You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World

As Thomas Kuhn notes, paradigm shifts occur when enough people start to live their lives on the basis of that new paradigm, without waiting for the rest of society to make the shift.35 In

Efforts to end slavery, promote women’s rights and civil rights, establish labor rights, support marriage equality, and protect animal rights are not necessarily the result of paradigm shifts, but rather the outcomes of people thinking, being, and acting differently.

When we disregard or overlook the collective, transpersonal nature of human existence, we underestimate our individual and shared potential for generating social change.

From the perspective of entanglement, when a [whole/part] of the system changes, the system itself has changed.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire writes that “Many persons, bound to a mechanistic view of reality, do not perceive that the concrete situation of individuals conditions their consciousness of the world, and that in turn this consciousness conditions their attitudes and their ways of dealing with reality. They think that reality can be tr

The technosphere neither includes nor acknowledges the role of human consciousness, intentionality, or interests in shaping systems, and it trivializes the role of individual and collective agency in transformation processes.

According to geologist Peter Haff, the technosphere includes the world’s large-scale energy and resource extraction systems, power generation and transmission systems, communication, transportation, financial and other networks, governments and bureaucracies, cities, factories, farms and myriad other ‘built’ systems, as well as all the parts of the

Teilhard de Chardin considered the process of self-reflection as critical to the emergence of the noosphere within an evolutionary context: “When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.”6

The noosphere refers to the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity, especially regarding its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution.