Evolutionary Agents

The Bridge We All Missed

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The Bridge We All Missed

Municipalities and the Metacrisis

Michael Haupt

Apr 27, 2025

178

Transcript

Cầu Vàng (Golden Hands Bridge), Da Nang, Vietnam. Photo by Aleksandr Barsukov

The audio above is an AI-generated 'podcast' crafted with careful prompting and highly selected data sources, which you can view here.

Everyone’s looking for the big solution. The grand plan. The master strategy that will save us from ourselves.

But what if the answer has been hiding in plain sight for 8,000 years?

We’ve been here before. Twenty-six times, to be exact.

History isn’t just a series of random events.

It’s the story of how humans figured out how to work together at scale. First through tribes. Then through religion. Then through markets.

Each time we hit the limits of one system, we invented a new one.

And each time, there was a bridge.

Religion wasn’t just about gods and afterlives.

It was humanity’s first scalable operating system. When tribes grew too large for everyone to know everyone, we needed something bigger to bind us together, as our consciousness evolved from Magical to Mythical.

Shared myths. Common rituals. Universal values that transcended blood ties.

It worked amazingly well. For thousands of years, religions coordinated human behavior across vast distances and diverse populations.

But it had limits. And it certainly had its issues.

Enter the state — history’s most under-appreciated bridge-builder.

From Han Dynasty China to Medieval Europe, states didn’t just enforce religious norms. They transformed them into legal codes, property rights, and civic institutions.

When the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, it wasn’t just limiting the king’s power. It was laying the foundation for markets to emerge.

The state took religion’s moral codes and turned them into something new: rules that could coordinate strangers without requiring shared belief.

That’s what bridges do. They connect two places while being neither.

Markets changed everything.

Suddenly — and in parallel with a shift in Consciousness from Mythical to Material — coordination didn’t require authority or shared myths. It happened automatically, through millions of voluntary individual exchanges.

Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” coordinated human activity better than any king or priest ever could.

For 400 years, we’ve optimized this system. Made it faster. More efficient. More global.

But now we’re hitting the limits of this form of coordination.

Overshoot. Social fragmentation. Mental health epidemics. Democratic decay. Totalitarianism.

The market — like religion before it — can’t solve the problems it’s created.

We need a new bridge.

What we’re facing isn’t just a series of separate crises.

It’s a breakdown of how we coordinate. As humanity continues its incredible progress — guided by the Evolutionary Impulse — we’ve reached another marker where our operating system needs an upgrade.

Material Consciousness excels at extraction, competition, and growth. But it’s terrible at regeneration, connection, and limits.

And so our consciousness is evolving so we can handle complexity without creating more of it. And with it comes an evolved coordination system.

Something that works like Nature does—distributed, adaptive, and regenerative.

The people who study civilizational cycles call this potential transition a “Momentous Leap.”

And like before, we need a bridge.

This time, the bridge isn’t the nation-state.

It’s the municipality.

Cities aren’t just smaller versions of countries. They’re fundamentally different coordination systems.

They’re big enough to matter but small enough to change (with a little conscious, concerted effort and a roadmap). They map to natural boundaries. They operate at human scale.

While nations are locked in ideological gridlock, cities worldwide are quietly reinventing governance:

Adelaide with its citywide regeneration projects.
Barichara’s bioregional learning center.
Mexico City’s citizen-led urban restoration.

These aren’t random experiments. They’re prototypes and living laboratories of the next coordination system.

What makes municipalities perfect bridges?

They’re networked. While nations compete, cities naturally collaborate, sharing solutions across borders and ideologies.
They’re responsive (generally). When something doesn’t work, cities can pivot without requiring consensus from 51% of voters or shareholders.
They’re contextual. Each municipality exists in a specific watershed, climate zone, and cultural context. No one-size-fits-all solutions required.
More importantly, they’re where ancient and modern meet. Where traditional knowledge systems intersect with cutting-edge technology.
Most importantly, municipalities fit the historical trend of (some form of) the state bridging coordination systems.

What comes after Material Consciousness isn’t a mystery.

It’s called Mycelial Consciousness — or Planetary Consciousness if you prefer — a way of coordinating that’s neither top-down control nor chaotic individualism.

It’s distributed intelligence. Information and resources flowing to where they’re needed without central planning.

