I have felt most of my life it's not that we as individuals are defective, it's the entire system. We're not geared for the technology and population we have grown to since the industrial revolution, and our removal from tight-knit communities has grown ever more absurd, reduced to pixels on a screen, swipe left or swipe right. Your advice to your friend was correct. Therapists are near useless, because we don't need fixing. The world at large does.
This is fierce! Just what a needed today. I admire so much about your writing. (The Russian mobster image made me smile.) And your observation to your young friend was spot-on. It’s insane *not* to feel what’s happening, and to sometimes be paralyzed by grief/rage/hopelessness. I hold to the idea that cultivating hope takes muscle and practice. It’s not at all passive.
Great read! We are the descendants of one wave after another of excess European/African/Asian populations who chose not to protect another generation from suffering in a massively overcrowded and dying world. What could go wrong? Everything? I always harken back to what I call "The Hunter-Gatherer Test", as that was the last time we lived in a true ecological balance with the Creator's natural order, and our clan's/band's territorial competition for limited resources kept our numbers within the Dunbar number of 150. They were never alone or unloved, as we are too often. I'm a retired psychiatrist/physician and wrote a free online e-book PDF, for anyone who still can read, "Stress R Us". Ideas and words are the new "territory" that we compete in and for resources. Best wishes to a talented writer and entrepreneur!
The purpose of say, a black background, is to more fully reveal in multidimensional ways the light figure... When this is forgotten, when the black becomes its own purpose, serves itself in other words, then our world is terribly lost in delusion, as this projected human world presently is, in spades...
This whole contrived world, sometimes called civilization, is the Great Lie... The source, basis and excuse of all other seeming lies...
AKA humans lost in delusional beliefs of separation– to a scale and degree that we already have or are currently destroying nearly ALL of the innate balances, subtleties, cycles, essential links, processes and interrelationships of earth, life and the natural world, far beyond what we know and understand any of this to be, and yet are, as humans, still inalienably and inseparably a part of...
To keep seeing through all of this, and most importantly sharing our ways of seeing, is of the highest service...
I love the idea of referring to the “mentally ill” suffering from depression, anxiety, etc as simply being hyper sensitive. There’s nothing wrong with us except that we sense things more acutely than others, so we have to learn coping mechanisms and establish buffers, be aware of our triggers.
To be honest I often think the opposite of normies. Why AREN’T you an emotional wreck over the suffering and death of thousands of children? Why aren’t you screaming that the world is on fire? Why aren’t you horrified at the mass death of the other creatures that inhabit our world? That numbness is a far greater concern than our hyper sensitivity.
Beautiful - thank you Rachel. Some reflective weaving from your words -
"The world, in contrast, feels like it’s disintegrating into inevitability; our institutions have been revealed as inconsequential during the greatest threat to global civilisation ever known…
Our bodies hold that which we are unable to admit; our bodies began living on this plane long before our tongues conjured language….
Yet, there are ways of being here that go beyond language, ways with which we can help one another to stay sane….
There exist spaces beyond language, beyond the world of mirrors, where even words may begin to make sense if they come from the very roots of us that have spent millennia in this soil….
Theorised by the revolutionary poet Federico Garcia Lorca who was assassinated by Franco’s regime, duende is an earth spirit the performer battles with “on the rim of the well”, bringing the performer face to face with death and the limits of human intelligence, creating an intense and powerful spontaneity that enraptures both performer and audience….
I want you to welcome uncertainty into your breast like a small bird whose flutterings will disturb you for those first few weeks but who eventually you will come to recognise as at home in your heart, for there is nothing truly beautiful that we can control....
I want you to remember you are sane and I want you to listen to your body. It knows. The fire is approaching. I’m scared, too."
Aha -
……”listen to your body. It knows.”
This raises questions for me…. Like:
What if this is not “just” poetry or metaphor? (and I have no doubt about that!)
What if this knowing is because each of us is as much part of the vibrant living planet as the old growth being clear cut in Canada, the wondrous mycelium assisting the forest’s homeostasis, or the bees dying from neonicotinoids just about everywhere?
What if the moments of sudden insight into the well-being of a loved one, an infant, a pet or a plant arise at the times when the unlanguaged communication between living things that enables autopoesis breaks through into something that even the presuppositions of a separate, individual, disconnected self/identity can stretch to entertain?
What if our distressed and anxious psyche is simply how we make sense of our personal experience of the distortions and disequilibrium of the over-arching system of which we are part? (as Zhiwa Woodbury has so elegantly described in his seminal piece, Towards a New Taxonomy of Traumatology")
What if the sense we make is shaped - inevitably - by the same presuppositions of separate, individual, disconnected self/identity - and the vulnerability and isolation that this brings - that have driven the world view that has led to crisis?
What if the institutions are “inconsequential” because they arose and remain dependent upon those presuppositions, and must therefore not the rock the boat but rather hand out band-aids and homilies?
