A Bad Condition For All

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We are in a bad situation. 

Climate change ravages the people with torrential downpours, flooding, heat domes, hurricanes. 

And yet we have a political movement in power that vigorously denies the existence and the relevance of climate change. 

Even though climate change is something that the people in the land all have by now directly experienced. Anyone my age and older has observed the unfolding of global warming directly over the last few decades. Our bodies know this is happening in reality, and yet our myths, in some cases, cannot grapple with the truth.

Indeed: we have a politics in power right now that strenuously denies any truths, any complexity that might conflict with its regressive and reductionist view of the world.

Denying complex truths about our shared reality that we can all see ourselves is made possible through a major exertion of energy, including narrative control rivaling what's described in the novel 1984, and a galvanizing grandiose effort to re-attain a former fantasy self: a mythologized state of total control by white male capitalist Christian rule and the subjugation of everybody else under that rule. 

Denial and aggression go hand in hand. 

Denialism and aggression as political stances are the result of some parts of us feeling backed into a corner. By definition, unintegrated.

Denial and aggression are coping responses. These are coping methods coming from people whose entire identity and mythos of grandeur would be threatened, would be tangibly undermined, if they faced the truth. 

People who cannot face reality and cannot grapple with complex truths found there will retreat sometimes into shallow identities and tribalism for an illusory and short-lived sense of protection and safety. But this retreat, in reality, can serve to undermine actual collective safety. By denying our relationship to ecosystems and to one another, karma cycles and intensifies. 

It is energetically costly to resist the truth, culturally speaking. But when you have an ego or a myth of self so powerfully entrenched, it may automatically seem worth the high price to pay to defend it. 

Here's the thing, though. The ultimate arbiter of truth is not going to be a politician, a political position, or even a political movement. Mother nature shall be the bottom line, the ultimate arbiter of truth. If this society literally cannot live within a hospitable environment, it will fail. It is tangibly doomed. 

And what we have here is a failure of sense-making and of meaning-making, which is highly consequential. 

In the fractal praxis worldview, sense-making and meaning-making are centered as a kind of universal and singular pattern, expressed by life itself—at all scales and in all forms. Meaning-making is seen as the ultimate function of living beings and how they contribute both to their own evolutionary survival and also how they benefit their environments too. So this pattern really is at the root of making everything literally livable. 

If we were to orient ourselves to accepting the truth… to doing the cognitive labor to try to integrate the truth and make meaning from it… to receive the feedback from the earth, to accept responsibility for how we may have thrown the system out of whack and caused illness from this these imbalances… and recognize our need to adapt… this is the reunifying path: the path that holistic peoples and cultures must and should avidly pursue. 

Instead, we inhabit a time of great fragmentation and inundation with garbage information. The people have become seduced by a political movement promising simplification—cheap and easy answers! short-term feel-good sensations!—that will absolutely fail in the not-so-long term and leave them utterly hung out to dry. 

What we have is a political movement of people who, according to their own myths, would only succeed insofar as they can effectively enforce their total projections onto the world. A reductionist simplicity, and I'm speaking racially, economically, sexually, structurally… manifesting a complete and total absolving denial of responsibility to the world. 

Denial of responsibility by force is a condition that makes systems of oppression possible (including unrestricted anti-market capitalism). Denial of responsibility to respond to the situation you are in fact implicated in. Denial of responsibility to act on the truth, to act in accord with what is necessary for health and thriving. 

And I want you to reflect that it is inherently a politics of privilege, and of maintaining elite privileges, that is a culture that doesn't want to take responsibility. Leaders take responsibility. Elders take responsibility. It is the domain of underdeveloped children—and privileged people—who tempestuously avoid taking responsibility, sometimes in cruel and extractive ways. This, of course, needs to be balanced by the entire society and the different roles played. But culturally speaking, we are somewhat infantilized by our insistence on denial, aggression, and avoidance. And, by contrast, when we choose to take responsibility actively, we reflect moreso as leaders and elders. 

So the politics we are afflicted with today involves championing insulation from consequences of the cruel behavior of those in power for some of us, at the expense of all of us. 

And yet I can't help but see this insulationist politics as kind of a flash in the pan of a dying culture, a culture that is inherently unsustainable and shall catastrophically fail… likely soon. 

⭐ Notice that in all of this, I'm speaking fractally. I'm speaking about the pattern level of things. You could interpret this at the societal scale, but even in terms of interpersonal relationships—or even psychology. I'm speaking in the most general sense, because when I help illuminate these underpinning patterns for your seeing as well, I believe it makes you, dear reader or listener, more adaptive yourself. ⭐

So in general, we are in a bad situation. That things have devolved the way that they have today. 😞

We are accelerating toward a “game over” point for humanity, unless we can collectively figure out (there's that vital sense-making again!) how to keep the game going, and indeed, ensure we are playing an infinite game. How do we “level up” ⭐ —and become grown enough to take responsibility for the globalized scale on which we actually exist now. 

Because climate change is merely feedback. It's the earth letting us know that the ways we are living are causing discord. Are causing ecological imbalances that are not healing themselves. That we are generating harm and breakdown. Something about the way we are living is out of alignment with the requirements of our ecological and climatological systems. 

And we’re getting this feedback from multiple sources. So why aren’t we listening? In what ways are we insulated (and “privileged” so as to avoid relationship responsibility?)

For millennia, a given human group's fitness to their environment would be effectively measured in terms of regional fit. 

