Last evening I went to see Nicole Foss (Stoneleigh at The Automatic Earth) talk about preparing for economic collapse (which she believes, as I do, will precede and help precipitate energy and ecological collapse). The presentation, which will be available in expanded form on their blog shortly for streaming or on DVD, lasted almost three hours including questions, and was, like their blog, fascinating, provocative and insightful. Some new learnings for me:

• It is quite possible to have the worst of both worlds in an economic depression: deflation (plunging prices) and high interest rates, and this is likely what’s on the horizon. The reason for this is that the rate of inflation/deflation is a result of available purchasing power, not a determinant of it. So we could see the value of our homes and investments drop precipitously, while at the same time the cost of borrowing (and of servicing our huge existing debts) soars to double digits, driven by risk fears and distrust reducing the availability of credit.
• A paradox of economic depressions is that in such times purchasing power declines faster than prices, so even though prices are dropping, our available cash and credit to take advantage of these dropping prices is falling even faster. The result: a vicious cycle of declines in spending, income and wealth.
• What’s worse, in these situations most of the small amount of cash that’s available is chasing the most essential goods (food, energy) so the prices of these goods decline the slowest and the least.
• Nicole believes that, as money supply continues to drop to 1970s levels, we should expect to see 1970s-level prices and wages soon. Do you remember what your house was (or would have been) worth in the 1970s? What the investments in your pension were worth then? What salaries for those doing your job were then?
• Some countries are especially vulnerable to economic collapse due to debt overextension. Japan’s debt load is huge. Canadians’ household debt load relative to GDP is one of the highest in the world. The UK’s total debt load to GDP ration is 1000%, mostly due to financial sector over-leveraging. Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland also have massively over-leveraged banks. And, as many have already realized, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland are all essentially bankrupt already, and their collapse will almost surely mean the end of the EC and the Euro.
• The most dangerous psychological fallout of sharp economic contraction is a shrinking of what Nicole calls the “trust horizon”. When banks don’t trust other banks, lenders don’t trust creditors (and vice versa), and no one trusts the government, lending seizes up (aggravating the shrinkage of credit, spending and purchasing power), many people cease complying with government regulations (like paying taxes), and governments, desperate to hold onto power, become repressive. The timing couldn’t be worse: When peak oil hits and energy must be rationed, the loss of trust will destroy citizen willingness to comply with the rationing scheme, leading to black markets, massive corruption and potentially even the collapse of governments.

What can governments do to prevent or mitigate the collapse of the overextended economy?

Anyone who reads the NYT knows that the austerity approach currently being rammed down the throats of the EC’s most overextended nations (and by the right-wing British government on its citizens) will not work. The argument against austerity goes something like this:

The government decides to cut back services in order to reduce massive debt levels and restore confidence in the nation’s solvency and currency. But the cutbacks in services affect mostly the poor, the sick, and the unemployed. Deprived of essential government services, these people have no alternative than to get worse, more dependent on others, and more inclined to take desperate measures that cost the country more than the cutback services did. Government support services are also cut, as are government payrolls leading to more unemployment (a further drain on the economy), a forced massive contraction in citizens’ spending (leading to further contraction in businesses unable to sell their products), and so on in an endless downward spiral. The excessive government debts levels that are causing the current crisis were not run up by overspending or undertaxing in recessions, but (almost exclusively by right-wing governments) by overspending (on wars, corporate subsidies, bailouts to reckless banks and corporations etc.) and undertaxing (the rich) in good times. The answer now, this argument goes, is not a crash diet but a sensible long-term plan to mitigate and correct the excesses of the past and ensure they are not repeated. Austerity by right-wing regimes in the 1930s greatly worsened the Great Depression.

Most of those (like the NYT) who oppose austerity approaches support stimulus programs. The argument is that by increasing government spending now, rather than decreasing it, we can help encourage renewed economic growth, and once that happens and the economy is booming we can selectively cut back some of these programs and increase taxes to start reducing the debt to manageable levels.

The problem with this thinking is that:

1. We’re far too late to do this — debt levels are already far too high to ever be repaid even after a prolonged boom,
2. Economic growth is causing and aggravating all the problems our modern society is facing — climate change, oil scarcity, and income inequality etc. — and is completely unsustainable in any case, and
3. We have a long history of, in good/boom times, electing right-wing governments (Reagan, Thatcher, Harper etc.) who perpetuate the misbehaviour of undertaxing and overspending (on wars, corporate subsidies, bailouts etc.) rather than repaying the deficits racked up in hard times. We cannot be trusted to ever repay our debts, which is why we’re in this global economic mess.

We are, in short, caught in a bind, where neither austerity nor stimulus will help — both make the situation worse, and now it has reached the point of no return.

Coping with this predicament is, of necessity, going to be left up to us as individuals within our communities to figure out collectively for ourselves. As our economies collapse, as the cheap energy that has provided almost all of the productivity growth we have achieved in the last two centuries runs out, and as climate change begins to wreak havoc on every aspect of our social and economic lives, governments and large corporations will collapse and our world will become, in lurches, much more local and self-managed. This is Nicole’s view, and, as I’ve argued often in this pages, it is mine too. In my next article I’ll talk about some of the ways Nicole suggests building the social capital and relocalized infrastructure and capacities to cope with the coming post-crash world.

But in the meantime, if austerity (contraction) and stimulus (renewed growth) are both disastrous prescriptions for our exhausted, reeling economy, what should we be telling our governments to do (and not to do) now?

My ‘Plan C’ answer is consistent with the title of my recent post, the intercession of a thousand small sanities:

1. End the wars: Immediately cease the imperialist and resource wars being waged by affluent nations against struggling nations all over the world, and the ideological and futile wars on “terror” and on drugs and “illegal” immigrants.
2. End corporate subsidies: Eliminate all agricultural, energy, military and other corporate subsidies, and instead provide incentives for new small business creation and employment.
3. Replace “free” trade with “fair” trade to reinvigorate domestic work and employment. Cancel globalist trade treaties like NAFTA and those of the WTO. This will provide an enormous boost to local economies, and save valuable energy used in long-distance transportation. And while we’re at it, forgive struggling nations’ debts: These nations will only be able to achieve self-sufficiency and democracy if we give them back the land and resources we’ve stolen from them, and let them make a fresh start.
4. Radically simplify tax laws and really enforce them: Current tax codes in most countries are so complicated that the rich who can afford to pay for expensive tax evasion schemes end up paying less than the rest of us. A simple tax code that computes your year-end global net worth and the annual change in it, and taxes a certain portion of each, with no deductions or exemptions or loopholes, on a graduated scale, could generate vastly more tax revenue, more fairly, with much less effort by everyone, even if those with income and net worth less than, say, $50k were exempted from tax entirely.

There are some other things governments can do to conserve resources, relocalize administration and services, delayer bureaucracy, shift health care from treatment to prevention, overhaul and radically scale down the domestic security and prison systems, and deschool our communities, but these are trickier reforms that will need to be done carefully or they’ll just be done badly and make matters worse.

The longer-term answer, I think, is to move towards a radically decentralized, steady-state economy. But I think it’s idealistic to think we’ll ever have the luxury of doing that. The storm ahead will be fierce, and we first have to stop the austerity and stimulus advocates from sinking the economic boat before it even begins to navigate the rocky and narrow strait between collapse through ruinous contraction and collapse through ruinous growth.

chart of fears, from this earlier post

Nick Smith recently pointed me to a short article by Turil Cronburg, which in part read:

The way I’ve found real safety, even while being held captive in jail and in homeless shelters (run almost like a jail) and mental institutions (again pretty much like a jail) has been a combination of realizing that safety is really all about freedom, and finding clarity of my own purpose in life. And by freedom I mean freedom to be oneself. To react to life’s complications in a way that is honest and true to what one’s deepest self is – one’s highest ideals of what one wants to contribute to the world, one’s purpose in life.

If I am trapped physically by a violent individual or group – the shelter system, “legal” system, or “health care” system or any other forceful agent – I might not be especially free in a physical sense, which certainly sucks, and is something a healthy society will avoid at all costs, but on a deeper, more meaningful sense I am very much free to make at least some choices about what I do and say such that they help me make progress on my life’s goals…  Real safety comes from finding the most effective way of expressing your true self – what you want and what you have to offer – in every situation you come across in your path.

This is what ee cummings was saying when he wrote about how hard it is to be “nobody-but-yourself” in a world where everyone (the media, advertisers, peers, others trying to influence and/or control us, and even that small self-critical voice inside us) is trying to make us “everybody-else”.

The day after I read, Turil’s post, Mireille Jansma pointed me to this TedX talk by psychologist Brené Brown, in which Brené says something quite similar:

Whenever we’re on the verge of bliss, we picture something horrible happening… I blame this in part on the media… This is a symptom of an issue that is both universal and profoundly dangerous, and that is: We are losing our tolerance for vulnerability, which we see as synonymous with weakness, and which is at the core of our fear and anxiety and shame and other difficult emotions, but which also is at the core of joy, love, belonging, creativity, and faith.