What if the fear of the fire is conflated with the fear of losing that identity, and that in clinging to that, we render ourselves unable to change - or even name - that which drives the fires?
What if that “small bird” is, as in the old mines, the canary that alerts us to having strayed too far, too deep, too fast, running into a seam of toxic gas?
What if her fluttering is what our visceral recognition of the need to let go of that identity feels like?
What if African psychologist, Bayo Akomolafe, and trauma maven, Thomas Hubl, have a point when they consider that “modern psychology is the policeman of the system”?
What if ideas of social well-being and mental health are expanded to recognise the health and well-being of the ecology of our planetary home? After all, as clinicians we might feel concern for a client who appeared to have no qualms about abusing family members or neighbour, and especially as a means of maintaining their sense of self….
What if we were to challenge the presuppositions of institutions, including our own, and to reclaim a role for our work that champions duende, dancing the wonder and awe of being as being central to living, rather than seeing it as a something to contain, constrain and banish as “unconscious” because the dominant system depends on our remaining guilty, fearful and "uncurious”?
What if we were to think of “psyche” as a small, but now very powerful, aspect of “psychosphere” and stepped up to a place alongside specialists in atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and more?
What if our institution led a transcontextual examination of the role that psyche has within the wider psychosphere in signalling the system’s disregulation - and also in reaching another equilibrium - knowing that this new balance will be resting on wholly different suppositions, ethical frameworks and identity?
What if we were to point out that evolution has not stopped just because one species began to play with fire and that any hope we might want to claim is best assured by recalling an ancient trust placed in us, as part of Life's living - that is, aligning with collective, evolutionary processes, honed over 13.8 billion years, to meet our needs, rather than leaning upon separative, human processes supercharged by 500 years of various forms of splitting in order to meet increasingly manufactured and manipulated wants?
What if we chose to be consequential as well as addressing consequences…?
What if we learned - together - to listen to our bodies, to venture meaning and hear how the voices entwine as a bigger picture emerges, the harmony and energy that comes as the voices combine and a bigger, fuller music is revealed - because alone we can only ever hear the system filtered through our own stories and experience?
Isn't that why we must sing, dance and share great soup together by fires?
Thank you for this piece, Raquel. I am not writing lately because my body is in pain, everything hurts, but this is not the first time this happened. I suffer from chronic pain for 13 years, and it starts when everything becomes too much. My body says no. So I have to stop with the piano lessons for a while and become an hermit, away from the world. But this time, the difference with other times when this happened, is this time it's even stronger. The pain comes accompanied by a very strong desire to be out, out of society, I don't want to be part of it anymore, it makes me sick. Everything stress me out, dealing with the housing company, the taxes, the invoices.... why should I contribute to this sick world? Even being homeless sounds like a liberation. That is a state, I read lately, called anomie: in society or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals. And the French sociologist who introduced the word, Emile Durkheim, believed that one type of suicide, anomic, resulted from the breakdown of the social standards. "When a social system is in a state of anomie, common values and common meanings are no longer understood or accepted, and new values and meanings are not yet developed." I, for sure, am there, but I don't think I am the only one.
Very good, . . . even better than very good, . . .
To comment, . . . Maybe, . . .
Did you advise the person to express the political lessons that the multiplying anti—hegemonic emergencies, the resistant insanities, the institutional suicides, . . . etc. . . . have taught all of us?
Without that expression, we perhaps have a dearth of "adults in the room”. Every interested voice contributes to the hoped-for solutions.
I find that being aware of the great and ongoing movement toward Community, toward Real Civilization & Higher Dimensional fusion among those capable of supporting such a creation is a vision that brings healing into every facet my being.
As the author observes, fear brings illness. Too many “ordinary people” are afraid to live the life they desire, . . . and not without excellent reasons for being afraid, . . .
In this culture, it takes courage to admit that you want more than the “economic elite” is ready to trade. Almost everyone has been blue—pilled for so long that we often mimic our bosses mentality. We forget that dreams for universal abundance are blueprints for tomorrow to create. We self-constrict our energy for progress, and peace, and community, and a full life.
Because we have been long—informed by orders, by coercion, by custom, by violence, we are conditioned to fear to make even the traditional protests that any legit ruling clique would not try to forbid, or use “brownshirt tactics” to punish.
Once healed and sufficiently strong, there is the perpetual invitation to help to isolate and exclude the agent provocateurs. Be savvy; protect your crib and access to it, but never be a green light for evil. Be safe & sage; no barefoot pilgrims nor martyrs are desired or required.
The section about the nature of Duende brought to mind “Pan’s Labyrinth”.
