New Reality [6]: Acknowledging Addiction to Madness
“Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.”{i}
“Net-zero 2050” is a predictable immune system response for those caught in the double-bind (of knowing that change will end their way of life whilst also knowing that not changing will end their way of life) to further delay and avoid making the systemic shift away from a violent destructive economic system even as irreversibility and collapse are now fully locked in… or as a Spanish Government Minister put it in his ground-breaking statement last year…
“the main problem underlying conventional economics is its reliance on a conceptualisation of the economy which deliberately ignores the physical context of which it is necessarily a part, as well as the most elementary laws of physics.”
The “net-zero 2050” cheer squad are still very much of the worldview that infinite economic growth (powered indefinitely by fossil fuels to a large extent) is a good thing and a valid representation of “human progress”. This is madness. And, this is deeply troubling and has infected (unsurprisingly) a wide range of otherwise well meaning folks and initiatives in the hope of some reciprocal funding in exchange for compromising their integrity. This is in no way a judgement of the individuals, rather an observation of the conditions of the system that provide signals that both encourage and legitimise this behaviour as appropriate.
Whilst the prevailing exchange value mechanism holds deeply onto racist and colonialist ideals and metaphors of ‘separation’ and ‘better-than’ to apply a suffocatingly intoxicating brew of differential valuations, I see not a shred of likelihood that the necessary paths will be even perceived, let alone trodden by enough in positions of “power” or “influence”. What if the $200 trillion+ of theft by the G20(ish) had of not been “legitimately” extracted from humans and beautiful living systems relationships from across the rest of the world over the last 30 years or so resulting in the fundamental underlying issue of ecological overshoot (or, put another way, the annihilation of the relationships of life of which we are a part)?
I sometimes imagine this… a world without endless extrinsic rewards for systemic sociopathic arbitrage that concentrates and amplifies existential risk for all life here on Earth… it would be rather lovely, all life respected for the simple reality of being life alive on a rapidly dying planet. What a gentle read the 2023 State of the Climate Report might have been had the “sane” within the madness of institutionalised violence been supported through the painful process of acknowledging and then working through their addictions.
The dissonance of the ridiculously transparent “post-COVID” discourse is yet further evidence of the deep habituated addiction to economic growth and the separation-by-fabricated-borders at all costs and expediency over survival that enables hollow slogans like “net-zero 2050” to gain such rapid momentum. But addiction that is not treated as addiction, not acknowledged as addiction, is very difficult to resolve into a way of being with a different perception of perceivable reality… addicts find it very difficult to break free because “it is not a matter of revolt against insane ideals around him/ her but of escaping from his/ her own insane premises, which are continually reinforced by society” {ii} especially as it is almost always ‘on-the-individual-to-change’ without focusing on the essential role of contexts (think: mindfulness or Inner Development Goals)… yet “the unit of survival is not the organism or the species but the largest system or ‘power’ within which the organism lives. If the organism destroys its environment, it destroys itself” {ii}…which is our shared and collective predicament due largely to the behaviours of a few… which makes change prior to crossing irreversible thresholds unlikely as “a tendency to verify the unpleasant by seeking repeated experience of it is a common human trait. It is perhaps what Freud referred to as ‘the death instinct’” {ii} that is now in full evidence across many of our species with choices they seem unable to perceive as being within an insane premise that is constructed as an unchallengeable myth by those in positions to impose their “truth” on others as Lakoff and Johnson so beautifully articulated in their 2003 masterwork:
“In a culture where the myth of objectivism is very much alive and truth is always absolute truth, the people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture (sic.. net-zero) get to define what we consider to be true — absolutely and objectively true. All cultures have myths (sic.. net-zero), and people cannot function without myth any more than they can function without metaphor. And just as we often take the metaphors of our own culture as truths, so we often take the myths of our own cultures as truths. The myth of objectivism is particularly insidious in this way. Not only does it purport not to be a myth, but it makes both myths and metaphors objects of belittlement and scorn: according to the objectivist myth, myths and metaphors cannot be taken seriously because they are not objectively true. However, the myth of objectivism is itself not objectively true.” {iii}
Heart-breaking on a daily basis as it is… the behaviours and speeches do not anymore lead to judgement of (or reflection by ) those making them, but rather are able to be observed as simply information about the conditions of the system and the constraints of the contexts that have pre-conditioned a way of perceiving reality that maintains an autophenomenologically reinforcing construct of individual as a relevant unit (with the implied transactionality) even when it is now accepted (more than a century after first being clearly understood and articulated) to be an absurdity anatomically and biologically due to the interdependent symbiont nature and mutual aid evolutionary elements on which the survival of life, including us fragile social humans, in rapidly changing environmental contexts is possible.
Idiocy and power
[342: 25.10.23]
Fermenting foment loosing sands of idiocy and power
As the ships gather and glower
The locks of compassion long now dry
The children dead don’t cry
Nowhere left now to cower
Unleashing perhaps a final autumn shower
Turn signal stuck though can’t deny
Minds burnt can no longer fly
With currents running sour
Our absurd achievements tower
Crushing attention as a flower
Surpluses of idiocy and power
And the wave ever building
Momenting magnificently
Jackets clinging fast
On skins not fit for task
Pass the dumplings
Some signals are worth sampling
As change is within the wind
Can we now rescind
The language with which we only see
Walls and me, not the essential we
Whilst we gouge into the glaciers with gleeful ferocity
Justifying endlessly our ongoing monstrosity
Tears rain down ever more violently
From clouds dismissed so diligently
Until manifesting beyond models malevolently
Parading as truth conveniently
Continue the aberration of abnegating wisdom through purpose
Conscious, ever so conscious on its way to usurp us
From ways of knowing beyond idiocy and power
From ways of knowing beyond idiocy and power
Who is teaching who a lesson?
The chamois on the Jura are paying more attention to the irreversible shift in our climate structure than the politicians, bankers and insurers are… not because these people don’t want to pay attention, but because they cannot… the moral act of paying attention more widely is negated by artificial structures and extrinsic motivational and reward mechanisms. Epistemological quagmires abound, and are well rewarded… at least in the short-term and are effectively blocking the possibilities of finding a way to perceive their reality differently. This is madness… but so many are paid to resolutely stay on the maps of certainty rather than exploring aimlessly into the territories of possibility… even when those maps are the source of the unacknowledged addiction, the source of trauma already experienced… and the trauma that is accumulating rapidly.
“Perhaps I feel something of the awe and humility a lone sailor might feel as he sits in his very tiny boat, in the quiet of a brewing storm, and beholds all around and beneath him the great heaving ocean on which he must stay afloat and hold to his course. I am a sailor on a sea of madness. Ahoy there Mr Curly!” {iv}
This is the 6th essay in my New Reality series and sort of fell out me unexpectedly after briefly reading the 2023 State of Climate Report and listening to the remarks of the UN Secretary-General in the Security Council (and the response with threats of “teaching a lesson”). I am not sure what to make any more of the addictions to violence against life still doggedly not being treated as such. Perhaps a gentle walk together in the forest might help. Quack. 🦆
The 5th essay in the New Reality series published in September 2023 is “New Reality: Reck and the UN Life Hub” and is available here (with links to the first four essays in the series at the bottom):
https://medium.com/@scott42195/new-reality-reck-and-the-un-life-hub-728ac6134121
End notes
{i} Ripple et al 2023. The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory. Bioscience https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad080
{ii} Bateson [1972] 2000. The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of Alcoholism in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press.
{iii} Lakoff and Johnson [1980] 2003. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
{iv} Leunig [2001] 2006. The Curly Pyjama Letters. Penguin.
