The Reckoning Is Here
Our "rendezvous with destiny" in this hinge moment of history
The 7 Stages of Regenerative Futurism: A Generational Guide
We aren't merely observers of history. We are active co-creators of what comes next.
From Chaotic Fractures to Regenerative Futures
"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." - Leonard Cohen
We are not passive observers of history. We are its co-creators.
Something fundamental is breaking. You can feel it in the headlines that grow more volatile by the day, in the dismantling of institutions buckling under attacks it can no longer withstand, and in the growing chasm between what we're told (and gaslit to believe by misinformation and propaganda) and what we actually experience. This isn't just another crisis cycle. As I’ve been saying in my global lectures for a few years now, this is the sound of an entire civilization reaching the end of what it can sustain.
“The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters."
- Antonio Gramsci, written from within a Fascist prison
And we—all of us—are standing in that liminal space where everything pivots on what we do next.
The Fracture Where Light Enters
Just this week here in my home base in the Los Angeles area, thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines were mobilized against immigration protests, overriding California's leadership and prompting a constitutional lawsuit from Governor Newsom. Armed forces on city streets to manage largely peaceful demonstrations. Fake crises and “mayhem” manufactured in their rhetoric and by the media to justify military occupation in the name of "security."
And it's escalating. Yesterday, Marines detained a US Army veteran who wasn't even protesting- just heading to the VA office. Meanwhile, peaceful protesting veterans were mass-arrested at the Capitol in DC. The very people who swore oaths to defend the Constitution, now being arrested for exercising the rights they served to protect.
And as I write this, we're learning of targeted assassinations of Democratic lawmakers and their spouses in Minnesota. Lawmakers and their families now requiring protection from the very extremists the regime emboldens.
But while they try to distract with manufacturing fear about chaos in LA, I was experiencing the actual reality. LA was peaceful. I moved freely through the city—grabbing tacos in East LA, Peruvian rotisserie on the Westside, passing Salvadoran food stalls in K-Town, seeing Pride events, riding the metro. Above ground, underground, calm everywhere. People just living their lives. Even the protests? Peaceful.
The lie that LA needed "liberation" from some phantom immigrant invasion? Pure manufactured crisis, designed to normalize military occupation of a city born and shaped by immigrants. The only invasion LA needs liberating from is the tyranny of a regime that sees diversity as a threat. This city isn't in chaos. It's alive and thriving. Because of immigrants. Because of diversity. Because of defiance, resilience, and joy.
This is the fracture where the light enters. The crack Leonard Cohen sang about—the wound in everything that lets the light get in. I’m not talking just about one wound in time in one city. I’m talking about the broader societal wounds that are being laid bare. It's a preview of the choice facing every community, every nation, every person alive right now.
In videos from the protests, I watched people singing spirituals and praying in vigil—voices raised in ancient songs of resilience while surrounded by militarized forces and law enforcement aggression. The contrast was breathtaking: the shadow and the light existing in the same frame. Spirituals that carried enslaved people through impossible darkness, now carrying us through our own moment of reckoning. So many choosing the light, weaving memory and storytelling and history into this pivotal moment.
This is our larger must-have social and planetary reckoning. When the dust settles upon this fractured and unsustainable status quo, we face the fundamental choice: the collective path of light, or the shadow—while integrating both within ourselves. As goes the individual, so goes the collective.
Do we let manufactured emergencies justify the dismantling of democracy? Or do we use this moment of rupture to remember who we actually are?
The Reckoning That's Been Coming
What’s happening in the U.S. is just the latest symptom of a deeper disease. For generations, we've organized human civilization around extraction, domination, and control rather than care, connection, and regeneration. We've built systems that treat people as resources to be exploited, the earth as a commodity to be consumed, and democracy as a threat to be managed.
The mindset that got us here cannot be the mindset that gets us out.
This is our “Truth & Reconciliation” moment—that generational reckoning with the soul of a nation (think Post-war Germany or Post-apartheid South Africa), the defining moment when we choose who we want to be as humans in a larger collective. Every empire reaches this crossroads. Every civilization faces this test, every epoch or so. The question isn't whether change is coming. The question is what we birth from the collapse.
Which brings us to the framework that can help us navigate what's unfolding in real time, as these events continue to escalate around us.
We are living through what historians will call a hinge moment—one of those rare periods when the entire trajectory of human civilization hangs in the balance. Like the fall of Rome, the Renaissance, or the collapse of feudalism, these are the pivot points where everything that seemed permanent suddenly becomes fluid. Where the fundamental rules of how society operates get rewritten in real time. The current status quo isn't sustainable. Not in LA, not in America, not in the vast majority of populous places on the planet. And while it's tempting to either retreat into denial or collapse into despair, there's a third path: conscious participation in what we wnat to emerge from the chaos, or what I call regenerative futurism.
