At Christmas, there's a reckoning we have to make with reality: we have not delivered on Jesus's message. Instead, we have extracted its value, called ourselves teachers and maintained the status quo in ways that only replicates his dilemma. The poor are still poor and the homeless still homeless. The wise men continue to bring their gifts and point at the North Star, urging us to follow in their footsteps. Others continue to band together to serve their hero, who is destined to get crucified in the end. While the women are still ostracised and left to weep.

We are taking this week to rest, contemplate and plot. See you at New Year for the next episode of The Alternative Global. Meantime, our editorial holds some clues.

As we drift towards the end of 2022, the UK is a strange place to be. Long established as the 5th largest economy in the world, we are in freefall. There is a vacuum in leadership with both the government and opposition internally ruptured. In the face of a confident prediction at the beginning of 2021 that we would be reaping the benefits of Brexit this year, instead we are heading for a General Strike - not seen since 1926.

Few of us would be surprised by the rail or postal strike, two strong unions that often make their unhappiness known. But a nurse's strike is unheard of. It was only a short while ago that UK citizens stepped outside their front doors to clap their heroic action. Now they are being caricatured as the villains, putting all our lives in danger.

Equally strange is the behaviour of the mainstream media, focusing more than usual on the direct effects of emotional turbulence. The Times newspaper (a globally trusted brand) gave nine pages - nine! - to Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan's Netflix documentary series, in which the royal refugees mostly expressed their deep hurt at events which led them to abandon their responsibilities.

Unlike the BBC reviews which showed empathy for the couple, the Times decided to crack down on what they saw as their self-indulgence and demand the Palace strip them of their titles. The public space is more like a soap-opera than ever.

In between, the headlines continue to focus on disaster and grief: murders, tragic accidents, inexplicable crowd behaviour and criminally negligent organisation. It all adds up to a consistent story about a dangerous world, untrustworthy people and our powerlessness in the face of collapsing institutions.

Where in the news cycle is there anything for the reading public to hook onto, that can get them through the next day? Not only are we carrying the trauma of our historic past (see this week's blog), but we are being re-traumatised on a daily basis. The public space as it is shaped by our mainstream media, amplified and further polarised by social media, is the scene of our collective declining mental health.

This is not the first time you're reading this assessment in our editorial. Where is the headline - we regularly ask - that can connect the dots to find a way forward for its readers? That can explain what is crumbling, in the light of what is emerging in its wake? That talks up our human resources as much as our frailties? That might take an imaginative and possibly evolutionary approach to collective agency?

Well, it's right here in the Daily Alternative. Over five and a half years ago we committed ourselves to system-convening: observing and curating the insights and actions of what Buckminster Fuller described as a 'new system that makes the old one obsolete'.

This means not just human development, nor just community empowerment, nor new social enterprises or simply new institutions. Or even breakthrough technology and scary but manageable artificial intelligence (see our other blog this week). But all of these things at the same time, beginning to relate to each other in ways that arrest, intrigue, often surprise and delight, and certainly challenge us.

Through this lens of systems-convening, we can see that what is in extreme danger is not as much the human species as the socio-economic-political system which led that species to the cliff's edge. It’s less the failure of humanity, than the natural breakdown of a mind-set and social structure that kept 99% of the global population under-potentialised. Not an irreperable economic breakdown, but the collapse of confidence in modern economic systems (aka capitalism).

If we humans, singly or collectively, were indeed just machines, these multiple failures would spell no possibility of recovery. However, we are nature's own offspring, capable of regeneration and uniquely designed to imagine and deliver futures entirely different from what we are experiencing in the present. In fact, nothing expresses human nature better than our ability to play our way out of danger and into immense possibility.

At The Alternative Global we often describe our present day as a revolution that began 30 years ago with the birth of the internet. Most noticeable is the huge leap in human capacity for creativity. Not only in our ability to invent new forms of energy, technology, currency, media, medicine - the categories are infinite. But also, in our ability to reinvent ourselves: new genders, new forms of intelligence, new bodies. The children born today are psychologically, spiritually and even biologicallynon wired quite differently from their parents; and radically so from their ancestors.

