The Political Cataclysm: Causes, Implications, and a Way Forward

The re-election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency will have global implications for decades to come. This article identifies key underlying drivers that led to this event, explores the potential landscape of the next few years, and sheds light on a positive way forward. Out of the approaching turbulence, there remains a possibility of life-affirming potentialities that can be nurtured and brought to fruition.

A political cataclysm has taken place in the United States that will have global implications for decades to come. A majority of Americans has chosen to entrust their nation to an authoritarian self-promoter and adjudicated sexual molester who has vowed to be a “dictator” on day one. The election of Donald Trump to head the world’s most powerful country, with minimal institutional or legal restraints on his power, could turn out to be one of the most momentous events in the history of the modern world.

How did Americans willingly take this path? What is it likely to mean? And what is the most skillful response? This article identifies key underlying drivers that led to this event, explores the potential landscape of the next few years, and sheds light on a positive way forward—for each of us as individuals and for our collective future. Out of the approaching turbulence, there remains a possibility that life-affirming potentialities may be generated that can be nurtured and brought to fruition.

Primary Underlying Causes

Most political pundits analyzing the election have been focusing on the wrong questions. In the end, it doesn’t matter why the swing states went for Trump rather than Harris. The real question we need to ask is why roughly half the citizens of the United States could have even considered voting for an inveterate liar and demagogue in the first place. Only by investigating that question can we begin to identify a potential way out of the quagmire.

I see two primary underlying and interlinked causes for this political cataclysm.

The first is the anguish and alienation caused by the ravages of neoliberalism and the impotence of the Democratic party to offer any meaningful alternative.

Neoliberalism is an ideology that first emerged in the 1970s and has since become the de facto governing doctrine of virtually every aspect of human endeavor, infiltrating its core beliefs into areas as wide-ranging as politics, finance, culture, education, technology, and agriculture. It holds that humans are individualistic, selfish, calculating materialists, and because of this, unrestrained free-market capitalism provides the best framework for every kind of human activity. These precepts lead to a fundamental belief in the value of unrestrained competition, with free markets, free trade, and minimal rules or restrictions. Wealth is seen as the ultimate measure of success, as manifested in personal riches, business profitability, or a nation’s gross domestic product. Inequality, therefore, far from being pernicious, is a sign of a society’s health, because it permits those who are most accomplished to be maximally rewarded.

Neoliberal ideas were first implemented as national policy in the 1980s by Republican President Ronald Reagan, along with Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK. But the crucial turning point came several years later with the abject acceptance of this ideology by Democratic President Bill Clinton along with Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair in the UK. From this point on, the Democrats no longer stood for the common people, but instead became primarily another instrument of corporate power and billionaires. In fact, it was during Bill Clinton’s presidency, between 1993 and 2001, that the income and wealth gaps between the wealthiest 1 percent and ordinary people broadened more than ever before (see the figures below).

This gaping disparity was further exacerbated by the inaction of President Obama after the 2008 financial meltdown and the consequent rise of the Occupy Movement. Instead of responding to this crisis by initiating a transformative Green New Deal, Obama doubled down on neoliberal ideology, coordinating the global establishment to spend $1 trillion dollars to bail out the banks with taxpayers’ money without demanding any meaningful reform in return.

Bernie Sanders, in 2016, offered a brief glimpse of an alternative program in his campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, calling for a “political revolution” and rejecting donations above $2,700, but he was shut out by the Democratic establishment. This was the pivotal moment that led to the current predicament. If we could re-run the reel of history with Bernie as Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, there is an excellent chance he would have won the election by offering a real path forward to common people, and we could now be living in a period of positive transformative change.

Instead, the Democrats have offered nothing other than “business as usual,” leaving vast numbers of disaffected Americans to channel their rage and resentment elsewhere: right into the hands of a rising authoritarian movement only too ready to stoke their anger with constructed “culture wars” fueled by misogyny and racism. Ordinary Americans are right to feel betrayed by the Democratic party. In choosing between one party that supports the status quo and another that calls for the wrecking ball, it’s not surprising that large numbers of struggling voters chose a candidate who claims he will demolish the system that has immiserated them.

The second interrelated reason is the rise in epistemic chaos generated by social media and weaponized by Elon Musk and others. The public sphere, which until recently has been maintained by a confluence of traditional media, academic institutions, news organizations, governments, and the public itself, has now been privatized by the large-scale algorithmic curation of the major platforms, which coordinate and steer the opinions and actions of billions of people.

Their concern is not to facilitate wise collective decision-making, but to increase advertising revenues by maximizing engagement. Since false news stories have been shown to reach six times as many people as true stories, these are emphasized by the selection algorithms. As we’ve seen, politically motivated special interest groups use the platforms to intensify polarization by spreading malicious propaganda, as exemplified by Musk’s takeover of Twitter to turn it into his own personal megaphone.

The shared sense-making that is fundamental to a healthy society has been systematically shredded, leading to widespread epistemic chaos fraught with bizarre conspiracy theories adopted as facts by an increasingly disoriented population.

It is the linkage between these two dynamics that led inexorably to the election of Trump. Americans know intuitively that the economic system has unfairly deprived them while magnifying the wealth of the elites. However, in the epistemic chaos of the public sphere, their minds have been systematically manipulated by Musk, Fox News, and other right-wing social media sites to believe false stories about the cause of their distress. Instead of aiming their anger at the elite echelon of centimillionaires and billionaires, corporations, and banks sucking the nation’s wealth from the common people, their rage has been misdirected toward the most vulnerable populations—racial and ethnic minorities, undocumented migrant workers and transgender people—who have played no part in their immiseration.

“The people who make $700 an hour have convinced the people who make $25 an hour that the problem is the people who make $7.50 an hour.” – @Jesse-v7h

What to Expect in the Next Few Years

The election of Donald Trump will not, however, alleviate the misery of those who turned to him. On the contrary, Trump—himself a billionaire—is stacking up the wealthiest administration in history, with a team containing 13 billionaires with a net worth of more than $350 billion dedicated to cutting spending on public services used by the poor and vulnerable, and shredding regulations that might block their pursuit of even vaster wealth.

With control of Congress, and the majority of the Supreme Court as his lackeys, Trump has no meaningful institutional restraints on his power. No-one can predict exactly how the new regime in Washington will play out, but the public statements made by Trump and his appointees indicate that we are entering a period when virtually every democratic norm will be overturned. Trump has repeatedly spoken like a Fascist demagogue dehumanizing his enemies, openly telling supporters at a rally that he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” He has vowed, on his first day, to pardon rioters imprisoned after the January 6, 2021 insurrection and begin mass deportation for the estimated 11 million people living in the US without legal immigration documents.

Based on the policies proposed by those that Trump has already selected for his administration, we should expect legislation criminalizing abortion care and restricting access so widely as to become an effective nationwide abortion ban, and a campaign of terror leading to millions of innocent undocumented migrants locked up in detention camps. Internationally, in addition to the possibility of prohibitive tariffs raising the cost of living for ordinary people, we can expect the US to pull out of the UN-administered climate COP process which is already on life-support, and European nations will face renewed threats from Trump about the US pulling out of NATO, further empowering Putin to threaten Europe militarily.

More broadly, we must expect an attack on democracy itself, including massive lawsuits against media outlets (which have already begun) leading to a virtual shutting down of free speech, widespread banning in schools and libraries of books with progressive perspectives—following the model set by Ron DeSantis in Florida where it’s illegal to teach critical race theory—and the threat of violence everywhere as right-wing extremist armed gangs learn they can act with impunity. Culturally, the ascent to power of leaders directly associated with misogyny, racism, violence, corruption, and cruelty will have far-flung reverberations, further elevating these pernicious values and behaviors as cultural norms.

In his first administration, Trump’s authoritarian tendencies were largely checked by legal challenges, institutional barriers, and his own chaotic mismanagement. However, in the past eight years, a focused group of extremists has developed a comprehensive plan for the overthrow of the administrative infrastructure that the vast majority of Americans rely on, laid out in terrifying detail in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which will be now be used as a blueprint for the new administration. In line with Project 2025, Trump’s appointees—some of whom were its key contributors—have explicitly called for the elimination, dismantling, or severe downsizing of agencies such as the Department of Education, the EPA, the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the FDA, the IRS, and the NIH.

Democracy in the United States has long been tarnished by the power of money and corruption. While studies looking back over decades have demonstrated that legislation is passed primarily for the benefit of corporations and wealthy elites, their interests have at least been held in check by an assemblage of laws attempting to regulate some of the worst excesses of capitalism. That era is now at an end. The US is becoming a consummate plutocracy—government by the wealthy for the wealthy—in which the very idea of “conflicts of interest” will come to be seen as a quaint relic of a bygone age, as the nation enters an era in which the primary objective of its rulers is to flagrantly expand further their own wealth and power.

There is, moreover, every reason to expect that the Justice Department and FBI will be subverted to become instruments of Trump’s personal vendettas. His plans for personal retribution have invoked a wide array of his political opponents including Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, former FBI director James Comey, and Barak Obama, many of whom he has claimed should be “impeached and prosecuted.” In the case of former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley, who earned Trump’s ire by describing him as “Fascist to the core,” he has even floated the idea of executing him for treason.

Since the Supreme Court granted Trump presumptive immunity in July 2024 for his official acts, there is no realistic constraint to prevent Trump asserting dictatorial powers in the coming months, if he should choose it. Political analysts have looked to historical precedents such as Orban in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines, or Hitler in Germany, to try to predict how Trump might seize full control. It is not inconceivable that, like Hitler, Trump could take advantage of a “Reichstag Fire” opportunity to impose martial law which could suspend civil liberties, impose curfews and restriction of movement, replace the civilian justice system with military justice, and give him power to deploy military force on US territory.

As Democrats attempt to regroup and hope that the mid-term elections of 2026 might give them the possibility of regaining control of Congress, it is not unreasonable to ask whether there will actually be authentic mid-term elections by that time.

Charting a Way Forward

As a teenager growing up in England in the 1970s and becoming aware of the horror that had afflicted the world only a few decades earlier, I felt deeply grateful for inhabiting a world that, flawed as it was, operated, at least in principle, according to a set of moral norms that eschewed racism, genocide, and structural cruelty. I wondered how people felt in the 1930s as they saw the darkness of such forces encroaching.

We no longer need to wonder about that. The re-election of Trump to the presidency of the world’s most powerful country is a fateful step toward an abyss into which the world system has already been inexorably slipping. Humanity is entering a period of epochal change. The dominant civilization is on a trajectory of climate breakdown, ecological disaster, and unconscionable levels of inequality—potentially leading to a collapse of the entire world system in the decades to come. The rise in authoritarianism around the world is an expected phenomenon as people recognize the system is failing them and turn to those who stoke their deepest fears with anger and resentment.

This is not, however, cause for despair. While the future has never appeared bleaker, this does not mean that anyone should give up on the potential of a brighter path forward. Far from it. As darkness envelops our world, the remaining beams of light become even more crucial to keep us oriented. As the current world system unravels, this opens up the possibility—remote as it might appear right now—to re-weave it into an entirely different form of organization.

For those of us who live in the US, and who have any kind of cultural, racial, or economic privilege, it will be crucial to attune to the needs of those most at risk from the institutional violence that is at hand. There has never been a time when inner resources arising from spiritual practice are called for more than now. After an initial period of grief, there is an imperative for us to cultivate all the love and compassion available within ourselves and offer that in abundance to those around us. Let our response to what unfolds be driven by compassion manifested in skillful action.

What does skillful action entail? Recognizing the forces that have led to this cataclysm allows us to orient ourselves to the behaviors that can counteract them. Here are some principles that might help to guide us.

Stay true to your core values

These are disorienting times, and those who wield authoritarian rule maintain their power by keeping their potential opponents off-balance. When greed and ruthlessness prevail, it is easy to lose faith in fundamental human qualities such as kindness, respect, solidarity, and hope. However, this is exactly when those qualities become most important. Hope, in the words of Czech dissident Václav Havel—who spent years as a political prisoner before becoming his country’s president—is “a state of mind, not a state of the world.” It is a “deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times . . . an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” That is what we must all cultivate.

Stay grounded factually

The epistemic chaos created by social media, and weaponized by Musk and others, can only be withstood by a commitment to careful discernment about what is happening around us. Consider the sources of the information you obtain. Obtain your news from media such as The Guardian which have a proven track record of veracity. When you encounter an unexpected news item from an acquaintance or on social media, check alternative sources to validate it before passing it on to others.

