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Otto Scharmer is the author of “Theory U” (2016) and co-founder of the Presencing Institute and the MITx u-lab. He works with leaders in the United Nations and in public, private and civil society organizations on awareness-based systems change.
I owe the primary inspiration for my life’s work to growing up on a family farm. Sixty-eight years ago, my parents transformed their farming methods from conventional to regenerative, prioritizing long-term soil resilience over short-term crop yields. And what I learned from my father is this: The quality of what grows above the ground depends on the quality of the soil beneath it.
Today, many decades later and many thousands of miles from the farm, my work focuses on cultivating the _social soil_ : the relationships, awareness and shared sensemaking from which all visible social systems grow. When the social soil is healthy — when trust runs deep, when shared reality holds, when people can communicate and sense together and act from it — everything above ground flourishes. When the social soil is depleted, no amount of structural reengineering can compensate. Structures become hollow. Coordination fails. Conflicts and wars increase. The system eats its own foundations.
We are living through a moment of radical depletion of our social soil. Three symptoms summarize this condition: _Anomie_ is the erosion of our moral norms, the collapse of our ethical behavior. _Atomie,_ the breakdown of social bonds into loneliness and polarized echo chambers, is the collapse of the relational web of connections on which society depends._Atrophy_ is the gradual loss of the deeper human capacities needed to create, converse and collaborate in ways that embody our humanity. It is the collapse of agency itself, both individual and collective.
Beneath all three lies a fourth dimension that connects them. Just as industrial agriculture replaced the diversity of the living soil with chemical fertilizers and crop monocultures — productive in the short term, devastating over time — the current AI moment is producing an _epistemic monoculture_. It manifests in a single, computational form of knowing that views the world as a set of objects.
The quality of the human-AI interface is sure to shape the future of society and humanity. More than $2.5 trillion is projected to flow into AI in 2026 alone, yet the human side of the equation — the cultivation of sensing, relating and sensemaking — receives almost none of it.
This is soil depletion at a civilizational scale. We see it manifest in the deepening of ecological devastation, such as climate change and biodiversity loss; in social divides, including polarization and war; and in spiritual consequences, like hopelessness and feelings of insignificance. And so we find ourselves at a threshold, one where the planetary polycrisis demands not just better policies or technologies, but a shift in our structure of consciousness.
## **The First Axial Age**
Roughly 2,500 years ago, something remarkable happened. It occurred not in one place but across the Eurasian continents, largely in parallel. Against the backdrop of Bronze Age civilizations collapsing, empires disintegrating, city-states competing and waves of migration and warfare reshaping social structures, the old mythic orders were failing. Local, myth-based traditions could no longer hold the weight of human experience. And out of that turbulence, new kinds of questions broke through: _What does it mean to be human? How shall we live? What is our place in the larger order of things?_
Within a few centuries, the responses to these questions crystallized into several of the world’s enduring wisdom traditions. In China, Confucius, Laozi and Zhuangzi explored ethics, harmony and alignment with the Dao. In India, the Upanishadic traditions, the Buddha and Mahavira investigated the nature of consciousness, liberation and nonviolence. In Persia, Zarathustra articulated a cosmic moral struggle between good and evil. In the Hebrew world, the prophets, voices like Isaiah, called for justice and ethical monotheism. And in Greece, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle began a systematic inquiry into ethics, knowledge and the nature of reality.
German philosopher Karl Jaspers named this the Axial Age. What these movements shared, despite their vast differences, was the discovery of a deeper interior dimension of the human being. For the first time, human beings stepped back from the immediacy of mythic experience and turned inward. They developed capacities for moral reflection, compassion and the articulation of universal ethical principles. A new vertical axis opened, linking the inner life of the individual with something transcendent: a universal moral order, a ground of being, a deeper source beyond the self.
Yet this shift carried an unintended cost. As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, the long arc of this development eventually gave rise to modernity and its “buffered self,” a self that is autonomous and self-authorizing, but also increasingly disembedded from the larger cosmos. Mind became separated from body, subject from object, self from nature.
> “Just as industrial agriculture replaced the diversity of the living soil with chemical fertilizers and crop monocultures — productive in the short term, devastating over time — the current AI moment is producing an epistemic monoculture.”
