Jeremy Lent

Dmitrij Achelrod (00:00) Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to have you.

Jeremy Lent (00:05) Yeah, I'm looking forward to the conversation, Dmitrij. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Dmitrij Achelrod (00:09) Actually it's not our first encounter, but I think it was more or less five years ago when I participated in your course, Deep Transformation, which was a wonderful course and led to many, I would say, seismic shifts on how I looked at the world. So you're still doing that course?

Jeremy Lent (00:26) That's great to hear. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, well, I've put it on pause for right now just because I've been focusing so much of my time on this new book and getting that launched. And I'll probably offer basically a whole different course maybe beginning next year, really, on this new book that is coming out in May. Yeah.

Dmitrij Achelrod (00:45) Wow, very exciting. And we will try also to talk about your book and the ideas you are bringing forward in it. But maybe let's start with a topic that I think leaves many people, me included, sometimes cynical, sad, confused. And it's really the topic about the state of our world. And what I mean by the state of our world, I'm referring to the overarching condition that we find ourselves in, in an economic system that just doesn't seem to work any longer or doesn't seem to produce the outcomes most people are actually hoping or wishing for. We have massive destructions in biodiversity. People are speaking about the sixth great mass extinction. You actually wrote in one of your newsletters recently that by 2050, we will have more plastics in the ocean than actual fish, which is just mind boggling. What is your take on where we are and what is broken about the system?

Jeremy Lent (01:43) Thanks. Yeah, well, you know, this is a system that is really bent on self-destruction. And I think in this century, we are at these kind of final stages of really a process that's been going on for pretty much around 500 years, ever since the rise of early modern Europe, say like the 17th century onwards. A simple but deep way to look at this system is to look at the underlying worldview that gave rise to the system. And it's one that actually came from that period of early modern Europe. It's really a worldview that was, with the scientific revolution, which had all kinds of wonderful things for our understanding of life and for the quality, for the material quality of our lives in so many ways. This is certainly not to criticize that incredible breakthrough and understanding. But it was also based on a view of the world as basically like a machine. It was the sense that humans are fundamentally separate from the world. And the world is really just a machine to be understood. And there was this idea of conquering nature. Francis Bacon was the one who was like the sort of prophet of that notion. But everyone around the time, all the great scientists who were part of this way of thinking, whether Descartes or Galileo or whatever, had the same sort of notion that understands how the basic functions of this incredible machine of nature worked and humans can do all kinds of wonderful things, which we have done over those hundreds of years. But by seeing nature as a machine, as a resource to be exploited, we have led on this path that has led to this untrammeled destruction, like a total success in exploitation and extraction from nature. But at the same time, it's led to so much that it's like destroying the life systems itself that we are part of. And at the same time as that whole system of extraction and exploitation of nature took over, there's also a sense of exploiting other people. So those white Christian Europeans that came up with these ideas saw themselves as somehow innately superior to all other human beings. And they justified colonialism as a sort of bringing the light of their understanding to the rest of the world while they basically implanted mass genocides and destructions of culture and 500 years of exploitation and oppression that we've had since then. You know, you were just saying that the people we look right now, we say, well, this system is so obviously broken. But actually what I came to realize as I was doing the research for this new book, the system is not broken. Actually, the system is doing exactly what it was intended to do. It's a system that is basically intended to exploit others, including other people, and extract as much energy and everything that is valuable out of what is seen as resources of the living earth. And it's been doing that so well that it is about to destroy its host. It's a little bit like a malignancy, like a cancer that has been super successful. It's basically destroying the host that it arose on. And that's what we're experiencing right now. So that's why once we understand that more deeply, we get to see that we're not going to fix things by trying to make things a bit better somehow. That's not to say we shouldn't, obviously, in the short term, incrementally try to make things better when we see them wrong. But that is not going to actually change the direction we're going in because the system itself basically takes even the best fixes and turns them into another instrument of exploitation and extraction.

Dmitrij Achelrod (06:16) Mmm, wow. So if I hear correctly, you're basically saying all the environmental destruction, the climate change, and also the suffering of all different forms of life are not accidental, but they're actually caused by design of the system, which has an inherently exploitative logic. But then if there is exploitation on the one end, I assume there is also another end which kind of receives the benefits.