When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding, disappointment, disconnection, perfectionism, [political, religious, and ideological] extremism, and most of all self-numbing, [mechanisms by which] we try to protect ourselves. What is driving this intolerance for vulnerability?… [I think it's] scarcity. We live in a culture that tells us that there is never enough [time, money, security etc. and] that we cannot ever be good enough. [We are inundated with hugely exaggerated messages of ubiquitous danger.]…

We numb vulnerability. We are the most addicted, the most medicated, obese and in debt cohort in human history. And we stay busy, so that the [feared] truth of our life can’t catch up. What are the consequences of numbing ourselves to vulnerability? You cannot selectively numb emotion. When we numb the dark emotions — vulnerability, fear, shame of not being good enough — we by default numb joy.

After this intriguing diagnosis, alas, Brené falls victim to the tendency of most ‘experts’ (and self-help book writers) to prescribe a cure for the malaise they’ve just identified.

How do we embrace vulnerability? Practice gratitude… Honor what’s ordinary about our lives… Play… [Appreciate] nature… We want more guarantees. We we want to believe that we we’re not going to get hurt and that bad things aren’t going to happen and they are. But if we don’t allow ourselves to [fully] experience joy and love we will definitely miss out on filling our reservoir with what we need when those hard things happen.

“Practice gratitude” is a nice phrase, and maybe whatever it means it works for her, but it’s not at all clear how this is supposed to help us “embrace vulnerability”. The advice, in any case, violates the corollary to Pollard’s Law: Things are the way they are for a reason. If you want to change something, first be sure you understand why it is the way it is. To tell us essentially the way to overcome our fears is “don’t be afraid” is not useful, or actionable, and the struggle in vain to try to follow this advice is likely to lead to even more feelings of “we can never be good enough”, and more retreat to numbness.

I am a fearful person, and I have become as a result of trying to cope with these fears and anxieties somewhat emotionally flattened, if not numbed. But I have come to accept myself: We cannot be other than who we really are. I aspire to liberate myself from civilization culture, and hence become less fearful and more present, more “nobody-but-myself”. But I acknowledge that this will take lifelong practice and may well be a fruitless pursuit.

As a result, a far more interesting approach, I think, would be to ask ourselves these questions, and come up with our own answers, coping practices, and self-acceptances:

1. Who is “nobody-but-myself”? If I lived in a cultural that didn’t try to make me “everybody-else”, what would I be like? What’s holding me back?
2. What am I afraid of, and why? How do I cope with these fears (avoid, vent, condition/desensitize, learn, accept, detach/let go)? Why aren’t these coping mechanisms fully effective for me?

The ultimate question stemming from these is What can I do with this self-knowledge? And the answer may be: nothing. It may be enough just to understand ourselves a little better, to know why we are the way we are.

sand sculpture in honour of the year of the dragon — online in several places, source unknown

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

What Am I To Do With Feelings Like These?: Paul Kingsnorth’s Pilgrimage: This month’s Orion features a tour de force of passionate, sensitive writing about how the environmental movement has lost its way, and what he’s doing now as a result, from Dark Mountain co-founder Paul Kingsnorth, his best work I think since the Manifesto. Two excerpts from this lovely piece of writing (but please go read the whole article):

I look out across the moonlit Lake District ranges, and it’s as clear as the night air that what used to come in regular waves, pounding like the sea, comes now only in flashes, out of the corner of my eyes, like a lighthouse in a storm. Perhaps it’s the way the world has changed. There are more cars on the roads now, more satellites in the sky. The footpaths up the fells are like stone motorways, there are turbines on the moors, and the farmers are being edged out by south-country refugees like me, trying to escape but bringing with us the things we flee from. The new world is online and loving it, the virtual happily edging out the actual. The darkness is shut out and the night grows lighter and nobody is there to see it.

It could be all that, but it probably isn’t. It’s probably me. I am thirty-seven now. The world is smaller, more tired, more fragile, more horribly complex and full of troubles. Or, rather: the world is the same as it ever was, but I am more aware of it and of the reality of my place within it. I have grown up, and there is nothing to be done about it. The worst part of it is that I can’t seem to look without thinking anymore. And now I know far more about what we are doing. We: the people. I know what we are doing, all over the world, to everything, all of the time. I know why the magic is dying. It’s me. It’s us…

I don’t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems, better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in consciousness. All I have is a personal conviction built on those feelings, those responses, that goes back to the moors of northern England and the rivers of southern Borneo—that something big is being missed. That we are both hollow men and stuffed men, and that we will keep stuffing ourselves until the food runs out, and if outside the dining room door we have made a wasteland and called it necessity, then at least we will know we were not to blame, because we are never to blame, because we are the humans.

What am I to do with feelings like these? Useless feelings in a world in which everything must be made useful. Sensibilities in a world of utility. Feelings like this provide no “solutions.” They build no new eco-homes, remove no carbon from the atmosphere. This is head-in-the-clouds stuff, as relevant to our busy, modern lives as the new moon or the date of the harvest. Easy to ignore, easy to dismiss, like the places that inspire the feelings, like the world outside the bubble, like the people who have seen it, if only in brief flashes beyond the ridge of some dark line of hills.

But this is fine—the dismissal, the platitudes, the brusque moving-on of the grown-ups. It’s all fine. I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking. I am leaving on a pilgrimage to find what I left behind in the jungles and by the cold campfires and in the parts of my head and my heart that I have been skirting around because I have been busy fragmenting the world in order to save it; busy believing it is mine to save. I am going to listen to the wind and see what it tells me, or whether it tells me anything at all. You see, it turns out that I have more time than I thought. I will follow the songlines and see what they sing to me and maybe, one day, I might even come back. And if I am very lucky I might bring with me a harvest of fresh tales, which I can scatter like apple seeds across this tired and angry land.

The Endless Obsession With What Might Be: My favourite non-fiction writer John Gray urges us to stop fixating on the future and learn to live in the now: “Without the faith that the future can be better than the past, many people say they could not go on. But when we look to the future to give meaning to our lives, we lose the meaning we can make for ourselves here and now.” Thanks to Euan Semple for the link.

Early Signs of Civilization’s Collapse: “This is one of the most important trends you’ll see in 2012 and beyond: Global supply lines are breaking down. The just-in-time system of deliveries on tap is deteriorating. Have you noticed how often the products or parts you need are backordered or delayed?” Thanks to Robert Volkwyn for the link.

LIVING BETTER

What Love Looks Like: An interview in Orion with Tim DeChristopher, in prison for daring to disrupt the sale of oil and gas leases on public land, on non-violent resistance and having the courage to risk your freedom for what you believe. Thanks to Tree for the link and the one that follows.

How Doctors Die: Most knowledgeable doctors refuse the same aggressive end-of-live medical treatments that so many of their patients demand, and that many doctors prescribe for them.

No Meat, No Dairy, No Problem: The NYT Food Critic Mark Bittman goes semi-vegan.

From Occupy Wall Street to National General Assembly: Lawrence Lessig: The Harvard prof and expert on political worldviews is encouraging Occupy to organize a new Constitutional Conference and National General Assembly to radically reform and democratize the US constitution. And Occupy is on the case. Thanks to Sam Rose for the link.

StreetBank is “a website that allows you to see all that your neighbours are giving away or lending. It’s a giant attic, garden shed, toolkit, fancy dress chest, library and DVD collection for you and anyone living within one mile of your home.” Thanks to my neighbour Don Marshall for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Who are the 1%?: Mostly doctors, lawyers, bankers, and financial and corporate executives.

Harper and His Ultra-Conservative Corporatists Wage All-Out War on Environmentalists:

• Canada’s megalomaniac PM has been blatently lobbying in the US, Europe and using the corporatist Canadian media to push sale of dirty megapolluting bitumen sludge from the horrific Alberta Tar Sands.
• He’s pushing for multiple pipelines to export it to the US and Canada, working hand-in-hand with big multinational oil companies.
• He’s launched a propaganda war labeling all environmentalists opposed to his plans as “radicals” and “extremists”, and tried to ignite xenophobia by claiming opponents are fronted by “foreign radicals”.
• A former BC Cabinet Minister explains why any or all of the three proposed Tar Sands pipelines would be a disaster.
• Lots more on this travesty (and the outrage of renewed logging of old growth rainforest in fragile areas of BC) in in the Vancouver Observer — thanks to Keith Farnish for this link.
• Meanwhile, this bastard created a “financial oversight” agency for his retired cronies that in its three years of existence has spent millions, but, by their own admission, has yet to do any work whatsoever.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Here’s an amazing and beautifully-filmed dubstep video featuring Marquese Scott dancing to a remix of the song Pumped Up Kicks (caution: disturbing lyrics). Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.

And an equally remarkable video of a crow using a bottle cap to repeatedly sled down a garage roof. Thanks to Mushin Schilling for the link, and the one that follows.

Walking backwards through time, a clever video that will make you think twice about the nature of movement, and of time.

Jonah Lehrer writes in this week’s New Yorker (full article by subscription only) that research shows non-critical brainstorming doesn’t work — debate and criticism, it turns out, stimulates rather than represses creative ideas, the best ideation groups have a good mix of people who know each other and those who do not, and the best collaborations occur face-to-face where spontaneous and unexpected meet-ups are physically likely and culturally encouraged.

