge stuff forward. It iterates. We learn and grow and evolve. Every leap has the potential to make the next leaps easier, too. Or at least to find yourself moving forward from a different place the next time. Doesn’t always work, but it can.
March 1 — A Sacred Day
We all have days that are important or sacred in some way. For me, March 1 is one of them — every year. Some of the reasons I don’t explain, but here are a few.
March 1 is the day DHS started in 2003, one day after the executive order was given by President Bush to build the post-9/11 system I later moved to the DC area to work on. March 1 is the day that a dear friend passed in 2012 who I met because of that national post-9/11 work meant to help first responders. March 1 is the day that same year that I went to a systems science summit on the survival of humanity at the Smithsonian that informs some of this nonprofit’s work here now (the back stories about disruption and transformation are here, with more recent background on the current website).
A Great Disruption… Or Transformation?
That Smithsonian summit in 2012 focused on the science of systems… with a 40-year update of work first done in 1972 (“Limits to Growth”) to see if humans could survive on this finite planet given the limited resources yet growing population and other factors.
On that March 1st in 2012, system scientists announced that we — humans — have overshot the limits of the planet.
They were absolutely certain that a corresponding population collapse would be coming, because that’s how ecology works. No population can survive without the appropriate resources to keep it fed and watered. They didn’t know when this crash or collapse would occur, though, or what it would look like when it started.
System science is funny that way. You don’t know what the feedback loops will be, or how changes will push interdependencies in the systems. As such, you can’t predict what the specific things will be that indicate that interconnected worldwide systems are out of whack.
They expected that an obvious disruption to the world as a whole would start to be obvious as this system collapse unfolded in anywhere from five years (which would have been 2017) to decades out… but they suspected it would be sooner rather than later.
They noted that such a disruption could look like a lot of things… most likely to be indicated by major system interruptions, changes, or challenges that were not likely to be easily resolved, and which led to more instability and disruption. Could be war, civic unrest, major political movements, supply chain interruptions, a pandemic, an increase or change in diseases and in disease spread, increasingly unstable weather, political instability, nation-state failure, major ecological changes, increased violence, increased competition for limited resources such as water or energy or food, and so on. A few months after that Smithsonian event I found a book that referenced the same science called “The Great Disruption,” and I’ve been using that term as a reference since.
The thing is — that disruption could be a great transformation. It could be. It has a better chance of being a transformation if we lean forward into it and get proactive.
We need to be ready to make big change fast; to drive it. We’re not there yet, but we could be.
Another aspect that’s likely to happen is that authoritarianism and the more extreme form of it, fascism, are likely to surge, increase, and expand worldwide as those with wealth and power use hate and othering of humans to pilfer resources and oppress people as is the habit of humans. That’s already well underway, and is certainly an issue in the US. It’s predictable. Historian Timothy Snyder does a deeper dive on how this happens in the last chapter of his book Black Earth.
But the authoritarians don’t have to win — and often they don’t. This is how we’ve gotten such nice societies all over the planet. It would be nice if we could keep those societies and transform them to adapt to the great disruption (i.e., transform) rather than going backwards into destruction and tyranny.
Human Continuity: Do We Still Have A Chance?
Last week, the Electric Infrastructure Security Council (EIS Council) held a forum called “Human Continuity: Do We Still Have a Chance?”
One of the panelists pointed out that we are in a unique moment in history because of the interconnected, interdependent nature of our global society. Before, a disaster could occur locally somewhere and be very, very bad for that region. Now in the modern era, our systems are so interconnected globally that a development, disruption, disease, or other crisis in one place could indeed threaten the whole human race — or at least the whole human civilization.
It’s a new kind of vulnerability, and we’re not doing a whole lot collectively as a species to get ready for it or to mitigate it. Especially when the world’s powerhouse — the US — is in total denial that that such a vulnerability exists, is not dealing with climate change, and has an active authoritarian movement itself.
Here’s one example of how this could go down. Certain extremists in the US (original post here, later post here) called “accelerationists” are working on ways to take down the US power grid, which would effectively get rid of modern society. Instant apocalypse. Extremists who are pushing this actively right now tend to be white supremacists, who are convinced that they’ll do a-okay in the new Armageddon because they’re heavily armed, and can rule the remaining society in the fascist style of their choosing. If they got their way, the US would fall. That would create a domino effect worldwide where countries dependent on the US would likely fall, too, and be vulnerable to the “might makes right” philosophy driven by guns and brutishness. Lucky for us so far, the FBI and other law enforcement folks have been arresting at least some of the extremists working on this kind of accelerationist goal. Pushing back against that kind of threat is one of the reasons it’s so important to keep our law enforcement and government institutions intact, uncorrupted, and functioning reasonably well (understanding that law enforcement as a whole also needs transformation); although the authoritarian movement in the US is working to either erode or politicize critical agencies and functions.
