The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent

each society shapes the cognitive structure of individuals growing up in its culture through imprinting its own pattern of meaning on each infant's developing mind.

language has a patterning effect on cognition.

Because of our unique cognitive capacity, human social systems need to be understood as a pair of two tightly interconnected, coexisting complex systems: a tangible system and a cognitive system. The tangible system refers to everything that can be seen and touched: a society's tools; its physical infrastructure; and its agriculture, terrain, and climate, to name just some of its components. The cognitive system refers to what can't be touched but exists in the cognitive network of the society's culture: its language, myths, core metaphors, know-how, hierarchy of values, and worldview.

Each of us conducts our lives according to a set of assumptions about how things work: how our society functions, its relationship with the natural world, what's valuable, and what's possible. This is our worldview, which often remains unquestioned and unstated but is deeply felt and underlies many of the choices we make in our lives. We form our worldview implicitly as we grow up, from our family, friends, and culture, and, once it's set, we're barely aware of it unless we're presented with a different worldview for comparison.

the foundations of a worldview comprise the earlier worldviews of previous generations. As we probe further into history, we excavate deeper into the cognitive layers of our ancestors. That's why we can think of this exercise as an archaeology of the mind.

what we believe about ourselves has a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

perhaps the uniquely defining characteristic of humanity is the patterning instinct we evolved along the way, which allowed us to develop the capacity for symbolic thought, and which incessantly drives us to construct patterns of meaning in everything we experience. It's through these patterns that we're able to look back over our history and try to make sense out of it, to look forward to our future and try to direct where it will take us.

The symbolic universe has ensnared us in an inescapable web. Like a “mind virus,” the symbolic adaptation has infected us, and now by virtue of the irresistible urge it has instilled in us to turn everything we encounter and everyone we meet into symbols, we have become the means by which it unceremoniously propagates itself throughout the world.

Our metaphors of nature have never mattered more than now. The way in which our global society views the natural world frames our collective behavior toward it. As we make our way through the twenty-first century, we are increasingly bombarded with news of climate change, deforestation, resource depletion, pollution, and other global crises arising from an imbalance in humanity's relationship with the earth. If we are to correct this imbalance before it's too late, we need to reevaluate and possibly replace the core metaphors we use in understanding the natural world.

This approach sees nature as a complex, dynamic web of interconnected systems, which works according to certain principles that can be investigated but never completely controlled. With its contradiction of the Western fixed, mechanical view of nature, the new systems way of thinking has a surprising amount in common with traditional Chinese ideas about the universe.

“We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

Whether we are evaluating tornadoes, Shakespeare, or life itself, the patterns that connect the parts frequently contain far more valuable information than the parts themselves.

It is our self-organized patterns that give us our continued identity.

The systems perspective offers important insights into the nature of reality that upend many assumptions forming the basis of the predominant worldview. It tells us that the relationship between things is frequently more important than the things themselves. It emphasizes that everything in the natural world is dynamic rather than static and that biological phenomena can't be predicted with precision: instead of fixed laws, we therefore need to search for the underlying organizing principles of nature. These principles, it reveals, occur across widely different domains, from heart rhythms to climate variations and from lake ecologies to internet social media connections. It also shows how self-organized systems are fractally embedded within one another: a cell may be part of an organism, which is part of a community, which is nested within an ecosystem, which in turn is part of Gaia.

The wisdom of indigenous worldviews shares much with systems thinking, and the Neo-Confucian investigation of the li—the organizing principles of the universe—offers deep insights to modernity, with its understanding of the Tao as the metapattern of all nature's principles, discoverable in one's own nature as well as in the natural world.

The recognition that we are not separate from nature and cannot, ultimately, control it encourages a more participatory approach of trying to influence the complex systems around us for greater harmony. In place of the metaphors of nature that have led humanity to this precipice, the systems worldview offers up a new metaphor of nature as a WEB OF MEANING, in which the very interconnectedness of all life gives both meaning and resonance to our individual and collective behavior.

As such, the money supply had to keep growing to service the interest on the debt, making perpetual economic growth a necessity to keep the entire system running. This reliance on the future growth of money extends also to the capital invested in companies. Corporations are valued as a multiple of their current earnings, so most of the financial wealth in our society really represents a claim on the future wealth still to be created. All these expectations for a return on capital are ultimately based on a presumption of continued economic growth in society at large. Failure to grow—or even just the threat of it—thus leads to banks failing, businesses going bankrupt, and people losing their jobs.

The story of our civilization's inadequate response to the threat of climate change is illustrative of how society's predominant values are at odds with humanity's own intrinsic well-being.

Could their enhanced connectivity with what's left of the natural world cause them to treasure it more keenly? Might the impending devastation from climate change drive them and their peers to demand a radical redirection in the world's trajectory? Could their potentially enhanced ability to literally feel the suffering of the impoverished billions cause them to press for a different world economic order that honors the intrinsic rights of each human being?

In our current world, two important threshold effects are the exponential progress of technology and the ever-widening global wealth gap. There are also two major sledgehammer effects: climate change and the depletion of the world's natural resources.

There seems no doubt that a transformation will take place. The question becomes: will it be humanity or our economic system that gets transformed beyond recognition?

Three core values emerge. The first is an emphasis on quality of life rather than material possessions. In place of the global obsession with defining progress in terms of economic output and material wealth, we would begin to prioritize progress in the quality of our lives, both individually and in society at large. Secondly, we would base political, social, and economic choices on a sense of our shared humanity, emphasizing fairness and dignity for all rather than maximizing for ourselves and our parochially defined social group. Finally, we would build our civilization's future on the basis of environmental sustainability, with the flourishing of the natural world as a foundational principle for humanity's major decisions.

When a cognitive system enters a release phase, this means that beliefs and values held implicitly through people's lives begin to be questioned. Structures of meaning begin to unravel. People's patterning instinct drives them to seek a new pattern of meaning to replace the old one, leading rapidly to the renewal phase, when the future is up for grabs.

It's likely we'd see a reorganized United Nations, with powers to enforce a more responsible approach to our global commons, such as the oceans, the atmosphere, and the environment. When corporations and governments made investment decisions, they'd explicitly factor the externalities of the natural world into their cost-benefit analyses. While there would still be massive income inequality between rich and poor nations, that gap would be decreasing as a result of economic structures based on fairness rather than untrammeled exploitation. And the flourishing of the natural world would be given a high priority in global decision-making. There might even be an enforceable UN Declaration of the Rights of Nature, putting the natural world on the same legal standing as humanity.

Many visionaries and deep thinkers today recognize the need for a new global consciousness, based on an underlying and all-infusing sense of connectedness. The meaning we derive from our existence must arise from our connectedness if we are to succeed in sustaining our civilization into the distant future: connectedness within ourselves, to other humans, and to the entire natural world.