image from The Daily Show

This is kind of a follow-on from my recent post on Everything Falling Apart, in which I reviewed and compared some cogent writings from Aurélien, Patrick Lawrence and Yanis Varoufakis about the fragmenting of our modern, global, industrial civilization culture. Since I wrote that summary, Aurélien and Patrick have written follow-ups, essentially trying to diagnose why everything is falling apart, and I thought they were worth thinking about.

British historian Aurélien’s newest article is called It’s All About Them, and his thesis is that much of the conflict we are seeing in the world stems from ethnocentrism — a propensity, especially among the Professional Managerial Caste (PMC), to believe that everybody substantially sees the world the same way they do. And that if they don’t, they need to be brought around to doing so, one way or another.

It presumes a cultural superiority and “it can be very dangerous indeed when it is combined with the power to do harm”. And the ethnocentrism of the current Euro-American Empire’s PMC transcends political parties and dominates thinking across the political spectrum in all the Empire’s countries. Even when those parties disagree strongly on social and economic issues, they all see the world through that same narrow, ignorant lens.

Underlying this ethnocentrism, he says, are three largely-unchallenged assumptions:

1. That most people in the world are Like Us in their beliefs and behaviours, or would be if they were not misinformed or oppressed.
2. That we understand why the people who are not Like Us are that way, and we know exactly how to correct their misunderstanding and/or oppression.
3. All international crises and conflicts are ultimately All About Us, and about some peoples’ and governments’ resistance to be Like Us. Even those of us opposed to the Empire’s actions still believe that the behaviours in the rest of the world are essentially All About Us.

He defines the cross-political administration of the western PMC as the Western Security Complex (WSC) — the coalition of western forces, ethnocentric, naive, idealistic, with fragile egos, surrounded by groupthink, and ignorant of history or anything outside their own borders and worldviews. Members of the WSC, which has, he says, low entrance barriers (as long as you’re part of the PMC), presume and are presumed to have expertise to talk, write, advise, and strategize on just about any topic, despite having neither the credentials nor the experience to do so competently. They are subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect (the more ignorant they are, the more wisdom they presume themselves to have, especially on topics on which they have no knowledge or expertise whatsoever). Aurélien goes on:

The result has been the progressive triumph of the WSC discourse, in all its internally-incoherent complexity. Which is fine until the WSC encounters something it cannot understand, but can’t ignore either. Behind the confusion and silliness of much WSC commentary on Ukraine, even by “military experts” and “strategic commentators” is a stubborn refusal to accept that things happen in the world which are outside its frame of reference. From the beginning, the war has been interpreted in terms of what the WSC understands and can talk about: an amalgam of Afghanistan, Iraq and Apocalypse Now. In the end the WSC is unable to imagine a world which is not About Them. It is unthinkable that there should be wars, revolutions and changes of government around the world where the West is not the main actor, and where local and often deep-rooted causes which the WSC cannot understand are the main drivers.

Given these are the people entrusted with the power to launch (and provoke) wars, overthrow foreign governments, and sanction and isolate countries that are not Like Us, it is small wonder that, as global economic and ecological collapse accelerates, we are ignoring these crises entirely and instead charging into (and creating) international political and social crises, in ignorant, childish, and recklessly dangerous ways.

…..

Journalist and foreign correspondent Patrick Lawrence’s latest is called The Undiscovered Country, referring neither to the expression’s use by Shakespeare nor its reuse by Star Trek writers, but rather to the fact that America does not know what it stands for, and neither do Americans. Instead, he says, those in other countries have learned (often the hard way) that what Aurélien would call the PMC and the WSC have never represented ordinary Americans of any political persuasion, and the actions they pursue are often directly contrary to the explicit desires and preferences of the majority of its citizens. (He cites popular support for universal health care and against supplying more arms to Ukraine as examples.) He writes:

We Americans are fortunate in that others are usually able to distinguish between the American people and the American government… We are indeed a fortunate citizenry, considering the so often egregious conduct toward other peoples of those purporting to lead us. People seem to know that what our government does in one or another circumstance is not necessarily a reflection of who we Americans are…

We do not have a government that reflects what we favor at home any more than it does abroad: the kind of society we wish to live in, the “values” we espouse. The world may understand that most of us are not high-handed imperialists, but it does not know much about what, in the positive, we actually are beyond what we are not. At home, corruption, money in politics, obsessions with power, crumbling institutions, and all the rest leave us ever less able to express our public selves in public space. We cannot, if we net all this out, be very sure of who we are. And we owe it to ourselves, and most certainly to others, to know ourselves and learn to act according to who we truly are.

Of course the PMC is all too happy to tell us, amplified by the media they control, who Americans really are and what they should believe, and to pursue a “divide and conquer” strategy to prevent any kind of cohesive alternative to their view of what needs to be done both domestically and internationally.

Is it even possible, he wonders, for divided and manipulated and deceived and befuddled and misinformed Americans to “get their act together” and accept that the PMC does not represent them and find a way to wrest power and control of the American experiment from them? He concludes:

Will we continue indefinitely to live submerged, so to say—an undiscovered country? Or will we come alive again, rediscover ourselves as those before us have done on numerous occasions in response to circumstances different from ours but with some things in common with ours? At home an authentic democracy, abroad, an authentic internationalism… We have lost all sight of our potential, what we are capable of doing—individually and collectively—but I cannot accept that we, any of us, is content in this condition. Robert Putnam’s [Bowling Alone] subtitle, it is worth mentioning, is The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Our better selves, and I will not even argue that we have better selves, will not lie undiscovered indefinitely.

…..

When I read these articles, and the ones I referred to in my earlier post, what most surprised me is that what they are saying is so obvious, but I had never really thought of our situation in these terms. Our ignorance of the world was brought home this week when every one of Canada’s political parties joined in a standing ovation in the House of Commons for a Ukrainian Nazi who fought for Germany in WWII, apparently not aware of the fact that the Russians were the heroes, and were our much-sacrificing allies, in the struggle against German Fascism in WWII.

And our submergence to the will of the PMC and WSC at home and internationally, our learned helplessness and resignation, is brought home again and again with every unchallenged lie in the mainstream media, with every new act of governments to increase oil & gas production, to impoverish and suppress the non-PMC castes (not just the “working class”) by deliberately forcing interest rates and inflationary costs up, to ramp up censorship of critics of the PMC, to subject citizens to the brutal consequences of foreign “sanctions” and embargoes requiring them to deindustrialize their entire economies. And to turn us against each other so they can continue their imperial rule over us without restriction, regardless of whether the Tweedledum PMC or Tweedledee PMC wins the “democratic” election.

This is a horrific tragedy, against the backdrop of civilization’s accelerating collapse, which continues unimpeded. Part of this tragedy is that the PMC are doing their best — they genuinely believe that what they’re doing is in the whole world’s best interest.

Were Shakespeare alive today he could not invent a better plot for a story with an inevitably ghastly ending.

This is #21 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community. 

our neighbourhood café after dark; my own photo, photoshopped

These days, this body frequently nags me to go to the local café and hang out there for an hour or so. It likes the company of the regular café denizens, likes to get out of the apartment at least once a day, and sees a trip to the café as a reasonable reward for its vigorous daily workout in the gym. Like me, this body is lazy; it has to be motivated to do things. So off we go.

It was a late workout today, so it’s dark when we (this body and I) head off to the café. The streets are busy at 7pm, and so is the café, but it’s a different crowd, a different ambiance from what you see here during the day. The people are walking less hurriedly, and they’re younger and speaking more animatedly. The majority, at this hour, are Persian, and they’re speaking Farsi. The same is true when we enter the café.

Inside, the place is bustling. There are ten occupied tables, and the majority of the conversations are in either Farsi or Korean. As I place my matcha order and take one of the last two empty tables to wait for it to be made, I am listening to a quite large, very-well-dressed group that look to have either recently been to a social gathering together, or are getting ready to go to one. I have no idea what they’re saying, but I’m fluent enough in French to occasionally pick up Farsi ‘loan-words’ from French colonial times.

So I hear mersi (thank you) several times, and trying to parse out the rest of their conversation I’m able to catch Etâzuni (the US) and, as one of them shows off his wool skully, I also hear šâpo (hat). One woman has a package on the table beside her latte, and I think I picked out kâdo (gift). And of course, kâfe, and the Italian loan-words we all use latte and barista. It seems customary in most Asian cultures to always bring a simply-wrapped gift whenever one visits another’s home. It’s a great custom that, unfortunately, beyond the obligatory bottle of wine (which even then is often BYOB), doesn’t seem as common in western cultures.

I hear the word mersi several times, and for a while I ponder why it seems so easy to say thank you in just about every language except English. It’s just two words (and just one in most languages). There are a couple of English language conversations going on in the café, and now I’m listening for those two magic words from them. I don’t hear them. It was a long shot, but still.

And of course while I’m listening for those two words, I start listening for that other magic word, sorry. But I didn’t hear it, either, except once from the barista. And it was a Canadian sorry. Whole wars have been fought, I’m sure, over English-language speakers’ incapacity to use that simple, inexpensive word.

Why is that so, I wonder? Have the damned lawyers ruined the word by warning us that its use can be legally interpreted as an admission of guilt? Does its use betray our secret, inadmissible shame for all the things we are blamed for, and blame ourselves for? Or is it an admission of weakness — a handing over of a weapon to the one we apologize to, that might later be used against us? Are our egos really that fragile?

It’s a fraught word, sorry. It is in a way ambiguous and in a way meaningless. Its root meaning is “feeling sore” [as in ‘he’s in a sorry state after the injury’] or “feeling sorrowful”. But in a way that’s all about the person saying it, not about the person it’s supposedly directed to. Perhaps that’s honest, but it’s not very sympathetic.

So I wondered, how do you say it in Farsi, or in Korean?

I was delighted to find that, in Farsi, it isn’t that simple. You basically have to own up to what you’re sorry for. So there’s a way to say “I won’t do it again.” There’s a way to say “I was wrong (or selfish, or at fault, or responsible) for doing X.” There’s a way to say “I hope you will forgive me.” There’s a way to say “I feel for (or offer condolences for, or can understand) your loss (or suffering, or anger, or reaction).”

Any of these is less ambiguous, less self-preoccupied and more responsible than just “I’m sorry.” They’re more forward-looking, towards what can be done as recompense or to prevent recurrence. And because they’re clearer, there is less wriggle room for later claiming that “When I said I was sorry, that wasn’t what I meant.” Or, even worse “Sorry… that you took what I said (or did!) the wrong way.”

How about in Korean? Well, interestingly, in Korean, the “I’m” in “I’m sorry” is omitted, because it’s considered redundant, and the way in which the words are said can be as critical as the words themselves. There are several variations depending on the identity and status of the addressor and addressee, but there are also two forms, one of which has the implication of accepting having done something wrong, while the other does not — it merely conveys sympathy for what has happened.

No wonder we get into such trouble, in many languages, both when we fail to use these words, and even when we use them!

And then, turning my attention back to the chatter in the café, I hear one of the English-speakers say “excuse me?” in a sarcastic, interrogative tone. I have to laugh.

I have my crossword book out, my excuse for loitering over my one large mug of matcha (A Japanese loan-word, literally meaning ‘ground tea’). I glance up to see what I guess to be two Korean women enter the café and take the empty table next to mine. (My policy, out of respect for the café owners, is to hurry up and leave if at any time there are no vacant tables left in the café, but one of the other groups is leaving, so I hunker back down.) The lilt of the language (short words, no stressed syllables) confirms to me that they are indeed speaking Korean. And the position of their table is perfect for my favourite form of ‘cultural anthropology’ when I don’t understand the language being spoken, namely (subtly, I hope) observing body language.

Before I catch any particular body language from the new duo, I note something in their conversation that seems lacking in both the English and Farsi conversations. Silence. It is clear that long pauses after someone has said something in Korean are appreciated, rather than considered awkward as they often are in English. It shows, I think, that the listener is taking the time to consider what has been said carefully. And to drink their beverage before it gets cold!

When the second woman replies, the first woman listens silently and nods frequently. When I noticed this once before, I had interpreted the nods to be signals of agreement, but I have learned since that they are not. In Korean culture, the nod indicates “I am listening intently”, and does not signal any judgement one way or another about the content of what is being said. I’ve also been told that, out of politeness, Koreans are quite reticent about saying “no”, or about stating explicitly that they disagree with what is being said, so you have to look for subtle, often non-verbal signs of doubt or concern.

I laugh at myself as I realize I haven’t the faintest clue how I would do that, and that even if I learned Korean I would probably suck at it. In Korea there is an important concept called nunchi, which is the ability to quickly take in and size up what is going on in a space, including very nuanced signals, and to respond accordingly. This is valued in personal interactions, social occasions and work environments, and for good reasons. There is some suggestion it can even be a ‘superpower’ for introverts who have excellent attention skills. The thought makes me sigh. We need a lot more of that in the world. I need a lot more of that.

My attention switches back to the large Persian group. Their body language is also somewhat subtler than what I’m used to, which, when you get used to looking for it, is astonishingly revealing, even without a Book of Tells to translate it.

The group displays some body language that I think I understand the meaning of. The hand-over-heart, combined with a slight nod, to indicate agreement, sincerity and/or respect. The hand bumping up under the chin to indicate being fed up. The bunched fingers pointing up, or the two hands repeatedly flipped outward, as expressions of emphasis. These seem to me largely universal signals, and I wonder how they became so.

Not so for some other very common western body language. As noted above, a nod doesn’t necessarily mean agreement, and a sideways shake of the head doesn’t necessarily mean disagreement (nor does its absence necessarily indicate agreement).

I’m glancing over at the Persian group to see if they are nodding or shaking their heads. I don’t see a lot of either gesture. But what I do notice is a bit of Groucho Marx-like eyebrow raising. After two of them, apparently in a serious conversation, have both done it, one accompanied with a kind of backward tilt of the head, I scramble to search my phone’s web browser for a translation. Apparently, it is a subtle, quiet, polite way of saying no!

I’m not close enough to be able to notice the body language conveyed just with the eyes, but I am starting to notice some patterns when it comes to eye contact. And they’re confusing as hell. It seems to be a bit of a balancing act: Direct eye contact can be rude, depending on familiarity, gender, relationship and age. But lack of eye contact can also be considered rude, conveying disinterest or disrespect. And how long you maintain eye contact is also critical to its message and social acceptability.

Another couple comes into the café speaking Farsi, and I am again blown away at how well most people in this café are dressed. The newcomers are both wearing pant-suits with perfect creases and immaculately polished shoes. I’m guessing they might be on a date, or just getting away from the kids for a couple of hours. They don’t hold hands, but as they speak their hands touch often; this is not a casual relationship.

I’m feeling seriously underdressed again, even more so than when I visit this café during the day. My phone’s browser is still open, and I click on a link to learn more. I’m chagrinned to discover, as I sit at my table wearing shorts with my legs stretched out and crossed, that both my attire and my posture would be considered rude in Korea. I pull my legs back under the table and place my feet firmly on the floor, an instinctive act that is one of self-respect rather than of deference. The perils of learning, and of paying attention!

The new couple points to an open table, and I note something that seems common to all Asian cultures — people from these cultures point with their whole hand, never with a finger. And many of their hand actions (not just handshakes) seem to prefer the right hand over the left, or entail the use of both hands (when passing things to another person, I understand it is customary to both give and receive with two hands).

The Persian woman acknowledges the pointing hand with a slight shrug, and they make their way over to that table. Now I’m smiling again — I know nothing about the significance of the shrug in different cultures, other than its use as an iconic French statement. For a few minutes I scan the room looking for more shrugs. I see none, and thinking back I can’t really recall seeing people shrug at all in this café.

So it’s back to my phone browser, and indeed I learn that the shrug is virtually unknown in Chinese, Japanese and Korean cultures. Perhaps this is wise, since it’s another terribly ambiguous gesture (except perhaps when used by the French, in which case there’s no doubt what it means)! It can mean “I don’t know.” Or more dangerously, it can also be interpreted as “I don’t care.” There are several components of the shrug, I learn: Not just the shoulders, but the simultaneous movement of the hands (usually turning them upwards), and the movement of the lips and/or eyebrows. The accompanying actions can often disambiguate the meaning. Shrug in a mirror while thinking “I don’t know.” and then again while thinking “I don’t care.” For most people, there’s a difference. If you’re paying attention. Aaaah!

And it gets worse. Psychologists and criminologists report that when people lie, they often betray themselves, and what they’re actually saying, with a slight shrug-like movement of one shoulder, or the flip of one hand.

…..

Back at home, looking in the mirror as I shrug, and then as I tell untruths to my image, I discover that the body language I think I’m conveying isn’t anything like what I’m actually displaying.

For a start, I’m much less expressive with my face and body than I think I am. I have just noticed, in the mirrored apartment elevator, that what I thought was a pleasant polite smile to others in the elevator actually looks terribly tight-lipped and repressed, probably even insincere, if it’s noticed at all. It’s more, I’m (Canadian) sorry to admit, a grimace! A bit ironic for someone who has often written about the enormous benefits of smiling!

I realize that most of my ‘selfies’ (which I use mainly for blog and podcast ‘portraits’) do not show me smiling, because I look unnatural — it just doesn’t look like me. Although when other people take pictures of me smiling, it does. I also realize, from my zoom sessions, that my sitting posture is lousy, making me look smaller, less fit, less interested, and less attentive. And just now, on the elevator, I noticed that my standing posture also sucks, with the same effect: I’m a slouch.

I resolve that, from now on, at least in ‘public’, I’m going to strive to stand up and sit up better, and to practice making my smile, which is usually perfectly sincere, actually come across as sincere. And maybe even poised, like most of the people I saw this evening. Doubtful plan, I know, but it’s worth a try. One more valuable café lesson.

Many years ago I was just finishing a business lunch on the outside deck of a restaurant, when I spotted my now-ex, who I’d arranged to meet at the conclusion of the lunch. I shook hands and said farewell to my client, who departed. When my ex came over to the table, she said “You were speaking French, weren’t you?” I confessed that, yes, my client was French and parts of our lunch had been conducted in his native language, and replied “How did you know?” She told me that my hands were flying all over the place when I spoke, and that my body language was completely different from when I spoke English.

I still notice this. Even when I’m writing emails in French, my hands automatically jump into action punctuating what I’m writing. Pretty funny to see.

…..

