Yeah, this is the main reason I invited you to come with me to the screening next month for that new PBS show "Brief History of the Future," which is dedicated to promoting "protopian" visions of the future where various technologies save us from all this. I'm trying to figure out how to balance realistic alarm with constructive positivity. The people behind that series (and their whole "Futurific" project) would argue that we are being unnecessarily and destructively negative. And I'd sure love to believe that doubling down on positivity will take us through. But I can't help but suspect it's another form of denial, and another set of excuses for more capitalism, more technology, and just plain more.
I think the ‘why’ is trauma survival mode, fawning (this is fine!) and freeze. Enough slow (and fast) rolling disasters in areas of food, water safety, pharmaceuticals, public safety and surveillance, and corporate greed have put the (vast?) majority of Americans into rigid conditions of either poverty or living paycheck to paycheck. It’s hard to make room for something that takes a lot of emotional bandwidth when you are: addicted as most of us are, emotionally immature as most of us are, and in sub optimal health as damn near all of us are. Hard to make a cohesive plan to tackle it all at once. I admit I haven’t read How Soon is Now, but following you for 10+ years I feel your pain in trying to manifest some momentum and think you are on to something again. You never know when it will take, don’t give up!
For the longest time the earth was constantly killing us or making us miserable. It was man vs nature and nature was winning. But now man has the upper hand, we could even kill earth if we wanted. We live so comfortably.
We don’t want to give up this upper hand, even if it leads to our eventual demise, because at least we’ll die in comfort in our warm beds with our phones and not with sticks up our butts, wet, or with ants biting us.
Yes, the taboo is palpable, and even for those of us working in the climate space, can feel hard to break. I spent several days at a meeting of various campaign and media organisations working on climate some months back, and for all the talk of strategy and plans, at no point was there any space made in the programme to honour the idea we must all secretly harbour that everything we're doing might in fact be completley immaterial relative to the biogeophysical forces now in train. Even the climate movement itself doesn't want to go there, in other words. Really looking forward to the course.
Such a good post. I hadn't heard of Puputan. It's an interesting methaphor. Although we seem to be pretending there aren't any armed Dutch colonialists in front of us...
I personally feel obsessed with this topic, it seems only logical to devote a great part of my energy to studying it and deciding what to do about it--how to live with such knowledge. And while it does get depressing and heavy at times, I'm glad that, overall, I haven't lost my enthusiasm about living a good, beautiful life.
After spending a good couple of weeks retreated in the countryside and reading a lot about collapse, including Breaking Together from Jem Bendell (great reccomendation, by the way!), I traveled with some friends for a couple of days to the original land of Dutch colonizers, curiously enough. It was an intriguing experience. While I feel like our friendship is meaningful, I couldn't help but feel alienated by many of their actions as they took photos of our avocados toasts and talked about professional ambitions and personal relationships as if life as we know it will stay the same for, at least, decades to come. The mind-boggling part is that all of them work in either social or sustainability fields.
During one of our lunches, I shared with them the main thesis of the book Breaking Together: that not only we're walking towards collapse but that it's in fact already happening. They listened attentively for a couple of seconds and even asked some questions, and then, apparently unconsciously and in sync, all three grabbed their phones and stopped listening. It was incredible--like some sort of button had been pressed: shut down! I love them, a lot, and we're talking about progressive people here that take pride in breaking many other societal taboos. I did feel for a moment that I did something inappropriate, not necessarily disgusting, more like I had gone mad and that they didn't have the psychological wherewithal to deal with me so they downright ignored me as I might be a drunk roofless stranger in the street screaming and announcing the apocalypse.
I had an honest chat with one of them afterwards, and directly asked him if he was both aware of how he reacted and of how bad things were. He shared that although he knows deep down it's pretty bad, he prefers to not think about it too much since there's not much more he thinks he can do about it. This was sad to hear. It felt like a literal 'I choose ignorance.'
Anyways, thanks for continuing to write about this. It makes me feel both less lonely and mad to read the comments too and know there are more folks concerned about this and committed to doing something about it.
In a recent post you were trying to recall an indigenous myth that applied to our predicament. Perhaps it was this?