For the most part, the arrival of these new capacities and intelligences has been reported as chaos. Billions of non-state actors on their personal and collective curves towards self-awareness. Whether this looks like wokeness, Fridays for Future, crypto currency, conspiracy theory or Extinction Rebellion, new mass behaviours appear fragmented and self-propelling, easily polarised by the media holding out for the dominance of the old system.

But we are already entering a new phase of that awakening: what some describe as a meta-awareness, in which the public sphere is able to observe itself in chaos and start to self-organise for new understanding and better results. Signs would include us paying growing attention to narrative and story-telling, as forms of soft power for both good and bad – and how such narratives have held us in thrall over history. Within that, we increasingly understand the persistent, controlling structures of colonialism, masculinity and capital.

But this meta-awareness also reveals how, at this stage of our development, most are largely fighting for the same privilege to control the narrative for the worlds we occupy, whether those be national or virtual. It seems increasingly obvious that trying to win this narrative battle is a trap--unless the winning story points at wholistic individual and collective empowerment. This isn’t simply the right to vote for a party, or within a union (although that remains important)—but a more active being together that gives rise to new agency. A kind of democracy we haven't seen before.

The fight for this new space of being and acting has already given rise to many experiments in what the Alternative Global calls, generically, community agency networks, also citizen action networks (CANs). New social forms like this, revealing similar (yet still distinct and unique) patterns of organisation, appear almost every day for us (see here for an Appropedia introduction and overview).

Key words include relational, mutual, cosmolocal, imaginative, energetic, creative. They have economic and ecological ambition for regeneration in many forms. For us, 2022 has seen a lot of exploration in how to connect these to each other.

As a result, we can now describe - with strong evidence - new social and economic architecture appearing, capable of holding these containers for the evolved capacities of individuals and communities the world over. When these support structures and forms finesse, they will become the incubators of human agency--just like once upon a time, a school became the recognised space for learning. Similar to a landmark discovery in cancer treatment or the first signs of nuclear fusion becoming a realityth, we can point at breakthroughs in new socio-political infrastructure, aimed at giving rise to human potential. If given enough attention and investment, this will, over time, save us.

Ah - as that supremely expressive human being, William Shakespeare, would say - there's the rub. Progress comes IF these processes are given enough time and attention. If not, there is every possibility that this moment of intense promise will slow down to the point that it can't meet the deadline it's rising to meet. For those who know the Three Horizons model this is the point where the early adopters in Horizon Two are staring at the chasm. For those who don't know this model, think of the phrase 'too little, too late'.

Broadly sketched, here is the work that we are naming at The Alternative Global as needing to be developed urgently.

1. The development of a tool box and methodology for CANs. This is not simply community organising, but cosmolocalism. Connecting I to We to World as a new form of energy, or life force. Doing this well creates soft power - the force of attraction.

2. Interconnectivity between CANs globally. This is a technical but also deeply narrative challenge. The rewards are a radical sharing, not only of intelligence but also belonging. When this global network becomes visible, people everywhere will have an alternative to choose.

3. A new media system. This arises directly out of the news agenda of 1 and 2. Capable of joining up the dots and translating its appeal to the world.

Our role is less to lead this revolution, more to be deeply engaged in its emergence. We are committed to what we call poiesis: the bringing into being of something that wasn't there before, in our lifetime. Right now, no-one else is doing the Daily Alternative’s work of both convening the system, and of telling the story of the new socio-economic-political-cultural-planetary possibilities coming into being. We deliberately do this in a way that directly reflects your personal journey of discovering agency, where before there was none.

If you think all this matters, and you want to make sure we can keep going doing what we do, please donate today and become part of our co-creator network. And do it for the sheer joy of being in the right place at the right time.

Alternative Editorial: We're Doing The Work