The Collapse of Our Mythology: Can Humanity Choose What's Next? with Charles Eisenstein

**Charles Eisenstein** (0:00)
This is the biggest change in my beliefs that has happened over the last 10 years. I no longer think that ecological limits, resource limits, energy limits are going to force us to change. If we want to continue the story of separation, we will do so at a greater and greater and greater cost to the rest of life and to our own souls. The increasingly difficult conditions to sustain that are a louder and louder invitation for us to ask, what do we want to sustain?
How do we want to live? How do we want to be? We got to bring it all in. Once we do that, then let's start asking, what is mine to do?

**Nate Hagens** (0:43)
You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together, and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification.
Today, I'm joined by frequently requested guest, Charles Eisenstein, to discuss how the story of separation permeates through our culture and our institutions, shaping how we relate to each other and the natural world. Most importantly, Charles and I explore how the mindset of separation causes us to get in our own way as we navigate the unfolding more than human predicament. Charles Eisenstein is an American author, public speaker, and teacher whose work focuses on civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. He graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a degree in mathematics and philosophy, and spent the following decade at a Chinese-English translator before turning to writing and speaking full-time, including as the former speechwriter for RFK Jr. Charles is the author of many books, including The Ascent of Humanity, Sacred Economics, and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. In this conversation, Charles and I wind through economics, money, climate, and language, tracing how the stories we tell ourselves ultimately shape the physical world that we live in and how we experience that world. We talk about why separation sits at the root of so many of our largest crises today and why trying to solve those crises by using the same narratives that created them gets us nowhere. Instead, Charles argues that by re-framing our stories towards one of inter-being, we can start planting the seeds of a different system even as the old one falls apart around us. With that, please welcome Charles Eisenstein.
Charles Eisenstein, great to see you.

**Charles Eisenstein** (3:13)
Good to be here, Nate. Happy to be talking to you.

**Nate Hagens** (3:17)
You are probably one of the top five most requested guests over the years. I'm glad we're finally able to schedule this and have a conversation. You've spent over two decades writing and speaking about foundational stories and mythologies that underpin human civilization. You especially focus on the concept or the idea of separation.
So before we go down into any specific rabbit holes, maybe you can share why you've centered your work so heavily around the stories that we tell ourselves and maybe give a concrete example about how our current cultural mythology actually shapes everyday lived experience.

**Charles Eisenstein** (4:05)
Okay. Yeah. I'll try to do it without sounding like I'm expressing metaphysical cliches that everybody's familiar with already. But the basic idea is that the world that we collectively create is a product of the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about who we are, why we're here, what the nature of reality is, what the purpose of human life is, what the purpose of the human species is, where we fit in the totality of the cosmos, like all these things that every culture talks about. Some of these stories take the form of explicit ideologies and others are implicit.
The deepest one that I've explored, I call it the story of separation, which essentially says, who are you? You are a separate individual.
That could take the form of a soul encased in flesh. It could be a self-interest maximizing genetically programmed machine. It could be a bubble of psychology inside of a flesh robot. It could be framed economically, an economic actor seeking to maximize its financial self-interest. Whether it's biology, religion, science, economics, it all converges on the same idea of what a self is, what a human being is, and therefore, what motivates a human being, and what the relation of the human being is to other human beings and to the rest of, I'll call it creation. So part of that story of separation is not only me separate from you, but also humans separate from nature, and there's also a psychological separation in the sense that intelligence is believed to be something that human beings possess, but that's not suffused into the world overall. The world overall is simply a collection of impersonal forces acting on generic particles, on masses, that are random and certainly indifferent to the human story. Therefore, human progress consists in rising to mastery of these impersonal or even hostile forces.