I have been feeling much the same, and suspect that's true for many others. Have you read the book by Dougald Hine called At Work in The Ruins? He talks a lot about how we make sense of what we feel called to do in the midst of collapse. The only antidote I've found to despair is action, and occasionally drawing back to recoup. The earth never quits and neither can we. Thanks for keeping at it.
"It is an unfortunate fact of human existence it takes crisis to get us off our collective asses and demand change. So I believe those numbers are coming. It is up to those of us who persist in efforts for a better world to lay the foundations, build the social and economic infrastructures, and point the way to that world we believe is possible."
As you are facing your own "wall," and I mine, we're collectively approaching a collective wall -- one which I believe is calling upon us to ask very fundamental, philosophical questions about political power in relation to notions like 'leadership' etc. I believe we're hitting a collective wall at the moment, and the result is a profound loss of faith in "leadership" as MOST people understand what this word means.
I proposed a radical re-framing of what leadership is, or aught to be in a comment following this essay (this morning).: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-07/the-mask-of-leadership/ And I feel deeply called to research and write about this topic and theme, to further develop and mature my insight on this deeply important question.
I intuit that in hitting our collective wall around what leadership means, or what it ought to mean, we're heading toward a paradigm shift in our conception of political and social life. The old, familiar paradigm is in ruins, and our social and ecological world along with it. And now we're collectively approaching this wall in such a way that what is called "the Overton Window" is going to be opened up in ways we cannot as yet fully imagine. Or at least I hope so! But here's the deal. We have to stop centering our political thinking on "demanding" change. Or mostly we do. The shift has got to be about directly embodying transformation, not demanding it. That's not rooted in the attitude of demand, but in the knowing of our power and our directly embodying our power.
But I'm talking about a very, very profoundly different kind of power than how that word gets used in most political discourse. You see, most everyone feels powerless! But it isn't true. It's an illusion, this powerlessness. For we are the majority. Our power is immense. But we come into the fullness of our power by giving power, by empowering others -- not seeking power over others. And that way of embodying power is our true and great power. And when we collectively hit this wall we're fast approaching, we'll wake from the old dream of power together. And then we will become truly powerful, not as power-over, but as power-with.
But the old institutions of power-over will then crumble -- everywhere. For it will not have any power over us at this time. We will have lost our faith in it. And we will have come to a path in which we will regain our life's breath -- our pneuma, our spirit. Think of it as a conspiracy -- a breathing together (literal etymology of conspiracy).
As usual, a thoughtful and challenging response, James. The complex question about building the new in the shell of the old is central here. I fully agree we need to embody the change we seek, and build it where we are. Your words on how the power is really within us are reminiscent of what John Trudell told us. The indigenous approach to leadership, empowering the tribe, also resonates with yours. I’ve been following your thinking on the hyper-local approach with interest, and understand that we really need to create that kind of mycelial network. An effort going on in my neck of the woods seeks just that, the Kitsap Resiliency Project. https://www.reseco.org/the-kitsap-resiliency-project.html. I also understand we are stuck with institutions that are taking us down and we somehow need to directly address them and their power. Hence, the demand. I would synthesize this dialectic by saying we need to build communities of empowerment through which we can address these huge institutions and move them away from their catastrophic paths. Indeed, that is probably the only way we can really do it.
I like the idea of synthesizing the dialectic which has the two notional poles of small/local and big/global. It's true that we need to address the problem of vast, powerful institutions which are destructive. And I would say we cannot do that without re-inhabiting the local and small -- even and especially at the neighborhood scale. That's the principal scale at which we can shift from a centripetal (concentrative) power and 'leadership' dynamic to a centrifugal (distributive) power dynamic -- mainly because it involves face-to-face human relationships rooted in mutuality and care for one another. (I call this dynamic "the communal sphere" -- a space of social life not contained within the private / public dyadic model of social and political imagination.) When we can achieve successes of this kind in our neighborhoods we can "scale it up" to whole villages, towns, cities, suburbs.... But I don't think we can do this without the neighborhood scale of organizing leading the way.
And a crucial key to what I'm saying is the understanding of how 'leadership' tends to fall into two very different types: centripetal power-accumulation and centrifugal power distribution. The world is in the mess it's in now mainly because power has been accumulated and concentrated into the hands of a very few within a hierarchy of access and deployment of power. And by 'power' I mean both decision-making power and money power (which ultimately amounts to decision-making power, really).