There are lots of reasons our global civilization as a whole is vulnerable. The panelists in that EIS video on continuity do a great job of talking about the big picture risk landscape we face today. Arguably they’re covering very complicated and very current risk stuff that no one else is even talking about.
We should be.
This country is so jacked up right now that we’re not even talking about what we need as a country to help ourselves thrive and flourish… because we’ve fallen into a culture war with an active authoritarian movement. Including heavy fascism.
When do we get to do the big problem-solving?
I would argue that we should be doing it as a way to help us fight authoritarianism. I would argue that we need to be having conversations now about what we want to see in this country and in this world. And working on how we can get there.
We can’t just be against. We have to be for.
There’s a line in the Star Wars movie The Last Jedi that goes, “That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love!”
Vision, values, and moral courage are part of how we can fight the big fight. They absolutely are. This organization intends to help. Shift the Country is ramping up activity to get shift going that can help us all do more of this big picture thinking. That’s what’s going on in the spring planning picture in the post.
Our country needs it, our people need it, and the whole damn planet needs it. And not in like five years, or twenty. We need it like yesterday.
So let’s get going. Let’s make make big vision and big problem-solving part of the narrative that drives the 2024 election. Let’s drive politics in a different direction. Let’s get ready to do some aggressive transformation, and pull ourselves out of shock and defense.
My Own Vision
With that, here’s my own personal vision. I wrote an earlier version of it in April 2020… when I became convinced that this great disruption had already started. I think we’re a couple of years in now, and I think it’s going to keep intensifying. So far, every day it does — intensify. More to come.
We can do way more to drive this great change. Step 1 might be pulling ourselves out of the shock and overwhelm. But maybe Step 1 is remembering to dream about the future in the first place.
So here’s my dream. Here’s what I intend, personally, to work on for the rest of my life. I updated it last week on March 1. Unspurprisingly, it dovetails nicely into the Shift the Country work (more here) — since I’m the founder here.
Be safe, be well, keep the faith, and pass this along. We’re going to need a whole bunch of really awesome people to help make this kind of shift happen.
It’s about the future of humanity. It really is.
Way Forward
“I want to help navigate this great disruption, and to help champion and catalyze transformation within it. To help it not be defined by collapse and disruption but rather adaptation, evolution, and transformation. By becoming the best of who we can be even in this time of accelerating chaos, reckoning, loss, crisis, and change. In ways that help us envision and chart new courses of transformation, and that help us walk those new paths. To make and to facilitate big pivots. To create conditions that throw sparks and that lead to tipping points, critical mass, viral spread, and mass ignition of ideas and change. To lead worldwide shift by catalyzing changes in the US’ trajectory. To increase civic engagement and organizational and business engagement at scale. To build community, energy, economic, business, and disaster resilience to strengthen homeland and national security. To innovate and evolve. To problem-solve. To think critically. To consider systems and interrelationships. To catalyze evolution of the US’ infrastructure, and electrification of the country. To transform our economy, energy, cultivation, production, supply chains, and distribution to be more equitable, regional, resilient, and sustainable. To foster wonder. To encourage empathy. To spread kindness and decency. To value humans, and taking care of humans. To grow connection and community. To help people survive and thrive and flourish and shine. And to help people love each other and to embrace our humanity.”
— Vanessa Burnett
First of all, Vanessa, thanks for sharing your "origin story." It's a powerful one. We tend not to do that often enough, so when people are vulnerable it makes a positive impact. There is so much truth, so much prescience in what you write. If we could just take the country by the "shoulders," shake it and scream, Wake up! Maybe we could get people out of their complacency. It's a scary world out there. Retreating into our corners makes us feel "safe." But that is false safety, at best, if we don't figure out how to take on--and take out--the demons that plague our society and our country. Perhaps that's why the story of the Ukrainians resonates: they have a tangible and definable enemy that threatens their very existence (and ours!). We, on the other hand, have a murky enemy from within. If we open our eyes, though (as you did those many years ago), we can see that enemy is every bit as tangible and definable as the Russians are for the Ukrainians. We must figure out how to connect the dots for the many Americans who think they are immune to the existential threats that we face. Nothing less than our democracy--and our way of life--depends on it. So again, thank you for illuminating how you got to where you are--and pointing us all in the direction of where we need to go.
There's also a push to default on the USD and take down our currency. The people pushing this idea are powerful, Elon Musk, Peter Theil, and others. Do you think they care what happens to the United States?