A poignant essay by a once middle-class American coping with a new “first-world problem”: ever-present daily struggle and anxiety over the basic necessities of life for herself and her family. Thanks to Tree for the link and the one that follows.

How Millennial Are You?: A just-for-fun self-test. I scored 53, a typical score for someone half my age.

Seeking the Kermode Bear in the threatened BC Great Bear Rainforest, photographer Paul Nicklen had a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Thanks to Sharon Goldberg for the link.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From Wallace Stevens (thanks to Cheryl Long for the link):

THE SNOW MAN

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

From TS Eliot’s essay The Social Function of Poetry:

Poetry has to give pleasure… [and] the communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for, which enlarges our consciousness or refines our sensibility… We all understand I think both the kind of pleasure that poetry can give and the kind of difference, beyond the pleasure, which it makes to our lives. Without producing these two effects it is simply not poetry.

From philosopher Eugene Gendlin (thanks to LessWrong for this quote and the three that follow):

YOU CAN FACE REALITY

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

From cartoonist Tim Kreider, on being wedded to a fixed idea of the future:

Whether their motives were righteous or venal, highminded or base, noble or ig-, in retrospect the obvious verdict is that they were all morons–yes, even the distinguished fellows and visiting scholars at think tanks and deans of international studies schools. They were morons because the whole moral, political and practical purpose of their scheme depended on its going exactly according to plan. Which nothing ever does. The Latin phrase for this logical fallacy would be Duh. Some of them were halfway intelligent; some of them may even have been well-intentioned; but they lacked imagination, and this is a fatal flaw. What we learn from history is that it never turns out like it’s supposed to. And the one thing we know for sure about the future is that it won’t be like we think.

From A Softer World:

There should be a word for the things we do not because we want to but because we want to be the kind of person who wants to.

From Terry Pratchett, in the fantasy novel Making Money:

Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.

From John O’Donohue, in To Bless the Space Between Us (thanks to Chris Corrigan for the link):

FOR THE TIME OF NECESSARY DECISION

The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it’s time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us anymore.

We drift through this gray, increasing nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul’s desire.

diagram from my earlier blog post explaining what complex systems are and how they differ from ‘merely complicated’ systems

In last week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik laments the epidemic of imprisonment in America, especially of the young and visible minorities, and explores what leads a society to give up on, incarcerate and hence enslave so many in brutal, soul-destroying institutions. In the article he describes the atrocity of privatization of prisons:

No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

“Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Gopnik reviews both the history of incarceration worldwide, and the circumstances that have led to different policies and approaches to defining, controlling and dealing with “crime”. He describes the precipitous decline in serious crime in New York and other large cities over the past two decades, and concludes that all three of the popular theories for this decline are wrong. Liberals are wrong to believe that better social programs and “broken windows” preventative programs are responsible — there is simply no evidence to support any correlation. Conservatives are wrong to believe getting tough on crime and more rigorous enforcement are responsible — if anything such actions have worsened the situation by leading to embittering enforcement excesses. And the statisticians who believe (as reported in Freakonomics) that it was the drop in birth rate among the poor and disadvantaged (as a result of Roe vs Wade) that is responsible, are also wrong — correlation doesn’t always mean cause and effect.

What led to the decrease, Gopnik found, was the combined effect of millions of small sustained actions by millions of determined people just trying to make their corner of the world a little better:

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.

Gopnik is saying, in effect, that complex ‘problems’ like crime, poverty, climate change, peak oil, corruption, pandemics, and unsustainable growth economies, are not ‘problems’ that can be ‘solved’ at all, but rather, as philosopher Abraham Kaplan explained, predicaments that must be “chipped away at” and adapted to. Our species tends to loathe complexity, and prefers to oversimplify everything, and the politicians, lawyers, corporations and media play on that loathing by always proposing analytic (“A or B”) dichotomies and simplistic “answers” — which cannot possibly work. “Three-strikes” laws, “trickle-down” economics, emissions trading schemes, subsidies, religious taboos and inquisitions, austerity programs, prohibitions, bailouts, military invasions and “quantitative easing” — these are all massively expensive complicated “solutions” to complex “problems”, and they have all failed spectacularly.

“The intercession of a thousand small sanities”, as Gopnik so elegantly puts it, will never be a popular approach to coping with complex predicaments, especially as they grow, through the indifference and incompetence of leaders and vested interests and the sheer size and scale of the systems creating them, into crises and then into chaos and collapse. Yet it is the only approach which has a chance of making things better.

And this is the reason, I think, why more and more informed, intelligent, imaginative people are giving up on trying to ‘reform’ our systems through various complicated solutions, and joining the ranks of the ‘collapsniks’ who concur with John Gray’s analysis that our civilization and our world cannot be “saved”, and that instead of hoping and trying to save it we should do nothing more than becoming more our animal selves — reconnecting with the rest of life on Earth and with our primeval senses and instincts, getting outside our heads, coping with contingencies (perhaps through “the intercession of a thousand small sanities”), relearning to play, living in the moment, turning back to real, mortal things, and simply seeing what is.

This seems to me obvious in hindsight, but it has taken me a decade of study and learning and reflection to realize (and I have been so privileged to have had the opportunity to learn it)! What may now be labeled as fatalistic, pessimistic, hope-less “doomer porn” might, soon enough, come to be seen as just a modest and enlightened philosophy of how to live a better life.

I’m very pleased to announce that we have now published the deck. Here is our announcement:

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The Group Works card deck, the first product of the Group Pattern Language Project, is now out! You can order copies of the deck, download a free PDF copy and learn about our upcoming mobile/phone app version of the deck on our website, groupworksdeck.org .

Image by Susan Stewart

The deck is designed to support your process as a group convenor, planner, facilitator, or participant. The developers spent several years pooling our knowledge of the best group events we have ever witnessed.

We looked at meetings, conferences, retreats, town halls, and other sessions that give organizations life, solve a longstanding dilemma, get stuck relationships flowing, result in clear decisions with wide support, and make a lasting difference. We also looked at routine, well-run meetings that simply bring people together and get lots of stuff done.

The deck consists of 91 full-colour cards (plus a few blanks to add your own patterns), a five-panel explanatory category/legend card, and an accompanying booklet explaining the purpose and history of the project and suggesting uses for the cards in group process work.

Each 3.5″ x 5.5″ card is laid out as follows:

These cards are yours, of course, to use in whatever ways make sense and work for you:  in the workplace, in design and preparation of facilitated events, as a learning and teaching tool, for reflecting on how an event went, or just for fun.  The website and booklet explain some of the ways they have been used by facilitators and students so far, to give you some ideas to get started with, and we invite users to share their experiences and stories with us.

Image by Ethan Honeywell

For more information on the deck, please visit our website: http://groupworksdeck.org

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We have also drafted a .pptx brochure oriented to business audiences (most of our direct contacts are in the non-profit, public, education and government sectors), which you can download here.

Please let me know what you think of the material above, and how we might “tweak” it to make it better. Also, please let me know if you buy or download a deck yourself, or if you have contacts you’d be interested in presenting this to. And of course, if you use the deck to improve your meetings and other group processes, I’d love to hear your stories!

This is another in my series of articles exploring the basic existential questions of who we are and what motivates us to do what we do. For those puzzled about what that has to do with “saving the world”, my answer is that if we hope to be able to organize with others to make the world a better place, and deal with the huge crises we are now beginning to face, we are going to have to be cognizant of the truth of human nature, and specifically these existential questions. There is no point hoping millions or billions of people are going to change their beliefs and behaviours if such change is just not in our nature. And, as regular readers of this blog know, I am inclined to believe it is not in our nature, though I’m open to evidence to the contrary.

My friend Dale Asberry has been writing about “human cognitive failures” and put me on to this article in the extraordinary Less Wrong wiki, about whether what we want and what we like are different, and if so how and why. At the same time, my contacts who are members of Quora, a collective brainstorming site on deep philosophical questions, have been pinging me about the threads related to the existence (or non-existence) of free will.