Don’t exacerbate polarization

Since fascism thrives on polarization, it is crucial to avoid further exacerbating the “othering” of those with whom we disagree. We can forcefully act against the ideas and behaviors that cause harm while maintaining a respect for the inherent dignity of all our fellow humans. Beneath the words of those we might consider our political opponents, there exists a sensitive soul—perhaps hardened through years of undeserved suffering—that desires to be seen and cherished. It is from a shared basis of core human values that political healing has the potential to emerge.

Don’t succumb to anticipatory obedience

Historian Timothy Snyder, who has studied the rise of authoritarianism in the twentieth century, explains that much of power accruing to authoritarian regimes is surrendered in advance. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given” he writes. “In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” There are, of course, times when it’s prudent not to speak your mind. But whenever you are faced with that choice, keep this precept in mind, and consider what the courageous course might be.

Connect with others whom you trust

Whatever difficult feelings arise in you, and whatever you’d like to do to help those in need, you can be sure there are others around with similar experiences and intentions. Seek them out and participate in creating a shared community of care. When we truly open our hearts to each other, there is no burden too heavy for us to carry together, there is no pain too deep for us to hold in each other’s arms. And it is together that we can find the most skillful way to respond to the most pressing needs around us.

Help to develop alternatives

In 1980, as Margaret Thatcher was consolidating her power in the UK, she uttered the ominous statement “There is no alternative.” For four and a half decades, most mainstream politicians have acted as if they believed she was right. The only way for society to be structured, it’s been assumed, is in the form of growth-based consumer capitalism—a system in which corporate profits ultimately drive the decisions that affect the lives of everyone on the planet, the health of the living Earth, and the destiny of future generations. This false belief forms the basis of the consensus trance that has now given rise to an authoritarian takeover of much of our world. People should not have to choose between corporate-controlled neoliberalism and corporate-backed fascism—between a hypocritical oligarchy and a flagrant plutocracy.

It is time to recognize that there is an alternative to this system of devastation. There is, in fact, a different way forward, an opportunity to reclaim our future, but it requires something that goes even beyond Bernie’s “political revolution”—it requires a complete systemic transformation to a different kind of civilization, one that replaces extraction and exploitation with a system that sets the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerated Earth.

Around the world, changemakers, community organizers, and researchers are working assiduously laying down pathways toward this life-affirming future, which is increasingly being called an “Ecocivilization.” While they may not always see themselves as part of a larger movement, they’re driven by a shared set of core human imperatives to care for others around them, nurture the living Earth, and strive to leave a healthy world for future generations to inherit.

In every aspect of our world system, these alternative futures present themselves. Advanced technology can be reconfigured to empower all of us rather than a few mega-corporations, cities can be redesigned to promote wellbeing rather than consumerism and traffic jams, and even democracy can be reconceived so that regular citizens, rather than wealthy oligarchs, can thoughtfully determine the best policies for society. We can—and must—envisage a world where corporations have been legally restructured to work for people and the planet rather than merely profits, where there is a cap on the wealth of billionaires, and where enforceable Rights of Nature legislation looks out for the welfare of the other sentient beings with whom we share our world.

The disaffected voters who chose Donald Trump’s wrecking ball over the paltry reforms offered by the Democrats felt something deep in their gut: The system isn’t broken—it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do. They are right about that. But rather than demolish the system for the benefit of the plutocrats, it can be transformed and reconstructed into a world that works for all.

This is my invitation to all those who feel the suffering around them and who want to work generatively with others to investigate what’s possible for a transformed world. Act as a beacon in the dark. Join others in taking skillful, compassionate action to support those most in need. Seek out, learn about, and help to build life-affirming alternatives. Let us collectively offer those around us a loving, nurturing container of sense-making that can attract those who are feeling despair and enjoin them to help us lay down a pathway together to a brighter future.

Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. In addition to his award-winning books The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning, he is founder of the online community, the Deep Transformation Network. His upcoming book, Ecocivilization: How We Can Reclaim Our Future, will be published by Melville House in 2026.

Honoring Multiple Truths: An Integrative Pathway to Peace in Israel/Palestine

Published by The Club of Rome in Enduring Peace in the Anthropocene, May 2024

A just resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict requires acknowledging and honoring truths that are seemingly contradictory. Examples from other domains show how this can be accomplished and offer a potential pathway to an enduring, long-term peace.

Let us consider some facts of historical significance generally agreed to be unequivocally true:

In the sixth century BCE, a people who became known as the Jews were expelled from their homeland in Judah to exile in Babylon. After the Persians permitted their return, the Jews repopulated the region until being exiled again by the Romans in 69 CE. Since then, a powerful cohering tradition within the Jewish diaspora centered on the prospective return to Israel (Zion), a dream that was consummated by the United Nations declaration of Israel as a Jewish state in 1947. I can attest, as a Jewish child growing up in London, to hearing the solemn invocation “Next year in Jerusalem” uttered during the annual Passover Seder service—a supplication that had echoed through generations—and sensing its fruition through Israel’s existence.

Meanwhile, in the two millennia following their exile by the Romans, other populations, mostly Muslim and Arab, inhabited the region that became known as Palestine, calling it their home. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, the British Empire took control of Palestine. The Balfour Declaration, a statement of British support for “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people,” was proclaimed in 1917, in spite of the fact that 90 percent of Palestine’s inhabitants were non-Jews.

Who, one might ask, has the historic right to live there now: the Jews, for whom it represents an ancestral homeland, or the Arabs, for whom it also represents an ancestral homeland? Since both historical narratives speak the truth, the only pathway toward a just and enduring peace would be to honor them both. How might this be possible?

A similar set of antithetical narratives has arisen around other key aspects of the Israel/Palestine conflict. In the aftermath of the Holocaust—the systematic genocidal murder of six million Jews—the United Nations, driven by a sense of collective guilt, voted to partition the region into two independent states, one Palestinian Arab and one Jewish. The Arabs rejected this enforced expiation of a crime that was not theirs, declaring war on the newly formed state of Israel. Why should the inhabitants of Palestine be forced to make reparations for Europeans’ genocidal treatment of Jews? The birth of Israel, celebrated by Jews worldwide as a culmination of two millennia of collective longing, was correspondingly the initiation of the Nakba, the ongoing catastrophe that began by violently displacing 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, imposing an exile that remains to this day.

The contradictory claims to moral righteousness and turpitude go on and on. While the Jews forcibly dispossessed Arabs in 1948, Arab nations expelled Jews who had lived in their lands for generations, frequently confiscating all their possessions. These Jews were welcomed by Israel, which declared a Law of Return allowing for the immigration of any Jewish family to Israel—a right of return that has been denied for the Palestinians driven out by the Israelis.

Since October 7, the conflicting moral interpretations have greatly intensified: the massacre by Hamas militants of over 1,100 people, mostly civilians, was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Israel’s ruthless response, resulting to date in the deaths of more than 34,000 Palestinians, around two-thirds of them women and children, is widely recognized as criminally disproportionate and has plausibly been prosecuted as genocide.

While these morally contrasting narratives both hold true, and their supporting evidence is readily available, most people engaging with this topic fervently repeat one set of shibboleths while refusing to acknowledge the other—as if adding to the decibels of one side will somehow drown the other into submission. Such a tactic might lead to short-term gains, but never to an enduring peace. For those who envision a long-term future where both Jews and Arabs can live together harmoniously in what both consider to be a Holy Land, what approach might offer a pathway forward? Let us begin to answer this question from a foundational perspective.

Holding and honoring conflicting truths

The dominant Western worldview arises from an ontology that takes an absolutist view of truth. If something is right, then it cannot be wrong. If it’s black, then it can’t be white. In ancient Greece, Parmenides first established the iron rule of systematic logic, which was further elaborated by the deductive reasoning of Aristotle to form a foundation for scientific thought. Alongside these developments, the religious absolutism of monotheism took root, claiming for the first time in the human experience that only one God existed, and all those who did not worship Him were sinners. Before the rise of monotheism, intolerance based on religious creed was virtually unknown.

This ontology, however, is not the only one available. Even among the Greeks there were those, such as Heraclitus, who claimed that “We both are and are not.” While systematic logic won out in the West, other cultural complexes such as Buddhism, Taoism, and many Indigenous traditions developed equally sophisticated conceptions of the universe that were more fluid. For example, the Huayan school of Buddhism, which flourished in Tang dynasty China over a thousand years ago, understood reality as an all-embracing web of causal relations between things. The Huayan philosophy emphasized that the significance of any object depends on how it’s approached, with the result that phenomena could be interpreted in multiple ways without one interpretation invalidating the other. In the words of an old, wise adage: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

This approach, at odds with Aristotelian logic, re-emerged in Western thought in the twentieth century as physicists, grappling with the paradox of quantum mechanics, realized that subatomic entities may be either a wave or a particle depending on how they’re measured. More generally, the wide array of modern systems sciences—including such fields as complexity theory, chaos theory, systems biology, and network theory—recognizes that complex systems manifest multiple layers of interactivity. While certain principles may hold true throughout the system, different parts within the system may exhibit behaviors that appear contradictory to other parts, even while all are contributing to the integrity of the system as a whole. Accordingly, a healthy living system represents a state of integration which may be understood as unity incorporating manifold differentiation.

The embrace of complexity has shown up more recently in therapeutic psychology, with the widespread adoption of parts work, based on the recognition that people hold different parts within themselves, some of which may contradict each other causing inner conflict. As Walt Whitman famously declared: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” In particular, Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a transformative therapy that helps people heal by accessing and honoring their inner parts, some of which are wounded, protective, aggressive, or defensive. Recognizing that these parts are frequently at odds with each other, which causes internal suffering, IFS emphasizes the importance of a core Self in a person which, if accessed skillfully, can attend with love to each part and encourage healing—not by rejecting those parts but by allowing them to feel acknowledged and become integrated into the greater whole.

There is much that could be achieved by applying this wisdom to the political process. What kind of political discourse might arise with respect to Israel and Palestine if such an approach were taken?

An integrative pathway to peace

Comparable to the Self in IFS, there are overriding values shared by virtually all human beings that transcend the parochial in-group values dominating the current political debate. In the resounding words of the UN Declaration of Human Rights—proclaimed the year following Israel’s birth as a nation—“Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Acknowledging that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind,” the Declaration calls for “a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want … as the highest aspiration of the common people.”

Tragically, since 1948, Israeli forces have trampled on these rights of Palestinians, while many Arab nations and political groups have similarly flouted them. A few days after the October 7 massacre by Hamas and the initiation of Israel’s criminal collective punishment, author and social activist Naomi Klein called for a global response “rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.” This is the kind of deeply humanitarian orientation that is required for an integrative pathway to peace.

We must recognize that a humane response to the enormity of the Holocaust did not have to lead to an Israeli ethno-state. As essayist Pankaj Mishra has demonstrated, many Jewish leaders surviving the Holocaust took the phrase “never again” to mean “Never again for any persecuted minority anywhere in the world” rather than “Never again for the Jews.” Nonetheless, we must appreciate that Israelis today continue to live under a constant existential threat with powerful enemies repeatedly calling for their annihilation. The Israeli political leadership, however, has thrived on weaponizing fear, using it to motivate fervid allegiance to Zionism in many Jews around the world, and currently fomenting a worldwide conflation of anti-Zionist protests with anti-Semitism, in spite of the fact that many Jews join in the public outrage at Israel’s brutal campaign.

When we engage in political discourse, we must choose our words carefully to avoid adding to the polarized grandstanding dominating the media. As journalist Judith Levine has pointed out, the mindless use of blanket terms such as “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestinian” only serves to smother the deeper issues of human rights under a cacophony of tribal rivalry.

We must call urgently for a ceasefire in Gaza and a return by Hamas of all hostages. At the same time, we must recognize the deep power imbalance currently existing between the state of Israel and the Palestinians living in the occupied territories, and demand the end of Israel’s abuse of its military superiority. We must call for an end to the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and to the fanatical Jewish paramilitary gangs currently terrorizing Palestinian villagers with the tacit—and sometimes open—support of Israeli armed forces. And when the current hurricane of violence subsides, we must call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, modeled on exemplars from South Africa, Rwanda, and Canada, and employing principles of restorative justice, that could facilitate a new generation to face into and move on from the current round of anguish toward a healed society.

*Credit: Eva Noslen photography [purchase image]*

Above all, an integrative pathway to peace calls for the boldness to imagine a transformed future for this divided region and to support those groups, currently nearly drowned out by the polarized voices on both sides, taking the first courageous steps in that direction. The Standing Together movement, which mobilizes Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and justice, envisions building a shared home for all through rejecting hatred and choosing compassion. Combatants for Peace is a grassroots nonviolence movement based in Israel and Palestine—the only peace movement in the world founded by former fighters on both sides of an active conflict. The Holy Land Trust, a Palestinian organization dedicated to fostering peace, justice, and understanding in the Holy Land, is committed to nonviolent activism, along with personal and spiritual transformation arising from honoring the dignity and equal rights of all peoples.

