Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The old paradigm is breaking apart. The new one is still not fully shaped.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - system, we need to meet the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can all step forward into a future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Join the evolution at: https://accidentalgods.life
Hey people,
It’s been a while since I spoke directly to the Accidental Gods community, and with so many new subscribers to the newsletter lately, this feels like the perfect time to welcome you all, share what’s happening, reflect on the broader context, and create a meditation that includes all of you—both old and new members.
Before we dive in, I’d like to revisit why we’re here—a reminder for those who’ve been with us for a while, and a warm welcome to those who have recently joined.
We’re living through a moment of profound transition. If you’re here, you likely recognize that this could be one of the most significant inflection points in the evolution of humanity. Everything we do now—individually and collectively, within our communities of place, purpose, and passion—will impact how the world unfolds. We are the ancestors our descendants will look back to.
This has always been true, but I don’t think there has ever been an inflection point where the worst decisions of our Trauma Culture, based on the wrong-story mindset of predatory capitalism, have all come home to roost at once. We’re not just in a climate emergency. It’s not just carbon pollution that’s killing us: industrial effluent is creating dead zones in the oceans, Forever Chemicals are in the rain, microplastics are in the clouds, and the combination of perverse incentives in our social media ecosystems and unbridled AI, which we treat not as kin in the emerging web of life but as tools to extract more, faster, is destroying our capacity for sense-making and our trust in our institutions. The concept of liberal democracy is far from perfect, but what threatens to replace it could be far worse.
So, given all of this, how do we each become the best ancestor we can be? How do we rise to meet the magnitude of this moment? How do we hospice modernity—acknowledging that its time has passed—and nurture something new in its place that could yet lead to humanity taking its place as a self-conscious node in a thriving, flourishing web of life?
How, in fact, do we make the shift from being embedded in a Trauma Culture to embodying an Initiation Culture?
This is the clear dividing line of our times. Francis Weller named the distinction between Initiation Culture and Trauma Culture. Initiation Cultures are defined by individuals undergoing episodic, intermittent contained encounters with death. The containment is held by elders, community, and the more-than-human world. Within this container, the individual is pushed to the edges of themselves until they must ask for help—from all parts of this: the human and the more-than-human world.
If they can receive and implement that help, they return to their people, elders, and communities alive with wonder and awe, fluent in the ways of asking and receiving, and aware of the reciprocal responsibilities of their lives. They return with pride, self-respect, and a deep respect for others, because this is what real community means: a sharing of mutual respect, pride in each other's joy and wonder, and the capacity to engage with whatever the world throws at us, safe in the knowledge that we face nothing alone, we are always part of a team, and we can meet any challenge, up to and including the rite of passage that is death.
In contrast, Trauma Culture offers no containment. Elders are few, and community has been annihilated by a narrative of individuation, by the myth of what Tanya Luhrmann calls the ‘Citadel Mind’ and the very real sense of separation this brings. Our encounters with death are not held in joy as ways to grow: they are triggers and traumas that stack and stack and stack until they overflow and we become another data point in the horrifying statistics of mental health breakdown in our culture.
Vanessa Andreotti, whose book Hospicing Modernity is essential reading, shares that her indigenous grandfather defines the core trauma of modernity not as the horrors of land grabs and mass slaughter—though these are deeply traumatic—but as the belief in separability. Not just separation, but the very possibility that separation can happen.
To be clear: being part of an Initiation Culture is our evolutionary history and our birthright. Our ancestors grew in these cultures, and people who are born into fully functioning indigenous cultures grow there now. We are born expecting this: expecting in the deepest part of our souls that we will be welcomed, cherished in a web of connection, sufficiency, and agency, where being, becoming, and belonging are the gifts of life.
But our culture doesn't give us this. It gives us separation, scarcity, and powerlessness. I listened to a podcast recently in which the guest travelled frequently between Bhutan and North America. She was asked if she experienced culture shock, and she did—when returning to modernity, where a culture of massive excess coexists with pervasive fear of loss and impoverishment. In Bhutan, a nation that measures Gross National Happiness instead of GDP, there isn't untrammelled joy, but there is a sense of belonging. When the government sees that women are less happy than men, or the young are less happy than the old, or that farmers are least happy of all, they act on this information to improve conditions for women, for the young, for the farmers.