People have to actually experience centrifugal empowerment of communities for the idea to come alive for them. Where better to provide such experiential opportunities than the immediate local scale of the neighborhood? But here I'm speaking about revolutionary praxis -- a rare thing to talk about. I may as well be speaking Swahili, I guess.
Well said Patrick, as usual. I have cross posted this. I can certainly relate both on the personal level where I've run into some recent challenges myself that seem to be feeding writer's block but also on the more philosophical level (eg. what's the point, given the level of institutional decay and elite manipulation?). But onwards we must go!
Most of us are not responsible (at least substantially) for the global ecological crises. We know who IS responsible. And we know that our institutions and citizen groups are outnumbered and shouted down. But have we really fully understood the nature of these crises, to the extent that we have adopted critical thinking, constructive skepticism and impartial investigation that are directed at the true perpetrators? Have we had the courage to put our own preferences, friends, colleagues and
affiliations to the test? Or are we just following these with blind faith because we have not been
sufficiently committed to look deeper into the issues themselves? How many people take seriously
the near-disappearance of insect pollinators? The overfished oceans? The melting permafrost?
The Australian bats dropping dead from excessive heat? How many people really care about or pay attention to the oppression and murder of tribal societies? The control of corporations over land and resources? How many people care about anything except avoiding the accusation of racism?
How many care about "illiberal democracy" that bestows privileges on those calling themselves
"oppressed" or "victimized"? How many people understand that the focus on individual complaints is an excuse to avoid dealing with existential crises like biodiversity loss and climate change? How many people have the courage to challenge and rebut the abnormal focus on self at at the expense of the rest of society and the planet? Answer: almost none. In the end the apathy and ideological delusions of the "woke" and the left can be seen as means of shunning responsibility at best,
and a means of indicting dissenters for being blind to "racism". Until we place the blame properly and put the planet's condition first, we are just treading water. The ecological paradigm is the only foundation for social and political change. Until its adoption we will continue to be distracted by
I liked this comment for the most part, but I'm tired of folks bashing the supposed "woke," which is mostly (not always) just a parroting of right wing propaganda. It's now a very fraught word, this "woke," and few have explored it in any depth of understanding which grounds it in history.
Over the decades I've developed dozens if not hundreds of plans for infrastructure, sociological, and political system overhauls. I doubt I could find a majority in any given room to concur with any of them, and I can think of no person, billionaire, president, or the populace in general who would be capable of implementing them even if a public majority did concur.
We would need someone beyond Bernie, with a charisma to have the support of more than a majority, capable of leading and directing the masses into direct revolutionary action to manipulate or usurp all politicians and business leaders, and all wealth - somehow without getting arrested of assassinated immediately.
Even for the smallest of changes, for instance putting a moratorium on building construction within a kilometer of shores, so that beaches instead of break-walls can exist 30 years from now - would require that level of revolution. So would things like directly electing a federal cabinet of educated wise non-profit experts who in turn ran our infrastructure institutions as non-profit public services instead of corporate baronies.
Vast vast changes are required, and yet I don't see any possible route, even if the majority of the world wants a revolution, of even establishing a fair educational media network, determining the best sort of energy grid, or restoring coral reefs. Even if someone claiming to be the return of buddha and jesus, with a plan for all the changes we require, whom the majority of the planet sincerely believed was some supernatural savior - would still come short of the capability required to rewrite this planet to the degree it needs to be rewritten.
I think all we can hope for is that the surviving stragglers of human kind get some chance to evolve and start over with a considerably different eco-system some 15,000 to 50 million years into the future. It's more or less over for us as we know life on earth within the next 40-300 years unless some miracle on the par with creation myths comes about. We are our own worst enemy.
Maybe some technology will come about which allows us all to link minds with some skyscraper AI with an IQ of 20,000 to whom we all willingly relinquish control of the planet to, executing any dissidents against the master plan for the ultimate compromising benefit of the future of mankind, to which we all offer our lives. In other words, not bloody likely.
Would you eat the last potato, or sacrifice the last day of your life to plant it? That's what this world will look like if things all fall apart, and I have no reason to believe they won't. Even the grim future of Cloud Atlas appears considerably over-optimistic in my opinion.
I'm sure there are a million things we could and should be doing to lessen upcoming calamity, but I still can't see how it can be anything other than apocalyptic, and I've been thinking on this matter for decades, with decades of school and research, a creative high genius IQ, and supernatural channelling (till a few years ago anyhow) to rival the famous yogi masters.