Not just political change, but ontological transformation - the nature of our very being - the next Existential Revolution that I wrote about last week. A shift in the very operating system of what it means to be human on a living planet.
Beyond Survival: The Seven Stages of Regenerative Futurism
In our recent exploration of navigating a VUCA world, we mapped tools for adapting to volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Those practices remain vital—they help us weather the storm. But many of you asked deeper questions: How do we move beyond reactive survival? Where are we actually headed? What connects it all?
That's why I'm introducing the 7 Stages of Regenerative Futurism to you now— a framework I’ve developed from my years advising global institutions, schools and leaders on the same. Because no one is coming to save us. We must save ourselves and every single one of you has a stake in our future. As they say, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
It’s not as a predictive timeline, but a navigational map for this great transformation. A way to track where we are, where we're going, and how our actions fit into the larger arc of civilizational renewal.
Your Guide Through the Great Transformation
This framework doesn't demand that we all move in lockstep. Instead, it offers language and structure for naming the shifts already unfolding—in our communities, institutions, ecosystems, and inner lives. It's not a thinkpiece—it's a generational guide that gives us language to track the storm, make sense of the chaos, and remember we are not passive observers but conscious participants in what comes next.
It also serves as scaffolding for the growing ecosystem of content I'm publishing here—each piece grounded in one or more of these stages. From ongoing political deep-dives like my Coup State investigative series to cultural systems breakdowns like Pop Culture Coup and Pop Culture Classroom™, from The Social Innovator’s Summer School to The ReSchool, every piece fits into this long arc of transformation. Whether you're reading for orientation, action, education or inspiration, this map is here to help you locate where you are—and where we are—as we co-create the future together.
These 7 stages aren't strictly sequential. They spiral, overlap, and interweave like mycelial networks underground, operating simultaneously across micro and macro scales. The LA crisis shows this perfectly: powerful resistance is happening alongside deeper reckoning about federal power, while communities simultaneously reimagine what true safety could look like.
This is our 100-year view telescoped into the present moment. The transformation we need for planetary survival and human flourishing doesn't require us to wait decades—it's available right now, in how we respond to each crisis, each choice point, each moment when the light enters through the cracks.
SPECIAL INVITATION: ZOOM LECTURE JUN 22
We'll do a deep dive into 7R Framework, focused on the first stage: Reckoning in my next monthly lecture for paid subscribers next Sunday, Jun 22 at 4PM PST (Zoom details will be shared separately).
I’ll go more in-depth as I lay out the key Reckonings upon us in terms of changes in mindsets, beliefs and social conditionings that we need to confront and reconcile. I’ll also share the systems tranformations currently happening here and around the world in service to developing better technological, social and economic governance models from the ground up.
Stage 1: Reckoning — The Courage to See What Is
Reckoning begins where all real change begins, with radical honesty. The willingness to stop looking away from uncomfortable truths, to be comfortable with discomfort as that’s the only way we learn. In LA right now, this means naming how "public safety" narratives can mask power grabs, how racism is systemic from the roots of our country’s founding and baked into society today, how institutions meant to protect rights can be weaponized for control.
This isn't about blame or despair—it's about diagnostic clarity. We can't heal what we won't acknowledge. Germany's post-war reckoning wasn't comfortable, but it was necessary. Our reckoning with the soul of American democracy isn't comfortable either. But it's equally necessary.
Where you might recognize this: The growing awareness of systemic racism after George Floyd. Climate activists refusing to sugarcoat the science. Whistleblowers exposing corruption. Anyone calling out the national constitutional crisis right now.
Here's why reckoning must come first: As I sound like a broken record saying, the same systems, beliefs, structures and mindsets that got us into this crisis cannot be the ones that get us out. Without diagnostic clarity about root and systemic causes of society’s ills, including their historic evolution, resistance becomes reactive—only fighting symptoms while the underlying disease adapts and spreads. We end up in endless cycles of tit-for-tat opposition that may feel satisfying but leaves the fundamental paradigm intact. True resistance requires first seeing through the lies we've been told about how the world works.
Stage 2: Resistance — The Sacred No
Once we see clearly, the next step is refusal. But not just any resistance—strategic resistance rooted in understanding. Resistance is the immune system of democracy, but only when it targets the actual virus, not just the fever. Surface-level pushback against individual policies or actions keeps us trapped in their game, playing by their rules. Systemic resistance emerges from reckoning with the one-sided, unsustainable extraction-domination paradigm itself.
