Amor Fati, Baby!

What an amazing time to be alive

The execution of King Louis XVI. Apparently, the King had helped design the guillotine: “An amateur locksmith generally fascinated by mechanical things, Louis had suggested that the device use an oblique blade rather than a crescent one to make certain that the head would come off at the first blow, no matter the shape of the neck,” writes The Public Domain Review.

There are many amazing people joining Embracing Our Emergency, our upcoming seminar. One of them is Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion in the UK. I recommend watching this recent talk from Bradbrook, where she explores the continuing evolution of the movement she helped launch and proposes a radical path for the future:

Bradbrook is a systems thinker as well as an activist. She offers an encompassing thesis of how we reached this current polycrisis based on “collective traumatic events” that led to left-brain dominance in the Anglo-European world. “When stress is severe and prolonged a form of shutdown occurs. We enter a state of separation from innate parts of ourselves from each other and from our environment. A pathology that seeks comfort, certainty, and control kicks in. In other words the left hemisphere takes over.” She proposes we “unite within a collective collaborate collaborative framework for change which would also leave space for many ways of doing things — seeing things — that are location and culture specific.”

Her framework for the future includes degrowth, a rejection of large-scale land ownership, and a repudiation of the current debt-based financial system: “We assert that the land under our feet is ours to steward, that it is a common treasury for all.  The ownership of excessive tracts of land is unjust and against life. We will reclaim and occupy the lands of our birth, growing food, and living lightly… We do not recognize the governments and the legal structures that destroy life on Earth as ours. It's not our government… It’s an oligarchy in power.”

Like Bradbrook, I spend a lot of time contemplating how our current global civilization reached this point and how we might still transform it before it brings about total planetary devastation and human extinction. This is not an easy problem to solve!

Most people find it absurd to even think about something so huge and abstract. And maybe it is. I made one attempt at the whole enchilada with my 2016 book How Soon Is Now. My perspective has changed since then, in both subtle and significant ways, as our shared planetary reality also shifts. I have some new hopes, as I will explore in what follows, while the task seems more daunting than ever.

I follow many climate scientists and researchers on Twitter who are deeply pessimistic at this point. Following James Hansen’s recent work, some believe ten degrees Celsius of warming is “baked in” to the future climate due to the greenhouse gasses we have already released, although it might take us a few centuries to get all the way there. We are currently on track for three or four degrees warming above pre-industrial levels by 2050, which would be catastrophic. There is also growing concern over the uncontrolled release of methane from under the Arctic and the thawing Siberian permafrost, which could accelerate the time-table for extreme warming by a few decades.

Any opportunity for efficient global coordination seems to have faded over the last decade or two — probably, in reality, such opportunities never existed. I am partial to an idea I once heard attributed to Hegel, that there is no such thing as unrealized potential. The globalized world that seemed to emerge after the crumbling of the Soviet Union did not have the capacity to address the climate crisis, or it would have done so. China, India, and so on, were always going to modernize and industrialize, following the destructive Western template, massively accelerating the processes we unleashed as billions of peasants became industrial workers and consumers.

In retrospect, the American or Anglo-European Empire was probably not the worst or most vicious empire in history. But it acted as all empires do. It carved up the world according to its own interests, extracting natural and human resources to increase its wealth and build its industries. It devised intricate financial mechanisms to keep less developed countries under its control.

This post-war system of debt peonage meant that overt slavery was no longer required in most places. Representative democracy was, in many ways, a neat trick. As originally designed by America’s founding fathers, it maintained power for the financial elite while giving the masses a certain degree of influence so they wouldn't storm out and revolt. All over the world, the American Empire overthrew democratically elected governments and assassinated popular leaders when they didn’t submit to our extractive game plan.

The short-term nature of this entire system is now becoming clear: Our leaders have no real plan for anything beyond it, except more of the same. “More of the same” means those at the top of the financial pyramid will continue to increase their disproportionate wealth, even as rapidly declining resources cause more misery for the have-littles and have-nots. AI and advanced robotics will be fully integrated into a military-surveillance-social-media complex allowing for remote-control domination of mass populations, who have been indoctrinated into false ideologies since birth. The elites will continue to use psychedelics, art, exotic travel, meditation, and other pirated esoteric practices to convince themselves they form a kind of spiritual and cultural aristocracy who innately deserve to live above the fray in little havens of permaculture’d tranquility.

The situation is fascinating. Personally, I would not choose to live at any other point in human history. Here, in Manhattan, I have a ringside seat. What was Neitzche’s concept, “amor fati” (love of fate)?

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it — all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary — but love it.

…

Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

The reality, I believe, is our current situation can’t make anybody truly happy. Yes, people can feel temporary euphoria in the midst of deep ecological grief and societal shame, or people can dissociate. Even the winners are losers, on some deep existential level. Except that many of the winners are narcissistic sociopaths who innately feel nothing for the subjugated, deluded masses or the titanic loss of insects, plants, animals, and ecosystems. Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, was well aware he was ripping apart the fabric of society with his insidious algorithm, causing epidemics of suicide in teenage girls, fueling authoritarianism, and so on. Instead of reckoning with his abject failure in humanity and compassion, he has bought a huge amount of land in Hawaii, spending $100 million on an underground “survive the Apocalypse” bunker for himself and his family, after helping to unleash this Apocalypse.

Strangely, I see glimmers of something like hope in all of this lugubrious darkness

Please join us for our next seminar, cohosted by myself and director Josh Fox, with speakers including Bill McKibben, Marianne Williamson, Jane Fonda, Jamie Wheal, Jem Bendell. and Michael Mann, starting April 28. We are offering 20% off this week. There will be five weeks of live sessions which will all be recorded and available for review.

First of all, I am encouraged by signs of imperial over-reach. Just as the French monarchy collapsed because Louis XVI funded the American Revolution instead of giving bread to his people, our self-chosen aristocracy of the super-wealthy keep taking too much, too quickly. This could lead to a severe backlash. For example, let’s consider the mass lay-off of software engineers, designers, film editors and producers, etcetera, already underway due to rapidly-advancing AI.

If you know anybody in that category, please share these reflections with them.

One of the fascinating aspects of the “AI revolution” is that it impacts people working in the knowledge economy or virtual sphere — my friend Warren Neidich calls them “cognitariat” while political philosopher Antonio Negri used the term “multitude” — first, instead of the working class. Many of these people have a high level of education and some resources, which means, once out of work, they have time and opportunity to study our situation. They might go MAGA but they could, potentially, self-realize as a new revolutionary vanguard against this late-last stage of imperial modernity or “cognitive capitalism.”

I would love to help them organize — in fact, our new seminar, Embracing Our Emergency, provides a great starting place for this. While we are charging $300 for the course, we won’t turn anybody away for lack of funds. If you want to attend but need a partial or even a full scholarship, please email us and tell is what works for you: hello@liminal.news .

Another thing that gives me hope still is, strangely, the Internet — not the Internet as it is today, but what it or something like it might become in the future.