The first Axial Age opened the depths of individual interiority. But in doing so, it also began to loosen the experience of relating to the whole. In that sense, as Taylor suggests, the Axial project remains unfinished, awaiting a completion that the original Axial thinkers could not have foreseen, but that our moment urgently demands.
## **AI As Modernity’s Mirror**
Our current AI moment, which renders the world as its resource, is the culmination of modernity’s extractive current — and its most vivid mirror. It is a brilliant automation of subject-object knowing: intelligence without interiority, pattern without presence, prediction without deep sensing. The structure of consciousness that the first Axial Age opened has been mechanized on its outward-facing side and severed from its source. Just as reflexive modernity backfires onto its own foundations, as seen through climate chaos, social fracture and political polarization, AI is an intelligence that depletes its own soil.
Model collapse is a case in point. AI trained on AI-generated output degrades rapidly. Even tiny fractions of AI-generated data can trigger collapse. The only remedy is a continuously growing supply of human-generated content. But more than 74% of newly published web pages now contain AI-generated text. Junior developer hiring has dropped 67% since 2022. The machine consumes the living sources on which it depends.
On the human side, the equivalent is cognitive debt. When AI is used to handle cognitive work passively, according to a recent MIT Media Lab study, neural connectivity weakens, retention goes down and the quality of the output declines. The brain, like large language models, degrades when severed from its sources of engagement.
Model collapse and cognitive debt are not separate problems. They are part of the same dynamic that depletes our social soil and manifests as anomie, atomie and atrophy across our social systems globally. Both point to a deeper issue: We have been operating with a single form of knowing, and when it consumes its own foundations, the entire system degrades.
## **The Three Intelligences**
The AI moment reveals that what we have been calling “intelligence” is not one thing. There are at least three different intelligences that need to be balanced and integrated in today’s institutions and social systems.
The first is _artificial intelligence_. Its epistemic stance is third-person knowledge: the world as a set of objects, as a data-shaped environment. Though powerful, it is locked in an epistemic stance that operates on patterns of the past.
The second is _organic intelligence_. Its epistemic stance is first-person (subjective), second-person (intersubjective) and third-person (objective) knowing. It views the world as a shared space of co-existing, living beings. This inherently holds multiple relational perspectives.
The third, emerging intelligence could be called _field_ or _source intelligence_. Its epistemic stance shifts the viewpoint from a set of objects to a source — the field or soil __ from which all perspectives arise. It’s a shift not only in the observed, but in the being of the observer. Through that subtle shift, the collective field can become aware of __ itself.
This is what the mystics knew, what Indigenous knowledge systems have always practiced and what the second Axial threshold calls us to cultivate at the collective and civilizational scale. My colleague Eva Pomeroy and I describe this epistemological stance as _fourth-person_ _knowing_.
The three intelligences represent a plurality of epistemic stances, from a mono-epistemic awareness (artificial intelligence) to a multi-epistemic awareness (organic intelligence) and from there to a meta-epistemic awareness (source intelligence). For societies and ecosystems to flourish, all three need to be developed and integrated.
## **The Current Axial Threshold**
The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations was the challenge that gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude.
That rupture demands a reordering of the structure of consciousness — this time, at the level of collective awareness. For the first time in human history, the challenges we face demand a planetary response. This will require a massive upgrade of human collaboration at local, regional and planetary scales, which will be possible only by improving social soil. Where modernity externalized coordination into markets, bureaucracies and algorithms or AI, we must re-embed it into fields of shared awareness, including attention and intention.
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> “More than $2.5 trillion is projected to flow into AI in 2026 alone, yet the human side of the equation — the cultivation of sensing, relating and sensemaking — receives almost none of it. This is soil depletion at a civilizational scale.”
If the first Axial Age deepened interiority at the individual level, the present threshold calls for something structurally new: a deepening of _collective interiority_. As a facilitator of many group processes in local communities and international institutions, I have been struck by questions that I have heard more over the past year or two than ever before: _What does it mean to be a human being? Who am I? What am I here for?_ _What are we here for?_ These are, remarkably, the same questions that broke through during the first Axial Age — now arising in collective settings.
To meaningfully reckon with such questions, we need all three forms of intelligence in concert, with source intelligence as the foundation. We also need awareness-based social leadership technologies, methods, tools and support structures for cultivating the social soil from which collective agency arises.
