Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future…Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in … Continue reading Election 2024: The Aftermath
Last time, we looked at how bad things are from an ecological perspective, and how a universal cognitive dissonance has emerged, coming from the lack of congruity between the pending collapse we all sense and the various delusional stories we are being told about possible paths to the future. This creeping sense of disoriented dread is exacerbated by the lack of any workable points of … Continue reading The Cheat Code for Preventing and/or Surviving The Coming Collapse (Part 2)
Dreams of individual accomplishment and desires to contribute to the common good become firmly attached to waged work, where they can be hijacked to rather different ends: to produce neither individual riches nor social wealth, but privately appropriately surplus value. Kathi Weeks, “The Problem with Work” Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds, insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing … Continue reading Morality & the Meaning of Money
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. John Maynard Keynes New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been engaged in talks with the White House over the past couple weeks, in an effort to prevent the US government from ‘defaulting’ on its debt later this year. As has happened many times over the last few decades, the … Continue reading Does the Debt Ceiling Matter? Yes and No (and probably not the way you’re thinking)
To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment….would result in the demolition of society. Karl Polanyi The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Antonio Gramsci As the planet flounders and fails under … Continue reading The Great Interregnum
What if this ongoing fear of ‘collapse’ … is a narrative designed to quell a worse fear: that things might not collapse, but continue like this? That the Earth’s final wild frontiers may be tamed and diluted, ravaged and destroyed, and that we would not care much because we were too busy following the logic of our narrative to its endpoint, becoming our machines – … Continue reading Rescuing the Future – Part 1
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at. Oscar Wilde For so many of us, the couple form and the job wind up bearing the weight of all of our hopes and dreams and need for human contact, and they were never meant to bear that weight. We need human relationships that extend beyond the romantic or … Continue reading BHB: Bigger Home Bases – Reasons why we need to start living in larger groups now
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Albert Einstein We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. Talmudic Proverb Many thinkers…have argued that studying philosophy is learning how to die. If that’s true, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age — for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. … Continue reading Utopia Now! Model communities & UBI: our last off-ramps to a sane, realistic future
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. Milton Friedman As I write this (Jan 2nd), there are … Continue reading After Trump: Is there any common ground?
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller The galloping, microscopic horseman of Covid has quickly exposed the fatal flaws in the American system, and the mixed messaging that we’re getting from our leaders cannot obscure the basic facts, which are not too complicated but profoundly terrifying nonetheless. The … Continue reading Narrowing Options
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