Don’t Look Down. Look Beyond.
A “New Rules” Opportunity for Economic Transmutation
(TL;DR)
We’re witnessing the death throes of an 80 year old world order and the potential implosion of the economic and political systems that once supported it.
We’re simultaneously witnessing a radical expansion of consciousness in a growing swath of the population — a critical mass is reaching a tipping point.
The operating system of an economy directly reflects the level of internal self-awareness and quality of consciousness of both its architects and subjects.
Those of us who prioritize human and planetary wellbeing would be wise to seize the “new rules” economic reconfiguration opportunity that’s poised to emerge.
Institutions that facilitate and protect unprecedented, corrosive corruption can’t be used to flush out the same. Clarifying the norms that oligarchs (worth $8 trillion and the 1% worth $55 trillion) have warped, and plugging up the loopholes through which they’ve slipped are insufficient responses. A new economic order cast in the role of the proverbial phoenix rising, presupposes that the entire house of cards as we know it has been burnt to cinders and ash.
The global solidarity economy, an alternative operating system with ancient origins and future-paced capacity is waiting in the wings. That evolving network of post-capitalist worker driven coalitions has been in gestation —steadily simmering for 30 years. Best case aspirational scenario, barring the inevitable virulent opposition, ushering in a solidarity economy would take roughly two generations.
The need for a massive cultural shift in how most Americans view work, money, ownership, profit, and community wellbeing almost dwarfs what will need to be nothing short of a simultaneous Herculean/Amazonian restructuring of production.
However, we typically think a certain way for ages until…..we don’t.
Scaling, stabilizing and sustaining a currently underfunded solidarity economy will require changemaker inner work. The new framework grounded in cooperation will require anchoring, and coherence-building at an entirely different bandwidth. If the changemaker teams and collectives don’t do their inner work and integrate the current planetary expansion of consciousness, the solidarity economy will slide back into the shadows…and their shadows.
Step #1: Learn to Abide, Manage, Befriend, and Collaborate with FEAR
The 2026 American Solidarity Economy at a Glance.
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A”New Rules” Opportunity for Economic Transmutation
Once-trusted American institutions and the norms that held them together have faltered and fallen. The reverberation of disintegrating American guardrails is global. We’re witnessing the death throes of an 80 year old rules-based world order and the potential implosion of the economic and political systems that once supported it.
Yet,... while the global landscape is still morphing, the terrain is malleable. We can be sitting ducks or we can collectively seize the “fast break” moment with decisive, deliberate, discernment.
Questions For Consideration…
How ready are we to craft what’s needed on the far side of the surreal authoritarian nightmare? What comes next?
How much and what kind of authentic agency do “We the People” have?
Further, do we have the collective capacity and courage to activate and use whatever agency we do have creatively in order to thrive? Or will we simply build back another “reformed” iteration of what we know is outworn but fear to release? Will we look for quick fixes that don’t drag us too far out of our comfort zones?
What does the playing field look like? What materials are we working with?
1. Elections do focalize attention and collective direction. They shape legal parameters and put faces on targets for citizen ire.
Yet,…as has become pathetically obvious in the past 15 years, once our votes are cast, “the people’s representatives” demonstrate zero accountability to the public and actively ignore the needs of their constituents. When the priorities of the average American differ from those of wealthy individual or corporate campaign donors, the needs and interests of average citizens have “near-zero”impact on public policy (Givens & Page Perspectives on Politics in 2014.)
Sustaining personal and partisan power, inertia once entrenched, corporate and wealthy donor interests, not the public interest drive the majority of elected officials.
2. Disruptive civil disobedience does shift the Overton Window for a time. It does eke out concessions from begrudging power brokers. At the very least, petitions, protests, demonstrations, and marches facilitate cathartic self-expression. They lighten the weight of despair and let some steam out of the pressure cooker of pent up public frustration. They temporarily give us a sense of purpose, make us feel better and useful. That’s a valuable function in and of itself.
Yet,… grassroots movements, even when influential and scalable, require sustainable containers that are anchored deeper than cerebral change models or they risk corporate funding-co-optation or dissipation, e.g. Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street.
Let’s Cut to the Chase…Our quality of life boils down to who owns and controls economic activity. The structure, strength, and social determinants of the economy condition whether we thrive… or not. Without belaboring the reality that we’re all currently enduring, we’re bearing witness at the present moment to the impact of: financial deregulation, hideous income and taxation disparity, social safety-net spending cuts, personal and national debt, feckless political representation, corporate and oligarchic domination, erosion of purchasing power and workers rights, etc. etc. etc….. topped off by unhinged leadership.