Beyond the horizon, an integrative path has the potential to lead to political solutions that are currently almost unimaginable. A movement of Israelis and Palestinians called A Land for All, acknowledging that both peoples belong to the same ancestral land, envisages a shared homeland encompassing two sovereign states. Their proposal calls for two democratic states based on pre-1967 borders, with citizens of both states given the right to move and live freely in all parts of the homeland. With Jerusalem as a shared capital, both states would be responsible for the security of their residents, would enter into a mutual defense treaty against external threats, and would share a Human Rights Court empowered to rule on alleged violations of rights by non-citizen residents of either country. While current political and cultural conditions render such an arrangement unworkable on many counts, this is the kind of integrative visionary thinking that will be required to enable an enduring long-term peace for a region that has suffered too much torment throughout its embattled history.

Jeremy Lent is author of the prize-winning books The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning. He is founder of the Deep Transformation Network and is currently writing a book on the vision and specifics of an ecological civilization. Author website: jeremylent.com

To Counter AI Risk, We Must Develop an Integrated Intelligence

The explosive rise in the power of AI presents humanity with an existential risk. To counter that risk, and potentially redirect our civilization’s trajectory, we need a more integrated understanding of the nature of human intelligence and the fundamental requirements for human flourishing.

The recent explosion in the stunning power of artificial intelligence is likely to transform virtually every domain of human life in the near future, with effects that no-one can yet predict.

The breakneck rate at which AI is developing is such that its potential impact is almost impossible to grasp. As Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, demonstrate in their landmark presentation, The AI Dilemma, AI accomplishments are beginning to read like science fiction. After just three seconds of hearing a human voice, for example, an AI system can autocomplete the sentence being spoken with a voice so perfectly matched that no-one can distinguish it from the real thing. AI linked with fMRI brain imaging technology, they show us, can now reconstruct what a person’s brain is thinking and represent it accurately as an image.

Tristan Harris and Aza Rasking presenting “The AI Dilemma”

AI models are beginning to exhibit emergent capabilities their programmers didn’t program into them. An AI model trained to answer questions in English can suddenly understand and answer questions in Persian without being trained in the language—and no-one, not even its programmers, knows why. ChatGPT, to the surprise of its own programmers, was discovered to have trained itself in research-level chemistry even though that wasn’t part of its targeted training data.

Many of these developments have been unfolding at a time scale no longer measured in months and years, but in weeks and days. Experts are comparing the significance of the AI phenomenon to the invention of the nuclear bomb, except with a spine-chilling difference: whereas the magnitude of the nuclear threat could only increase at the pace of scientists’ own capabilities, AI is becoming increasingly capable of learning how to make itself more powerful. In recent examples, AI models have learned to generate their own training data to self-improve, and to edit sections of code so as to make the code work at more than double the speed. AI capabilities have already been expanding at an exponential rate, largely as a result of the distributed network effects of programmers building on each other’s breakthroughs. But given these recent developments, experts are forecasting future improvements at a double exponential rate, which begins to look on a graph like a vertical line of potentiality exploding upward.

The term generally used to describe this phenomenon, which heretofore has been a hypothetical thought experiment, is a Singularity. Back in 1965, at the outset of the computer age, British mathematician, I. J. Good, first described this powerful and unsettling vision. “Let an ultraintelligent machine,” he wrote, “be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion’, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”[1]

Nearly six decades after it was first conceived, the Singularity has mutated from a theoretical speculation to an urgent existential concern. Of course, it is easy to enumerate the myriad potential benefits of an ultraintelligent computer: discoveries of cures to debilitating diseases; ultra-sophisticated, multifaceted automation to replace human drudgery; technological solutions to humanity’s most pressing problems. Conversely, observers are also pointing out the dangerously disruptive potential of advanced AI on a world already fraying at the seams: the risk of deep fakes and automated bots polarizing society even further; personalized AI assistants exploiting people for profit and exacerbating the epidemic of social isolation; and greater centralization of power to a few mega-corporations, to name but a few of the primary issues. But even beyond these serious concerns, leading AI experts are warning that an advanced artificial general intelligence (“AGI”) is likely to represent a grave threat, not just to human civilization, but to the very existence of humanity and the continuation of life on Earth.

The alignment problem

At the root of this profound risk is something known as the alignment problem. What would happen, we must ask, if a superhuman intelligence wants to achieve some goal that’s out of alignment with the conditions required for human welfare—or for that matter, the survival of life itself on Earth? This misalignment could simply be the result of misguided human programming. Prominent futurist Nick Bostrom gives an example of a superintelligence designed with the goal of manufacturing paperclips that transforms the entire Earth into a gigantic paperclip manufacturing facility.

It’s also quite conceivable that a superintelligent AI could develop its own goal orientation, which would be highly likely to be misaligned with human flourishing. The AI might not see humans as an enemy to be eliminated, but we could simply become collateral damage to its own purposes, in the same way that orangutans, mountain gorillas, and a myriad other species face extinction as the result of human activity. For example, a superintelligence might want to optimize the Earth’s atmosphere for its own processing speed, leading to a biosphere that could no longer sustain life.

As superintelligence moves from a thought experiment to an urgently looming existential crisis, many leading analysts who have studied these issues for decades are extraordinarily terrified and trying to raise the alarm before it’s too late. MIT professor Max Tegmark, a highly respected physicist and president of the Future of Life Institute, considers this our “Don’t Look Up” moment, referring to the satirical movie in which an asteroid threatens life on Earth with extinction, but a plan to save the planet is waylaid by corporate interests and the public’s inability to turn their attention away from celebrity gossip. In an intimate podcast interview, Tegmark likens our situation to receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis for the entire human race, declaring that “there’s a pretty large chance that we’re not going to make it as humans; that there won’t be any humans on the planet in the not-too-distant future—and that makes me very sad.”

MIT Professor Mag Tegmark sharing his fears about human extinction from AI

Tegmark’s fear is shared by other leading experts. Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has been working on aligning AGI since 2001 and is widely regarded as a founder of the field, points out that “a sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.” Yudkowsky calls for an immediate and indefinite worldwide moratorium on further AI development, enforced by coordinated international military action if necessary.

In the short-term, there are several policy proposals urged by leaders in the AI community to try to rein in some of the more obvious societal disruptions anticipated by AI’s increasingly pervasive influence. An open letter calling for a pause on further development for at least six months has over thirty thousand signatories, including many of the most prominent names in the field. Beyond a worldwide moratorium, proposals include a requirement that any AI-generated material is clearly labeled as such; a stipulation that all new AI source code is published to enable transparency; and a legal presumption that new versions of AI are unsafe unless proven otherwise, putting the burden of proof on AI developers to demonstrate its safety prior to its deployment—analogous to the legal framework used in the pharmaceutical industry.

These proposals are eminently sensible and should promptly be enacted by national governments, while a UN-sponsored international panel of AI experts should be appointed to recommend further guidelines for worldwide adoption. Ultimately, the overarching strategy of such guidelines should be to restrict the further empowerment of AI unless or until the alignment problem itself can be satisfactorily solved.

There is, however, a serious misconception seemingly shared by the vast majority of AI theorists that must be recognized and corrected for any serious progress to be made in the alignment problem. This relates to the nature of intelligence itself. Until a deeper understanding of what comprises intelligence is more widely embraced in the AI community, we are in danger, not just of failing to resolve the alignment problem, but of moving in the wrong direction in its consideration.

Conceptual and animate intelligence

When AI theorists write about intelligence, they frequently start from the presumption that there is only one form of intelligence: the kind of analytical intelligence that gets measured in an IQ test and has enabled the human species to dominate the rest of the natural world—and the type in which AI now threatens to surpass us. The AI community is not alone in this presumption—it is shared by most people in the modern world, and forms a central part of the mainstream view of what it means to be a human being. When Descartes declared “cogito ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am”—setting the intellectual foundation for modern philosophical thought, he was giving voice to a presumption that the faculty of conceptual thought was humanity’s defining characteristic, setting humanity apart from all other living beings. Animals, according to Descartes and the majority of scientists ever since, were mere machines acting without subjectivity or thought.[2]

However, the human conceptualizing faculty, powerful as it is, is only one form of intelligence. There is another form—animate intelligence—that is an integral part of human cognition, and which we share with the rest of life on Earth.

If we understand intelligence, as it’s commonly defined, to be the ability to perceive or infer information and apply it toward adaptive behaviors, intelligence exists everywhere in the living world. It’s relatively easy to see it in high-functioning mammals such as elephants that can communicate through infrasound over hundreds of miles and perform what appear like ceremonies over the bones of dead relatives; or in cetaceans that communicate in sophisticated “languages” and are thought to “gossip” about community members that are absent.[3] But extensive animate intelligence has also been identified in plants which, in addition to their own versions of our five senses, also use up to fifteen other ways to sense their environment. Plants have elaborate internal signaling systems, utilizing the same chemicals—such as serotonin or dopamine—that act as neurotransmitters in humans; and they have been shown to act intentionally and purposefully: they have memory and learn, they communicate with each other, and can even allocate resources as a community.[4]

Animate intelligence can be discerned even at a cellular level: a single cell has thousands of sensors protruding through its outer membrane, controlling the flow of specific molecules, either pulling them in or pushing them out depending on what’s needed. Cells utilize fine-tuned signaling mechanisms to communicate with others around them, sending and receiving hundreds of signals at the same time. Each cell must be aware of itself as a self: it “knows” what is within its membrane and what is outside; it determines what molecules it needs, and which ones to discard; it knows when something within it needs fixing, and how to get it done; it determines what genes to express within its DNA, and when it’s time to divide and thus propagate itself. In the words of philosopher of biology Evan Thompson, “Where there is life there is mind.”[5]

A cell has a rich and complex inner life. Source: “The Inner Life of the Cell” animation – Harvard MCB | BioVisions Lab

When leading cognitive neuroscientists investigate human consciousness, they make a similar differentiation between two forms of consciousness which, like intelligence, can also be classified as conceptual and animate. For example, Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman distinguished between what he called primary (animate) and secondary (conceptual) consciousness, while world-renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio makes a similar distinction between what he calls core and higher-order consciousness. Similarly, in psychology, dual systems theory posits two forms of human cognition—intuitive and analytical—described compellingly in Daniel Kahneman’s bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow, which correspond to the animate and conceptual split within both intelligence and consciousness.[6]

Toward an integrated intelligence

An implication of this increasingly widespread recognition of the existence of both animate and conceptual intelligence is that the Cartesian conception of intelligence as solely analytical—one that’s shared by a large majority of AI theorists—is dangerously limited.

Even human conceptual intelligence has been shown to emerge from a scaffolding of animate consciousness. As demonstrated convincingly by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, the abstract ideas and concepts we use to build our theoretical models of the world actually arise from metaphors of our embodied experience of the world—high and low, in and out, great and small, near and close, empty and full. Contrary to the Cartesian myth of a pure thinking faculty, our conceptual and animate intelligences are intimately linked.

By contrast, machine intelligence really is purely analytical. It has no scaffolding linking it to the vibrant sentience of life. Regardless of its level of sophistication and power, it is nothing other than a pattern recognition device. AI theoreticians tend to think of intelligence as substrate independent—meaning that the set of patterns and linkages comprising it could in principle be separated from its material base and exactly replicated elsewhere, such as when you migrate the data from your old computer to a new one. That is true for AI, but not for human intelligence.[7]

The dominant view of humanity as defined solely by conceptual intelligence has contributed greatly to the dualistic worldview underlying many of the great predicaments facing society today. The accelerating climate crisis and ecological havoc being wreaked on the natural world ultimately are caused, at the deepest level, by the dominant instrumentalist worldview that sees humans as essentially separate from the rest of nature, and nature as nothing other than a resource for human consumption.

Once, however, we recognize that humans possess both conceptual and animate intelligence, this can transform our sense of identity as a human being. The most highly prized human qualities, such as compassion, integrity, or wisdom, arise not from conceptual intelligence alone, but from a complex mélange of thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and felt sensations integrated into a coherent whole. By learning to consciously attune to the evolved signals of our animate consciousness, we can develop an integrated intelligence: one that incorporates both conceptual and animate fully into our own identity, values, and life choices.

Once we embrace our own animate intelligence, it’s natural to turn our attention outward and appreciate the animate intelligence emanating from all living beings. Acknowledging our shared domain of intelligence with the rest of life can lead to a potent sense of being intimately connected with the animate world. If conceptual intelligence is a cognitive peak of specialization that distinguishes us from other animals, it is our animate intelligence that extends throughout the rest of the terrain of existence, inviting a shared collaboration with all of life.