But resistance isn't just about blocking what's harmful—it's about creating space for what's life-giving to emerge. Every act of resistance is simultaneously an act of creation. Every "no" to authoritarianism is a "yes" to something better.
Where you might recognize this: Today’s nationwide No Kings protests. Standing Rock. #MeToo. Labor strikes. Sanctuary cities. Governor Newsom's fight against Trump and lawsuit against federal overreach. Anyone calling out harm of the vulnerable.
Stage 3: Revolution — The Great Turning
Revolution is the rupture—the moment when transformation becomes inevitable. It doesn't always mean violence; it means fundamental change in how systems operate, like what I wrote about last week. We're already living through multiple revolutions. Together, they're transforming how we work, learn, and understand our place in existence itself.
The revolution isn't coming. The revolution is here. The question is whether we're conscious participants or unconscious casualties.
Where you might recognize this: These three revolutions aren't happening in isolation—they're amplifying each other. AI is forcing a reckoning with how we adapt to the Future of Work while forcing us to grapple with questions of human purpose. Climate change accelerates both technological innovation and spiritual awakening. The breakdown of traditional career paths opens space for new forms of learning and meaning-making.
Stage 4: Reimagining — Dreaming New Worlds Into Being
This is where visionary thinking takes flight. The audacity to dream big and bold. Reimagining invites us to envision alternatives grounded in care, trust, and collective wisdom - a birthing of a better, balanced future. What if community-led restorative justice handled conflict? What if safety came through dialogue and mutual aid instead of force? What if we organized society around wellbeing instead of profit?
Art, science, technology, spirituality, and systems design converge here. This is where we tell new stories about what it means to be human on a living planet.
Where you might recognize this: Solarpunk fiction. Startups and social enterprises for true circular economies and regenerative capital, not just resilience. Biomimicry in technology. Indigenous futurism. Participatory democracy experiments. Anyone asking "what would it look like if we designed this system to actually serve all life instead of just oligarchs’ livelihoods?"
Stage 5: Rebuilding — Making Vision Real
Rebuilding is where dreams meet dirt. It's prototyping those visions in concrete ways—pilot programs, demonstration projects, proof-of-concept initiatives that show another way is possible.
This isn't about going backward—it's about building forward toward what we've reimagined. Each experiment tests ideas, gathers feedback, and adapts based on what works.
Where you might recognize this: Community land trusts. Mutual aid networks. Regenerative agriculture. Participatory design and budgeting. Any community creating the infrastructure for the world they want to live in.
Stage 6: Regeneration — Designing for Life
Regeneration embeds ongoing feedback loops so our prototypes can heal and evolve. Community safety initiatives continuously gather input, address past harms, and refine approaches to build trust. Policies and practices become self-correcting, restoring social bonds rather than perpetuating cycles of coercion.
This is where we move beyond sustainability to regeneration—actively restoring vitality to damaged systems. And I’m not just talking about natural and environmental systems. Not just doing less harm, but actively healing and restoring even better than before. I’m talking about the built environment and mad-made systems as well- politics, governance, work, education, et.
Where you might recognize this: Permaculture farms that improve soil health over time. Cities designed to work with natural cycles and human health, interaction and wellbeing. Economic models that account for ecological and social impact. Governance systems with built-in feedback loops for continuous improvement.
Stage 7: Renewal — Living the Dream
Renewal is what happens when regenerative systems are allowed to breathe and evolve naturally. It looks like civic cultures where disputes resolve through dialogue, institutions that uphold rights without defaulting to force, and communities that co-govern in ways that honor everyone's dignity.
This isn't a utopian endpoint—it's a dynamic state of flourishing that emerges from diversity, interconnection, and continuous adaptation. Like a rainforest, it's self-organizing, resilient, and self-generative. Unlike the brittle monocultures we've built—whether in agriculture, economics, or governance—these systems thrive through complexity and mutual support rather than control and extraction.
In a rainforest, no single species dominates. Instead, countless forms of life create the conditions for each other's flourishing. The canopy provides shelter for understory plants, which feed the soil organisms, which nourish the trees. When disturbance occurs, the system regenerates through its own abundance and diversity.
This is what renewal looks like at human scale: systems that create the conditions for everyone to flourish, not through central management, but through emergent cooperation and positive feedback loops.