There were probably many times that human tribes messed up their local environment and, being nomadic, moved away from the problem areas, and adapted to a new area—or died out. 

But now that we have a global, technologized society unified under the rule of imperialist neoliberal capitalism, we have a global circumstance on our hands, and we can't simply move on to sweeter territory if our tribe happens to mess up our local area. We need to adjust and adapt our primate behaviors to the new scale of complexity in which we actually function and are entangled with each other. 

And please hear me when I say: I'm speaking about what kinds of cultures are adapted, or “fit,” to the Earth. Many years ago, a friend of mine who is of Haudenosaunee lineage taught me that the proper way to understand the term indigenous (in his view) is the idea of: being fit for inhabiting a specific place. So, the Seneca people were indigenous to their particular place. They were adapted successfully to ongoing existence in that particular environment. So, to generalize the term in this way: What would it look like to be fit, generally, collectively, be fit for inhabiting the conditions of the Earth? 

We don't have a culture like that. We have not evolved into that yet, and yet we are approaching a certain kind of evolutionary horizon, perhaps, for this very type of evolution. 

Since we come from a lineage of tribalist primates and exhibit many of the same enduring patterning, we perhaps haven't yet realized that the relevant scale of our cultural dilemmas and our actual evolutionary fitness is now the scale of the planet Earth. 

We can certainly be afraid, facing this. And begin to see that any social “boogeymen” we are perceiving are just these shadows of what we're trying to suppress—these unintegrated “toxic” parts of ourselves. And that maybe this supposed “global identity” of belonging to life as a system is actually too big, and we might be better off retreating back into our smaller, simpler, lower order, automatic selves and identities… those that feel familiar and find at least temporary comfort there. 

Globalized consequences mean, in part, generalized consequences. We will all live with the costs of the ways that the present-day dominant culture has tolerated, in terms of our living out of balance for quite so long. 

Being out of balance is not a value judgment. It's a fact in a living system of the difference between sickness and health. Being out of balance is simply known through feedback; it doesn't have to be politicized or emotionally reacted to, it can just... be. It's just information. Climate change just is, and it is a logical outcome of how we have enacted and conducted ourselves at scale. 

So ask yourself, why is it that this seemingly extremely successful culture is so resistant to digesting the truth—to digesting information of climate change? 

You see the same denial and resistance to truth manifesting in regard to Israel's occupation of Palestine today. 

You see the same denial of truth when it comes to attempting to suppress knowledge and discourse about America's legacy of racism and oppression. 

You see the same denial of truth when you see efforts to suppress the very existences of transgender and queer people. 

So what we're dealing with is very much a political stance of might makes right—whoever is in power gets to dictate what is true.

So I'm simply calling and inviting us into an alternative stance. Let’s flip the script. Rather than expend all this energy to try to make what we want to be true, true in reality… we could begin to look for what is true, and then adapt ourselves to it. 

This is the reunifying path—the path that brings us back into right relationships. and harmony with the earth most broadly, but also all of its different components, all of the living systems surrounding us. 

I invite you to become courageous enough to lean into trust for your experiences, trust for the feedback that you are able to discern from those lived experiences, and reflect on how to make your identity better conform to the truth that you are uncovering in that process. 

Evolution is shaping us right now, and the self you select for is the self you're going to end up with in a circumstance of crisis. And you’ll quickly learn then what's adaptive and what brings us more thriving. 

So if it helps, you might consider freeing yourself up from the heavy static identity involved in investing in an ego or a mythos. And, breathe. And consider identifying more so with processes: processes of collective sense making, processes of cultural evolution, processes of life life-ing… and seeing just how much wisdom and power is available to you from life itself to draw upon. 

On the other side of ego… through the portals of awakening and stripping bare and insight… there is a much more gratifying way to live: this reunifying way. 

But if you've only ever known ego, you might be just totally scared and utterly disturbed by what I'm saying. You might feel again like the price of that wasted aggression and denialism is worth the cost, and is a better use of your energy, than becoming willing to transform and metamorphosize. And all I can say is trust me when I say truth will win out and in general it is better to side with truth. 

Truth is much more enduring. It has way more stamina and it will easily crush your little self and your little society before too long. Frankly, many, many, many civilizations have collapsed and failed in the past because their active mythos—even all the way up to the end—did not adequately grapple with changing conditions, whether that be changing climate, changing environmental details, changing social conditions. Our civilization will be no different. 

So I encourage you to align yourself with a cultural/social and political stance of dealing with the truth. A culture that organizes itself around dealing with the truth is going to become quite resilient and quite knowledgeable… Compared to a society that unfortunately will continue manifesting its fragility through its excessive uses of power.

Climate change is just feedback. It's just inviting us to reflect, inviting us to get right with life and get our shit in order so that we can live more fulfilling and meaningful lives. Just like an adult. 

Let's be a people that takes responsibility. Even if we didn't make the mess, we're the ones here now and we're capable of cleaning it up. Let's be. We're resilient. Let's take responsibility and let's adapt ourselves, in reality, to the truth. The truth in the environment and the deeper truth too, buried within ourselves—that more true self that is the version of you capable of evolution and of becoming more and more unified in your holistic way of living.

Ultimately, if we cling to a false story of self, a mythos or an ego that is supposedly so grand and so accomplished, it will nevertheless be washed away in the wake of us failing to attend to our own context for existing. If we fail to attend to our relations, to our literal environment, then I believe we will have no future and no identity at all to speak of. 

⚫

Thank you for reading and listening, fellow beings. ‘Til next week.

-C.