Destruction comes before transformation
Or the only constant in life is change
Perhaps because of the pace of change over the past century we humans have come to believe that things invariably happen quickly. Yes, there can be sudden, fast, dramatic changes but most change happens slowly and often without us knowing.
For anything new to be born, something must die. Every second of our lives our bodies at a cellular level are dying and transforming in a constant unseen process of death and rebirth.
In our brief time on earth, around seventy years for most people, we can see dramatic manmade changes which turn our world around, but most change is slow, steady, inexorable and much that happens is cyclical. Any study of history makes that clear. While our material worlds have changed greatly, the human condition has changed very little, particularly at the psychological level.
This makes humans more dangerous than they have ever been. The stone-age mentality and instinctive responses coupled with hi tech weaponry and machinery, has a terrible potential for destruction. But as the maxim goes: The only constant in life is change.
We do change, we are changing, we have changed - the only question is, how participatory are we consciously in that process. For some a lot for others very little if not at all. It is our capacity for consciousness and conscious functioning which makes the difference between us managing change and change managing us. That applies at personal and national and cosmic levels.
Many people would say the world seems to have entered a period of dramatic change now and they would be right. For whatever reason the Government of the United States is destroying the old order with little plan for a new one. Well, they may have a plan but from their words and actions it is hardly likely to be enlightened.
So, as the world falls apart, it is up to us, the adults, to pick through the dregs and dross and preserve that which is of value and rebuild that which serves us best. I like to think that such cobbling together of the fundamentals of a new era, a new world, a new age would be sourced in principles of justice, rule of law, human rights and common human decency, all of which have been binned by the US and its Allies in the past half century. We cannot solely blame the Americans because too many have gone along with it as craven, gutless allies and weak, amoral cowards, including my country.
But there is always a percentage in society who can hold the ground through the worst of times. To be fit for that task we need to remain aware. The following article offers some insights which may be of use.
I do not agree with everything Richard Hames says in the following article but I think it offers some salient metaphors and thought provoking statements. And we need, we desperately need, thoughts to be provoked. NB: I do think that at cellular and frequency levels, the caterpillar knows exactly what it is meant to be and I believe we humans do also. That sense or knowledge is even more empowered when we apply our conscious minds.
We need to think, really think about the world we have and the world we would wish to have. People did in the past but in the technological age of general comfort and security, we relaxed and stopped thinking. We existed in a world where machines did much of the work once done by humans. And computer technology has compounded that with machines which supposedly think for you so you do not have to think.
We have forgotten, if you do not use it you lose it!
We are in danger of losing our minds.
The Covenant That Wasn’t There
On the pattern no constitution prevents
Every chrysalis contains, at its most critical moment, a substance that looks like failure. The caterpillar doesn’t gradually become a butterfly.
It dissolves — its own enzymes breaking down the structures it spent its entire larval life building, liquefying what was organised and functional into something closer to soup. The imaginal cells that will become the new form are present throughout this process, but for most of it they are suppressed, attacked by the immune system of the dissolving body as foreign and threatening. The transformation succeeds only when the imaginal cells reach a density at which the old immune response can no longer hold them back.
We are living in such a dissolution phase. The structures of industrial civilisation — the institutions, the legal architectures, the governing frameworks, the epistemic assumptions — are not simply failing. They are actively breaking down their own organisation, deploying their own enzymes against the coherence they once provided. And the imaginal cells — the new forms of relationship, obligation, and meaning that could constitute the next civilisation — are present, recognisable, but still being suppressed by the immune response of the order that’s dissolving. They are still trapped in caterpillar logic.
What the imaginal cells lack isn’t vision. It isn’t energy, nor numbers, nor the moral clarity that always attends genuine emergence. What they lack is a covenant — a founding commitment that could hold the new form stable long enough for it to become viable, that could prevent the next civilisation from being absorbed by the remnants of the old one before it has developed the architecture to resist.
Because that’s what history shows us, with a consistency that should by now be alarming: movements born of genuine suffering and genuine vision that have arrived, one after another, at destinations their founders would not have chosen and could not have imagined. Not because the founders were naive or the movements were corrupt, though both things have sometimes been true. But because every movement that has accepted the tools of the existing order — its institutions, its bureaucracies, its legal frameworks, its economic architecture — without first establishing what they must never be used for, has found those tools shaping evolution rather than the other way around.
A constitution, as the modern world has understood it, isn’t a covenant. It faces inward and forward — toward the governance of those currently alive, currently present, currently capable of asserting a claim. At its best, a sophisticated instrument for managing conflict within a bounded community across time. At its worst, a document of aspiration that encodes, in its silences and its compromises, precisely the betrayals it will later be unable to prevent. What no constitution has yet managed to do is face outward and backward and forward simultaneously — toward the living world that the polity inhabits and on which it depends, toward the generations not yet born who will inherit what the polity builds and destroys, toward the others beyond the border whose fate the polity’s choices will determine even when they have no standing in its courts. These are not constituencies that can sign a document. They can’t vote, can’t sue, can’t mount a legal challenge when the covenant is broken. And it’s precisely because they cannot enforce their own claims that the covenant with them must be written into the foundation — not as aspiration, but as architecture.
