On our podcast, David and I were fortunate to host one of the most fascinating people either of us has met, Dr. Michael Lerner. In the early 1970s, Dr. Lerner left a faculty position at Yale and, in his own pragmatic way, followed the spirit of the summer of love to help found a residential school for at-risk children. The founders were studying the precise role nutrition played in children’s learning and behavioral disorders, and they found that when these traumatized youth were taken out of punitive institutional settings and given healthy diets, skilled guidance, and individualized attention, their aggressive behaviors eased and they began to thrive. Three years on, that work grew into Commonweal, a health and environmental institute in Bolinas, California, which under his steady, pragmatic hand grew into a retreat that has helped countless people work through hard problems, from alternative treatments for cancer patients to those seeking other paths through terminal illness. These pursuits look ordinary enough now, but in the early 1970s, taking alternative healing seriously was frowned upon and often enough to end a career. He credits his own staying power to his pragmatism, and to never sitting in judgement of what someone else held to be true for themselves. He also played a part in turning Bolinas itself from a hippie destination into something more like a center for spiritual healing.
What draws me to Michael, as much as his long record of service to others, is how he sees the world – in particular, how he thinks about the existential threats facing the human race. He is regarded as one of the pioneering thinkers behind the idea of the “polycrisis” – not something his work has caused, but a framework he has helped shape for understanding how ecological breakdown, economic instability, and social injustice compound one another with each one making the others worse.
When we spoke with Michael about how he holds this idea in his mind, he told me he thinks of himself as a “cheerful catastrophist,” and he referenced a musical line from the a 1980’s REM song: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” What strikes me now is that this conversation about dystopia happened before the latest news of AI possibly outpacing its makers. I doubt Michael’s notion of polycrisis leaves out what technology is doing to us, though it never came up directly between us. And yet, having talked with him, and having sat with the idea that the end is something certain and something we must all learn to live alongside, I found myself ready to take in the recent AI news with a steadier eye. He spoke of the end as a certainty we cannot avoid, and said that the least we owe ourselves is to learn how to move through it.
That is more or less what I did. I had a trip planned to New York for the Primary conference, a gathering built around bringing founders and investors together. The talk of the end of the world was there, as it tends to be these days, but what struck me more were the technologies on display, the kind that stand to make our lives easier in ways hard to fully picture yet. And if our lives grow easier, perhaps that buys us the time to spend on what we love, and on the people we love to spend it with. This has me believe that respectfully, Michael is both right and wrong. I don’t think the end of the world is close. My own household had its brush with a potential life-ending health scare not too long ago – and for whatever reason, we, too, chose simply to feel fine.
Our podcast with Dr. Lerner will be released next week. Please keep an eye out for it and listen. We think you’ll be fascinated in the same way we were.