Other cultures have long possessed this understanding. Traditional Chinese philosophers saw no essential distinction between reason and emotion, and used a particular word, tiren, to refer to knowing something, not just intellectually, but throughout the entire body and mind. In the words of Neo-Confucian sage Wang Yangming, “The heart-mind is nothing without the body, and the body is nothing without the heart-mind.”[8] Indigenous cultures around the world share a recognition of their deep relatedness to all living beings, leading them to conceive of other creatures as part of an extended family.[9] For Western culture, however, which is now the globally dominant source of values, this orientation toward integrated intelligence is rare but acutely needed.

Aligning with integration

These distinctions, theoretical as they might appear, have crucially important implications as we consider the onset of advanced artificial intelligence and how to wrestle with the alignment problem. Upon closer inspection, the alignment problem turns out to be a conflation of two essentially different problems: The question of how to align AI with human flourishing presupposes an underlying question of what is required for human flourishing in the first place. Without a solid foundation laying out the conditions for human wellbeing, the AI alignment question is destined to go nowhere.

Fortunately, much work has already been accomplished on this topic, and it points to human flourishing arising from our identity as a deeply integrated organism incorporating both conceptual and animate consciousness. The seminal work of Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef sets out a comprehensive taxonomy of fundamental human needs, incorporating ten core requirements such as subsistence, affection, freedom, security, and participation, among others. While these needs are universal, they may be satisfied in myriad ways depending on particular historical and cultural conditions. Furthermore, as Earth system scientists have convincingly demonstrated, human systems are intimately linked with larger biological and planetary life-support systems. Sustained human wellbeing requires a healthy, vibrant living Earth with intact ecosystems that can readily replenish their own abundance.[10]

What, we might ask, might an AI look like that was programmed to align with the principles that could enable all life, including human civilization, to flourish on a healthy Earth?

When we consider, however, how far the requirements for flourishing are from being met by the vast majority of humans across wide swaths of the world today, this brings to light that the alignment problem is not, in fact, limited to the domain of AI, but is rather a fundamental issue underlying the economic and financial system that runs our modern world. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, global capitalism, as manifested in the limited liability corporation, may itself be understood as an embryonic form of misaligned AI: one where the overriding goal of maximizing shareholder value has ridden roughshod over fundamental human needs, and has led to the current metacrisis emanating from a confluence of rising inequality, runaway technology, climate breakdown, and accelerating ecological devastation. In this respect, as pointed out by social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger, advanced AI can be viewed as an accelerant of the underlying causes of the metacrisis in every dimension.

Our misaligned economic system has caused us to break through planetary boundaries. Source: Johan Rockström, et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009): 472–75.

Emerging from this dark prognostication, there is a silver lining affording some hope for a societal swerve toward a life-affirming future. When analysts consider the great dilemmas facing humanity today, they frequently describe them as “wicked problems”: tangles of highly complex interlinked challenges lacking well-defined solutions and emerging over time frames that don’t present as clear emergencies to our cognitive systems which evolved in the savannah to respond to more immediate risks. As an accelerant of the misalignment already present in our global system, might the onset of advanced AI, with its clear and present existential danger, serve to wake us up, as a collective human species, to the unfolding civilizational disaster that is already looming ahead? Might it jolt us as a planetary community to reorient toward the wisdom available in traditional cultures and existing within our own animate intelligence?

It has sometimes been said that what is necessary to unite humanity is a flagrant common threat, such as a hypothetical hostile alien species arriving on Earth threating us with extinction. Perhaps that moment is poised to arrive now—with an alien intelligence emerging from our own machinations. If there is real hope for a positive future, it will emerge from our understanding that as humans, we are both conceptual and animate beings, and are deeply connected with all of life on this precious planet—and that collectively we have the capability of developing a truly integrative civilization, one that sets the conditions for all life to flourish on a regenerated Earth.

Jeremy Lent is author of the award-winning books, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, and The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. He is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network.

[1] Vinge, V. (1993). “What is The Singularity?” VISION-21 Symposium(March 30, 1993); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._J._Good.

[2] For an in-depth discussion of this historical process, see my book The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, Chapter 3.

[3] Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2015), pp. 92, 211, 236–7; Lucy A. Bates, Joyce H. Poole, and Richard W. Byrne, “Elephant Cognition,” Current Biology 18, no. 13 (2008): 544–46; Kieran C. R. Fox, Michael Muthukrishna, and Susanne Shultz, “The Social and Cultural Roots of Whale and Dolphin Brains,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, November (2017): 1699–705; Katharina Kropshofer, “Whales and Dolphins Lead ‘Human-Like Lives’ Thanks to Big Brains, Says Study,” The Guardian, 16 October, 2017.

[4] Paco Calvo, et al., “Plants Are Intelligent, Here’s How,” Annals of Botany 125 (2020): 11–28; Eric D. Brenner et al., “Plant Neurobiology: An Integrated View of Plant Signaling,” Trends in Plant Science 11, no. 8 (2006): 413–19; Anthony Trewavas, “What Is Plant Behaviour?”, Plant, Cell and Environment 32 (2009): 606–16; Stefano Mancuso, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior (New York: Atria Books, 2018; Suzanne W. Simard, et al., “Net Transfer of Carbon between Ectomycorrhizal Tree Species in the Field,” Nature 388 (1997): 579–82; Yuan Yuan Song, et al., “Interplant Communication of Tomato Plants through Underground Common Mycorrhizal Networks,” PLoS Biology 5, no. 10 (2010): e13324.

[5] Boyce Rensberger, Life Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 62–6; Brian J. Ford, “Revealing the Ingenuity of the Living Cell,” Biologist 53, no. 4 (2006): 221–24; Brian J. Ford, “On Intelligence in Cells: The Case for Whole Cell Biology,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 34, no. 4 (2009): 350-65; Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. ix.

[6] Gerald M. Edelman, and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1999); Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011).

[7] For a lucid explanation of why human intelligence is not substrate independent, see Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (New York: Pantheon 2018), pp. 199–208.

[8] Donald J. Munro, A Chinese Ethics for the New Century: The Ch’ien Mu Lectures in History and Culture, and Other Essays on Science and Confucian Ethics (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005), p. 24; Yu, N. (2007). “Heart and Cognition in Ancient Chinese Philosophy.” Journal of Cognition and Culture, 7(1-2), 27-47. For an extensive discussion of the integrative nature of traditional Chinese thought, see my book The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2017), chapters 9 and 14.

[9] Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs), and Darcia Narvaez, Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2022).

[10] Max-Neef, M.A., 1991. Human Scale Development: Conception, Application and Further Reflections. Zed Books, New York; Johan Rockström, et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009): 472–75; William J. Ripple, et al., “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,” BioScience 67, no. 12 (2017): 1026–28.

How Corporate Dominance Is Driving Civilization to a Precipice

The neoliberal ideology of unrestrained markets has led to a global crisis. Humanity now faces an existential threat as the result of global dominance by corporations, whose ultimate goal is at odds with human flourishing.

Originally published March 14, 2022 in Inside Over as “The world on the brink of the abyss. Looking at the real danger.”

Back in 1947, as the world was rebuilding from the destruction of the Second World War, a few dozen free-market ideologues met in a luxury Swiss resort to form the Mont Pelerin Society—an organization devoted to spreading the ideology of neoliberalism throughout the world. Their ideas—that the free market should dominate virtually all aspects of society, that regulations should be dismantled, and that individual liberty should eclipse all other considerations of fairness, equity, or community welfare—were considered fanatical at the time. Over three decades, though, financed by wealthy donors, they assiduously established networks of academics, businessmen, economists, journalists, and politicians in global centers of power.

When the stagflation crisis of the 1970s threw classic Keynesian economics into disrepute, their moment of opportunity arrived. By 1985, with free market disciples Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher entrenched in power, they initiated a campaign to systematically transform virtually all aspects of life into an unrestrained marketplace, where everything could be bought and sold to the highest bidder, subject to no moral scruple. They crippled trade unions, tore up social safety nets, reduced tax rates for the wealthy, eliminated regulations, and instituted a massive transfer of wealth from society at large to the uber-elite.

*Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher helped initiate the neoliberal takeover of global politics, economics, and media. (Photo by Ron Galella/WireImage)*

Through their control of government, finance, business, and media, neoliberal adherents have succeeded in transforming the world into a globalized market-based system. The triumph of neoliberalism has led to the greatest inequality in history, where the world’s twenty-six richest people own as much wealth as half the entire world’s population. It also created the conditions for large transnational corporations to become the dominant force directing our world, more powerful than any government or nation. Through their influence on legislation, they have virtually eliminated regulatory limitations on their growth, their permissible industries, or their competitive playing field. Massive corporations are gobbled up by even vaster ones, creating commanding monoliths that set the terms for their own activities. Of the hundred largest economies in the world, sixty-nine are now corporations.

In today’s corporate-dominated global stage, nations and municipalities compete against each other to attract corporate investment to their region, relinquishing taxation, regulations, and worker protections in the hope of jobs or infrastructure spending. In most countries, the boundaries between corporate executives and government have become so blurred as to be virtually nonexistent. Transnational corporations control most of the world’s finance, manufacturing, agriculture, and trade, and are routinely invited to intervene in international treaty negotiations, ensuring that their interests remain protected.

*Sixty-nine out of the hundred largest economies in the world are for-profit corporations*

A new moniker arising from the corporate titans at the World Economic Forum is “stakeholder capitalism”: an inviting term that seems to imply that stakeholders other than investors will play a role in setting corporate priorities, but actually refers to a profoundly anti-democratic process whereby corporations are assuming even more dominant roles in global governance. This month, the UN Food Systems Summit was essentially taken over by the same giant corporations, including Nestlé and Bayer, that are largely responsible for the very problems the summit was intended to grapple with — which led to a widespread boycott by hundreds of civil society and Indigenous groups.

If this supreme global force had benevolent aims, then at least a case could be made for permitting it to retain such control over human activity. But the opposite is true. The common goal of corporations around the world is to monetize human activity and what’s left of nature’s abundance as rapidly and efficiently as possible. The overriding purpose of the world’s most powerful institutional force is thus directly at odds with a flourishing Earth or a viable future for humanity.

A fundamental reason for the rapacious behavior of transnational corporations is their drive to maximize shareholder value above anything else. While there is no explicit requirement for this in the standard corporate charter, a century of case law has entrenched this principle into the behavior of large corporations to the point that is has become the de facto standard of operation. As a result, if corporations were people, they would be considered psychopaths, utterly devoid of any caring for the harm they cause in the pursuit of their goals.

This relentless pursuit of profit and economic growth above all else has propelled human civilization onto a terrifying trajectory. The uncontrolled climate crisis is the most obvious danger: The world’s current policies have us on track for more than 3° C increase by the end of this century, and climate scientists publish dire warnings that amplifying feedbacks could make things far worse than even these projections, and thus place at risk the very continuation of our civilization.

But even if the climate crisis were somehow brought under control, a continuation of untrammeled economic growth in future decades will bring us face-to-face with a slew of further existential threats. Currently, our civilization is running at 40% above its sustainable capacity. We’re rapidly depleting the earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, freshwater, even the topsoil we require to grow our crops. We’ve already transgressed five of the nine planetary boundaries that define humanity’s safe operating space, and yet global GDP is expected to more than double by mid-century, with potentially irreversible and devastating consequences.

*We have already transgressed five of the nine planetary boundaries defining humanity’s safe operating space.*

The corporate takeover of humanity is so all-encompassing that it’s become difficult to visualize any other possible global system. Alternatives do, however, exist. Around the world, worker-owned cooperatives have demonstrated that they can be as effective as corporations—or more so—without pursuing shareholder wealth as their primary consideration. The Mondragon cooperative in Spain, with revenues exceeding €12 billion, shows how this form of organization can efficiently scale.

There are also legal and structural changes that can be made to corporations to realign their value system with human welfare. The pathology of shareholder value maximization could be addressed by requiring their charters to be converted to a triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits, and subject to rigorous enforcement powers. This alternative corporate value system is already available through chartering as a benefit corporation or certifying as a B-Corp. Since it is voluntary, however, it has had virtually no impact on a broader scale. If, instead the triple bottom line were a requirement for all corporations above a certain size, and strictly enforced, it would rapidly lead to a profound shift in corporate priorities.

The idea of restraining corporate domination of our society may seem daunting in the current global political environment. It must, however, begin with the clear and explicit recognition that the overarching goal of corporations is currently at odds with a healthy Earth and the future flourishing of humanity. The neoliberal model that has led our global civilization to the precipice of disaster must be supplanted by a different economic system based on life-affirming values before it’s too late.

Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. His two recent books are The Patterning Instinct: A Cognitive History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning and The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. More information: https://www.jeremylent.com/

Solving the Climate Crisis Requires the End of Capitalism

It’s time to face the fact that resolving the climate crisis will require a fundamental shift away from our growth-based, corporate-dominated global system.

Originally published October 9, 2021 in Salon

The global conversation regarding climate change has, for the most part, ignored the elephant in the room. That’s strange, because this particular elephant is so large, obvious, and all-encompassing that politicians and executives must contort themselves to avoid naming it publicly. That elephant is called capitalism, and it is high time to face the fact that, as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system of our globalized world, the climate crisis won’t be resolved.

As the crucial UN climate talks known as COP26 approach in early November, the public is becoming increasingly aware that the stakes have never been higher. What were once ominous warnings of future climate shocks wrought by wildfires, floods, and droughts have now become a staple of the daily news. Yet governments are failing to meet their own emissions pledges from the Paris agreement six years ago, which were themselves acknowledged to be inadequate. Increasingly, respected Earth scientists are warning, not just about the devastating effects of climate breakdown on our daily lives, but about the potential collapse of civilization itself unless we drastically change direction.

The elephant in the room

And yet, even as humanity faces perhaps the greatest existential crisis in its species’ history, the public debate on climate barely mentions the underlying economic system that brought us to this point and which continues to drive us toward the precipice. Ever since its emergence in the seventeenth century, with the creation of the first limited liability shareholder-owned corporations, capitalism has been premised on viewing the planet as a resource to exploit — its overriding objective to maximize profits from that exploitation as rapidly and extensively as possible. Current mainstream strategies to resolve our twin crises of climate breakdown and ecological overshoot without changing the underlying system of growth-based global capitalism are structurally inadequate.

The idea of “green growth” is promulgated by many development consultants, and is even incorporated in the UN’s official plan for “sustainable development,” but has been shown to be an illusion. Ecomodernists, and others who stand to profit from growth in the short-term, frequently make the argument that, through technological innovation, aggregate global economic output can become “absolutely decoupled” from resource use and carbon emissions — permitting limitless growth on a finite planet. Careful rigorous analysis, though, shows that this hasn’t happened so far, and even the most wildly aggressive assumptions for greater efficiency would still lead to unsustainable consumption of global resources.

The primary reason for this derives ultimately from the nature of capitalism itself. Under capitalism — which has now become the default global economic context for virtually all human enterprise — efficiency improvements intended to reduce resource usage inevitably become launchpads for further exploitation, leading paradoxically to an increase, rather than decrease, in consumption.

This dynamic, known as the Jevons paradox, was first recognized back in the nineteenth century by economist William Stanley Jevons, who demonstrated how James Watts’ steam engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of coal-powered engines, paradoxically caused a dramatic increase in coal consumption even while it decreased the amount of coal required for any particular application. The Jevons paradox has since been shown to be true in an endless variety of domains, from the invention in the nineteenth century of the cotton gin which led to an increase rather than decrease in the practice of slavery in the American South, to improved automobile fuel efficiency which encourages people to drive longer distances.

When the Jevons paradox is generalized to the global marketplace, we begin to see that it’s not really a paradox at all, but rather an inbuilt defining characteristic of capitalism. Shareholder-owned corporations, as the primary agents of global capitalism, are legally structured by the overarching imperative to maximize shareholder returns above all else. Although they are given the legal rights of “personhood” in many jurisdictions, if they were actually humans they would be diagnosed as psychopaths, ruthlessly pursuing their goal without regard to any collateral damage they might cause. Of the hundred largest economies today, sixty-nine are transnational corporations, which collectively represent a relentless force with one overriding objective: to turn humanity and the rest of life into fodder for endlessly increasing profit at the fastest possible rate.

Under global capitalism, this dynamic holds true even without the involvement of transnational corporations. Take bitcoin as an example. Originally designed after the global financial meltdown of 2008 to wrest monetary power from the domination of central banks, it relies on building trust through “mining,” a process that allows anyone to verify a transaction by solving increasingly complex mathematical equations and earn new bitcoins as compensation. A great idea — in theory. In practice, the unfettered marketplace for bitcoin mining has led to frenzied competition to solve ever more complex equations, with vast warehouses holding “rigs” of advanced computers consuming massive amounts of electricity, with the result that the carbon emissions from bitcoin processing are now equivalent to that of a mid-size country such as Sweden or Argentina.

An economy based on perpetual growth

The relentless pursuit of profit growth above all other considerations is reflected in the world’s stock markets, where corporations are valued not by their benefit to society, but by investors’ expectations of their growth in future earnings. Similarly, when aggregated to national accounts, the main proxy used to measure the performance of politicians is growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Although it is commonly assumed that GDP correlates with social welfare, this is not the case once basic material requirements have been met. GDP merely measures the rate at which society transforms nature and human activity into the monetary economy, regardless of the ensuing quality of life. Anything that causes economic activity of any kind, whether good or bad, adds to GDP. When researchers developed a benchmark called the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which incorporates qualitative components of well-being, they discovered a dramatic divergence between the two measures. GPI peaked in 1978 and has been steadily falling ever since, even while GDP continues to accelerate.

*Since 1978, Genuine Progress has been falling even while GDP continues to increase. Credit: Kubiszewski et al., Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress*

In spite of this, the possibility of shifting our economy away from perpetual growth is barely even considered in mainstream discourse. In preparation for COP26, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) modeled five scenarios exploring potential pathways that would lead to different global heating outcomes this century, ranging from an optimistic 1.5°C pathway to a likely catastrophic 4.5°C track. One of their most critical variables is the amount of carbon reduction accomplished through negative emissions, relying on massive implementation of unproven technologies. According to the IPCC, staying under 2°C of global heating — consistent with the minimum target set by the 2015 Paris agreement — involves a heroic assumption that we will suck 730 billion metric tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere this century. This stupendous amount is equivalent to roughly twenty times the total current annual emissions from all fossil fuel usage. Such an assumption is closer to science fiction than any rigorous analysis worthy of a model on which our civilization is basing its entire future. Yet, even as the IPCC appears willing to model humanity’s fate on a pipe dream, not one of their scenarios explores what is possible from a graduated annual reduction in global GDP. Such a scenario was considered by the IPCC community to be too implausible to consider.

This represents a serious lapse on the part of the IPCC. Climate scientists who have modeled planned reductions in GDP show that keeping global heating below 1.5°C this century is potentially within reach under this scenario, with greatly reduced reliance on speculative carbon reduction technologies. Prominent economists have shown that a carefully managed “post-growth” plan could lead to enhanced quality of life, reduced inequality, and a healthier environment. It would, however, undermine the foundational activity of capitalism — the pursuit of endless growth that has led to our current state of obscene inequality, impending ecological collapse, and climate breakdown.

The profit-based path to catastrophe

As long as this elephant in the room remains unspoken, our world will continue to careen toward catastrophe, even as politicians and technocrats shift from one savior narrative to another. Along with the myth of “green growth,” we are told that a solution lies in putting monetary valuations on “ecosystem services” and incorporating them into business decisions — even though this approach has been shown to be deeply flawed, frequently counterproductive, and ultimately self-defeating. A wetlands, for example, might have value in protecting a city from flooding. However, if it were drained and a swanky new resort built on the reclaimed land, this could be more lucrative. Case closed.

The new moniker arising from the corporate titans at the World Economic Forum is “stakeholder capitalism”: an inviting term that seems to imply that stakeholders other than investors will play a role in setting corporate priorities, but actually refers to a profoundly anti-democratic process whereby corporations assume increasingly large roles in global governance. This month, the UN Food Systems Summit was essentially taken over by the same giant corporations, including Nestlé and Bayer, that are largely responsible for the very problems the summit was intended to grapple with — which led to a widespread boycott by hundreds of civil society and Indigenous groups.

*The UN Food Systems Summit was essentially controlled by corporate interests. Source: Food Systems 4 People*

As net-zero targets decades away are formally announced at COP26, built implicitly on a combination of corporate procrastination and speculative technologies, we can only expect the climate crisis to continue to worsen. Ultimately, as negative emissions technologies fail to meet their grandiose expectations, the same voices that currently promote reliance on them will lend support to the techno-dystopian idea of geoengineering — vast, planet-altering engineering projects designed to temporarily manipulate the climate to defer a climate apocalypse. A leading geoengineering candidate, financed by Bill Gates, involves spraying particles into the stratosphere to cool the Earth by reflecting the Sun’s rays back into space. The risks are enormous, including the likelihood of causing extreme shifts in precipitation around the world. Additionally, once begun, it could never be stopped without immediate catastrophic rebound heating; it would not prevent the oceans from further acidifying; and may turn the blue sky into a perpetual dull haze. In spite of these concerns, geoengineering is beginning to get discussed at UN meetings, with publications such as The Economist predicting that, since it wouldn’t disrupt continued economic growth, it’s more likely to be implemented than the drastic, binding cuts in emissions that would head off climate disaster.

There is an alternative

Why is the elephant in the room so rarely mentioned in mainstream discourse? One reason is that, since the collapse of communism and the parallel rise of neoliberalism beginning in the 1980s, it is assumed that “there is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher famously declared. Even committed green advocates, such as the Business Green group, are quick to dismiss criticism of our growth-based economic system as “knee-jerk anti-capitalist agitprop.” But the conventional dichotomy between capitalism and socialism, to which such conversations inevitably devolve, is no longer helpful. Old-fashioned socialism was just as poised to consume the Earth as capitalism, differing primarily in how the pie should be carved up.

There is, however, an alternative. A wide range of progressive thinkers are exploring the possibilities of replacing our destructive global economic system with one that offers potential for sustainability, greater fairness, and human flourishing. Proponents of degrowth show that it is possible to implement a planned reduction of energy and resource use while reducing inequality and improving human well-being. Economic models, such as Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economics” offer coherent substitutes for the classical outdated framework that ignores fundamental principles of human nature and humanity’s role within the Earth system. Meanwhile, large-scale cooperatives, such as Mondragon in Spain, demonstrate that it’s possible for companies to provide effectively for human needs without utilizing a shareholder-based profit model.

Another reason people give for ignoring the elephant in the room, even when they know it’s there, is that we don’t have time for structural change. The climate emergency is already upon us, and we need to focus on actions that can occur right now. This is true, and nothing in this article should be taken as a reason to avoid the drastic and immediate changes required in business and consumer practices. Indeed, they are necessary — but insufficient. Ultimately, our global civilization must begin a transformation to one that is based not on building wealth through extraction, but on foundational principles that could create the conditions for long-term flourishing on a regenerated Earth — an ecological civilization.

*Indigenous people on the frontline of the climate emergency desperately need support. Image: Amazon Watch | Kamikia Kisedje*

Even in the short term, there are innumerable steps that can be taken to steer our civilization toward a life-affirming trajectory. Around the world Indigenous people on the frontline of the climate emergency desperately need support in defending the biodiverse ecosystems in which they are embedded against assaults from extractive corporations. A growing campaign is under way to make the wholesale destruction of natural living systems a criminal act by establishing a law of ecocide—prosecutable like genocide under the International Criminal Court. The powers of transnational corporations themselves need to be addressed, ultimately by requiring their charters to be converted to a triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits, and subject to rigorous enforcement powers.

The transformation we need may take decades, but the process must begin now with the clear and explicit recognition that capitalism itself needs to be supplanted by a system based on life-affirming values. Don’t expect to see any discussion of these issues in the formal proceedings of COP26. But, turn your attention outside the hallowed halls and you’ll hear the voices of those who are standing up for life’s continued flourishing on Earth. It’s only when their ideas are discussed seriously in the main chambers of a future COP that we can begin to hold authentic hope that our civilization may finally be turning away from the precipice toward which it is currently accelerating.

Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. His recently published book is The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. Website: jeremylent.com.

Join Me in Weaving a New Story of Meaning

Upcoming courses on Ecological Civilization and The Web of Meaning

Wildfires. Floods. Political polarization. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the onslaught of these harbingers of society’s unraveling. Sometimes, it might seem like there’s nothing we can do to help steer our civilization away from the precipice.

Yes—society needs to undergo deep transformation, much deeper than most people recognize. But it’s not necessarily too late, if enough of us can articulate and engage collectively in the changes we need.

I will soon be offering two series of online classes designed to lay out a foundation for the transformation in our worldview, culture, and society that’s needed to avert catastrophe. I invite you to sign up for one or both series, and join other engaged participants in exploring the pathways toward a flourishing future.