## **The Heretics’ Renaissance?**
The West has always harbored two cultural currents. The first, extractive current is familiar: industrial capitalism, colonial expansion, shareholder maximization and now the AI monoculture. This is the modernity of depleted soil.
The second, regenerative current is a counter-mainstream current within the Western tradition. German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe developed a participatory science that deepened the quality of beholding and honored phenomena from within. British researcher Henri Bortoft articulated a mode of perception in which the whole is revealed through the parts. Chilean biologist Francisco Varela linked phenomenological practice with neuroscience. German idealism developed philosophies of _bildung_ : the cultivation of the whole human being. This tradition directly inspired the Danish folk high school movement, which transformed Scandinavia from poor feudal societies into some of the world’s most successful democracies within a generation. It happened not through economic policy, but through _folk-bildung_ : the systematic cultivation of ordinary people’s inner development, moral imagination and civic agency.
The reach of _folk-bildung_ extends far beyond Scandinavia. In the early 1930s, American educator and political activist Myles Horton studied the folk high schools in Denmark and then returned to Tennessee to found the Highlander Folk School on the same principles: no grades, no degrees, just people learning together how to act on what matters. It was at Highlander that Rosa Parks attended a workshop on desegregation four months before she refused to give up her bus seat. Other civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, John Lewis and Ralph Abernathy also trained there. Tennessee eventually shut the school down, calling it a “Communist training school.” But the movement it had helped catalyze could not be stopped.
The regenerative current can be found across cultures and geographies. It intersects with and is complemented by Indigenous knowing, the decolonial critique and the contemplative traditions of the wisdom lineages that trace back to the first Axial Age. What the Goethean scientist, the Buddhist contemplative, the Anishinaabe knowledge keeper and the Quaker elder share is a commitment to forms of knowing that go deeper than subject-object cognition — forms that require the participation of the whole person embedded within a community. These were the heretics. They discovered direct access to the vertical axis, and they were marginalized because this threatened the institutional structures that claimed to mediate between the human and the transcendent.
This deeper current has continued across wisdom traditions and manifested in a planetary moment that demands its gifts at a scale the heretics could never have imagined. The second Axial threshold democratizes and collectivizes what the heretics knew individually and in small communities — not through a new prophet descending from the mountain, but through a shift in awareness that perhaps is the most important and least noticed event of our time.
This quiet shift continues to deepen through practices, such as deep sensing; through methods and tools, such as generative dialogue; through the development of shared language, such as fourth-person knowing; and through support structures and __ reimagined institutions, such as the Highlander Folk School. The heretics could not scale because they lacked these elements — the beginnings of which we now have.
Yet moving forward will still require inner work to see the extractive current composted and the regenerative current cultivated. Could we see the heretics at the beginning of a new renaissance?
## **Reimagining Our Core Institutions & Practices**
Just as the first Axial shift generated a whole new host of institutions and practices, we now must reimagine our existing institutions and create new collaborative structures that our sectorized setup mostly lacks. There are several emerging opportunities for innovation.
> “The first Axial Age opened the depths of individual interiority. But in doing so, it also began to loosen the experience of relating with the whole.”
Our _educational ecosystems_ must shift from knowledge transmission to the cultivation of multi- and meta-epistemic capacities. The Highlander Folk School movement proves this is not utopian. We need a free, high-quality, multi-local, regionally grounded folk high school 3.0 for the planetary age.
Our _information_ and _media ecosystems_ must shift from attention-fracking to collective sensemaking. We need media architectures that support deep understanding and dialogue rather than polarized echo chambers.
Our _democratic structures_ must evolve beyond the current forms of mostly procedural democracy, too often captured by special interest groups. Citizens’ assemblies, piloted from Ireland to Taiwan to the Global Citizens’ Assembly for COP30, represent the kind of innovation needed: deliberative spaces where citizens learn together, sense together and develop recommendations from shared understanding rather than partisan positioning.
Our _economic institutions_ must move beyond mere shareholder value, the perfect expression of mono-epistemic intelligence. They currently treat nature, humans and our own attention as commodities that can be extracted and depleted. Human and planetary flourishing require rebalancing all three intelligences within economic governance in ways that shift the boundaries of competition and collaboration to enable innovation at the scale of the whole system. For example, new regional coordination and finance mechanisms could advance healthy soil, healthy food and human health as integrated ecosystems.