It is actually possible for us all to enter a higher connected state of consciousness, and that might provide a better answer and living conditions than we have at the moment even, but I wouldn't count on it happening. Possibly a billion planetary civilizations are popping in and out of existence daily. It's not like any of us were going to personally exist as humans forever anyhow.
A long and thoughtful reply. This post has attracted a number of them, I think because it strikes a nerve in what many of us are thinking. Can we avoid some form of apocalypse or another? Climate collapse? Nuclear war? AI replacement? Obviously, we can’t know. All reflect a madness for power, and the unequal advantages it offers, that goes back to the Bronze Age. We are in the culminating stages. The issue is about or relation to power itself, and to each other. That is why it becomes a spiritual issue in the sense I write about here. A certain level of collapse seems likely, perhaps even necessary. The dinosaurs dying so the mammals can crawl out of their burrows and begin evolution again. Question is how much will survive the asteroid. Meanwhile, keep planting the seeds for a future we can imagine, take that leap of faith, and begin making changes where we can. I think the approach of trying to line up the whole world is impossible, and we need to envision creating centers of survival and working out from there, creating mycelial tissue between us. I wonder if the hyper-local approach espoused by some, such as James on this string, is the way to go. It’s certainly part of the picture.
I have to disagree, at the risk of being called insensitive or blind. I do not deny discrimination or the economic disadvantages of blacks. But I do deny the existence of subconscious racism; to claim this is to claim that you understand how everyone thinks, as opposed to how everyone acts. I do think that the competitive nature of capitalist society and the blind accumulation of wealth (which equates with power) necessarily required obliterating the less powerful in society, i.e. other races.
I am not an expert on criminal reform but I think it is imperative to note accurately how crime is
reported, how much and where. The denial of black crime against blacks is well known. And the denial of crime's connections to poverty and powerlessness is ongoing. If in fact more blacks are imprisoned for crime than whites. one has to wonder, in fairness, whether in fact there is more crime committed by blacks (especially in black neighborhoods) than whites. Drug use is widespread in black communities, for example, as well as broken families and poverty that provokes theft. As for industrial pollution, the unfortunate linkage of polluting industry in minority and poor neighborhoods is a direct result of the low property values in these neighborhoods. A corporation or developer finds it much cheaper to buy land in minority areas, as opposed to
Santa Barbara or Westchester. As for minorities being greater supporters of climate action, I have not seen anything to support this view. On the contrary, in my long environmental career, I witnessed the constant berating of whites b blacks for ignoring the "real' issues of poverty and discrimination. The lack of black membership in environmental organizations has been deplored for decades, without mentioning the fact that blacks didn't join these mainly white national groups because they didnt want to work within or along side these groups and preferred to definite the word "environment" not as related to the natural world but to their quite urban problems such as
waste disposal, transportation, health, etc. This was a deliberate choice, ignoring the fact that environmentalism was in fact the most powerful social justice movement in our history, something that blacks are unwilling to concede. Had they joined these groups and movements, and worke alongside them since Earth Day 1970 we might have seen a much stronger and widespread environmental awareness and involvement that in turn would have strengthened both the environmental movement as well as social justice groups. I dont see any connection between racial injustice and planetary health. We need to work on both in appropriate ways, especially to overcome the co-optation of climate change groups by those who see it as "climate justice",i.e. a social movement as opposed to an ecological one. We have a long way to go.
Let me put this another way, as it would be a huge win for everyone including you (peace of mind acceptance and some soul connection to human kind) to reevaluate your position.
I will believe there is no such thing as subconscious racism the day you can honestly tell me that if the good fairy turned you black overnight, that you wouldn't be giving the subject any thought after the novelty wore off in a week or two. Rather I imagine you would be freaking out, wondering how you might possibly live out the rest of your life. Your knitting circle or book club friends might not drop you like a hot potato, but you might become their token black friend, proving they aren't racist. I would guess that you, as most older white people, and myself when they aren't a regular thing, have a brief pandora's box instant of evaluating threat upon coming face to face with a black person by surprise, before coming to your senses and realizing they're just another person. I'm not blaming anyone for this; It would be hard not to after decades of television with blacks largely cast as security officers and such.
Even if we implemented some reverse discrimination, I think you'd still find it more comfortable to remain white. You're not worried about the police shooting you if you take a midnight stroll to smell flowers by moonlight.
Wow. Your line of thinking is exactly why people claim subconscious racism exists. It makes perfect unbiased logical sense to you, but you do not experience the real context.