There is a lot of passion in this writing - and some great images. But sadly, it misses the Degrowth and Doomer movement's contribution to this modern anxiety. Sure - Americans live in a nation that is going insane. Much of this is due to the echo-chambers in social media. Young people just cannot fight the algorithm. Watch "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix. If you'd rather read many papers on it - there are stacks of papers here. https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/ It's the social stress it puts young people under to compare themselves to others - both in physical attractiveness, the number of likes on their posts, the quality of their posts, etc. It's also the way those social media echo-chambers function. Like minded people getting together to rant from the same perspective - reinforcing each other's beliefs that they alone are right - and everyone else is wrong. It's fracturing nations. People that used to view political opponents as having misguided social policies now view them as EVIL. In America, both sides see the other side as the ultimate threat to their democracy! I know which side I think is the ultimate threat - and I think there are objective facts to be considered. But is that because I'm in an echo-chamber? (Hint: I'm pretty sure not - as I don't watch that bastion of untruth Fox News.)
But my point? What's happening here? Blogs can function the same way as social media.
For instance - does Duende also apply when one screams into an echo-chamber - only to hear those same fears come crashing back at you a thousand fold? Does Duende cover the grief of Geoff McKee - a man I met after his 19 year old son Tas McKee committed suicide after being in a peak oil Doomer group too long? It's why I blog the way I do. (See Part 5 of my summary page.) I met with the father, and have chatted with him online. The leader of that peak oil group lacked the courage to also meet with the father. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/eclipse/#doomers-and-the-suicide-that-changed-me
The leader of that group is basically running a secular cult, and tells his members NOT to hear the other point of view - NOT to read certain peer-reviewed papers - NOT to get another perspective. There's only one 'truth' - so read his sources only. They are like a secular version of Old Testament prophets of doom. People must revere Simon Michaux - not laugh at the premise that the world is going to use luxury EV batteries to store 4 WEEKS of the world's energy instead of much cheaper saner sodium batteries and off-river pumped hydro. (I mean - does Simon Michaux even understand the price mechanism? He's basically saying building the Harbour Bridge is impossible because there isn't enough GOLD in the world to do that! My question is why he would even model something that absurd?)
But no! On Degrowth sites like this Simon is revered. Or at least referenced.
Then when some young person is feeling anxious, they read this. "disintegrating into inevitability; our institutions have been revealed as inconsequential during the greatest threat to global civilisation ever known."
There is another perspective. That we at least won on the technical front decades ago when Germany subsidised renewables. Then China got involved - and today we finally have an answer. The costs have finally come crashing down. The Energy Profit per unit of solar and wind is finally so overwhelmingly positive that they're now returning more energy per unit energy invested than oil itself!
With the rise of EV’s, oil demand will peak and start to decline by 2028.
In a world hungry for energy, last year only 50 GW of coal was built. 350 GW of solar was built - over 7 TIMES the amount of new coal. Solar used to double every 4 years - now it is every 3! “If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
Queen Elizabeth Prize winner Professor Andrew Blakers says we’ll be done WELL before 2050!
That's the energy stats for you. But what do people who "really get it" think? Let's try Johan Rockstrom - the climatologist that has recently published work saying we CAN NOT go over 1.5 degrees - as his recent work on the past 100,000 years shows the climate is more sensitive than we initially thought. He also asks the audience why not much has happened on climate change for so many decades? He asks how if the world solved the hole in the ozone lay so fast by just BANNING CFC’s outright - why climate change has taken decades to get things going? How could the Montreal Protocol happen so FAST!? Easy. There was a painless, relatively easy and affordable alternative. Johan points out how now the cost of renewables have dropped they’re on doubling curves that is soon to overtake ALL new fossil fuel builds - and then start to retire the old fossil fuels. This is our “Montreal Moment”. https://youtu.be/7KfWGAjJAsM?t=1191 Johan writes for the Club of Rome's "Earth4All" institute.
It is an anxious time. But the answer for that is strident activism out there fighting big oil that is trying to slow all this down. The answer is to talk about the reality of the massive wave of renewables coming our way - with 7 times more solar being built than new coal this last year. The answer is to admit the REALITY that as renewables pick up speed - we DO have at least the TECHNCIAL capacity to solve this. But if you want to increase anxiety? Tell everyone there's nothing we can do - and discourage activists from "believing in" the peer-reviewed engineering that says we CAN do this. Tell everyone we CAN'T. Then see how youth depression and suicide rates go - and how much Big Oil loves you! There's a reason young people give up hope when they hear the doomer message, and stay home to "eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die". There's a reason big oil sponsor climate Doomers.
What do you want your message to young people to be? "There's hope - come and fight big oil with me and we'll soon have all the clean energy we need!" Or "There's no hope. So grieve and scream and hold your loved ones close. Dance. Celebrate the short time we have left. Because everything's utterly hopeless - and it's all crashing down."
I know which message is more technically true - psychologically safer - and morally responsible. The other message? It kills. I've seen it.
Lots of good stuff there, Eclipse. What is necessary is for the institutions to actively become relevant and speak against these things. Psychology abrogates its responsibility almost entirely, and the results of this round at every level, from the personal to the global.... (psychology is the policeman of the system, etc!).
