A Solarpunk Worldview
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In creating a solarpunk society, it may seem obvious that we require a solarpunk worldview. Yet, what exactly do we mean by worldview?
Koltko-Rivera defines worldview as, “sets of beliefs and assumptions,” but he advises us to “think of a worldview not as a […] description of reality, but as a lens through which one reads reality.”1
In other words, a worldview shapes and organizes our perception, interpretations, and predictions about what we experience.
If something happens to us, our worldview determines how we understand that event. Before we even begin to consider how to respond, our worldview has already cut-off entire worlds of possible response given the understanding we come to. When we actually begin to respond, our worldview again determines which responses we can even begin to consider as legitimate. By the time we finally respond, we’re left with a tiny fraction of the responses that could have been possible. When that response then has real consequences in the world that we must interpret and understand, we are again caught behind the lens of our worldview.
It seems then that we ought to understand very deeply what our worldview actually entails. Unfortunately, as you can likely imagine, our understanding of our worldview is itself defined by our worldview. It might be easy to be thrust into a terrified nihilism because of that realization, feeling ourselves trapped within a worldview that closes any possibility of ever transcending it. When we look to those who have such horrifying worldviews that are destroying the planet, it would be all the easier to become all the more horrified that they have no hope of ever changing.
Fortunately, it’s not so hopeless. The simple fact is that our worldviews are not static, crystallized prisms imprisoning us in our current identity. They are after-all, not actually “lenses” like the glasses you may now feel on your face. They are instead fluid processes constantly updating and shifting as they’re confronted with the real world.2,3 They’re lenses that change as they filter the world they offer to us.
Given the hope for updating our worldviews, we are again called to actually reflect on what our worldview is and what it ought to be. Where do we actually begin?
Taves, Asprem, and Ihm have created a worldview model consisting of several “big philosophical questions” which can help us begin offering our own answers.4 Together, those answers constitute our worldview. Once we have those answers, we can also begin asking new questions in order to come up with new answers that actually align with the kind of worldview we seek to have. Here are the 5 big philosophical questions:4
1. Ontology – or map of reality, what exists and how does it behave?
2. Epistemology – how do we know what we know?
3. Axiology – what do we value?
4. Praxeology – what should we do? What actions should we take?
5. Cosmology – where do we come from and where are we going?
If we have an ontology in which angels, demons, and hell are “real”, then that is going to inform all other aspects of our worldview. If someone confronts us with knowledge about how the world “really” works, then our epistemology is going to be incredibly constrained. No matter what evidence they might offer us about some other “reality”, we cannot believe them because we know angels and demons exist, even though we may not have any evidence whatsoever.
When it comes to creating a solarpunk society then, what happens if we believe that human beings exist as homo entrepreneurialus? This is my name for Wendy Brown’s entrepreneurial self, the idea that evolution has created human beings as innately capitalist.5 This is a very specific ontological statement about what humans are and it constrains quite severely what we could value, what we can do in the world, and thus, what we can envision for our future. From that perspective, if solarpunk is fundamentally post-capitalist, then it amounts to a complete waste of time.
As someone who’s dedicated himself to the co-creation of solarpunk, you can see how this creates a pretty significant problem for me. To solve that problem then, I am beginning a new era for this Substack. My reading and writing will now be organized around the articulation of a solarpunk worldview. This isn’t something I aim to do myself, but is instead an invitation for you to be a fellow creator of this emerging worldview.
As Grant Maxwell writes, this is because:6
“the peoples that emerged coextensively with mythology in pre-antiquity were generally defined by unified languages and cultures, a primary question that we now face is how to integrate the inextricably intertwined dissonance of our multicultural and multilingual nations into an emergent entity that satisfies the urgent requirement for global solutions to global problems while avoiding the totalitarian erasure of heterogenous difference, thus maintaining an open and pluralist society.”
In other words, given that our world is now a truly global world, one that includes numerous cultures that consist of an immense array of interpenetrating subcultures, a solarpunk worldview has a significant challenge. Again, rather than being a static framework or description of the reality we seek to create, a solarpunk worldview is a process that allows us to interact with ourselves, our world, and with each other in ways that allow us to collaborate toward solarpunk rather than compete into the fragmented and polarized chaos we seem to be headed toward.
Collaboration must also not mean erasure of diversity because, importantly, diversity is the lifeblood of progress. Here I define progress as post-capitalist, meaning that a world that becomes more capitalist, or even worse, more technofeudal, is regression.7 This is for the simple reason that any economic system that depends on infinite growth in a finite world is doomed to self-termination.1 Put more simply, the economy can’t grow indefinitely forever.
Solarpunk as a vision of progress is thus not a colonialist enterprise that seeks to erase all diversity, but is a truly global project that emerges from the collaborative dialogue between the diverse cultures that share this planet.
Maxwell writes further about integrating visions:6
“Integration is an openness to paradox, a recognition that all modes of relation coexist in various concentrations in each of us, that these concentrations shift and fluctuate over time, and that the world always exceeds our capacity for final comprehension. Paradoxes are the anomalies that reveal interstices where we can emerge into more expansive domains, the fissures through which the light shines that may illuminate the darkness beyond a bright nucleus of consciousness, the virtual domains of reality brought into actuality through creative invention.”
A solarpunk worldview exists on the horizon of possibility, a promise of a future integration that can only exist when we see a final integration as an unreachable and undesirable goal. This means that the fruit of any collaborative dialogue is the opportunity for further dialogue, for further challenge, disagreement, and co-creation. Such a process is important because no worldview can ever be the final say. The worldview questions above are, quite clearly, not answers. Even though a question invites an answer, the fact of the matter is that we must hold onto the question.
