I recently came across Daniel Schmachtenberger, a systems thinker doing everything he can to show the human race which problem we actually need to solve. He strikes me as a brilliant individual who takes a bit of concerted effort to understand, so today I’m trying to decode some of his most earthshaking observations for your benefit.
Daniel argues that our biggest problem isn’t any of the ones that might leap to the front of your mind: it’s that we’re living inside a system that keeps producing crisis after crisis. It’s like fighting a hydra: cut off one head, two more appear.
Daniel calls this the metacrisis—a tangle of interlocking issues that feed and accelerate each other.
At the core of his thinking is this radical idea:
Our current economic system is destroying the conditions on which life depends.
Until we replace that system, he says, no amount of reform or personal sacrifice will save us.
The Game We’re Playing
Daniel says we are playing a civilization-scale game with rules that guarantee collapse. Here's what those rules look like:
Rivalrous dynamics
Every actor—people, companies, nations—is incentivized to win at the expense of others. Zero-sum thinking is baked into our system.Infinite growth on a finite planet
The game only "works" if it grows. More markets, more consumption, more extraction. But Earth has limits—and we’re already breaching them.Perverse incentives
We reward behaviors that extract, exploit, and externalize harm. Success is measured in GDP, stock prices, and attention—not well-being or planetary health.No built-in sense of “enough”
There is no off switch. No governor. No warning signal like the one that guards railroad crossings.
Daniel points out a brutal irony:
“Everything required for life on Earth—clean air, rich soil, intact ecosystems, biodiversity—is considered an externality in our current models. That is, it doesn’t count.”
So we keep turning:
Forests into board feet
Soil into “real estate”
Whales into commodities
Data into control
Human attention into ad revenue
Our system is turning the living world into numbers, and it will keep chasing those numbers until the human race opts for a different system.
Make no mistake: our economic system will be replaced. The only question is whether we replace it voluntarily or not.
Putting Solar Panels on a Predator Drone Doesn’t Help
Daniel is clear: individual lifestyle changes won't solve this.
Driving EVs, installing solar panels, buying carbon offsets… none of these fix the machine that’s generating collapse. They’re like painting the walls of a burning house.
He says:
“I don't want people to think about how to make their own life regenerative, because it doesn't matter. I want people to think about what it would take to turn the entire arc of humanity, factoring (in) what is driving it... and that everything else that you could do doesn't matter at all because the end of the possibility space of all meaningful human activities is imminent if we don't do that.”
Translation: if we don’t change the core rules of the system, we all perish.
The Planetary Boundaries
Our economic model assumes infinite growth, but Earth doesn't.
This image (by physicist Rob Davies, based on the Planetary Boundaries framework) shows just how far we've already gone. Of the nine essential Earth systems life depends on, we've already crossed six.
The green zone is safety. We are well outside it.
What Daniel Wants Us To Do
He isn’t asking us to meditate more, consume less, or go off the grid.
He’s asking us to:
Stop optimizing for a better personal life
Start figuring out how to change the trajectory of civilization
Understand what’s actually driving collapse: the economics, the incentives, the rivalrous dynamics, the myth of separation
Then ask: How do we replace the system?
Because the system isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.
He argues that the problem is the system itself. We need to find a replacement for it.
A Few More Words From Daniel
“We’ve been employing more and more powerful technology to play rivalrous games. That means more potent warfare, more potent environmental extraction, more potent narrative control.”
Translation: the system is accelerating. And it’s using exponential tech to do so.
“Exponential tech is inexorable. We cannot put it away. So, we either figure out anti-rivalry, or we go extinct. That’s the core thing.”
Translation: if we keep thinking like separate individuals in a global competition, we will lose everything.
“Cognitively we’re not eating salads and healthy things. Cognitively we’re just eating french fries.”
Translation: our thinking is junk food—cheap, fast, and not built to sustain deep understanding.
And Now for Some Good News…
You may find this message so far to be depressing. I’m sorry for that.
But the good news is that Daniel also has described many elements of the new system that could—and should—replace our existing economic model. It’s positive. He argues it will lead to a sustainable and highly positive future for human beings as well as our planet as a whole.
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Now, I’m going to share some sense of what Daniel Schmachtenberger thinks we should be doing. I adapted much of what follows from a 25-minute talk he gave at least eight years ago.
Emergence is at the heart of Daniel’s thinking. He describes it as the phenomenon by which something fundamentally new arises from the interaction of parts: new properties, capabilities, and systems that didn’t exist before.
Water emerges from hydrogen and oxygen. Life emerges from a collection of non-living molecules. Consciousness emerges from billions of neurons. These aren’t just combinations; they’re transformations.
In Daniel’s view, the same potential for emergence applies to human civilization.
Right now, we’re more like a scattered pile of parts than an integrated organism; we think of ourselves as separate from each other, and we act that way. We don’t try to keep humanity safe; we try to keep ourselves and our family safe.
He compares our current global society to cells that haven’t yet become a functioning body. We are humans, but we haven’t yet formed humanity in the truest sense.