As I wrote last year, my position on who we are and the existence of free will is as follows:

1. The cells and organs of our bodies evolved our brains as a feature-detection, protection and mobility management device for their purposes. The ‘existence’ of our minds and identities as ‘individuals’ is therefore a self-deception. Our minds are nothing more than processes carried out for the benefit of our cells and organs — they are their information processing system, not ‘ours’.
2. Like most species, we are social creatures that have evolved codes of behaviour that enable us, as part of the larger organism of all-life-on-Earth, to collaborate, share and keep our numbers in balance with the local ecosystem — these are all evolutionary selected behaviours, since they enable us to adapt and fit well into these ecosystems. These learned codes of behaviour are called cultures.
3. In times of stress, due to overcrowding, natural disasters, climate change or the exhaustion of local resources, cultures can intervene to act in adaptive ways that would be unneeded in normal times, including war, migration, adoption of new diets, new tools and new ways of living that are better suited in evolutionary terms to the changed environment. At some point some of our species chose to leave the trees of the tropical rainforest where we lived a leisurely life as vegetarian gatherers for a million years, and struggle to survive in other environments. We evolved weapons to kill other animals, enabling us to live as carnivores, and discovered ‘catastrophic’ agriculture, enabling us to live where there was insufficient food growing naturally. These new tools, however, required settlement and a very different kind of culture — civilization culture — to sustain.
4. Civilization culture requires sacrificing a great many freedoms for the survival of the collective membership, and requires vastly more work, personal sacrifice, hardship, suffering, and vulnerability to catastrophe than other cultures. To keep people from obeying their cells’ and organs’ natural tendencies by just walking away from this culture, it is of necessity inherently coercive, using hierarchy, violence, threat of imprisonment, propaganda and other means to ensure obedience and conformity of the group.
5. Whereas our cells and organs had nearly full control of our (their) minds before civilization culture evolved, the new culture was able, through language and coercion, to influence and seize control of a significant part of our minds. There has been a continuing and escalating war for control of our minds ever since. Our culture persuades us that we have ‘free will’ to ignore what our cells and organs impel us to do and instead do what it (our culture) wants us to do — that we have an ego, an identity, and a responsibility to conduct ourselves according to the rules of civilized society, or we must face the social consequences.

So ‘we’ are, essentially, helpless witnesses in an endless struggle between our cells/organs/bodies and our culture for control of ‘our’ minds, and our beliefs and behaviours reflect who has ‘won’ each battle in that struggle. By contrast, our close cousins the bonobos (yes, I know they aren’t perfect either) are at peace — there is no inherent conflict between what their bodies and culture want, no scarcity, no imposed responsibility, almost no aggression, no monogamy or jealousy, no hoarding. And their only real stress is caused by our brutal, cancerous culture, which is extinguishing theirs.

Where does ‘liking’ versus ‘wanting’ fit into this model of who we are? Things we like (such as being in love, being in nature, listening to music, play, learning and helping others), according to the Less Wrong article, are different from things we want (such as sex, addictive foods and other substances, attention, appreciation, and acquisition of shiny objects — all things that in our modern culture are usually scarce). When we do or get things we like, we are happy. When we do or get things we want, we are often not happy — just (for a time) satisfied. Wants are cravings; likes are joys. Needs are another matter entirely — none of the “wants” listed above are really needs, the way that nutritious food, water, warmth, and social contact are — things we cannot live without. Wants could be seen as the midpoint of a continuum between likes and needs. Some things may be both wants and likes — beauty, for example, may be something we crave (especially if our world offers little of it) but is also something we derive genuine happiness from.

An example to explain the difference: For many years I hosted and organized monthly neighbourhood poker games. The game was small stakes with strict limits, couples and total novices were welcome, and we played “dealer’s choice”, developing over the years a list of some 100 variants, some of them really silly. Really serious poker players who had to win to consider the event a success, generally dropped out after one or two months. Much of the game was about learning, sharing, showing, and inventing new games. It was fun, and generally people were happy, win or lose. But everyone sometimes got unhappy if they lost too many times in a row, or lost a large pot by a very close margin. At these points, when tension rose, liking to play became wanting to win. Joy became addiction to the ‘high’ of taking risks and winning big. The nights I liked best were the ones where I came out ahead, but not too far ahead, and not as a result of any one person’s loss. Yet I know there is a gambler in me, someone who wants to win more than he likes to play. When I get stressed, I distract myself with video games (including poker against computer opponents) and I want to win (and get upset when I don’t, even though there is no ‘real’ money involved).

Scientists now say that the chemical reactions in the body when we ‘want’ something (dopamine-based) are different from those when we ‘like’ something (endomorphin and enkephalin based). Why would this be so?

My hypothesis is that this different chemistry evolved to suit different requirements: Our wants take precedence in times of stress or scarcity, while our likes take precedence in times of peace and abundance. When we can “afford” it, we do what we like; the rest of the time, we do what we want. This does make sense in the context of wants being more urgent and closer to needs.

Creatures in the wild, according to some biologists, spend most of their lives in “Now Time” — present, blissful, unaware of the passage or even existence of “Clock Time”. During this time they are happy (that’s in the best interest of the perpetuation of the species) and their lives are seemingly eternal. Their body chemistry in this state is driven by endomorphins (not to be confused with endorphins) and enkephalins, which create a feeling of bliss.

In times of stress or scarcity, however, wild creatures snap into “Clock Time” (the instantaneous time-sensitive state that most humans spend their entire lives in), and hormones are produced to equip the body for fight-or-flight. They are driven then to satisfy immediate needs and wants (safety, food, victory over a predator or enemy etc.), and their body chemistry in this state is driven by dopamine — which immediately flushes the body when a craving for one of these needs or wants is satisfied. Not the same thing as happiness at all. When the crisis has passed, the creature returns quickly to Now Time, and the endomorphins and enkephalins again take charge of the body, seeking happiness.

Except for the few humans who are able to set aside the constant and chronic stressors of modern civilization culture (through meditation or other relaxation/awareness/presence practices), we humans spend all our lives charged up and seeking the satisfaction of our endless needs and wants, the dopamine “rush”. And our industrial civilization culture, which now depends on a constant growth of consumption, encourages this by creating additional “needs” and anxiety about scarcity and inadequacy. We’re never really happy, only temporarily satisfied.

My guess is that the emotional and erotic response stimuli shown in the Chemistry of Love chart above, are primarily “want” chemicals, while the aesthetic, sensual and intellectual response stimuli in the chart are primarily “like” chemicals. Science remains almost entirely clueless on this, however, so this is only a wild guess.

This is part of the reason, I think, that we humans have become so utterly disconnected from Gaia, from the land and place where we live, from all-life-on-Earth. That biophilia connection is a “like” connection, which only few humans, rarely, really feel, so deeply are we buried in the chemistry of unfulfilled needs and wants. Yet our instincts, I think, still “know” and long for this connection, and every once in a while, in those still, peaceful moments of deep relaxation and awareness, we become present, shift into Now Time, and start to resonate with the ancient and delightful chemistry of what we really like, beyond wants and needs.

That is why I believe that the essential preparation for the coming economic, energy and ecological crises, culminating in the collapse of our exhausted civilization, is re-acquiring those essential capacities that will lift us out of the culturally-created illusion that our world is one of endless conflict and scarcity, full of unmet needs and desperate wants, and move us into the real-ization that a better, simpler life is possible, one almost entirely without wants or needs, one where we are free to enjoy what we really like — being in love, being in nature, listening to music, play, learning and helping others, all things that are and have always been free.

Only then can we realize that our civilization culture cannot be reformed to provide what we want and need (in fact its purpose is to create more and greater wants and needs). And by its very design, it will never make us happy.

cartoon by Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune, from Cagle comics

The Occupy movement has focused public attention on the vast and growing disparity of wealth and power in the US, and increasingly in other affluent nations. You’ve all seen the statistics — essentially all of the increase in real wealth and income over the last 40 years has accrued to less than 1% of citizens, and for the other 99% real wealth and income have declined, in some cases precipitously. As a result, nearly half of all Americans, and well more than half of American children, now live in poverty or near-poverty. There is essentially no social or economic mobility left in US society — if you’re born rich, you will surely grow richer, and if you’re born poor, you will surely grow poorer. The American Dream, and the American middle class, are dead.

This dramatic and accelerating shift has not been an accident. It is the result of deliberate policy decisions that have prevailed since the Reagan/Thatcher era: Huge subsidies, bailouts, tax loopholes and tax cuts for the rich and wealthy, near-zero interest rates (well below the real cost of living, masked by fake government statistics), massive deregulation (and non-enforcement or cheap out-of-court settlement of horrific regulatory violations), dismantling of employee benefits, crippling of unions and workers’ rights, incentives for offshoring and laying off domestic employees, and on and on.

The rich and powerful now own the politicians of all major parties, almost all of the large corporations that control much of the economy, and the mainstream media, and through them they have altered the financial, political, economic, tax, regulatory, information and education systems, globally, to suit their own purposes and entrench and further enlarge their power, wealth and privilege. As long as this elite continues to wield this much power, the situation will continue to get worse. And as renowned management consultant Charles Handy has said: No one gives up power willingly or voluntarily.

So how might this power be shifted? How can we radically redistribute income, accumulated wealth and power from the 1% to the 99%? The likelihood of revolution seems remote, and revolutions rarely achieve democratic or egalitarian ends anyways — the power and wealth are simply redistributed to a new elite. Political reform seems equally improbable, since the political systems (and the use of bribes, first-past-the-post voting, interference with minority voting rights, election-rigging, super PACs, paid media smears of establishment critics, backroom deals, threats from slimy corporate lawyers, and gerrymandering) ensure that there is no choice for voters that is not endorsed by the 1%.

We could wait until the economy collapses, at which point governments, banks, large corporations and the media will also collapse. The wealth and power of the 1% will then largely evaporate, and the elite will take what’s left of their money and retreat behind their gated mansions, as the suffering of everyone else mounts.