I'm wondering if your targeting of Faux Fox News means that you believe the MSNBC segment of the MSM is credible? To any degree better than the Democrat Party propaganda that shills for its half of the corporate-government duopoly?
Understand that I am not making that accusation. But you have left that possibility open, and I'd like to hear you expand your criteria about where you see the outlines of the boundaries of "Evil". It's important.
My definition of such boundaries have changed again relatively recently. Have yours?
Thanks to you for your post and for your attention.
It depends what subject we are talking about. I'm Australian and so of course don't watch a lot of MSNBC or CNN or whatever. But I have read the psychiatrists that have diagnosed Donald Trump has a pathological narcissist - and am concerned about SO many directions of American life and alt-right conspiracy theories and entitlement to guns, steak every night, and burning all the fossil fuels they want because of COURSE Donald would never LIE to anyone about climate change being crap! (Facepalm). In many ways social media is bringing some of that crazy downunder to Australia as well.
And here's the thing. Climatologists used to only have Climate Deniers to deal with. Now they spend half their time fighting Climate Doomers as well! But why would they do that? Isn't it better to have people TOO cautious rather than not cautious enough?
Well, it turns out becoming a climate Doomer creates a hopelessness that can quickly kill motivation to even try. "Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." In fact it is such a well understood phenomenon that Big Oil are sponsoring Climate Doomers! Atmospheric Physicist and youtuber Simon Clark explains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSG2Dw2mL8
This proposal advocates for a significant paradigm change in how we perceive, understand, and manage the roots of global warming. This shift is essentially moving away from the present general basic beliefs of what is considered Sovereignty in our days as “the supreme power or authority of each country within their official boundaries admitted by the rest of the countries of the world”.
We find very damaging the claim “within their official boundaries”. Why?, because it allows countries to do, environmentally speaking, whatever they want, whatever they choose, if it is “within their official boundaries “. It is a claim universally accepted in the Constitutions of the world. That unlimited power is wrong. It challenges that the environment Is a shared global resource that transcends countries’ political boundaries and that is why we introduce and propose ENVIRONMENTAL SOVEREIGNTY which is totally divorced from the reigning notion of Sovereignty as far as the environment is concerned. ENVIRONMENTAL SOVEREIGNTY means that the environment is universal and not politically parceled or divided, proportionally or not amongst countries of the world. We find that the present division of the environment amongst countries of the world could well be the major cause of global warming.
However, countries do not accept the assertion that “the environment is a shared global resource that transcends national boundaries. On the contrary, countries take for granted that, within its borders, the environment is a rightfully earned and inherited property and therefore countries have an absolute free hand to do environmentally whatever they wish within those borders, which countries call “SOVEREIGNTY”. It is Sovereignty all right, but it is BAD SOVEREIGNTY.
In sum….
1) Countries policies cannot be a dominant factor reigning above the Environment. THE ENVIRONMENT is beyond not only of what countries presently call SOVEREIGNTY but also above their Judicial, Legislative and Administrative powers, a “Power above Powers”.
2) Political authoritarianism and lack of or improper enforcement of pro-environment laws is a very damaging factor that significantly impacts the environment.
3) Worldwide environmental degradation will continue until the present concept of SOVEREIGNTY is changed and the world accepts that there are two kinds of sovereignty in its place: GOOD SOVEREIGNTY or BAD SOVEREIGNTY. The first respects the environment as a power above all powers. The second, does not.
What does this all mean:
1) Human presence anywhere in the world should not be indifferent to the environment. When it is in a positive way, we call it GOOD SOVEREIGNTY. If it is in a negative way, we call it BAD SOVEREIGNTYY
2) Caring for the environment is not only an obligation but also an art.
3) The environment has been and will be considered always the backbone of any country, city or community and as such it is most respected and cared for accordingly.
What do we propose?
Eradicate BAD SOVEREIGNTY from the world and replace it with GOOD SOVEREIGNTY, which prioritizes global environmental interest above all other interests. Highlighting the interconnectedness of environmental health with global well-being is a thought-provoking argument. Quite easy to say, almost impossible to achieve, but it can be done, and must be done, the sooner the better. Constitutions must therefore be changed accordingly. It will take time and resources, but we don’t see any other way out if we want a world for future generations. Big International Money will oppose it of course, just as political interests and arrogance, ignorance, fear, and indifference, but facts are facts: NATURE’S GENEROSITY IS NOT FOREVER
Please help me spread the word and share it. Thank you.
I have felt most of my life it's not that we as individuals are defective, it's the entire system. We're not geared for the technology and population we have grown to since the industrial revolution, and our removal from tight-knit communities has grown ever more absurd, reduced to pixels on a screen, swipe left or swipe right. Your advice to your friend was correct. Therapists are near useless, because we don't need fixing. The world at large does.
This is fierce! Just what a needed today. I admire so much about your writing. (The Russian mobster image made me smile.) And your observation to your young friend was spot-on. It’s insane *not* to feel what’s happening, and to sometimes be paralyzed by grief/rage/hopelessness. I hold to the idea that cultivating hope takes muscle and practice. It’s not at all passive.