Black people are still under a lot of baggage from the slavery days. I've lived in a couple black communities and its dang oppressing even without crime. The school children are far more diligent about homework because the culture is still far more 'do as you are told by authority', and yet they do not progress because the parents are unaware that success comes down to children being constantly educated by their parents above and beyond what the school teach. Criminals are more likely to prey upon their kindred because it's safer. You wouldn't consider crime because you were raised with the prospect that this was the land of opportunity. Black people do not see theirselves as having that same opportunity, and thus not believing in themselves, don't. I've known many successful black entrepreneurs as well, but they all come from predominantly black nations where any industry leaders are black as well, and find hanging out with local black culture to be too depressing.
Technically equality of opportunity exists on the books, but culturally it does not. Really it doesn't exist technically either, in the same fashion that I had far more creative genius going than Bill Gates (I literally invented 1000's of things), but not his cultural connections to launch a commercial enterprise.
As to environmentalism, they already had a war to fight much closer to home, to be seen as equals. Your pretending to see them as equals and blaming them for their own failure is evidence that you still really don't. Recognizing they do live at a disadvantage and helping to overcome that is what it would take to embrace them equally as people.
In LA or Oakland I never gave it an instant's thought, but here in the PNW for a brief instant I find myself thinking 'ooh, that person's black'. What an awful thing to live with. At some subconscious level it's still stigmatic. We saw Michael Jackson turn white. You never see anyone turning black.
I used to be of the 70s 'see no color' ideology, but I have to agree now that it hasn't worked, and probably ever won't until the day we forget it ever meant something different to be black.
Not acknowledging that they have it rough is not much different from treating them as untouchables, like don't think about them and maybe they will disappear somewhere. People don't like to see themselves as contributing to a collective plight, and I guess its easiest to just pretend the plight doesn't exist. Even if we are all on our best behavior, as I'm sure you're coming from, and thus resenting any accusations of guilt, we are all still contributing members of that collective subconscious plight.
It sucks for everyone, and there is no precedent for eradicating such a thing, but to pretend it doesn't exist and has no consequence certainly isn't helping.
Maybe if everyone could say 'Hey, I'm sorry things suck for you' that could cure it, but you are righteously no where near that. Stop resenting them for continuing to see a valid problem here, and see the situation with your heart instead. You are seeing 'them', not your fellow people, and I believe that is where the core of the subconscious collective problem lies. It's a sublime complexity as you still need to acknowledge 'them', but them as part of us, not just them as them.
The wokeness of the left exceeds any history of race and racism. Once upon a time we had serious
principled movements for civil rights, anti discrimination laws and other beliefs and laws. Wokeness arose not from these but from vengeance, the notion of racial privilege for the "oppressed" and the irrational charge that all whites and their society were innately racist. This is of course reverse racism. The worst examples are the doctrines being forced on professors and students in universities, which emulate the Soviet Union's social engineering projects and practices under Stalin. In effect wokeness is neo Stalinism written by anti democracy anti pluralist power hungry indidivuals pretending to be defending human rights. It is as dangerous as the right wing, the neo cons and the evangelicals. More dangerous in fact because naive liberals will believe anything that
convinces them that they are the cause of all the problems.
One would be hard pressed to say pervasive racism is not present throughout US institutions, including the justice system, education, and corporations. Statistics prove this, whether you’re looking at disproportionate imprisonment and police killings, educational budgets and attainment or hiring practices. The legacy of discrimination has left Black people with low average net worth, while this history of red lining in real estate crammed them into areas that did not let them accumulate value in their homes to the extent of white people, while their neighborhoods were often bulldozed for freeways. The history is real, and the legacies remain. People are still fighting to overcome them, in recent years notably through criminal justice reform. It is also real that our history has left us with a racism and bigotry that can often be subconscious but is nonetheless present. I think it is a mistake to stack dealing with racism against dealing with ecological degradation. Especially as people of color typically are disproportionately victims of industrial pollution, as the environmental justice movement focuses. They are also greater supporters of climate action, polling shows. I don’t think we will learn to treat the natural world with respect if we don’t learn how to treat each other the same way.
Daily Introspection saves me from total blindness. On the battlefield of life it is crucial to know whether my good or evil tendencies have prevailed so that I can self correct before ignorance can overcome me.
Please do!
It will be up and running in a few minutes. Thanks!