He sees this as the great opportunity of our time: to intentionally bring about the emergence of a higher-order civilization: one capable of stewarding life, consciousness, and creativity into the future.
That, he says, is the arc evolution wants to take. But it won’t happen automatically. We have to choose it.
Daniel is not advocating for a return to the past or a slight modification of either capitalism or socialism. He believes we need to invent something new, something that wasn’t possible before now.
At the highest level, this new system would be defined by aligned incentives, closed-loop material flows, and a shift in identity from individualistic to interdependent.
Let’s look at those one at a time.
Aligned Incentives
Our current system rewards people and institutions for behaviors that harm our common interest, whether that’s burning fossil fuels, hoarding data or manipulating attention. Daniel proposes a new kind of economic structure in which the incentive of every individual agent is aligned with the well-being of all other agents and the biosphere itself.
In other words, the system would be designed so that doing what’s good for you is also good for everyone else, and for the planet.
This is not naive idealism. It mirrors how healthy biological systems already work. Your liver doesn’t try to outcompete your lungs. Each cell in your body functions in a way that supports the whole. That’s what health is.
Daniel calls this systemic advantage, in contrast to the differential advantage model we live in today.
He’s careful to say this isn’t communism or capitalism. It’s something new… enabled by technology, intelligence, and awareness we didn’t have before.
Closed-Loop Systems
The next major shift involves how we relate to matter. Right now we extract, consume, and discard. Daniel calls this a linear materials economy: one that turns finite resources into infinite waste.
The new system would be a closed-loop economy. Nothing is wasted. Everything is reused, regenerated, and reintegrated.
This is possible. Modern materials science, logistics, and manufacturing make it achievable in a way that was unimaginable even fifty years ago. But it requires a radical redesign of infrastructure, and a willingness to measure success in terms of sustainability and resilience, not just throughput and profit.
Again, biology offers the model. Forests don’t create landfills. Everything becomes food for something else. Circularity is not a luxury—it’s a prerequisite for life.
A Perceptual Shift: From Separated to Interconnected
Perhaps the most fundamental change Daniel calls for is not economic or technological. It’s cultural and spiritual. It’s a shift in how we define ourselves.
He argues that many of our problems stem from a misperception that we are separate from one another and from the living systems that support us.
This is an illusion, he says. Your body is made of the same atoms as the soil and stars. You breathe what the trees exhale. You depend on fungi, bacteria, and insects more than you realize. There is no meaningful version of your success that can be separated from the health of the whole.
This awareness leads to a new kind of ethics, where collaboration becomes natural, and harming the system that gives you life begins to feel insane.
Daniel calls this the mimetic shift: a cultural movement that helps people see themselves as facets of one evolving whole. In his words, we stop seeing ourselves as passengers on spaceship Earth, and start seeing ourselves as crew.
How Might This Happen?
Daniel doesn’t pretend this transition will be easy. He also doesn’t think it will come about through incremental reform.
Instead, he suggests that the collapse of our current system will create the conditions for something new to emerge. That emergence, however, must be designed not by central planners, but by conscious, committed individuals willing to align with the evolutionary impulse itself.
My own translation of this thought is: we need entrepreneurs and innovators to spark this change.
He sees three major forces already in play:
Technology is giving us the ability to track resources, coordinate globally, and solve complex problems… but it also accelerates the risks to our continued survival.
Crisis is breaking the legitimacy and functionality of existing institutions, creating openings for new ones to be born.
Consciousness—our capacity for reflection and abstraction—is allowing us to glimpse our role as stewards of planetary evolution.
He is explicit: the emergence of a better system is not inevitable. It depends on our ability to consciously coordinate, understand the dynamics of complex systems, and design new structures in which the well-being of each part is aligned with the well-being of the whole.
Daniel argues that this cannot happen through:
Revolution
Top-down mandates
Local-only action
Incremental reform
Instead, it must emerge through:
Shared understanding of the whole system
Internalization of externalities (aligning incentives so that harm to the commons is no longer rewarded)
Redesign of economic and governance systems from first principles, using distributed intelligence, technological capacity, and moral commitment
A shift in how individuals see themselves: not as separate actors, but as facets of one evolutionary process
Daniel likens this to cells forming a new organism. The parts don’t lose their identity. But they gain coordination, synergy, and shared function.
In Summary
Daniel believes we are standing at a crossroads. Our current systems cannot continue. We will either descend into collapse… or consciously bring forth a new civilization.
That new civilization would be rooted in emergence, synergy, and cooperation. It would reward life-giving behavior, close the loops we’ve left open, and allow every person to contribute their unique genius in service of the whole.
Daniel is asking us to stop thinking of ourselves as consumers and start thinking of ourselves as creators of the next phase of evolution.
That’s his invitation. There is a vast amount of work to do.
This is a LOT to take in, and much to debate. I don’t know whether he is wrong or right; I only know he made me think in a broader and deeper manner about what exactly is happening in the world around us.