The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - 10 Qualities That Could Change the Future: The Seeds of New Cultural Mitochondria | Frankly 98

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Living in a period increasingly fraught by various crises and risks, it is more necessary than ever to be able to metabolize anxiety into something useful. But what about at a cultural level? The behaviors that the current economic superstructure rewards cannot form the basis of what emerges from its ashes…we require new ways of thinking and living that put us in closer relationship to one another and the planet around us. In a system structured to serve as a dissipative structure, how do we plant the seeds of something that is more resilient and cooperative? In this week's Frankly, Nate addresses how we, as humans, might adapt and take on characteristics that will allow us to face the coming challenges of our world head-on. Through a framework of "cultural mitochondria," Nate explores 10 traits that will help to shape the way we move through and address the human predicament. These are not far off ideals to think about once, then forget about. These are behaviors that require deep and regular practice, perhaps one of the most important tasks of our time. How can we become more grounded and regulated in our bodies in order to become agents of change? What does it mean to metabolize grief into resilience and action? And how do we expand empathy and humility for one another as we grapple with increasingly isolating conditions? (Recorded June 1, 2025)   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie. ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners

Last week, we had a video of the superorganism in seven minutes, which was actually the superorganism in like nine and a half minutes. But near the end of it, I alluded to what comes after the economic superorganism in the human historical and future trajectory. And I use the word mitochondria of the cells of what might come next. The economic superorganism period of human history where cheap fossil energy, coupled with abundant global credit and globalization and collaboration is nearing its end in the not too distant future. Some new social organism will replace it. We don't know what. Mitochondria are the power

centers of biological cells, tiny organelles that convert nutrients into usable energy, keeping the organism and life adaptive and alive. In a similar way, the internal human traits and skills offered in this short video and others, I just came up with this on the fly, could be the mitochondria of a future cultural system for humans. Each small, distributed, largely invisible, but absolutely essential. They could be the metabolic engines of resilience, regeneration, and a new co-consumerations. a new coherence of how we relate to each other and to the natural world.

I want to explore that a little bit under the cultural materialism framework of Marvin Harris, who looked at lots of historical cultures and found that they had three things in common. There was a pyramid. There was the superstructure, which is our ideas and our beliefs and our values on top of the social structure, he called the structure, which was our economic system, our laws, our regulations, our institutions, and all that was on a foundation of infrastructure, which was our energy, our economy, our environment. And he said it was that core foundational infrastructure that was the most important thing

for cultures changing. What he didn't talk about is the inner worlds of the humans alive at the time, I think he kind of subsumed those into the beliefs and values. But if you view this pyramid in our current 2025 global human predicament, it is highly relevant what the sea of humanity outside this pyramid expresses, feels, experiences in their own minds. Like how skilled, resilient, able, are we as humans to adapt and engage with the coming challenges? And so I've come up with a short list of traits that, speculatively, I don't know the answers here, the traits that might comprise the mitochondria of individuals around the world

engaging with the human predicament. So in no particular order, here are 10 traits of a different culture, potentially, that engages not only after the superorganism splinters, but while it splinters and before, right now. So first, which would be number zero, actually, is self-care, because before we engage with the world, we have to take care of our physical and mental well-being of you, the human being, the person, first. That means adequate sleep, nutrition. nutrition, rest, exercise, all those things.

And this is not self-indulgence. It is the baseline requirement for resilience in a fraying world. Regeneration, learning, creativity arise only when the parasympathetic nervous system is active. So self-care in these times is not a luxury. It's actually a neurobiological strategy. And so if we do nothing else, I think, Paying attention to self-care is critical because only when we sleep well, eat decently, move often, and feel safe, can we become agents of change?

A dysregulated human body cannot sustain a new story. So if that's number zero, then number one is grounding. A grounded person is tethered, not just to place, but to their body, their breath, their emotional center. and in a storm of too much information and polarization and disorientation, groundedness is the ability to stay in that parasympathetic zone, calm, present, and able to hold space for others. You may have noticed from the start of this podcast a few years ago that I am more grounded. I'm certainly not fully grounded, but through a lot of help from others and a lot of personal work on meditation and time in nature and trying to find balance.