What we’re dealing with now has been laid bare and is obvious.
We know that the system we have now only works for an infinitesimally small portion of the population.
In what direction will the control and ownership of the economy go in the 2026, 2028, 2032 go-rounds —corporations, the owning-elites, workers, oligarchs, community members?
Taking Ownership: The Fractal Mirror
Economies are people, not statistics and algorithmic predictions. The nature of an economic operating system reflects the level of internal self-awareness and quality of consciousness of both its architects and subjects. That is, myriad interconnected subsystems of people with beliefs and expectations who go about meeting their needs, working, producing, and consuming.
The economy to which we are subject, including those holding the power to manipulate it, isn’t a detached external entity that toys with our lives. It’s a reflection of how aware we are of our total interdependence, or not. Our consciousness creates it.
As per Mandelbro’s fractal principle of self-similar patterns repeating across scales in nature (and Indra’s Net 2,500 years earlier), the consciousness of people who comprise an economy is reflected in the economic environment that they either create or enable —consciously or unconsciously. Economies, composed of and driven by architects and subjects alike, behave just like other organisms in nature. Every part at every scale contains the whole. Separation is an artificial construct.
That’s a tremendous amount of creative responsibility we have in our hands whether we’re conscious of it or not! At the micro level a positive shift translates into consciously deciding how we spend, what we demand of our work environments, how we treat each other and allow the power brokers to treat us, how much we’ll tolerate and how much we’ll continue to enable exploitation. Our individual beliefs, choices, repeated behavior patterns in aggregate reverberate throughout and shape the fractal pattern of the framing economic system. So necessarily as individual consciousness shifts at the micro level, so does the macro economic environment in which we live.
When corporations and the majority of the population are hyper-competitive, driven by greed and the need to dominate, the energetically corresponding base level of consciousness precipitates an exploitative extractive system.
When we-the-people who animate the economy consciously decide to share resources, work collaboratively, and care for our communities, we create the conditions that produce a regenerative economy that prioritizes the quality of life of the collective good.
Shall we own up to the current situation we’re living through in order to integrate the lessons and rise?
Broader Sweeping Forces - A New Chapter
There are no unbalanced equations. The crumbling of political and economic institutions is happening in tandem with a radical expansion of consciousness in a growing swath of the global population — a critical mass is reaching a tipping point. The opportunity is ripe to co-create a new reality in partnership with the organically arising planetary winds of change.
The same forces driving global crises and the unraveling of all that’s familiar to us are propelling humanity toward a higher state of awareness. We’re simultaneously experiencing two aspects of the same overarching phenomenon. When individual consciousness, i.e., that of the parts, “We-the-People,” increases its capacity for collective metacognitive and meta-conscious functioning, the macro level framework within which we all function shifts as well. The whole game changes when enough people can clearly see the forest for trees and word spreads.
Amidst the noise and chaos, millions of people have already gotten the, “we’re all interconnected memo” and are finding the divisive “us vs. them - right vs. wrong” paradigm hollow. This new chapter opens to experientially reveal that interconnectedness necessarily means that if I hurt you, I also hurt myself in the process. We’re learning this the hard way as ICE continues to haul off our neighbors.
Granted, expansion of human consciousness comes at the price of uncomfortable, often horrific, shredding of reality as we’ve known it. That’s happening now. We’re completely surrounded by the disintegrating rubble of our old institutional anchors. Feeling so untethered can be deeply unsettling.
Yet, … when crises crescendo, rigid structures that haven’t served us for a long time crack and fall away. The most disruptive upheaval is inevitably the prelude to needed transformation.
For example, we’ve historically been enculturated to look outside of ourselves for the all-wise or charismatic leaders who have the answers and will show us the way. We’ve typically handed over our power to “representatives” of all stripes and hoped for the best which more often than not hasn’t materialized. That’s changing. Trusted leaders whose counsel we’ve dutifully followed, or who were making decisions that determined the trajectory our lives are falling by the wayside in front of our eyes daily, in droves.
So where do we look? We may have learned our lesson. More and more people are trading external validation-seeking for the internal exploration that’ll be needed to anchor and stabilize incoming new cycles.
The new chapter invites us to look within ourselves to find the leaders. We do have the wherewithal to dispense with rigid hierarchical, top down, ..bow down to the boss or doctor, …defer to the teacher …or to whatever authority figure, types of interactions with the systems that impact our lives.
Hierarchies that position a select few at the top are dissolving. We have an opportunity to design systems that authentically decentralize the distribution of authority and resources. Social, economic, and technological progress in the next chapter would serve the whole.
