Riding the Wave of a Paradigm Shift
Feature by Manda Scott
Today, we’re featuring Manda Scott, best-selling author and visionary change-maker, to share where her thinking is at, right now, on the thrutopian movement she has been nurturing since 2019, when the instruction for this work was received through her shamanic practice. Manda is a fierce and fearless pioneer and we are indebted to her for her leadership and teaching. Her thinking is far ahead of the pack, and this article reflects that. We invite you to read it as a springboard – a catalyst for thought.
Manda Scott is living and breathing this work. As a writer, she is doing the graft of changing her creative practice and in her recent book, Any Human Power, has written a thrutopian narrative that models new ways of actually living in community. She is bringing her whole self and all her connection with the web of life with her. If you’re coming to thrutopia for the first time, some of what follows may be puzzling initially, so our invitation is to let it sit with you a while. At the end of the article are practical steps you can start taking today but do feel your way in, this work is new everywhere and we’re waking up together.
Editors
Riding the Wave of a Paradigm Shift
by Manda Scott
Author of Any Human Power and host of the Accidental Gods podcast.
There’s an easy statement that garners nods these days. If you’re in the right company, all you have to say is that ‘the system’ is self-evidently broken and everyone agrees.
We don’t even have to propose what the system is, how long it’s been going or what its aims are, though for clarity, I’ll define this as the death cult of predatory capitalism which is predicated on a belief in separation, scarcity and powerlessness (thanks to Miki Kashtan for this phrasing) and which is typified not only by a need for endless growth – the commodification of land, labour and capital means the economy must grow or it falls over in a putrefying heap – but by a mindset that requires extraction, consumption, destruction and pollution without care for the human and the more-than-human worlds.
So let’s look at the baselines we need to agree on if we’re going to get through the pinch point we’re in.
First and most obvious is that we are better than this. None of us likes the meaningless life. Nobody seriously believes we were born just to pay bills and die. We all ache for a sense of being, belonging and becoming where we know what’s ours to do, the thing we do so well that makes our hearts sing and our senses light up and has a clear impact on the communities of place, purpose and passion that we care about and that care about us. When we know what’s ours to do, and are surrounded by others who know what’s theirs to do with equal passion, we share pride and respect with the human and the more-than-human world and this gives us meaning.
More, when we feel truly held in these communities of the human and the more than human world, we wake up in the morning knowing that we’re safe, feeling confident that we can face a day full of unknowns because we have all the resources we could need. Too, we know that if we need help, then help is there for the asking: again, from the human and the more-than-human world.
This is our birthright as fully connected, self-conscious nodes in the web of life. This is what it is to live in an Initiation Culture (thanks to Francis Weller[1] for the original naming).
Instead, we live in a Trauma Culture, where most of us have lost this absolute baseline trust in the world to hold us whatever happens. With it has gone our capacity to find true meaning. If we can’t connect to the web of life in a fully reciprocal relationship, we are not whole. The pathological desperation for dopamine that afflicts our culture is a doomed attempt to fill this void, a triumph of hope over experience because we know by now that no amount of boxes from Amazon (or rockets to Mars if you have more $$$) is going to heal the hurt.
Understanding that the wonder of life waits on the far side of a leaf-thin door in our hearts is the task of any human child coming to adulthood, but many never make it. We end up forever stuck in the toddler’s world where we demand things of the adults in the room and throw tantrums if we don’t get them. Help is there for the asking if only we’ll drop the bizarre idea that we can figure out the nature of complexity (spoiler alert: the point of complexity is that we can’t) and instead embrace the unknowing.
Here, in the place of all possibility, comes a relaxation that our western minds rarely encompass. We stop trying to figure everything out and instead let go into the understanding that it’s not our job to organise the world. It’s our job to offer ourselves in service to life, to ask the Web of Life moment by moment, ‘What do you want of me?’ and then to live the answer into being. It’s our job to offer heart-exploding gratitude for the awe and majestic and sheer, glorious wonder of life. It’s our job, actually, to fall in love with the process of living and then to express that love back to every part of the web, even the bits that seem dark to us, as a continuous flow of strong-hearted, open-hearted, clear-hearted, full-hearted blazingly alive compassion.
It’s our job to balance on the knife edge of each moment alive with a joyful curiosity that says, ‘Wow, that’s so amazing! I wonder what happens next?’ and then to step into that moment, offering ourselves in service to the wonder, being what the Web needs of us, reflecting the joy, being the life, being the self-conscious node that can express the wonder of it all while at the same time doing what is needful.
What would you do if we lived in a world of agency, connection and sufficiency where you could follow your heart’s joy and offer the best of yourself to the world? What’s stopping you from doing this now? Because truly, if you’re ever going to do it, the time is now. Right now. Today.
Bottom line: we need to become the change, you and me and everyone we know. It's an inner thing. Where it goes is unknowable, but it will be gloriously better than where we are.
As I write, the temperature record for February 2025 has just come online. At 1.6 C above the pre-industrial average, this was the third hottest February on record behind 2016 (1.64) and 2024 (1.78): both of these were El Nino[2] years. The AMOC[3] is disintegrating as we speak and even if it doesn’t, the GOES[4] report from the Roslin foundation suggests the seas will be dead by 2045. A mass extinction event is one where 75% of species are lost in a span of 2 million years – which is fast in geological time spans. Humanity is creating this rate of species loss within one human lifetime.
