Are human beings crazy? Here we are, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, and what we’ve seen are a series of tragedies, mostly arising from human conflicts. From Sept 11, 2001 through to the current war in Iran, and everything in between: the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Oct 7 attack on Israel, and Israel’s genocidal response, Iraq, Afghanistan. Any design for planetary intelligence must take into account the reality that our most powerful leaders are misguided, misinformed, and myopic. In America, the Trump Administration’s policies continue to degrade civility, public health, and ecological integrity. I would like to imagine a model of collective intelligence based on the Kinship Way (https://thekinshipway.earth), an indigenous-led movement to create communities of care around the world based on a clan system (See https://kindredspirits.earth/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Kinship-Way-Manuscript-4.pdf, https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IpW-i2IZC35cu0M1RLLP1vI0-jqbRLY7tB3jKAUUwro/mobilepresent?pli=1&slide=id.g3b2062e8dc2_0_68, and provide a clear and thoughtful summary.) They aspire to raise all voices. Yet what about human craziness, whether it’s the madness of crowds, or the more individualized insanity of the few (but nevertheless sufficiently numerous) who can disrupt things because of their own traumas and resentments? Where’s the balance and the way forward? Also weave in https://youtu.be/_uBIkII3Mp4?si=ALMqzk_mJeNuBWFJ and the work of the EcoRestoration Alliance, and comment on the challenge of building islands of sanity within a decaying but still extremely dangerous culture, which is blind to the most important realities, that we are nature, we are all connected, and the harm we do to others harms us in equal measure.
I would not say human beings are crazy in any simple sense. I would say we are a traumatized, mimetic, status-driven, symbol-using species with extraordinary capacities for care and extraordinary capacities for self-deception. Under stress, crowds can become irrational, leaders can become grandiose or paranoid, and institutions can normalize cruelty while still speaking the language of order, security, or progress. What looks like “craziness” at a civilizational scale is often the interaction of trauma, propaganda, fear, humiliation, group identity, concentrated power, and technologies that amplify all of it. That is one reason the early 21st century has felt like a cascade of violence rather than a progression of wisdom. The present war involving the U.S., Israel, and Iran is a vivid example: Reuters and WHO report an ongoing war that began on February 28, 2026, with attacks on hospitals, over 1,300 deaths in Iran, and wider regional destabilization.
That means any serious design for planetary intelligence cannot assume that elites will be rational, benevolent, or adequately informed. It must be designed precisely for a world in which power is often captured by short-term interests, prestige competition, and distorted threat perception. In the U.S., that problem is not abstract. Recent Reuters reporting describes court fights over Trump administration health-policy changes, attempts at sweeping funding freezes, and proposals to ease limits on a cancer-causing sterilization gas, all of which reinforce your point that institutional power can degrade public health and ecological integrity while still presenting itself as governance.
Against that backdrop, The Kinship Way is important because it begins from a different anthropological premise. It does not start with the isolated individual, the consumer, the voter, or the sovereign state. It starts with relationship, role, belonging, and responsibility. The public site describes it as “a home for every culture,” rooted in Indigenous wisdom and oriented toward a “global circle of belonging.” The manuscript itself frames the project as a response to “deep fragmentation—social, ecological and spiritual,” drawing especially from Anishinaabe clan traditions as a way to restore relationship, role clarity, and self-governing communities of care.
From the manuscript and slide deck, the core architecture seems clear. The Kinship Way proposes 12 kinship groups organized around the three realms of sky, land, and water, combined with cyclical and life-stage patterns. Each community of care includes age- and gender-based advisory councils, including Two-Spirit representation, with children “spoken for by all.” Representatives are chosen for their “ability to listen” and “courage to speak,” and communities are nested fractally: local communities within watersheds, watersheds within bioregions, bioregions within the biosphere. The aim is to create a social “sensory system” in which more of reality can be felt and voiced before decisions are made.
That is the strongest part of the Kinship Way concept. It understands that collective intelligence is not just a matter of better data. It is a matter of better relational architecture. A society becomes stupid when it cannot hear what matters: the young, the old, the wounded, the land, the water, the marginalized, the future, the more-than-human world. By giving enduring places to different stages of life and different social locations, the model tries to solve a real problem of modernity: atomization. The manuscript also explicitly links this to transparency, consensus, consent, and visible protocols for decision-making, with an effort to include voices “overlooked in traditional decision-making processes.”
But your question goes deeper: what about the disruptive, traumatized, manipulative, or violent few? What about the madness of crowds? Here I think the Kinship Way is promising, but not yet sufficient on its own.