Having done a bit more research, I’m now prepped for my next visit to the Café. I’ve learned about some additional body language that is quite common for Chinese, Japanese and Koreans to exhibit in conversations, that I think I’ve observed but didn’t know quite what to make of. Apparently, laughter can sometimes be used as a means to release discomfort, and smiles to release feelings of shame, in addition to (or even in contradiction of) their usual meaning.

A finger on the forehead can mean “That’s crazy”, rather than “I’m thinking”. In their cultures you beckon someone over by waving with your fingers palm down, not palm up as westerners do. And a slightly raised hand with the pinky finger raised and slightly waving apparently means “I promise”, and can sometimes be followed by a whole ritual of confirming actions to “seal”, convey and “record” the promise.

I’ll be watching.

bonobo mother playing with her baby; photo by Frans Lanting in the Smithsonian

The word village comes from the PIE root word weik which refers to a clan or tribe — a small group of people that is larger than just a family of relatives.

The expression “It takes a village”, usually followed by “… to raise a child” speaks to the fundamental way in which humans live together. We cannot survive as individuals, no matter how rich and powerful and clever we may be. Our species just doesn’t have the physiology or the individual capacity to do so.

Primate species have a wide variety of social arrangements, depending on what has provided evolutionary success in their biosphere, but the primates closest to us, the bonobos and chimps, almost always associate in what are called fission-fusion communities.

Fission-fusion communities are less cohesive than [other] multi-male multi-female groups [such as those of baboons and macaques]. These groups occupy very large home ranges in which temporary foraging parties cleave and coalesce over time with changes in resource availability and female reproductive condition. These social systems are typically characterized by female dispersal [females leave the group at puberty and join other groups] and male philopatry [males remain with their natal group for life].

There is an obvious resonance and similarity between this bonobo/chimp social organization and that of humans, dating back to our earliest origins. Land and property has often remained with the (usually first-born) male human, and females have to find accommodation elsewhere, usually mating with males from other nearby communities.

Because of the variable fission-fusion nature of the societies of bonobos and chimps, they are not really ‘troops’, which is why the term ‘community’ is usually used to describe them. Chimp and bonobo communities generally vary from 20-80 individuals.

Historically, in most parts of the world, a village is the closest human settlement in size to a chimp or bonobo community. Wikipedia states: “The population of a village varies; the average population can range in the hundreds. Anthropologists regard the number of about 150 members for tribes as the maximum for a functioning human group.” This (quite controversial) maximum number of 150 is famously known as Dunbar’s number.

And hence “it takes a village”, not only to raise a child, but to function effectively and sustainably at all as a human society. Fewer than 20 and you don’t have the diversity needed to reproduce healthily and learn effectively from others. More than 150 and the group loses cohesion and effectively becomes chaotic and ungovernable.

Of course, it takes a lot more than the right number of ‘members’ to constitute a healthy, cohesive, and functional community. Most of us, regardless of what we are used to calling a “community”, have absolutely no idea of what actually building and being in community entails. But here’s a list of some of the qualities I have observed or been told about, that every effective community must have:

1. Mutual trust
2. A diversity of skills, knowledge and capacities (“mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive” to meet all the community’s requirements)
3. A willingness, and the experience, of the whole group to self-manage
4. Love and respect for all of the community’s members, including those you don’t particularly like
5. The will and capacity to collaborate rather than compete with other members
6. An appreciation of the resources, advantages, limitations and dangers of the specific place where you live
7. Freedom from chronic debilitating stress
8. Enough local basic resources to enable the community’s self-sufficiency

On a psychological level, there are additional individual needs that the community has to meet (healthy attachment and capacity for authenticity, a sense of meaning and purpose, possibility of optimism, sufficient attention and appreciation, connection with the natural world etc). The community cannot hope to be healthy if many of its members are ailing or dysfunctional.

How does a community self-organize and self-manage to ensure these requirements are met, so that the community remains caring, cohesive, collaborative and functional?

The simple answer is: practice. There is no formula or rule-book for managing a community, which depends on the community’s ever-evolving culture, preferences, opportunities, appetites, needs, situation, and passions. The sense of community is an emergent phenomenon of its membership and its circumstances.

Why is this important? Because as collapse deepens, our very survival will ultimately depend on our capacity to build and live in community. Fortunately, the collapse we are now going through is a long (relatively-speaking) emergency. We will have time to practice, to learn, to fail, and to start all over again, and again.

We might begin now to identify where we think we want to establish community when the SHTF in our particular part of the world, and who we think we might want to live in community with. But what will ultimately happen in and to our particular little community is unpredictable.

As Tyson Yunkaporta says, the key is not to try to create community by imposing or following any particular ideology, theory or model, but rather to stay adaptable to ever-changing circumstances. We may be looking at multiple long-distance migrations to new and unfamiliar places before our community takes root, and its membership will likely change during those journeys.

That will also mean leaving egos at the door. What one person thinks, believes, or thinks they know, is not going to matter. The building of community, especially among the ruins of a dying civilization, cannot be designed, planned, directed, or conducted. To create a true community, there will first have to be a sense of urgency, since as Joe Bageant often said “Community is born of necessity.” In most places we are not even close to a recognition of its necessity.

And then, once there is a sense of necessity, we will, one way or another, look around and find a way to create a community with those with whom we find ourselves, wherever we may then happen to be. And when we get to that point, ready to self-organize, well, then… it will take a village to make it happen.

currency exchange in Somaliland, an unrecognized country within Somalia, from the BBC, photographer Simon Reeve

Collapse is happening more quickly this year, but for most people it’s still happening so slowly as to be hardly noticeable. What will it take to wake people up to what’s going on? And when the next crisis happens, will it be seen as an element of a larger civilizational collapse, or merely as another isolated incident that we need to ‘bounce back’ to ‘normal’ from?

The last major signifier of collapse was, of course, CoVid-19, or perhaps more specifically our utterly incompetent and selfish response to it. Hurricanes, massive forest fires, record heat waves, financial collapses, and the political and economic collapse of individual nations are all still seen by most as ‘isolated’ events that have ‘always happened’. And already the seeming majority view of the pandemic is that it was an embarrassment that hopefully won’t happen again and is now best forgotten.

So, against a background of everything slowly falling apart, what might we see next, that can’t easily be dismissed as an anomaly, but which rather has to be viewed, at least by those paying attention, as a portent?

My reading of history suggests that major economic crises happen more quickly and more often than political, social or ecological crises, so my guess continues to be that the next major turmoil as we slide into collapse is likely to be an economic one.

I should know better than to write down my predictions for the short-term future (though I did correctly predict the Ukraine War), but it is fun to speculate, so here is my guess at the ‘top 3’ possibilities:

1. Partial collapse of the banking system:

Our fragile banking system, and all the financial and economic systems tethered to it, have never recovered from the collapse of 2008, which required trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to prevent total collapse. Having blown the budget on foreign wars, the US and its vassal states have nothing left in the till for another massive bailout.

Almost every bank is overextended with high-risk loans (needed to meet profit targets), and vulnerable to a run by worried depositors, and when banks start refusing to honour deposits to stave off insolvency, trust will evaporate and citizens will look for safer places to park their money. The banking industry’s attempt to move us to a ‘cashless’ banking system, where you cannot take any money out in cash, will accelerate their nervousness.

Without a functioning banking system, governments will have to reestablish public financial institutions, which will entail relearning from scratch how to do so. Without adequate deposits, banks can’t loan money, and they have to call in existing loans. The economic effects could be horrific, and it could take decades for the situation to restabilize.

2. Global currency chaos:

The US is furiously working to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world, because the exorbitant privilege (their adjective, not mine) given to the wildly overvalued US dollar as the global reserve currency would quickly be lost, as countries switched to trade in reasonably-priced reciprocal currencies.

That would lead to a run on the US currency not dissimilar to a run on a bank — the currency would collapse, and without a replacement (even a return to the gold standard would probably no longer work), currency chaos, with wild fluctuations as the speculators (who presently do 95% of all currency trades) desperately try to recompute what value, if any, the rest of the world’s currencies have. It may not get as bad as a return to barter and scrip this time, but for those who deal with, hold assets in, or visit foreign countries, it could be a wild ride.

3. Trade wars leading to hyperinflation and empty shelves:

The US, as part of its attempt to destabilize China and other countries that threaten its economic and (to a slightly lesser extent) political hegemony, is using economic and trade sanctions and economic blockades to try to weaken those countries’ technological, resource and other economic advantages. That plan appears to be failing, as other countries are just reorganizing their manufacturing operations and pivoting to other supply sources and trade partners.

Once the world realizes that the US essentially produces nothing of value except war materials, it may not take that long for trade agreements to be revamped to cut the US out of the picture entirely, since they have nothing to offer except threats, the world’s reserve currency, and an insatiable appetite to consume everything.

There’s even a question about how long the US’ European vassal states will put up with absurdly overpriced US gas and other resources in place of ‘sanctioned’ Russian supplies, a situation which is leading to the disastrous de-industrialization of Europe as it can no longer afford the energy to power its manufacturing industries.

This will all inevitably be hugely disruptive to global supply chains and trade patterns, so our current economies, which are based on just-in-time delivery of everything (for “efficiency” reasons), are likely to seize up. Remember those pictures of people running to the bank with wheelbarrows of cash to exchange it for new bills before inflation makes it worthless? And the huge lineups and empty shelves after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Coming soon, perhaps, to a country near you.

…..

Any of these three crises (which are somewhat related) might easily lead to a broader economic collapse — a major depression that we may never really ‘recover’ from.

There are some other possible near-term crises that I considered adding to this list: immigration wars, cancelled elections, extended major heat waves (much greater than the one in Europe in 2003 that killed 72,000 people), more balkanization of countries as national governments become too unpopular to hold, more natural disasters (like the Indonesian tsunami that killed 250,000 in 2004, or the Haitian earthquake that killed 320,000 in 2010, except this time in a ‘western’ country), and another pandemic (this time most likely an avian flu pandemic, that will wreak havoc on global food supplies). Any of these is quite likely, but they are, I think, less certain that the three economic crises at the top of my list.

Place your bets. Rien ne va plus.

This is, like everything, a work of complete and utter fiction.

“Childlike Wonder”, by Midjourney AI; my own prompt

I

If, some morning, this body were to awaken, without a sense of self and separation to reconstruct its worldview and conception of reality, nobody would notice. ‘I’ would not notice, since there would be no ‘I’ to notice. Nothing would have changed. Nothing would change.

If, some afternoon, while walking in the forest by the creek, this belief in being centred in this body, and in control of it, were to suddenly dissolve, the walk would continue, unchanged, and the apparent behaviours and preferences of this body thereafter would remain the same. No one would perceive any difference in what was seemingly happening.

If, late one evening, gazing down from this window at the night city and the night sky, and singing along with the music in the headphones, it suddenly became obvious that there was no one gazing, no one singing, and never had been, the gazing and singing, and the closing of blinds, and preparations for sleep, would continue as they seemingly always had.

“Absolutely.”

…..

II

When, some morning, this body awakens, without a sense of self and separation to reconstruct its worldview and conception of reality, nobody will notice. ‘I’ will not notice, since there will be no ‘I’ to notice. Nothing will have changed. Nothing will change.

When, some afternoon, while walking in the forest by the creek, this belief in being centred in this body, and in control of it, suddenly dissolves, the walk will continue, unchanged, and the apparent behaviours and preferences of this body thereafter will remain the same. No one will perceive any difference in what is seemingly happening.

When, late one evening, gazing down from this window at the night city and the night sky, and singing along with the music in the headphones, it suddenly becomes obvious that there is no one gazing, no one singing, and never has been, the gazing and singing, and the closing of blinds, and preparations for sleep, will continue as they seemingly always have.

“Possibly.”

…..

III

Now that each apparent morning this body awakens without a sense of self and separation to reconstruct its worldview and conception of reality, nobody notices or remembers its absence. There has never been anybody to notice. Nothing has ever actually changed.

Now that there is no one to believe that there was ever anything centred in this body or in control of it, whenever there is an apparent body walking in the forest by the creek, the apparent walking continues and the apparent behaviours and preferences of this body remain just as they seem. There is only what is seemingly happening.

Now that it is obvious that no one has ever gazed down from this apparent window at the night city and the night sky, or sung along with the music in the apparent headphones, the gazing and singing, and the closing of blinds, and preparations for sleep, continue as they seemingly always have.

“Inconceivable.”

an old cartoon by Michael Leunig, from his fans’ Facebook site.  “What has been lost…”

All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races, going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses, no expression, no expression
Hide my head, I wanna drown my sorrow, no tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles, it’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world

Children waiting for the day they feel good, Happy birthday, happy birthday!
And I feel the way that every child should — sit and listen, sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous, no one knew me, no one knew me
“Hello, teacher! Tell me, what’s my lesson?” Looked right through me, looked right through me

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles, it’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world
— Roland Orzabal

COLLAPSE WATCH

wind and solar energy remain an insignificant source of energy, as oil, gas and coal dependence continues unabated; chart from Our World in Data

Collapse goes (briefly) mainstream: CNN actually interviews a climate scientist about collapse without challenging or dismissing his statements.

Why we’re running out of affordable energy: Tim Morgan explains in detail, one more time, the imminent collapse of cheap, affordable energy, which spells the end for industrial civilization.

Badmouthing collapse realism: First it was Rebecca Solnit “doomer-shaming” collapsniks for telling the truth about the inevitability of ecological collapse. Renaee Churches was one of many to reply to her offensive and divisive Guardian article. Then it was Rachel Donald arguing (her word) with her guest, Bill Rees, on the same subject, on her podcast. At least she followed up with an article acknowledging what Rebecca has not — that we have to work together to deal with the climate crisis, not fight among ourselves over how bad it is. Thanks to Indrajit Samarajiva and Paul Heft for the links.

Protection racket: As social collapse deepens, especially among the homeless, sick and poor, the ultra-rich, and even government authorities, are responding by hiring their own private police and security forces. This is not a good sign.

Close to extinction, the first five times: There have been at least five times in the last million years when humans nearly became extinct, all with different causes but all of them related to sudden drastic climate change. The latest study suggests the human population 900,000 years ago dropped to as little as 1,300 people.

Move that shit over here: The Honest Sorcerer describes how much of our non-renewable energy consumption consists of moving goods and materials around to where we are, and explains that that need is expected to triple by 2040. Ain’t going to happen. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

“Forests are no longer our friends”: David Wallace-Wells, in a masterful understatement, explains that massive and ubiquitous forest fires have switched our forests from being net carbon sinks to net carbon emitters.

The Maldives as a microcosm of climate collapse: Coming soon to nations everywhere.

LIVING BETTER

‘accommodating’ sculpture by Tuck Langland in the Goshen IN public library; image from the memebrary

How to really address rising crime: Better social supports, instead of more police. Well, duh.

Mutual willing incomprehension: Political detente and peace require a willingness by all ‘sides’ to try to really understand the others — both what they are actually trying to do, and why. This is obvious, but in all our major current conflicts, such willingness, and even capacity, is absent.

Moving from self-help to collective action: The key to achieving change, says the author of this year’s Massey Lectures, is re-learning how to collectively organize to fight existing power structures.

The myths of happiness: Claims that people are happier if they exercise, spend time in nature, pursue “mindfulness/meditation”, and have active social lives, are simply not supported by credible evidence. They’re just psychobabble.

#1 tip for internet content providers: It’s ignore the trolls.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Cartoon by Colombian cartoonist Boligan, from Cartooning for Peace

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):

• Biden wants billions more in military funding for the Ukraine war.
• And by sending long-range missiles to attack Russia, and officially condoning their use for that purpose, Biden is again sharply escalating the risk of global nuclear war.
• The rest of the world, outside the west, understands that ‘power’ is the capacity to get people to actually do things.
• Biden’s DOJ states in court “There is no constitutional right to a stable climate”.
• Trudeau’s biggest oil & gas boondoggle, the Trans Mountain Alberta Tar Sands pipeline, is in logistical and financial difficulties yet again.
• Why Americans should give blood, but not money, to the politically compromised American Red Cross.
• More new info on the US/UK/CIA-orchestrated coup that destroyed democracy in Iran 70 years ago.
• China responds aggressively to US attempts to cripple China’s growing tech dominance through restrictions and sanctions on parts and materials, and a ‘silicon blockade’, an act of economic warfare against China (thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link).
• Europe is once again attempting to force disastrous, immiserating austerity measures on its citizens to try to deal with its sanctions-induced economic collapse.
• John Pilger told us back in 2016 exactly what was coming in Ukraine and the new war against China. So did John Mearsheimer.
• NED, the CIA front, is planning the overthrow of the government of Indonesia.
• A criminal arms dealer who is now the largest military supplier to Zelinskyy personally orchestrated the 2014 Ukraine Maidan Massacre that led to the US/CIA-orchestrated coup in Ukraine and the resulting civil war.
• Will the newly elected government of Guatemala be allowed to end 36 years of war, genocide and corruption, or will right-wing forces prevent it from taking power?

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

• Former intelligence agent and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s YouTube channel, and all of its content, has been deleted by Google. Ritter has been an outspoken critic of US foreign policy and the outsized and uncontrolled role of the CIA for many years.
• Based on a smear piece in the NYT, Marco Rubio has accused anti-war activists and peace groups like Code Pink of being Chinese agents and called for them to be investigated and expunged.
• Taiwanese pro-independence groups are working hand-in-hand with the FBI and US media and ‘think-tanks’ to persecute Chinese citizens in the US, intimidate pro-China US politicians, and foment anti-China hatred. (They’re doing the same in Canada.)
• CNN continues to faithfully scribe and repeat US intelligence agency propaganda as news.

CoVid-19 the Gift That Keeps On Giving: Short takes:

• The importance of avoiding CoVid-19 even if you’re healthy. Please keep masking up in crowded indoor spaces, especially if you’re in them for an extended time, get your booster shots, test if you get symptoms, and self-isolate if you test positive.
• New research indicates that exposure to the virus increases, not decreases, your vulnerability to future infection from newer variants.
• Health authorities in some jurisdictions, like BC Canada, have been ordered to stop using the term “outbreak” when CoVid-19 outbreaks occur, because of the term’s “negative connotations”, and to use euphemisms instead.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

cartoon by Christopher Weyant in the New Yorker

We owe everything to trees: Fascinating article by Jill Lepore traces our dependence on trees as our homes for most of our time on earth, as our source of fire which was essential to our capacity to migrate from our early forest homes, for our earliest weapons to survive as hunters, for paper and books, and many other purposes. The earliest human age should, she says, be called the Wood Age, as it was more transformative than those named after stone or metals. She describes some of the reasons we might have been forced to abandon these Edenic structures as our homes, but strangely omits the cosmic ray theory, that suggests the forests were all burned several million years ago by an exploding Nova. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

State security secrets!: A priceless exploration into AI by Thomas Wade, who asked ChatGPT what tactics the US security state could use to undermine, gaslight and control us, and got a list of 500 mind-blowing methods. The list would be falling-down-funny if it weren’t exactly what propagandists and sociopaths (and probably most governments) actually do. Thanks to Peter Webb for the link.