We will of course continue, no matter what happens and no matter what else we do, to try as networkers and teachers and writers to inform the majority of the 99% about the criminal actions and social and environmental atrocities that have allowed the 1% to acquire and entrench their wealth and power, and as activists to undermine, mitigate and undo some of their most outrageous damage and injustices. But this is a tall order: Decades of propaganda and educational neglect have brainwashed most citizens to believe the rich and powerful have earned their privileges legally and ethically, and that there are opportunities for anyone to join them. And that until/unless they join that elite the average citizen isn’t listened to and can’t change anything anyways.

Thanks to the Occupy movement, the Indignant movement and the Arab Spring movement, it is dawning on many people that the massive disparity and inequity of wealth, income and power in the world is not because some people are smarter or luckier or harder-working than others, but because the 1% have cheated, bribed and stolen the wealth of the 99%, and the natural wealth of the Earth, and used it to brutally and relentlessly consolidate their power over all of the systems of modern society, on a global basis. That, in effect, our society is now run by a privileged, in-bred and self-perpetuating elite of gangsters and banksters — an illegitimate, unelected, undemocratic, criminal elite. One that is running our economy off a cliff, and desolating our world to the point of collapse.

Still, the conditioned response of most people, even those most oppressed and those most aware of the true extent of malfeasance that has led to this state, is a “Well what can we do anyway?” shrug. “It’s always been this bad” resignation and “It’s not really that bad” denial play right into the hands of the elite. That is why I predicted that (although I think there is still considerable life left in it yet) the Metamovement will ultimately fail. No one gives up power willingly or voluntarily. And (almost) no one is prepared to make the powerful give it up involuntarily.

So we wait.

The people of the world’s struggling nations (and the homeless in affluent nations) are perhaps a step ahead of the rest of us in this cycle of growing disparity and hopelessness. They have lived with this reality longer, and while there are still millions, perhaps billions longing and dreaming of joining the elite, there are few in denial that the rich and powerful are substantially gangsters and banksters dressed up and posing as caring democrats.

If we can, like them, move past denial, what would it then take to move past outrage, and move to take back our political and economic systems? Is “involuntary” redistribution of income, wealth and power in a morally bankrupt political and economic system necessarily violent? Is it even possible, or, as Hendrik Hertzberg at The New Yorker has written, are the huge, massively-complicated, centralized, necessarily-bureaucratic systems that underpin our civilization themselves the problem — is their very size their undoing? Could we really bring about change, for example, by revoking the rights of corporations and making the elite individuals hiding behind them personally and fully liable for their corporations’ (and banks’, and political parties’) illegal activities? Or would their armies of well-paid lawyers simply prove, as many believe, that the rich and powerful can get away with anything?

And then what? When corrupted courts exonerate the criminal elite, will that elite be spurred to even more extreme and transparent outrages, and will a chastened citizenry give up once and for all and just struggle along as best they can? The failure of most of the public to become outraged at the Citizens United case, or other egregious highly-publicized pro-corporatist court decisions, is disturbing.

My sense is that most citizens (and the proportion is growing with each new generation) intuitively feel that the systems under which we are forced to live and work are hopelessly broken and that the elite is too well entrenched for there to be any hope of fixing these systems through reform, by “working within the system”.

So we wait.

The work of anthropologists suggests this is how civilizations often end. When the majority have given up believing in them and in their possible reform, but are not yet ready to walk away from them, system collapse becomes inevitable. The coming Long Emergency, as our unsustainable economic, energy and ecological activities cause all of our civilization’s systems to repeatedly reel and stumble, and finally fall, will give most of us, I think, the impetus we need to walk away, at first to the edges, where the homeless in affluent nations and the vast majority in struggling nations are already living — outside the purview of the “official” political, economic and other systems, and then off the edge, to begin to create new systems from the ground up. I see all of this happening, in waves and fits and starts, over the next half-century. We will have no other choice.

Until then, the gangsters and banksters will continue to rule, though more and more uneasily, as their own dependence on many of these systems results in them slowly or quickly losing most of their wealth and power. And even then they will have more than most of us could ever dream of.

So we wait. And do what we can, in the meantime, both to mitigate as much as possible the most egregious ills of the elite machine, and to begin to begin to learn what we must learn to start again when that machine completes its desolation of our planet, and implodes.

Cartoon by Terry Mosher (Aislin) in the Montreal Gazette

It’s been a particularly dispiriting month for those of us doing the grim duty of chronicling civilization’s collapse. I had hoped that when the unsustainability of our economic and political systems became obvious, those with wealth and power would take their money and run, rather than fight an unwinnable battle. But it’s becoming clear that denial among the 1% is strong, and they’re willing to do just about anything to hold on to power, including waging an all-out war against the citizens who gave them that power. Some evidence of what they’ve done recently, and the consequences:

• Obama signed an abhorrent military bill authorizing the indefinite and arbitrary detention (and possible torture or ‘disappearance’ in Guantanamo or one of the secret military prisons) without charge or access to lawyers or appeal, of anyone deemed to be a ‘terrorist’ by the US government or its agents, regardless of citizenship, and anywhere in the world.
• The FBI has joined the Canadian intelligence service in deeming animal welfare activists, including anyone who dares expose or even just investigate the evils of factory farms, testing laboratories and other animal torture facilities, to be ‘terrorists’, subject to the above human rights abuses (thanks to David Hodgson for the link).
• Obama has also resumed the use of Bush’s ‘signing statements’, objecting to dozens of provisions in the latest budget bill sent to him by Congress as impeding on his constitutional authority, announcing his intention to ignore those provisions as he in his sole discretion deems appropriate. Bush used these provisions basically to put himself above the law, and Obama, facing a hostile and utterly dysfunctional Congress, is now following suit.
• Details of mindless slaughter of Afghan civilians by the US occupying force, covered up by the authorities, were found in a junkyard.
• Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has been a “one-stop wrecking machine” for environmental legislation, watering down or eliminating regulations at the behest of corporate lobbyists more energetically than Bush did. And the Republican Congress is introducing a new bill to allow them to unilaterally kill any new regulation its corporate owners don’t like.
• In a secret wire, Canada’s security agency asserted that without using torture, they couldn’t do their job, and lobbied the government to renew the law enabling them to do so.
• We’re still learning the chilling truths about the billion dollar G20 police-staged riots in Toronto last year. Most Canadians thought this type of politically-motivated police thuggery could never happen here.
• Thanks to a freedom of information investigation by the Climate Change Network, it has been revealed that Environment Canada warned the Canadian government about the ecological atrocity of the Alberta Tar Sands, and the government chose to label the report ‘secret’ and bury it.
• When BC First Nations presented a united front against the Alberta Tar Sands pipeline, threatening to blockade bulldozers if necessary, the slimy pipeline consortium found a dissident group of members of one group and ‘persuaded’ them to sign a contract approving the pipeline on behalf of their people. A new study describes the huge risks involved in the project.
• The village of Attawapiskat is a hell-hole in Canada’s north where due to unresolved sewage backups in their community First Nations people have been living for three years in horrific conditions in temporary mouldy wooden and canvas housing; the right-wing Harper government blames the First Nations, accusing them of wasting government money sent to them.
• The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has, well, basically stopped inspecting food (and specifically the claims made on labels regarding efficacy and nutritional value), leaving the powerful and chronically negligent agribusiness industry to “self-regulate”.
• Despite conservatives’ aggressive attempts to discredit the statistics, reviewers have now confirmed that the recent US census did indeed show that nearly 1/2 of all Americans are now either living in poverty or living below twice the poverty level, defined as ‘low income/near poor’. Further evidence of the disappearance of the middle class.

As long as we cling to the foolish belief that these systems can be ‘reformed’, or that with the right ‘leaders’ the systems can be made to work, we will waste time that could be spent learning and practising community-building, and planning, acquiring and developing the new relocalized competencies, processes, resources and infrastructures needed to sustain ourselves when the current systems crumble. What will it take before we understand that sustainable ways of living must be local, rooted in place and adaptive to the unique situation of each place, and that they simply do not scale without becoming unresponsive, ineffective, bloated with useless bureaucracy, and utterly corrupt?

We have seen this ‘failure to scale’ now in ideologies across the political spectrum: Communism, capitalism, mixed-economy socialism, libertarianism — none of these economic systems scales without becoming dysfunctional. I have long been a believer in the mixed-economy model used in Scandinavia and (though it is currently being dismantled by governing corporatists) in Canada. I know a lot of bright, passionate, well-intentioned people who work in the ‘public sector’ in fields like social welfare, education and health, and even they admit the systems they work in are dysfunctional, and the money and energy spent on them are largely wasted and ineffective at achieving the goals these services are intended to provide.

