My Identity Crisis

What to do? Why do anything?

Maybe I should chop off an ear?

I find myself in a bit of an identity crisis at the moment. Let me try to explain…

I oriented my life—my fragile, perfectly imperfect life—toward envisioning and, as much as possible, enacting a path toward an evolutionary upgrade for human society, culture, and consciousness. When I was young—even in childhood, growing up in Manhattan—I realized that something was very wrong, totally broken, in our post-industrial world. At first I didn’t know how to articulate or approach this. I was always, innately, a Leftist, but I didn’t grasp the deeper levers of our ontological mega-meta-crisis until I found indigenous ceremony and visionary plant shamanism in my late twenties.

When I visited indigenous cultures like the Secoya in Ecuador, the Bwiti in Gabon, and the Mazatec in Mexico, when I went through their ceremonies and stayed with them, I realized there are other ways to organize society that are not inherently destructive, acquisitive, and hierarchical. These indigenous cultures were not cynical or materialistic. They oriented around community, initiation, ritual, natural wisdom, and transcendence of the ego-identity through non-ordinary states. Without being romantic or sentimental about it, I found some aspects of these cultures to be far superior, more advanced, than our own.

In my books and the 2010 documentary film, 2012: Time for Change, I explored how we could collaborate to build a new regenerative culture that took the best elements of modern and postmodern civilization and integrated them with what we needed to learn from indigenous cultures, including their reverence for and reciprocal relationship with nature, their animistic and magical practices. I built a media company and a nonprofit organization, trying to instigate a benevolent transformation of our society. Back in 2008 - 10, I was already very worried about the direction we were headed. But I believe—I hoped—that positive transformation was possible.

I’m struggling now because, sadly, I feel I have to relinquish that sense of possibility for this civilization as a whole. I don’t know what faith or idea replaces this hope for me. Friends of mine that I trust talk about hospicing this civilization in its death throes, or following the Bhagavad Gita and courageously embracing our tragic karmic fate. Considering the tsunami of destruction we are facing, I don’t know what role I should fulfill as a public intellectual and thinker with a moderate-sized following and a (very small) degree of influence in this more mature phase of my own development.

When I wrote Breaking Open the Head (2002), my first book, I discovered that we — any human being — can access vast realms of the psycho-cosmos through inner exploration with visionary plants and chemical compounds. I believed this could be the next frontier for humanity — the exploration of the infinite universe of consciousness within us could displace our society’s rigid focus on material progress, technological development, military conquest. It seemed to me we were reaching the end of material rewards, in any case. We had depleted and would soon exhaust the mineral resources of the planet. We could not continue in this direction of exploitation and consumerism. Technological progress, also, had increasingly negative effects.

I also understood that the elites — the natural aristocracy, we might say, which includes those born into wealth as well as those born into talent and beauty — of any society define the ideology and the blueprint for that society. I was, therefore, very excited to discover Burning Man and the transformational festival culture around the world, where the “best and brightest” would take psychedelics together and explore a more tribal or communal way of life. However, over time, I found that this “transformational” culture as well as the new “psychedelic movement” that attracted a great deal of wealth and talent seemed, in significant ways, shallow and immature. Today, “psychedelics” seem effectively assimilated into corporate technocracy and crypto-Libertarian neofascism.

There was a few year period — around 2008 - 2016 — where the attention of this culture started to recognize and confront the planetary emergency. But then it turned back to self-centered and hedonistic ideals and pursuits. From my perspective, the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies contributed to this. Crypto draped a phony utopian ideology around what was basically a new way to generate parasitic wealth.

Sociologically in retrospect, I see crypto as a mechanism that allowed a subset of smart, younger people to attain financial freedom at a time when a lot of capital was locked up in capital markets. Those people were on the verge of potentially becoming a new radical or revolutionary class, who could have influenced the direction of our society.

As crypto blew up, their brilliance and energy got subsumed and channeled back into the prevailing system of exploitation. Many of them became fervent Libertarians, seeking to protect their spoils, moving to tax havens like Puerto Rico to avoid paying their fair share back to society. We see this now, clearly. Crypto under the current regime is yet another corrupt scam, another mechanism for transferring wealth from the middle class to the oligarchy.

Not to belabor this point, but the fake utopian promise of crypto, along with other new technologies (including AI today), helped to alleviate the deepening, legitimate anxiety about the ecological emergency felt by the progressive elites. Instead of addressing it, most of them chose to go back to sleep — similar to how the Baby Boomers surrendered their hippie ideals in the 1970s, joining the corporate world. The problem, however, is that there isn’t much planet left to exploit. Millenials and Gen Z are not going to have the luxury of ignoring the consequences of planetary decimation over their lifespans, as the Boomers did.