You are a marvellous writer.
Great read! We are the descendants of one wave after another of excess European/African/Asian populations who chose not to protect another generation from suffering in a massively overcrowded and dying world. What could go wrong? Everything? I always harken back to what I call "The Hunter-Gatherer Test", as that was the last time we lived in a true ecological balance with the Creator's natural order, and our clan's/band's territorial competition for limited resources kept our numbers within the Dunbar number of 150. They were never alone or unloved, as we are too often. I'm a retired psychiatrist/physician and wrote a free online e-book PDF, for anyone who still can read, "Stress R Us". Ideas and words are the new "territory" that we compete in and for resources. Best wishes to a talented writer and entrepreneur!
I love all this embodies - your words and your sentiments too -thank you 🙏🏼
The purpose of say, a black background, is to more fully reveal in multidimensional ways the light figure... When this is forgotten, when the black becomes its own purpose, serves itself in other words, then our world is terribly lost in delusion, as this projected human world presently is, in spades...
This whole contrived world, sometimes called civilization, is the Great Lie... The source, basis and excuse of all other seeming lies...
AKA humans lost in delusional beliefs of separation– to a scale and degree that we already have or are currently destroying nearly ALL of the innate balances, subtleties, cycles, essential links, processes and interrelationships of earth, life and the natural world, far beyond what we know and understand any of this to be, and yet are, as humans, still inalienably and inseparably a part of...
To keep seeing through all of this, and most importantly sharing our ways of seeing, is of the highest service...
And so again thank you...
🙏🌻
I love the idea of referring to the “mentally ill” suffering from depression, anxiety, etc as simply being hyper sensitive. There’s nothing wrong with us except that we sense things more acutely than others, so we have to learn coping mechanisms and establish buffers, be aware of our triggers.
To be honest I often think the opposite of normies. Why AREN’T you an emotional wreck over the suffering and death of thousands of children? Why aren’t you screaming that the world is on fire? Why aren’t you horrified at the mass death of the other creatures that inhabit our world? That numbness is a far greater concern than our hyper sensitivity.
Beautiful - thank you Rachel. Some reflective weaving from your words -
"The world, in contrast, feels like it’s disintegrating into inevitability; our institutions have been revealed as inconsequential during the greatest threat to global civilisation ever known…
Our bodies hold that which we are unable to admit; our bodies began living on this plane long before our tongues conjured language….
Yet, there are ways of being here that go beyond language, ways with which we can help one another to stay sane….
There exist spaces beyond language, beyond the world of mirrors, where even words may begin to make sense if they come from the very roots of us that have spent millennia in this soil….
Theorised by the revolutionary poet Federico Garcia Lorca who was assassinated by Franco’s regime, duende is an earth spirit the performer battles with “on the rim of the well”, bringing the performer face to face with death and the limits of human intelligence, creating an intense and powerful spontaneity that enraptures both performer and audience….
I want you to welcome uncertainty into your breast like a small bird whose flutterings will disturb you for those first few weeks but who eventually you will come to recognise as at home in your heart, for there is nothing truly beautiful that we can control....
I want you to remember you are sane and I want you to listen to your body. It knows. The fire is approaching. I’m scared, too."
Aha -
……”listen to your body. It knows.”
This raises questions for me…. Like:
What if this is not “just” poetry or metaphor? (and I have no doubt about that!)
What if this knowing is because each of us is as much part of the vibrant living planet as the old growth being clear cut in Canada, the wondrous mycelium assisting the forest’s homeostasis, or the bees dying from neonicotinoids just about everywhere?
What if the moments of sudden insight into the well-being of a loved one, an infant, a pet or a plant arise at the times when the unlanguaged communication between living things that enables autopoesis breaks through into something that even the presuppositions of a separate, individual, disconnected self/identity can stretch to entertain?
What if our distressed and anxious psyche is simply how we make sense of our personal experience of the distortions and disequilibrium of the over-arching system of which we are part? (as Zhiwa Woodbury has so elegantly described in his seminal piece, Towards a New Taxonomy of Traumatology")
What if the sense we make is shaped - inevitably - by the same presuppositions of separate, individual, disconnected self/identity - and the vulnerability and isolation that this brings - that have driven the world view that has led to crisis?
What if the institutions are “inconsequential” because they arose and remain dependent upon those presuppositions, and must therefore not the rock the boat but rather hand out band-aids and homilies?
What if the fear of the fire is conflated with the fear of losing that identity, and that in clinging to that, we render ourselves unable to change - or even name - that which drives the fires?
What if that “small bird” is, as in the old mines, the canary that alerts us to having strayed too far, too deep, too fast, running into a seam of toxic gas?
What if her fluttering is what our visceral recognition of the need to let go of that identity feels like?
