We are the prodigal species. We left our home and partied it up and now the hangover is setting in, and we're realizing our drunken orgy was never really all that fun anyway. We couldn't ever get enough so even while we were in it we were clawing at the emptiness inside of us.
We're starting to sober up and think about how to come home again. As individuals and small groups, we're drifting away from the house party as it gets more dangerous, more dark, more sadistic.
Gaia's been waiting for us to return to her. We won't be let off the hook - we will endure the consequences of our myopic revelry - but it won't be a punishment. It's just consequences.
We will learn what we must to adapt to the world we've made.
There is nothing to be sad about. There is no Armageddon in our future. We were the Armageddon. We're already post-tribulation. The story of our return home has already begun. This is good news.
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What gets me excited is the idea of learning new Gaicentric lifestyles and ways of human-ing. We've made massive advances in science and technology but largely yoked them to the aims of profit, power, and greed.
I want to emancipate the advances we've made in science, technology, sociology, medicine, justice, governance, psychology, all of our arts and humanities, our understanding of the human brain, I want to employ the bounty of the human mind in the service of all beings. Our science and advances are not bad; it is bad that thus far they've been used only to further the interests of the powerful few. They've been pressed into service to dominate other humans and other beings.
Well, it's impossible to use black magic without spilling some on yourself. The effect of dominance is dissolution. As the old power structures tear themselves apart, the bounty of the human mind will be available to serve not just all of humanity but all of creation. If we make it.
Humans can be a force for good for all life, not in the form of a dominative patriarchy but as a child of gaia. We will know our place within and of the web of life. We will know our power to destroy and we will safeguard this power, we will finally take seriously the responsibility we have.
We didn't know our own strength. We didn't know how much we were hurting gaia and ourselves.
Now we do.
And we are changing, slowly, individual by individual, starting with the most sensitive and perceptive. Often it starts with those who suffer oppression because they're quick to make the empathic connection with gaia. It's been happening slowly but the rate is accelerating. Soon now we will be changing all at once, in great heaps and jumps, all over the world, in every corner and nook and cranny. The speed will become breathtaking.
The old way is doomed.
It won't be due to some great leap forward, some great leveling up in global consciousness. It'll be normal, everyday, viral cultural adaptation on a global scale. The signs are everywhere.
We will not collapse back to the stone age. We will build our future using components from our past. We'll take what works and discard what doesn't. Even as the consequences of our excess makes life harder, the global project of adapting what we have to serve our children and all of creation will bring us a sense of meaning and purpose.
I am not talking about utopia. There will always be war, famine, disease, and insanity. Always. I'm not talking about utopia. I'm talking about a future. Too many people have given up on the idea that we have one, but we do. We will get through this and we will have a future.
And what we do now, right now, has enormous effect on what that future will look like. Our actions matter now.
And so there's no time to waste chasing the illusions of safety, comfort, or affluence that our current arrangement projects in the air in front of us. Those are fantasies. It's time to reject those, see what's real, and begin the work of becoming citizens of the future we decide to build for ourselves. A world in which humans are not a parasite on gaia but a symbiont. An obligate mutualist relationship, locked in coevolution together. A species critical to the health and beauty of all life on this earth.
But we can't begin to do this work if we're still beholden to the current arrangement, if we're dependent on industrial consumerism for all of our needs. We must learn how to free ourselves as much as possible so that we can devote our lives to the work we must do.
The work begins with ourselves and no one can do it for us. We must choose freedom and we must risk everything, because to become children of the future means to change who we are, how we think. we no longer can see ourselves as children of the machine of progress. we must reclaim our own sovereignty, our own responsibility, our own place within the community of this world.
We must free ourselves, as quickly as possible, and I am not speaking metaphorically or poetically. There are a series of practical steps, techniques and strategies, that we can employ to engineer our own paths to individual emancipation.
As we become free we find the others and begin the work of adapting our societies to the future we're going to get.
Without freedom the machine has us. Just like a key to emancipation in India was decoupling survival needs from the British colonialists, so too will we free ourselves by learning how to live without the baubles and distractions of the machine, to meet our own needs via our own production, skills, and mutual aid.
This is the first step.
Reading and LIstening Recommendations
I wrote a short blog post on Back of the Envelope Freedom Math.
I loved this Great Simplification episode with Mario Giampietro - the links in the show notes alone are worth many evenings of fun reading. From the episode description: “He has developed a novel methodology, Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM), that integrates biophysical and socioeconomic variables across multiple scales, thus establishing a link between the metabolism of socio-economic systems and potential constraints of the natural environment.”
Chris Ryan, author of Sex and Dawn and Civilized to Death, interviewed Jack on his podcast. Great episode, not to be missed. (Also, if you haven’t read those books, uh, get on that.)