Are We Doomed?

At an awkward, honest event last week in Chelsea, we put all of our cards on the table

Last Sunday, I hosted “Are We Doomed?”, an awkward, beautiful (in my eyes) live event at MCM Studios in Chelsea, NYC. My old friend Bob Eisenberg, who sadly suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, approached me more than a year ago about putting together a colloquium on how we seem to be accelerating toward “the end of the world” — through civilizational breakdown, nuclear war, ecological collapse, rogue Artificial Intelligence enslaving or eradicating us, bio-plague, or what have you. Bob has had a long, brilliant career as an investor and author (Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground). Even before his Parkinson’s became severe, he was quite convinced that imminent doom was in the offing. Our event somehow honored mortality and fragility in a way I found moving.

I still hope, of course, that we are going to see some miraculous, magical, rapid, delightful, sublime, sexy, playful, quixotic, super-cool, stylish, radical transformation / transmutation of human consciousness and civilization at the 11th hour, 59th minute and 59th second, as so many Hollywood movies have imprinted upon us. Considering my research into occult and esoteric topics including Hermetic philosophy as well as the mystical, extraterrestrial, and paranormal, I do not find this totally out of the question. It would be like a spontaneous remission from late-stage cancer on a species level, which (if we believe highly-paid motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and Joe DiSpenza) can happen at any moment. In fact, I spent ten years smashing my head against a wall to research and write a book (How Soon Is Now) on how we could accomplish this amazing feat (we would, um, like, you know, need to embrace unity and compassion, coming together as one species organism in a new planetary confederation, using social tools to, um, you know, reinvent, like, governments and media as participatory structures, moving those in southern hot zones up North in vast numbers, and so on).

However, despite my innate Gnostic-utopian idealism, I do see great value in giving voice to the darker prospects looming over us, partly because these tend to be conveniently excised from our public debates. While climate scientists are panicked, freaking out, about incredibly rapid changes all across the Earth — far beyond the nastiest predictions of even a few years ago — the mainstream media avoids and downplays the brutal severity of what is happening all around us. In her acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, Kamala Harris barely mentioned the ecological emergency which is, by far, the most important subject we are all thinking about, fearing, ignoring, repressing.

In “Are We Doomed”, we didn’t manage to cover the full gamut of existential threats, but we did hear from the infamous doomer climate scientist Guy McPherson, who believes human extinction is probable by 2030 (!). However, I should note that McPherson, a few years back, was convinced we would be annihilated by 2026. It looks like we will make it at least that far, so his predictions may not be entirely accurate. On the other hand, one can envision a pathway where rapid warming leads to methane eruption which spikes the temperature to the point where forests and oceanic plankton stop producing enough Oxygen for us to breathe — just one plausible extinction scenario (Putin getting indigestion and hitting the button is another). But never mind: Burning Man is happening now. Fashion Week, art fairs, are coming up. Lots of fun things ahead to take our mind off the dread!

Along with McPherson, we had wonderful shares from Doug Rushkoff, Vicki Robins, Nathan Oglesbury, Doug Henwood. You can watch the event on YouTube or here:

The event, for me, raised many important questions: What if we collectively acknowledged that, barring some late-stage miracle, we were in our sunset phase as a species? How would we (you, me) live differently, right now? Would we approach every moment as the extraordinary, precious, utterly improbable miracle that it, in fact, is? Would we go into some new consciousness state of universal, unconditional love and compassion? Would we party together in the streets? Would we

“Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”

As Walt Whitman exhorts?

This is, I suppose, part of my reason for being so enthusiastic about our current seminar, The Future of Consciousness, which you can still join right now. Here is a link for 20% off tickets:

Today at 1 pm EST, we will be joined by two amazing thinkers: Cell biologist Neil Theise (author of the excellent, concise Notes on Complexity) and Jefrrey Kripal, academic, whose books include The Flip and Authors of the Impossible. Kripal shared his talk in advance, so I know he will be proposing that, among other things, “Mystical literature is the Hadron collider of human history.” He also notes:

My most general intellectual wager is that the total gestalt gleaned or intuited from comparative mystical literature (my own specific specialty) strongly suggests that consciousness and the cosmos are two modes or expressions of the same fundamental reality manifesting in us as knowing and experiencing subjects. The world is One, although it becomes Two in our experiences when we “split it up” in our knowing and sensing, that is, when we become human subjects and are socialized into various reigning worldviews and identities. … I lean strongly to some sort of monistic picture in a “dual aspect” mode. I have employed this ontology in my published work to understand “the impossible” as a meaningful collapse of the subject/object epistemological structure, that is, as a temporary revelation of the dual aspect monistic nature of reality.

As some readers may already know, I am personally quite convinced that it is only the “flip” into this new paradigm that recognizes consciousness as the fundamental ground of being, leading to what Jean Gebser called the “integral-aperspectival” structure of consciousness is our only pathway beyond the otherwise insurmountable existential threats. I hope The Future of Consciousness seminar will help more of us make this switch, and integrate the crucial new ideas and concepts which lead us beyond this cul de sac.

Please let me know what you think of the video in the comments.