WETIKO IN A NUTSHELL
BY PAUL LEVY, AUTHOR OF WETIKO: HEALING THE MIND-VIRUS THAT PLAGUES OUR WORLD
A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Wetiko is a psychosis in the true sense of the word, “a sickness of the spirit.” Wetiko covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen.
Wetiko bewitches our consciousness so that we become blind to the underlying, assumed viewpoint through which we perceive, conjure up, and give meaning to our experience of both the world and ourselves. This psychic virus can be thought of as the “bug” in “the system” that informs and animates the madness that is playing out in our lives, both individually and collectively, on the world stage.
Before being able to treat this sickness that has infected us all, we have to snap out of our denial, see the disease, acknowledge it, name it, and try to understand how it operates so as to ascertain how to deal with it—this is what my book Wetiko is all about.
You forget, most humans lived lives very different from life these days only a couple of hundred years ago; fossil fuels (with the exception of coal, and not everyone had it) were virtually nonexistent. Nobody had AC or central heat, nobody drove cars, etc., three hundred years ago nobody had electricity. Technology and population have exploded, yet from an evolutionary perspective , it's the blink of an eye. A PhD biologist told me a year ago she knows we're in dire straits, she prefers to bury her head in the ground. Cognitive dissonance is one factor; what's to be done? Suggest to someone he might live without AC, it's unthinkable.
I love the opening to your piece about how it sometimes feels when you bring up the notion that we are nearing the brink of collapse. I've felt the same so many times that I rarely bring it up. All the previous comments here are right on the money. Perhaps people sense it is a predicament and predicaments just don't have solutions, so why focus on what's coming for us all when there is nothing to be done. Truth is . . . there are things that can be done once you accept that collapse is inevitable. Check this: The 15 Benefits of Collapse Acceptance from the Post Doom website. You'll all feel better I promise:
Also, one of my heroes, David Lauterwasser who is an eloquent permaculturalist and "collapseologist" in Thailand just penned a great piece on how agriculture as we know it has ended:
The forces of democracy need to be prepared for those who will fight dirty. For example, it is a travesty that the Democrats were not prepared for Roger Stone in Miami. Democracy, in the tangible forms of voters and election workers needed protection that day. The Democrats could've called upon and had in place skilled local and national non-violent organizers and peace keepers. Where might we be today if that mini-insurrection had been a different kind of learning ground?
I get cranky when Democrats express belated dismay, even outrage, at some behavior they should've expected; maybe even did expect and thought it somehow best to let things play out. As if they don't know that a willingness to play dirty is a requirement of leadership in Roger Stone's party as it is in any party that serves private interests. Privateers play dirty. A game of thrones with no rules for me is how they roll. 🐢
This relates to your dis-ease in breaking taboos because the things you are talking about are the dirty tricks being played. The 50 shades of fuckedupedness is hard to hear, much less engage. It helps me to remember that, if people can't see the collapse then neither can they see the good news that goes with it. Even if you take pains to show them the good news, its the kind of thing people need to see for themselves. I am more and more convinced that we need to save most of our talking for people who can hear us. 🌼
Thank you for this and all your rich reflections. 🌼
I love this cute little mammal. Problem is time. I am in my 80's so have little time left. I don't do certain things cause of the time . What I must do is take pictures of my art, make a web site and sell or donate my sculptures and paintings to those who want them. I'll probably never finish this. But I can't stop reading about the coming fall and I do simplify, throw away lots of stuff I don't want now, visit friends who are sick (many,) exercise and sleep 8 hrs or more.
Why? Learned helplessness. Many individuals believe that there's nothing they can do to stop this train because those with the levers of power and money don't seem to be interested, and because at least in the USA the unquenchable thirst for profit is embedded in our legal system and is highly effective at promoting blindness. As Schiller once said, "Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain."