* * *
The United States Constitution is the most instructive case, not because it’s the worst document of its kind but because it is arguably the best — the most carefully considered, the most philosophically grounded, and the most self-consciously designed to prevent the accumulation of tyrannical power. Its authors were educated men who had read their Montesquieu and their Locke, who understood faction and corruption and the seductions of unchecked authority, who built into the document a system of counterweights so elegant that it has been studied and imitated ever since.
And it failed. Not suddenly, not completely, but in the ways that matter most — the ways that were visible from the beginning to anyone willing to look. It failed because its male authors, for all their learning, were building within the order they inhabited rather than against it. They distributed power among those who already held it. They wrote rights for those already recognised as rights-bearing. They encoded, in the silences between their carefully chosen words, the exclusions that would take two centuries and a civil war and a civil rights movement and an ongoing reckoning to even partially address — and have not yet been fully addressed, and may not be.
This isn’t a counsel of cynicism about the founders. It’s an observation about the structural limits of what a constitution, as the modern world has understood it, can do. A constitution faces inward — toward the community of those currently present, currently enfranchised, currently capable of asserting a legal claim. It manages conflict within that community. At its best it does this with genuine wisdom and restraint. But it has no face turned toward the living world on which the polity depends, no face turned toward the generations who will inherit what the polity builds and destroys, no face turned toward the others beyond the border whose lives the polity’s choices will shape without their consent or recourse.
These absences are not accidental. They reflect something deep in the civilisational psyche within which every modern constitution has been written — the psyche of industrial economism, which measures value in the present, among the living, within the boundary, and which has no native grammar for obligation to what cannot yet speak, what does not yet exist, what lies beyond the line on the map. A constitution written within this order will reproduce its limits even when its authors intend otherwise. The document will aspire toward justice and encode injustice in its silences, aspire toward permanence and build in the mechanisms of its own erosion, aspire toward the common good and find itself, generation by generation, captured by the interests most capable of exploiting its ambiguities.
What would interrupt this pattern isn’t a better constitution. It’s a different kind of founding commitment entirely — one that doesn’t distribute power among those present today but covenants with what the present cannot represent: the unborn, the living world, the other beyond the border. A covenant of this kind can’t be enforced by any court, because its primary beneficiaries have no standing in any court that exists or could exist. It can only be held by a civilisational culture that understands what it has committed to and why — a culture that treats the breaking of the covenant not as a legal infraction but as a civilisational betrayal, the kind that echoes forward through generations in ways no subsequent legislation can fully repair.
This is what no founding document has yet managed to be. And the question the dissolution of the current order makes newly urgent is whether the imaginal cells now forming in the body of the old civilisation carry, in their earliest organisation, the architecture of that different kind of commitment — or whether they will arrive at statehood and institution and recognition, accept the tools the existing order offers, and begin, quietly and with the best of intentions, the long journey toward the same destination.
* * *
The first difficulty is naming what the covenant is with, because the modern mind — trained by centuries of contractual logic — reaches immediately for a party. Contracts require signatories. Rights require bearers. Obligations require someone capable of making a claim. And the three constituencies that a civilisational covenant must address — the unborn, the living world, the other beyond the border — share the quality of being unable to appear before any tribunal, unable to sign any document, unable to enforce any promise made in their name.
This isn’t a technical problem awaiting a legal solution. It’s a philosophical threshold that the civilisational order of industrial economism has never crossed, because crossing it would require abandoning the foundational assumption on which that order rests: that value is generated by and for the present, the living, the bounded. To covenant with the unborn is to acknowledge that the future has claims on the present that the present didn’t confer and can’t revoke. To covenant with the living world is to acknowledge that the web of relationships sustaining all life has a standing that precedes and exceeds any human legal system. To covenant with ‘the other’ beyond borders is to acknowledge that the consequences of power don’t stop at the line on the map, and that obligation follows consequence regardless of whether any legal architecture has been constructed to enforce it.
Each of these acknowledgements is, within the logic of industrial economism, a kind of heresy. They don’t simply extend the existing framework — they contradict its deepest premise. And this is why no constitution written within that framework has managed to encode them, even when its authors sensed their necessity. Jefferson knew that slavery was a betrayal of the principles he was advocating. He wrote it anyway, or rather he wrote around it — encoding the three-fifths compromise and the twenty-year protection of the slave trade not as aberrations from the document’s logic but as expressions of it, the places where the civilisational order’s actual priorities surfaced through the aspiration. The self-limitation that honouring his own principles would have required had no architecture in the order he was working within. It still doesn’t.