I'm more grounded than I used to be in any case. Because being grounded is an inner ballast of sanity in these crazy times. And ultimately a grounded human becomes an attractor for safety and truth. And in turbulent times, groundedness is sanity. Next is post-tragic mindset. We're perhaps the only species that can grieve in the abstract. I do it all the time. Ecosystems, cultures, future generations of ours and other species.

We don't just grieve in the moment. We can grieve in the abstract. But unresolved grief becomes unhealthy in our bodies. It's not metabolized. It results in cynicism or nihilism. And I believe it was Mark Gaffney or Zach Stein. I can't remember who coined the phrase post-tragic. And real briefly, pre-tragic is when you're just going about your life, seeing the world

and everything looks fine because you're unaware of all the crap under the surface. Tragic is you're becoming aware of the metacrisis and all the things. And post-tragic is after metabolizing it, understanding what's there and still rolling up your sleeves and playing a role. So the post-tragic human integrates grief as some sort of a daily rhythm. And it's like composting emotional energy into a more productive state. And studies do show that grief rituals enhance individual and collective resilience and meaning-making.

We're going to have to probably repeatedly process grief in the world ahead and attain a zone of acceptance, but that zone of acceptance then leads to potential action and engagement. So post-tragic as a category of the cultural mitochondria. Category number three is networked. Biological intelligence often emerges from decentralized nodes like mushrooms, mycelium, or beehives. And humans evolved similarly. We are social animals and our cognizant.

is enhanced by being around others that we trust. So in a collapse or great simplification scenario, survival will not correlate too strongly with wealth, but with social capital and mutual aid. So finding the others is not just a feel-good phrase. It's actually distributed resilience for the times ahead. So this is about cultivating relationships, not just for strategy, but for meaning. So we need to find the others. And I'm hopeful that either now on this platform or in the future, we will be able to help people find the others that are thinking about

and working on these things. Category number four, related to the previous ones, but something different is co-regulation. With others, you gain strength, vitality, purpose, and very. co-regulation of your nervous system. Polyvagal theory, which I'm hoping to find an expert guest to talk about this because I've been discussing it with my cranial sacral therapist, but polyvagal theory tells us that safety is not a thought. It's a feeling. And co-regulation in our bodies happens when we are seen, when we're heard, and when we are accompanied and respected. It's not just emotional. It's biological. Heart rate variability, the vagal tone, mirror neuron activity all improve in trust-based relationships. And groups and ultimately cultures

that are built on co-regulation are going to outperform those that are based on competition. Because trust scales. This gets back to David Sloan Wilson's and E.O. Wilson's multi-level selection theory where individuals, selfish individuals out-compete altruistic individuals within groups, but that altruistic groups out-compete selfish groups. And it's along these lines, co-regulation. The next theme, the fifth theme for the mitochondria people, homo sapiens alive today, is systems thinking or wide boundary thinking, our ancestors largely focused on local cause and effect, but today's problems, climate feedback, financial contagion, supply chains, polarization,

AI, algorithms, all that require nonlinear cognition. So to think systemically is to notice feedbacks, delays, thresholds. It's also at a wider, even a wider boundary sense, it's to stop blaming individuals for structural problems. So there's a little bit of a spaciousness and empathy and tolerance there. And also that the systems lens invites humility. We're each nodes in something vastly more complex than we see with the naked eye. So to expand your ability for uncertainty and view the world in probabilities, given the systemic backdrop, is also part of this frame.

Next is restraint. And I mean this in two ways. This trait of restraint sounds radical in a culture of more, which we have today. So saying no to consumption or convenience. or to what could be described as corrupted or even unethical norms of our current culture is an act of personal sovereignty. It's rewilding the self into alignment with our biophysical reality. It's also a signal that you can't be bought or baited.

