From Clash to Pattern: A Living Systems Guide

The human world hums with tension. Meetings flare into argument, social feeds crowd into outrage, and kitchens, workplaces, and councils echo with competing voices that rarely feel heard. Con Viv, which simply means “with life,” treats this heat as living energy rather than waste. In living systems disturbance is not an error but information, so the real question becomes whether we can build vessels strong enough to hold that energy and transform it into insight, relationship, policy and practice.

Jung’s insight is helpful here. When two poles lock against each other, a “third” thing is missing. The “Third” is not a bland compromise but a new form that appears only when opposites are consciously held long enough to reveal a creative synthesis. Our public life often fails at this, since we either suppress conflict in the name of peace without truth, or inflame it in the name of truth without peace. If we want to move beyond that binary, we need containers that invite the Third to appear, which is a cultural and institutional task rather than a purely emotional one.

Anthroposophy offers a clear shape for healthy community life. It says culture thrives with freedom, our shared rules should treat people as equals, and our economy should be based on mutual support. When we mix these up, trust breaks down. When we keep them distinct and in balance, love becomes something you can build with. Roles are placed where they fit, relationships are cared for, and decisions follow a steady rhythm so care can move through a community reliably. Con Viv turns this into practice through head, heart, and hand: seeing clearly, meeting each other warmly, and making things together. We move through a simple cycle of notice, hold, transform, and act. The aim is not to remove conflict but to guide its heat into learning and useful patterns.

On the ground this looks ordinary and practical. Listening spaces give people a way to speak without fear so that heat turns into information that everyone can use. Rights containers make decision paths visible with transparent timelines, rotating facilitation, small trials that run for a set period, and a public review that invites revision rather than punishment. Mutual-aid prototyping redirects arguments into safe-to-try projects such as verge care, herb plots, walking routes, tool libraries, and shared maintenance days, so trust grows sideways through work done together. Creative activation turns disputes into raw material for theatre, music, murals, and story-gathering, since new forms often appear first in image or gesture before they can be legislated. Individual containment gives each person a way to hold strong feeling through journaling, contemplative movement, boundary practice, or a quiet walk, which is less about private self-help and more about civic hygiene that prevents projection from flooding the commons.

The virtue that names the tone of this work is Michaelic courage, a clear and warm quality of attention that meets the dragon without becoming one. In practice this looks like precision instead of blame, imagination instead of cynicism, and rhythm instead of rush. It is a kind of heart-thinking where understanding is shaped by interest in the other, which keeps the social field from hardening into camps and slogans. Conflict will not vanish, nor should it, since friction keeps systems alive. What changes is the destination of that energy. Within a living container the spark falls into a wider field and can ripen into a third thing, perhaps a pattern other places can reuse, a pilot that becomes policy, or a poem that restores language where it had collapsed.

This is the seed-vision here… Love becomes infrastructure that shapes decision making, convivial governance, and everyday interaction, while Con Viv offers a choreography for the passage from heat to practice. Jung gives us the organ of perception for the Third, and Anthroposophy gives us a social anatomy that keeps freedom, equality, and mutuality in honest relationship. Together they sketch a future life system that is robust enough to hold our heat and gentle enough to help us grow. Here, friction is fuel and the vessel that turns it into life is made, maintained, and renewed in common.

Beyond the Hashtag: Why Progressive Platforms Must Build Futures, Not Just Protest

In today’s hyperconnected world, moral outrage travels fast. From War and injustice to salmon farms and destruction to ancient forests. Activists and leaders with platforms flood social media with sharp critique and heartfelt calls for justice. Yet, for all the powerful voices and viral hashtags, the conversation often stops short of what comes next. Moral clarity is necessary but not sufficient.

“When progressive leaders wield their megaphones only to condemn without creating pathways forward, they cede the future to corporate boards, militaries, and political hardliners”

The real challenge is not just to name what’s wrong but to build convivial governance, systems where communities are invited into genuine conversation, co-creating the institutions they will live within. Convivial governance treats imagination as an organ essential to democracy. It insists that governance must be of the people, not imposed from above; it thrives on dialogue, shared responsibility, and an openness to diverse futures. This methodology is urgently needed in places like Tasmania, where industrial salmon farming disrupts ecosystems and silences community voices; in forests under threat of over-extraction; and in global hotspots like Gaza, where decisions are made far from the lived experience of those most affected.

“These struggles, though geographically distant, share a common thread: the failure of top-down governance and the absence of meaningful participatory design”.

Tools for convivial governance already exist.

Yet, too often, influential thinkers like Naomi Klein illuminate the systemic roots of injustice without stepping into the generative space of scenario-building and solution design. She speaks powerfully about global crises but rarely opens her platform to the messy, grounded work of co-creating alternatives with affected communities.

Progressive leaders with reach bear an ethical responsibility: to shift from reactive outrage to proactive convivial conversation, inviting followers into structured, inclusive spaces where futures are imagined, tested, and refined together. This is how movements mature and how change becomes sustainable. Without this shift, the “day after” will always belong to someone else.

It is time to move beyond the hashtag, toward using our imagination as the most important organ of our time.

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About the Author
Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne (also known as Dr. Demeter) is an eco-philosopher, farmer, and author of the forthcoming series The Spiral Shelves: Living Library of Magical Farm Tasmania. Her work bridges policy design, ecological healing, and the spiritual-cultural renewal of place. She works at the intersection of community resilience, regenerative governance, and embodied stewardship, inviting new myths and models for living well together in times of great change.