Accepting Crisis as Your Saviour

Accepting an unpleasant reality does not eliminate hope. It just makes the hope relevant and meaningful. It is a hope that directs us to actions that are rational and productive.

An unusual confluence of events brought me to this particular essay (and a life shift). The U.S. Administration spewed its official versions of the Minneapolis murders, and I discovered the work of Sarah Wilson (a journalist who writes about societal collapse.)

I don’t blog about politics, and this essay is no exception. However, when I see patterns in the big picture, I share them. Human brains are wired for patterns. (It’s why we enjoy music and poetry.) It has always been my belief that there is nothing more powerful than metaphors and allegories to communicate ideas.

This weekend, I’ve been thinking about what we’ve all been thinking about. An effectively-private mercenary army of masked undesirables, operating outside of society’s laws, is publicly (and almost certainly privately) executing common people who rightfully question their actions. More importantly, despite overwhelming clear evidence to the contrary, those who reconfigured and control this army are telling you that the reality you can observe with your own eyes is incorrect.

Scenarios like this have happened throughout civilization’s history. What has changed in this cycle is the proliferation of instantly viewable videos worldwide which are contradicting the official accounts.

Before we go any further down that path, I want you to consider a parallel narrative…

At least two thousand years ago, much of human civilization adopted a belief system that “WE” were separate from the natural world, superior to every other species, and that everything we could see was owned by us. We may have been exercising some distorted version of the Maximum Power Principle (MPP) - said to apply to all lifeforms - but we were just smarter enough to be ecologically dangerous. Paramount to our Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) society (and earlier), we layered on an all-pervasive belief in a value system derived from the MPP but taken out of context - the idea that success can be measured by number, that More is Always Better, and that infinite growth is our reason for being.

This is a narrative that has been firmly entrenched as THE status quo. It is not to be questioned. Those who say it’s unsustainable, those who see the disconnect with a finite earth, those who want to sound the alarms - they’re on the fringe, and ignored. They’re the hippies, tree-huggers, do-gooders, and primitive savages who are annoyingly obstructing access to the real treasures.

In more recent times, it was the climate scientists who were uncovering the difficult truths. They could see the big picture. They spread the word. Many people also saw the data and grew alarmed by the reality. The Climate Movement was born.

But in that same time, a parallel denial movement arose. It didn’t even have to be as strong or supported by logic, because it had the power of the status quo behind it. No one likes change! When challenged with sobering facts, the establishment simply ignored them, twisted the numbers, or made up new ones. To appease the growing environmental electorate, it held international conferences and signed global agreements. This was perfect for appealing to both sides of the debate - say you are changing; don’t actually change. And yet, for those who care to look, and are willing to see, the evidence for the polycrisis is all around us - everywhere - and it is going to hit the fan.

Flip back to the reality videos recorded on the streets on Minneapolis. Multiple angles, indisputable, and still - STILL - we are told that what we are seeing is not reality. Actually, no, that’s not strictly the truth either. In fact, they rarely reference the existence of any videos. (Not unless they find an angle that can be spun, or one that can be altered with AI.) Instead, they invent immediate outrageous lies. We know they’re lying, and they know that we know they’re lying.

So, what’s the point? Why lie?

Because they have to. Because to do anything less would be to create unimaginable cognitive dissonance within their entire worldview. They are not lying to us. They are lying to themselves. No matter how clearly it can be demonstrated, accepting their core doctrine as wrong is unthinkable.

Hold that thought.

Now shift it to the polycrisis, including ecological overshoot and climate change. It is not just the fossil fuel industry or politicians who are (intentionally or unintentionally) lying to us. We are lying to ourselves. No matter how clearly it can be demonstrated, accepting our core doctrine as wrong is unthinkable. Economic growth must be maintained. We pretend that we can ‘solve’ the problems and avoid the collapse. We deny a reality that is too frightening, or that creates a cognitive dissonance with the status quo programmed into us from birth. To see the full reality of the polycrisis or inevitable civilizational collapse for what it is would be too painful. To acknowledge it would feel like we were giving up hope - that humanity was doomed. That just seems inhuman.

We MUST have hope. Right?

I agree. So does Sarah Wilson.

Accepting an unpleasant reality does not eliminate hope. It just makes the hope relevant and meaningful. It is a hope that directs us to actions that are rational and productive.

The first impact typically recorded by those who ‘give up’ the charade of normalcy is a massive sigh of relief. Cognitive dissonance is exhausting and damaging. It arises when reality does not match your worldview, which gives you two choices: (1) deny reality, or (2) change your worldview. The second is actually much harder than the first - that is, until reality starts shooting your neighbours dead in the street.

The reality, as I see it, is that for ecological ‘solutions’ (in the traditional sense), there’s no time left.1 We are not going to escape the polycrisis. We are not going to win the race against some form of system collapse. We are not even going to mitigate the Climate Emergency - too many side effects will trigger other polycrisis dominoes long before that. Like those cellphone videos, every scrap of rational evidence shows that our civilization’s fragile and unfathomable complexity is critically vulnerable to the shock that is most assuredly coming.

“So where’s the hope, Andrew?”

I could give you an answer, but it would be ill-formed. For me, this worldview of clearer acceptance is still unfolding. So, I’ll share the wisdom of others:

“How to respond to societal collapse” (14 mins) - TEDx Talk by Sarah Wilson

“The Simple Pleasure of Presence” - by Jackie Feather

“It’s OK not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out. So just be present. The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present. And when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That was what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.” - Joanna Macy

“100 Things to Do Now You Are Collapse-Aware” - by Gabrielle Feather

Please access at least one of these. They just might inspire you to shift your paradigm.

What I’m writing about now is consistent with what I first proposed over a decade ago in “The Value Crisis”. And my hope for the future is still tied to ‘resolving’ the value crisis by reconfiguring society’s ridiculously flawed value system. Even my sequel (“Our Second Chance”) should still be relevant. What’s changing, for me, is holding space for the idea that we might be able to bypass the really ugly part.