I think after Covid and all the nefarious policy making and lying from our governments, the WHO, the WEF, the UN, our hospitals and our doctors, our educators etc. People are incredibly untrustworthy of Climate Change now. I for one am now questioning, mostly after Michael Moore's documentary, Planet of Humans, was taken down, criticizing 350.org and the Climate Change Industry, which there is a very big one now. #Follow the money. Again, debate is crucial, the science isn't settled, science is never "settled". That phrase is troublesome already. Of course we have to reconfigure how we live, capitalism, farming, medicine, education, etc. I'm not saying the world isn't "fucked". But it's always been. I think the fear and emergency aspect of it is also what turns people off. Living in fear and anxiety is what's helped create a more "fucked" up world, especially for our children. It didn't rain in California for decades, now it hasn't stopped raining. Nature is a mystery. Housing development around the world has been disastrous, building where we shouldn't. I.e building a city in a desert! There are so many factors that contribute to our climate changing. The focus on CO2 alone is also a red flag in my opinion and not smart science. There's no nuance in the fight for a different world, it's either "The world is going to end" or "Who cares, we're all going to die", both are tribes I think most people don't relate to.
I would suggest part of the way is that people who are listening to the challenges are saturated with too much information without a sense of agency. There is SO much discourse out there on the topic and it's easy to withdraw into a cocoon characterized by a perception of powerlessness. Simply listening to experts--however prolific and prominent they are--talk about the issue is--in my opinion--creating some of the inertia that perhaps is leading to lessened participation. After reviewing the speakers for the upcoming course, the descriptions indicate more discourse and big ideas and perhaps policy and activist work. For me, I have consumed much discourse and big ideas on the issue but after this consumption I often feel stuck about what to do. Therefore, my recommendation is to make sure that speakers--especially folks like Jane Fonda and Marianne Williamson--truly provide participants with practical tools and/or ways to cultivate practical skills--both internal and external--without simply creating more alarm or waxing philosophical. A rhetorical question I grapple with is "what are the skills" I need to be as effective as possible in dealing with the deleterious impacts of climate while not resorting to temporary fixes, psychedelics, biohacking, etc. as a means to armor myself and escape to imaginal worlds? Consequently, I find myself looking for on-the-ground community not limited to virtual spaces where I can build relationships with like minded people not only interested in surviving these times but help others flourish in the midst of it. Finally, I think it would be great to offer more speakers who are experts in supporting people to learn tools like: regenerative design and leadership, permaculture, food systems and agroforestry, how to cultivate clean water, how to identify communities that are not just late stage capitalistic ploys to lure you in to so-called green eco-villages which are nothing more than claims for private property under the veil of community, how to regenerate land that has been destroyed (highly recommend the work of Joe Brewer) so we can actually heal the earth rather than just trying to figure out how to cannibalize and buy up what good land remains (e.g., Zuckerberg and Gates), etc. Perhaps that's too tall an order but I think it would help with engagement. Finally, I recommend that the courses have an intentional pedagogy anchored in how adults learn. Stringing together a series of speakers with limited Q&A without any deep participant engagement may not result in the hoped for learning goals. Perhaps developing participant "learning guides" aligned with each talk would maximize participation.
A formal way of describing it is that social systems are structural and therefore they tend to have an immunological response to that which is anti-structural as threatening to the homeostasis of the system. My friend George Hanson wrote about this in his seminal book, The Trickster and the Paranormal. The paranormal, esoteric and occult are all strongly connected to the trickster archetype which violates established hierarchies--EG Rasputin and the Czar's royal court---and are unpredictable, episodic and in many ways anti-structural. I discuss this here: https://zaporacle.com/rabbit-hole-navigation-skills-free-video-guide-for-orienteering-in-zones-of-high-strangeness/A variation of the immunological reaction of systems to the anti-strucutural is what you read in Mustafa Suleyman's book, The Coming Wave--pessimism aversion--- which he defines as: The tendency for people, particularly elites, to ignore, downplay, or reject narratives they see as overly negative. A variant of optimism bias, it colors much of the debate around the future, especially in technology circles. Game-over scenarios are by definition, anti-structural. They are end of business as usual, of structure, therefore they are unwelcome objects of perception.
Wondering if you have read Peter Kingsley or have thoughts about the book: A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World?
