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The Great Unsettling
What do you call a year that includes a global pandemic, a global uprising against racial injustice and an extra divisive US presidential election?
I call it the Great Unsettling.
The rumbles and signs of this unsettling started many years ago and were propelled forward by much broader access to information, smartphones, the proliferation of content, social media — and other internet-related phenomena. Sadly, all of this technology created a kind of unsustainable busy-ness that covered up issues and injustices.
At Root + River, we refer to the old world as the World of Convention. This world was all about production, expansion, hierarchy, order. In this world, we put up with a lot of bullshit in the name of security and stability. In this world, tradition and heritage were valued — as long as it was the tradition and heritage of a majority. The World of Convention ran on institutional trust. And when that trust began to finally erode, this world came crashing down in the Great Unsettling.
Humanity goes through these great unsettlings every 50–150 years. They are painful, but necessary times — a part of what Martin Luther King, Jr. was referring to when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In each unsettling, institutions crumble or evolve, old ways die, new ways emerge. And we highly…
