How to fulfill your dream of escape

I am a university professor at a German university of applied sciences. My work is largely academic, and so I talk to many academics. A constant in those conversations is that people experience an exhaustion with the mechanisms of the academy: hyper-competitive funding, short-term contracts, and — especially in the sustainability sciences — the way action dissolves into abstraction. Let’s call this system I.

I also run a research and education institute. The work there is academic too, but the people I meet through it are, for lack of a better word, system crashers: people who left academia because it was too confining, who start businesses, programs, art projects, communities, psychedelic therapies. And the like. Many of them left system I in order to build something different. Let’s call this system II.

In my day-to-day life I oscillate between the two. One minute I am developing self-inquiries for connecting with the more-than-human — animals, plants, spirits — and the next I am grading agile project management exams.

I love the tension.

I would also, often, love to dedicate my life entirely to system II.

What I keep seeing, though, is that most people devoted to system II cannot escape the larger mechanisms of system I. And I don’t just mean academia. I mean the older machinery underneath it — markets, contracts, metrics, habits of winning — machinery that visibly no longer serves the reality we’re in, yet keeps running through us all the same.

What I keep seeing, though, is that most people devoted to system II cannot escape the larger mechanisms of system I … machinery that visibly no longer serves the reality we’re in, yet keeps running through us all the same.

Something I often see people grapple with is that we are somehow caught in system I induced with content from system II. The grander conditions remain the same:

We want funding, outreach, growth, impact, recognition.

Win.

While the ideas inside are often revolutionary, renegade and radical, we seem to be so deeply embedded in what makes “winning” that a true system II is yet to be built.

For a long time I read this as failure. Or even hypocrisy.

The system crashers hadn’t escaped anything, had they?

The flaw, though, is in the idea of escape all together.

Escape assumes that a system is a place — a building with an inside and an outside, walls we can walk through and be done with.

But this is not what systems are.

A system is not a container, but a pattern of relations.

Academia is not the buildings in which it happens. It is a particular way that money, attention, status, and time flow between people. And we do not stand inside a pattern of relations. We are made of it. The wanting-to-win is not something system I does to me from the outside. It is something system I does as me. I carry the funding call in me. When I sit down to design a program for connecting with plants and spirits, and the first question that arises is: how will this scale? It’s me system-I-ing.

This is why “leaving” is impossible. We walk patterned.

And: if systems are relations rather than places, then they are not escaped — they are re-woven. And re-weaving does not require an outside. It happens in place, thread by thread, relation by relation.

The anthropologist Anna Tsing studied the matsutake mushroom, which cannot be farmed, resists every attempt at plantation logic, and grows best in ruined, human-disturbed forests. Life, she argues, keeps emerging in the cracks of the dominant system — not by defeating it, not by building its replacement on a greenfield somewhere, but in patches of small collaborations with their own internal logic, feeding on the system’s disturbances.

Life, she argues, keeps emerging in the cracks of the dominant system … in patches of small collaborations with their own internal logic, feeding on the system’s disturbances.

Bayo Akomolafe similar talks about “the cracks” as conducive spaces for real emergence.

This is what system II actually is. System II will not be launched, funded, and scaled — those are system I verbs, and anything that can be described in system I verbs is system I.

System II grows wherever relations are woven differently. Mostly unimpressive, from the perspective of winning. Thus — at least for me — very difficult to reconcile with.

Which brings me back to my own oscillation.

Ecologists have a word for the zone where two ecosystems meet — for example where the forest becomes meadow or where the river becomes sea. They call it an ecotone.

An ecotone is reliably one of the most alive places in the landscape with more species and more novelty than in either system alone.

The edge is its own fertile habitat.

I used to think my life between the systems was a transitional arrangement — that grading agile project management exams was the price I paid while waiting to cross over fully into system II, the way we might hold a day job while writing a novel. Now I think there may be no “over” to cross into, because there is no outside, and that the edge is not where I am stuck, but where the weaving happens. Every funding application I write can also be a chance to smuggle a differently-shaped relation into system I.

Now I think there may be no “over” to cross into, because there is no outside, and that the edge is not where I am stuck, but where the weaving happens.

So when someone tells me they want to leave it all behind and finally build system II, or when I myself fantasize about this, I have started to ask which cracks in system I are open enough for system II to germinate in.