Yeah, this is the main reason I invited you to come with me to the screening next month for that new PBS show "Brief History of the Future," which is dedicated to promoting "protopian" visions of the future where various technologies save us from all this. I'm trying to figure out how to balance realistic alarm with constructive positivity. The people behind that series (and their whole "Futurific" project) would argue that we are being unnecessarily and destructively negative. And I'd sure love to believe that doubling down on positivity will take us through. But I can't help but suspect it's another form of denial, and another set of excuses for more capitalism, more technology, and just plain more.
I think the ‘why’ is trauma survival mode, fawning (this is fine!) and freeze. Enough slow (and fast) rolling disasters in areas of food, water safety, pharmaceuticals, public safety and surveillance, and corporate greed have put the (vast?) majority of Americans into rigid conditions of either poverty or living paycheck to paycheck. It’s hard to make room for something that takes a lot of emotional bandwidth when you are: addicted as most of us are, emotionally immature as most of us are, and in sub optimal health as damn near all of us are. Hard to make a cohesive plan to tackle it all at once. I admit I haven’t read How Soon is Now, but following you for 10+ years I feel your pain in trying to manifest some momentum and think you are on to something again. You never know when it will take, don’t give up!
Here’s my hot take:
For the longest time the earth was constantly killing us or making us miserable. It was man vs nature and nature was winning. But now man has the upper hand, we could even kill earth if we wanted. We live so comfortably.
We don’t want to give up this upper hand, even if it leads to our eventual demise, because at least we’ll die in comfort in our warm beds with our phones and not with sticks up our butts, wet, or with ants biting us.
Yes, the taboo is palpable, and even for those of us working in the climate space, can feel hard to break. I spent several days at a meeting of various campaign and media organisations working on climate some months back, and for all the talk of strategy and plans, at no point was there any space made in the programme to honour the idea we must all secretly harbour that everything we're doing might in fact be completley immaterial relative to the biogeophysical forces now in train. Even the climate movement itself doesn't want to go there, in other words. Really looking forward to the course.
Such a good post. I hadn't heard of Puputan. It's an interesting methaphor. Although we seem to be pretending there aren't any armed Dutch colonialists in front of us...
I personally feel obsessed with this topic, it seems only logical to devote a great part of my energy to studying it and deciding what to do about it--how to live with such knowledge. And while it does get depressing and heavy at times, I'm glad that, overall, I haven't lost my enthusiasm about living a good, beautiful life.
After spending a good couple of weeks retreated in the countryside and reading a lot about collapse, including Breaking Together from Jem Bendell (great reccomendation, by the way!), I traveled with some friends for a couple of days to the original land of Dutch colonizers, curiously enough. It was an intriguing experience. While I feel like our friendship is meaningful, I couldn't help but feel alienated by many of their actions as they took photos of our avocados toasts and talked about professional ambitions and personal relationships as if life as we know it will stay the same for, at least, decades to come. The mind-boggling part is that all of them work in either social or sustainability fields.
During one of our lunches, I shared with them the main thesis of the book Breaking Together: that not only we're walking towards collapse but that it's in fact already happening. They listened attentively for a couple of seconds and even asked some questions, and then, apparently unconsciously and in sync, all three grabbed their phones and stopped listening. It was incredible--like some sort of button had been pressed: shut down! I love them, a lot, and we're talking about progressive people here that take pride in breaking many other societal taboos. I did feel for a moment that I did something inappropriate, not necessarily disgusting, more like I had gone mad and that they didn't have the psychological wherewithal to deal with me so they downright ignored me as I might be a drunk roofless stranger in the street screaming and announcing the apocalypse.
I had an honest chat with one of them afterwards, and directly asked him if he was both aware of how he reacted and of how bad things were. He shared that although he knows deep down it's pretty bad, he prefers to not think about it too much since there's not much more he thinks he can do about it. This was sad to hear. It felt like a literal 'I choose ignorance.'
Anyways, thanks for continuing to write about this. It makes me feel both less lonely and mad to read the comments too and know there are more folks concerned about this and committed to doing something about it.
In a recent post you were trying to recall an indigenous myth that applied to our predicament. Perhaps it was this?
