What's the Plan?

Where do we go from here?

A few things before today’s essay. I am only now trying out bluesky. I invite you to follow me there. It seems the place to go to escape the twisted propaganda machine formerly known as Twitter.

I will be speaking and giving a workshop at Sacbe X Chosen NYE Re-Union, a New Year’s Eve gathering over four days in Florida that should be beautiful. Many friends of mine will be there, and you can join us. Info is here. When you buy your ticket, you can use the code “PINCHBECK” for 10% off the ticket price.

I am currently reconsidering my 2016 book How Soon Is Now, where I offered a strategic and tactical action plan for transforming postmodern civilization by directly confronting the ecological emergency and building participatory, resilient, and regenerative systems to heal human society and elevate consciousness. I intend to update this book to accommodate the social, ecological, philosophical, and political changes we have seen over the last eight years. One central idea is that social change will require a transition from physicalism or materialism to a new paradigm: Monistic idealism or panpsychism.

Our political situation looks bleak. I recommend Jeff Sharlet’s essay on Trump’s proposed defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, a Fox News announcer and extremist who could advance the plans in Unhumans, a book Trump and Vance praised, as I explored here. This podcast interview with Lincoln Mitchell, political scientist at Columbia University, is also fairly straightforward.

We don’t know what level of repression will be used against the domestic population in the US. I don’t know about you, but I can already sense the shift in the psychological ambience. It feels murkier.

As I discussed in my interview with Melik Kaylan, what we are experiencing in the US with the rise of Right Wing populism is our local variant of a widespread phenomenon. There are many reasons why this is happening now, not all of them easy to understand through a purely rational analysis. They include concerns over immigration, declining quality of life, and, also, a reaction to the “meaning crisis,” the collapse of all values, that is an inevitable result of secular liberal humanism in its current, immature form.

One of the tendencies of our situation that I find most worrisome is the distortion of the information environment. This may intensify over the next years. Masses of people already fail to discern between evidence-based journalism and delusion. This could become much worse. I won’t address that today, but will soon. The intolerable Elon Musk is currently suing California over their new, sane, and reasonable state law that prevents the use of deep fakes to influence elections. This is one of many worrisome developments.

I see a possible silver lining in the dark clouds, connected to what I explore in How Soon Is Now: The truth is there was no way our society, under the old political system, could adapt fast enough to confront the ecological emergency. Also, people were rightfully fed up with the corrupt, hypocritical Democrats who pretend to be a meaningful alternative while maintaining symbiosis with Wall Street, the billionaire class, and the most destructive corporate interests. The system needed to break. Now it is breaking.

From where we are now, we can still envision a path to a benevolent metamorphosis of post-industrial civilization. It could be that the current regression into authoritarianism is the necessary precondition for the emergence of a new societal paradigm, one that is truly participatory and regenerative. We are definitely in a time when “all bets are off,” when anything can happen.

Of course, this also may not be in the cards: We may be descending into AI-augmented, surveillance-based “infinitely stable dictatorship” while our ecosystem collapses and power centralizes in fewer and fewer hands. Admittedly, this seems the most likely outcome. I am not being naive. I am simply noting that we can also envision the path to a very different, much better outcome. I think it is important that we point toward that, also, even as we acknowledge current feelings of fear, despair, and defeat. After all, the future remains an “unknown unknown.”

In this and future essays, I am going to offer a scaffold and outline for the transformative project we can undertake together.