If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins. Wendell Berry You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller Before we get into what could be called a “rural strategy” for de-Trumping our non-urban areas in America, let’s do a quick recap of the overall scheme … Continue reading De-Trumping Rural America
2500 years is long enough for us to have learned that escape from community, and from the earth, is not a solution, but a root cause of our troubles. John Zerzan In 1949, in his book The Origin and Goal of History, the German philosopher Karl Japsers coined the term “Axial Age,”. In Jaspers’ view, similar ways of interpreting the world emerged in different civilizational … Continue reading The Next Axial Age: Salvaging a workable future from metacollapse
You are captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity. This is what prevents them: they are unable to find the bars of the cage. Daniel Quinn The child who is not embraced by the … Continue reading Last Chance Moonshot – Part 2: Bigger Home Bases
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967) The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide … Continue reading Last Chance Moonshot – Part 1: Basic Income
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
As we come down the home stretch of the shitshow that is the 2024 Presidential election, it has become clear that our problem is not just Trump, or his legion of followers, or even the entire American political system, which has tipped over completely into plutocratic servitude. What is really crippling us is a dysfunctional set of ideas, a system of zombie ideas so entrenched … Continue reading Hard to Kill: Zombie Ideas That Need Slaying
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)
The order which has been taken for granted suddenly appears queer and contingent. There is an appearance of the contingency of order. This is the main value of utopias. At a time when everything is blocked by systems which have failed but which cannot be beaten…utopia is our resource. The utopia seems to say something plausible, but it also says something that is crazy. By … Continue reading Recapitulation: How to Save the World
The development of new, alternative perspectives define utopia’s most basic function. May we not say then that imagination itself – through its utopian function – has a constitutive role in helping us to rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia – this leap outside – the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is consumption, what is authority, what is religion and so … Continue reading Avoiding Armageddon: (2) Cracking the utopia code
If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. Abraham Lincoln In a pair of earlier posts about Rescuing the Future, we looked at the competing delusions on offer from our mainstream political camps, and how Covid has laid waste to these fantasies, leaving us floundering and exhausted. We are mired in an almost cosmic sense of “stuckness,” a foreboding that … Continue reading Avoiding Armageddon: (1) How to circumvent the Polarization Industrial Complex
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