Being adopted by a cat: A charming tale from Indrajit Samarajiva. Some things are the same the world over. 

Things are  not as they seem: Another gem from Indrajit about the nature of reality and the stories we tell about it, inspired by a visit from the tooth fairy.

Abandoning the Big Bang myth: Webb telescope data suggests our mythological stories about the origin of the universe just don’t jibe with the facts. Sadly, our response always seems to be to create an even more complicated story. I’m absolutely convinced that if we gave up storytelling and just accepted, as adults, that we cannot possibly hope to know the true nature of the universe and its origins, it would be a great step forward.

No, there is no new global mental health crisis: There are many surveys and news headlines suggesting the current political and social stresses have created a monstrous new global mental health crisis. But drill down into the data and you’ll find it’s only American youth who are suffering. And a more likely cause of that is their unhealthy addiction to social media.

Mindfulness: The useless billion dollar industry: There is absolutely no credible research that ‘mindfulness’ meditation has any enduring therapeutic value whatsoever, beyond the placebo effect. And no, it doesn’t help you lose weight either.

Headline from the Beaverton (Canadian version of The Onion): “Toronto Goodwill asking people to stop donating Leafs jerseys” (ask a Canadian)

Mitch McConnell’s brief flash of humanity: The moment he had his mini-strokes, or whatever they were, the monster in Mitch briefly disappeared, and a real person appeared. A lovely read.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

“Sadness”, by Midjourney AI. Not my prompt.

From Matt Haig, in The Midnight Library:

Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough. Her parents who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.

She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she had ever made. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.

She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.

She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying her best. And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.

From Caitlin Johnstone, on western xenophobia and propaganda and on Hollywood’s copaganda and psyopaganda:

Nothing will shatter your dreams of a broad left-right antiwar coalition faster than publicly opposing US warmongering against both Russia and China simultaneously.

…..

Hollywood overdubs the [wimpy peeps of the] bald eagle with the [more powerful-sounding screech of the] red-tailed hawk in precisely the same way it depicts police officers as spending their time fighting crime, and depicts news reporters as brave muckrakers digging for the truth to expose the wicked and corrupt, and depicts soldiers as heroic defenders of the American people.

From Scott Cook — his latest song “A Bigger Pull” (thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link — song has not yet been released):

I got friends who live in cities with brewpubs and bike lanes
Who got sweet tattoos and charcuterie, and ancient grains
Who seek out the finest, frothiest flat whites and macchiatos
Who eat cheese made out of cashews and CBD gelatos

And I got friends who live in small towns and like to shoot at deer
Who like dogs that like working, who like beer that tastes like beer
Who say yes sir, and thank you ma’am, and even God bless y’all
Who castrate and brand and have a testicle festival

And where my city friends are careful with the language that they use
Some of my country friends just get a kick out of trampling on taboos
But if I call and tell ’em I’m broke down, they’ll be there in an instant
My city friends would ask, “don’t you have roadside assistance?”

I got friends who give their kids names like Leaf and Tree and Arlo
Who feel like their fellow grownups failed the grownups of tomorrow
And I got friends who give their kids names like Colton and Shelby
Who think teachin”em to respect the flag and their elders is healthy

I got friends who go to seminars and ayahuasca retreats
Who might spill their deepest secrets to the kindred souls they meet
And I got friends who don’t say a lot, but mean everything they say
Who believed every word of Scripture (’til their daughter turned out gay)

I’ve seen forests of culture flattened by the money machine
All the houses with Black Lives Matter signs and no black folks to be seen
And I got friends who’d never hunt or fish but love their surf and turf
And me, I’m burning diesel drivin’ ’round singing songs to save the Earth

Sometimes it hurts to hear my friends talk about some of my other friends
Like everything that’s going wrong has somehow got to do with them
As if they’re so completely different they just can’t be understood
As if one side’s all bad and the other side’s all good

But from a certain angle they look similar to me
Whether they get worked up by Fox News or MSNBC
I’m not saying there aren’t real concerns, no, everybody’s got ’em
Just that it’s less about the left and right than the top against the bottom

‘Cause a few folks aim to own the world and they’re well on their way
And no matter what crisis comes, they’ll make sure they’re okay
They’ll short-sell and hedge and make profit from misery
If they wanna catch a bunch of fruit they just gotta shake the tree

Well, the left I loved was punk rock and Food Not Bombs
Now it’s cancelling comedians and policing language norms
Greenwashing corporations with whatever’s on brand
With the fresh new hell they’re dreaming up in Davos Switzerland

Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it with less of a smirk
That our Grandpas fought the fascists and built all the public works?
Back when unions gave us weekends, faced the bosses and their thugs
How come now it seems so joyless, censorious and smug?

With an ever-narrowing circle who think just like we do
We went from we are the 99% to we are the chosen few
If we’re gonna move the needle, if we even have a chance
What’ll it take to make all us snowflakes into an avalanche?

And didn’t conservative used to mean careful and considered
Rather than racing to sell off everything to the highest bidder
Weren’t lying and cheating condemned in the Bible
Didn’t there used to be a wheat pool to keep the farmers viable?

Is there something wrong with public roads, the library and post office?
And who really thinks it’s a good idea to run prisons for a profit?
Now we all believe in freedom, what about the freedom to live?
And not to go bankrupt buying medicine for your kids?

There ain’t no one who’s just one thing, there ain’t nothin’ uncomplicated
There ain’t one without the other, man, we’re all interrelated
We belong to one another, we drink from the same cup
Stop throwing punches at each other and start punching up

Fortune favours the fortunate, it don’t trickle down
Gonna need most of us paddling to turn this ship around
Gonna need a tent big enough to fit most of us inside
Gonna need a bigger pull to turn the tide

From Confucius: “The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.”

my own diagram of what Jim Kunstler calls “The Long Emergency” — a gradual multi-stage collapse over an extended period

Aurélien, Patrick Lawrence and Yanis Varoufakis are IMO three of the most astute observers of our modern, global, industrial civilization culture. It is now pretty apparent that collapse of that culture is well underway, and no longer just the looming danger I’ve been writing about for twenty years.

These three writers have all recently written “state of the world” articles from very different perspectives. They’re all well worth reading and thinking about. I thought it might be useful to summarize, contrast and comment on them. The common thread of all of them might be “everything slowly falling apart”. That’s perhaps an excellent descriptor of this, the first of the three phases of each stage of collapse. The disintegration phase.

…..

Aurélien’s contribution is called, aptly enough, “Going to Pieces Slowly“. The British historian, diplomat, and cultural analyst (now based in France) writes:

Given the many developing crises that are jostling for priority now, social breakdown, either self-generated, or more likely a consequence of multiple economic or environmental and health crises, may well not be far away. In fact social breakdown is perhaps already here, even if, as William Gibson might say, it’s not evenly distributed… People accept the legitimacy and authority of the state as much out of habit and collective self-protection as anything else. So the kind of decay in state legitimacy that we are now starting to see is less likely to lead to violent conflict, than to a kind of sour apathy and disengagement, and a search for some [group that can fill the power vacuum or some] way of making up for what the state can’t do. There are parts of the world where you can see this in action…

No western country has remotely the internal security forces required to defeat a serious massed challenge to the legitimacy of the state, because so much depends on unspoken social contracts between the governors and the governed. But supposing that starts to break down?… We forget the extent to which it is safe to go out into the streets precisely because the vast majority of people never think about smashing their way into a supermarket and looting the goods, or attacking police or firemen. But this is only a convention and, beyond a certain point, if too many people decide to disobey it, there is nothing much that the authorities can do…

For the first time in modern western history, there are no groups with organisations and ideologies waiting in the wings [when civil order breaks down], either to launch a struggle for power, or to profit from a power vacuum.

Aurélien goes on to explain that the crumbling of political and social system legitimacy would immediately have knock-on economic effects that would amplify political and social unrest: the collapse of investment, currency and housing markets, massive disruption of food and energy supply chains, degraded road and public transport and communication infrastructure, and a surge in organized crime. This is where the slide into chaos begins, and we’d be wise, he says, to study some African, Latin American and Asian countries where this has already happened, to see what may come next.

…..

Patrick Lawrence’s new piece, entitled “Psychology & Disorder“, is a history of American Exceptionalism, describing the history of that unique ideology that runs right across the political spectrum, and has now, like one of those pathetic western-supplied tanks rotting in the fields of Eastern Ukraine, run out of ammunition and fuel. In the text of a speech he gave to a Swiss conference on multipolarity, the American author, foreign correspondent and globe-trotting university lecturer writes:

Little that America has done, from the earliest settlements and the Quaker hangings in the late seventeenth century to its nineteenth century wars, expansions, and annexations, to its anti–Communist crusades in the last century, to Vietnam, and all the coups and interventions in the post–1945 decades: To grasp all of this fully we must see the underlying, driving psychology… All of these events, disparate as they are as historical phenomena, arise from the same consciousness: They are all part of the same root phenomenon. And all of this goes, it hardly bears mentioning, for all that we witness now: The cruelly inhumane proxy war in Ukraine, the dangerously provocative encirclement of China, America’s unruly conduct in the Middle East, in Latin America—America’s claim to exceptionalism lies behind all of this…

After the débacle of the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan’s [subsequent] feat was to persuade an entire nation, or most of it, that it was all right to pretend: All was affect and imagery. He licensed Americans to avoid facing the truth of defeat and failure and of professed principle betrayed. He demonstrated in his words and demeanor that greatness could be acted out even after it was lost as spectacularly as it had been in Indochina.

This is the exceptionalism whose many destructive consequences we now witness. It is an ideology whose most peculiar feature is that it is subliminally understood to be exhausted and that it rests in large measure on denial. No American political figure would dare now to speak sensibly against the exceptionalist orthodoxy. This is ever more the case as the orthodoxy becomes more obviously hollow, more detached from perfectly discernible realities…

[In her essay “Ideology and Terror Hannah Arendt notes that ideologies] replace thought with belief, so obviating the need for ideological believers to indulge in the act of thinking—to respond with rational judgment to events and circumstances. Another [of ideologies’ consequences] is the effect of isolation. Ideologies are in one dimension boundaries, and one stands on either side of these. Those inside these boundaries share a bond made of allegiances of which no one else can partake. Those outside these boundaries are simply excluded: They are Others. The implied separation is sometimes much more than psychological, but it is psychological before it is anything else.

Americans [in addition to now being politically isolated from much of the world], are also isolated from others psychologically, and I would say this is also in direct consequence of their claim to be exceptional. Like all ideologues, and here I will make a generality I am prepared to defend, Americans, by and large, would much rather believe than think. This in itself tends to leave Americans isolated, because he who believes but cannot think is incapable of relating to the world… We trap ourselves within a fantasy of eternal superiority and triumph. So we cannot hope to speak the same language as the rest of the world, and we don’t. We do not see events the same way. We do not react to events in the same way. We do not calculate the same paths forward.

Patrick sees little evidence that the US, and its perpetually-governing Professional Managerial Caste in particular, are either willing or able to abandon the bankrupt idea of American exceptionalism, which has propelled us to the brink of nuclear annihilation, and is now largely driving the slowly accelerating economic, political, social and ecological collapse we are now trying to contend with. And as long as this insane ideological belief, rather than rational, evidence-based thought, is what is directing the decisions of those in power, what hope do we have of even softening the blows of collapse before we plunge into the chaotic phase?

…..

Yanus Varoufakis has just written “Technofeudalism Has Just Arrived“, a look at how massive inequality, the demise of democracy, the de facto privatization of the internet, and horrific financial and economic mismanagement, have combined to produce a dramatic shift in the dynamics of power, and has hence shifted the global economy from a capitalist one to a ‘neo-feudal’ one. In the introduction to his new book, the Greek-Australian economist, professor and former parliamentarian writes:

What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicentre of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as [private] fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud-rent.

As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, or industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour – in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance.

Yanis asserts that it is essential that we understand this new economic power dynamic in order to grapple effectively with the personal, political, economic, social and ecological challenges we are facing. Although the book has not yet been published, judging from its detailed table of contents, its key ideas will be familiar to readers and viewers of his writings and speeches.

He argues that the US acted as a “Global Minotaur” that used its economic and political power from 1945 through 2008 to essentially repatriate all the proceeds of global production back to the US, despite the fact the US is a massive debtor nation that produces essentially nothing of value (except munitions). But the financial collapse of 2008 brought about the end of the “Minotaur” and opened up the opportunity for the power shift to the private technofeudalists who now control global commerce through ownership of their online ‘platforms’ (their fiefs), and who are indifferent to ‘profits’ because they get their ‘rents’ from both producers and consumers (users) of their platforms.

He attributes the new US hostility to China to the fact that China’s technological advancements (and possibly their superiority) threaten the technofeudalists’ oligopoly over platforms and rents, and hence their wealth and power. And he argues that the Ukraine war, with its crippling economic sanctions and massive theft of non-westerners’ bank deposits, is largely an economic war rather than a political one. The losers in both wars, he says, are Europeans, the Global South, and our ravaged planet.

As an idealist, his answer to these problems is perhaps not surprising: He wants the internet to be de-privatized and reconstituted as a public commons. He wants corporations and currencies to be democratized, repurposed to serve the public good. He wants land to be returned to what it was before the foreclosures — a public commons. I would love to believe that was all possible, but you probably won’t be surprised to hear that I do not. Good diagnosis, though.

…..

So we have the gradual acceleration of global political, social and economic collapse, with no group likely to be able to fill the power vacuum as the world slides more quickly into chaos. And we have only poorer nations, ahead of us on the curve, to study for clues as to how that chaos is going to unfold.

We have an Empire that remains deluded about its ideology to the point that it is in denial about everything happening in the world except what it sees as immediate threats to its supremacy and exceptionalist beliefs, and which is pushing for multiple wars against nuclear armed countries in ‘defence’ of those beliefs.

And we have an economic system that has quietly replaced unregulated capitalism with an even more insidious and destructive private neo-feudal order that views the world’s consumers as its ‘product’ and the world’s producers as its renters, and is completely agnostic to social, labour, economic and ecological abuse.

Sounds like everything slowly falling apart, all right.

This is a partial, edited transcript of a meeting held by Tim Cliss in 2021, on zoom. Probably not of interest unless you are intrigued by the message of radical non-duality. At the end of the transcript, I ponder a bit on the subject of human trauma. 

“The Dissolution of the Self” by Midjourney AI; my prompt, photoshopped

Tim’s introductory remarks:

We’re talking about life, being alive, aliveness. Whatever we want to call ‘this’, it’s not in parts, Parts are an illusion, and the central illusion is that “I am apart” (from everything) or “I am a part” of something larger. ‘Life’ is whole and complete. There is no ‘oneness’ to be found or become ‘one’ with. There is nothing ‘apart’ or ‘becoming’ anything. This is the end of the possibility of becoming. Everything is exactly as it is ‘already’ in every way. The sense of self is a sense of being apart, excluded, separate.

There isn’t anything ‘in place’ of ‘me’. When ‘I’ am no more, there is nothing instead, or better. There is no ‘you’ to be replaced, so the seeming absence of ‘you’ isn’t even noticeable, because ‘you’ already are not what you feel and believe your self to be, which is apart.

The (terrible) term ‘non-duality’ is just pointing to the illusion, the mistake, the misunderstanding, that ‘you are’. The problem with ‘I am’ is that that felt sense of being separate, ‘inside’, with everything else ‘outside’ is so convincing it seems impossible that it can’t be true. The conviction that ‘I know who I am’ becomes so powerful that it becomes the centre or lens through which all other happenings and experiences are filtered ‘in relation to me’.

Because ‘I’ have this felt sense of being absolutely real, I believe my story is real, and in that is most of what we call suffering. “I am real and I did something yesterday and I could have chosen to do otherwise or differently. And because I will exist tomorrow I need to work on ensuring that I do better tomorrow, and that I keep myself and those I care about safe now and tomorrow.” These misunderstandings arise as anxieties and neuroses and insecurities.

It can happen seemingly that this illusory sense of ‘I am’ can dissolve, or fall away. It isn’t ‘seen through’, or ‘realized’. It just no longer appears. That can be slow and excruciating or instantaneous. That’s the whole message: Self isn’t real. ‘This’ is not something that can be known or seen or been.

There is a longing not to feel that sense of separation. But ‘this’ is not at all what the self wants or imagines. The ‘me’ wants to know, and in the absence of ‘me’ nothing can be known, or learned, or obtained, or achieved, or lost. And the equality of everything can then feel like love, but not a love for someone, or a love that has conditions. It is a love that simply, unconditionally, is.

…..

[after the above introduction, Tim answered questions from the meeting’s attendees; in the edited transcription below, I have abridged many of his answers, and grouped answers to related questions by topic, even when they occurred at different times in the meeting]

Money and Power:

Separation feels very unsafe; this tiny me in this vast universe. Money and power are sought by some because they give the illusion of greater security. But it’s just an illusion. And with more money and power come more choices and responsibility, more to lose and hence more suffering. But nothing is separate. There is no one to have anything. But absolute poverty and powerlessness is unthinkable to ‘me’. Yet there is only ‘this’ and it can’t be found or achieved or lost. There is no ‘you’ to have things, and no things to have. There is no poverty greater than that.

The ‘Me’ versus the Body:

‘This’ is the ‘not turning up’ of the one who is attached to, inside, and having, a body. Without ‘me’, the seeming body is just allowed to be as it is. It’s not ‘mine’,
When there is no ‘one’ to be attached to the body, there is no longer any judgement or criticism of the body. The entire ‘self-improvement program’ disappears. Everything, including the body, is just accepted. It’s easier with the body when it’s not ‘yours’.

For a lot of selves the body is like a prison. But the body is already empty, and perfectly capable of looking after itself without ‘me’. There is no ‘experience’ of the body being empty; there’s just no longer any inside or outside — it’s all just empty.

All the body-obsession associated with being a physical ed teacher, and the related vanity, is gone. The body pursues pleasure, whether that is ‘good for it’ or not, since the body is no longer ‘my’ body. The body is subject to its conditioning of course. ‘I’ have nothing to do with what it does.