The users of these services — notably the physically and mentally ill, the poor, the homeless, the sick, and students — often don’t know what they need or want, and have been so dumbed down by (and become so dependent on) these systems that they can’t begin to partner competently with service providers to make the provision of these services even marginally effective. Most people simply don’t know how to prevent, self-diagnose or self-treat illnesses, how to learn, how to make a living for themselves, or how to self-manage any aspect of their lives in even the most basic ways. As long as these systems depend on massive, centralized, standardized bureaucracies catering to incapacitiated, dependent ‘clients’, there is no hope for them. We need to let go of these systems, and our belief in them, and start the hard work of learning how to prepare for, and adapt to, full-on collapse and the crises that will accompany it.

photo ridiculing Fox News’ allegation that the new Muppet Movie is left-wing propaganda

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

Occupy Space, Cooperatively: Shareable.net talks about the need for a permanent, vibrant physical space for the Occupy movement in each community. I think this is absolutely essential. We can’t learn the process of building community when we’re constantly dealing with evictions from politicians and police. If we create community space in each community for this purpose, not only will the movement be more effective, the creation of the space as a cooperative will be a great exercise in learning how to create local coop enterprises. And it will give us practice in facilitating large and small groups, in creating a vision of the world we want and intend to create, in making decisions and achieving consensus and in resolving conflicts. Thanks to Tree for the links.

Practical Post-Scarcity: Open Source Ecology identifies and teaches how to build, maintain and use 50 essential machines that can be made from local materials, and which allow construction and manufacture of many of the structures and products needed for self-sustained communities, fuelled by local renewable energy sources. Thanks to Seb Paquet for the link. An interesting contrast to Hexayurts, the simple, cheap buildings proposed by Vinay Gupta and popular among Dark Mountain’s members.

A Kinder Gentler Revolution: Thanks in part to the Occupy movement, there has been a resurgent interest in the importance of compassion and generosity in achieving change. Ripples of kindness, caring, thoughtfulness. Helping people save their homes. Thanks to Tree for the links. And for more on the deeper meaning behind Occupy, check out Tom Atlee‘s blog.

Cash Out Time: Ilargi at TAE says it’s time to start taking some of your money out of the banking system and keeping it in cash.

China Collapsing?: Paul Krugman sees signs that the fragile, critical economy and social fabric of China is disintegrating.

Economic Re-Set: Jim Kunstler foresees the collapse of the European economy and a possible disruption to next year’s US elections as a result. He describes the coming economic meltdown as not being a depression, but rather a “re-set”.

LIVING BETTER

Free Food: Todmorden, UK has now achieved substantial food security, growing (and giving away) all its own vegetables. Thanks to Tree for the link. Meanwhile, Stan Goff at Feral Garden calls for “a million gardens” as the first stage of achieving local food self-sufficiency, an act of emancipation from the agribusiness industry. Thanks to Paul Heft and Anthony Dias for that link.

Derek Sivers’ Co-op Business Model: From the founder of CD Baby: You already have something that people need. Find out what that is and share it with everyone that needs it. If it takes effort to do so, charge a little so you can keep on sharing it. Thanks to Kate Michi Ettinger for the link.

Pro-Vegetarian Ad Campaign: Toronto transit riders get the message. Note: video contains disturbing scenes. Thanks to Prad for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Enough of that in my opening remarks this month.

cartoon by David Sipress in the New Yorker

FUN AND INSPIRATION

A Letter to Yourself at Age 16: What would you say to your 16 year old self, if you knew then what you know now? Thanks to Nick Smith for the link and the one that follows.

Why Humans Had to Invent Time: Without it, we would be stuck in the present. Fascinating set of experiments to demonstrate this.

How to Avoid Occupy Eviction: How Occupy Melbourne prevented the tents from being dismantled. Priceless. Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.

What’s It All About ALF: Steve Best provides a compelling and compassionate portrait of the animal liberation movement.

Who: Amazing hi-res slow-motion video of owl landing. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Feminist Sci-Fi: Liz Henry tells you what to read to put a different perspective in your reading.

Aaron Hobson’s Google Street View collection: An amazing, haunting collection of uncomposed photos from the Google Street View van. Thanks to Sam Mills for the link.

Dan Gilbert: On what makes us happy (not what you’d expect). And on how our failure to understand what will/won’t make us happy in the future leads us to make bad decisions (and to indecision).

Robert Sapolski: On how we mishandle stress. And on what makes our minds work differently, we think, from other creatures’. Thanks to Avi Solomon for the links.

Movin’ On Up: Fascinating study of the exodus of blacks from SF to the exurbs, and how they were disproportionately hit by the housing/foreclosure crisis. Sometimes charts and statistics do help you understand. Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.

Edible Education 101: Atlantic offers the entire Michael Pollan lecture series in sustainable food production online. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link.

Hallelujah Chorus for Corporations: Corporations are people too. Thanks to 3Es Newsletter for the link.

I’m Going to Go Back There Some Day: Gonzo (Dave Goelz) sings the best Muppet song ever, penned by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

From Maia Duerr: “Every dollar you spend is a statement about the kind of world you want”. (original author unknown)

From Derek Sivers’ book Anything You Want (advice for entrepreneurs):

Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
Never do anything just for the money. The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes you happy.
Just answer the calls for help.
Your business plan is moot. You don’t know what people really want until you start doing it.
Starting with no money is an advantage. You don’t need money to start helping people.
You can’t please everyone, so proudly exclude people.
Make yourself unnecessary to the running of your business.
Don’t think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today.
Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing.

From WS Merwin:

THE NEW SONG

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song

—–

Collapse! The Game

DRAFT 1.0

Purpose of the Game: To enable those concerned about coping with emerging economic, energy and ecological crises to learn about and practice, through game simulation, building resilient and sustainable communities.

Game Objective: The players work cooperatively to build a new self-sufficient, resilient community, and prepare for and deal with various 21st century crises as they impact the community. The effectiveness of their efforts is reflected by changes in the community’s Well-Being Index (WBI). The game continues until the WBI either falls below the ‘unsustainable’ threshold (game is lost) or rises above the ‘exemplary’ threshold (game is won).

Equipment:

• The Community Story: This is the background story behind the creation of your community. This reflects the culture of the community, what led it to be created, and the particular advantages and vulnerabilities of the specific place where the community is located. A generic story is provided, but players are encouraged to modify the generic story to better suit the situation of the particular place where they live.
• The Community Map: This map shows the 13 Aspects of an Effective Community (see illustration 1), and tracks the ‘investment’ of members of the community in (a) infrastructure, (b) resources and (c) acquiring competencies, relevant to each Aspect.
• The Well-Being Index: The index (WBI – see illustration 2) is initially set to a score of 60 (‘satisfactory’). Events, activities, investments and crises all affect the WBI. The lowest WBI levels shown on the index is 30 (‘unsustainable’); the highest level is 90 (‘exemplary’).
• The Community Vulnerabilities Matrix and 22 Crisis Tokens: This matrix (see illustration 3) shows the probability (horizontal axis) and potential severity (vertical axis) of 11 different types of crisis that can affect the community. Each crisis has both a ‘mild’ (low severity high probability) and a ‘severe’ (high severity low probability) version. A suggested starting position for the tokens for each version of each crisis is provided, but players are welcome to modify these starting positions to better reflect actual vulnerabilities in their community. The position of crisis tokens on the matrix is affected by various event cards that are drawn during the game; some events will push a crisis ‘over the edge’ at which point players must deal with it as a crisis occurring in the community in real time.
• Crisis Descriptions: A description of each version of each of the 11 crises is provided, but players are welcome to amend the descriptions to better reflect the situation in their specific community. These descriptions are used to assess the impact of an occurring crisis on each Aspect of the community, and to provide a context for the Strategy Discussion among players on how to address the crisis. Note that crises are not independent — increases and decreases in risks of some crises will automatically increase or decrease the risks of other crises.
• Infrastructure, Resource and Specialized Competency Cards: Forty cards of each of these three types suggest investments that can be made in specific Aspects of the community. An additional 20 cards describe General Competencies that can be useful in any of the 13 Aspects of the community. Players must decide collaboratively which of these to invest in, which involves risk trade-offs.
• Event Cards: 120 cards describe various events that are drawn at random and which govern the progress of the game. Some events are beneficial; others are not, and increase the risk of crises occurring. Some events are personal (e.g. they may entail a player losing his/her competencies, or acquiring sudden wealth that can be invested strategically in the community). The event cards include 10 ‘Black Swan’ event cards; suggested ‘Black Swan’ events are provided on these cards, but players are welcome, before the start of the game, to secretly write their own alternative ‘Black Swan’ events which, if these cards are drawn, override the default suggested events. The drawing of an event card represents the passing of 3 months of time in the life of the community.
• Crisis Impacts Table: Shows the impact of each version of each of the 11 crises on each of the 13 Aspects of the community (see illustration 4). This table is used by the community in assessing its vulnerabilities and deciding what investments of infrastructure, resources and competencies to make in each Aspect.