Beginning Tuesday, October 5, I’ll be offering a series of four online classes investigating an Ecological Civilization: what it means, why it’s necessary, and how we might get there:

Class 1 | Ecological Civilization in Historical Context
Class 2 | Ecological Civilization: Worldview and Values
Class 3 | An Ecological Civilization in Practice
Class 4 | Pathways to an Ecological Civilization

Each two-hour class will consist of presentations, breakout groups, and full group discussion. It will be a rare opportunity to explore deeply with others how to engage in helping transform our civilization to one that is life-affirming. It will meet every Tuesday in October (5, 12, 19 and 26) at 10:00 am Pacific time. (More information and registration here.)

Beginning Tuesday, November 2, I’ll be offering a Guided Exploration of The Web of Meaning in a series of six online classes. This course will cover the central themes of The Web of Meaning. Following the book’s design, it will be structured as six investigations into the existential questions asked at some point by every human being: Who Am I? Where Am I? What Am I? How Should I Live? Why Am I? and Where Are We Going?

We’ll meet every Tuesday at 10:00 am Pacific time, with the final class on Tuesday, December 7. Each ninety-minute class will consist of presentations, breakout groups, and full group discussions. Each week we’ll explore the rich and awe-inspiring pathways invited by an alternative worldview recognizing the intricate interrelationships that link our lives to those in our community, to all humanity, and to the entire living Earth. (More information and registration here.)

When we change the lens with which we see the world, another future becomes possible. Please join me this Fall in exploring what that future may look like.

Review of The Web of Meaning by Phyllis Creme

Reposted from Share International website

The following book review is included in the July/August issue of Share International. We feature this early because of its relevance to our present world situation and as an early heads-up that Jeremy Lent will be a guest interviewee in a Share International webinar on 24 October.

The Web of Meaning feels like a book our time has been waiting for. Those who protest in Black Lives Matter gatherings, who feel at one with the everyday suffering they witness on TV, who are deeply worried about our planet Earth as well as the pandemic, are all reminded every day that we are connected to each other and part of the natural world, and that ‘we are only safe when all of us are safe’. We cannot live if the Earth dies.

But, Jeremy Lent points out, the prevailing ‘worldview’ contradicts these deeply felt sympathies and most of our lives are underpinned by that worldview. We have been conditioned to feel like separate units up against the rest of the world. We have ‘conquered’ nature, as we will conquer the pandemic. The exigencies of a world dominated by this worldview make us machine-like, tied to our grinding routines of making money – often just to subsist, or else to buy more than we need, in some cases thousands of times more.

Our time is confronting us with a choice. Our planet is wearing out – and we, the people, have caused it. Greed and self-aggrandizement stalk the land as surely as the pandemic we can’t shake off. We see the rich countries hoarding the means to live and to defeat the coronavirus. We have seen the sacrifice countless ordinary people have made in caring for the sick at the cost of their lives. But most of us are afraid, with seemingly little choice but to continue with our lives driven by our need to survive and to avoid discomfort.

The timeliness of this book is in its exploration of how to change the long-held Western worldview that urges us not to notice that we are all interconnected. It traces the history of this mindset, based on scientific reductionism, that we are separate from each other and even within ourselves. It encompasses Christianity and the Enlightenment scientists who separate the soul, or mind, from the body, and the modern, influential idea of the ‘selfish gene’ that entrenches the thoughtform that we are genetically programmed to look out for ourselves. The Web of Meaning speaks to those brought up and caught up by this dominant worldview, but who are beginning to realise how it doesn’t fit with their deepest feelings about themselves and others.

Jeremy Lent gives us a thorough and carefully researched account to counter the idea of the ‘selfish’ and separative gene, drawing on a wide range of sources, including science, philosophy, literature, anthropology, poetry. He integrates ancient philosophies, particularly Taoism, Buddhism and Indigenous beliefs, with contemporary systems theory and neuroscience, that demonstrate ‘connectedness’ on all levels – from the tiniest particle and individual cell to whole natural systems, indeed to cosmos. For instance, in the ways that trees and insects ‘think’ and co-operate to mutually survive, and how neurologically we are intricately connected within ourselves, with no separation between our mind and body. Our thinking identity (that Lent terms for the sake of argument our ‘I’) needs to be at one with our deeper, embodied identity that he terms the ‘self’. He explores how the ancient oriental wisdom posited that everything is energy, and the only way to find a deep and lasting well-being is to be in tune with the whole, both inner and outer. The ancient Chinese philosophies and Indigenous peoples have a wisdom about how to live meaningfully that our modern society denies. Lent also suggests that psychedelic and mystic states may reveal a reality beyond the everyday. He urges us to be true to our deepest sense of ourselves and to cultivate the inner harmony that comes from fully embracing all of life experience.

The Web of Meaning, while dealing in detail with difficult subjects, is an engaging and endearing read. It is often addressed as if to an individual reader – and it is designed with a pedagogic, even a crusading intent. It includes an informative glossary and further reading, and most usefully gives a summary at the end of each section. The book is also a beautifully produced object. The style of the writing is direct, and uses analogy, anecdote and story-making. It begins with ‘Uncle Bob’s speech’ (“which you’ve probably all heard”) expounding on how humans have always looked out for themselves (and Uncle Bob also features in the final chapter, more forgivingly) and it ends with an analogy of the Native America legend of Windigo – a monster that is driven by insatiable greed to devour all it encounters, and worse, transforms them into replicas of itself.

The first five sections of the book are mainly expository/explanatory and didactic. But in the final section, ‘Where are we going?’, in just this one chapter ‘Weaving a New story of Meaning’, it is as if the author takes on a new role – he becomes a visionary activist, the passionate advocate on behalf of nature, for every individual to find their own sense of purpose and act to repair the ravages done to our planet Earth by the forces of greed and commercialization in which we are all implicated. It is as though he assumes that the previous 300 pages have done their work of quiet persuasion and the reader is now ready to respond in a new way (or possibly because some readers, from different vantage points –have hardly needed persuading of our Oneness).

Lent shows powerfully the harm caused by our continuing insatiable greed, to the planet and to a society entrenched within inequality. He singles out for particular blame and excoriating criticism the transnational corporations, which have become more powerful than societies and politicians, for their ‘Windigo’ voracious destructiveness: “strengthened by the overpowering corporate compulsion to convert human needs into profit opportunities” (p.357). He vividly details the terrifying state of our planet caused by the climate emergency.

But Lent also makes the case for a new dispensation; for ‘an ecological civilization’ which could “create the conditions for all humans to flourish as part of a thriving living Earth” (p.365). He writes hopefully of the movements that are countering the emergency and makes the case for ‘an ecological worldview’ and for ‘revolutionary love’: “Instead of responding to our oppression with animosity, which merely exacerbates the divisions in our society we can choose what activist Rabbi Michael Lerner calls revolutionary love” (p.379) – both words are important. Above all, Lent urges us to ‘hope’, quoting Vlacev Havel: “Hope is a state of mind not a state of the world, a deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times. An ability to work for something because it is good and not because it stands a chance to succeed.” (p.375) Lent urges us to believe this and take it as the basis for our lives, knowing that every move we make will play its part in the whole.

For, although “we have all grown up in the culture of separateness”, on the basis of our interconnectedness that has now been established, we are asked to find and weave our own thread of the cosmic web: our unique sense of purpose and meaning, which now also – inevitably – has a moral purpose. “As we learn to open eyes that have been sealed by our dominant culture we can discern the rainbow that was always there waiting for us. We can waken to our true nature as humans on this Earth, feel the life within us that we share with all other beings … realize the deep purpose of our Existence on Earth”. (p.376)

Finally, then, we have the responsibility, to ourselves as well as to all others, to contribute, however little it may seem, whatever each of us is uniquely able to do. The book ends with the question that brings us back to the title, The Web of Meaning: “What is the sacred and precious strand that you will weave?”

Jeremy Lent, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find our Place in the Universe. Profile Books | New Society Publishers 2021.

Nature Is Not a Machine—We Treat It So at Our Peril

First published as “Nature Is a Jazz Band, Not a Machine” by Institute of Art and Ideas | News on July 30, 2021.

From genetic engineering to geoengineering, we treat nature as though it’s a machine. This view of nature is deeply embedded in Western thought, but it’s a fundamental misconception with potentially disastrous consequences.

Climate change, avers Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil and erstwhile US Secretary of State, “is an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.” This brief statement encapsulates how the metaphor of the machine underlies the way our mainstream culture views the natural world. It also hints at the grievous dangers involved in perceiving nature in this way.

*Rex Tillerson: a powerful and highly destructive proponent of treating nature as an engineering problem*

This mechanistic worldview has deep roots in Western thought. The great pioneers of the Scientific Revolution, such as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, believed they were decoding “God’s book,” which was written in the language of mathematics. God was conceived as a great clockmaker, the “artificer” who constructed the intricate machine of nature so flawlessly that, once it was set in motion, there was nothing more to do (bar the occasional miracle) than let it run its course. “What is the heart, but a spring,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, “and the nerves but so many strings?” Descartes flatly declared: “I do not recognize any difference between the machines made by craftsmen and the various bodies that nature alone composes.”

In recent decades, the mechanistic conception of nature has been updated for the computer age, with popularizers of science such as Richard Dawkins arguing that “life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information” and as a result, an animal such as a bat “is a machine, whose internal electronics are so wired up that its wing muscles cause it to home in on insects, as an unconscious guided missile homes in on an aeroplane.” This digital metaphor of nature pervades our culture and is used unreflectively by those in a position to direct our society’s future. According to Larry Page, co-founder of Google, for example, human DNA is just “600 megabytes compressed, so it’s smaller than any modern operating system . . . So your program algorithms probably aren’t that complicated.”

But nature is not in fact a machine nor a computer—and it can’t be engineered or programmed like one. Thinking of it as such is a category error with ramifications that are both deluded and dangerous.

A four-billion-year reversal of entropy

Ultimately, this machine metaphor is based on a simplifying assumption, known as reductionism, which approaches nature as a collection of tiny parts to investigate. This methodology has been resoundingly effective in many fields of inquiry, leading to some of our greatest advances in science and technology. Without it, most of the benefits of our modern world would not exist—no electrical grids, no airplanes, no antibiotics, no internet. However, over the centuries, many scientists and engineers have been so swept up by the success of their enterprise that they have frequently mistaken this assumption for reality—even when advances in scientific research uncover its limitations.

When James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the shape of the DNA molecule in 1953, they used metaphors from the burgeoning information revolution to describe their findings. The genotype was a “program” that determined the exact specifications of an organism, just like a computer program. DNA sequences formed the “master code” of a “blueprint” that contained a detailed set of “instructions” for building an individual. Prominent geneticist Walter Gilbert would begin his public lectures by pulling out a compact disk and proclaiming “This is you!”

Since then, however, further scientific research has revealed fundamental defects in this model. The “central dogma” of molecular biology, as coined by Crick and Watson, was that information could only flow one way: from the gene to the rest of the cell. Biologists now know that proteins act directly on the DNA of the cell, specifying which genes in the DNA should be activated. DNA can’t do anything by itself—it only functions when certain parts of it get switched on or off by the activities of different combinations of proteins, which were themselves formed by the instructions of DNA. This process is a vibrant, dynamic circular flow of interactivity.

This leads to a classic chicken-and-egg problem: if a cell is not determined solely by its genes, what ultimately causes it to “decide” what to do? Biologists who have researched this issue generally agree that the emergence of life on Earth was most likely a self-organized process known as autopoiesis—from the Greek words meaning self-generation—performed originally by non-living molecular structures.

These protocells essentially staged a temporary, local reversal of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which describes how the universe is undergoing an irreversible process of entropy: order inevitably becomes disordered and heat always flows from hot regions to colder regions. We see entropy in our daily lives every time we stir cream into our coffee, or break an egg for an omelet. Once the egg is scrambled, no amount of work will ever get the yolk back together again. It’s a depressing law, especially when applied to the entire universe which, according to most physicists, will eventually dissipate into a bleak expanse of cold, dark nothingness. Those first protocells, however, learned to turn entropy into order by ingesting it in the form of energy and matter, breaking it apart, and reorganizing it into forms beneficial for their continued existence—the process we know as metabolism.

Ever since then, for roughly four billion years, the defining quality of life has been its purposive self-organization. There is no programmer writing a program; no architect drawing up a blueprint. The organism is the weaver of its own fabric, using DNA as an instrument of transmission. It sculpts itself according to its own inner sense of purpose, which it inherited ultimately—like all of us—from those first autocatalytic cells: the drive to resist entropy and generate a temporary vortex of self-created order in the universe. In the words of philosopher of biology Andreas Weber, “Everything that lives wants more of life. Organisms are beings whose own existence means something to them.”