Getting ‘This’:

It can seem really heartless to say that there’s no path or process, nothing the self can do. But once bitten with this message, there is no antidote. You can’t leave it alone.

When there’s nowhere else to go, when ‘this’ is it, and there is no possibility of being anywhere else, it’s the end of any effort to be or do otherwise from what is.

Everything is just what it (apparently) is, and what ‘you’ called ‘yourself’ is just ‘being human’. And everything is just the same ‘being’.

The Loss of Motivation:

One apparent result of the self no longer turning up is an apparent laziness. There is no longer a ‘you’ urging that things be done. So there is less inclination to work or to concentrate doing things. Yet there’s probably more love of stories, because they’re just indulgence, enjoyable for what they are, which is just stories. They don’t ‘mean’ anything.

Even ‘my’ story becomes more enjoyable to tell. There are still emotions attached to the story, rooted in memories, but there is no longer any attachment to the story, even ‘my’ story.

It is such a relief that, without ‘anyone’ around to ‘allow’ or not ‘allow’ anything, life is allowed to just be as it is. This is not saying ‘your’ life will be better or worse. There is no longer a ‘you’ to ‘have’ the life, and judge it.

How the Unraveling of the Self Might Appear:

If ‘self’ dissolves, unravels, becomes more transparent, and starts to feel insecure as ‘the ground starts to fall away’, and you’ve never heard this message to give you context for it, you might even be hospitalized (as suffering from a serious dissociative disorder). If you’ve explored and been attracted to this message, however, so you have the context and language to describe it, it might be less devastating.

With the loss of the sense of self, there can be great fears about ‘losing yourself’ or becoming disconnected from the people close to you. Or there may be just a carrying on as if nothing had happened. With the realization that there are no real relationships between family members (they are part of the loss of everything) this can be overwhelming. And in Tim’s story this ‘dissolution’ was excruciatingly slow, and terrifying.

Yet after all the overwhelming fear and excruciating terror, it was realized that there was and is nothing to be afraid of. Self is afraid of not knowing, but the abyss of not knowing is completely benign. There is bliss in going to sleep now; just a falling into the embrace of nothing. But the fullness and wonder of life is exactly the same as the emptiness of the embrace of nothing.

The End of ‘Personal’ Love and the Emergence of Unconditional Love:

There is no one to be ‘in love’. There is just love. But while there is no longer love ‘in relationship’, ‘this’ is in a way more loving. There is no longer love out of need or expectation or negotiation. In place of such ‘transactional’ love there is unconditional love.

Since there is no ‘you’, ‘you’ can never fall in love. There can be ‘falling in love’, but it doesn’t need a ‘me’ or a ‘you’.

Causality:

There is no causality. Things are the way they are, but not ‘because’ of anything. There does not need to be a reason or purpose for anything.

Being with Other People:

There is seemingly less interest in pleasing and compromising with other people, but conditioning of the body is what it is. It was never ‘me’ doing anything anyway, so very little changes. But it is not terrible being alone anymore. Though being alone with others is somehow more enjoyable than being alone without them.

Trauma:

‘I’ loved the Eckhart Tolle model of the ‘pain-body’ for awhile because it let ‘me’ off the hook. It wasn’t ‘me’ causing the suffering, this model tells us, it was my ‘pain-body’. But the truth is that all humans suffer trauma, deeply and repeatedly, especially in our ‘defenceless’ childhood. It’s just that that trauma isn’t actually ‘yours’.

[end of transcript]

…..

Dave’s thoughts:

I have been profoundly affected by Tim’s comments on trauma over the years — he’s a trained and experienced psychologist, and therefore brings a unique and compassionate perspective to this ‘radical non-duality’ message.

He explains that trauma has a profound affect on all of us, on our conditioning, and on the fears, neuroses and suffering we all feel. The ‘injury’ of that trauma doesn’t magically disappear if the sense of self and separation drop away — memories and conditioning remain. Gradually there may be less neurosis, less anxiety and fear, though the fear of a sudden close call or great danger will still arise instinctively in the body. But by taking ‘ownership’ of ‘our’ decisions, experiences, and judgements, we actually inflict and prolong the suffering and trauma that comes from them, which is tragic. But we have no choice but to do so. You don’t have to have a ‘self’ to be traumatized — but it helps!

So what is trauma, exactly? Psychologists define it as our reaction of profound emotional shock stemming from one event (acute trauma) or repeated events (chronic trauma) that are simply too stressful and horrifying for the person to deal with. It can result in lifelong, debilitating, unpredictable emotional (and sometimes physical) reactions to triggers, dreams, memories and flashbacks, and lifelong incapacities like PTSD, unmanageable addictions, dissociation and depression.

Gabor Maté, the renowned Canadian psychologist and addiction therapist, agrees with Tim’s assessment that we all suffer from trauma; it’s just that some of us handle it better, and some of us are more aware of what it’s done to us. His argument is that (especially in our modern stress-filled world) while it happens to everyone, those who have an emotionally stable infancy and childhood, sufficient to develop a sense of healthy attachment and a sense of autonomy, are better equipped to deal with it, but that our modern society deprives most of us of that early stability and development opportunity. Trauma, he says, is not “what happens to you”, but rather “what happens inside you” as a result of the traumatic event(s), how you self-adapt to its occurrence, to protect and support yourself. That may be suppression of emotion, denial, dissociation, addiction, or some other coping mechanism.

I’m still trying to sort out how trauma, which is ubiquitous in humans, ties into the unique belief of humans, which apparently emerges very early in life, that they are separate beings with selves that control and are responsible for ‘their’ body and ‘their’ lives. Hence giving rise to emotions like shame, guilt, low self-worth, chronic anxiety, indiscriminate and irrational hatred, and so on — emotions that wild creatures, lacking this sense of self and separation, apparently don’t feel.

But, horrifically, humans have induced all the symptoms of stress-related trauma in wild creatures in the laboratory. So trauma is not uniquely human, even though the ‘self’ apparently is. The common variable, of course, is acute or chronic stress. What does all that mean for the effect of (the illusory) self on humans’ unique proclivity for gleeful violence, and for such disconnection from the natural world that we have irrevocably destroyed our planet’s capacity to sustain life, including human life? I have no idea. Maybe it’s a question that cannot be answered.

Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework (2021). Adds liminal domains, points of uncertainty or paradox, notably the aporetic domain, from whence, notably, NZ’s Jacinda Ardern chose to cede decision-making authority to health experts as being better equipped than politicians to determine the most sensible next steps to deal with the pandemic, buying time in a chaotic period of crisis and keeping options open.

Chaos, in its social rather than mathematical sense, refers to the absence of effective constraints.

What that means in a human political, economic or social system, is that no one pays attention to any accepted rules governing the system, which are therefore unenforceable. In ‘chaotic’ economic and political systems that means oligopolies, bribes, extortion and other ‘officially illegal’ activities may prevail without limit. In some cases, organized crime actually substitutes its own laws, rules and constraints, to deal with the chaos.

What I think we are starting to see this century is gradually increasing levels of chaos in much of the world. In fact, the increasing number of the world’s economies that are dominated by oligopolies and organized crime might actually be a little less chaotic than countries that are still trying to play by the rules. In countries ruled by oligarchs and organized crime, you at least know who you have to pay off, and how much, and the consequences if you don’t. That may be despotic, but it isn’t chaos.

If the system collapses to the point that even oligopolies and organized crime cannot maintain order, then you have at least short-term chaos and possibly anarchy. Immediately, in order to get essential things done (like food and energy distribution), ad hoc systems will emerge. Dmitry Orlov has described how this happened with the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the ruble: A system of commerce emerged based on a combination of tribute (giving to those you respect), barter (trading reciprocally for something of value), gifting (giving without expectation of compensation), and scrip (effectively, IOUs signed by someone known in the community that become a replacement ‘currency’ that others agree to accept). Such systems, of course, do not scale.

In political systems, a descent into chaos means that, especially in the early stages of collapse, and largely thanks to ubiquitous corruption and broken electoral systems, those in power may not need to have the support of citizens to stay in office nearly indefinitely, and they are hence free to ignore the citizens and their wishes and needs, other than propagandizing them through the media. And they can accept money for implementing laws and regulations written and paid for by moneyed interests.

But that tends to only last a short while, as citizens lose respect for these “officials” and start to disobey their laws as well. And then, if the police and others charged with enforcing the laws become as disenchanted as the rest of the citizens, political chaos is likely. That means, among other things, that people will stop paying taxes, will overtly disobey laws and rules set by officials they no longer respect, and that there will be a huge jockeying for power and authority among those seeking to fill the power vacuum. Politics and economics, after all, only function when there is broad agreement to abide by the rules; coercion and propaganda can only achieve so much in its absence. Currencies, in particular, are based in trust that they can be redeemed for their face value, and when that trust is lost, the currency quickly becomes worthless, as citizens of many countries can attest.

Once you get political and economic collapse, and these systems devolve into chaos, social collapse may ensue, as people take things into their own hands and refuse to trust anyone else. As Dmitry explains, social collapse and social chaos are disastrous, as they preclude everyone’s attempts to restore some sense of order. Civilizational collapse then becomes pretty much inevitable.

My sense is that this situation is well advanced in many poorer countries, and becoming much more evident in many countries in the west, to the point I currently believe global civilizational collapse is nearly inevitable over the coming decades, and this will occur even without the multiple ecological crises that are compounding the polycrisis.

Once an entire civilization crumbles, collapse historically has followed one of three pathways: devolution, with the making and carrying out of decisions radically relocalized to the family, tribe or small community level (as larger and more centralized systems just cease functioning or are no longer recognized as legitimate); absorption, where the members of the collapsed societies scatter and join other still-functioning cultures, if there are any; and/or abandonment, where the citizens just ‘walk away’ from systems that no longer function and re-band together (in the same or some other location) into cohesive social groups and self-organize to create order within those groups and in relation to other groups. They then self-impose new constraints and hence achieve some sort of self-governance.

We may see all three, or some new alternatives, in different parts of the world as collapse deepens. One of our greatest challenges in many parts of the world is that most of us are completely dependent on the centralized, specialized, fragile systems of modern capitalism, such that few of us still have the competencies and skills to meet any of our basic needs without support from “the system”.

We can learn much about coping with collapse and the resulting chaos, from studying past civilizations, and from studying how those in poorer nations (and impoverished parts of more affluent nations) have already been dealing with the essential collapse of their political, economic and social systems.

Many of these collapsed societies and sub-societies have effectively self-reorganized around tribes (in the broader sense of the word: “families or small communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, often with a common culture and dialect”).

In many cases, the economies of these ‘neo-tribal’ societies are substantially what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in her brilliant book The Mushroom at the End of the World has called salvage or scavenger economies. During the reign of an industrial capitalist economy, salvage activities are marginalized and usually feed back into that capitalist system (eg collecting recyclable containers and selling them to commercial buyers, or selling privately harvested crops to commercial enterprises). Anna’s book, which describes how the salvage/scavenger economy works already today in parts of the world, is essential reading for anyone wanting to imagine what our post-civ economy and society might look like.

When the industrial capitalist economy crumbles, just about every activity carried out then becomes a salvage operation, since there is no longer a reliable commercial/industrial system to sell the salvaged goods to. So as Big Ag collapses (as farmers in the Great Depression found out), there is no longer a market for large volume monoculture crops, and all food and resource harvesting at every level becomes a salvage operation. You then ‘harvest’ and sell just what’s needed, just in time, to whoever near you needs it — copper for repairing broken machines for example. And at that point you give up reliance on large established markets ordering stuff in large quantities in advance, because they’ve disappeared.

We will all become salvage operators. A lot of industrial economy outsourcing and offshoring has already made much of the economy into a salvage operation — ‘independent’ truckers replacing commercial fleets, Uber/Lyft drivers, and ‘gig’ economy, offshored and outsourced work are all, in a way, forms of salvage work that currently sit at the periphery of, and feed into, the industrial economy. As that industrial economy collapses, we will all be doing salvage economy work, except we’ll be meeting the needs of our fellow community members, not those of big corporations which will no longer exist.

The issue in a salvage/scavenger economy is not “Who will buy my product or service?” but “What does my tribe/community need today, and where can I salvage it from?”

Ronald Wright’s somewhat dystopian cli-fi novel A Scientific Romance envisions what a salvage/scavenger economy might look like. But personally, I need look no further than outside my window, where I see throngs of crows, every day, thriving in such a self-evolved economy, drawing on the things humans throw out.

And before our invention of killing tools and fire, humans scavenged for everything we ate, and many anthropologists would assert they lived happier and healthier lives than we do. (Mind you, there were not eight billion of them!)

Economic collapse (and the resultant chaos) will likely come much more quickly than ecological collapse, at least for most of us. Even then, it will not be an overnight occurrence. To modify the famous Hemingway expression, collapse will happen slowly, then suddenly all at once, and then it will slowly tail off until the system, and those dependent on it, disappear. Think of it like the right side of a ‘normal’ (bell) curve, or the descent of a roller coaster. For most of us in the west, we’re still in the first of these three phases of collapse.

So what do we do as we slide into the second, chaotic phase, as everything starts to fall apart and then does so “suddenly all at once”?

We cannot possibly know. It will unfold very differently in different places. The key word for coping with collapse into chaos is not sustainability or resilience or regeneration — once you’re on the way down, none of those is an option. Instead, the key word is adaptation. Some of the means by which we can position ourselves to better adapt are:

• acceptance: The sooner we are able to get past the ‘blame game’, and appreciate that things aren’t going back to the way they once were, the better off we’ll be.
• increasing our collective competence: We don’t all need to become individually expert at growing and harvesting our own food, but collectively, depending on who we define as our community, we will have to acquire and build on a whole suite of self-sufficiency competencies. They include the basic “know-how” of how to make/provide/manage our own food, clothing, shelter, water, energy, resources, tools, livelihood, infrastructure, health, education, art, recreation, and stories, and a host of ‘soft’ skills like conflict resolution, mentoring, persuasive and facilitation skills.
• learning from those experienced: In collapse, theoretical and conceptual skills will take a back seat to practical skills, so once it happens, we will need to identify those in our community who have hands-on experience doing essential things, and then learning by watching them and trying it ourselves.
• being pragmatic: We humans tend to be really attached to our models, ideas and ideals of how things “should” be done. We will likely have to settle for less ideal ways of doing things that work in the moment and in the situation we find ourselves in. Sometimes the perfect can be the enemy of the good, and of the “good enough for now”. Rigid commitment to some new ideal “how we’re going to live together” plan, especially if it isn’t “safe-to-fail”, could prove perilous. Increasingly, we’ll be looking for “adjacent possibilities” that will make things marginally better.
• drawing on the “wisdom of crowds”: As we face novel and unexpected situations, our personal specialized expertise is unlikely to serve us as well as a mechanism to draw upon the collective knowledge, ideas, and experiences of the whole community.
• collaborating: Few of us have experienced working in (often spontaneously) self-organized environments where there is no hierarchy, and where decisions are arrived at, and actions are taken, collectively by consensus and appropriate delegation. That kind of experience will soon be invaluable.
• exaptation: Exaptation is the accidental or deliberate repurposing of something from its original function to a new and useful function. The classic example is that birds evolved wings for warmth and cooling, and only later did these wings evolve for purposes of flight. Most scavenging and salvaging activities are inherently exaptive, repurposing activities. When we can’t get what we need “ready-made” we’ll have to cobble it together, exaptively.
• abductive thinking: Abductive thinking entails the capacity to see things from different trans-contextual perspectives, to listen empathetically and pay attention to outlying thoughts and perspectives and draw on them to imagine novel approaches and ideas, to draw on the “logic of hunches” and intuition, to rest in uncertainty and welcome and play with ambiguity, and to combine well-considered, pragmatic theory with direct experience. It requires lots of practice, good attention skills, and rigour. And a practiced capacity to hypothesize, and to test out hypotheses, and hold several hypotheses simultaneously. And a capacity for “small noticings” — recalling things you noticed in a different context that just might apply to the issue at hand. Few of us are very good at this.
• finding our community: While the community that we find ourselves in as collapse reaches the “suddenly all at once” stage, may be able to acquire and share the skills and resources needed to become a true community, it might well not. If not, we may have to keep searching until we find a community in which we usefully and comfortably ‘fit’. We are all likely to become ‘homeless migrants’ at least once in the coming decades, until we find it.

These skills and methods, the more we can acquire and practice them in the years to come, will help make us more competent at navigating collapse and chaos and co-establishing and building sustainable communities with just enough of the right constraints to be viable and healthy.

We cannot ‘prepare’ for collapse and chaos, because we have no idea how specifically it will play out where we live. But we can start, anytime, I think, acquiring the skills, knowledge, connections, networks and capacities, so that, regardless of how it happens, we’re able to adapt ourselves, and co-adapt with those we’re with, to cope as well as humanly possible.

image by Midjourney AI; my own prompt and photoshopping

At various times over my 20 years of blogging I’ve found myself taking a controversial position on some issue, usually political or economic, but occasionally social or ecological.

I was surprised that my articles “against” love, “against” hope, in support of polyamorous relationships, and asserting our lack of free will, turned out to be less controversial than they did. I was equally surprised at the relatively hostile response of some readers to my position on healthy veganism (including a death threat), my opposition to western involvement in the war in Ukraine, my strong support for masks and vaccines, and my occasional ridiculing of religions and ‘spirituality’ (including CBT and ‘mindfulness’).

But generally, people have been pretty tolerant of what people write on their blogs. They are, after all, just opinions, and no matter what you believe, you can find a blog or a group somewhere that will reassure you that what you believe is right, and that anyone who believes to the contrary is misinformed or worse.

For most of those 20 years, I’ve hewed to a fairly consistent ‘progressive’ party line on most issues, to the point early blog listings categorized me as a ‘radical lefty’ blogger. I think in many ways I am even more so now than when I started blogging, though I’m a lot less doctrinaire and idealistic than I was. I rarely tell people what to do any more, or even proffer advice or “solutions”. I write more in the first person singular, and add “I think”, or “it seems to me” to qualify what I am saying, so I think my opinions are expressed less categorically than they once were, no longer implying that “this is obviously what any smart, informed person would believe”.