I have been feeling much the same, and suspect that's true for many others. Have you read the book by Dougald Hine called At Work in The Ruins? He talks a lot about how we make sense of what we feel called to do in the midst of collapse. The only antidote I've found to despair is action, and occasionally drawing back to recoup. The earth never quits and neither can we. Thanks for keeping at it.
I will check the book out. Agree the antidote for despair is action.
"It is an unfortunate fact of human existence it takes crisis to get us off our collective asses and demand change. So I believe those numbers are coming. It is up to those of us who persist in efforts for a better world to lay the foundations, build the social and economic infrastructures, and point the way to that world we believe is possible."
As you are facing your own "wall," and I mine, we're collectively approaching a collective wall -- one which I believe is calling upon us to ask very fundamental, philosophical questions about political power in relation to notions like 'leadership' etc. I believe we're hitting a collective wall at the moment, and the result is a profound loss of faith in "leadership" as MOST people understand what this word means.
I proposed a radical re-framing of what leadership is, or aught to be in a comment following this essay (this morning).: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-07/the-mask-of-leadership/ And I feel deeply called to research and write about this topic and theme, to further develop and mature my insight on this deeply important question.
I intuit that in hitting our collective wall around what leadership means, or what it ought to mean, we're heading toward a paradigm shift in our conception of political and social life. The old, familiar paradigm is in ruins, and our social and ecological world along with it. And now we're collectively approaching this wall in such a way that what is called "the Overton Window" is going to be opened up in ways we cannot as yet fully imagine. Or at least I hope so! But here's the deal. We have to stop centering our political thinking on "demanding" change. Or mostly we do. The shift has got to be about directly embodying transformation, not demanding it. That's not rooted in the attitude of demand, but in the knowing of our power and our directly embodying our power.
But I'm talking about a very, very profoundly different kind of power than how that word gets used in most political discourse. You see, most everyone feels powerless! But it isn't true. It's an illusion, this powerlessness. For we are the majority. Our power is immense. But we come into the fullness of our power by giving power, by empowering others -- not seeking power over others. And that way of embodying power is our true and great power. And when we collectively hit this wall we're fast approaching, we'll wake from the old dream of power together. And then we will become truly powerful, not as power-over, but as power-with.
But the old institutions of power-over will then crumble -- everywhere. For it will not have any power over us at this time. We will have lost our faith in it. And we will have come to a path in which we will regain our life's breath -- our pneuma, our spirit. Think of it as a conspiracy -- a breathing together (literal etymology of conspiracy).
Love is the revolution. The revolution is love.
As usual, a thoughtful and challenging response, James. The complex question about building the new in the shell of the old is central here. I fully agree we need to embody the change we seek, and build it where we are. Your words on how the power is really within us are reminiscent of what John Trudell told us. The indigenous approach to leadership, empowering the tribe, also resonates with yours. I’ve been following your thinking on the hyper-local approach with interest, and understand that we really need to create that kind of mycelial network. An effort going on in my neck of the woods seeks just that, the Kitsap Resiliency Project. https://www.reseco.org/the-kitsap-resiliency-project.html. I also understand we are stuck with institutions that are taking us down and we somehow need to directly address them and their power. Hence, the demand. I would synthesize this dialectic by saying we need to build communities of empowerment through which we can address these huge institutions and move them away from their catastrophic paths. Indeed, that is probably the only way we can really do it.
I like the idea of synthesizing the dialectic which has the two notional poles of small/local and big/global. It's true that we need to address the problem of vast, powerful institutions which are destructive. And I would say we cannot do that without re-inhabiting the local and small -- even and especially at the neighborhood scale. That's the principal scale at which we can shift from a centripetal (concentrative) power and 'leadership' dynamic to a centrifugal (distributive) power dynamic -- mainly because it involves face-to-face human relationships rooted in mutuality and care for one another. (I call this dynamic "the communal sphere" -- a space of social life not contained within the private / public dyadic model of social and political imagination.) When we can achieve successes of this kind in our neighborhoods we can "scale it up" to whole villages, towns, cities, suburbs.... But I don't think we can do this without the neighborhood scale of organizing leading the way.
And a crucial key to what I'm saying is the understanding of how 'leadership' tends to fall into two very different types: centripetal power-accumulation and centrifugal power distribution. The world is in the mess it's in now mainly because power has been accumulated and concentrated into the hands of a very few within a hierarchy of access and deployment of power. And by 'power' I mean both decision-making power and money power (which ultimately amounts to decision-making power, really).