WETIKO IN A NUTSHELL
BY PAUL LEVY, AUTHOR OF WETIKO: HEALING THE MIND-VIRUS THAT PLAGUES OUR WORLD
A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Wetiko is a psychosis in the true sense of the word, “a sickness of the spirit.” Wetiko covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen.
Wetiko bewitches our consciousness so that we become blind to the underlying, assumed viewpoint through which we perceive, conjure up, and give meaning to our experience of both the world and ourselves. This psychic virus can be thought of as the “bug” in “the system” that informs and animates the madness that is playing out in our lives, both individually and collectively, on the world stage.
Before being able to treat this sickness that has infected us all, we have to snap out of our denial, see the disease, acknowledge it, name it, and try to understand how it operates so as to ascertain how to deal with it—this is what my book Wetiko is all about.
You forget, most humans lived lives very different from life these days only a couple of hundred years ago; fossil fuels (with the exception of coal, and not everyone had it) were virtually nonexistent. Nobody had AC or central heat, nobody drove cars, etc., three hundred years ago nobody had electricity. Technology and population have exploded, yet from an evolutionary perspective , it's the blink of an eye. A PhD biologist told me a year ago she knows we're in dire straits, she prefers to bury her head in the ground. Cognitive dissonance is one factor; what's to be done? Suggest to someone he might live without AC, it's unthinkable.
I love the opening to your piece about how it sometimes feels when you bring up the notion that we are nearing the brink of collapse. I've felt the same so many times that I rarely bring it up. All the previous comments here are right on the money. Perhaps people sense it is a predicament and predicaments just don't have solutions, so why focus on what's coming for us all when there is nothing to be done. Truth is . . . there are things that can be done once you accept that collapse is inevitable. Check this: The 15 Benefits of Collapse Acceptance from the Post Doom website. You'll all feel better I promise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhKbOtZM01c
Also, one of my heroes, David Lauterwasser who is an eloquent permaculturalist and "collapseologist" in Thailand just penned a great piece on how agriculture as we know it has ended:
https://open.substack.com/pub/animistsramblings/p/agriculture-diminishing-returns?r=nnwaa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The forces of democracy need to be prepared for those who will fight dirty. For example, it is a travesty that the Democrats were not prepared for Roger Stone in Miami. Democracy, in the tangible forms of voters and election workers needed protection that day. The Democrats could've called upon and had in place skilled local and national non-violent organizers and peace keepers. Where might we be today if that mini-insurrection had been a different kind of learning ground?
I get cranky when Democrats express belated dismay, even outrage, at some behavior they should've expected; maybe even did expect and thought it somehow best to let things play out. As if they don't know that a willingness to play dirty is a requirement of leadership in Roger Stone's party as it is in any party that serves private interests. Privateers play dirty. A game of thrones with no rules for me is how they roll. 🐢
This relates to your dis-ease in breaking taboos because the things you are talking about are the dirty tricks being played. The 50 shades of fuckedupedness is hard to hear, much less engage. It helps me to remember that, if people can't see the collapse then neither can they see the good news that goes with it. Even if you take pains to show them the good news, its the kind of thing people need to see for themselves. I am more and more convinced that we need to save most of our talking for people who can hear us. 🌼
Thank you for this and all your rich reflections. 🌼
I love this cute little mammal. Problem is time. I am in my 80's so have little time left. I don't do certain things cause of the time . What I must do is take pictures of my art, make a web site and sell or donate my sculptures and paintings to those who want them. I'll probably never finish this. But I can't stop reading about the coming fall and I do simplify, throw away lots of stuff I don't want now, visit friends who are sick (many,) exercise and sleep 8 hrs or more.
Why? Learned helplessness. Many individuals believe that there's nothing they can do to stop this train because those with the levers of power and money don't seem to be interested, and because at least in the USA the unquenchable thirst for profit is embedded in our legal system and is highly effective at promoting blindness. As Schiller once said, "Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain."
