A Question from Loic

What is to be done?

Loic Le Meur is a tech entrepreneur who has been studying with indigenous traditions in Brazil. He wrote this to me:

Hi Daniel really enjoyed your latest newsletter on Tulum. Do you mind me asking though? How do you see yourself in the world you describe, since living in Tulum yourself is just also accepting that system and being a full participant of it? I agree with most of your points in your text, just to be clear. Not trying to criticize or make you uncomfortable. I just also see that you live and benefit from exactly what you are criticizing or showing the issues of by precisely living there yourself?

I appreciate this question. My answer has a few different levels to it. The short answer is that I wish I knew what to do now that would be truly helpful. I realize that bringing awareness may seem futile, but, as I have found, it can start a process that eventually leads to tangible change. 

As for living in Tulum, I have to live somewhere! Tulum seems a good place for me to be right now as many amazing people pass through here and a new culture is developing here that can be inflected, influenced and perhaps shifted. The fact that Tulum’s culture is theoretically focused on “consciousness” makes the unconsciousness, selfishness, and hypocrisy more glaringly obvious than in Cancun, say, or New York. 

Before I wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head (2002), you couldn't speak seriously about psychedelics / visionary plants in mainstream society without being ridiculed. Today, we are in a psychedelic renaissance. For better or worse, massive industries are forming around them and everybody has changed their minds about them. That book contributed to a change of perception which is now leading to significant social change. 

As I wrote in my piece, Tulum is a perfect microcosm of the macrocosm. For instance, let’s look at the situation in the Amazon, which is similar. We are pushing the Amazon to the brink. Scientists now worry that the huge Amazon rainforest may collapse as a functional ecosystem within five to fifteen years. According to a recent study, the Amazon now produces more CO2 than it sequesters. Since the Amazon rainforest is the hydrological heart of the planet, this should concern all of us and motivate us to take action. 

The same underlying pressures that are ruining the Yucatan are also devastating the Amazon. Essentially, the logic of our economic system forces the need for incessant growth and development, beyond the limits of what the Earth can support. (Useful books to understand this are The Case Against the Global Economy, edited by Jerry Mander, and Oneness Versus the 1% by Vandana Shiva). We are either going to find a way to change this or our children will inherit a dystopian inferno with drastically reduced possibilities and curtailed lives. 

I have been reading Bill Gates’ new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, on climate change. Typically, he doesn’t focus on reducing the massive amounts of CO2 we release, which requires changing the lifestyles of the wealthy, first of all. The top 1% use an estimated 20% of our collective resources. Instead, Gates is funding experiments in “global dimming,” where we pour sulfur particles into the atmosphere to reduce sunlight. This is obviously not a holistic solution and could cause new disasters. But for those trapped in the logic of Capitalism and endless growth, they have no choice but to believe we can continue this current system indefinitely.

What seems clear is that piecemeal efforts of philanthropy and charity cannot address the underlying forces driving us toward catastrophe. What we need is systemic change. We must redesign the operating system for our civilization — our economic system above all. In my 2017 book How Soon Is Now, I explored some ways this could be done. 

I know it seems difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish this. On the other hand, many things that once seemed impossible have come to pass. We don’t know what we are capable of until we try. 

How can we bring about systemic change?

We need to establish, first of all, shared awareness and a collective agreement about what must be done. Such a shared awareness naturally begins with a small group, a minority, who then transmit it to larger circles of the population (as happened with psychedelics). We need to build the movements, media, institutions and tools to drive such a transition. Luckily, we have many prototypes for how this can be accomplished from initiatives and innovations from the past. 

Let’s take the Amazon as an example. Millions of people live in the Amazon basin and many of them are doing work that further exploits and deforests the rainforest. They don’t do this because they want to, but because they have no choice. One of the main drivers of destruction is that large tracts of the jungle are being converted to soybean plantations for cattle, to satisfy a growing demand for meat in countries like China and India. 

You can’t solve the situation in the Amazon without providing a different way for those millions of people to make decent livelihoods. Their work has to become labor that supports the health and biodiversity of the local ecosystem. This would require the use of different tools for exchanging and measuring value, along with a large-scale retraining program. We also need to find a way to reduce the world’s growing appetite for meat. While this is difficult to imagine, it is not actually impossible. Nothing physically prevents us from making these changes, only the logic of the economic system and the ideologies that prop it up.  

