Beyond the Superorganism | Nate Hagens

Entangled World explores the interrelated, existential social, economic, ecological, and technological risks we face, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge. Entangled World is a labor of love, I am deeply grateful for the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider supporting the project at Patreon: entangledworld

My guest today is Dr. Nate Hagens. Nate is the Executive Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF), an organization focused on educating and preparing society for the coming cultural transition. Nate is also a fellow podcaster as the host of The Great Simplification, in which he has conversations with experts in energy, ecology, human behavior, geopolitics, technology, and the economy to provide a systemic view of the world around us, inform more humans about the path ahead, and inspire people to play a role in our collective future.  As a backdrop for The Great Simplification podcast, Nate also produced a short animated film by the same title that you can find on Youtube. And he has also co-authored two books Reality Blind - Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures - Vol 1 and The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century.

In this episode, we talk about our current collective predicament, especially, a way of life built on unsustainable energy consumption, also known as the energy dissipating “superorganism” of humanity. One core aspect of our current predicament is the climate crisis and many people believe that all we have to do is get off fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy but this is an ecology-blind view that ignores the fact that the minerals that power our EVs and solar panels are finite and their extraction has devastatingly complex environmental and human costs.

Nate emphasizes how our cultural values, goals, and aspirations must evolve if we want our technological advancements to affect positive change rather than accelerate our current unsustainable extractive way of life. Nate paints a picture of the bifurcations between technology and ecology, masculine and feminine, right brain and left brain, and how these forces have fallen out of balance throughout human history.

We also talk about Nate’s recent visit to India, where he experienced firsthand some of the differences between Eastern and Western cultures, and close our conversation by honoring ancient traditions and opening an inquiry into how we might both remember the wisdom that was hard earned over thousands of years by our ancestors and apply it to our modern-day metacrisis predicament.