Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“The Future” is a sales pitch designed to keep us locked into existing institutions and power relationships. It has nothing to do with solving our real problems or liberating us from the increasing power of corporations and the governments they have captured. It is, in fact, an elitist vision of a future entirely run by wealthy technologists who find politics and environmental disruption inconvenient.
It’s impressively easy to misunderstand the point made in last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report. To say that the world we experience is made up of representations of reality, constructed in our minds by taking the trickle of data we get from the senses and fitting those into patterns that are there already, doesn’t mean that nothing exists outside of our minds.
Modern economies appear to run less on character, more on energy, resources, investment, debt, and innovation. But in the world that’s coming, who we are may once again matter more than what we have.
Our stories hold energy. They can keep us focused on the content and energy of life as we know it.
If we want a Planetary Awakening, we need to be thinking new story forms that celebrate interdependence, cooperation, and resilience.
Language is the real break of humans with everything else that walks, crawls, or flies on the earth…But, as for all technologies, it has unexpected consequences.
One of the core themes of the Retrotopia narrative I’ve been developing here over the last month or so is the yawning gap between the abstract notion of progress that we all have in our heads and the rather less pleasant realities to which this notion has been assigned.
Pure reason doesn’t tell us that we should do something to keep alive the other species sharing the earth with us.
Beliefs matter. So do stories. My inspiration often comes from the written word, and I’ve long been interested in writers who revel in the complexity of beliefs, understand how adept humans are at self-deception, but nevertheless provide a useful roadmap.
In our social evolution as a species, biology and culture run on parallel tracks, but they do so at different speeds. Thus biology, quickly and disruptively, can be outpaced by cultural change.
Anyone who farms experiences setbacks on a daily basis. That rate of failure and a willingness to try again seems teach a few practical lessons in being resilient.
"The Maya forest garden holds, in its ramblings and roots, a hidden-in-plain-sight way through our present crises."