In considering the dynamics of systemic change, one theme that I keep exploring is the necessity for a new over-arching paradigm that transcends reductive materialism and mass consumerism. I believe this new paradigm already exists in nascent form, but it must be collectively recognized. We need more “propaganda” (myths, stories, songs) to transmit it to different sectors of the populace. One element of this new paradigm is the integration of science and mysticism, which also allows a place for traditional religious beliefs. Spirituality (and religion) impart dignity and purpose to people’s lives. They point us toward a greater goal that we can unify to achieve, as leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King demonstrated.  

We know that a group of smart, well-resourced people who decide to work together can change the world. The book Dark Money by Jane Mayer gives one example. Mayer documents how the Koch brothers used their wealth and power to change the direction of American society over a half century. The Kochs hated the increased taxation, increased social services, decent public education and movements for civil rights and the environment that were the legacy of the 1960s. They wanted to reduce taxes on the wealthy, cut social services, and evade ecological restrictions. They realized they needed a long-term master plan to do this. So they developed one. As part of their strategy, they established media outlets, started think tanks, bought academic departments at universities, and created “Astro-turf”’d social movements like the Tea Party, copying progressive grassroots initiatives. They successfully rolled back decades of progress. 

The “other side” — those seeking a systemic alternative to reduce wealth inequality, reverse the extractive model of Colonialism, and protect our threatened planet — can study what the Koch brothers did and copy it. In fact, such a counter-initiative might develop quickly. After all, it has reason and justice on its side. To quote Shiva: “We can, through our creativity and imagination, through our solidarity and interconnectedness, create a planetary freedom movement through which we break free of the chains and walls constructed by the illusions of the mechanical mind, the money machine and the delusion of democracy. We can reclaim and create real knowledge through real intelligence. We can reclaim and create real wealth with nature, through our creativity. We can sow the seeds of real freedom and earth democracy.” I actually don’t know if we can do this — but it seems at least worth a shot.

Among the people I know, many have decided that it is already too late; “the machine is unstoppable;” our civilization is going to collapse no matter what we do, so there is no reason to try to find or build scale-able solutions. In any case, it will require a succession of horrific disasters before the masses start to “wake up.” Some choose to focus on self-healing, personal spiritual growth, building off-the-grid communities with a small group of friends, or they apprentice with indigenous people and see the spiritual wisdom of the indigenous as an Absolute Good compared to the Absolute Bad of the Capitalist technocracy. 

While I sympathize with this perspective, I find it misguided and self-serving. It is another way to abdicate and avoid taking responsibility. 

The problem with focusing on healing yourself is that there is no end to it. We remain imperfect beings in mortal, imperfect bodies. There will always be more to heal. On the other hand, a degree of self-healing — from our education system, from a culture based on competition and exploitation, and from personal trauma — is necessary, so it requires balance. In retrospect, I realized that I rushed into trying to "save the world" before I had done enough healing work on myself. This led to negative consequences and hard lessons I had to learn.

We will definitely see intensifying disasters in the coming years. But those disasters won’t lead to positive social change unless we are prepared with functional alternatives to the current system. We still have time to develop and disseminate such alternatives — but we don’t know how much time is available.

In our culture, we are trained to continually seek for the next thrill, the next escape. We do this by moving to exotic places like Tulum and Bali, or by adopting spiritual practices from other cultures as a badge of identity. This inevitably continues the logic of Colonialism, which is based on a model of exploit-and-escape. As beneficiaries of the Western system, it might be more honest for us to accept our culpability for this legacy of exploitation and seek to terminate it, rather than believing it is enough to seek inner peace while swaddled in native beads and fabrics.

Indigenous traditions, indigenous medicine, and indigenous spirituality are beautiful and transformative. As Europeans and Americans, we can learn so much from them. But we do not belong to those cultures. We have a moral and spiritual responsibility to deal with our Wetiko culture, the one that has unleashed this planetary holocaust. Instead of seeing this as a horrible burden, we can approach it as a tremendous spiritual opportunity and adventure.

Who is up for this challenge?

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