So what holds a covenant when no court can compel it?
The answer history offers, when it offers one at all, is culture — but culture understood in an explicit and very demanding sense. Not the culture of custom and habit, which is in most respects the residue of past power arrangements. Not the culture of identity, which is always available for capture by the ethno-nationalist logic that industrial economism makes available to threatened communities. What is needed is the culture of living obligation.
The culture of living obligation is the daily practice, embedded in education and ritual and the texture of ordinary life, of remembering what the community has committed to and why — of making the keeping of the covenant a matter not of legal compulsion but of civilisational honour.
To the modern ear, this sounds either naively idealistic or uncomfortably close to the kind of sacred obligation that has historically been used to justify the worst violence. Both responses are worth taking seriously.
The idealism charge first. The objection is that culture without enforcement is merely aspiration — that without courts and penalties and mechanisms of accountability, a covenant is only as strong as the goodwill of those currently in power, and goodwill is precisely what power erodes. This objection has force. But it proves too much — because every legal system ultimately rests on something it cannot itself generate. It rests on a shared understanding, however contested and imperfect, that certain things must not be done regardless of whether doing them is currently advantageous. When that substrate erodes, no legal architecture can substitute for it. The United States is demonstrating this in real time: a constitution of genuine sophistication, hollowed out by the cultural abandonment of the commitments that gave it meaning, not by legal assault. Law without covenant is a shell. The covenant isn’t the backup to the law. It is the condition of the law’s possibility.
The sacred violence charge is more crucial, because the history of civilisational covenants is also the history of their weaponisation — the sacred obligation invoked to consecrate destruction, the divine command deployed to silence the counsel of restraint. What distinguishes a covenant that holds life from one that sanctifies its elimination?
The distinction lies in the direction of the obligation. A covenant oriented toward the unborn, the living world, and ‘others’ beyond the border is structurally incapable of sanctifying their destruction — because they are its beneficiaries, not its enemies. The sacred violence tradition, by contrast, is always oriented inward and backward: toward the purity of the community, toward the commands of the founding moment, toward the elimination of what threatens the covenant’s own continuation. It’s a covenant with the past against the future, with the bounded against the unbounded, with the living against the not-yet-born. Its structure is the precise inversion of what a civilisational covenant requires.
This inversion isn’t a mistake. It’s what the absorption logic produces when a community, having lost its founding vision to the tools of the existing order, reaches for something older and more binding than law to hold itself together against the fear that the loss generates. When a movement accepts the existing order’s tools and finds those tools unable to deliver what they promised, the community doesn’t dissolve — it regresses. It reaches past the constitutional settlement for something that feels more absolute, more certain, more immune to the erosions that took the vision. The religious nationalist movements now rising across multiple civilisational traditions — not one tradition, not one religion, not one ethnicity — are not atavisms. They are the predictable response of communities that accepted the tools of industrial economism, found those tools unable to provide what they had promised, and reached for something older.
The distinction between a covenant that holds life and one that sanctifies its elimination is structurally clear. It isn’t, in the heat of a community’s fear, experientially obvious — which is precisely why it must be written into the founding before the fear arrives, rather than reasoned toward after it has taken hold.
The covenant the imaginal cells need isn’t more absolute in that sense. It is more demanding — because it requires holding an obligation to that which cannot yet speak, cannot yet vote, cannot yet sue, and may not yet exist, against the permanent pressure of the present’s needs and fears and appetites. That kind of holding doesn’t require sacred certainty; but it does need civilisational patience: the capacity to act in the present with full awareness of consequences that will only become visible across generations, and to treat that awareness as binding regardless of whether any institution currently exists to enforce it.
* * *
The question the constitutional analysis returns us to is this: what must the imaginal cells carry in their earliest organisation in order to prevent the pattern of capture and absorption from repeating?
The imaginal cells don’t know, in the early stages of their organisation, what they will become. This isn’t a weakness of the metaphor — it is its most important feature. The butterfly isn’t planned. It’s not the caterpillar’s vision of its own future, carefully designed and then executed. It emerges from the dissolution because the cells that carry the new pattern are already present, already organising according to a logic the old body cannot read, already forming the rudiments of a structure that will only become intelligible when the transformation is complete.
What this means for the civilisational moment we are in is this: the question isn’t what the next civilisation will look like in its mature form. That’s unanswerable from inside the dissolution, and too early in terms of design. Any attempt to answer it will produce the kind of totalising vision that has historically been more dangerous than useful. A better question is what the imaginal cells need to carry in their earliest form — what commitments, what orientations, what refusals — in order to prevent the pattern of absorption from repeating.