It’s how forests work. How the internet was supposed to work. And increasingly, how innovative municipalities already work. It’s the next logical iteration in the Evolution of Coordination Systems — in parallel with the Evolution of Consciousness.

The state isn’t disappearing in this transition. It’s evolving — from enforcer to enabler, from controller to connector.

Municipalities are where this evolution happens first.

Here’s what everyone misses about this moment:

We’re not just facing another transition. We’re facing the completion of a pattern.

From Magical to Mythical to Material Consciousness, each way of thinking expanded our capacity to coordinate at scale. And so we built coordination systems: Tribes, Religions, Markets.

Mimetic → Magical → Mythical → Material → Mycelial
Tribes → Settlements → Religions → Markets & Cities → Holism & Bioregions

But each system also created new problems that only the next system could solve.

The Mycelial approach is naturally what comes next. It’s a coordination system modeled on Nature’s own methods. It’s called Stigmergy and it has been refined over billions of years.

It doesn’t just solve the problems created by markets. It reintegrates what we’ve separated: humans from nature, economics from ecology, technology from community.

This isn’t just the next chapter. It’s the final chapter of a story 8,000 years in the making.

The state bridged religion to markets by creating legal frameworks, property rights, and neutral institutions.

Municipalities are doing something similar today.

They’re (slowly) taking market mechanisms and embedding them within ecological and social contexts called bioregions.

Look at the Generation Restoration Cities program:

Douala reconnecting economic development to mangrove ecosystems
Kochi reimagining waterways as shared commons
Naples repurposing agricultural waste for urban regeneration

These aren’t just environmental projects. They’re proto-institutions of a new coordination system — one that measures success in restored watersheds and strengthened communities, not just GDP growth.

Every successful bridge connects while transforming. That’s exactly what these municipal experiments are doing.

So what?

If you’re waiting for national governments or global institutions like the UN to lead this transition, you’ll be waiting a long time.

The real action is happening much closer to home:

Start by understanding your municipality’s history. Not the sanitized version, but the ecological and cultural patterns that shaped it over centuries.
Connect with those already doing the work — the watershed protectors, community builders, and local food innovators operating at the edges of the current system.
Most importantly, participate in your city’s future-making process. If it doesn’t have one, help start it.

Responding to the metacrisis isn’t complicated. It’s about seeing patterns, imagining alternatives, and acting locally.

The momentous leap isn’t something that happens to us.

It’s something we create together, step by step, neighborhood by neighborhood, municipality by municipality.

Religion gave us shared purpose. Markets gave us unprecedented prosperity. The next system gives us integration — harmony between human systems and living systems.

And municipalities are the perfect laboratories for this evolution.

They always have been.

We just weren’t paying attention.

Until now.

Author’s Note

This essay is a teeny glimpse into a much larger body of work I'm developing — one that attempts to scientifically map an evolutionarily coherent response to the metacrisis. The Bridge We All Missed proposes that municipalities are our most promising pathway forward. This is no flippant proposal. The insight comes from a comprehensive theoretical framework that integrates historical patterns with future possibilities. You can read and comment on the full framework here.

I am currently convening a Community of Practice to write a doctoral thesis that scientifically elaborates on the concepts presented in this brief essay. The thesis will provide mathematical models of historical patterns across 26 civilizational collapses, develop methodological frameworks for integrating historical analysis with futures literacy, and outline practical implementation pathways through transformation guided by municipalities.

This is, in many ways, an existential paper. I don’t say that lightly. Those currently in positions of power—whether in government, finance, or technology—are struggling to navigate what we call the metacrisis. They’re applying Material thinking to post-Material challenges. This thesis aims to provide decision-makers with a coherent framework for understanding both the historical patterns driving our current predicament and the emergent possibilities for transcending it.

If you found value in this essay’s perspective on municipalities as bridges to a new way of coordinating human activity, I invite you to join the incredible group of people working towards the completion of this thesis. Your involvement will help develop a science-based roadmap for navigating humanity’s momentous leap — one that could guide municipalities, organizations, and leaders worldwide in addressing our metacrisis not as separate problems to solve, but as an evolutionary opportunity to embrace.

To learn more or contribute to this work, please see (and comment on) the founding Google doc, visit https://petoc.michaelhaupt.com, or contact me directly at hello@michaelhaupt.com.

With gratitude,
Michael Haupt