Complexity theorist Alicia Juarrero explains clearly why this is the case in her discussion of hermeneutics, or our theory and method of interpretation:8
“Nineteenth-century hermeneutics failed to take into account that the explainer, as much as the phenomenon explained, is embedded in time and space. Twentieth-century students of hermeneutics, in contrast, have finally come to appreciate that interpretation is doubly historical. The phenomenon being explained has a history, and so must be understood within that history; but interpreters, too, are situated within history, within a tradition, which their interpretation both reflects and influences. This double historicity affects the pragmatics of explanation. […] If explainers are as much situated in a context (a tradition) as the phenomenon they are trying to explain, bringing this background-that-goes-without-saying to the foreground is a valuable contribution to the pragmatics of explanation: it helps determine how much the explanatory context itself has contributed to the explanation.”
That is to say, any worldview worth its salt must be able to offer a theory of the one who has that worldview. This is obvious when we consider the worldviews held by an adult, a child, or a dog. A dog’s worldview may seem a bit ridiculous, but Taves and colleagues state explicitly that the first 4 questions can be answered, however implicitly, by non-human animals.4 As such, we must take into account theories of psychological development that articulate just precisely how cognition differs between an adult, a child, and a dog. Such theories of development can show us how we can get better at making better worldviews.
Yet, there’s also an important distinction that I think Taves and colleagues gloss over. This essay is already longer than I had originally planned and so I want to be clear that this is, ironically, a glossing over of a more complex topic we’ll discuss in the future.
When we look at “cosmology” we see that it is in fact two questions, “where have we come from and where are we going?”
Where we come from is quite clearly our history. A solarpunk future requires a solarpunk understanding of its past. For example, are we truly a hierarchical species that is innately patriarchal, as the Red Pill manosphere seems to believe? Quite clearly, not exactly.9,10 Yet, we have to articulate clearly what our history actually entails.
When it comes to our future, I want to state that this is better conceived as a mythos. This may seem odd. Firstly because myths are supposed to be falsehoods. Secondly because myths include an understanding of our past.
On that first point, a myth is not merely a falsehood. It can also be an orienting story. A mythos includes a narrative and praxis that orients us to ourselves and our world in ways that adapt us to the challenges we face. We can see then that a mythos acts as a way to connect our history to our praxeology into our future. In other words, given where we come from, what must we do in order to make our story about the future a reality?
Our praxis consists of specific practices, yes, but also rituals and festivals that bring our narrative to life and that bring us as characters within that narrative to life. When world, narrative, character, and praxis are aligned, we recreate that alignment through our engagement in that mythos.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, we are already characters bound within a narrative with practices, rituals, and festivals that come with it. National anthems, holidays, statues of celebrated people, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of it all, are all part of the mythos we currently live, and they are creating us as people with certain goals, hopes, and fears.
If we unconsciously practice certain rituals that align us to a mythos that actualizes a horrifying future, then we cannot be surprised when that’s the kind of future that becomes a reality. Peter Thiel imagines a future that makes him hesitate when asked if humans are a part of that future. Such a future is likely to amplify income inequality before creating a climate catastrophe that destroys us all.
We can thus see that our survival, let alone our thriving, depends on us having a mythos that is not only inspiring, optimistic, and beautiful, but one that can actually come into reality.
With all of that being said, we have to understand a mythos as a story that can be understood. That is to say, a mythos isn’t the entire articulation of a worldview, but is the worldview filtered into a narrative. As such, a worldview contains a mythos that articulates the worldview in a form that can be understood and learned from by those that wish to have that worldview.
To be more clear then, when I say mythos is a narrative I don’t mean that it’s a work of fiction, but rather that it is a story about our future in the same way that saying we want an AI to liberate us from wage labour is a story about our future.
Moving forward then, I will categorize all of my essays into the 6 worldview questions. Below you can find 6 headings with all of my essays categorized into the 6 worldview questions. Additionally, each category will also have subcategories.
I’m doing this because while writing my Solarpunk Self series I ran into the problem that the longer the series became, the more investment you the reader were forced to make. While my essays can be categorized, I also want each one to be as standalone as possible. Rather than write long series, I want you to be able to jump in at any point. However, because many essays will follow a similar theme, I want to create a space where you can go to see how they connect. This will make the most sense when you see the categories themselves, so I won’t say more.
Suffice it say that I want my essays to be digestible for you the reader, but I also want to offer you clear connections so that you can understand the whole picture if you desire.
That is the essay, so thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
Ontology
Epistemology
Axiology
Praxeology
History
Mythos
References:
1 – Koltko-Rivera, M. E. (2004). The Psychology of Worldviews. Review of General Psychology, 8(1), 3–58. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.8.1.3
2 – Dempsey, B. G. (n.d.). Psyche and Symbolic Learning. Sky Meadow Press.
3 – Storm, J. A. J. (2021). Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. University of Chicago Press.
4 – Taves, A. (2020). From religious studies to worldview studies. Religion, 50(1), 137–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2019.1681124
5 – Brown, W. (2017). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books.
6 – Maxwell, G. (2022). Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic. Routledge.
7 – Varoufakis, Y. (2024). Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House.
8 – Juarrero, A. (2002). Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. Bradford Books.
9 – Boehm, C. (2001). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press.
10 – Power, C. (n.d.). Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “How to change the course of human history.” LibCom. Retrieved June 30, 2026, from https://libcom.org/article/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-response-david-graeber-david-wengrows-how-change-course
Can’t remember if I got that from Nate Hagens or Daniel Schmachtenberger