Some of the principles that govern my writing are:

1. I try to remember, and state as often as possible, that I don’t know much on a lot of topics, and my “thinking out loud” is rarely more than “this is what I think, tentatively, for now, and why”. I keep track of when I change my opinion on things, and try to own up to how and why I believed what I did. I’m not a very humble person, but I try not to be arrogant. And I try to be honest when I say what I believe on the basis of the “preponderance of evidence”, and admit when I am not an expert. I’d rather be useful, or at least interesting, than popular.
2. When it comes to a few issues, I see no virtue in “both-sidesing”. Sometimes you just have to take a stand. That doesn’t mean that adversaries are “evil” or “insane” or “wrong”, it just means that the danger they seem to me to present to people and the planet outweighs, IMO, their right to be taken seriously and given airtime. The recent mutterings of RFK Jr are an example.
3. I try to appreciate the inherent complexity of all things, especially anything that is social or ecological, and try not to simplify things that are not simple, even though that means living with uncertainty and ambiguity and expressing that in my writing. In most cases I am suspicious of simple models, answers, diagnoses and “solutions”.
4. I recognize the immense power of stories, and therefore deliberately do not tell stories (particularly the emotionally-charged ones that mainstream media increasingly rely on) when there’s anything much at stake in how they’re taken. Many awful atrocities have been facilitated by manipulative story-tellers. When I write stories, they are usually labeled up-front as fiction.
5. I try to avoid writing “me too” articles. If I haven’t got something — new information, new perspectives, new insights, new possibilities — to add, I don’t see much point in writing about a subject.

Some of these principles are on occasion in contradiction to each other, and then it’s a balancing act. Chronicling collapse is an exercise fraught with challenges, especially when the future is unpredictable and when so much is unknown.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of the Overton Window, it is essentially the range, across the political spectrum, of ideas that are currently considered acceptable for airing in public. Especially in the blogosphere, that window has always been reasonably broad. In the mainstream media, it’s always been much less so, and is quickly getting much narrower.

So for those who are exposed to blogs, the political writings of Noam Chomsky, the disclosures of whistle-blowers like Julian Assange, the deep and knowledgeable historical background offered by people like John Mearsheimer, and revelations such as those of award-winning investigative reporters of the calibre of Sy Hersh, for example, are pretty readily available, and often appreciated. They serve as an antidote to the much narrower and more right-wing views that now dominate publications like the NYT, WAPO, Guardian, New Yorker, Atlantic etc, publications that pointedly refuse to publish or even acknowledge the existence (except as crackpots or criminals) of people like these four extraordinary men.

If you read any of the above publications, it’s pretty clear that the Overton Window for these corporate media is very narrow, right-wing, and driven by a specific ideological agenda — substantially US exceptionalism, US/NATO unipolar imperialism, and neoliberal economics. On non-political, non-economic, non-military issues like gender rights and identity issues, they open the window slightly wider because these issues don’t threaten their core political and corporate sponsors, so they can appear to be more open-minded.

But recently, the Overton Window everywhere seems to have narrowed. Perhaps this is the effect of the mainstream media, which have become more doctrinaire even while pretending to maintain their ‘progressive’ credentials, and which now regularly pass off editorials and blatantly slanted reporting as real ‘news’. Perhaps it’s the effect of social media, which have been eagerly demonetizing, banning, using down-ranking algorithms, and just outright censoring and deleting writing and videos from people outside their perceived Overton Window, their ineffectual and ham-fisted way of “combatting conspiracy theories”.

Or perhaps it’s just an indication of how what used to be known as ‘the left’ or ‘progressives’ has fractured over the past few years over issues that pit leftists against each other (and that’s not entirely due to the mainstream media, and academia, harping on these issues).

I first noticed this trend a decade ago when trans rights activists got into battles with radical feminists. I’m not going to get into the issue here, but the upshot was a lot of ‘canceling’ of (and even physical assaults on) important progressive speakers like Derek Jensen. It was basically impossible to support ‘both sides’, and the animosity was so strong that if you supported one you were cut off from the other.

Since then, that malaise has spread. On issues such as the homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction problems in San Francisco that led to the recall of Chesa Boudin, for example, leftists couldn’t win no matter what position they took. This splintering of the left over social and ‘identity’ issues has continued, and it seems to have torn the left apart in the UK and Europe as well, particularly on issues such as immigration. And during CoVid-19, progressives throughout the Euro-American Empire have further split on issues like vaccine and mask ‘mandates’ (and even on the ‘Lab Leak Hypothesis’), much to the delight of the more unified right.

Again, I am not going to get into these issues (or at least, not again), because it would take a long article to explain the split on each one. The point is, the “range of positions and opinions acceptable in public discourse” has become incredibly complex, depending on which section of the “public” you are talking about.

So what we have ended up with is essentially three Overton Windows, one for conservatives, which is moving steady right towards rabid populism and fascism, and two (or more), often mutually exclusive, for progressives. So, for example, if you oppose US/NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine, you will have to deal with a large majority of self-described progressives who support the war (as happened in previous wars like the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which, along with the mainstream media, most progressives also supported), and who find any opposition to the latest war intolerable.

As a result, as a blogger, I’ve found my positions on many issues attacked as often by those who would probably consider themselves progressives, as by conservatives (who generally don’t read my blog anyway).

So I know collapsniks whom I agree with on almost all issues, except on their belief that the government response to CoVid-19 was an excuse to increase power and surveillance over citizens. I know bloggers who are progressive on social and economic issues who fervently support supplying billions of dollars in gruesome weapons to the Ukraine army, and also support preparations for a war against China over Taiwan or Xinjiang or some other issue. My support of radical feminism has resulted in me being labeled a TERF. My belief that trying to prevent or mitigate economic, ecological, and political (and hence civilizational) collapse is now futile, and that it makes more sense to focus our attention on adapting ourselves to its realities, has been assailed by some progressives as defeatist and dangerous.

I have found myself adding blogs to my blogroll, newsletter or RSS feed lists, based on an excellent article on some issue, only to find myself deleting them when their author goes off on some (to me) bizarre and embarrassing tangent on another issue. And then I end up adding them back when someone points me to some new insightful writing of theirs. It’s exhausting! Oh, for the days when the people on my blogroll agreed with me on just about everything!

So perhaps the whole idea of the Overton Window has lost its meaningfulness as the complexity of public discourse increases. There are no simple left/right lines anymore (and some would say there is no ‘left’ anymore). And no part of the ‘window’ seems to be open to all major constituencies of the citizenry.

The concept of the Overton Window originally applied only to the acceptable range of government policies that the electorate would tolerate. Now government policies are largely, as Aurélien has explained so well, performative exercises in saying the right thing to the party faithful, rather than doing anything at all, while the policies that are actually enacted are substantially written by corporate donors, wealthy lobbyists, the defense establishment, and other powerful administrators not beholden to any party, or to the citizens.

So the original Overton Window has become relevant only for wording the carefully-crafted talking points, rallying calls and scripted op-eds in the mainstream media by the governing and opposition parties of the day.

As political collapse continues, this does not bode well. Coping with collapse of all types is going to require, as I wrote earlier, a focus on acceptance, adaptation, competence, experience, pragmatism, and collaboration. That will require a lot more tolerance than most people seem currently willing to show. Whether this will get better or worse as collapse deepens is anyone’s guess.

In the meantime, we bloggers are likely to be seen, more and more, as being outside the window of acceptable opinion and discourse, especially as the number of issues we feel compelled to be knowledgeable about (and have an opinion about) increases. Most people want things to be simple, in which case they’re going to find the blogosphere an uncomfortable place, perhaps best avoided entirely.

Me, I’ll just stick to my principles, write to try to make sense of the world and to chronicle civilization’s collapse, and invite others interested in my musings to follow along and respond as they will. That sense-making is likely to be complex, tentative, and counter-intuitive, and will probably often introduce new possibilities that may challenge, annoy or even outrage.

But perhaps, if we’re all finding ourselves increasingly on the outside of the window, looking in, we might look together, compare notes, and see if we can make more sense of it that way. We don’t have to agree. Two eyes give you perspective, and two heads are better than one, and all that.

screen cap from one of Sabine’s recent videos

One of the mailing lists I’m part of (thanks to Paul Heft) has been debating physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s controversial recent video in defence of capitalism. I’m a huge fan of Sabine’s scientific work, and I think her use of scientific methods and principles to “do one’s own research” is well-founded, even when it’s outside one’s area of expertise.

But I would argue that her video, entitled “Capitalism is Good”, should have been more modestly titled “The Ideas of Money and Capital are Good, in Theory”. She sees the problems with capitalism as stemming from poor governance and lack of proper regulation, rather than from the theory itself. But that assumes that systems of proper governance and regulation are possible in a massively complex world. My study of complex systems, and human systems in particular, suggest they are not.

This is how I replied to the mailing list group, in response to their heated debate over the video:

I think one has to consider that Sabine, who is a world class theoretical physicist, is an expert in exactly that — theory.

She is absolutely correct in that the invention of money and ‘capital’ was (and is) essential to large scale industrial production, without which many of the inventions and products we enjoy today (and many of the resultant problems) would never have occurred. They are great ideas in theory. So is Marxism, in theory.

The real problem is that we live in a society in which everything we do is part of a massively complex system, and such systems are essentially unregulatable. We think we can introduce a system that is governed by a theory or set of principles and then control and regulate its application. We cannot.

That is why all of our theories and -isms ultimately get us into trouble. Not because they aren’t good theories, but because we cannot control their application.

Capitalism is a great theory that is also one of the major causes for almost all aspects of the polycrisis. If we had 8 billion humans living under an economic system based upon some other great theory, like Marxism, or the Gift Economy, or even feudalism (which in theory is not as bad as we’re taught), it is almost certain that we would be facing a different but equally intractable polycrisis, and be in roughly the same stage of collapse that we are facing now.

My article last month on “moving beyond ideologies” was focused on political systems, but it applies equally to economic systems. As Tyson Yunkaporta said: “All you can do is foster the conditions for emergence and allow it to emerge and just behave with integrity, and, you know, maybe others will do the same. But the minute you have an idea and you think this is an important idea, everybody should know about this, everybody should be doing this — as soon as you do that you’ve made an ideology and you’re [fucked].”

Human beings, beyond the level of tribe, small community and autonomous confederation (in the indigenous sense of the term), seem to be simply politically and economically ungovernable. Despite all attempts to make us into homogenous robots, that is not who we are.

It’s a shame, because our brains are great at inventing theories and ideologies. You know, things that work brilliantly, in theory.

I will probably write more about this in future, because it’s critically important, but I think that’s enough for now.

For the hard core interested in the subject only. This is a partial transcript of Jim Newman’s answers to questions about radical non-duality, from his meeting in Amsterdam in March 2019. It was one of the last in-person meetings on the subject before CoVid-19. I thought his answers that day were particularly articulate. 

Midjourney AI attempts to capture the essence of “nothing has any meaning or purpose”. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it succeeded. 

In this meeting we’re going to talk about — and whatever I say from now on, I mean “apparently”, ie it’s neither real nor unreal [only an appearance] — we’re going to talk about two things:

First, a pointing to what can’t be known; and that’s what’s happening. ‘This’ is what’s happening; ‘this’ can’t be known. It’s indescribable. It’s the ‘absolute’; it’s trying to describe what can’t be described. There is no word that can say what ‘this’ is, what ‘is happening’. Because there’s no distance, space or time in what’s happening. It appears there is but that’s not real. So we’ll be pointing at what can’t be known.

Second, the reason we think this meeting is happening (it’s not really happening; it’s only apparent) is because there’s an experience [a ‘me’] that arises in what’s happening that says “I know what’s happening.” And that experience “I know what’s happening” seems to be separate or distinct from ‘what’s happening’. It’s not. It’s an illusion, a trick. But that’s the experience. And it’s because this experience arises, that this meeting apparently happens. As that experience arises it says “I am separate from everything, separate from what’s happening, I am real, I was born, I have a life, I’m going to die” — and that’s problematic [for the ‘me’].

So ‘I’ need to find a way out, a way to be fulfilled, to feel whole. I need, through my experience I have of being real, to use my free will and choice to make my life better. To find whatever it seems to be that’s missing, which is, always, something else — the next moment, the next instance, the next experience. So the situation is, you have an experience, that arises in ‘what is’. That experience seems separate; it’s not.

Experience is an illusion. It assumes two “what’s happenings”. “What’s happening here” and “what’s happening there”. And there isn’t a “What’s happening here” and a “what’s happening there”. Experience is a sort of knowing; it’s a subject-object relationship. That’s what experience is. There is no subject or object. “Knowing” is the absolute appearing as knowing. Everything that arises is the absolute. Whatever you can name or say is the absolute. It’s not actually separate.

What’s being pointed to is that the knowledge or experience ‘I am’ is illusory. It’s the illusory experience that there’s separation.

You can’t say what this is. You can call it anything — you could call it ‘oneness’. It’s not oneness, it’s not non-duality, It’s not a thing.

There is no ‘you’, and there is no ‘there’, there is only what’s happening.

.     .     .     .

When somebody experiences the senses [experiences are different from sensations that are just what’s happening — the senses are just a function], such as when ‘I’ look, ‘I’ see an object. When no one is looking there’s only the infinite, the singularity of what’s happening. There’s no witness, no knower, no actor, no one outside of it. There’s just what’s happening. It’s complete, it’s everything, it’s whole. It leaves no space for there to be a witness, or a knower or a perception or a perceiver.

The thought that there is something else beyond what is happening is [also] what’s happening. The individual separates it, as if there was another reality. Nothing happens really, only apparently. ‘You’ is the experience of separation, that there is another reality. That there’s an experiencer, that there’s what’s happening and something else that’s happening. That’s the experience of duality; that’s an illusion.

There is no separation. The paradox of this is that it cannot be explained because there is no separation. It only seems paradoxical because of the [me’s] need to understand and explain it.

.     .     .     .

The apparent solidity of the individual gives the impression that this whole thing is coming from somewhere, that time and space are real, that this is a part of a continuum that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s a dream. There is only what’s [apparently] happening. There isn’t anything outside of what’s happening. But for the [illusory] individual it all seems real. For the individual, words are real. But there is no individual, just appearance. There is no experience, no experiencer, there is only [raises his hand] nothing [apparently] “hand-ing”.

.     .     .     .

There is no you. You, wanting to leave, is nothing, appearing as an individual saying “I’m real and I want to leave.” Nothing is hidden. There is nothing to find, nothing that has been lost. It’s only the illusory individual that has the illusory experience that there’s something lost. There is nothing lost.

The individual is an experience of being inside the body, with buttons and levers that ‘I’ call my free will, to be able to ‘deal’ with what’s outside the body. When ‘I’ arise — that experience of position inside the body — it arises simultaneously in everything else. And then the appearance, and ‘my’ life, are, [to the ‘me’], ‘real’. That experience is illusory. There isn’t anything in here [points to body]. There isn’t anything that ends at the skin. And there isn’t anything outside. There is no inside or outside. There is only what’s happening.

You don’t live in an illusion; ‘you’, the sense of being an individual, are an illusion. There is only the absolute, [everything]. There is no space for a question [‘why’]. There is no ‘one’ to ask.

.     .     .     .

Nothing is ‘known’. There is only what’s happening. And that can appear as ‘knowing where my hotel is’. It can even appear as the experience of being separate.

.     .     .     .

‘You’ don’t have a life. You’ve never made a decision. The ‘me’ doesn’t actually do much of anything. It doesn’t have thoughts or feelings; it takes ownership of what arises and says “that’s mine”. It arrogates everything to itself, in its illusory experience.

.     .     .     .

The memory of ‘you coming here’ is what’s happening, but ‘you’ didn’t do it. There is nobody ‘in there’. Nobody ‘makes decisions’. The entire experience of being an individual with free will and choice is an illusion. Because the illusion of the individual is ‘the absolute appearing as the illusion of the individual’, there is no why. There is just what’s happening. ‘Why’ only arises if there is real separation and somebody trying to find reasons. It’s all just the absolute. There is nowhere to go. Nothing moves. There is nowhere for a ‘why’ to arise and nothing for a ‘why’ to direct anything to, because there’s only what’s happening — apparently.

.     .     .     .

This is not a philosophical exercise. There is only what is happening. It’s not a philosophy, so it’s very difficult to talk about it in philosophical terms. It’s not a theory. It’s just what’s being expressed. It’s obvious. ‘This’ isn’t saying that there’s no individual as a theory, this is saying there’s no individual because [it’s obvious] there’s no individual. This isn’t saying that this [points around him] appearance is the absolute appearing as a room as a philosophy or theory; it’s just obvious that that’s all there is. So there’s no ‘room’ to philosophize about it.

This is like a film without a screen. And nobody watching.

.     .     .     .

When the ‘I’ [seemingly] arises [in very early childhood], it doesn’t immediately make sense of everything; it just makes everything ‘real’. Over time [in the story] it builds up a belief system around the solidity of ‘I am’ that makes sense of what ‘this’ is about for it. It needs to ‘make sense’ because it’s on its way somewhere. It feels like it’s on a path. It grows up and leaves home and Mom and Dad and loves God (another Dad) to make it feel good — somebody who knows what is going on. It’s a very insecure existence. It’s a frightening, contracted existence — it’s a dream, it isn’t real. But that’s its experience.

.     .     .     .

There is nothing excluded from what’s happening. No way to get closer or further away from what’s happening. It’s already everything. That’s why it’s suggested that the experience of being an individual is illusory — It’s not happening.

So when it stops happening, it’s obvious it never did.

For the individual, everything is really happening [to it]. The experience apparently happens to the individual, it’s apparently real to the individual. The individual can’t say it’s not real. To it, it is. [It’s the individual that isn’t real.]

.     .     .     .

There’s nothing to gain, and nothing lost. The experience of the individual is that something’s missing. It keeps adding experiences to itself, but never fulfils that gap of separation. It can’t solve the problem of itself.

.     .     .     .

Death only appears for the individual. It only has a reality in the experience of separation. There is no separation. There is no death.

.     .     .     .

This [pointing to his body] doesn’t actually see people, so it’s quite obvious there isn’t anybody in this room. [The fact that the individual sees people in the room is] just a dream. There isn’t personal responsibility. There isn’t anybody who could make a decision. There isn’t anyone. There is no ‘you’.

.     .     .     .

If there is the appearance of a sound [such as someone asserting something], it’s the infinite ‘sounding’. But the individual will try to make sense of what it’s ‘about’ because it’s on a journey and will want to give it meaning and purpose, hoping that it means something important. It doesn’t.

The hope is that in the future, something is going to happen to make ‘me’ OK. But there is no future, and there’s no need for hope, because there’s nothing ‘wrong’.