Jeremy Lent (06:52) Yes, that's right. That's a great point. And it's valid to say, well, many of us have received great benefits of the system over the last few hundred years. And there's no question. And some people have studied this and made that their primary message. People like Steven Pinker is probably the best example. Somebody else called Hans Rosling, who also put similar ideas out. And there's a truth to that logic that materially, in almost every which way you look at it, including the most fundamental things like child and infant mortality or longevity or overall health, there's been massive improvements over the last hundreds of years. No question about that. But maybe a deeper point about that is that if you look at who is really getting the benefits of the system and who are getting exploited, what you see is a very — it's what has been aptly called a wealth pump — that essentially most of the value that is being sucked out of the earth and out of humans who have to give their blood, sweat, and tears for the vast bulk of their life's energy, is getting sucked into a smaller and smaller tiny elite. The Occupy movement used to talk about the 1%. Nowadays, it's also equally important to look at the 0.1%. And like the tiny, tiny group of people who are amassing billions of dollars of wealth and power as a result of the system that sucks everything out and pulls it up to a smaller and smaller group of people — that is the system that we live in.

Dmitrij Achelrod (10:37) And so you told us some of the Pinkerian arguments, so to speak, right? We have massive increase in life expectancy, material wealth, so many people dragged out of poverty. And I think that there are a lot of reasons to say, well, it's not so black and white. And the classical argument is we've tried communism and it's spectacularly failed. And the current system that we have is the system that brought us prosperity and peace that they claim was unprecedented in history.

Jeremy Lent (11:54) Yes, and that's what the claim is. And that claim, by the way, has been promulgated so powerfully that most people would say, that obviously must be true because everyone keeps saying it. And that's actually something that's worth exploring — the concept of what's known as cultural hegemony, which is really the recognition. It was actually an Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, who first talked about that in the 1930s. What happens is when you have a power structure, the elite at the very top of it are served by this whole array of cultural thought leaders, intellectuals, lawyers, accountants, the whole array of professionals who go around saying this is the very best system. And the way cultural hegemony works is by creating a consensus trance that this is the best system. You don't have to enforce it on people who are getting exploited. Even the very people who are getting exploited support it because they're told that this is actually the best thing for them too. But there's another way of organizing the world that is available to us. And you can only really understand that once you realize what both capitalism and communism had in common — they both ultimately agreed on this notion of extracting from the natural world as much as possible. And communism, no more than capitalism, ever questioned the notion of extract. So what we need to do is look at systems that actually by design empower ordinary people collectively in groups to determine what is best for them.

Dmitrij Achelrod (16:41) So before we step into the solution space, you already outlined parts of it, I wanted to get back to this situation we are in right now. There might be a lot of people who are able to see the clear design errors in the system, who say, yeah, I see the harm it is causing. But what shall I really do about it? I can't just quit my job and go off grid. And this fear of descending the social ladder keeps, I think, me and many people in line in the sense of — keep doing your job because if you don't, you will lose in the system. So somehow the sentiment is, even if I don't like the system, I need to play by its rules because I'm not in the position to change it. What would you tell to these people?

Jeremy Lent (18:26) Yeah, these are complex questions. I'm glad you're going there. And there are sort of multiple layers around that. One is, yeah, we all are in this place where, because we're born into this system, whether we're privileged or not, we still actually are sort of sucked into being cogs in the wheel of that system. And it's designed to force that. From my own personal experience, the only reason I have the luxury right now in my life to be able to spend this time looking at the system and putting my own energy into trying to change it, is because financially I was part of that system in an earlier part of my life. So I'm certainly not claiming that I'm above that kind of set of trade-offs that we all need to look at. For the most part, we do need to make trade-offs. But ultimately, I think we've got to understand that it's not really true that none of us gets to change the system. In fact, all of us are part of the system. Even the relatively small decisions we make and small choices we make are actually part of changing that system. The system itself is this incredibly complex, non-linear, self-organized thing where once we recognize we are part of doing that, we can actually begin to be more of a force towards those beneficial futures.

Dmitrij Achelrod (22:35) I want to get back to one of the things you said — that you were in the belly of the machine. Maybe you can share with us a little bit about that period when you were part of the game, and what happened that made you reconsider fundamentally your life.