What if African psychologist, Bayo Akomolafe, and trauma maven, Thomas Hubl, have a point when they consider that “modern psychology is the policeman of the system”?
What if ideas of social well-being and mental health are expanded to recognise the health and well-being of the ecology of our planetary home? After all, as clinicians we might feel concern for a client who appeared to have no qualms about abusing family members or neighbour, and especially as a means of maintaining their sense of self….
What if we were to challenge the presuppositions of institutions, including our own, and to reclaim a role for our work that champions duende, dancing the wonder and awe of being as being central to living, rather than seeing it as a something to contain, constrain and banish as “unconscious” because the dominant system depends on our remaining guilty, fearful and "uncurious”?
What if we were to think of “psyche” as a small, but now very powerful, aspect of “psychosphere” and stepped up to a place alongside specialists in atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and more?
What if our institution led a transcontextual examination of the role that psyche has within the wider psychosphere in signalling the system’s disregulation - and also in reaching another equilibrium - knowing that this new balance will be resting on wholly different suppositions, ethical frameworks and identity?
What if we were to point out that evolution has not stopped just because one species began to play with fire and that any hope we might want to claim is best assured by recalling an ancient trust placed in us, as part of Life's living - that is, aligning with collective, evolutionary processes, honed over 13.8 billion years, to meet our needs, rather than leaning upon separative, human processes supercharged by 500 years of various forms of splitting in order to meet increasingly manufactured and manipulated wants?
What if we chose to be consequential as well as addressing consequences…?
What if we learned - together - to listen to our bodies, to venture meaning and hear how the voices entwine as a bigger picture emerges, the harmony and energy that comes as the voices combine and a bigger, fuller music is revealed - because alone we can only ever hear the system filtered through our own stories and experience?
Isn't that why we must sing, dance and share great soup together by fires?
This is a deeply soulful piece, Rachel. It moved me. Its human sincerity is a thing to behold.
Thank you for this piece, Raquel. I am not writing lately because my body is in pain, everything hurts, but this is not the first time this happened. I suffer from chronic pain for 13 years, and it starts when everything becomes too much. My body says no. So I have to stop with the piano lessons for a while and become an hermit, away from the world. But this time, the difference with other times when this happened, is this time it's even stronger. The pain comes accompanied by a very strong desire to be out, out of society, I don't want to be part of it anymore, it makes me sick. Everything stress me out, dealing with the housing company, the taxes, the invoices.... why should I contribute to this sick world? Even being homeless sounds like a liberation. That is a state, I read lately, called anomie: in society or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals. And the French sociologist who introduced the word, Emile Durkheim, believed that one type of suicide, anomic, resulted from the breakdown of the social standards. "When a social system is in a state of anomie, common values and common meanings are no longer understood or accepted, and new values and meanings are not yet developed." I, for sure, am there, but I don't think I am the only one.
Very good, . . . even better than very good, . . .
To comment, . . . Maybe, . . .
Did you advise the person to express the political lessons that the multiplying anti—hegemonic emergencies, the resistant insanities, the institutional suicides, . . . etc. . . . have taught all of us?
Without that expression, we perhaps have a dearth of "adults in the room”. Every interested voice contributes to the hoped-for solutions.
I find that being aware of the great and ongoing movement toward Community, toward Real Civilization & Higher Dimensional fusion among those capable of supporting such a creation is a vision that brings healing into every facet my being.
As the author observes, fear brings illness. Too many “ordinary people” are afraid to live the life they desire, . . . and not without excellent reasons for being afraid, . . .
In this culture, it takes courage to admit that you want more than the “economic elite” is ready to trade. Almost everyone has been blue—pilled for so long that we often mimic our bosses mentality. We forget that dreams for universal abundance are blueprints for tomorrow to create. We self-constrict our energy for progress, and peace, and community, and a full life.
Because we have been long—informed by orders, by coercion, by custom, by violence, we are conditioned to fear to make even the traditional protests that any legit ruling clique would not try to forbid, or use “brownshirt tactics” to punish.
Once healed and sufficiently strong, there is the perpetual invitation to help to isolate and exclude the agent provocateurs. Be savvy; protect your crib and access to it, but never be a green light for evil. Be safe & sage; no barefoot pilgrims nor martyrs are desired or required.
The section about the nature of Duende brought to mind “Pan’s Labyrinth”.
Might your friend enjoy it?
Oh, yes!
Wanting to restack this, I read and read unable for a while to find an appropriate comment. Then I did... Peace, Maurice
There is a lot of passion in this writing - and some great images. But sadly, it misses the Degrowth and Doomer movement's contribution to this modern anxiety. Sure - Americans live in a nation that is going insane. Much of this is due to the echo-chambers in social media. Young people just cannot fight the algorithm. Watch "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix. If you'd rather read many papers on it - there are stacks of papers here. https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/ It's the social stress it puts young people under to compare themselves to others - both in physical attractiveness, the number of likes on their posts, the quality of their posts, etc. It's also the way those social media echo-chambers function. Like minded people getting together to rant from the same perspective - reinforcing each other's beliefs that they alone are right - and everyone else is wrong. It's fracturing nations. People that used to view political opponents as having misguided social policies now view them as EVIL. In America, both sides see the other side as the ultimate threat to their democracy! I know which side I think is the ultimate threat - and I think there are objective facts to be considered. But is that because I'm in an echo-chamber? (Hint: I'm pretty sure not - as I don't watch that bastion of untruth Fox News.)