And here the analysis arrives at something precise. The movements, institutions, and communities now forming in the body of the dissolving order share a common vulnerability: they are forming within a civilisational field still dominated by the tools, the norms, and the gravitational logic of industrial economism. They cannot avoid this because the dissolution isn’t yet complete. The old immune system is still active, still attacking what it can’t recognise, still offering the tools of the existing order to every emerging form that looks like it might become important. The offer is always the same: accept our institutions, our legal frameworks, our economic architecture, our diplomatic protocols, and we will recognise you. Refuse them, and you will remain marginal.
Every liberation movement of the modern period has faced this offer. Most have accepted it, for reasons that were in each case entirely understandable and pragmatic — exhaustion, the genuine need for stability, the pressure of immediate human suffering that demanded practical solutions rather than civilisational patience. And in accepting it, they stepped onto the path whose destination we have been examining.
The covenant is what changes the terms of that offer. Not by refusing the tools — the tools are necessary, and the refusal of all existing institutional architecture is to embrace chaos. But by establishing, before any tools are accepted, what they must never be used for. By writing into the founding, in language that cannot be quietly archived or judicially reinterpreted into meaninglessness, the three obligations that no tool of the existing order can satisfy on its own: that what is built must be genuinely beneficial to every person within and beyond its borders, not merely to those present at its founding; that it must operate syntrophically within the living world, contributing to the conditions that sustain life rather than drawing them down; and that it must honour the claims of those not yet born, treating the future as a constituency with standing rather than a resource to be discounted.
These are not policies. They are not planks in a platform, not items on an agenda, not goals to be achieved when circumstances permit. They are the foundations within which policy, platform, agenda, and goal must be conceived — the prior commitments that determine which tools are acceptable and which are not, which victories are real and which are simply the old logic in new guise.
The difficulty is that writing them into an origin or founding impulse requires a moment of genuine creation — a moment when the community is still early enough in its organising that its defining commitments have not yet been shaped by the gravitational pull of the existing order. These moments are rare and they are brief. They don’t announce themselves. The constitutional conventions and founding congresses of history were mostly unrecognised as civilisational thresholds at the time they occurred — they were experienced as practical necessities, urgent responses to immediate crises, gatherings of people trying to solve specific problems under considerable pressure. The civilisational significance only became visible later, when it was too late to go back and change what had been written, or write what had been left out.
This is the argument for paying close attention to what is being founded now — not the institutions that are most visible, most funded, most recognised by the existing order, but the communities of practice and commitment that are forming in the dissolution’s margins, that the old immune system has not yet decided whether to attack or absorb. These are the sites where the covenant can still be written before the tools arrive. Where the question of what must never be done can still precede the question of what must be done next.
What would it look like in practice? Not a document, or not only a document — because the history of documents is also the history of their abandonment, and a covenant that lives only on paper is already halfway to the archive. It would look like a culture of founding obligation embedded in the daily practice of the community: in how decisions are made and who is consulted, in what counts as success and what counts as betrayal, in the stories the community refuses to tell about itself — and the ones it insists on telling. It would look like an education that begins not with the skills the existing order requires but with the questions the covenant makes inescapable — what is owed to those not yet born, what the living world requires of those currently alive, and what obligations follow from the consequences of power even when no court exists to enforce them — questions that don’t resolve into answers so much as into a way of inhabiting the present with full awareness of what it costs the future.
It would look, in other words, less like a constitution and more like a practice of civilisational conscience — one that treats the keeping of the covenant not as a legal obligation but as the central act of cultural reproduction, the thing the community does to remain recognisably itself across time and transformation.
The chrysalis does not hold the butterfly by force. It holds it by providing the conditions within which the imaginal cells can complete their work — the membrane that maintains the necessary environment while the dissolution proceeds and the new form organises itself from within. The covenant is that membrane. It doesn’t determine the shape of what emerges. It determines whether what emerges carries, in its earliest organisation, the orientation that will make it something genuinely new — or whether it will arrive, as so many have arrived before it, at the familiar destination by the familiar route, wondering what went wrong.
The answer to that question, if we are paying attention, is always the same. Nothing went wrong. The pattern completed itself, as patterns do, in the absence of an architecture capable of interrupting it.
* * *
As the old model of industrial economism dies and a new paradigm emerges to take its place, the most crucial work of the imaginal cells must be to build that architecture before the next founding, not after. None of this is the work of vision. Every age produces its visionaries, and the next founding will not lack for people ready to declare what civilisation must become. Our job is to lay the ethical architecture before any vision settles what’s possible. To write the covenant. To mark the prohibitions. To do the hard normative labour while the community is still small enough to mean it. And before the tools arrive with their own answer already built in.
And then to hold that answer, generation by generation, against everything the dissolution will throw at it — the fear, the urgency, the old order’s offer of comfort and certainty — as the one thing that cannot be traded away without losing the reason the transformation was worth surviving.