People have to actually experience centrifugal empowerment of communities for the idea to come alive for them. Where better to provide such experiential opportunities than the immediate local scale of the neighborhood? But here I'm speaking about revolutionary praxis -- a rare thing to talk about. I may as well be speaking Swahili, I guess.
Well said Patrick, as usual. I have cross posted this. I can certainly relate both on the personal level where I've run into some recent challenges myself that seem to be feeding writer's block but also on the more philosophical level (eg. what's the point, given the level of institutional decay and elite manipulation?). But onwards we must go!
Most of us are not responsible (at least substantially) for the global ecological crises. We know who IS responsible. And we know that our institutions and citizen groups are outnumbered and shouted down. But have we really fully understood the nature of these crises, to the extent that we have adopted critical thinking, constructive skepticism and impartial investigation that are directed at the true perpetrators? Have we had the courage to put our own preferences, friends, colleagues and
affiliations to the test? Or are we just following these with blind faith because we have not been
sufficiently committed to look deeper into the issues themselves? How many people take seriously
the near-disappearance of insect pollinators? The overfished oceans? The melting permafrost?
The Australian bats dropping dead from excessive heat? How many people really care about or pay attention to the oppression and murder of tribal societies? The control of corporations over land and resources? How many people care about anything except avoiding the accusation of racism?
How many care about "illiberal democracy" that bestows privileges on those calling themselves
"oppressed" or "victimized"? How many people understand that the focus on individual complaints is an excuse to avoid dealing with existential crises like biodiversity loss and climate change? How many people have the courage to challenge and rebut the abnormal focus on self at at the expense of the rest of society and the planet? Answer: almost none. In the end the apathy and ideological delusions of the "woke" and the left can be seen as means of shunning responsibility at best,
and a means of indicting dissenters for being blind to "racism". Until we place the blame properly and put the planet's condition first, we are just treading water. The ecological paradigm is the only foundation for social and political change. Until its adoption we will continue to be distracted by
what is trivial.
I liked this comment for the most part, but I'm tired of folks bashing the supposed "woke," which is mostly (not always) just a parroting of right wing propaganda. It's now a very fraught word, this "woke," and few have explored it in any depth of understanding which grounds it in history.
Over the decades I've developed dozens if not hundreds of plans for infrastructure, sociological, and political system overhauls. I doubt I could find a majority in any given room to concur with any of them, and I can think of no person, billionaire, president, or the populace in general who would be capable of implementing them even if a public majority did concur.
We would need someone beyond Bernie, with a charisma to have the support of more than a majority, capable of leading and directing the masses into direct revolutionary action to manipulate or usurp all politicians and business leaders, and all wealth - somehow without getting arrested of assassinated immediately.
Even for the smallest of changes, for instance putting a moratorium on building construction within a kilometer of shores, so that beaches instead of break-walls can exist 30 years from now - would require that level of revolution. So would things like directly electing a federal cabinet of educated wise non-profit experts who in turn ran our infrastructure institutions as non-profit public services instead of corporate baronies.
Vast vast changes are required, and yet I don't see any possible route, even if the majority of the world wants a revolution, of even establishing a fair educational media network, determining the best sort of energy grid, or restoring coral reefs. Even if someone claiming to be the return of buddha and jesus, with a plan for all the changes we require, whom the majority of the planet sincerely believed was some supernatural savior - would still come short of the capability required to rewrite this planet to the degree it needs to be rewritten.
I think all we can hope for is that the surviving stragglers of human kind get some chance to evolve and start over with a considerably different eco-system some 15,000 to 50 million years into the future. It's more or less over for us as we know life on earth within the next 40-300 years unless some miracle on the par with creation myths comes about. We are our own worst enemy.
Maybe some technology will come about which allows us all to link minds with some skyscraper AI with an IQ of 20,000 to whom we all willingly relinquish control of the planet to, executing any dissidents against the master plan for the ultimate compromising benefit of the future of mankind, to which we all offer our lives. In other words, not bloody likely.
Would you eat the last potato, or sacrifice the last day of your life to plant it? That's what this world will look like if things all fall apart, and I have no reason to believe they won't. Even the grim future of Cloud Atlas appears considerably over-optimistic in my opinion.
I'm sure there are a million things we could and should be doing to lessen upcoming calamity, but I still can't see how it can be anything other than apocalyptic, and I've been thinking on this matter for decades, with decades of school and research, a creative high genius IQ, and supernatural channelling (till a few years ago anyhow) to rival the famous yogi masters.