What might this look like: Communities where everyone has what they need to thrive. Ecosystems returning to health. Children who grow up assuming the world works for everyone. Democracy that feels alive and responsive to human needs. Economies that distribute abundance rather than concentrate scarcity. Organizations that adapt and evolve without breaking people in the process.
Our Rendezvous with Destiny
“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
- FDR in one of his most enduring speeches in accepting the 1936 Democratic nomination for president
We are here again- our generation, here with another rendezvous with destiny.
Here's what makes this framework meet this moment: These stages are already happening. Right now. In communities across the globe, in moments of crisis and breakthrough, in the daily choices of ordinary people who refuse to accept that this is as good as it gets.
The LA crisis reveals the entire pattern. We see the history repeating itself, yet again - manufactured emergency (the lie), the resistance (the lawsuits and protests), the glimpse of what's actually possible (peaceful, thriving communities), and the ongoing work of building alternatives to authoritarianism.
Every community is facing some version of this choice. Every person is living some version of this spiral. The transformation we need for our democracy (and planet) to survive and for our societies to flourish isn't a distant possibility—it's an immediate opportunity, available in how we respond to each moment when the cracks appear and we choose the light that falls in.
The old systems are failing because they were designed to fail. Designed to extract, dominate, and control rather than nurture, connect, and regenerate. Our task isn't to prop them up but to midwife what wants to be born.
The Practical Prophetic
I’m not just writing this for empty inspiration. I’m inviting you to join me in recognizing that the same mindsets that created these crises cannot solve them. Notice how each question builds on the previous one—we cannot effectively resist what we haven't honestly reckoned with. Each stage requires us to operate from fundamentally different assumptions about how change actually works.
You don't need formal authority to apply this spiral. In your work, community, relationships, or inner life, you can ask:
What discomfort or inconvenient, hard truths am I avoiding in my life? (Reckoning)
Where can I refuse harmful defaults of the status quo or what they’ve conditioned me to believe? (Resistance)
What breakthroughs or changes have been wanting to emerge, first from within myself outward? (Revolution)
What alternative, better self, society, future can I envision? (Reimagining)
What can I prototype and start on right now? (Rebuilding)
How do I build in feedback loops for continuous learning, adaptation and improvement? (Regeneration)
What wants to flourish through me and who can I help build up along the way? (Renewal)
Each question aligns with a stage in the spiral, guiding your next move toward the future our great-grandchildren deserve.
It’s a No-Brainer, Really…
We are standing at the threshold of the most important decision in human history. Not just for America, but for the species in light of so many serious challenges beyond democracy. Not just for this generation, but for all the generations to come.
The future isn't something that happens to us—it's something we're actively creating through our daily, moment by moment choices, our attention, our actions, and our refusal to normalize the abnormal.
We are the ones we've been waiting for. Not because we're special, but because we're here, now, when the cracks in everything are letting the light pour in. We are co-creators of history, not powerless spectators. And everything is connected.
Don't believe their lies. There is no chaos in LA—only a regime trying to manufacture consent for its own violence. What there is, is us: messy, resilient, diverse, defiant, and determined to keep the light burning no matter how dark they try to make it.
What stage are you living from today? What wants to emerge through you? Where are you in this spiral—and what first step can you take to help steer us toward the future where all beings can thrive?
The old world is dying. The new world is struggling to be born. And in that space between—in the fractures where the light enters—this is where we make our stand. The light is ours to tend, the darkness ours to illuminate.
The rendezvous with destiny isn't coming. It's here. And it's calling your name.
Share this framework. Use it in your communities. Apply it to your own life. The transformation begins with each of us choosing to be conscious participants in what's emerging.
With clarity from the chaos,
Bian “B” Li
The Regenerative Futurist
This framework serves as the foundation for all content in this newsletter—from political deep-dives to cultural systems breakdowns, from practical tools to visionary thinking. Each piece is designed to help you navigate and participate in this great transformation we're all building together.
And don’t worry - we’re just getting started. Each of the seven stages will have it’s own lectures, monthly thematic subtopics, and other relevant content.
SPECIAL INVITATION: ZOOM LECTURE JUN 22
We'll do a deep dive into 7R Framework, focused on the first stage: Reckoning in my next monthly lecture for paid subscribers next Sunday, Jun 22 at 4 PM PST (Zoom details will be shared separately).
I’ll go more in-depth as I lay out the key Reckonings upon us in terms of changes in mindsets, beliefs and social conditionings that we need to confront and reconcile. I’ll also share the systems transformations currently happening here and around the world in service to developing better technological, social and economic governance models from the ground up.
Thank you for this brilliant, inspiring piece!