By the way, I do think it is quite likely that the U.S. under Trump or Vance will, indeed, invade and take over Greenland and Canada, as Trump frequently threatens and insinuates. The tech “broligarchs” and their followers only pretend they don’t think climate change and global warming are real. They will happily move north, to greener pastures, as the vast majority of the U.S. turns into a permanent disaster zone. As this YouTuber explores, the bg banks like JP Morgan Chase know that global warming is accelerating and may exceed the worse projections of the IPCC. As long as they can make a few more years of financial profit before things collapse, they simply don’t care.

In Quetzalcoatl Returns, I quoted God’s Last Offer by Ed Ayers, a former director of World Watch. He identified four accelerating developments, or “spikes,” that threaten our immediate future: population growth (although it has slowed, global population still grows by eighty million each year), consumption of resources, increasing carbon gas emissions, and the mass extinction of species (a massive loss of amphibians, birds, mammals, insects, plants, and marine life). As I wrote then:

“Global warming and bio-extinctions are all-encompassing, and the expansions of population and consumption trigger chain reactions that cannot be stopped by shores or borders,” Ayres writes. The trends create feedback loops that further increase the rate of change—for instance, climate shift makes forests more vulnerable to fires, like the vast conflagrations that have swept the West in recent years, releasing more carbon gas while further reducing the number of carbon-absorbing trees. Ayres picks apart the mechanisms of dissimulation and deception—as well as the much more powerful denial, or will to ignorance—that have obscured the massive changes now taking place around us. “It’s likely that a general pattern of behavior among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fall,” he suggests.

Ayres was prescient. The current regime—their oligarchic backers, and their vast media infrastructure—have completely wiped the ecological emergency off the political map. The regime is seeking to remove all mentions of global warming and anthropogenic climate change, while it subsidizes the oil and coal industries and sabotages the new initiatives to build a renewable energy infrastructure, purely out of spite.

What’s happening now in the U.S. is brutal, cruel, and almost incomprehensible—and the response is so eerily muted. I feel a terrible sense of disappointment, both in myself for contributing to this situation (by making many mistakes and failing to further my mission), and for everyone else in this society. People — even intelligent and well-meaning people — still seem, for the most part, very much asleep and not paying attention. We are choosing to be dissociated, because constantly reckoning with it is too painful and sad.

I thought it would become obvious that, as members of a planetary culture, we need to learn to act like responsible members of an indigenous, planetary community — both of human life and also of the wider circle of life on Earth. But the instinct toward self-preservation and self-aggrandizement seems much greater in many people than the instinct to support the collective field, if this requires any kind of personal sacrifice.

I recently got thrown off a WhatsApp group of friends in the blockchain world. I’ve been on the chat for years and usually stay quiet. At this point, they have become a smug, cynical horde of crypto-fascists with no conscience. Many of them became Trump supporters. On the chat, I asked how they were feeling about the mass deportations. One of the group’s prominent members said that “tokenization” was the only issue she cared about. I asked why she wasn’t concerned about the ecological emergency—the fate of the Earth over the next decades—considering she had a small child. She blocked me from the chat and called me a “spy.”

The NxReactionaries and the Fascist oligarchy are much better organized (and well-funded) than the much larger group of those who oppose them. Liberals, progressives and all of those politically undefined still seem to be struggling to catch up to what’s already happened to the U.S., with little foresight about what may be coming. The people I know are not behaving as if we are in an existential emergency. Genocide in the U.S. is very possible at this point—not just against illegal immigrants but against political opponents of the current regime. We’ve seen it in other countries around the world. There are many signs pointing toward it here.

My personal quandary—my identity crisis—includes the question of whether to escape the U.S. before things get more dangerous and dire here. If I stay, is there a way to contribute to a meaningful, effective resistance? Or is the situation already too far gone for that? Perhaps I should refocus on some kind of magical practice, go back into the shamanic realms, seek to dialogue with whatever invisible powers lurk behind the scenes? Or should I give up, become apolitical, focus on art-making, narrative fiction and screenwriting? Let me know your suggestions for me in the comments. Perhaps, like an avatar in a video game, I can take the direction where you want to send me.

While I agree with much of what Jem Bendell writes, I don’t personally feel the attraction of a rural farming lifestyle. I feel I am an indigenous creature of New York City: My fate seems enmeshed in this collective dream of a multi-ethnic, multicultural, participatory democracy. My heart cries out, yearns, when I listen to Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy Is Coming”:

It's coming to America first

The cradle of the best and of the worst

It's here they got the range

And the machinery for change

And it's here they got the spiritual thirst

It's here the family's broken

And it's here the lonely say

That the heart has got to open

In a fundamental way

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A

It's coming from the women and the men

Oh baby, we'll be making love again

We'll be going down so deep

The river's going to weep

And the mountain's going to shout Amen!

It's coming like the tidal flood

Beneath the lunar sway

Imperial, mysterious

In amorous array

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.