Play:

1. Set-up: The players read out, and if desired, amend the Community Story to suit their local community’s situation.
2. Each player can choose to write one alternative, secret Black Swan event, containing the same information as the Black Swan cards in the deck. They assign it a number from 1 to 10, also secretly. If that Black Swan card is drawn in play, they announce the replacement Black Swan event they have written. (If two players have written a replacement for the same Black Swan event, the event written by the player who is next to draw an event card prevails).
3. The 140 Infrastructure, Resource and Competency cards are shuffled together. Ninety of them are dealt at random to the players, who turn them over so all players can read them. In turn, each player, in consultation with the group, discards one of their cards until only 65 cards remain. Tokens are placed on the respective hexagons of the community map to show which Aspect these 65 ‘investments’ in the community apply to. Players holding General Competency cards must choose and write down which two Aspects they elect to apply those General Competencies to. Depending on the number of General Competencies of the community, the number of initial tokens on the map will vary from 65 to 85, with an average of 75 (about 6 per Aspect).
4. The Well-Being Index marker is placed at the number corresponding to the number of tokens on the Community Map minus 15 (i.e. approximately 60).
5. The 22 labelled Crisis Risk tokens are placed on the Community Vulnerabilities Matrix at the initial positions suggested in illustration 3. The community members then discuss whether they wish to adjust these Crisis Risk token positions to better reflect the specific vulnerabilities of their community. Each token can only be moved one space in any direction, with the proviso that when any token is moved, another token must be moved in the opposite direction. For crises moved up or down on the Matrix, make a note on the Crisis Impacts Table — all non-zero Crisis Numbers for that row of the table need to be adjusted up or down by 1 accordingly when a crisis occurs.
6. The 22 Crisis Descriptions are passed around for players to familiarize themselves with. By consensus, any of the Descriptions can be amended to better reflect the specific situation of the community in which the players live. (The game includes printable electronic versions of the Descriptions, should players want to permanently customize the Descriptions to suit their specific situation).
7. Now, each player in turn draws an Event card, and follows the instructions thereon. If the Event card drawn results in a Crisis, proceed to step 8 (otherwise go step 9).
8. When a Crisis occurs, the process is as follows:
   • Refer to the Crisis Impacts Table. For each Aspect of community that is affected by the crisis, compare the investment in (resilience of) that Aspect (total number of tokens on the four hexagons for that Aspect) to the Crisis Number on the Crisis Impacts Table.
   • If the investment is greater than or equal to the Crisis Number, remove one token (which one to remove is determined by consensus) from that Aspect of the Community Map, and have the player with that investment discard it (it goes back to the pile that may be drawn again in future turns); reduce the WBI by one point.
   • If the investment is less than the Crisis Number, an emergency meeting of the community is convened:
     • The Crisis Description card is read out. The various (but inadequate number of) investments in Infrastructure, Resources and Competencies for that Aspect are read out. The group now collectively discusses what their Strategy might be to deal with this crisis if it occurred with this level of severity in their community. This requires honesty, debate and imagination.
     • After this discussion, by consensus (unanimous agreement, though players may ‘stand aside’ if they are not in agreement but don’t feel strongly enough to ‘block’ consensus), the community assesses the adequacy of its in-the-moment Strategy. They can choose to remove any number of tokens from one to all of the tokens in that Aspect, to reflect this consensus on the effectiveness of the crisis strategy. (Note: If there are NO tokens in that Aspect when the crisis occurs, or if the Crisis Number is more than 3 greater than the number of tokens for that Aspect, NO strategy will be adequate and the game is lost, regardless of the community’s overall WBI score.)
     • For each token removed, a corresponding Infrastructure, Resource or Competency card is returned to the discard pile (exception: if it is General Competency card, it is only returned to the discard pile if it has been eliminated from both Aspects where it was applied), and for each token removed WBI is reduced by one point.
     • Continue for all Aspects affected by the crisis. When you are finished, note the Related Crises for this crisis (shown on both the Crisis Description and on the applicable Crisis Risk tokens). For each Related Crisis you must now move the two Crisis Risk tokens either one space right or one space up (decide this by group consensus). If you move the token to the right and this moves it into the orange Crisis Occurs area, you now have another crisis — repeat this entire step for this new crisis. If you move the token up, make a note on the Crisis Impacts Table — all non-zero Crisis Numbers for this row of the table will go up by one when this crisis actually occurs.
9. The player completes their turn by drawing 2 cards from the unused Infrastructure, Resource and Competency cards and selecting one to ‘invest’ their time/energy in, adding a token to the appropriate square of the Community Map and moving the WBI index up by one point accordingly.
10. Repeat steps 7-9 as applicable for each player in turn until one of the following occurs: (a) WBI rises above 90 to the Exemplary level (game is won — congratulations), or (b) WBI falls below 30 to the Unsustainable level, or there is an inadequate number of tokens to deal with a crisis in point 8 of someone’s turn (game is lost — but you learned a lot about resilience, sustainability, community and consensus, right?)

Work still to be done:

• Write the 140 Infrastructure, Resource and Competency cards (I’m about 1/2 way through this process)
• Write the Event cards (just beginning this process)
• Write the generic Community Story and Crisis Descriptions
• Test the game out with various numbers of players to ensure that the Event cards make the game challenging but not impossible
• Field test the whole game with people familiar with sustainability, community and resilience, to improve the realism of the stories, vulnerabilities, crises, events, and strategy processes of the game etc.

This is another post in my ongoing personal exploration of ‘who we (human beings) are’, how we got that way, and how, at the individual level, we might learn to better heal, better adapt, and better prepare ourselves for what’s to come.

I‘m a pretty fearful guy. I spend a lot of time trying to work up the courage and/or energy to do important things, and not much actually voluntarily doing anything important (I’m comfortably retired from paid work, so I am fortunate to not have to do anything).

At the risk of appearing to rationalize my unproductivity, I have a theory for why I am this way: Our culture wants us fearful and (emotionally) flattened. Here’s my thinking:

Back when there were only a few million of our species, we had no real need for culture. When I observe wild creatures, I see them living “in the now”. They will do what is needed to help the flock/herd/group in the moment, and most wild creatures are a lot more generous and altruistic than we might think. What they are not is anxious or fearful about the future, or in thrall to their collective culture. That’s in part because they ‘know’ they have no control over the future, so there is no evolutionary point in them imagining it or worrying about it. Their fears are immediate, and require a quick fight/flight response, after which the anger and/or sorrow they felt when the fear was realized, is discharged, and they return to living joyfully in Now Time. That’s not to say they don’t feel grief at the loss or suffering of a loved one — just that they are not fruitlessly consumed or debilitated by these feelings.

Wild creatures have cultures (read Bernd Heinrich’s works on corvids if you want to learn more about avian cultures), but these cultures are simple emergent properties of the reality of their lives; culture is not necessary to their evolutionary success and does not impose itself on individuals in the group. Wild creatures do what they do because their instinctive, intellectual, sensory and emotional ‘knowledge’ guides them. They may scrap with others in their group, and may not always get what they want, and they are able in the moment to collaborate brilliantly to achieve a shared goal, but ultimately they make their own culturally-unencumbered decisions.

When human populations started to outstrip the carrying capacity of our ecosystems (the reason why we did so is a subject for another essay) it became necessary for our species to ‘settle’, and to create new political, economic and social systems just to survive in unnaturally large numbers and concentrations. Democracy and personal freedoms don’t scale well, especially in situations of horrific and unnatural overcrowding, so as these human systems grew larger they had to become ever-more coercive — we had to be forced to conform, to obey others and cultural “rules”, to “settle” for less than what our wild selves had always been accustomed to, and will always yearn for.

As our human numbers accelerated and soared past a billion, the levels of human violence and oppression have ratcheted up commensurately. So have the numbers physically imprisoned — in jails, ghettos, camps, and (in Gaza for example) even whole nations.

But physical violence and physical constraints have not been enough to keep us in line. To submit more and more of the ever-increasing plague of human numbers to the necessary levels of restraint and suppression of our natural behaviours, psychological violence has been required as well. What I see, all over the world, are two now-endemic forms of psychological violence invoked to keep seven billion people in our culture’s thrall:

1. the social construction and constant triggering of a new set of crippling fears via learned helplessness, and
2. the emotional flattening of the human spirit through social prohibitions and inurement.

To inure is “to habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection” or acculturation. If you are subjected to something long enough and often enough (e.g. spending time in slaughterhouses or jails or emergency wards or factory farms or “old age” homes or street gangs or torture prisons or refugee camps or ghettos or the armed forces or police forces, or living with an abuser, or watching violent “entertainment”) you become habituated to it. You become unable to feel the strong negative emotions and visceral revulsion that you would if this were a rare or brief event. You cannot. You emotionally detach, disengage, dissociate. No one can sustain that intensity of emotion indefinitely. The emotion gets suppressed, turned inward, and eventually the chemical reaction that occurs no longer has the same effect. You become emotionally flattened, numbed.

From the perspective of a massive human culture that is trying to get all seven billion of its members to work hard without anger, grief, outrage, or complaint, such emotional flattening provides a huge evolutionary advantage. If you can be inured to not care, or to not care to know, you can be made to do anything. Or, in the face of continued cultural atrocities, to do nothing.

But there is an even more powerful tool that can be brought to bear to wield control over billions of people — fear. Fear is a natural phenomenon — most creatures have evolved instinctive fears of injury, and of being trapped, and of imminent harm happening to their loved ones, and these instincts have helped them survive.

