Are We Enough?

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I want to pose a question that I expect might strike poignantly at a fear embedded deep inside of you, and mostly unconscious. So, brace yourself.

Are we enough?

Are we—humankind—”enough” to overcome the very catastrophes we’ve set in motion?

Do we have what it takes to actually navigate and overcome our compounding crises?

Or will our legacy in 100 or 10,000 years be a dismal, embarrassing one—defined moreso by ignorance than by intelligence? Moreso by what we failed to attend to with our attention—than the proliferating technologies and innovations we enraptured ourselves with?

If we fail to attend to the context of our environment, and the continuum of life that we are an indelible part of—then we will fail ourselves, and doom ourselves. Maybe not in this little lifetime, but we will render all our descendants moot. Which is perhaps a fate worth than death: total meaninglessness.

To render an unliveable future is to render our own lives pointless.

And this is the tragic fate we seem headed towards.

So… are we enough to change our fate? 
Do we have, or can we find, what it would take?
Is there something within “being human” that could possibly redeem us from this yawning abyss we now careen into?

…Controversially, I argue, yes.

There is something special within being alive that can be reclaimed for its redemptive properties.

There is something within being human that contains the seed for reclaiming our place and role in life-as-a-whole.

But it is just a seed, and would need to be cultivated. And in our self-absorbed noisy complexity of the modern era, it is almost entirely obscured.

The Arrogant Cynicism Of Giving Up On Our Own Messes

Climate change is just feedback. And the Earth is giving us feedback about how we are living, and whether or not the way we are living is suitable for inhabiting life on Earth.

Speaking from the position of being a modern, educated, materially comfortable human: We enjoy lives of relative material abundance yet profound spiritual loss and meaning hollowing-out.

Let’s not discount the ways our material comfort distorts our perception, actually. We seem to not be dependent on our environments for our existence. We find many “inconvenient truths” in the compounding damages of climate change. We know we must reckon with it for a liveable future, and yet the status quo has held pretty well intact for the last 50 years. Recently David Suzuki commented on this, indicating that the fight is “over” for climate change mitigation because of the evident inertia of these systems. For various reasons: as a society, we failed to adequately make sense of, and respond to, the crisis dooming our kin. As if the future didn’t matter. Which reveals a deep rot at the center of our so-called culture, indeed.

If your inner world is constantly afflicted by a sense of severe disorientation, floundering, grief, and disaffection—then you sharing an experience of most modern humans today. This is a common, chronic condition of people who lack a culture that situates them in nature, as indigenous cultures do. Indeed, the cultural imprinting of a colonialist, imperialist, capitalist logic is utterly rooted in estrangement and exploitation. Of course it applies to circumstances of dominance among humans, clearly. But of course it also cannot deliver us from the problems that paradigm creates. It cannot, and does not, hold answers for how we might transcend our cycling warring circumstance, how we might care for the whole, nor does it provide a cosmological narrative that holds any beauty or insight beyond said domination.  

We're stuck.
Perhaps because we’ve been conditioned to become a very self-centered people.
Or perhaps… the people would have changed the game toward something more wise and holistic as a society/planet—but the people did not possess the power.
The elite who benefit the most from things staying the same, controlled the game.
And we, so comfortable in our material wealth and relative ignorance, went along with it. Dazed by the apparent plenty & the many “affordances” we enjoy while degrading Earth—we forgot we needed to cultivate and wield alternative power so as to meaningfully build pathways to different worlds.
When the tsunami was on its way, we went to sleep.
Shame on us.

I mean, I understand the pressures generated by the cognitive dissonances involved here. I understand the individual and culture-wide temptation to install blinders on one’s perception, and maintain a shallow, self-serving focus. But that means, in effect: no one is attending to the whole.

Despite our penetrating interreliance planet-wide now, no one seems to want to attend to the whole. We are in denial of our globalized modern reality if we think only local scale action is relevant. And we are in denial if we think we can abdicate our responsibilities to one another and our environments—while reaping all the short-term abundance.

We might think someone else will pay that price. That the facing of consequences will be displaced by a few, or a few hundred, years. And yet, if we are telling an accurately broad story of self, then it becomes clear: we pay these prices. There is no “away.” What we sow, we will reap—no matter the “we” the form takes.