I think after Covid and all the nefarious policy making and lying from our governments, the WHO, the WEF, the UN, our hospitals and our doctors, our educators etc. People are incredibly untrustworthy of Climate Change now. I for one am now questioning, mostly after Michael Moore's documentary, Planet of Humans, was taken down, criticizing 350.org and the Climate Change Industry, which there is a very big one now. #Follow the money. Again, debate is crucial, the science isn't settled, science is never "settled". That phrase is troublesome already. Of course we have to reconfigure how we live, capitalism, farming, medicine, education, etc. I'm not saying the world isn't "fucked". But it's always been. I think the fear and emergency aspect of it is also what turns people off. Living in fear and anxiety is what's helped create a more "fucked" up world, especially for our children. It didn't rain in California for decades, now it hasn't stopped raining. Nature is a mystery. Housing development around the world has been disastrous, building where we shouldn't. I.e building a city in a desert! There are so many factors that contribute to our climate changing. The focus on CO2 alone is also a red flag in my opinion and not smart science. There's no nuance in the fight for a different world, it's either "The world is going to end" or "Who cares, we're all going to die", both are tribes I think most people don't relate to.
I would suggest part of the way is that people who are listening to the challenges are saturated with too much information without a sense of agency. There is SO much discourse out there on the topic and it's easy to withdraw into a cocoon characterized by a perception of powerlessness. Simply listening to experts--however prolific and prominent they are--talk about the issue is--in my opinion--creating some of the inertia that perhaps is leading to lessened participation. After reviewing the speakers for the upcoming course, the descriptions indicate more discourse and big ideas and perhaps policy and activist work. For me, I have consumed much discourse and big ideas on the issue but after this consumption I often feel stuck about what to do. Therefore, my recommendation is to make sure that speakers--especially folks like Jane Fonda and Marianne Williamson--truly provide participants with practical tools and/or ways to cultivate practical skills--both internal and external--without simply creating more alarm or waxing philosophical. A rhetorical question I grapple with is "what are the skills" I need to be as effective as possible in dealing with the deleterious impacts of climate while not resorting to temporary fixes, psychedelics, biohacking, etc. as a means to armor myself and escape to imaginal worlds? Consequently, I find myself looking for on-the-ground community not limited to virtual spaces where I can build relationships with like minded people not only interested in surviving these times but help others flourish in the midst of it. Finally, I think it would be great to offer more speakers who are experts in supporting people to learn tools like: regenerative design and leadership, permaculture, food systems and agroforestry, how to cultivate clean water, how to identify communities that are not just late stage capitalistic ploys to lure you in to so-called green eco-villages which are nothing more than claims for private property under the veil of community, how to regenerate land that has been destroyed (highly recommend the work of Joe Brewer) so we can actually heal the earth rather than just trying to figure out how to cannibalize and buy up what good land remains (e.g., Zuckerberg and Gates), etc. Perhaps that's too tall an order but I think it would help with engagement. Finally, I recommend that the courses have an intentional pedagogy anchored in how adults learn. Stringing together a series of speakers with limited Q&A without any deep participant engagement may not result in the hoped for learning goals. Perhaps developing participant "learning guides" aligned with each talk would maximize participation.
A formal way of describing it is that social systems are structural and therefore they tend to have an immunological response to that which is anti-structural as threatening to the homeostasis of the system. My friend George Hanson wrote about this in his seminal book, The Trickster and the Paranormal. The paranormal, esoteric and occult are all strongly connected to the trickster archetype which violates established hierarchies--EG Rasputin and the Czar's royal court---and are unpredictable, episodic and in many ways anti-structural. I discuss this here: https://zaporacle.com/rabbit-hole-navigation-skills-free-video-guide-for-orienteering-in-zones-of-high-strangeness/A variation of the immunological reaction of systems to the anti-strucutural is what you read in Mustafa Suleyman's book, The Coming Wave--pessimism aversion--- which he defines as: The tendency for people, particularly elites, to ignore, downplay, or reject narratives they see as overly negative. A variant of optimism bias, it colors much of the debate around the future, especially in technology circles. Game-over scenarios are by definition, anti-structural. They are end of business as usual, of structure, therefore they are unwelcome objects of perception.
Wondering if you have read Peter Kingsley or have thoughts about the book: A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World?
Thanks Daniel I hear ya , color me in with a happy crayon 🖍