The neurophysiology of this is interesting, I think, and useful. If we bring things down to their lowest common neuroscience denominators, there are broadly two kinds of reward centres in our brains—or at least, two that we know of right now.
The first are the dopamine hits. We get a dopamine blip from, say, white carbs, alcohol, a like on Facebook, cocaine, or the huge cocaine-like hit when our ‘tribe’ gets to beat the other tribe, particularly if it looked as if it was going to lose (lots of Democrats and their supporters are experiencing big dopamine hits right now).
These are every bit as addictive as recreational drugs and just as damaging because dopamine rewards are short-acting, discrete, and subject to the law of diminishing returns. This means we need more white carbs, alcohol, tribal success on the internet, or bigger and bigger boxes from online shopping to get the same hit as last time. But —and this is crucial—no matter how much we accumulate, the void inside remains unfilled. The traumas continue to stack. It doesn’t matter if it’s sniffing glue or building rockets to Mars, there is no amount of dopamine that will heal the gap—because it’s not dopamine that we need: it’s serotonin.
So, let’s look at this: Serotonin rewards are long-lasting, reinforcing, and cumulative. They are fed by a sense of community, by sharing, by the pride we feel when we have the respect of those we respect and offer it back in return. Serotonin rewards are not isolated blips, but a mesh of mutual reinforcement. Singing together once a week will be enough to maintain a sense of community, although living, breathing, working, and playing together as we did in our forager-hunter tribes for almost all of human existence builds the mesh into the container that holds the intermittent encounters with death that we see now as rites of passage.
And the really cool discovery way back in the 1970s by a group in Canada led by Bruce K Alexander showed us that serotonin beats dopamine every time. They put rats in isolated cages and offered them plain water or water laced with sugar and morphine, and they chose the morphine in vast, vast quantities.
But if they created a ‘Rat Park’ with lots of rats in family groups, lots of places to play, and lots of enrichment in the environment, they didn’t drink the sugar-morphine water much at all. And then, if they put a morphine-addicted rat into the group, these incomers became part of the social groups and were helped to wean themselves off the drugs.
This tells us a lot about the two cultures. We could unpick that for another hour—particularly the work by Vaughan Wilkins on what he calls ‘Zoochosis,’ which is the fact that humans in our dominant Trauma Culture exhibit all the psychopathologies of animals in a zoo. In his PhD thesis, he writes, "The collective developmental trauma that we experience points to a cage that is constructed through norms and conventions and a faulty definition of sanity that condones us living in a way that is killing our own life support system. By living in a way that is anti-ecological and hurting us, but then naming it sanity, we validate and condone it and then teach it to our kids. It becomes a secret cage that prevents us from living as functioning members of the earth community."
I am hoping to invite Vaughan onto the podcast later next year, so we’ll leave that one for now, but what I want you to take away from this is that if we learn how to build real, functioning cultures where we have respect, relevance (or agency), reciprocity, and responsibility, we can reverse the isolation and devastation of our Trauma Culture. It is possible.
So where does this leave us? The trauma that severed us from the web of life likely began long ago, long before what we now call the agricultural revolution—a development that, upon closer examination, seems more like a disaster than an advancement. Our forager-hunter ancestors, and those who still live that life today, were uniformly happier than those in our modern culture, where the mental health epidemic is as bad as the epidemic of dietary chaos and diabetes, with the same sense of separation as the underlying cause. Our sense of separation leads to perverse incentive structures where a dead tree is worth more than a living biome, where a dead whale is worth more than a living ocean, where we can pour billions into carbon capture and storage while cutting down old-growth forests in the name of economic growth.
We are destroying the very web of life on which we depend. And we are destroying ourselves in the process, and our children, and our children’s children.
Yet, despite all of this, I’m not sure I’ve ever been more hopeful than I am now. A clear path to creating an Initiation Culture is emerging.
My hope is that we can look squarely at the harsh reality of our current situation without the dopamine blip of horror or denial, and instead, we can work towards a more profound, sustained serotonin response. We are the ancestors of the future. We have the capacity to rise to this moment and create a culture that embraces life in all its fullness and reciprocity. We can leave behind a legacy of true connection and care for those who come after us.
For everyone reading this, whether you’re new to this journey or have been walking it for some time, let’s reflect on how we can each contribute to this cultural shift. Let’s consider how we can build and nurture the web of life, how we can create spaces for real community, and how we can hold each other through the inevitable challenges.
With much love and respect,
Manda