It is actually possible for us all to enter a higher connected state of consciousness, and that might provide a better answer and living conditions than we have at the moment even, but I wouldn't count on it happening. Possibly a billion planetary civilizations are popping in and out of existence daily. It's not like any of us were going to personally exist as humans forever anyhow.
A long and thoughtful reply. This post has attracted a number of them, I think because it strikes a nerve in what many of us are thinking. Can we avoid some form of apocalypse or another? Climate collapse? Nuclear war? AI replacement? Obviously, we can’t know. All reflect a madness for power, and the unequal advantages it offers, that goes back to the Bronze Age. We are in the culminating stages. The issue is about or relation to power itself, and to each other. That is why it becomes a spiritual issue in the sense I write about here. A certain level of collapse seems likely, perhaps even necessary. The dinosaurs dying so the mammals can crawl out of their burrows and begin evolution again. Question is how much will survive the asteroid. Meanwhile, keep planting the seeds for a future we can imagine, take that leap of faith, and begin making changes where we can. I think the approach of trying to line up the whole world is impossible, and we need to envision creating centers of survival and working out from there, creating mycelial tissue between us. I wonder if the hyper-local approach espoused by some, such as James on this string, is the way to go. It’s certainly part of the picture.
I have to disagree, at the risk of being called insensitive or blind. I do not deny discrimination or the economic disadvantages of blacks. But I do deny the existence of subconscious racism; to claim this is to claim that you understand how everyone thinks, as opposed to how everyone acts. I do think that the competitive nature of capitalist society and the blind accumulation of wealth (which equates with power) necessarily required obliterating the less powerful in society, i.e. other races.
I am not an expert on criminal reform but I think it is imperative to note accurately how crime is
reported, how much and where. The denial of black crime against blacks is well known. And the denial of crime's connections to poverty and powerlessness is ongoing. If in fact more blacks are imprisoned for crime than whites. one has to wonder, in fairness, whether in fact there is more crime committed by blacks (especially in black neighborhoods) than whites. Drug use is widespread in black communities, for example, as well as broken families and poverty that provokes theft. As for industrial pollution, the unfortunate linkage of polluting industry in minority and poor neighborhoods is a direct result of the low property values in these neighborhoods. A corporation or developer finds it much cheaper to buy land in minority areas, as opposed to
Santa Barbara or Westchester. As for minorities being greater supporters of climate action, I have not seen anything to support this view. On the contrary, in my long environmental career, I witnessed the constant berating of whites b blacks for ignoring the "real' issues of poverty and discrimination. The lack of black membership in environmental organizations has been deplored for decades, without mentioning the fact that blacks didn't join these mainly white national groups because they didnt want to work within or along side these groups and preferred to definite the word "environment" not as related to the natural world but to their quite urban problems such as
waste disposal, transportation, health, etc. This was a deliberate choice, ignoring the fact that environmentalism was in fact the most powerful social justice movement in our history, something that blacks are unwilling to concede. Had they joined these groups and movements, and worke alongside them since Earth Day 1970 we might have seen a much stronger and widespread environmental awareness and involvement that in turn would have strengthened both the environmental movement as well as social justice groups. I dont see any connection between racial injustice and planetary health. We need to work on both in appropriate ways, especially to overcome the co-optation of climate change groups by those who see it as "climate justice",i.e. a social movement as opposed to an ecological one. We have a long way to go.
Let me put this another way, as it would be a huge win for everyone including you (peace of mind acceptance and some soul connection to human kind) to reevaluate your position.
I will believe there is no such thing as subconscious racism the day you can honestly tell me that if the good fairy turned you black overnight, that you wouldn't be giving the subject any thought after the novelty wore off in a week or two. Rather I imagine you would be freaking out, wondering how you might possibly live out the rest of your life. Your knitting circle or book club friends might not drop you like a hot potato, but you might become their token black friend, proving they aren't racist. I would guess that you, as most older white people, and myself when they aren't a regular thing, have a brief pandora's box instant of evaluating threat upon coming face to face with a black person by surprise, before coming to your senses and realizing they're just another person. I'm not blaming anyone for this; It would be hard not to after decades of television with blacks largely cast as security officers and such.
Even if we implemented some reverse discrimination, I think you'd still find it more comfortable to remain white. You're not worried about the police shooting you if you take a midnight stroll to smell flowers by moonlight.