But my point? What's happening here? Blogs can function the same way as social media.
For instance - does Duende also apply when one screams into an echo-chamber - only to hear those same fears come crashing back at you a thousand fold? Does Duende cover the grief of Geoff McKee - a man I met after his 19 year old son Tas McKee committed suicide after being in a peak oil Doomer group too long? It's why I blog the way I do. (See Part 5 of my summary page.) I met with the father, and have chatted with him online. The leader of that peak oil group lacked the courage to also meet with the father. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/eclipse/#doomers-and-the-suicide-that-changed-me
Details by another blogger here.
https://restoringmayberry.blogspot.com/2008/12/moment-of-darkness.html
The leader of that group is basically running a secular cult, and tells his members NOT to hear the other point of view - NOT to read certain peer-reviewed papers - NOT to get another perspective. There's only one 'truth' - so read his sources only. They are like a secular version of Old Testament prophets of doom. People must revere Simon Michaux - not laugh at the premise that the world is going to use luxury EV batteries to store 4 WEEKS of the world's energy instead of much cheaper saner sodium batteries and off-river pumped hydro. (I mean - does Simon Michaux even understand the price mechanism? He's basically saying building the Harbour Bridge is impossible because there isn't enough GOLD in the world to do that! My question is why he would even model something that absurd?)
But no! On Degrowth sites like this Simon is revered. Or at least referenced.
Then when some young person is feeling anxious, they read this. "disintegrating into inevitability; our institutions have been revealed as inconsequential during the greatest threat to global civilisation ever known."
There is another perspective. That we at least won on the technical front decades ago when Germany subsidised renewables. Then China got involved - and today we finally have an answer. The costs have finally come crashing down. The Energy Profit per unit of solar and wind is finally so overwhelmingly positive that they're now returning more energy per unit energy invested than oil itself!
With the rise of EV’s, oil demand will peak and start to decline by 2028.
https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-global-oil-demand-is-set-to-slow-significantly-by-2028
In a world hungry for energy, last year only 50 GW of coal was built. 350 GW of solar was built - over 7 TIMES the amount of new coal. Solar used to double every 4 years - now it is every 3! “If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/
It could be 2 to 3 times FASTER than the IPCC’s Paris goals by 2030! https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christmas-is-one-terawatt-of-solar-deployed-annually/
Queen Elizabeth Prize winner Professor Andrew Blakers says we’ll be done WELL before 2050!
That's the energy stats for you. But what do people who "really get it" think? Let's try Johan Rockstrom - the climatologist that has recently published work saying we CAN NOT go over 1.5 degrees - as his recent work on the past 100,000 years shows the climate is more sensitive than we initially thought. He also asks the audience why not much has happened on climate change for so many decades? He asks how if the world solved the hole in the ozone lay so fast by just BANNING CFC’s outright - why climate change has taken decades to get things going? How could the Montreal Protocol happen so FAST!? Easy. There was a painless, relatively easy and affordable alternative. Johan points out how now the cost of renewables have dropped they’re on doubling curves that is soon to overtake ALL new fossil fuel builds - and then start to retire the old fossil fuels. This is our “Montreal Moment”. https://youtu.be/7KfWGAjJAsM?t=1191 Johan writes for the Club of Rome's "Earth4All" institute.
It is an anxious time. But the answer for that is strident activism out there fighting big oil that is trying to slow all this down. The answer is to talk about the reality of the massive wave of renewables coming our way - with 7 times more solar being built than new coal this last year. The answer is to admit the REALITY that as renewables pick up speed - we DO have at least the TECHNCIAL capacity to solve this. But if you want to increase anxiety? Tell everyone there's nothing we can do - and discourage activists from "believing in" the peer-reviewed engineering that says we CAN do this. Tell everyone we CAN'T. Then see how youth depression and suicide rates go - and how much Big Oil loves you! There's a reason young people give up hope when they hear the doomer message, and stay home to "eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die". There's a reason big oil sponsor climate Doomers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSG2Dw2mL8
What do you want your message to young people to be? "There's hope - come and fight big oil with me and we'll soon have all the clean energy we need!" Or "There's no hope. So grieve and scream and hold your loved ones close. Dance. Celebrate the short time we have left. Because everything's utterly hopeless - and it's all crashing down."
I know which message is more technically true - psychologically safer - and morally responsible. The other message? It kills. I've seen it.
