The revolution will not be sensible
The breakdown of industrialised civilisation begins between our ears.
Photo by Myburgh Roux via Pexels.com (edited)
One of the most disturbing effects is how few of us now have the ability to put forward a truly cogent position. I mean on anything. On reality.
Not long ago you could believe in whatever flavour of isms you liked. You could stack it up and push it out onto the battlefield of ideas. Now it seems our brains are too Kentucky fried by individualism, media and social media to do it. Our heads are in such a spin it’s splintering us into a myriad of sub groups and niche belief systems. We skirmish over ephemeral nonsense like whether Tom Hanks is an alien or if girls exist.
Grab anyone on either side of your local counter protest. Ask them to put forward a coherent worldview. Ask yourself if it's possible to reach agreement between gibbering idiots who can’t do that.
We used to be able to sort out differences. Sure it sometimes took a while, and a lot of people got killed. We'd rally around competing notions of nationhood or religion. They’d provide the necessary gloss for our primal squabbling over stuff and sexy people to mate with.
Without these notions the fighting could continue indefinitely.
America leads the industrialised world on this. It has obvious and serious reasons for division. But these are hopelessly overwhelmed by wingdings. The US is at the mercy of a cabal of influential people for their own benefit. So let's storm a pizza restaurant looking for their child sex ring. That has all the logic of searching Fort Knox for the Easter Bunny. Meanwhile, the real conspirers are buying barrels of whisky for 16 million pounds and laughing their asses off.
It seems that declining societies lose their collective sanity fairly early on in the process. Along with climate chaos, this conceptual chaos could last generations. When the fighting starts over nothing, then nothing will stop it. Your grandchildren could spend their best years huddled around trash fires of almost entirely random beliefs.
I’ve encountered this for real. I went on a ‘peace mission’ to Angola in 2003. It had just emerged from a 26 year civil war. At one stage my companions were set to include several heavily armed mercenaries. I asked whether this was appropriate. Their leader said: “A teenage boy wearing a wedding dress and covered in razor cuts filled with cocaine waves an AK at you. Do you want us to give him the good news first?”
It was then I realised that societal breakdowns breed war bands with beliefs madder than a chilli-powdered ferret. There's the Taliban and their mates. Then there's folks like Joseph Kony’s Lord's Resistance Army. Ostensibly Christian, they believe the sign of the cross protects them from bullets. They also believe they should steal children to be soldiers and sex slaves. The prophetess that inspired them preached that shea nut oil was bullet proof. She told followers they should never kill snakes or bees.
The affluent world is cocooned inside its racism, positivity myopia and denial of even recent history. So we think this sort of thing could never happen to us. But many is the yoga teacher about three organic keto meals away from batshit in a crisis. Google up something like “Cults in industrialised nations”. You'll see what I mean.
I’m seeing signs of this all over. It’s not just my jaundiced view of people I think are wrong anyway. The event horizon for me is that it’s at least as prevalent among people I respect.
Friends and acquaintances I admire are whirling down plugholes full of crap. One veteran green campaigner button holed me at an election party. The Earth was about to flip on its axis, triggering apocalyptic tidal waves. This came fresh from the aliens he’s in telepathic contact with.
Many people from the environmental movement are getting into ‘life coaching’. A lot of it plays dangerously close to the same whacky terrain. They do a course or two. They feel qualified to tell people how to do ‘life’. If they’re as narcissistic as me this is an attractive opportunity. Like environmentalism, you can continue to feel superior and tell people what to do.
Someone I know started a LinkedIn post with: “Before I cracked the code on human potential…” Presumably they’re now a billionaire.
Similar shit is happening to many of my favourite writers.
I recently did an excellent writing course with Paul Kingsnorth. He’s a legendary activist, poet and author. His life trajectory is similar to mine, only much, much more successful. He co-founded the Dark Mountain project. A lot of this blog is a pale imitation of it. Last January he became an Orthodox Christian. So his steely eyed quest for truth now encompasses things I struggle with. Like asserting that a magic man came back from the dead because the handbook for an ancient desert peoples' mystery cult says so.
I’ve mentioned James Howard Kunstler before. He produced a masterful analysis of the unsustainability of modern suburbanism. He expanded this to describe what he calls the oncoming Long Emergency. Again, a lot of what’s in this blog is a half assed regurgitations of that. He’s now a Trump apologist and conspiracy nut. His recent material has about as much grasp on reality as Stephen Hawking had on his last mug of Horlicks.
We can argue the relative merits of telepathic aliens, resurrection, and Donald Trump. But that’s not my point. My point is that my people seem to be getting scattered to the conceptual four winds. But what we need most is to come together around some seriously practical ideas.
Which makes me worry. What if a brighter future based on collective reasoning was a luxury of affluence?
Every empire seems to have had its own version of this. The Romans had Pax Romana, America had Manifest Destiny and then The American Dream. But as empires collapse, their ideas collapse too.
What can we do about that? How can we take on the epic task of restoring our cognitive, imaginative and spiritual world?
This goes levels deeper than what we choose to believe or think. It goes beyond which side we pick on this or that issue. It is about maintaining the basic tools we believe and think with.
The crucial point is that those tools are collective. I can think or believe anything I like. It has no agency in the world unless others believe it too. Which means it needs to be developed with others.
We urgently need agreed, understood and relatively consistent ways of believing and thinking together. That’s what culture is based on. This has been neglected and abandoned. We have told ourselves that we don't need others to live. We didn’t need culture. That includes not needing others to agree what we are living for. That, it turns out, is another aspect of the dead end we have motored down. It might turn out to be the most lethal one of all.
The revolution will not be sensible
I agree that these are weird times and I often think of the Roman Empire falling into trivia, gluttony, and collective blindness - although I haven't actually researched the end of the Roman Empire, so I might be imagining a myth! Still it does so often seem as if many people are off point somehow. And, most annoying of all, I waste time and energy talking about how off point they are. Are there really only two big issues - planetary systems - i.e. the natural world, and massive material inequalities? We seem to have forgotten the material in so much of our talk - how we actually live, individually, collectively and comparatively. And what that is doing to the life systems on which we depend.
As a bar man i hear different conversations, where no one can pin the tail on the donkey.
Divisions and convictions are erected, defended and commonalities and similarities of position, place are overlooked or mistaken.
But all agree, something is not right.... (Admittedly sometimes headlines are parroted and cliches, urban myths expounded as truth.) And yes alcohol can distort differences.
And today fake news has filtered or trickled down so the common man, or in this case an ex- soldier with PTSD, who states Angela Merkel as a socialist, whilst holding his head intermittently as the horrors of the Falklands flash back. His government pension enough for self medication but not real care. Yet he still defends them in argument, the ever loyal soldier.
The wider narrative is unravelling, in the vacuum real terror may come.
In this country presently is another leadership contest and so paper thin are the lies, 'integrity' from a billionaire chancellor whose wife evaded her taxes... Are derisory and laughable ...
Yet the game is played interviews given and media backing and gravitas supplied to a parody of a tragedy. There is no real opposition be that in voting choice or on the streets...yet...
Individualism leaves us as tombstones in the graveyard.. with only epitaphs to cling too...