To do all the above, we need a _new social contract_ for the age of AI. The current arrangement — the commodification and extraction of our lived experience into data analytics that are sold to manipulate human behavior — should not be legal. No one agreed to this effective “land grab” by big data companies. Our extracted experience is sold and weaponized against us to redirect attention toward paid content and to activate anger, hate and fear for maximizing user engagement. These companies are inflicting harm to billions of people while building trillion-dollar tech empires that continue to undermine our democratic and societal foundations — our social soil.
We need to reclaim our data sovereignty by recognizing that people and their communities are the subjects, not the raw material, of the AI-enabled economy. We need a social contract that allows us to collaboratively govern how AI operates in our lives — not behind closed lobbying doors, but through democratic processes and dialogue. A constitution for the age of AI.
And finally, to complete the Axial project, we need _new civic infrastructures_ — institutions whose explicit purpose is to cultivate social soil. These are the missing support structures that help compost modernity and reimagine how we live and work together.
But how does systemic change in hypercomplex systems actually work? Not through centralized control and not through abstract master plans. An insight from nonlinear systems theory, associated with the Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, helps to explain how this can work. Systems held far from equilibrium can be reorganized at bifurcation points by small islands of coherence — local pockets of new order that, once connected, can shift the entire system to a higher state. The civic infrastructures, the citizens’ assemblies, the reimagined schools, the regenerative farms, the mission-driven enterprises, the new social contract — these are exemplary islands of coherence that we need to nurture, weave and connect across places and regions.
## **Tending The Soil**
My parents’ family farm, which now operates as a cooperative with steward ownership, is one among many of these islands that, over time, have become nodes in a much larger ecosystem of agricultural and civilizational renewal.
One day, when I was 16 years old, I returned from school and saw our farm in flames. Most of the 250-year-old farmhouse had already burned down. Seeing the world I had been living in up to that point as a burning heap of rubble felt like the ground was being pulled from under me. The next day, my then-87-year-old grandfather, who happened to be in the final week of his life, came for a last visit to the farm. When he exited the car, his head did not turn to the still-burning rubble. He went straight to my father, who was busy with cleanup work. He took his hand and said, “Head up, my boy. Look forward!”
“A farmer who puts his hands to the plow,” he continued, “must look forward.”
That attitude — to turn your attention not toward the loss, but toward the new horizon of possibility — made a lasting impression on me. Today, it’s not just a farm, but the whole planet and our various civilizational structures that we see going up in flames. Yet we cannot create human flourishing on an exhausted soil, which degrades from within. This is the threshold we face. AI is holding up the mirror. What do we see? _Ourselves_. We see the mono-epistemic structure, the subject-object split, that we have been enacting collectively for too long and that still undergirds most of our institutional designs.
> “AI trained on AI-generated output degrades rapidly. But more than 74% of newly published web pages now contain AI-generated text.”
Are we entering a second Axial Age? We see a beginning shift in consciousness that shows up in many faces. One is a rapidly growing frustration with the status quo and the feeling that some radical change is called for today. Another shows up as a quiet movement of countless place-based initiatives and living examples across the world. It’s a profound sense of future potential. But that potential needs our agency. It will manifest only if we tend the social soil at both the interpersonal and the collective levels by imagining and shaping new practices and institutions — exactly how the first Axial shift came into being.
Many of these living examples exist at the local or regional level. Some take shape in the cracks of old institutions. If we connect, support and weave these islands, we can build the capacity to shift the structure of awareness at the level of the whole. Why? Because the deepening of our current rupture creates space for a possible intentional shift from intelligence without interiority to intelligence with interiority. From pattern without presence to pattern with presence.
It will not happen tomorrow or all at once. It will take real work. But being alive on this planet at this Axial juncture, where we can see the potential for both civilizational collapse and profound civilizational regeneration, and thus being part of a generation that has the opportunity to tip the balance in one direction or another, is perhaps the most meaningful gift anyone could hope for.
My father did not force the harvest. He tended the soil. He trusted that if the soil was right, what needed to grow would grow.
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