Lots of good stuff there, Eclipse. What is necessary is for the institutions to actively become relevant and speak against these things. Psychology abrogates its responsibility almost entirely, and the results of this round at every level, from the personal to the global.... (psychology is the policeman of the system, etc!).
I'm wondering if your targeting of Faux Fox News means that you believe the MSNBC segment of the MSM is credible? To any degree better than the Democrat Party propaganda that shills for its half of the corporate-government duopoly?
Understand that I am not making that accusation. But you have left that possibility open, and I'd like to hear you expand your criteria about where you see the outlines of the boundaries of "Evil". It's important.
My definition of such boundaries have changed again relatively recently. Have yours?
Thanks to you for your post and for your attention.
It depends what subject we are talking about. I'm Australian and so of course don't watch a lot of MSNBC or CNN or whatever. But I have read the psychiatrists that have diagnosed Donald Trump has a pathological narcissist - and am concerned about SO many directions of American life and alt-right conspiracy theories and entitlement to guns, steak every night, and burning all the fossil fuels they want because of COURSE Donald would never LIE to anyone about climate change being crap! (Facepalm). In many ways social media is bringing some of that crazy downunder to Australia as well.
And here's the thing. Climatologists used to only have Climate Deniers to deal with. Now they spend half their time fighting Climate Doomers as well! But why would they do that? Isn't it better to have people TOO cautious rather than not cautious enough?
Well, it turns out becoming a climate Doomer creates a hopelessness that can quickly kill motivation to even try. "Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." In fact it is such a well understood phenomenon that Big Oil are sponsoring Climate Doomers! Atmospheric Physicist and youtuber Simon Clark explains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSG2Dw2mL8
I'm a self-rave-man ~ Odyssey of love & hate ~ Vanishing out rare.
NATURE’S GENEROSITY IS NOT FOREVER
ENVIRONMENTAL SOVEREIGNTY
GOOD and BAD SOVEREIGNTY
This proposal advocates for a significant paradigm change in how we perceive, understand, and manage the roots of global warming. This shift is essentially moving away from the present general basic beliefs of what is considered Sovereignty in our days as “the supreme power or authority of each country within their official boundaries admitted by the rest of the countries of the world”.
We find very damaging the claim “within their official boundaries”. Why?, because it allows countries to do, environmentally speaking, whatever they want, whatever they choose, if it is “within their official boundaries “. It is a claim universally accepted in the Constitutions of the world. That unlimited power is wrong. It challenges that the environment Is a shared global resource that transcends countries’ political boundaries and that is why we introduce and propose ENVIRONMENTAL SOVEREIGNTY which is totally divorced from the reigning notion of Sovereignty as far as the environment is concerned. ENVIRONMENTAL SOVEREIGNTY means that the environment is universal and not politically parceled or divided, proportionally or not amongst countries of the world. We find that the present division of the environment amongst countries of the world could well be the major cause of global warming.
However, countries do not accept the assertion that “the environment is a shared global resource that transcends national boundaries. On the contrary, countries take for granted that, within its borders, the environment is a rightfully earned and inherited property and therefore countries have an absolute free hand to do environmentally whatever they wish within those borders, which countries call “SOVEREIGNTY”. It is Sovereignty all right, but it is BAD SOVEREIGNTY.
In sum….
1) Countries policies cannot be a dominant factor reigning above the Environment. THE ENVIRONMENT is beyond not only of what countries presently call SOVEREIGNTY but also above their Judicial, Legislative and Administrative powers, a “Power above Powers”.
2) Political authoritarianism and lack of or improper enforcement of pro-environment laws is a very damaging factor that significantly impacts the environment.
3) Worldwide environmental degradation will continue until the present concept of SOVEREIGNTY is changed and the world accepts that there are two kinds of sovereignty in its place: GOOD SOVEREIGNTY or BAD SOVEREIGNTY. The first respects the environment as a power above all powers. The second, does not.
What does this all mean:
1) Human presence anywhere in the world should not be indifferent to the environment. When it is in a positive way, we call it GOOD SOVEREIGNTY. If it is in a negative way, we call it BAD SOVEREIGNTYY
2) Caring for the environment is not only an obligation but also an art.
3) The environment has been and will be considered always the backbone of any country, city or community and as such it is most respected and cared for accordingly.
What do we propose?
Eradicate BAD SOVEREIGNTY from the world and replace it with GOOD SOVEREIGNTY, which prioritizes global environmental interest above all other interests. Highlighting the interconnectedness of environmental health with global well-being is a thought-provoking argument. Quite easy to say, almost impossible to achieve, but it can be done, and must be done, the sooner the better. Constitutions must therefore be changed accordingly. It will take time and resources, but we don’t see any other way out if we want a world for future generations. Big International Money will oppose it of course, just as political interests and arrogance, ignorance, fear, and indifference, but facts are facts: NATURE’S GENEROSITY IS NOT FOREVER
Please help me spread the word and share it. Thank you.
Jorge Partidas A
jorgepartidas@gmail.com
Venezuela