Matt birkhold on why now is a time to practice existing differently and the importance of locating ourselves in systems and hstory
In VOLs team meeting last week, we had an unplanned conversation about our fears and anxieties related to the world's political instability, inflation, and war. As we talked about Saudi Arabia and the BRIC states, the decline of US power, and the rise of China and Russia, I thought back to being in grad school and said, “There’s a term for what you’re describing. Social scientists call it a hegemonic transition.” As we continued the discussion and unpacked the term’s meaning, they both expressed gratitude and some relief for having more language to understand the current state of the world. When Ashley shared her screen, I saw that she had googled it to learn more.
Reflecting on our discussion, I saw that when we understand the world around us, we don’t have to react to chaos. Instead, locating ourselves in systems and history empowers us to respond to chaos in ways that align with our inner wisdom. In chaotic times we have a nonmaterial need to locate ourselves in systems and history to avoid being overwhelmed. By unpacking hegemonic transitions, we can locate ourselves in systems and history.
On a global scale, hegemony describes a situation where one state has the power to shape the overall world order through the consent of other states. For example, after WWII, the US created the United Nations and used it to maintain its global interests. Economically, US hegemony was maintained by the world’s use of the dollar as the primary currency. There have been four world hegemonies since the emergence of what we at VOL call patriarchal racial capitalism (PRC), which emerged in the 15th century and consolidated into a system in the 17th.
The Italian city-states were the hegemonic power whose world order led to the emergence of PRC. Dutch hegemony consolidated the system, British hegemony globalized the system through colonization, and US hegemony maintained the system by managing legal decolonization.
Hegemonic transitions are periods of transition from one hegemony to the next. They are always chaotic and unpredictable. Giovanni Arrighi described these transitional periods as “systemic chaos,” and demonstrated that periods of systemic chaos share patterns. First, economic growth slows down and economic crises are created. As the economy becomes less dependable, the hegemonic state’s power becomes less legitimate. In response, states begin to jockey for leadership, and global political alliances shift. These shifts create a world that is more multi-polar. As potential new world orders—or hegemons—emerge, chaos increases because multiple hegemons can’t coexist. Hegemonic transitions have historically been facilitated by wars that end when states become willing to consent to the leadership of a new hegemony.
Currently, as the inability of the US to provide world leadership for the wars in Gaza and Ukraine shows, the world no longer believes US power is legitimate. Other states—China and Russia in particular—are jockeying for leadership, and the BRIC states are exploring which world order to align with.
As Ashley pointed out in our team meeting, this transition is different from others because of climate change. A Chinese world order organized around green economics could restore order to the system as a whole by leading us to adapt to climate change. It’s also plausible that climate change means that we are currently in a period of systemic transition rather than just a hegemonic transition. If we’re in a period of systems transition, the entire system of PRC will decline and be replaced by an entirely new social, political, and economic system.
The possibility of systems transition is why we have a real opportunity to begin existing differently. As long as we need PRC to meet our material needs, it’ll be hard to make non-material needs important, and systemic chaos will make it increasingly harder to meet material needs, too. As a result, the political, social, and organizational dysfunction we’re experiencing will get worse until our economy, communities, and organizations practice new ways of being and thinking.
Systemic chaos gives us incentives to create social and organizational practices and systems that equally emphasize our material and nonmaterial needs. Systems transition makes existing differently practical. When we locate ourselves in history and systems, we can see that each of these transitions is on the table. This insight can provide a framework to understand that we’ll experience systemic chaos until we collectively begin to exist differently by creating systems, practices, and organizations that can equally emphasize our material and nonmaterial needs.