The Doorway Through Despair

…From what I’m saying, it might seem like I’m leading to the conclusion that: we can't be the solution, and we are not enough. We will doom ourselves, and all our potential, through the plague of our ignorance, period. Indeed, many philosophers might find such a position increasingly defensible and “realistic.” But I’m not just a philosopher, I’m a dreamer: an imagination worker, and a midwife between worlds. So, I have somewhere else to go from here.

Trust me, I know, it’s a long journey back to nature for us modern folks—one requiring us to give up a lot. And it’s a ton of work to develop the ways of seeing and being that enable belonging to nature for folks raised within cultures like mine growing up. However, it’s not impossible. Indeed, it’s our birthright: a journey of reclamation. 

Having undertaken such work myself, for decades now, I believe one of the crucial advantages it’s given me is the ability to look out on the world, and have it make sense. Have it not look like a bunch of noise, but signal. And, to possess a firm purpose arising from my existence. These differentiate my experience from most. These are like anchors in a world gone mad, and tools to sculpt my interactions for the greater good.

My worldview has become resilient enough to accommodate this complexity—and still see through to its root patterns. I’ve located the subtle reality of what it takes through my diligent seeking. I’ve earned my way to a destination of enoughness. And through Fractal Praxis, I’m attempting to invite you into that.

So I’ll boldly pose this question: 
What if there were nothing wrong with the world? 
What if all of this mess made sense—in the sense that it is following an intrinsic logic? 
What if we are, in reality, fundamentally as much a part of the solution as the problem?
What if the only thing we might say is “wrong” with the world—is our perspective on it? (And the perspectives generating what we see as wrong or harm IN the world?)
And that to evolve the right perspective would enable us to meet and mitigate the harms of this moment?

What if we ARE enough—under the right conditions?

So what is that “something special” within us that can be leveraged for crafting a truly liberated and enlightened future?

What is that secret ingredient that could render the mass mess we’re in intelligible—and remediable?

It is a process and a premise: LEARNING.
Meaning-making. Sense-making.
Engaging in this process is key to liberating ourselves from the affliction of ignorance and its many consequences.
It gives us the way—the actual pathway—to emerging from a destitute, detached condition… and into increasingly better, wholer conditions.

To practice meaning-making is to bring about higher order structures—that is to say, more elegant and productive ways of seeing and being.
More adaptive cultures and selves.
This is not just a poetic claim, it is an existential one, and with huge implications.

To exemplify life’s praxis is not about existing as a standalone, unchanging entity.
To exemplify life’s praxis is to leverage one’s BEING within a process of adaptation.

What the world needs now is for us to embrace a process of adaptation—taking in the truth, digesting it, and transforming our condition.

Consider this: All beings, at all times, are unified through their immersion in a process of learning for the sake of adaptation. 
Furthermore: all beings, across all time, exist in relation with one another. The 3+ billion year continuum of life’s evolution on planet Earth is a story of mutual, co-evolution.
This means: We have the whole world as our allies and mentors in this quest to achieve adaptivity. If we learned to partner with them in this crisis.

If we could see ourselves as part of a fabric of life—we’d recognize the need to defend all life and agency, and the conditions for life and agency to prosper in general.

If we located our identities within this broader phenomenon of life, we might see that we are in a crisis OF surviving and adapting system-wide. And that unless we address this, all of our other “lower order” individual efforts shall be rendered truly meaningless.

The buried seed of the truth, in which we DO have what it takes, and we ARE enough to respond to this crisis… it lies in our willingness to embrace the truth and adapt to it. Mind-bogglingly, this is the charge of ALL life forms, in reality. And so, when we embrace this path, we embrace our unity with life—and enable ourselves to harness the intelligence shared collectively among all lifeforms, past and present, too. 

This is a path out of dissociation, and into re-association—for our salvation.

It’s not gonna take some transhumanist ascension fantasy.
It’s not gonna take some ecofascist regressive dystopia to purify ourselves.
And it’s definitely not going to be achieved by apathy.

Our redemption arises from our willingness to engage, to re-enter the dialogue, to meaning-make, and to act in accordance with what’s meaningful. This liberates our true selves fractally—across all scales.

I believe we are enough, intrinsically—and that no matter how horrible or messy, we can integrate this shit. But not if we don’t redeem these potentials. Not if we forget our true natures. Not if we stay asleep in shallow identities and convenient myths. Not if we wait until it’s too late to change. Not if we forget our humanity—fractally.

So, what will you do to become more enough, for yourself and for all of us—soon?

With love from Fractal Praxis.

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Love,

C.