CONCEPT
The Great Turning
Macy's name for the civilizational shift from an industrial-growth society to a life-sustaining civilization — contested, unguaranteed, participable, and most powerfully tested by the AI moment.
The Great Turning is Macy's name for the structural transformation she spent her life working toward: the shift from a civilization organized around extraction, growth, and the concentration of power to one organized around the interdependence of all living systems. The Turning is not a prediction. It is a possibility whose reality depends on participation. Macy specified three dimensions through which the Turning is enacted — holding actions that slow the damage, new structures that embody the alternative, and the shift in consciousness that changes the paradigm within which the other two operate. The AI moment is the most powerful test the framework has encountered, because AI accelerates all three of Macy's competing stories simultaneously, leaving the direction of the civilizational arc genuinely undetermined.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Macy developed the concept through her systems-theoretical work and her engagement with Buddhist philosophy, particularly the bodhisattva ideal — the figure who acts on behalf of all sentient beings not because success is assured but