The following are 10 working paradoxes that authors Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy have identified in their book Post Capitalist Philanthropy: 1. **Paradox of personality** – We want to both acknowledge the role of individual personalities and their subjective influences, while deepening into non-identified states of being. Our individual personalities, preferences and identities are both paramount to sense-making and obstacles for the deepening of understanding, empathy, and the transcension of subject/object duality. Relatedly, even though this text points to a shared complicity in the dominant culture, there are some people who are more complicit than others and are actively benefiting from the meta-crisis. This acknowledgment is part of non-dualistic thought. Even at an archetypal level, there may be a 1%er in all of us, yet there is still agency, responsibility and consequence for every individual choice we make. 2. **Paradox of practice** – The more we practise emerging forms of sense-making, the better we become at holding complex, non-dualistic thoughts. Yet we become ignorant in other ways we cannot see. Albert Einstein was once quoted as saying: “As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.” 3. **Paradox of power** – As we value other ways of knowing and being, we situate power outside the traditional conceptions. Yet, the powers of wealth, decision-making, status, racialised hierarchies, and other systems of oppression continue to affect the lives of all of us, and indeed, all of Life. For example, the more we as co-authors are embedded within the halls of philanthropy or situated in proximity to traditional power, the less effective we will become at valuing other modalities of power. 4. **Paradox of privilege** – Although there can be an acknowledgement of privilege (e.g. economic, racial, gendered, historical, able-bodiedness, etc.) this does not diminish the power that comes with these privileges. And often, privilege is a blinding constraint. It is a constraint in the sense that it blocks understanding, empathy, compassion and other ways of seeing the world. Comfort numbs. Certainty obscures. Those who fear losing what they have (including control) also tighten their hold on privilege once they understand that privilege. Self-reflexivity does not necessarily lead to selfless change. Yet, without our privileges, we could not engage in this inquiry in the ways we do. 5. **Paradox of perpetuation** – In the hope of trying to address social issues, we often labour to keep the existing structures in place. A generous interpretation would be that philanthropy believes the alternative (e.g. philanthropic foundations not existing) would have a negative impact on those it is trying to support. A realpolitik interpretation of this is that we keep the dominant structures in place because those who benefit from existing systems cannot tolerate what would have to be relinquished through true structural change. That is, most people do not have the psychological and emotional fortitude, selflessness and compassion to imagine a world where the existing structures (and their respective positions in those structures) do not exist. As a result, we perpetuate the existing system and its destructive forces even in the face of annihilation, while discussing systemic change in earnest. Partly this is because we fear the unknown more than we fear our current trajectory, no matter how suicidal the path may be. 6. **Paradox of planning** – Part of the practice of sense-making is to become more contextually sensitive in order to become more contextually relevant to present, historical and future states. Yet our desire to be more sensitive or relevant does not necessarily mean we will be any more successful in understanding future states. The future is, by definition, unknowable, emergent and non-linear. Even invoking the language of transitions or pathways implies that we can somehow plan for a future to come when in fact we are simply planning with the limited knowledge of the future we believe we hold now. Of course, this is still a worthy endeavour and may increase our ability to better navigate the contours of emerging futures. 7. **Paradox of pronouncement** – Language both matters and is inherently limited. Language can be hegemonic in its application. The dominant culture perpetuates the elevation of the written word. Beyond language, we are engaging in abstract thought and rational arguments to analyse and describe embodied, subjective phenomena. In that sense, embodied cognition and pronouncements of the word are in paradoxical tension. The very act of pronouncement is an act embedded within the dominant culture of capitalist modernity and reinforces dualistic thought. 8. **Paradox of ‘post’** – This is related to the paradox above: we use the language of post capitalism throughout this text. As mentioned in the section about post capitalism, the prefix post can imply a “context after” but it can also imply a state which is informed by the context prior to it. Both are true. Post capitalism is informed by capitalism but is not an end-state that simply comes after it (which is why we spell the two words separately without a dash). There are simultaneous post capitalist realities that exist right now, some of which have existed for hundreds of years (e.g. various indigenous cultures) and some for decades (e.g. Zapatistas). Also, an aspect of many lived alternatives to capitalism is to deconstruct the conditioning of future fixation, of a belief that a new society will necessarily be better. As such, we aim to stand in the present, rooted in a deep historical understanding while actively building newancient-emerging ways of living, knowing and being beyond the logic of capitalism. 9. **Paradox of performance** – We perform and embody the values of the culture we live in, even if we do not agree with the dominant culture or its tenets (this could also be called the paradox of culture). For example, one key feature of the colonial mindset is a focus on urgency, analysis, planning, and rational action, rather than on being, allowing, and surrendering, perhaps to a deeper and unknowable cosmic design (intelligent or otherwise). Another key feature of the colonial mindset is the belief in its own exceptionalism – setting the exceptional urgency of this moment above all other critical junctures of history through which our species and our planet have passed through. Accordingly, we perform or enact the dominant culture through our grandiose sense of our own agency and influence, all so that we can diagnose and address systemic problems at a systemic level. And yet, an attempt to deepen our systems-level understanding is critical to contextualising the meta-crisis and our roles within it, and in becoming more self-aware and expansive in our consciousness, regardless of outcomes. 10. **Paradox of perfection** – The coming to form of this text (i.e. publishing a book) implies some kind of neat, tidy end-state. Yet, many of the references and examples we use will already be dated by the time of publishing, and emerging examples will be omitted as the world(s) continues to turn in waves of expansion and entropy. This work is an ongoing exploration of theory and praxis, and we will endeavour to find other ways to deepen this inquiry and share our findings (e.g. in-person gatherings, online discussions, etc.) with this book being simply one output, as a product of its context.