*The deep purpose of life is to reverse entropy and create more of itself*

This implies that, rather than being an aggregation of unconscious machines, life is intrinsically purposive. In recent decades, carefully designed scientific studies have revealed the deep intelligence throughout the natural world employed by organisms as they fulfil their purpose of self-generation. The inner life of a plant, biologists have discovered, is a rich plethora of complex experience. Plants have their own versions of our five senses, as well as up to fifteen other ways of sensing their environment for which we don’t have analogues. Plants act intentionally and purposefully: they have memories and learn, they communicate with each other, and can even allocate resources as a community through what biologist Suzanne Simard calls the “wood-wide web” of mycorrhizal fungi linking their roots together underground.

Extensive studies now point to the profound realization that every animal with a nervous system is likely to have some sort of subjective experience driven by feelings that, at the deepest level, are shared by all of us. Bees have been shown to feel anxious when their hives are shaken. Fish will make trade-offs between hunger and pain, avoiding part of an aquarium where they’re likely to get an electric shock, even if that’s where the food is—until they get so hungry that they’re willing to take a risk. Octopuses, one of the earliest groups to evolve separately from other animals about 600 million years ago, live predominantly solitary lives, but just like humans, get cozy with others when given a dose of the “love-drug” MDMA.

The ideology of human supremacy

As we confront the existential crises of the twenty-first century, the mechanistic thinking that brought us to this place may be driving us headlong toward catastrophe. As each new global problem appears, attention gets focused on short-term, mechanistic solutions, rather than probing deeper systemic causation. In response to the worldwide collapse of butterfly and bee populations, for example, some researchers have designed tiny airborne drones to pollinate trees as artificial substitutes for their disappearing natural pollinators.

As the stakes get higher through this century, the dangers arising from this mechanistic metaphor of nature will only become more harrowing. Already, in response to the acceleration of climate breakdown, the techno-dystopian idea of geoengineering is becoming increasingly acceptable. Following Tillerson’s misconceived logic, rather than disrupt the fossil fuel-based growth economy, policymakers are beginning to seriously countenance treating the Earth as a gigantic machine that needs fixing, and developing massive engineering projects to tinker with the global climate.

Given the innumerable nonlinear feedback loops that generate our planet’s complex living systems, the law of unintended consequences looms menacingly large. The eerily named field of “solar radiation management”, for example, which has received significant financing from Bill Gates, envisages spraying particles into the stratosphere to cool the Earth by reflecting the Sun’s rays back into space. The risks are enormous, such as causing extreme shifts in precipitation around the world and exacerbating damage we’ve already done to the ozone layer. Additionally, once begun, it could never be stopped without immediate catastrophic rebound heating; it would further increase ocean acidification; and would likely turn the blue sky into a perpetual white haze. These types of feedback effects, arising from the innumerable nonlinear dynamic interdependencies of Earth’s complex systems, get marginalized by a worldview that ultimately sees our planet as a machine requiring a quick fix.

*Geoengineeering: one of the most terrifying entailments of treating nature as a machine*

Further, there are deep moral issues that arise from confronting the inherent subjectivity of the natural world. Ever since the Scientific Revolution, the root metaphor of nature as a machine has infiltrated Western culture, inducing people to view the living Earth as a resource for humans to exploit without regard for its intrinsic value. Ecological philosopher Eileen Crist describes this as human supremacy, pointing out that seeing nature as a “resource” permits anything to be done to the Earth with no moral misgivings. Fish get reclassified as “fisheries,” and farm animals as “livestock”—living creatures become mere assets to be exploited for profit. Ultimately, it is the ideology of human supremacy that allows us to blow up mountaintops for coal, turn vibrant rainforest into monocropped wastelands, and trawl millions of miles of ocean floor with nets that scoop up everything that moves.

Once we recognize that other animals with a nervous system are not machines, as Descartes proposed, but likely experience subjective feelings similar to humans, we must also reckon with the unsettling moral implications of factory farming. The stark reality is that around the world, cows, chicken, and pigs are enslaved, tortured, and mercilessly slaughtered merely for human convenience. This systematic torment administered in the name of humanity to over 70 billion animals a year—each one a sentient creature with a nervous system as capable of registering excruciating pain as you or I—quite possibly represents the greatest cataclysm of suffering that life on Earth has ever experienced.

The “quantum jazz” of life

What, then, are metaphors of life that more accurately reflect the findings of biology—and might have the adaptive consequence of influencing our civilization to behave with more reverence toward our nonliving relatives on this beleaguered planet which is our only home?

Frequently, when cell biologists describe the mind-boggling complexity of their subject, they turn to music as a core metaphor. Denis Noble entitled his book on cellular biology The Music of Life, depicting it as “a symphony.” Ursula Goodenough describes patterns of gene expression as “melodies and harmonies.” While this metaphor rings truer than nature as a machine, it has its own limitations: a symphony is, after all, a piece of music written by a composer, with a conductor directing how each note should be played. The awesome quality of nature’s music arises from the fact that it is self-organized. There is no outside agent telling each cell what to do.

Perhaps a more illustrative metaphor would be a dance. Cell biologists increasingly refer to their findings in terms of “choreography,” and philosopher of biology Evan Thompson writes vividly how an organism and its environment relate to each other “like two partners in a dance who bring forth each other’s movements.”

Another compelling metaphor is an improvisational jazz ensemble, where a self-organized group of musicians spontaneously creates fresh melodies from a core harmonic theme, riffing off each other’s creativity in a similar way to how evolution generates complex ecosystems. Geneticist Mae-Wan Ho captures this idea with her portrayal of life as “quantum jazz,” describing it as “an incredible hive of activity at every level of magnification in the organism . . . locally appearing as though completely chaotic, and yet perfectly coordinated as a whole.”

*Life as “quantum jazz”. (Image by Tony Adamo) .*

What might our world look if we saw ourselves as participating in a coherent ensemble with all sentient beings interweaving together to collectively reverse entropy on Earth? Perhaps we might begin to see humanity’s role, not to re-engineer a broken planet for further exploitation, but to attune with the rest of life’s abundance, and ensure that our own actions harmonize with the Earth’s ecological rhythms. In the profound words of 20^th century humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, “I am life that wills to live, in the midst of life that wills to live.” How, we may ask, might our future trajectory change if we were to reconstruct our civilization on this basis?

Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. This article contains excerpts from his recently published book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe.

The Future Is Not a Spectator Sport

Like all self-organized, adaptive systems, society moves in nonlinear ways. Even as our civilization unravels, a new ecological worldview is spreading globally. Will it become powerful enough to avert a cataclysm? None of us knows. Perhaps the Great Transition to an ecological civilization is already under way, but we can’t see it because we’re in the middle of it. We are all co-creating the future as part of the interconnected web of collective choices each of us makes: what to ignore, what to notice, and what to do about it.

Excerpted from The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe (published in June in the UK, and available July 13 in the US).

The nonlinearity of history

There are many good reasons to watch the unfolding catastrophe of our civilization’s accelerating drive to the precipice and believe it’s already too late. The unremitting increase in carbon emissions, the ceaseless devastation of the living Earth, the hypocrisy and corruption of our political leaders, and our corporate-owned media’s strategy of ignoring the topics that matter most to humanity’s future—all these factors come together like a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut driving our society toward breaking point. As a result, an increasing number of people are beginning to reconcile themselves to a terminal diagnosis for civilization. In the assessment of sustainability leader Jem Bendell, founder of the growing Deep Adaptation movement, we should wake up to the reality that “we face inevitable near-term societal collapse.”

Our civilization certainly appears to be undergoing profound transition. But it remains uncertain what that transition will look like, and even more obscure what new societal paradigm will re-emerge once the smoke clears. A cataclysmic collapse leaving the few survivors in a grim dark age? A Fortress Earth condemning most of humanity to a wretched struggle for subsistence while a morally bankrupt minority pursue their affluent lifestyles? Or can we retain enough of humanity’s accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and moral integrity to recreate our civilization from within, in a form that can survive the turmoil ahead?

An important lesson from history is that—like all self-organized, adaptive systems—society changes in nonlinear ways. Events take unanticipated swerves that only make sense when analyzed retroactively. These can be catastrophic, such as the onset of a world war or civilizational collapse, but frequently they lead to unexpectedly positive outcomes. When a dozen or so Quakers gathered in London in 1785 to create a movement to end slavery, it would have seemed improbable that slavery would be abolished within half a century throughout the British Empire, would spur a civil war in the United States, and eventually become illegal worldwide. When Emmeline Pankhurst founded the National Union for Women’s Suffrage in 1897, it took ten years of struggle to muster a few thousand courageous women to join her on a march in London—but within a couple of decades, women were gaining the right to vote across the world.

*Emmeline Pankhurst, Martin Luther King Jr., Tarana Burke: their impact is evidence of the nonlinearity of history*

In recent decades, history has continued to surprise those who scoff at the potential for dramatic positive change. It took eight years from Rosa Parks being arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech inspired the nation—leading to the Civil Rights Act being passed into law the following year. In 2006, civil rights activist Tarana Burke used the phrase “Me Too” to raise awareness of sexual assault; she couldn’t have known that, ten years later, it would potentiate a movement to transform abusive cultural norms.

The rise of an ecological worldview

Might people one day look back on our era and say something similar about the rise of a new ecological civilization concealed within the folds of one that was dying? A profusion of groups is already laying the groundwork for virtually all the components of a life-affirming civilization. In the United States, the visionary Climate Justice Alliance has laid out the principles for a just transition from an extractive to a regenerative economy. In Bolivia and Ecuador, traditional ecological principles of buen vivir and sumak kawsay (“good living’) are written into the constitution. In Europe, large-scale cooperatives, such as Mondragon in Spain, demonstrate that it’s possible for companies to provide effectively for human needs without utilizing a shareholder-based profit model.

Meanwhile, a new ecological worldview is spreading globally throughout cultural, political, and religious institutions, establishing common ground with Indigenous traditions that have sustained their knowledge worldwide for millennia. The core principles of an ecological civilization have already been set out in the Earth Charter—an ethical framework launched in The Hague in 2000 and endorsed by over six thousand organizations worldwide, including many governments. In China, leading thinkers espouse a New Confucianism, calling for a cosmopolitan, planetary-wide ecological approach to reintegrating humanity with nature. In 2015, Pope Francis shook the Catholic establishment by issuing his encyclical, Laudato Si’, a masterpiece of ecological philosophy that demonstrates the deep interconnectedness of all life, and calls for a rejection of the individualist, neoliberal paradigm.

Perhaps most importantly, a people’s movement for life-affirming change is spreading around the world. When Greta Thunberg skipped school in August 2018 to draw attention to the climate emergency outside the Swedish parliament, she sat alone for days. Less than a year later, over one and half million schoolchildren joined her in a worldwide protest to rouse their parents’ generation from their slumber. A month after Extinction Rebellion demonstrators closed down Central London in April 2019 to draw attention to the world’s dire plight, the UK Parliament announced a “climate emergency”—something that has now been declared by nearly two thousand jurisdictions worldwide comprising over a billion citizens. Meanwhile, a growing campaign of “Earth Protectors” is working to establish ecocide as a crime prosecutable by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

*The campaign to Stop Ecocide is just one example of rising movements that may transform our future*

Is this enough? Can the collective power of these movements stand up to the inexorable force of corporate capitalism that so tightly maintains its stranglehold on the political, cultural, and economic systems of the world? When we consider the immensity of the transformation needed, the odds look daunting. Those nonlinear historical shifts described earlier—while revolutionary in their own way—were ultimately absorbed into the capitalist system, which has the tenacity of the mythical multi-headed hydra. The transformation needed now requires a metamorphosis of virtually every aspect of the human experience, including our values, goals, and behavioral norms. A change of such magnitude would be an epochal event, on the scale of the Agricultural Revolution that launched civilization, or the Scientific Revolution that engendered the modern world. And in this case, we don’t have the millennia or centuries those revolutions took to unfold—this one must occur within a few decades, at most.

Is the Great Transition already under way?

Daunting, yes—but it’s too soon to say whether such a transformation is impossible. There are powerful reasons why such a drastic change could come to pass far more rapidly than many people might expect. The same tight coupling between global systems that increases the risk of civilizational collapse also facilitates the breakneck speed at which deeper, systemic changes can now occur. The world’s initial reaction to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 showed how quickly the entire economic system can respond when a recognizably clear and present danger emerges. The vast bulk of humanity is now so tightly interconnected through the internet that a pertinent trigger—such as the horrifying spectacle of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis by a police officer—can set off street protests within days throughout the world.

Most importantly, as the world system begins to unravel on account of its internal failings, the strands that kept the old system tightly interconnected also get loosened. Every year that we head closer to a breakdown, as greater climate-related disasters rear up, as the outrages of racial and economic injustice become even more egregious, and as life for most people becomes increasingly intolerable, the old story loses its hold on humanity’s collective consciousness. As waves of young people come of age, they will increasingly reject what their parents’ generation told them. They will look about for a new worldview—one that makes sense of the current unraveling, one that offers them a future they can believe in. People who lived through the Industrial Revolution had no name for the changes they were undergoing—it was a century before it received its title. Perhaps the Great Transition to an ecological civilization is already under way, but we can’t see it because we’re in the middle of it.

