I Think It's Bill Plotkin

half a paean

There’s not a shortage of frameworks and diagnoses — how the world works, what our place is in it, what’s wrong with things, how to fix them. From the Meaning Crisis lectures to Game B podcasts and Integral Studies programs and Metamodern thinkpieces and IFS workshops and monastic programs and transhumanist rants and and and and —

I’m encouraged by the heave of creativity I see, the outpouring of ideas and experiments and remixes. It crackles, this whole atmosphere.

But time is short, and energy isn’t infinite. Energy doesn’t become power until it’s turned towards the Work, and for every thousand crackles of brilliance that go off in a thousand different directions, there’s the lost potential of the power those crackles could have been, the work it all could have accomplished.

If everyone has their own model, their own diagnosis, their own framework, the Work is fractured. The hourglass drains, bit by bit, and some rough beast slouches towards our cozy bedlam.

I look around at the crackling in me, the crackling in my friends, the exuberant crackling all around us — and I feel it might be time for some compromises (co-promises) to be made, for people to let their energy course into shared channels where it can become power.

We would need a framework that already exists, that already has some pull; one that has power, poetry, and practicality; one that doesn’t need to be built up from scratch, but that can synergize with what’s already here.

I think it’s Bill Plotkin. Looking around at what’s available, I hardly see any competition for his work’s place as our best bet to transform Reality. For anyone who cares about the evolution of consciousness, the maturation of the species, the flourishing of the planet; for anyone looking for a robust system of thought that never loses itself in the systematics, a system that can be expressed just as easily through lectures and podcasts, through myths and movies, through spirituality and psychology, through business seminars and indie unconferences — I hardly see any competition.

And it’s not like the rest of us have to drop what we’re doing. There’s so much space in Plotkin’s work to include everyone’s work while giving it a shared language and shared purpose.

I think it’s Plotkin. I’m pretty sure that if we want to stop farting around with the endless panels and podcasts and ebooks and thinkpieces — if we want to cohere our collective energy as an emergent network of conscious operators for the restoration and evolution of the world-soul, and to grow that emergent network — getting familiar with Plotkin is our best bet.

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