Space is opening up for a colossal creative pivot and the emergence of what may have been:
Simmering, seasoning, and ripening in preparation mode,
Actively suppressed by agents of the previous dominant reality frame, and is about to be liberated,
Totally unforeseen —a new way of seeing, operating, or of structuring reality that we hadn’t anticipated.
This timing bodes well specifically for a radical rethinking of hierarchical economic structures in particular. Americans now know first hand where centralizing power in the hands of a few takes us! A door is opening, preferably not for reformist bandaids, stopgap measures, or tweaking around the edges, but for BOLD new configurations to emerge.
The same institutions that protect and facilitate unprecedented, corrosive corruption can’t be used to flush it out. Clarifying the norms that oligarchs (worth $8 trillion and the 1% worth $55 trillion) have warped, and plugging up the loopholes through which they’ve slipped are insufficient responses. A new economic order cast in the role of the proverbial phoenix rising, presupposes that the entire house of cards as we know it has been burnt to cinders and ash.
The Solidarity Economy
The global solidarity economy, an alternative operating system with ancient origins and emerging future capacity is waiting in the wings. That evolving network of post-capitalist worker driven coalitions has been in gestation —steadily simmering for 30 years. Best case aspirational scenario, barring the inevitable virulent opposition, ushering in a solidarity economy would take roughly two generations.
At this crucible moment of new systems birthing, those of us who prioritize human and planetary wellbeing would be wise to seize the economic reconfiguration opportunity that’s poised to emerge. Do Americans have the courage to allow and facilitate the birth? For the majority of us this means stepping into the unknown and living with uncertainty until new systems stabilize over time.
However, we typically think a certain way for ages until…..we don’t.
The Solidarity Economy will need to build much greater cross-movement coordination capacity. And YES,... “People’s Movements” are classically threatened by corporate co-optation, funding dilution of purpose, burnout etc. etc. etc. The temptation to “fix” the current system will also be powerfully seductive.
However, the greatest need of the hour is for the cultivation of inner landscapes; the canvas on which we design this new opus. This is the work which quite literally, given what we know about the reverberating impact of the quality of consciousness, holds space for an enduring solidarity economy infrastructure to take root and expand.
Consider internal landscapes at two levels of the fractal pattern:
A Cultural Perception Shift in how most Americans view work, ownership, profit, and collective wellbeing that almost dwarfs what will have to be nothing short of a Herculean/Amazonian restructuring of production.
Changemaker Teams’Internal Work: Scaling, stabilizing and sustaining a currently underfunded solidarity economy will require changemaker teams’ focused inner work; engaging with their existential fears. The new framework grounded in cooperation will require anchoring, and coherence-building at an entirely different bandwidth. It will require those who collectively pick up the mantle, to commit to deep personal transformation which then reverberates through every level of our fractal connectedness.
We are invited to align with the new chapter and rise to the occasion.
Step #1: Learn to Abide, Manage, Befriend, and Collaborate with FEAR
FEAR
An Initial Dive Down An Important Rabbit Hole
Learn to Dance with, Or At Least Befriend Existential Fear
Fear is as essential as pain. Neither is pleasant but we can’t navigate our environment without fear just as we can’t grow without some discomfort or pain. How do we move through, think, and stay present through waves of existential fear?
Fear is our early warning system that signals threatening danger. It’s tremendously helpful in keeping us safe and alive when real danger looms. We’re moved to take appropriate action and deal with the threat in one way or another. The fear then subsides. In manageable doses, fear offers us life’s tests that toughen the metal and provide opportunities for growth, expansion, and evolution. Fear can be a constructive ally.
The challenge arises when our experience of traumas, large and small, predispose us to constantly perceive danger when there is no clear, acute, real threat. Or when we allow fear to open us up to other people’s manipulation (e.g. the press, the government, friends, family, social media etc). We allow murky, unclarified fear to ride roughshod over us.
At the moment of threat detection many of us shift into survival mode and the autonomic nervous system swings into action. A fear-driven life is dominated by overwhelm and chronic stress which depletes our bodies of vitality. We remain in psychological “stuck states” for protracted periods of time. We allow shadowy, nebulous, unexamined fear to hang around us like a cloud and pray upon us.
Fear-driven movements make decisions from a place of chronic urgency.
We can learn how not to be passively controlled and wedged into automatic panic responses that were once thought to be inevitable. We don’t have to be reactive products of our environments.
We can skillfully manage our neuromodulators and neurotransmitters, —specifically the norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and dopamine systems. We can practice strategically inviting discomfort when there’s no real risk of harm so that we learn to internalize our locus of control. This is the definition of sovereignty.