Wow. Your line of thinking is exactly why people claim subconscious racism exists. It makes perfect unbiased logical sense to you, but you do not experience the real context.
Black people are still under a lot of baggage from the slavery days. I've lived in a couple black communities and its dang oppressing even without crime. The school children are far more diligent about homework because the culture is still far more 'do as you are told by authority', and yet they do not progress because the parents are unaware that success comes down to children being constantly educated by their parents above and beyond what the school teach. Criminals are more likely to prey upon their kindred because it's safer. You wouldn't consider crime because you were raised with the prospect that this was the land of opportunity. Black people do not see theirselves as having that same opportunity, and thus not believing in themselves, don't. I've known many successful black entrepreneurs as well, but they all come from predominantly black nations where any industry leaders are black as well, and find hanging out with local black culture to be too depressing.
Technically equality of opportunity exists on the books, but culturally it does not. Really it doesn't exist technically either, in the same fashion that I had far more creative genius going than Bill Gates (I literally invented 1000's of things), but not his cultural connections to launch a commercial enterprise.
As to environmentalism, they already had a war to fight much closer to home, to be seen as equals. Your pretending to see them as equals and blaming them for their own failure is evidence that you still really don't. Recognizing they do live at a disadvantage and helping to overcome that is what it would take to embrace them equally as people.
In LA or Oakland I never gave it an instant's thought, but here in the PNW for a brief instant I find myself thinking 'ooh, that person's black'. What an awful thing to live with. At some subconscious level it's still stigmatic. We saw Michael Jackson turn white. You never see anyone turning black.
I used to be of the 70s 'see no color' ideology, but I have to agree now that it hasn't worked, and probably ever won't until the day we forget it ever meant something different to be black.
Not acknowledging that they have it rough is not much different from treating them as untouchables, like don't think about them and maybe they will disappear somewhere. People don't like to see themselves as contributing to a collective plight, and I guess its easiest to just pretend the plight doesn't exist. Even if we are all on our best behavior, as I'm sure you're coming from, and thus resenting any accusations of guilt, we are all still contributing members of that collective subconscious plight.
It sucks for everyone, and there is no precedent for eradicating such a thing, but to pretend it doesn't exist and has no consequence certainly isn't helping.
Maybe if everyone could say 'Hey, I'm sorry things suck for you' that could cure it, but you are righteously no where near that. Stop resenting them for continuing to see a valid problem here, and see the situation with your heart instead. You are seeing 'them', not your fellow people, and I believe that is where the core of the subconscious collective problem lies. It's a sublime complexity as you still need to acknowledge 'them', but them as part of us, not just them as them.
The wokeness of the left exceeds any history of race and racism. Once upon a time we had serious
principled movements for civil rights, anti discrimination laws and other beliefs and laws. Wokeness arose not from these but from vengeance, the notion of racial privilege for the "oppressed" and the irrational charge that all whites and their society were innately racist. This is of course reverse racism. The worst examples are the doctrines being forced on professors and students in universities, which emulate the Soviet Union's social engineering projects and practices under Stalin. In effect wokeness is neo Stalinism written by anti democracy anti pluralist power hungry indidivuals pretending to be defending human rights. It is as dangerous as the right wing, the neo cons and the evangelicals. More dangerous in fact because naive liberals will believe anything that
convinces them that they are the cause of all the problems.
One would be hard pressed to say pervasive racism is not present throughout US institutions, including the justice system, education, and corporations. Statistics prove this, whether you’re looking at disproportionate imprisonment and police killings, educational budgets and attainment or hiring practices. The legacy of discrimination has left Black people with low average net worth, while this history of red lining in real estate crammed them into areas that did not let them accumulate value in their homes to the extent of white people, while their neighborhoods were often bulldozed for freeways. The history is real, and the legacies remain. People are still fighting to overcome them, in recent years notably through criminal justice reform. It is also real that our history has left us with a racism and bigotry that can often be subconscious but is nonetheless present. I think it is a mistake to stack dealing with racism against dealing with ecological degradation. Especially as people of color typically are disproportionately victims of industrial pollution, as the environmental justice movement focuses. They are also greater supporters of climate action, polling shows. I don’t think we will learn to treat the natural world with respect if we don’t learn how to treat each other the same way.
Daily Introspection saves me from total blindness. On the battlefield of life it is crucial to know whether my good or evil tendencies have prevailed so that I can self correct before ignorance can overcome me.
May I republish this at The R-Word?
(Yes, lots of folks are feeling just what you describe, including myself!)