Jeremy Lent (23:18) Yeah. Thank you for asking that. Well, for me, I grew up in England. And when I was a student in Cambridge, I basically had all the same views that I'm espousing right now, in fact — which is kind of ironic — because then I came to the United States. I ended up getting an MBA at the University of Chicago, which is now known as the center of neoliberal thinking. I ended up going into management consulting and then being part of the dot-com boom right back when the internet first started in the 1990s. I ended up creating the first internet company that allowed people to apply for credit cards online, get approved in real time. Ended up getting venture capital funding, taking the company public. I was chairman and CEO. It was a super exciting experience. But what's interesting when I look back on that time is the irony that it was doing everything that I now look at and see as exploitive, extractive, and destructive of people's lives. But in my personal life, things crashed for me. My wife at the time, who passed away some years back, got very sick and I left the company to look after her. Within a year or two, the company itself collapsed. And I found myself in this place of really deep investigation — almost like a meltdown of my life. And I was asking myself, what can I do with my life going forward that was truly meaningful? That led to this really deep investigation, both intellectual and embodied. The intellectual investigation led to that book, The Patterning Instinct — A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning. The embodied investigation led me to practices like meditation and qigong and different other embodied practices, which have become fundamental to my life ever since. And it was from that kind of exploration I wrote The Web of Meaning, Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. But that whole journey of discovery was really forced on me by a crash in my life. And as I look back on it now, I feel it was a blessing for me — that I was forced to look at these questions.

Dmitrij Achelrod (28:06) Thank you for sharing the story, Jeremy. And I think it's remarkable that you can look back at that and say it was a blessing because I'm sure at that time it felt like life was ending. And I have one more question about that — because when I talk to people, a lot of them say, look, I hear you, I share the main concerns, but first let me win in this system, let me exit, and then I can lean back and try changing the system. What would you say to that?

Jeremy Lent (29:08) Yes, that's right. You know, Dmitrij, this is such an important point. There is this movement of effective altruism, which basically starts from a diagnosis similar to what I talked about. It says, yeah, the system is bad. But the best way to affect the system is to create wealth and then do it with a good intention. The problem with that is it does kind of require an assumption of incorruptibility. And one of the realities of human nature is that once people get to experience greater levels of wealth and comfort and power, it's very difficult to let go of that. So you keep going — yeah, I'll do really good, but let me just get to 10 million, well, that's not quite enough, but if I get to 50 million… And it keeps going until you end up being part of the system itself. And in making those funds, you are part of that wealth pump I described earlier. So I think a lot of that approach can be self-serving. What ends up happening is you don't get forced to break out of the system by something dramatic, but you sort of get embedded in the system. And oftentimes you may find, decades later, you look back at your life and say, things didn't work, I didn't take the path that I really felt was the right one.

Dmitrij Achelrod (32:35) What I wanted to continue on and take up is this thread — when part of your life collapsed and you started digging into history looking at how civilizations constructed meaning, and that there were alternative ways of constructing a good life. Can you give us an example of what other cultures maybe found meaningful and how they looked at human thriving?

Jeremy Lent (33:11) Yeah, well, maybe a good place to begin with is actually from the Western tradition. Aristotle was somebody who drew a very important distinction, looking at the question of flourishing — or happiness — between what he called eudaimonia and hedonia. And this is crucial. The notion of hedonia is the sort of short-term or superficial happiness that comes from external experiences: physical pleasure, comforts, status, safety, wealth — basically external sources of feeling good. Eudaimonia is something fundamentally different. It was about what it was like when you were on your path to truly fulfill your own internal destiny — your own true nature of who you are as a person. And the reason why that's so important in today's world is because our entire system of consumer capitalism relies on not having you experience eudaimonia. Because if you have eudaimonia, you actually don't need to go out and buy the next status object or the fancier car. You might be perfectly satisfied with a really simple life. Some of the early movers of consumer capitalism were very clear about this. They would say specifically, we have to keep people feeling perpetually dissatisfied so that they are always looking for that next thing. That very distinction between eudaimonia and hedonia is also closely correlated to the Buddhist notion of dukkha and sukha — that deep well-being that comes from really being in touch with what you know is your true nature, where you don't need to accomplish something or make something happen, because just the way you are right now is absolutely perfect in its own way. And in sub-Saharan Africa, there is this core concept of Ubuntu — I am, therefore you are — recognizing that our existence itself arises from our relationality with others. So in many different cultures around the world, these same insights about true fulfillment keep appearing.

Dmitrij Achelrod (38:47) Beautiful answer. Thank you for that. And how can we build on a societal or systemic level systems that respect these principles? That is probably also a question you thought about in your new book.