Any model that “raises all voices” still needs three counterweights.
First, it needs containment. Not every impulse deserves equal power. Every living system has membranes. A healthy culture must distinguish between inclusion of persons and permission for harmful behavior. The manuscript helps here by treating conflict as a restorative process involving pausing harm, truth-telling, listening, repair, and ritual return to the circle. That is valuable. But in a dangerous world, restorative practice must also include thresholds, exclusions, and protective boundaries when someone is persistently predatory, coercive, or reality-denying. Compassion without boundaries gets colonized.
Second, it needs epistemic discipline. A council can still be captured by rumor, charisma, grievance, ideology, or coordinated disinformation. So collective intelligence cannot be only ceremonial or participatory; it must also be observational and self-correcting. It needs grounded feedback from ecology, public health, material flows, and actual lived outcomes. In your language: a planetary intelligence worthy of the name must be answerable to reality. The Kinship Way manuscript points in this direction through bioregional inventories, ecological knowledge, and domain-based stewardship; this should be strengthened into explicit bioregional sensing and accountability systems.
Third, it needs a power design. Goodwill is not enough when empires, oligarchies, militaries, extractive industries, and algorithmic propaganda systems are in play. Local circles need ways to federate, defend themselves non-pathologically, share resources, and make coherent decisions across scale. The slide deck’s nested model—community, watershed, bioregion, biosphere—is therefore crucial. It implies that intelligence should be distributed but not disconnected. That is exactly the right instinct.
The video and related Design School materials sharpen this. The “Regenerating Earth Through Collapse” framing is blunt: Joe Brewer and colleagues argue that we are already in ecological overshoot, already in breakdown, and that the task is not to pretend collapse can be fully avoided, but to organize regeneration through it. The broader Design School description emphasizes practical bioregional learning, governance, and cooperation across a planetary network of bioregions.
That framing matters because it clarifies the historical task. We are not waiting for the dominant culture to become sane. We are building islands of sanity inside a larger system that is often delusional, violent, and ecocidal. But these islands cannot be retreats. They must be seed forms of the next civilizational logic: places where people relearn reciprocity, grief literacy, ecological observation, intergenerational responsibility, and practical self-governance. The Kinship Way offers one such seed form. The Design School offers another: a learning-and-practice network for bioregional regeneration under conditions of breakdown.
This is also where the EcoRestoration Alliance fits naturally. ERA presents itself as a network of scientists, earth stewards, storytellers, and grassroots leaders working to restore degraded lands and waters, connect Indigenous and local partners with funders and scientists, and build projects that address climate, biodiversity, and human livelihoods together. That is not just restoration as land management. It is restoration as a social-ecological organizing principle. In other words: heal place, and you create conditions for healing perception, relationship, and governance.
So where is the balance and the way forward?
Not in naive universalism. Not in technocracy. Not in letting every voice have equal veto power over reality. And not in abandoning inclusion because some people are dangerous.
The balance is something like this:
A sane collective-intelligence system must be maximally inclusive in dignity, broadly participatory in voice, rigorously reality-based in learning, and firm in its boundaries against harm.
That means:
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everyone belongs;
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not every behavior is acceptable;
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every local group needs restorative processes;
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every federated system needs standards of truth, evidence, and accountability;
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every governance model must include the more-than-human world and future generations as represented interests;
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and every culture of care must be paired with the courage to confront manipulation, domination, and organized violence.
In that sense, the deepest contribution of the Kinship Way is not merely its clan structure. It is its insistence that belonging and responsibility are inseparable. Modern society has given us abstract rights, mass loneliness, and centralized systems too large to feel. Kinship tries to restore felt relationship. That does not solve human “craziness,” but it may reduce the social conditions that produce it: isolation, humiliation, invisibility, rootlessness, and powerlessness.
My own conclusion is this:
Human beings are not simply crazy. We are developmentally unfinished. We carry Paleolithic nervous systems, imperial institutions, industrial technologies, and planetary consequences. The result is a dangerous mismatch. The answer is not to wait for better rulers. It is to cultivate forms of intelligence that are more distributed, relational, ecological, trauma-aware, and morally bounded than the systems now dominating the world.
The work, then, is twofold: (1) build islands of sanity, and (2) link them into archipelagos.
The Kinship Way, the Design School’s collapse-aware bioregional work, and the EcoRestoration Alliance all point in that direction. They are different expressions of the same wager: that if we can re-embed human communities in living relationships with place, one another, and the larger web of life, then intelligence might cease to mean domination and begin to mean participation in reality.