Nobody knows this. This [pointing to his body] doesn’t know anything. Knowing isn’t what this is about. The concepts of this are very simple to understand. But understanding doesn’t help the individual. Though that experience of the individual just might end [the same way it started happening, for no reason], revealing that it never happened, then that is just what’s happening. But the concepts are useless. “I know that this is the absolute” has no relationship to the fact that this is the absolute.

.     .     .     .

The individual may take what is shared here as some kind of practice. But it’s completely useless. [The ‘me’] is convinced it will be part of its own solution. But there is no real separation, there is nothing to overcome, nowhere to go. There is only ‘home’ — everything, ‘what is happening’.

This appearance is absolute chaos.

.     .     .     .

The individual thinks there is something missing, thinks that the solution has to be something added on to make it complete and whole. That’s an illusion. There is nothing needed to be added.

Meaning and purpose comes immediately when the individual arises; it’s part and parcel of the experience of separation, of being an individual.

All there is is the absolute — this, everything — appearing. There is no individual. Nothing is real (or unreal). There is no meaning or purpose.   

Jim’s style of speaking can strike some people as being a little brusque. For a contrasting style with the same message, this is one of Tim Cliss’ best meetings, IMO, an online interview and Q&A from April, 2021. The last half is especially good, with some really thoughtful questions from attendees. Tim is a retired teacher and psychologist, and quite compassionate. I may produce a transcript for this meeting, too.

image: creative commons CC0 license from pixabay

The mass of [humans] lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called ‘resignation’ is confirmed desperation. Unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of [human]kind. There is no play in them, for this comes only after work. [And the work never ends] — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

This body is on a train. Like most of what passes for infrastructure, at least in this part of the world, the train, the tracks, the staff and their training, the internet service, the electrical outlets, and the cafeteria with its ghastly non-nutritious menu, all are unreliable. I don’t count on getting where I’m going anywhere close to on time, or even arriving on this vehicle rather than a replacement.

When I left this morning, the main elevator in my apartment building remained out of order for a third week, waiting for parts to be shipped from who-knows-where-or-when. Across the street at the mall, the main escalator has been out of order for almost a month. Several stores in the mall are closed due to lack of staff. Many ferries have been cancelled, for the same reason, or because a ferry broke down despite ‘preventative maintenance’, and there are simply no replacements until it gets fixed. Everything seems to be slowly falling apart.

This body, by comparison, seems to be operating very well, especially considering it’s now well past its ‘best by’ date.

My last post of each month is usually a meandering story about my recent travels in the community where I live, but this month, until today I haven’t been out much, thanks to seemingly endless heat waves and smoke from nearby forest fires. And there’s nothing terribly interesting happening on the train.

So instead, I am contemplating, and now writing about, what I think is going on in the world. I’m thinking about how someone from the distant future, or from a far-off planet, might summarize what has been happening on this planet since the emergence of our species. Not with the goal of predicting ‘what comes next’, since there seem to be few possibilities left, and all of them start with the letter C. But rather just to place what’s apparently happening in some kind of context, to see how we ended up in this strange situation, with 8 billion seemingly traumatized and slightly deranged apes running around in funny costumes, unintentionally, collectively, and rapidly destroying the environment on which our health and existence depend.

So: What’s going on here? How did we get to this hopeless point?

My sense is that what we are seeing is behaviours stemming from ubiquitous mental illness; we are a species that, like a cancer, has lost its bearings, its connection to the rest of life on the planetary organism of which we are merely a part.

The mutual conditioning of our species, which for a million years kept us thriving as a well-fitting part of the ecosystems in which we emerged, is now driving us to behave in dysfunctional ways — producing extreme overpopulation, endless violence against each other and against the planet, fierce competitiveness, mindless and unsustainable consumption, and desensitizing us from acknowledging the harms and suffering that are happening everywhere.

How did that happen? I have a number of theories, but my two current favourites are:

1. The maladaptation theory

Our forced exodus from the tropical rainforest (destroyed by massive prehistoric cosmic radiation) where we once fit naturally and comfortably into our environment, led to a situation of extreme, unnatural and chronic stress as we spread across the globe in search of the kind of way of living we had lost. To survive in these places we had to construct (and we had the brains to do so) completely prosthetic environments. But these environments alienated us from everything we were a part of, and forced us to live in ways which, though we could ‘successfully’ live in them (ie physically survive, until we run out of space, air, water, energy, soil etc), they were not the way we were ‘meant’ to live — by which I mean that, since that time, we’ve had to live in ways we were never naturally suited, evolved, and adapted to live (in trees, as scavengers, like bonobos and chimps). Primatologists have claimed, for example, that if you filled a small space like an airplane with 50 members of any primate species, even if it were equipped with abundant food, the primates would begin killing each other within hours.

Our maladaptation to these prosthetic man-made environments has left us lost, scared, bewildered, and ultimately mentally ill. Our conditioning of each other now reinforces this mental illness, seeing the resultant behaviours (war, self-domestication, and civilization) as somehow ‘normal’, since it’s all any of us has ever known. Like wild creatures locked forever in small, unhealthy cages, we beat our heads against the bars, sensing something is terribly wrong, but with no idea (or possibility) of righting it.

2. The evolutionary misstep theory

At some point thousands of years ago, probably as our local environments and hence our diet changed, our brains evolved (perhaps as an accidental ‘spandrel’ as the circuits of our brains morphed from bicameral to entangled cross-cameral) the capacity to imagine and conceive of unreal things as being real. At that point, we changed from being perceptual creatures (like most or all other creatures on the planet) to conceptual creatures. Among the first conceptions of this rewired human brain must have been the concept of the self being real and separate from ‘everything else’, and ‘everything else’ likewise being conceived of as being real and separate.

As soon as we saw ourselves (our ‘selves’) as separate and apart, it would not be surprising that we would find this terrifying. Suddenly, we were ‘responsible’ for this seemingly separate body we conceived our selves to be located in, and hence responsible for its safety, security, and beliefs and behaviours. This is a different form of mental illness, but its consequences are the same: Instead of just being a part of everything, we now became preoccupied with protecting our selves and ‘our’ bodies from everything else, every imaginable danger, in a competition to the death with others. Yet our belief that we can and do control ‘our’ bodies’ behaviours and actions is completely illusory. This had to be crazy-making.

Either way, our species went mad, went rogue, and the current state of our world reflects that collective insanity.

Whether this was a result of extreme chronic stress and maladaptation, or an evolutionary misstep in the development of the human brain, does not really matter. The malaise is not going to go away, and it is a predicament with no solution. And either way, none of this is ‘our’ fault. The dice rolled badly for our recent evolution, and now it’s playing out the only way it can.

It’s anyone’s guess, when, centuries or millennia from now, after civilizational and ecological collapse have hopefully led to some new equilibrium, and if there are any humans left, whether they will remain afflicted with a mental illness that renders them incapable of fitting into whatever new ecosystems have emerged at that time. We can only hope they won’t.

. . . .

Meanwhile, this body seems to be managing just fine, despite this self’s endless and futile attempts to affect its behaviour. It does what animal bodies do — it seeks pleasure, in its own peculiar ways, and seeks to avoid pain. It doesn’t much care or worry about collapse, or its inevitability, or about things already falling apart. As it gets older, its wants and its needs become fewer, and simpler. And of course, compared to most of the 8 billion human bodies, it is extremely privileged and fortunate.

So it will enjoy the music, and the scenery, and the comfort (most of the time) of the gently rocking train. It will engage in many types of play, from imagining possibilities and writing stories to flirting and wordplay, if and as opportunities arise.

This body watches the other humans on the train with a growing sense of sadness; they seem hopelessly dissatisfied, trapped, distracted, lost in the past or the future, uncomfortable, and worn down. Perhaps this is what Thoreau meant by “lives of quiet desperation”. This body is curious (circling them figuratively like the wild creature it has always been) and it is compassionate, but it is not terribly patient with those caught in these terrible traps. Maybe it thinks them lost causes. Too little pleasure, too much pain is found, it seems, in consorting with most people. More trouble than it’s worth.

There’s an opportunity for clever banter instead up there, at the front of the car, perhaps, or some new interesting learning about an unfamiliar culture back in the car behind us. This body gravitates to them, not to the majority seemingly caught up in struggle. So cruel, so selfish, this body! Why can’t it care about others’ apparent suffering? So insensitive! Uncivilized, even!

The hopelessness of what’s going on in this world no longer causes ‘me’, this self, any despair, either. This is not a Hollywood movie, after all, with that sad part just before the happy ending. What fills me with joy, and wonder, instead, is that there is no ending to Gaia’s story, even if you measure time in billions of years. This time we presume to be living in is just a blip, the curve of an apostrophe, in this story. We only get to glimpse one small part of one chapter. But wow, it has a Great Extinction event, and a lot of action! We might even witness how this part ends! But as for the longer arc, we can only imagine.

So this body and my self seem simpatico these days. Both are increasingly accepting of what is and is not possible. They’re not ‘resigned’ in the sense that Henry David Thoreau described. More like equanimous. Content with playing our apparent parts in this remarkable story.

Though perhaps it’s a good thing “what’s going on” is, apparently, maybe, only a story.

“The New Leader Holds Court”, by Midjourney AI; my own prompt

Aurélien has been writing lately about how much of the malaise of our crumbling modern systems can be attributed to the incompetence (defined as inability to do the job) of those administering them and working in them. The horrific and growing failures of our education system, for example, surely cannot be attributed to deliberate, evil, insane, malicious teachers out to miseducate and fail their students.

Mostly, this malaise is due to the sheer unworkability of systems that are so huge, bloated and sclerotic that even when everyone knows what needs to be done, it still cannot be done — examples being the US failure to adopt the metric system, or to dispense with the nonsense of daylight saving time. And in part, they’re due to the incompetence of the people working in those systems, mostly the people ‘at the top’.

That incompetence has several dimensions. Firstly, in large organizations, most executives and administrators have never done the job of their subordinates (they were parachuted in from MBA or other ‘professional’ schools, or moved laterally within the organization). The ludicrous assumption seems to be that if you did reasonably well in ‘management’ courses in university, or in some simple on-the-job management task, you’ll be good at managing anything you’re assigned to do.

Secondly, modern post-secondary educational organizations do not attract people with excellent, practical skills and experiences. They reward academic ‘achievements’ (as assessed by other academics), such as publishing articles about their theories in journals, not skill at teaching, facilitating, or mentoring. How can they possibly be expected to teach anyone how to do anything, let alone run a department or an entire organization?

So you have a situation where the people running the show, making the key decisions and mandating that they be followed, are inevitably making incompetent decisions, with inevitably poor, and even (consider our ‘management’ of CoVid-19 for example) catastrophically poor results and outcomes. They simply don’t have the skills and experience to be competent. This is arguably true in all of our systems — political, economic, educational, health etc.

And, making matters worse, these incompetent decision-makers are working within codependent hierarchies that are echo chambers, where being a sycophant is rewarded and where challenging incompetence is “a career-limiting move”. So total bone-heads like Antony Blinken, Rochelle Walensky, Larry Summers, Victoria Nuland, and Jerome Powell (not to mention the two most recent US presidents), for example, continue to hold positions of power year after year and in position after position, despite having long records of dangerous, uninterrupted, staggering incompetence.

And not only do we have massive systems incapable of change or response to change, and incompetence up and down the hierarchy, we have the ‘players’ in each system conditioning each other to believe that what is in fact utter incompetence, is actually outstanding competence — “Look: my beloved boss and my friendly colleagues and my dutiful, obedient staff, and these consultants we hired, all say I’m wonderful, so I must be, right?”

As a result we have not just incompetence, but conditioned incompetence — incompetence that is rewarded and immune to challenge because all the ‘players’ are telling each other that they’re stellar performers and that what they’re doing is the right stuff. And so we have executives earning obscene incomes for mismanaging organizations in all economic sectors, taking credit for others’ work and for brief good fortune, and accountable only to others in their echo chambers.

No surprise then, that at all levels in all sectors of our society all over the world, both private and public, we see, to put it mildly, lousy leadership and fawning followership. Incompetence up and down the line.

And though you may be tired of hearing me say it, none of this is anyone’s fault. No one set out to create dysfunctional, crumbling systems run and operated by incompetents. It’s the inevitable result of our lack of essential skills and experience, our conditioning of each other, and trying to function in systems that are so huge and complex that they are unmanageable, and thus quickly and inexorably begin to collapse.

Look at any of the systems of industrial civilization and you’ll see, everywhere, the signs of inherent unmanageability, a dearth of real skills and experience, and conditioned incompetence. The decline of our education systems into expensive, dysfunctional, and irrelevant baby-sitting services. The decline of our political systems into competing gangs of short-sighted, power-crazed, sociopathic liars. The decline of our economic systems into vehicles for the organized theft from the poor, sick and lower castes by the obscenely wealthy. The decline of our health systems into overburdened, bankrupt, expensive, administratively-bloated shells of incapacity. Same goes for our transportation systems, our public infrastructure, our systems of trade, and all the other systems on which our civilization utterly relies.

All of them led and staffed by incompetent people doing their (awful) best to make inherently unmanageable and unsustainable systems work, when they cannot.

This is what collapse looks like. There is no ‘fixing’ these systems, least of all by replacing the ‘leaders’ with other incompetents. These systems are in the advanced stages of collapse, and in a few decades they will be gone, as extinct as the systems of ancient empires.

What will take their place is unpredictable and perhaps unimaginable: New types of feudal systems, perhaps; systems of barter and scrip; cobbled-together apprenticeship systems for learning essential skills; community-owned medical clinics run by nurses? Or perhaps, as the long collapse deepens, even more anarchic systems: economies without money, politics based on ad hoc citizens’ assemblies, health care systems without pharmaceuticals, and education systems without teachers? We will do what we must. It’s going to be interesting.

Once these systems have fully collapsed (perhaps many times, as naive replacement systems also fail), in a few centuries or millennia, if there’s any of us left, we will likely see the emergence of some viable, sustainable new systems, almost inevitably much more local, small-scale, practical and low-tech. Instead of experts and specialists, we’ll have become, and will rely on, experienced, competent generalists.

If we are able to do that, we’ll have relearned some of the capacities that enabled human societies to thrive for a million years, in the same ways societies of wild creatures have always thrived — tribally, collaboratively, skillfully, and in concert with the rest of life. Fit, again, and at last, for the more-than-human world in which we live.

I confess: I hate exercising. I’ve been doing it, on and off, for more than 50 years. Partly this is out of vanity, since I do look better for doing it. And partly it is because I just feel better — healthier, less creaky, more resilient — when I do it. But whether it’s outside or in the gym, the guy dragging himself out of my apartment to exercise is not a happy person.

I am also something of a statistics nut, and I’ve been tracking my running times (and walking times, when I wasn’t up for running) over various distances since I was a teenager. That has helped greatly in figuring out the role of exercise in recovering from various ailments over the past five decades.

And fortunately, there are other statistics geeks among runners as well. One of the most valuable statistics I’ve been tracking is something called WAVA (now renamed WMA). What it represents is your average speed for a particular distance as a percentage of the speed of the top performers in the world of your age, over the same distance. One number tells the whole story.

Generally speaking, if you have a WAVA/WMA score of 60%, you’re going to put in a good showing in a fun run — probably in the top 20% or so of your age cohort. If your WAVA/WMA score is 70%, you could probably perform credibly in regional events, and if it’s 80%, you might qualify for national events of your age cohort. There’s a calculator if you want to compute your own score.

Here’s a chart showing for men (m) and women (w) what your time in minutes for a 10k run would have to be to meet the 60%, 70% and 80% thresholds. (World record time is 26:11 for men and 29:01 for women, both held by African runners, unchanged after this week’s world athletic championships; for runners over age 50, world record is 30:04 for men and 34:14 for women.):

I am not metabolically a distance runner. I was one of the fastest sprinters in the 100m and 200m in my high school, and my WAVA/WMA % at those distances was (and probably still is) in the 80-90% range. By the time I get up to a 5k run, however, I have to work to keep my WAVA/WMA % score at 60% or higher. But as the table at the top of this post shows, I seem to have been able to keep achieving that score with sufficient exercise. In 2006, when I was levelled by colitis, and in 2021, when I came up lame with repeated leg sprains (for reasons still unknown), I did have to face a slow rehab to get my score back over 60%. And it’s been there for the past six months, with nary an ailment.

There is of course another important number in fitness, and that’s the number of calories you burn. Common wisdom is that men on average burn 2,000 calories/day and women 1,500 calories/day without exercise, and that good health requires burning an additional 500 calories/day (2,000-3,000 calories/week) through strenuous exercise.

Unfortunately, the numbers just don’t add up to support this contention. One calorie of consumed food does not equate to one calorie of energy burned through exercise or other activities. The general rules of thumb ignore the complexities of how different types and paces of exercise contribute to fitness, and about what form the calories we consume are in, and even about what time of day we eat and exercise.

Nevertheless, the WAVA/WMA % only describes the intensity of exercise you’ve achieved, and calories, alas, seem to be the only measure that also considers the duration of the exercise. If you want a rule of thumb for computing calories burned (sorry, Americans, this only works in the metric system) here it is:

your average speed (km/h) x number of minutes exercised x weight in kg /55

So for a 72kg runner, 40 minutes at 10 km/h (fast jog) burns 530 calories. There’s your 500 excess calories per day, if that’s your intention. Equivalents would be 50 minutes at 8 km/h or 60 minutes at 6.5 km/h (slow jog). If you don’t like math or can’t manage metric, here’s a calculator for calories burned.

No matter how you calculate it, 500 excess calories per day, at least five days a week, is a lot more exercise than most people get in a normal week. And the above calculation is only for jogging and running. If you want to burn your 500+ excess calories a day walking at an intermediate 5.5 km/h speed, you’ll have to walk for two hours a day to do it. As the chart at the top of this post shows, there have been times in my life when I’ve gotten this target amount of exercise, and other times when I’ve fallen short.

Oh, and one more thing: You may have learned the rule for a safe maximum heart rate as 220 minus your age, in beats per minute (bpm). That rule is obsolete, especially for older people. The new rule is:

211 – (your age x .64)      bpm

So for a 40 year old the new limit is 185 beats per minute, and for a 70 year old it’s 165. Of course, it depends a bit on your height and weight, so here’s a more precise calculator for your maximum heart rate (HRMax, which, the site explains, you should stay 8-10 bpm below). Sorry, it’s metric too. It also calculates your BMI, which can be handy to know.