So the ability to muzzle your own ghost of dopamine past to the smorgasbord of supernormal stimuli we have today, but also to say no in cultural situations where something is off, something is wrong, stand up, have the restraint, and say no. I think the mitochondria of the future will require such a trade. Next is status-free or status-aware and status-free because the current economic superorganism thrives on hierarchy, image, identity and constant comparison of yourself to others. And escaping the grip of this is going to require divorcing your self-worth from the status ladder and recognizing the futility of chasing all these likes and social approval

and stimulation. It is really the rat race of our times. A post-superorganism human, the mitochondria that I'm hypothesizing, will seek depth as opposed to display. And remember that no one wins a game that's designed to devour its players. So being intrinsically motivated instead of externally validated would be a trait in this sea of humanity surrounding Marvin Harris's hierarchy. Number eight is recognizing feeling, beyond knowing, but actually feeling how interconnected we are to the web of life of Earth.

Indigenous worldviews and deep ecology tell us what science now confirms that life is relational. The human microbiome, the Gaia hypothesis, Earth system science all confirm this. And to live with an interconnected worldview shifts from ego to eco, and it generates compassion, long-term thinking, and ethical coherence. You know, ultimately, I love nature, but we don't protect nature because it's sacred. We protect it because we are it. This is also something that's shifted for me in the last few years, especially the last year. I've loved nature and the biosphere and animals and organisms my entire life. But I was looking at them from me.

And now when I go out in the forest or I go for a hike or I go to my sit spot, I do truly feel like I'm meshing in, merging in with the ecosystem. I feel interconnected. I don't just know that I'm interconnected. And I think this is an important trait that more and more people, are starting to feel. Number nine, emergence. In chaos theory, sensitive dependence on the initial conditions of a situation means that small changes in those initial conditions can create vast outcomes in the future.

This is the heart of the concept of emergence. And I think a lot more people need to take an aerial view and without trying to have have binary success, failure, goals. And rather than aiming for final outcomes, we alter the conditions, relationships, norms, incentives today, now. And I think thinking an emergent way and not being wed to certain outcomes frees us from purity and perfectionism and invites curiosity, iteration, and experimentation on the things that we do. The future is not planned. It's seated.

And we are seating it now with these conversations. So I just don't think it's a black and white, block and tackle, get this thing done. We are changing the initial conditions of the next period. And then the next period, people, maybe us, maybe you, viewers of this show will change the initial conditions for the next period. And all of a sudden, three periods from now, some pathways are open to us that weren't before. Last but not least is play and joy. And this one's optional, but powerful. Also something I've learned personally, so I'm throwing it in here, number 10, is the ability to hold the gravity

of collapse or the great simplification, if you prefer, and retain levity and music and play and joy because humor is a survival trait and it creates space. It builds resilience in groups and it keeps the heart supple and your body and mind young. I think integrating levity, play and joy into your life despite the circumstances or probably because of the circumstances would be one of the characteristics, one of the traits of the emergent mitochondria of the next culture. So, again, I'm no expert on these things. I just think that this is not a bad quiver of arrows to aspire to, to play a different role in our culture as things become.

a little more chaotic and nonlinear and topsy-turvy. These traits aren't boxes to check their muscles to grow. And begin where you are. I'm on the path on many of these I just listed, and I'm just at the starting gate on many others. We don't need millions of people to be perfect. We don't need millions of people to sign up to all this, but we do need some people to live and think.

and act in different ways so that new seeds are planted in the rubble of this failing system. If you don't believe this system is failing, stick around because next week's frankly is going to be the 10 major flaws that are still being taught in business schools if I get it done in time. The people who carry some or most are all of these traits that I mentioned here who live with groundedness and grief and restraint and joy are not friends. in our society, they are the scout team. They're needed to prepare the ground and to study the heart during the Great Simplification

and to seed some sort of post-gallapse possibilities that will become the roots of a new, hopefully more sapient, livable culture. And to be honest, even if we didn't face the metacrisis, shouldn't we all be living this way anyways? I'll close with a quote that I often use by Ilya Priyugin, when a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order. I'll adapt that here to point out that the islands of coherence start with individuals and small groups. How could they not? Culture doesn't change by decree.

It changes by mitochondria, us. Thank you. I will talk to you next week.