Humans, however, thanks to our exceptional imaginations and memory and our invention of “Clock” Time, are capable of whole sets of additional fears about things that are either outside our control or are about the future. It doesn’t matter whether we are able to do anything useful with these fears. If they are invoked, we will fear nonetheless — and groups that are able to invoke widespread fear among others can capitalize brilliantly on it. Here are some of the things we humans fear (the taxonomy is mine, and is not intended to be complete or scientific); the ones on the right are those fears our culture has added to our instinctive repertoire, and thence exploited mercilessly and relentlessly to keep us in line:

Fearful and flattened. That’s what our industrial growth culture wants and needs of its members, now that it is a global monoculture strained to its absolute limits. Unless exercised in a culturally-approved way (such as “competitive” sports, wars, or abuse of one’s work or social “subordinates”), or locked away behind closed doors where there is plausible deniability, anger is now met with quick and violent suppression. Peaceful but angry demonstrations are met with heavily-armed stormtroopers. Anyone who even discusses angry resistance to the ecological desolation of our planet, to the theft and pillaging of Earth’s resources for the benefit of a tiny rapacious 1%, or to wars over oil or ideology, is branded a “terrorist” and subject to “disappearance”, extraordinary rendition to torture prisons, and/or indefinite imprisonment.

Likewise, feelings of debilitating grief, which I think are perfectly normal in our terrible world, have been pathologized and are now treated with large doses of anti-depressants or, failing that, ostracism and/or incarceration or other institutionalization. Our industrial culture teaches us to self-victimize. We are to blame, we are told, for our own unemployment and poverty (due to personal laziness or lack of moral fibre). We are to blame, too, for our own chronic illnesses (due to our poor eating and exercising habits). Suicide is, of course, treated not only as a sign of irresponsibility, but as a crime.

Our culture employs propaganda not only to divert responsibility for our anger and grief to ourselves, but also to keep us fearful. The propaganda machine creates a worldview of danger and scarcity, consuming us with fear of attack, of failure, of loss (especially loss of love), of uncertainty, of not fitting in and “not having enough”. And, of course, of death.

Because of our brain’s vulnerability to these future, unpredictable, easily-exaggerated and unactionable fears, our culture can exploit us by playing on our anxieties — re-triggerable dreads that precede fear and subside when those fears are not realized. Anxieties are conceivable fears. Any fear that can be conceived — terrorists, foreigners, rejection, threats of all kinds — can be blown up and exploited and used to control us and our behaviour, and even to immobilize us.

This cultural immobilization runs deeper than most of us ever realize. People on their death-beds, asked what they most regret in their lives, overwhelmingly cite things they regret not doing rather than things they did, and most of those ‘inactions’ are the result of cultural constraints or personal self-constraints, self-censorship of action, rather than the result of never having the opportunity to do those things. Daniel Gilbert‘s research shows that (thanks to our cultural programming) we have a tendency to overestimate the impact of current and future events and decisions on our future happiness, and this makes us timid and risk-averse in making those decisions, and overly preoccupied with the future instead of our current happiness. And many people’s reaction to Derrick Jensen’s relentless urging of us to act on our instincts in defence of our suffering and dying planet, is resentment at being pushed to do what is culturally-prohibited, rather than anger at the culture that is, with our own complicity, holding us back.

There are two cycles, which I think are unique to our species (or at least to large-brained species), that can be provoked with appropriate propaganda, as shown in the diagram below.

Because our brains create stories (mental representations of what is, was, may be or will be, and of who we are and why we are that way), we can and do constantly ‘re-enact’ situations which caused us pain and suffering — what I call the grief/inurement cycle. We feel the pain, we create a story to explain it, that story is so vivid and memorable that recalling it re-invokes the pain, and so on. We can become incapacitated by such suffering, until enough cycles have passed that we begin to forget these stories and heal. This aids a coercive culture in two ways: through the initial debilitation that prevents us from acting against the perpetrator of the outrage that produced the pain, and through the inurement that comes when we become so desensitized to the outrages, and the pain and suffering, that we begin to accept them as normal, the only way to live.

And then there’s the feedback cycle from anger and sorrow to chronic anxiety, as our brains imagine situations in which the atrocity that caused our pain could recur again and again, to the point this anxiety begins to immobilize us, and makes us pliable to cultural forces that promise to relieve us of or protect us from the things we have learned to fear. As Robert Sapolsky‘s research has shown, this anxiety/fear/pain/anger/grief feedback cycle is an emergent property and unintended consequence of our brain’s exceptional ability to imagine and recall, and the anxiety, especially in situations where events are outside our control, is unhealthy and useless — except to the culture that wants to use it to control us. This cycle also produces “learned helplessness” — the invalid but propaganda-reinforced sense that there is nothing we can do, except hope and trust that our ‘leaders’ can ‘save’ us.

Those who presume to be able to tell us how to deal with and ‘overcome’ our fears suggest six broad approaches to doing so. None of them is simple, or else we would all be using it. But the harder approaches (at least, harder for me: your experience may be different) seem to me to offer more effective ways of interrupting the vicious cycle of suffering, grief and inurement, or the vicious cycle of chronic anxiety and learned helplessness. Here’s a table that shows these six broad approaches to dealing with fear, and my personal assessment of their potential efficacy (again, your experience may be different):

The first, and obvious, approach is to try to avoid situations that give rise to fear or anxiety in the first place, but I’m learning that this is futile. The more you try to protect yourself, the more vulnerable you become to events and situations you could not avoid, and in the process you can incapacitate yourself to the point you become afraid to do anything.

Another common approach is to try to discharge, through physical means or through conversation therapies or other behavioural techniques, the emotion that the fear gives rise to. Many people believe wild animals do this when they “shake off” their emotion after averting danger. The theory is that this “discharging” cuts off both the grief/inurement cycle and the anxiety/fear/pain/anger/sorrow cycle by preventing the pain from being constantly revisited and reimagined and dwelled upon. But I would argue that we are incapable of having that much control over our memories and imaginations, and that while discharging might provide temporary relief, in the long term it is more likely to lead to addiction to the act of discharging (especially dangerous if that discharging is expressed as violence or unrestrained anger against others), than to any relief from either pain or recurring anxiety.

A newer method of dealing with fears is conditioning. For those with fear of flying, for example, the idea is to have the fearful person experience many safe flying experiences gradually, so that the mental connection between the experience and the feeling of pain is broken, and eventually the anticipation of the experience arouses no anxiety. I know some people for whom this has worked (and others for whom it has not). The danger is that you can end up being desensitized to real risks based on limited experiences. What happens if you are conditioning yourself to overcome fear of flying and your plane has an emergency landing? Trauma, I would think.

A fourth approach is learning and preparation. The more you know about what you can actually do if a fearful situation arises, in theory the less anxious you are likely to be about its potential occurrence. You are, in effect, combating the learned helplessness by giving yourself something (knowledge and experience) that gives you more control over a potential future experience. The danger here is that you may think you have more control than you really have, and that self-deception may lead to underreaction or complacency when the risk is real.

Now we come to the two methods I’ve been working on most recently. I think they’re connected. The idea of “letting go” of our stories about what might happen (our anxieties) to the extent they are beyond our control is extremely difficult, and I appreciate the skepticism of those who assert we can think ourselves out of our pain and anger and sorrow and fear. But our anxieties and fears and stories about things we cannot really know and cannot control is a ‘learned’ behaviour, so it should be something that, with practice and self-awareness and self-knowledge and self-management, can be unlearned.

And the sixth approach, of simply Living in the Now, and rejecting the stories our minds (and our culture) tell us about ourselves and others, and about what is and was and will be (or may be) in the future, before they even become part of our belief system and worldview, seems to me likewise a means of living more naturally, of being more present. I have had moments when I feel fully present, when I am simultaneously very aware (and self-aware) and very relaxed (and hence more competent and resilient in the moment), and in such moments I feel legitimately fearless. I want that feeling to last forever, and sense that this is the way most wild creatures, unencumbered by diabolically imaginative and past- and future-oriented brains, live their whole lives (except when danger is imminent), joyfully, naturally, and arguably more sensibly than we.

So my sense is that this practising of presence, this learning to live in Now Time and to let go what I cannot predict or control, is what I must pursue with increasing energy and commitment. I see it as being part of rediscovering who I really am, this feral, nobody-but-myself, me. And I think this is essential to cultural liberation and hence to the emotional flatness and fearfulness that is so much a part of the “everybody-else” me I have been acting as for so many years.

Maybe this is what we must all learn to do if we want to be able to do the essential work of preparing ourselves, our loved ones and our communities for the terrible crises ahead, when our industrial-growth civilization culture collapses and loosens its well-intentioned hold on the rest of us. Maybe that preparation is nothing more than this learning, this becoming ready to live without dependence on and coercion by culture. So that when it happens, we will know, as liberated, wild creatures, exactly what to do, in the moment.

Our perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps what I am seeing as the dark constraint of and the emotional imprisonment by our culture, is just my own projection, my own neat and convenient story for my own inaction, now. I don’t know. I’ll let you know if I figure it out.