My gym’s treadmills monitor heart rate, and I’ve found this calculator to be very helpful. When I was middle-aged, I used to slow down if my heart rate exceeded 185. At my current pace at age 72, even after 40 minutes at 10 km/h my heart rate rarely exceeds 155. Those just feel like the right maximums to keep to.

So, I guess the answer to the question post in this article’s title is:

1. Yes, I am as fit now as I was in my 20s, and have been intermittently throughout my life.
2. But when I worked out only 3 days a week, or relied on an hour a day’s walking for my exercise, my fitness level dropped considerably. It’s just not enough.

I won’t annoy you this time around with my thoughts on diet, which always get me into trouble when I write about them. Though I will say that I have been following something called the 16/8 intermittent fasting diet (eating only between noon and 8pm each day) for several months now and found it has (1) reduced my late night food cravings and (2) also unintentionally led to a significant but not unhealthy drop in my average weight to the exact midpoint (21) of the recommended BMI range. I have no idea why it seems to work for me.

I think that’s more than enough maths and statistics for today. I hope you found some of this stuff interesting.

the pictures in this post are Midjourney AI’s attempts to mash-up two selected elements of my Ikigai; other than these three images, Midjourney did not do particularly well; these are my own prompts

I’ve written several times on the subject of what we pay attention to. Much has been written about how what we “choose” to pay attention to determines what we do and ultimately who we are. 

That’s an appealing sentiment, but I think it gets it precisely backwards. It’s our conditioning — biological and cultural — that determines what we pay attention to. It is not a “choice”. The only thing ‘we’ can do about it is to be occasionally aware of what we are (and aren’t) paying attention to. (And of course, if you want to go further down that rabbit hole, we have no choice about what we are aware of, or become aware of, either.)

The people closest to me — those who I suppose have had the largest impact on my conditioning over the past decade or so — have generally been quite forward, and quite articulate, in telling me when I have not been paying attention, and pointing out what I have apparently missed through my inattention (or misdirected attention). 

What I have missed, mostly, I think, is what Annie Ernaux calls “the pure immanence of the moment” — not the external analysis, memory or making-sense of the moment, but its simple ‘beingness’, independent of mental constructs about it and what it might ‘mean’. Perhaps this is what Russell Hoban meant when he wrote about “the moment under the moment”, which a reviewer of his work describes as “the reality underneath the one we’re aware of”. Though my sense is that this reality is not so much ‘within’ or ‘underneath’ what we conceive of as real, as it is the ‘natural reality’ that is staring us in the face but is veiled and concealed from us by our sense-making selves ‘protecting us’ from it, in all its raw, inescapable, uncontrollable and awesome wonder (and sometimes horror). 

So though I seem inherently inattentive (and I could make up a dozen explanations for that tendency, mostly having to do with life-long conditioned fear), my conditioning lately seems to be to ‘catch myself’ not paying attention. That doesn’t make me any more attentive, but it seems to be useful to know a little bit more about how this strange body, and stranger self, appear to function.

And I sense that I get closest to the ‘pure immanence of the moment’ when I am, for whatever reason, being my most attentive, and least caught up in my thoughts and in my head.

As an example of this: One of my joys these days is combining two aspects of my Ikigai (defined as the list of things that make me want to get up and start my day, and that bring simple pleasure and joy to my life):

1. my favourite music
2. hedonistic pleasures (eg hot baths by candlelight; Ayurvedic massage)
3. just being in a state of equanimity, curiosity, and discovery
4. clever humour and theatre
5. play (board games, flirtations, exploring ideas, clever exchanges, challenging puzzles, pick-up sports where no one keeps score, and collaborative creative activities)
6. the view from my apartment
7. tropical ocean beaches and tropical rainforests
8. my few true friends and small blog community
9. the more-than-human world
10. gentle, joyful, exceptionally bright/perceptive people
11. reading and writing in order to learn new things 
12. my creative writing (words and music)

So often at midnight, with the day’s chores behind me and my body starting to relax and think about sleep, I stand by my living room window and look out at the city lights spread out below, and listen to “My Station” — an endless list of songs that Apple Music draws partly from my music library and partly from its recommendation engine, so I never know what song is coming next. And there is a period when I’m thinking about the music — the lyrics and what they might mean, and the memories the song stirs up. And then that thinking seems to stop, and I’m actually just listening to the music. Noticing the instruments coming in, the harmonies and counterpoint and the change in tempo or key, that I’d never noticed before. Not in an analytical way, but simply in an attentive way.

Something strange happens then. When I’m thinking about the music, I’m prone to hit the ‘forward to next song’ button when a song doesn’t immediately appeal to me. But when I stop thinking and just listen, every song suddenly seems beautiful, artful, and astonishing, and I have to stop myself from adding them all to my music library (and later suffering ‘buyer’s remorse’). 

When I am just listening, I cease to be aware of myself, of time passing, or of anything else that is self-referential. At these (immanent?) moments there is only what is happening. There is no ‘intervention’, no sense-making, no ‘relating’ the music to my experiences or memories or mood.

And I realized, looking at my Ikigai list, that there is something almost everything on this list has in common: Almost all of these things can dissolve, and even temporarily erase, my sense of self, and what is left, without ‘me’, is  a world that is boundless, edgeless, timeless, and utterly astonishing. I think we’ve all had ‘in the moment’ experiences like this.

Engaged in these activities, ‘I’ — by which I mean this sense of separateness and physical substance and agency that presumes to inhabit and control this body — just disappear. ‘I’ get lost in ‘the moment’. What is most remarkable about the “immanence of the moment” is that, apparently, there is no ‘one’ there. 

And nearly everything ‘I’ seem to love to do (though it is probably actually this body that loves to do these things) seems to require ‘my’ absence. That is perhaps why ‘I’ am so drawn to the message of radical non-duality. 

The strangest thing, which I only appreciated after I spoke to those (relatively few) who have permanently lost the sense of self and separation, is that the self is never missed. The body does just fine, regulating its billions of cells, and its resultant behaviour, without any need for this vexatious self that thinks itself so indispensable to the body’s safety and survival.

These ‘moments’ don’t seem to occur any more frequently than they ever did, but I do seem to notice them more. And damn I’ve tried a lot of ‘practices’ to try to learn to pay better attention to what’s happening in the moment, but I’ve largely given up — my self stubbornly insists on getting in the way, and it has shown no signs of leaving the building. I’ve even tried ‘not trying so hard’.

Somehow, though, it’s enough to just notice. The moments, I think, will always be there, just waiting for our attention. Waiting for us to get lost.

cartoon by Michael Leunig, of course

Turn away from your animal kind,
Try to leave your body just to live in your mind.
Leave your cold cruel Mother Earth behind. Gaia.
As if you were your own creation,
As if you were the chosen nation.
And the world around you, just a rude and dangerous invasion. Gaia.
Someone’s got to stop us now, save us from us, Gaia!
No one’s going to stop us now.
— James Taylor, Gaia

I walk along the river shore
as crows (with no ‘free will’) sweep by:
just bodies being, nothing more —
you do not need a ‘self’ to fly.

So sorry, world, we’ve come to this:
our fractured species, our disease.
We all know something is amiss —
collapse at one-point-five degrees.

Regretting all we ‘should have’ done.
lost, scared and helpless, ghastly ill,
our long decline has just begun
and most are in denial, still.

I find that, now, I dare not care
about your trauma, dread, and shame.
I know your heart still cannot bear
to hear that no one is to blame.

What can I say? I offer just
compassion, but not empathy.
As all things turn from dust to dust
“the thing to do is just to be”.

The damaged, frightened souls in power
act out their conditioning.
The doomsday clock chimes out the hour:
sixty years since ‘Silent Spring’.

“If only we’d just all done…” more? —
We do our best, and we pretend
it makes a difference, toward
the only way that it could end.

These bodies do what they will do;
they make ‘our’ choices, and retain
the core of us we never knew —
the animal that we remain.

So here’s to deranged apes! We tried
to be what we could never be —
domesticated, civilized,
when our true nature’s wild and free.

And now, I have to go outside —
and smile, and run, and play, and sing.
We’re all just part of Gaia’s slide
of nothing into everything,
(so might as well enjoy the ride).

Fare forward, weary comrades all,
the die is cast, still much to learn
before the heavens start to burn:
Our last hurrah before the fall —
The fire next time. The dragons’ turn.

Midjourney AI’s take on scientists debating the existence of time and free will. Apparently Midjourney is of the impression that all scientists are male. I wonder where it got that idea? ChatGPT did no better with its all-male list of “prominent figures” on these topics. Not so intelligent. 

Over the last month or two I’ve made my way through four provocative books about the nature of reality:

1. theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland
2. quantum physicist Julian Barbour’s The End of Time
3. theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s Existential Physics
4. neuroscientist Anil Seth’s Being You

The authors of these books know, refer to, support, and sometimes criticize each other’s work. But to some extent they all represent a growing but still unorthodox school of scientists who believe, on the balance of probabilities:

• time does not exist
• the ‘self’ does not exist
• free will does not exist

They use words like illusion, misconstrual, and even hallucination to describe what time, self and free will really are, and why they seem to exist, and how their actual non-existence does not in any way affect how the world works, or how we function in it. Unlike some more conservative, orthodox thinkers in their fields (some of whom say that widespread acceptance of our lack of free will would somehow, preposterously, inexorably lead to global chaos and anarchy), they describe how the human brain might have evolved the faulty belief in the reality of these things (we are incorrigible pattern-seekers, sense-makers, and meaning-makers, after all), and how our belief in them has not affected, and need not affect, our beliefs and behaviours — any more than our mistaken belief that the sun revolved around the earth affected them.

Three of the books tackle the issue of free will, and explain why we are not ‘responsible’ for our actions, and describe the moral dilemma that this realization presents for our systems of laws, enforcement, and incarceration. The horrific lifelong trauma, both psychological and physical, suffered by most of those who then became serious criminals is supported by mountains of data. That doesn’t ‘justify’ their behaviour, but it does explain it.

Just as journalist Michael Pollan and biologist-neuroscientist Robert Sapolski explained in their books, the argument outlined in these books isn’t that we should take no action against those convicted of crimes, but that (i) instead of using the threat of punishment and incarceration as an attempt to deter criminal behaviour and reduce recidivism, we should use counselling and other methods to treat those convicted, the same as we should for anyone else suffering from serious mental illness, and (ii) we should only incarcerate those who we perceive to pose a significant risk to others, and only until treatment of their mental illness reduces that risk.

As scientists, all four writers are most interested in how abandoning our belief in the ‘reality’ of time, self and free will, affects our overall understanding of the nature of the universe and our place in it. In that respect, accepting that time is just a mental construct is relatively easy — our new models of the universe and its workings are mostly independent of the concept of time and work just fine without it.

Likewise, setting aside the confusing plethora of words like ‘determinist’, ‘physicalist’, ‘materialist’, and ‘compatibilist’, these writers seem to accept that, regardless of its lack of intuitiveness, and the ethical dilemmas it poses, the evidence for our behaviour being completely biologically and culturally conditioned, rather than subject to free will, is increasingly compelling, and that all attempts to locate, identify, or rationalize the existence or even the need for a ‘self’, have failed.

We simply don’t need the concepts of a self, or of free will, to comprehensively explain human behaviour. In fact, our behaviour makes more sense if we acknowledge that they don’t exist. And it’s not terribly difficult to explain why our species evolved the ubiquitous misunderstanding that we have selves and free will, and the false belief that time really exists.

In short, our understanding is wrong, but it is perfectly understandable. This is how the human brain apparently makes sense of things, by creating flawed, best-that-it-can-manage models, and then adopting them as accurate representations of reality until/unless a better model can be found. This is why it is so easy for humans to get caught up in a movie, which is just pixels on a screen, and feel that its characters are real and that the events it depicts are really happening.

So why do we care? If our misunderstanding of time, self and free will doesn’t affect our behaviour, what does it matter?

It matters for the same reason that our search to understand quantum effects, and why they just don’t fit (to put it mildly) with any of our existing models of how the world works, matters to us — We want to know ‘the truth’. We endlessly seek better models that more accurately represent reality.

Some scientists are now going further. Sean Carroll, another theoretical physicist (referred to in two of these books), says that when we dispense with the concept of time, we need to also reconsider our understanding of the rest of what seems to be real. While he is holding on to a belief in the many-worlds theory, he’s also admitted that the true nature of reality can most likely never be known or understood, and that the only thing we might be able to say with any assurance about the universe is that it is “an infinite field of possibilities”.

This is not so far from the message of radical non-duality that “nothing is either real or unreal”, that everything is just “nothing appearing as everything”. If there are only appearances, then anything is possible, ie the universe is an infinite field of possibilities. (Two of the books go into why, if anything is in fact possible, most ‘improbable’ things never seem to happen, drawing largely on entropy theory. They also suggest that our categorization of the ‘arrow’ of time might be our flawed model of the apparent tendency of things towards greater entropy.)

Even if we might be persuaded that everything is just an appearance, and that nothing (including time, space, separate things, and selves with free will) is real, what does it mean when radical non-dualists say nothing is ‘unreal’ either?

By ‘unreal’ we generally mean imagined or imaginary, like a hallucination or a story. The message of radical non-duality is that time, the self, free will, and other constructions of the (apparent) brain are ‘purely’ unreal — they are just things the self conjures up and imagines to be true, because it lacks any better explanation for what seems to be happening. But “nothing appearing as everything” (all the ‘stuff’ that isn’t merely conjured up in our brain) is neither real nor unreal. In other words, it isn’t real, because nothing is separate and because there is no time for anything to ‘really’ exist in or be happening in. And it isn’t unreal, because we aren’t just imagining it. “Nothing appearing as everything” is, therefore, just an appearance. We can’t conceive of anything being neither real nor unreal (though if there’s been a ‘glimpse’ it is immediately understood), but we can kind of get the concept.

So what about ‘consciousness’?

In terms of understanding the nature of reality and the message of radical non-duality, the whole concept of consciousness, as important as it is to many scientists, theologians, philosophers, spiritualists, and psychologists, is essentially irrelevant. The term has no strict definition and is often used to mean very different things. It is, merely, another mental construct, a concept, a model, with no actual basis in reality. The entire family of similar terms — awareness, presence, self-awareness, sentience, and even knowledge — are the arrogation of qualities of the self, arrogated strictly to the self. They are scaffolding placed atop the concept of the self, and, like the self, they are just models, theories, ideas, sense-making, devices used by the illusory self to position itself (at the centre) in the model of reality that it has constructed. There is no need for something called ‘consciousness’ to ‘really’ exist, any more than there is a need for the self to ‘really’ exist. It is like the rationalization of a hallucinator for how their hallucinations are actually real.

One of the fundamental principles of science is that, in seeking to understand how something is, or works, one should look for the simplest possible explanation. We could all make up stories about fairy dust or holograms or 13-dimensional strings to try to explain how the universe unfolded or how everything fits. The problem is, every time we find an explanation that seems sensible, it turns out to be either disproven by a subsequent discovery, or crazily convoluted (like the theologians’ complicated models developed to try to refute Copernicus and Galileo) and untestable or unfalsifiable.

The message of radical non-duality, which resonates with a lot of new discoveries in both physics and neuroscience, is, arguably, the simplest possible explanation for the nature of reality. It is falsifiable — there could one day be verifiable evidence that time or the self or free will actually exists. The message is internally consistent and quite elegant in its simplicity:

• The self and all its constructs are psychosomatic misunderstandings, illusions concocted by the (apparent) brain and body to try to make sense of the signals they are receiving.
• Everything ‘else’ is only nothing appearing as everything, for no reason or purpose. Nothing that appears is real or unreal. And nothing matters.

There are obvious reasons why such a message produces rejection, outrage, dismissal and disbelief when it is heard by most people (including most scientists). Even if it is correct, it is useless. There is nothing you can do with this understanding of the nature of reality and humans’ place in it. It is immensely humbling, and thinking about it puts humans (especially scientists) on the defensive. Not only is there nothing you can do with this understanding, there is no ‘you’, no self, no thing separate that can do anything, or that ever has done anything. There is only what is apparently happening, for no reason or purpose. Everything that ‘we’ think we have done, or learned, is just a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation in the desperate attempt to make sense and make meaning of (and try to control) everything that is apparently happening, when there is no rationale or meaning for, or control over, anything.

It’s enough to make you howl in anger, indignation, and incredulousness. No, that can’t be.

Perhaps the same reaction that those who first read Copernicus’ and Galileo’s books had.

(Oh, and if you only have time to read one of the books above, I’d recommend Sabine’s, especially the excellent chapter on free will.)

Midjourney AI’s take on “pointing the finger of blame”

You are not responsible. Not for your actions, or your inaction, or anything that has happened or will happen or failed to happen. Not for the world’s fuckedupedness.

I’m not saying that to make you feel better. You had no free will or choice in, or control over, what you did or did not do. Everything you have done or will do is the result of your conditioning. Individual action isn’t how social or other change comes about anyway. Human behaviour is an emergent phenomenon, highly dependent on the immediate and ever-changing local situation and the needs of the moment. No one is to blame for what does or does not happen. No one is responsible for the mess. What has happened is the only thing that could have happened. The deus ex machina only occurs in simplistic revisionist history, fairy tales, and Hollywood movies.

This is how the world works. Not predictably, not according to grand design or predestination or consensual collective intention or mass uprising. Often not prettily. (But pretty wondrously nevertheless.) This is what collapse, which is always inevitable, looks like.

The last words and epitaph of our civilization will be: If everyone had only…

COLLAPSE WATCH

famous line from The Princess Bride, which perhaps also applies to the word ‘collapse’

Science ‘journalists’ clueless on collapse: Most of the mainstream media misreported a journal article predicting the 50% chance of the AMOC North Atlantic circulatory system changing course between 2025-2095 as “collapse of the Gulf Stream as soon as 2025“. And we wonder why the general public is clueless! Meanwhile, seawater temperatures off Florida’s coast hit a world record (38ºC, 101ºF), the standard hot tub temperature, resulting in a health warning to residents. In our preoccupation with ‘average’ global temperatures, we’re missing the fact that ocean, arctic and antarctic temperature changes have already soared far past the point of no return.

Badmouthing climate realists: Meanwhile the magical thinking humanist salvationists like Rebecca Solnit are dissing scientists and citizens who say it’s time to get real and who want us to shift to preparing for inevitable collapse, as if those who care about the issue weren’t already divided and discouraged enough. Fortunately there are saner voices like Umair Haque to call them on it.

