By Peter Merry
In times of rapid change, there’s often a sense of something breaking down. At the Embassy of the Future gathering, one underlying thread has surfaced again and again: the reclaiming of personal and collective agency. Whether in De Kai’s call to mature our relationship with AI, Jeff Booth’s challenge to rethink our money systems, or the more intimate work of clarifying individual purpose — the invitation is the same: step back into responsibility for what we choose and create.
This reclaiming of agency at the human level mirrors broader patterns of decentralisation in society — in governance, economics, technology, and beyond. It is the same movement seen through different lenses. As individuals become more differentiated — clearer about who they are and what matters to them — so too do our collective systems differentiate into more diverse, autonomous nodes. At first glance, this may appear like chaos. But from a systems view, it’s the necessary precondition for higher-order emergence.
From Fragmentation to Emergence
When an existing order can no longer meet the complexity of the life conditions it faces, it begins to break down. This is what Spiral Dynamics co-founder Don Beck described as the Beta–Gamma transition — a period of mounting frustration, followed by the erosion of trust, identity, and consensus. Sound familiar?
At this stage, entropy increases. Systems lose coherence. Old narratives no longer hold. What appears is a greater differentiation of parts — individuals, communities, perspectives. But here’s the key insight: differentiation is not disorder. It is a stage in the process of reorganisation.
In complexity science, this is well-articulated by thinkers like Stuart Kauffman, who proposed the concept of the “adjacent possible” — the idea that when systems reach a tipping point, they reorganise by recombining existing parts in new ways. Similarly, Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework shows how emergence becomes possible only once we exit the ordered (or even complicated) domain and enter complexity or chaos.
The transformation from entropy to order is not random. It is requisite — a term drawn from Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, which tells us that to respond effectively to increasing complexity, a system must possess equivalent internal diversity. More differentiated parts, more potential relationships. More tension — yes. But also more capacity for coherence at a new level.
Creative Tension as Evolutionary Driver
Differentiation brings diversity. Diversity brings tension. But this is not something to be feared — it is the crucible of emergence.
As Otto Scharmer writes in his Theory U, “The emerging future always appears first as a disturbance, a breakdown, or a conflict.” If held generatively, creative tension — between perspectives, between levels of development, between what is and what could be — catalyses higher-order integration. In Spiral Dynamics terms, this is the movement from GREEN’s pluralism into YELLOW’s capacity to hold multiplicity within coherent systems.
This dynamic is also seen in Howard Bloom’s Global Brain model. In a beehive, when a food source disappears, the system reallocates resources from conformity enforcers (worker bees) to diversity generators (scout bees). The hive becomes temporarily destabilised as scouts search for new options. Once a new source is found, the system recentres and returns to order. It’s a perfect biological metaphor for how societies — and individuals — can navigate disruption.
The Cost of Outsourced Agency
Much of modern society is structured around expertocracy — a term echoing the critiques of Ivan Illich and E.F. Schumacher, who warned of systems that disempower the individual in favour of remote expertise. From our health to our money to our data to our beliefs, the dominant pattern has been to outsource discernment.
But this comes at a cost. Illich called it “counterproductivity” — where the very institutions designed to serve us undermine our autonomy. Fritjof Capra argued that when work and knowledge are removed from human-scale relationships, they become abstract, alienating, and ultimately disempowering.
Today, we’re experiencing a backlash to that disempowerment. The rise of decentralised finance, citizen science, community-supported agriculture, and consciousness-based education all point to a common direction: reclaiming the power to sense, choose and act.
This is not regression. It is adaptive intelligence at work. A system losing faith in its top-down operating model and experimenting with bottom-up reassembly.
The Parallel with AI and Consciousness
De Kai’s work on ethical AI development illustrates this same pattern. As AI systems grow in power, they expose our human systems’ lack of maturity and agency. AI trained on past data will only amplify existing patterns — unless we humans reclaim the inner authority to decide what kind of future we want.
This is where agency and communion, in Ken Wilber’s terms, must evolve together. As we individuate (agency), we must also deepen our relational sensitivity (communion) — to each other, to systems, to the planet. Only then can our intelligence, artificial or otherwise, reflect not just what has been, but what could be.
Finding Order in the Chaos
There is a paradox here, and it’s important: chaos does not mean disorder. The word chaos, from the Greek khaos, originally meant “gap” or “space.” It refers not to noise, but to the pregnant stillness before new form.
This is why, when things fall apart, we’re called to retreat spaces, sensing spaces, inquiry circles. Not to escape, but to feel into the subtle order beneath the noise. These spaces allow us to sense the new relationships forming among the parts — the new coherence emerging in the rubble of the old.
It is not about finding “the answer” — it is about cultivating the capacity to be with uncertainty long enough for the next pattern to reveal itself.
The Evolutionary Invitation
In his Integral Vision, Wilber describes the path of development not as a straight line, but as a spiral of inclusion and transcendence. Each stage includes the truths of the last, while transcending its limitations. That is what we are being asked to do now — as individuals, as societies, and as a species.
This moment is not the collapse of everything. It is the differentiation before re-integration. The retreat before emergence. The entropy that precedes order — but a new kind of order, fit for the complexity we now face.
The invitation is clear:
Reclaim your agency.
Feel into the field.
Let the new pattern form — through you, and around you.
