"The Age Of Endings, Of Acceleration, Is At Hand, And Each Of Us Is Strung Out On Its Web"

[hatrack]

EDIT

All of these changes are caused by one phenomenon: a burgeoning human economy that serves a global consumer society in which desire poses as need and all needs are there to be met. Blame who you like for this situation: blame the sixties, blame the eighties, blame science, blame the Enlightenment, blame Thatcher or Marx or capitalism or feminism. Blame climate deniers or oil companies or people who take cheap flights or loggers or the owners of battery chicken farms. Blame population growth or greed or politics or technology. Blame yourself, or everyone else – it doesn’t really matter. The age of endings, the age of acceleration, is at hand, and each of us is strung out in its web.

What does it mean to live through times like these, and what should be done to make sense of them? If your children will be poorer than you were, their world scarred and deprived of much of its beauty and magic, what questions should we be asking about what human progress has come to mean? Questions, I think, are the key. We need to be interrogating our stories deeply: the myths that underpin who we are and how we see the world. In the loosest sense of the word, we live in a materialist society. We pay attention to the material, the measurable, above all else, and we have a tendency to dismiss or ignore aspects of life which are equally real but not as easily reduced to a column on a spreadsheet.

This means that when we ask ourselves how this global suite of potential disasters has arisen, we tend to look at the outer rather than the inner manifestations. We tell ourselves that the problem is technological: that we are producing too many greenhouse gases because we are burning fossil fuels, and therefore we need to stop burning them. Or we tell ourselves that the problem is political: democracy cannot respond adequately to the needs of ecology, so we need a new political system. Or perhaps the problem is structural: governments cannot reach agreement on necessary measures to tackle global problems, and corporations are too powerful and should be purged from the political system.

All of these things may well be true, but I would suggest that our culture has an inner problem as well as an outer one: our stories are malfunctioning. All cultures, all civilisations, are built on stories. The things they believe about themselves and their place in the world, and how that world works, are integral to how people behave, how institutions operate and how humans in that society relate to the nonhuman world. If you want to understand any culture, look at its myths.

EDIT

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-08-07/the-age-of-endings

[phantom power]

1. "our stories are malfunctioning"

[CRH]

2. Excellent article, from a sociological perspective, ...

Puts the human dilemma in clear perspective.

Worth a follow up into other writings of the Dark Mountain Project.

K&R

[GliderGuider]

3. This is why I feel such a resonance with the Dark Mountain Folk

I posted this a few minutes ago on Facebook as a comment on my piece "Paradise Lost", in which I explore my nascent understanding of where we are, how we got here, and what's really going on.

I hear you loud and clear. This has been the most wrenching shift for me since the day I discovered the potential for collapse lurking behind Peak Oil.

I've been steeped for my whole life in the traditions of the Age of Enlightenment, complete with the notions of reason, free will, morality and the perfectibility of man. My political background was the socialist, social-justice movement where concepts of fairness and equality reign supreme. All that has now crumbled to dust.

My journey to this strange place began with a simple question. I wanted to know why we couldn't seem to do anything to stop climate change despite everything we know about its causes and effects.

I first looked outward - "Who is to blame?" Then I looked inward - "What in our evolved psychology make us so eager to accept activities that many of us know are dangerous and wrong-headed?" I kept pulling the various threads I found, then going over to whatever wiggled in response, finding the threads connected to that, and pulling them in turn.

When the fabric finally unraveled I found myself staring at the Second Law of Thermodynamics, with nobody to blame and precious little to be done about our predicament.

In a way I feel betrayed. Everything I've been told about how the world works appears to be wrong. The traditional explanations don't truly explain what I see happening in either the outer or the inner world. Very few people realize that our precious "Story of the People" - our scientifically derived, culturally grounded, explanatory narrative of the world and our place in it - is little but a comforting, self-deluding fabrication. It's a fantasy borne more out of wish fulfillment than out of any realistic assessment of what's actually going on. It may be the greatest piece of confirmation bias that we have ever perpetrated on ourselves.

I feel betrayed by the scientists, the politicians, the activists, the philosophers and engineers. It's enormously frustrating to have come to this realization about the world, in my limited capacity as a single private citizen. It feels incredibly disempowering, which is not surprising - the very concept of "power" has always been defined by those same scientists, politicians, activists etc. As that falls away I even have to realign my inner definitions of power and relationship.

But while I feel a huge rupture of dislocation, I also feel a soaring sense of freedom and liberation. No longer shackled to shame, blame and guilt, I can see people and events through a less reactive, emotionally filtered eye. The world seems clearer. What people do and why they do it is suddenly obvious. What's going on in the world has begun to make sense for the first time in my 62 years.

For me the trade-off between clarity and comfort has been worthwhile. As difficult as this journey has become, I'd rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

[pscot]

4. Milo Minderbinder rules

People could learn a lot from Joe Heller.

[Bigmack]

5. K & R nt

[Nihil]

6. K & R for the first sentence in that extract ...

> All of these changes are caused by one phenomenon: a burgeoning human economy
> that serves a global consumer society in which desire poses as need and all needs
> are there to be met.

The phrase "a global consumer society in which desire poses as need" is a fitting
epitaph on its own.