We’re already geoengineering: Hank Green explores whether instead of throwing more waste products, metals and artificial crap into the air to see if anything helps, we might see if putting perfectly natural stuff up there (like water vapour) might help at least a little. I’m not sure about this, but he makes a coherent argument.

Democracy is a great idea that doesn’t work in practice: Indrajit Samarajiva goes a step further than those who say capitalism is hopelessly flawed idealism, and asserts that the same is true of our naïve idealism about democracy. And that naïveté is preventing us from getting real about the impossibility of making real changes to our political and economic systems, and hence about the inevitability of collapse.

LIVING BETTER

from the memebrary

The fracturing of the petit bourgeoisie: Rhyd Wildermuth reviews Dan Evans’ book A Nation of Shopkeepers, arguing that economic events have caused the (increasingly struggling) western middle class to split into two factions, only one of which relates to the “social justice identitarianism politics” now espoused by the western Tweedledee parties like Democrats, Liberals, Labour and Greens. Thus enabling a shift towards the reactionary populist Tweedledum parties (Republicans, Conservatives), the only other game in town. Worth thinking about.

The appeal of cult thinking: Richard Heinberg strays from his usual collapsnik essays to describe his brush with cults, their allure, and the dangers they pose to all of us. Thanks to Bart Anderson for the link.

Why soy milk is better for you than both dairy and other ‘alt milks’: Michael Gregor looks at the nutrition data. Includes a transcript for those allergic to videos.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

record high temperature in Death Valley — photo op!

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (the first two articles in particular are essential reading; thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):

• A grim irony: the defense establishment that is driving us toward nuclear disaster doesn’t actually want war, just profitable (for them) war ‘preparations’
• The forgotten victims of America’s class/caste war — a moving personal report from Chris Hedges
• How an economy driven by profit and competition is killing us
• Neoliberalism is recolonizing much of the Global South (and a grim follow-up from Indi on its impact on children and the poor)
• The relentless, savage brutality of Israel’s US-supported Apartheid
• The CIA is engaged in Ukraine up to their necks
• US policy on Taiwan is based on a flawed 70-year-old doctrine
• How Ukraine became “the most avoidable war in history”
• Biden says he cares about asylum-seekers, but his actions say otherwise
• Biden promotes yet more warmongers
• The Bidens’ blatent corruption in Ukraine, and its frenzied cover-up
• NATO knew Ukraine would lose the war against Russia, right from the start
• Why the US/NATO opposition to Ukraine peace means a longer war, and the worst possible outcome for Ukrainians
• How ideological righteousness blinds us to the immense suffering of war
• John Mearsheimer, who predicted the Ukraine War in 2015, predicts its ghastly outcome (and a follow-up interview with John)
• Ukraine’s torture of ‘contrary’ journalist Gonzalo Lira
• The profit to be made from anger, resentment and cancel culture
• How Germany has criminalized anti-war views and protests (thanks to Cara MariAnna for the link)
• How absurdly low minimum wages in North America have made service workers into beggars
• Western involvement in, and silence over, the overthrow of Pakistan’s popular elected PM

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

• The dangers of RFK Jr, and of the anti-RFK Jr propaganda machine
• Contrasting press coverage of US military transit through Chinese waters vs Chinese military operations near US waters
• A senior CBC executive discovers how easy it is to be personally victimized by fake ads, and how hard it is to catch and stop the perpetrators
• As the Ukrainians lose their country, NATO propaganda shifts to China

CoVid-19 Refuses to be Cancelled: Short takes:

• Westerners oppose and refuse vaccination while blocking affordable vaccines from being sent to nations that want them
• Excess deaths data suggest that politicized opposition to masks, vaccines and other protective orders killed those who supported CoVid-19 conspiracy-theory touting political groups at much higher rates than the rest of the population.
• With the emergence of variant EG.5, cases, hospitalizations, and excess deaths are rising again; so far it doesn’t seem worse than other recent variants, but public health authorities are urging that older and immunocompromised people at least keep up with boosters and mask up in crowded indoor spaces. The high level of excess deaths in 2023 (far above death totals ascribed to CoVid-19) are particularly concerning, but the slowness in reporting and inconsistent reports on causes of deaths mean it will take a discouragingly long time to see whether CoVid-19 remains in the list of Top 5 killers this year.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

from the memebrary — photoshopped panel from an old Calvin and Hobbes strip; if you don’t get the reference, ask a Canadian

Ólafur Arnalds from Iceland’s volcanic wilderness: A recording of an outdoor concert in one of the most desolate and breathtaking places on the planet. Includes some of his finest compositions, and a travelogue of Iceland seen from the air.

Great contemporary women artists: A profile of 17 outstanding  modern women artists with examples of their work and links to more.

What is money?: A great Economics 101 primer on money, banking and the modern economy with no-bullshit economist Yanis Varoufakis.

The nonsense of Meyers-Briggs: The great physicist Sabine Hossenfelder continues to wander far outside her areas of expertise, but this time credibly deconstructs our obsession with meaningless ‘personality tests’. And in another article, she describes what’s wrong with modern-day theoretical physics, where she’s on solid ground. (Hint: It’s about money.)

South Africans fight Alberta forest fires: And they greet their hosts with heart-warming rousing music, to the astonishment of onlookers. Thanks to Peter Webb for the link.

The state of the media: If you want to see how low the mainstream media will sink to get readers, take a look (carefully: multiple trigger warnings, even just the headline) at this nauseating piece of ‘reporting’ by the Toronto Sun, owned by PostMedia, Canada’s largest newspaper publisher. Even the News of the World and the National Inquirer were better than this.

“Wichita Lineman” deconstructed: Composer Jimmy Webb and Rick Beato talk about how the song evolved, break it down compositionally, and credit its influences. A wonderful interview with a brilliant writer of words and music.

More pop music mashups: DJ Earworm has been cleverly mixing audio and video from each year’s US top 25 pop hits for more than a decade, and the resulting ‘mashups’ are usually better than any of their components. Some of the best are his mashups from 2022, 2021, and 2016.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

New Yorker cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz

From Julian Assange, on the function of Wikileaks, in 2010 (thanks to Caitlin Johnstone for the link, and the one that follows):

We can all write about our political issues, we can all push for particular things we believe in, we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say actually it’s all bankrupt. And the reason it’s all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt and particular lines of political thought, is because actually we don’t know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions — how they operate in practice, these titanic organizations, how they behave inside, not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentations — until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis? How can we set the direction to go until we know where we are? We don’t even have a map of where we are. So our first task is to build up a sort of intellectual heritage that describes where we are. And once we know where we are, then we have a hope of setting course for a different direction.

From Noam Chomsky, on the limits of acceptable opinion:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

From Indrajit Samarajiva, on Biden’s decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine:

Cluster bombs are the spray-and-pray of artillery, and prayer is not a winning military strategy… Cluster bombs salt the earth with high explosives, which make them a crazy thing for Ukraine on soil it claims to care about. They fail at a much higher rate than 1%, 14% according to the NYTimes. I’m citing from imperial propaganda rags because even they can’t hide the depravity. These are widely illegal weapons for a reason. They are also not nearly as effective as A) just having a steady supply of regular shells and B) more accurate guided and drone munitions. It’s really a unique combination of evil and incompetent. Forget wunderwaffen like F16s and HIMARS, how do you win an artillery war with no bullets?… The great White Empire is running out of bullets. They’re becoming the butt of a joke. And the punchline is the severed legs of children.

From Indi again, citing municipal engineer Charles Marohn, on the unsustainability of urban development:

Every road is actually a long-term liability, and cities don’t raise nearly enough money from taxes to pay for them. Instead they take money from new projects to pay for maintenance on the old, just kicking the can down the literal road. And we’re rapidly nearing the end of the road. If you thought the housing collapse was fun, wait for the roads collapse. In this case actual tunnels and bridges will fall down.

[Charles writes:] “We began to collect hard numbers from actual projects and compare those costs to the revenue generated by the underlying development pattern. This work continues, but in every instance we have studied so far, there is a tremendous gap in the long-term finances once the full life-cycle cost of the public obligations are factored in. Without a dramatic shift of household and business resources from things like food, energy, transportation, health care, education, etc… and into infrastructure maintenance, we do not have even a fraction of the money necessary to maintain our basic infrastructure systems.”

The very reasons [he cites] for the car-city’s collapse (“it’s too expensive!”) are the reasons the car-city can never change (“it’s too expensive!”) It’s the sunk-cost fallacy writ large. Americans have simply invested too much publicly in roads and too much privately in cars to ever turn around. The system will just keep going until the bridges fall down and the oil runs out. Chuck puts the problem simply when he says:

“The great American experiment in suburban development entices communities to take on long-term liabilities in exchange for near-term cash advantages. But as those liabilities cost the community more than the development creates in overall wealth, the approach ultimately results in insolvency. To forestall the day of reckoning, more growth is induced, setting up a Ponzi scheme scenario where revenue from new development is used to pay liabilities associated with old development  This is unsustainable, but that has not kept us from trying desperately to keep it all going.”

What I think he misses is what Aboriginal thinker Tyson Yunkaporta observes when he says, “it really is not possible to maintain massive nations and cities in any sustainable form.”

From Carl Jung, on “the task of social adaptation” (thanks to Paul Heft and The Negative Psychologist Nick Williams for the link):

This task [social adaptation] is so exacting, and its fulfilment so advantageous, that one forgets oneself in the process, losing sight of one’s instinctual nature and putting one’s own conception of oneself in place of one’s real being.

My essay last week attempted to draw together three sets of ideas (those of Aurélien, John Michael Greer and Tyson Yunkaporta) about how and why political collapse is now unfolding. The gist of these ideas is that politics has become rooted in simplistic ideologies (notably what might be called ‘conservative’ nostalgic reactionary traditionalism, versus ‘liberal’ eternal-progress-seeking humanism). But the suggestion here is that all ideologies, political theories, and —isms are doomed to fail in real, complex, large-scale societies, because human nature just doesn’t work that way. Our belief systems, behaviours, and ways of thinking and seeing the world, don’t fit into neat, simple ideological boxes.

To make matters worse, failures of education, lack of practical experience, poor critical thinking skills, ignorance of history, and lack of imagination, have resulted in the administrations charged with implementing these ideologies becoming increasingly incompetent. (Victoria Nuland probably qualifies as the poster child for ideology-obsessed incompetence, and Biden just gave her a big promotion.) From the top down, our political governance and administration is more and more infantile, amateurish, and incapable of doing the job, Aurélien argues, and he spent most of his life in the system. And they are more and more credulous. Every newscast contains new evidence to support this observation.

We are now coping with the consequence of imposed ideologies managed by incompetent people — namely utterly dysfunctional, horrifically mismanaged, dangerously-broken systems. Most of us sense that something is terribly wrong with our political systems, but the only options we’ve ever been presented with are all based on impracticable ideologies. We can hardly even imagine a political system that isn’t ideology-based. Even if the ideology is as intellectually and morally bankrupt as “Hope” or “MAGA”.

Those who’ve become disillusioned with all the —isms have of late started casting around for a new ideology, a new theory or model or new ‘story’. And each group of salvationists has a different ideology: social justice theory, longtermism, neosurvivalism, posthumanism etc. As the song goes, “Everybody wants to change the world.” And “if everyone would just…” the world would surely be saved.

Their intentions are good, of course, but’s it’s exactly these sorts of ideologies that got us into this mess. Instead of dreaming up and designing new ideologies and models to impose on the population, we are going to have to ‘grow up’ and realize that we will only manage our way through deepening civilizational collapse (economic, political, ecological and social collapse) if we abandon ideologies entirely and instead support and promote acceptance, adaptation, competence, experience, pragmatism, and collaboration, focused on matters over which we have enough substantiated knowledge not to be dangerous, and on matters which directly affect us and which our actions can meaningfully affect.

That is only likely to happen sporadically, among those who appreciate the failings of ideology (political, economic, social, religious, scientific and philosophical) to serve us well. It is also likely to happen only in small groups and at the local level. And it will never come about as a result of some large-scale concerted effort. That’s just magical thinking.

So it’s a hard sell. We’re mostly sold on the ideologies and —isms we’ve been conditioned all our lives to believe are fair, moral, and/or the best way to live. We don’t want to give them up, and are easily suckered by political opportunists who will reduce everything to a dichotomy — “us” versus “them”. But it’s getting harder and harder to stomach the endless attempts to sell us warmed-over, failed ideologies. The very thought of voting for a Biden, or a Trudeau, or a Starmer, even at the risk of the latest reactionary sociopath squeaking by them into power, is enough to make anyone who ever called themselves a progressive, absolutely gag.

But here we are. I have often trotted out my Being Adaptable reminder list for coping with collapse (reproduced above), which I think is quite ideologically neutral, unless you believe collapse is a conspiracy theory, in which case I really can’t offer you anything. But beyond that I have been at a loss to suggest what could or should be ‘done’ to deal with any aspect of the collapse ‘polycrisis’, and the same applies to political collapse.

Fortunately, Aurélien has been asking the same questions, and today he asked So Where Do We Go From Here? The article starts off rather slowly, at least if you’re a regular reader of his blog or this one, reiterating the complexity and interrelatedness of the polycrisis. But then he gets to the heart of the matter.

I won’t try to summarize the whole, long article, but here are what I thought were the highlights and major insights from his thinking [my blather in square brackets, and emphasis mine]:

Action to contain, let alone resolve, even one of the [polycrisis] problems, would require high-level national and international coordination, massive technical and managerial expertise, and the allocation of immense financial and human resources over years or decades, according to a robust long-term plan. Yes, that was my reaction too: there’s no point wishing for things you can’t have. [Even, or especially, if some political group promises them.] If you actually want to see how the collective West handled a really grave crisis it’s enough to look at the Covid shambles…

Western states today are not only incapable of preventing [major natural or human-caused] disasters in the first place, they are incapable of dealing with the symptoms and the consequences. Theoretically, even now, the worst effects of climate change could be avoided with massive coordinated action, the energy crisis could be managed with careful rationing, changes in patterns of life and massive investment in alternative technologies … which everyone knows is not going to happen. That’s not pessimism, any more than it’s pessimism to say that an old tractor can no longer pull a heavy load up a hill, and there are no spare parts…

[So] the problems are of an unprecedented gravity, the individuals who have to deal with them probably represent the weakest political class in modern history, and the surrounding circumstances greatly limit their ability to act, even if they knew what to do. So the interaction of the situation and the response to it is unlikely to produce much that is positive.

So far, so grim. But if we are to think our way through the problems of the future (and yes, I am getting to that) then we have to have a clear idea of what they are, and of what can effectively be done to confront them. To begin with, it is wise to assume that the solutions cannot come from enfeebled governments and adolescent political classes. This is not to write off all possibility of governments doing necessary and useful things, but it is a question of scale and capability: things have effectively gone too far already. Nor can we have any confidence that the private sector will step in: in many cases they will simply make things worse.

The corollary of governments no longer being able to deal with these problems, therefore, is that it is pointless to stage performative acts to demonstrate (or demand) that something is, or should be, “done.” The Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP) will probably continue, since these things acquire an inertia of their own, but ultimately, the Conference brings together actors who, with the best will in the world, no longer have the political or technical capability to influence the progress of climate change very much. And by extension, gimmicks aimed at “raising consciousness” or “putting pressure on governments” are equally pointless and counter-productive. There is no point in wasting time and energy lobbying governments to do things that they cannot do, or to engage with problems they cannot solve…

The final point I want to make about the future context, is how the inevitable decline will come. Here, the problem is that “decline” is not one thing but a whole series of things, going at different rates. As a general rule, elements of our society will disappear like Hemingway’s character who went bankrupt — gradually and then suddenly. Which is to say that the capabilities that support our society will not necessarily decline gradually and in a civilised fashion. The de-industrialist dream, I think, is of slow and steady decline: each year a little less energy, a progressive adaptation to climate changes, and so forth. But we know quite a lot about the decay of complex systems, and it resembles what happens when a bridge finally buckles and falls under gradually increasing stress. And there never has been a society remotely as formally and technically complex as ours, so we have very little idea where the inflexion point comes, and the system suddenly can no longer support itself…

So rather than gentle managed decline, what we can expect is a series of sudden, unpredictable lurches downwards, to a new temporary equilibrium, but without any consistent logic. Likewise, the terrifying diseases of my childhood, like Smallpox, have been banished by immunisation. But if we can’t get the vaccines for some reason, and the percentage of the vaccinated starts to fall much below 90-95%, we would be in trouble very quickly.

How are we going to deal with all that? The first thing to say is that, if we are facing a series of unprecedented changes and crises at a time when capability to deal with them has never been lower, then much will depend upon individuals and groups who can actually do something. Crises tend to have a Darwinian effect on groups and structures: those best fitted to handle the crisis find themselves thrust into in positions of responsibility. This happens with armies and governments at the start of wars, for example, when competences required in peacetime are no longer relevant.

It’s perhaps hard to realise just how far government has become performative and virtual in recent decades. It’s not simply that governments have lost capability, it’s also that they don’t care. For modern political parties, the imperative is that of the Party in 1984: to be in power. Actually doing things is dangerous: you might fail, and even if you succeed you could annoy potentially powerful groups. Talking about doing things, on the other hand, is fine. Blaming others (especially outside forces), condemning your opponent’s or your rival’s plans on ideological or financial grounds, successfully burying a problem or even denying that it exists, are the standard tools of government today…

So I think we are at a point where action and influence (if not necessarily formal power) will increasingly devolve upon those who can Do Things, as it always does in difficult times, especially at a local level. Otherwise, we will perish…

It seems clear that if we abandon performative gestures and impossible demands, if we recognise that our enfeebled states are likely to be overwhelmed by the challenges of the near future, then we are of necessity thrown back on the collective resources of ordinary people. In times of stress, these have often turned out to be considerable, and our energies might be better devoted to doing things ourselves and with others, than striking poses to demand action from institutions that increasingly lack the capability to act. You can certainly demand your “rights” but, as Spinoza was probably not the first to notice, rights do not enforce themselves in the absence of power…

Perhaps it would be useful if we were to consider how we spend our lives, and try to do what we are doing to the best of our ability… Perhaps we will be called on to make a personal contribution when the time comes, or perhaps we just cultivate our personal gardens as best we can, which is not a small thing in itself. But given the series of crises that are drumming their fingers in anticipation of an interesting future, we will not be helped by performative actions or performative words, but only real actions, no matter how humble, of ordinary people.

Yeah. What he said.