Jeremy Lent (39:20) Yes, that's exactly right, Dmitrij. And that's where I came to in my own investigation. In The Web of Meaning, I looked at what would a worldview of deep interconnectedness look like. And that led me to this vision of an ecological civilization — recognizing that what would need to be transformed is not just one element like our economic system, but every aspect of what we call civilization: education, law and governance, economics, how we grow food, technology, everything. And that led to this book coming out in May, Eco-Civilization: Making a World That Works for All. The first place to begin is to recognize that it has to be a fundamentally different system — not broken, but doing exactly what it was intended to do. And therefore, what would a different system look like? What I discovered, to my great delight, was that in every aspect of what we call civilization, people have already done the work to come up with these ideas. In most cases, people are already living and working on the ground in ways that do prefigure what that different kind of system could look like. For example, you can build businesses cooperatively — there are great examples like Mondragon in the Basque country. There's a whole different way we can organize ourselves according to the commons — think of Wikipedia as a perfect example, not owned by Google or Facebook, built by people empowering themselves to self-organize. And that model could apply in all different aspects of the world — even in things like platform cooperatives, where the wealth that accrues actually flows to the very people doing the work.

Dmitrij Achelrod (44:41) These are beautiful concepts. And at the same time my brain is signaling, but isn't there so much systemic resistance to these concepts? The structures of power — why would they ever say, sure, we will give away our surplus? And also what I see and which really scares me is that we see that the commons are being exploited for privatized gains. All the big LLMs — trained on things that people put out on the internet in good faith, on Wikipedia — and now suddenly all that wealth creation is being sucked up the pyramid to literally a handful of people. How can you defend against these kinds of dynamics?

Jeremy Lent (46:18) That's right. Completely right. And these are such critical points. I think we need to recognize that everything you're saying is true — the system is doing exactly what it was intended to do, and doing it in an ever more powerful way to the detriment of almost all of us. The first place to begin in changing that is by recognizing it. And by recognizing that the one thing the system doesn't want to allow is many of us to envision that there actually is an alternative. There was this famous phrase by Margaret Thatcher — There Is No Alternative — called TINA. That notion of cultural hegemony is really important to the system's success. So part of what this book is about is establishing what's known in systems thinking as an attractor — a magnetic pole — recognizing there is actually an alternative. And once millions and millions of us begin to realize there is a real feasible alternative, we can start working together and pulling towards that. And this system, as it's getting more and more powerful in what it's doing, is also suffering from its own internal contradictions. The ecological breakdowns, the incredible inequalities getting worse day by day — all of those things could lead the entire system to unravel. And it's in that unraveling that the degrees of freedom open up for some of these changes to happen. What we know is that this century, we are going to experience a great transformation in the human experience, something along the lines of when we moved from hunter gatherers to agriculture, or when the scientific revolution transformed people's lives. What we don't know is what that's going to look like. But if enough of us who within our hearts as human beings want that life-affirming future — we may not have the money or the political power or the military power to make that happen. But what we have is the power of shared human love for life, for each other, and for this living earth. And that's a kind of empowerment that might just allow these islands of coherence to come together so as this old system cracks open, we can build that new system from within.

Dmitrij Achelrod (50:48) That is a positive note. And maybe that is the right point also where we can end this interview. If you could share one wish for people who listen to this conversation, what would it be?

Jeremy Lent (51:07) Yeah, thank you for that question, Dmitrij. It would be to open to some of the things I was talking about — looking at your own place within the system and recognizing that that future I was just talking about is not like a spectator sport. It's not something that somebody else is going to do, but it's something that you and I, the two of us here and anyone listening to this, is actually participating in whether you like it or not. And so recognizing that kind of choice — and what does that mean for the choices that you personally make — that would be my wish for anyone listening today: to do that inquiry yourself.

Dmitrij Achelrod (51:49) Very necessary inquiry. Thank you, Jeremy, for doing this work. I think it is more necessary than ever before. And I deeply respect how much you try to bring people together and make them aware of not only the problems, but also of pathways forward. And of course, we are all looking into uncertain times. But I find your spirit and your work is hopeful and it's giving me hope. Thank you so much for doing that, Jeremy.

Jeremy Lent (52:25) Thank you. Thank you for inviting me on today, Dmitrij, and for continuing your podcast, which is such an important contribution in itself. Thank you.

Dmitrij Achelrod (52:34) Thank you.