Think Fractilian
Shifting our Focus from Size to Pattern Matters
Excerpted from Karen O’Brien’s Substack Quantum Social Change: Small Numbers
We are patterning the future. One small action at a time.
A fractal approach to our existence-meaning captures the essence of Quantum Social Change: we matter in every moment.
“Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words.
Creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.”
–Viktor Frankl, Yes To Life: In Spite of Everything
Small, incremental actions are not trivial. They strategically shift larger patterns when they are grounded in values that apply to the whole.
A whole that recognizes and includes the full diversity of people and nature, not one that is socially and politically constructed through separation, exclusion, domination, and fragmentation.
One way to redress our fear of being too small-inconsequential to being powerful-enough is to:
shift focus from size to patterns.
In other words, think fractally:
-what we call ‘separate’ are simply patterns within patterns, embedded in a larger whole.
-we are all diverse and whole at the same time.
Wholeness does not have to mean homogeneity. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, physicist David Bohm argues that what seem to be separate parts are inseparable aspects of an unbroken and undivided whole.
How can humans ever be absorbed within the splendor of planetary integrity, its profound wholeness, while insisting upon a socially constructed idea of ‘us vs them’ whether it be people or Nature as the ‘other’?
"Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity."
-James Clear, Atomic Habits
Every action is a vote for the society we wish to have, and the type of planet that we want to live on.
We need a different way of thinking about wholeness and our relationship to the whole.
Cultivating a Fractal Patterning mindset is a new way to view ourselves in relation to the whole, the integral way Nature’s been conceptualizing everything she does for billions of years...the way that’s all around us...if we shift our focus to notice it.
Karen O’Brien is a leading social scientist exploring the extraordinary potential that lies within people to create meaningful changes in the world. She is also a professor of Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. Her latest book is: You Matter More than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World.
Metaphorward applies new mental perspectives for considering old intractable problems...to, not only positively, resolve them but to braid them in with our current limited ones.