Recognize Fear As a Neutral Emotion
How might we best live with fear, …obviously a permanent part of the human condition? Like all emotions, fear is neutral. We can learn to see it as such and cultivate an alliance with it. Fear is just a heightened state of arousal which is generically generated. That is, fear can protect, overwhelm, immobilize, serve us well, or crush us.
It is our human forebrain that artificially superimposes meaning on its inherent neutrality. It translates autonomic arousal into dread, (fear anticipated) terror (while the dreaded event is occurring) and horror (consideration of the experience in the aftermath).
The broad categories of existential fear that we all face as a function of being human are: 1) fears related to death itself and, 2) fears related to the threatened ego or personality structure, or personal identity.
Our task is to examine fear from myriad angles. Rather than running from it, denying it, or stuffing it down we can constructively interact, learn from, establish rapport, detente, and then befriend existential fears. We can become skilled at shining a spotlight on fear in order to see it for what it is….and isn’t. We’d be wise to devote time to stabilizing our relationship with fear by relating to it from various vantage points.
To be continued…
pbs9@georgetown.edu
The American Solidarity Economy At a Glance
Collective Ownership: Control of Land, Money & Our Own Labor
Consumption
314 Community Land Trusts (CLT) and shared equity organizations are operating across 46 states managing 40,000 units of affordable housing.
3,500 Intentional Communities.
6,400 Housing Co-ops provide housing for over 1.2 million people ranging from cohousing groups to eco-villages.
830 Member-owned Rural Electric Utility Co-ops serving 130–140 million people.
Production
300 to 350 Retail Food Cooperatives (University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives)
Combined generate more than 2.4billion in annual sales.
PCC Natural Markets in Seattle is the largest, with over 56,000 members.
1,620 Agricultural Producer Cooperatives (farmer, rancher, and fishery co-ops) operating in the United States, according to (USDA 2024) serving over 1.7 million members and generating $275.8 billion in revenue in 2024.
1,300 Worker Owned Cooperatives as of 2025-2026, a number that has tripled over the past decade. These co-op businesses employ 7,000 to 10,000 workers and generate over $550 million in annual revenue.
18,000 - 29,000 Community Gardens (American Community Gardening Association and urban planning studies)
800-3,000 Mutual Aid Networks and Collectives
Volunteer Collectives: 75.7 million people in the U.S. (28.3% of the population aged 16 and over) formally volunteered through organizations in 2023. This reflects a post-pandemic total of over 4.99 billion hours of service at an economic value of $167.2 billion.
Finance
4,400 to 5,000 Federally Insured Credit Unions with membership of over 140 million, managing over $2.3 trillion in assets.
1,400 to 1,500 Certified Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) across all 50 states.
Non-extractive Finance is a borrower-centric lending and investment model that supports local wealth building without causing resources to flow out of the community or exploiting labor. The model keeps capital circulating locally. Payments don’t exceed the surplus value created by the borrower making it impossible for lenders to benefit more than the workers or communities they finance. Loan repayment only occurs when a project is profitable, preventing financial distress. Rather than transactional lending, relationship-building is prioritized.
Exchange
500 Timebanks have 40,000 members.
7,244 Farms are involved in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) selling products directly to consumers through various arrangements. These are direct-to-consumer marketing operations which totaled $2.9 billion in sales. CSAs account for $225 million of that total, strengthening local food systems and producer-consumer connections.
45 Fair Trade Towns generate over $1 Billion in annual Fairtrade product sales in the US market.
400-500 Barter exchanges or networks service 400,000- 500,000 businesses, facilitating roughly $12 billion in annual sales.
300 Alternative Currencies are tracked in databases.
Governance
Sociocracy: Design principles featuring a consent-based, dynamic decision-making process that distributes authority through self-organizing “circles.” Equivalence is a priority and feedback loops provide continuous improvement.
Holocracy: Decentralized management system that focuses on agility, transparency, and accountability in adherence to a specific “constitution.”
Teal Organization: Decentralized organizational model that emphasizes member self-management and wholeness, viewing organizations as living organisms. Organizational direction is emergent rather than planned.
Participatory Budgeting: Community members directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget building civic trust.
Municipalism: A political strategy advocating for home rule, decentralization, and the empowerment of local governments (cities and towns) over centralized state control. It emphasizes direct democracy, local autonomy and citizen participation in managing social and economic issues.
Commoning: The process of collectively creating, managing, and maintaining shared resources. A group of people creates self-organized shared agreements and steward assets like land, knowledge, or spaces for their common benefit. Cohesive relationship-building and stewardship that meets needs outside of market or state are emphasized.
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