Why?

Help me understand

A lemming.

Why is it, when you try to talk about the single most important thing happening to all of us and to all life on Earth and to the Earth itself right now — something that has the potential to transform our existence in unfathomable ways, or even quite quickly curtail it — you have this feeling that you are doing something wrong, almost smutty or disgusting, almost but not quite as bad as suddenly farting or belching loudly in public, shameful activities which won’t get you lynched or arrested but which result in the people around you seeking to move away from you, shun you, whether subtly or immediately?

I am fascinated by taboos. I make a habit of breaking them. Sometimes this yields wonderful results — ignorance dispelled, esoteric secrets revealed, new movements or cultural renaissances initiated — and other times it ends in personal disaster and misery.

When I started to explore and write about psychedelics in the late 1990s in New York City, there was a powerful taboo surrounding them. You were not allowed to take them — or explore any kind of inner-dimensional adventure — seriously, particularly in materialist Manhattan, world capital of advertising and fashion, proud home of the Manhattan Project, epicenter of the cult of Moloch and Mammon. My first book, Breaking Open the Head, helped to lift this prohibition, which has since been shattered. Psychedelics are now considered a fantastic entrepreneurial opportunity — a growth industry for the near-future — which I find a bit absurd, but a huge improvement.  

For better and worse, I tend to see my life as an experimental research project aimed at extending the cultural edges of the permissible and possible. I still push against many unstated bans that, I believe, block our collective potential for evolution and growth. For instance, we still have taboos around open discussion and acceptance of the psychic, synchronistic, supernatural, and paranormal aspects of reality. Most people I meet are still trapped in the reductive materialist paradigm, which meshes, ideologically, with Neoliberal late-stage Capitalism and technocracy to create the illusion of an air-tight system. Serious inquiries into soul, spirit, myth, reincarnation, allegory, and afterlife continue to be anathema. 

Similarly, there is massive suppression — ongoing, multilayered interdiction — against open, calm, serious reflection and conversation on the biospheric emergency we have unleashed as a species, and what we can do about it now. We know our brains evolved to deal with immediate threats — that cobra or saber-toothed tiger lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce — rather than diffuse, atmospheric, relatively slow-motion frog-in-pot-getting-imperceptively-boiled-alive kinds of danger. The threats spilling over from the biospheric emergency are no longer so slow or so imperceptible, yet we remain non-reactive. Why is this the case? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

I have my theories. One is that something is going on on a biopsychic, epigenetic, collective evolutionary (not sure of the right term) level that we simply do not understand or know how to articulate. George Carlin expressed this idea brilliantly in his legendary “Save the Planet” monologue, where he proposed the Earth saw us as fleas and probably created us because it needed to make plastic for some future evolutionary experiment. Now that we had completed our assigned task, the Earth would quickly get rid of this irritating human infestation.

One common metaphor for our bizarre detachment is that we, humans, are a bit like the lemmings, a species of rodent that lives in the Arctic, infamous for committing mass suicide by jumping off a cliff into the ocean and then swimming into deeper waters until they drown. However, upon further research, it turns out that the lemmings do not actually commit mass suicide and the only reason we think they do is because of a nature documentary from the 1950s, produced by Disney, where they forced a group of unlucky lemmings —“nasty rodents,” according to the narrative — to charge off a cliff so they could film it. This seems like an even more perfect metaphor for our human predicament, somehow!

Another possibility I consider is that we — by which I mean, collective contemporary post-modern human society — are acting a bit like the Balinese nobility who chose to walk directly into the guns of the Dutch colonialists, instead of facing the humiliation of surrender and conquest by them, in mass ritual actions called Puputan. We can’t admit to ourselves that this particular social and ideological construct of exploitative Capitalism, requiring exponential growth, has reached a dead end, so, instead of confronting what we have unleashed and striving to change it before it wipes us off the map, we are doubling down on it, shambling shamefully into the abyss.

As a major contributing factor: The fossil fuel behemoths have spent and continue to spend hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars on a multilevel disinformation campaign brilliantly architected — with the help, no doubt, of lavishly paid behavioral scientists and intelligence agencies — to keep the people confused and to obfuscate the issue, which has been amazingly successful. In fact, as I write this, yet another well-produced documentary has come out claiming to debunk the idea that humans have unleashed rapid warming. Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) has, of course, been instantly refuted. But that doesn't matter, because as long as doubt continues to be sown among enough of the mass populace, collective action remains impossible.

In my long-winded fashion, I am getting around to making a pitch for our upcoming seminar, Embracing Our Emergency, which I am super-excited about. I hope you will join us.

Please join our upcoming seminar, featuring amazing speakers including Bill McKibben, Jane Fonda, Marianne Williamson, Thom Hartmann, Jamie Wheal, and more!. 20% off this week - all info here.

I feel that many people remain inactive because they toggle between two extreme positions: One common belief is that we are utterly doomed and everyone will die soon as a result of the biospheric catastrophe, hence there is nothing we can do and we might as well go on with “business as usual” until the last second. The polar opposite belief, held by many, is that new technologies will somehow save the situation without us having to massively change our lifestyles or alter our consumption habits. (The most common strategy, by far, is to ignore the situation entirely, surrender to social inertia, and wait until change is forced upon you.)

Let’s consider another option: Temperatures will rise several degrees in the next decades leading to intensifying catastrophes. Even so, the world won’t end all of a sudden. Most will survive. We will find ourselves trying to build decent lives and new communities in unfamiliar circumstances.

If we accept this as a plausible or perhaps even the most likely option, then it would be incredibly smart to start retooling, re-skilling, rethinking and even redirecting our lives, now, in resonance with the changes that are already happening and will increasingly intensify. One way to do this is learn from wise and amazing people (like our course speakers) who have carefully analyzed the crisis and all available options, who build movements that “speak truth to power,” while supporting and facilitating rapid change.

On an abstract level, you can check out the short guide we just released, Seven Essential Tools For Surviving — and Thriving — in a Time of Climate Crisis. This is not meant to offer a definitive or final word. We hope it will be the beginning of a conversation we will continue through the five-week seminar.

While we have proposed a price for the seminar, we also offer partial and full scholarships for those who need or want it. Please email us — hello@liminal.news — and we will work it out.