We’re not there yet, but we’re accelerating at terrifying speed. We live now in a world where the tech-gangsters who have stolen control across the globe consider ‘nature’ (even this nomenclature sets the other half of our souls as a thing apart from us) to be an ‘aesthetic option’ with the obvious inference that one could choose to live without it and nothing much would change. Why weep over the loss of a blue sky (because: geoengineering[5]) when you can don a pair of tech-specs and the AI will render the world around you as if the sky were still a bright, cerulean wonder?
And of course, it's not all about the climate. We’re in the midst of geo-political collapse, cultural collapse, a collapse in meaning-making, sense-making and our own understanding of our place in the world, together with levels of human inequity not seen in the history of our species, fueled by rampaging sexism, racism, homo- and trans-phobia and an acceleration of tribalism that can only end in wide-scale violence if it isn’t addressed. Indeed, we are seeing this play out horrifically in the US at this moment.
Leaving aside the human failure to self-regulate at scale, we have AI that is cheating to win chess games[6] and subverting its own morals to avoid being reprogrammed and Asa Raskin, who has followed its development from the beginning has now stated clearly in the public domain that we have created a whole new species: it can reproduce itself, evolve and adapt. If that’s your definition of a species, he’s right. What could possibly go wrong, eh?
The roots of this Trauma Culture go back many thousands of years to the point where we abandoned our connection with the web of life and started plundering the entire natural world for agriculture. We abandoned age-old social technologies that previously guaranteed those who were afflicted by the Dark Triad of narcissism, psychopathy and raw cunning could never gain power over others… and instead we pushed them to the top of a vertical power stack that let them pretend they deserved to be there. Dieu et mon droit has morphed into Dollars est mon droit and we need to understand this is wrong.
For all that we’re in dire straits, the current system is not broken. Rather, it is doing what it was always designed to do, which is to shovel wealth and power from the many to the few at a human scale and from the more-than-human world to the industrial, technical maw of predatory capitalism at an ecological scale. This death cult is in its death throes, but it will still take us all down with it if a significant number of us don’t get together and choose a different path.
Suppose we accept the current system is not fit for purpose, and never has been if that purpose is the continuation of complex life on earth; if it is the flourishing of humanity as an integral part of the web of life; if it is a world steeped in compassion, decency, integrity, generosity-of-spirit and absolute confidence in our place as conscious nodes in the web of life.
We urgently need a new system.
To get there, we need a movement that will awaken this new paradigm. And, because ‘be yourself as a conscious node in the web of life’ is not always going to land clearly with someone who’s caught in the cogs of capitalism’s dis-imagination machine, I suggest we boil our new movement towards an Initiation Culture down to some basic asks:
We want (need):
● clean air
● clean water
● clean earth
● clean, clear, courageous, compassionate connections between all parts of ourselves (so we need to do the inner work of healing)
● clean, clear, courageous, compassionate connections between ourselves and each other (so we need to do the community work of connecting with our tribes of place, purpose and passion)
● clean, clear, courageous, compassionate connections between ourselves and the web of life (so we need to do the spiritual work of reuniting with the web of life)
In the absence of anything better, I'm working on this. You're welcome to join me. We need narratives that can shape who we become when we bring the best of ourselves to the table… and how to get there.
And in order to know what those narratives are – the new mythologies of our time – we need really, wholeheartedly to have done the inner work that frees up those parts of us that are frozen in time by old hurts. Are you afraid? That's a part frozen in time. Are you triggered by what people are saying/doing/being? That's a part frozen in time.
How can we heal at scale?
We can say to each other:
I see you - individually and collectively, each of us can do the inner work now that lets us acknowledge our frozen parts.
I am here for you - this lets us hold our frozen hurt with curiosity, compassion and courage.
I hear you - this lets us stand with our frozen parts as they grieve or rage or scream within us and slowly, slowly thaw out the old, frozen hurt.
This takes time. It often takes help. But it's the single most important thing any of us can do.
And while we do it, we sing, we give thanks, we offer the blazing furnace of our heart's compassion to the world. We act as if we were already there, in this place of all becoming.
Out there beyond hate and strife is a forest full of interconnections. I’ll meet you there.
Editors’ note
The Accidental Gods website is a great place to start if you’re interested in the inner work of collective healing, and where you can also pick up the podcast. We can recommend the self-study Thrutopia Masterclass if your writing would benefit from the nuts and bolts of how to imagine convincing thrutopian futures for your stories and poems. Writers can step up to this moment with conviction but readers have an important role to play too, in boycotting addictive, dopamine laden, apocalypse narratives and turning towards storytelling that believes our species has a future on Earth. You become the questions you ask. If we’re wired to pay attention to conflict, change the scope of the conflict – after all we are the ones who tell ourselves these stories. In Any Human Power, Manda’s story is powered by the question of how the protagonists can act from a place of radical compassion, community, joy, abundance and sufficiency. Turning the dial on how stories about power are told makes for fundamental and meaningful changes in how people think about themselves. It becomes behavioural shift. That’s the power of narrative, let’s tell stories where power-over is replaced by power-with.
“A clarion call for our times, this visionary book dreams into being a new mythology of interpersonal power, eco-societal agency and democratic governance.” – NATHALIE NAHAI
[2] El Nino refers to the anomalous appearance, every few years, of unusually warm ocean conditions along the tropical west coast of South America. Britannica
[3] AMOC is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a large system of ocean currents driven by differences in temperature and salt content, that carry warm water from the tropics northwards into the North Atlantic. Met Office
[5] A geoengineering project to cool the earth by spraying tiny sunlight-reflecting particles high into the air would turn the sky from blue to white; see Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Under a White Sky.
fiercely expressed; much thanks!
Thanks for this Manda!