*Waves of young people coming of age will increasingly reject what their parents’ generation told them*

As you weigh these issues, there is no need to decide whether to be optimistic or pessimistic. Ultimately, it’s a moot point. As author Rebecca Solnit observes, both positions merely become excuses for inaction: optimists believe things will work out fine without them; pessimists believe nothing they do can make things better. There is, however, every reason for hope—hope, not as a prognostication, but as an attitude of active engagement in co-creating that future. Hope, in the resounding words of dissident statesman Václav Havel, is “a state of mind, not a state of the world.” It is a “deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times . . . an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

This points to the most important characteristic of the future: it is something that we are all co-creating as part of the interconnected web of our collective thoughts, ideas, and actions. The future is not a spectator sport. It’s not something constructed by others, but by the collective choices each of us makes every day: choices of what to ignore, what to notice, and what to do about it.

Coming back to life

We live in a world designed to keep us numb—a culture spiked with innumerable doses of spiritual anesthesia concocted to bind us to the hedonic treadmill, to shuffle along with everyone else in a “consensus trance.” We are conditioned from early infancy to become zombie agents of our growth-based capitalist system—to find our appropriate role as consumer, enforcer, or sacrificial victim, as the case may be, and exhaust our energy to expedite its goal of sucking the life out of our humanity and nature’s abundance.

But, powerful as its hold is, we have the potential to shed our cultural conditioning. As we learn to open our eyes that have been sealed shut by our dominant culture, we can discern the meaning that was always there waiting for us. We can awaken to our true nature as humans on this Earth, feel the life within ourselves that we share with all other beings, and recognize our common identity as a moral community asserting the primacy of core human values. As we open awareness to our interbeing, our ecological self, we can experience ourselves as “life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live”—and realize the deep purpose of our existence on Earth to tend Gaia and participate fully in its ancient, sacred insurgence against the forces of entropy.

There are many effective methods to shed the layers of conditioning. Each person’s pathway is unique. Some choose extended time in nature; others may utilize psychedelic insights, learn from Indigenous groups, engage in meditation or embodied practices, or simply open up to the deep animate nature within themselves. The trail has already been blazed by those who have assumed their sacred responsibilities and developed on-ramps for others in their wake. Ecophilosopher Joanna Macy, for example, has developed a set of transformative practices, called The Work that Reconnects, offered in communities worldwide, that helps people navigate the steps of what she calls “coming back to life.” Beginning with gratitude, it spirals into a full acceptance of the Earth’s heartbreak—the willingness, in Thích Nhât Hanh’s words, “to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.”

*In Thích Nhât Hanh’s words, we have the power to shed our layers of conditioning and “hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying”*

Absorbing this pain, however, doesn’t mean wallowing in it. Rather than giving way to despair, it instead becomes a springboard to action. As such, The Work that Reconnects leads its participants to experience the deep interconnectedness of all things, and continue the spiral into conscious, active engagement. As Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming noted: “There have never been people who know but do not act. Those who are supposed to know but do not act simply do not yet know.” You know when you’ve reached the place of fully experiencing the Earth’s heartbreak, because you suddenly realize you are drawn to action—not because you think you should do something, but because you are impelled to do it.

Explore The Web of Meaning further on Jeremy Lent’s website. The book is now available for purchase in the UK and in the USA/Canada.

The Ideology of Human Supremacy

The somber truth is that the vast bulk of nature’s staggering abundance has already disappeared. We live in a world characterized primarily by the relative silence and emptiness of its natural spaces. Underlying this devastation is the ideology of human supremacy—claiming intrinsic superiority over nonhuman forms of life. But is human supremacy innate to humanity, or rather something specific pertaining to our dominant culture?

Excerpted from The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe (published in June in the UK, and available July 13 in the US)

Shifting baseline syndrome

The nonhuman creatures with whom we share the Earth are being systematically annihilated by the Great Acceleration, as they lose their habitat, get hunted down, or poisoned by our pollution. There has been a 68 percent decline in vertebrate populations worldwide since 1970, with freshwater species such as amphibians registering a jaw-dropping 84 percent loss. Insects have been faring just as badly, with reports of “insectageddon” from some areas that have seen populations crashing toward extinction levels—such as the Monarch butterflies that migrate annually from Mexico to the United States, and have declined by 98 percent over the past thirty years.

There have been five mass extinctions of life in Earth’s history, caused by cataclysms such as volcanic eruptions or meteorite impact. Scientists warn that human activity is now causing species to go extinct at a thousand times the normal background rate, and that if we continue at this rate for a few more decades, we will have triggered the Sixth Extinction. Leading experts in the field, such as biologist E. O. Wilson, predict that half of the world’s estimated eight million species will be extinct or at the brink of extinction by the end of this century unless humanity changes its ways.

Why don’t we react in unbridled outrage to the devastation of the natural world taking place before our eyes? A major reason is that we don’t realize what we’ve lost. Back in 1968, in a song that became an icon of the environmental movement, Joni Mitchell sang about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, making the point that you never know what you’ve got until it’s gone. She stirred millions of hearts—but she was wrong. The disturbing reality is that, once it’s gone, people forget they ever had it. Whatever conditions people grow up with are the ones they generally consider normal. This is a tribute to the amazing plasticity of the human mind, but it means that we tend to take for granted things that should never be accepted.

This phenomenon, known as “shifting baseline syndrome,” was first discovered by fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, who was researching the drastic reduction in the size of catch off the eastern seaboard of North America, which had declined by 97 percent since written records began, although the fishermen remained strangely unconcerned. He realized that each generation viewed the baseline as whatever they caught at the beginning of their career, regardless of how much smaller it was than the previous generation, leading to what he called “the gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance” of fish populations. Shifting baseline syndrome has since been shown to be pervasive everywhere in the world.

*Shifting baseline syndrome: seen dramatically in the reduction of catch size of Florida fishing charters over 50 years*

The somber truth is that the vast bulk of nature’s staggering abundance has already disappeared. We live in a world characterized primarily by the relative silence and emptiness of its natural spaces. It’s only when we read accounts of wildlife from centuries ago that we realize how much is gone. One eighteenth-century writer, standing on the shores of Wales, described schools of herrings five or six miles long, so dense that “the whole water seems alive; and it is seen so black with them to a great distance, that the number seems inexhaustible.” In the seventeenth-century Caribbean, sailors could navigate at night by the noise of massive shoals of sea turtles heading to nesting beaches on the Cayman Islands. In the Chesapeake Bay, plagued today by polluted dead zones, hunters harvested a hundred thousand terrapins a year for turtle soup. In the nineteenth century, passenger pigeons would blot out the sun when they appeared in massive flocks throughout the eastern United States. The last one died in a zoo in 1914.

The Great Dying

In normal times, extinction is a natural part of evolution: new species evolve from prior existing species, meaning that, rather than dying out, “extinct” species are really the progenitors of new ones. When extinctions occur, however, as part of a mass extinction, they represent a grave and permanent loss to the richness of life. Species exterminated by human development are wiped out from nature’s palette, terminating any possibility of further evolutionary branching. The average lifespan of a species is roughly a million years—the unfolding story of each one is, in E. O. Wilson’s words, a unique epic. We’ve seen how life’s prodigious diversity on Earth can be understood as nature’s own evolved intelligence, earned over billions of years. Through extinction, we are dumbing down nature, eliminating the plenitude it has so painstakingly accumulated.

Terminal as extinctions are, the virtual disappearance of most populations of existing species, known as extirpations, are perhaps even more devastating. It’s been calculated that, since the rise of human civilization, Earth has lost 83 percent of its wild mammals, 80 percent of marine mammals, and about half the biomass of trees and plants—a worldwide elimination of life’s abundance that has been aptly named by biologist Norman Myers “the Great Dying.” The species we view as iconic of nature’s magnificence, such as lions, tigers, elephants, and whales—now barely eking out an existence—were once prolific around the world. It’s estimated that, as late as 1800, twenty-six million elephants roved Africa. There are now barely four hundred thousand. The spectacular vista of wildebeest migrating in their millions across the plains of Africa is itself facing extinction, with the few remaining wildebeest finding migration routes blocked by fences, settlements, and roads. And the Great Dying continues at an ever-increasing pace: 2,000-year-old baobab trees that were around when Jesus lived suddenly dying off; three billion animals lost in Australia’s wildfires of 2019–20. In the words of environmental writer J. B. Mackinnon, “extirpation is the great, sucking retreat of the tide of life.”

*Will the great wildebeest migration of Africa soon be another relic of natural history?*

The next time you go for a hike in nature, and marvel at its beauty, take a moment to realize that you are looking at a pale, shrunken wraith of what it once was. An accumulation of studies around the world measuring the declines of species and ecosystems indicates that overall we’ve lost around ninety percent of nature’s profusion. We live, Mackinnon observes, in a “ten percent world.” Those of us who gain sustenance from the sacred beauty of nature sometimes like to think of it as a temple. But, as Mackinnon notes, “a greater truth should be foremost in mind: Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.”

The ideology of human supremacy

It’s rather stunning to consider that all this destruction has been carried out by a species that has been around for less than 0.01 per cent of life’s history; a species that makes up just 0.01 percent of all life on Earth as measured by biomass. While some, such as Ecomodernist Stewart Brand, may glorify humanity’s ascendance declaring “We are as gods,” there are other ways to see it. Humanity has undoubtedly developed unprecedented power, but much of it has been used for destruction. What would other animals say about humans, if they had the opportunity? The animals that still remain on Earth are suffering an apocalypse unlike anything that has occurred in the history of this planet. Other mass extinctions happened through geophysical events that no-one was responsible for, such as volcano eruptions or meteorites. This one is a deliberate and systematic annihilation of life executed by one species with full knowledge of what it’s doing. It may be the Sixth Extinction, but as some have pointed out, a more apt name would be the First Extermination Event.

With the exception of a few hardy survivors such as cockroaches, rats, and pigeons, the animals that have been spared extirpation or extinction are mostly those which have been domesticated, such as cows, chickens, and pigs. But the word domestication doesn’t hint at the reality of their existence. For the most part, these animals are enslaved, brutally tortured, and mercilessly slaughtered merely for human convenience. The ongoing atrocity of the systematic torment administered in the name of humanity to 74 billion animals a year—each one a sentient creature with a nervous system as capable of registering excruciating pain as you or I—must represent the single greatest cataclysm of suffering that life on Earth has ever experienced. It’s most likely, as ecophilosopher Derrick Jensen points out, that if animals could speak, they would tell us that when they see the face of a human, they don’t see a god—they see the devil.

*Factory farming: the greatest single cataclysm that life on Earth has ever experienced?*

But, of course, they can’t speak, and that is why this ongoing holocaust continues with barely a mention in public discourse. Ever since the rise of agrarian civilizations, cultures have justified their domination over those they conquered by claiming innate superiority. In recent centuries, as Europeans subjugated other regions, a discourse of white supremacy—one that retains its pernicious power even today—asserted superiority over other races. Among those who recognize its toxic qualities, white supremacy is understood as a form of violence that inflicts suffering on others while simultaneously damaging the perpetrator by binding them to a system of brutality. What is less recognized is that the ideology of human supremacy—claiming innate superiority over nonhuman animals—has a similarly malignant effect.

Human supremacy is so embedded within our cultural norms that it is barely even discussed. As ecological philosopher Eileen Crist describes, “it is indoctrinated into humans from a tender age, without time-out, hammered into the human mind by innumerable conditioning feats of the dominant anthropocentric culture.” It is, however, a specific ideology with origins in the Western worldview that desacralized nature, turning it into a resource to exploit. Ultimately, it is the ideology of human supremacy that allows us to maltreat animals in factory farms, blow up mountaintops for coal, turn vibrant rainforest into monocropped wastelands, trawl millions of miles of ocean floor with nets that scoop up everything that moves—while glorying in the Anthropocene, claiming that nature only exists to serve human needs. Because it’s all around us and almost never mentioned, human supremacy is easy to ignore—but once you recognize it, you see it everywhere you look.

Anthropocene . . . or Capitalocene?

Once one becomes aware of the enormity perpetrated by the human race, it can sometimes lead to a revulsion against our own species. “We are serial killers beyond reason,” writes one author. Others occasionally liken the human race to a cancer, which spreads uncontrollably until it kills its host. Is it, however, human nature that has caused this unfolding catastrophe, or something specific pertaining to the dominant culture?

When malignant cancer cells spread, they generally do so on account of abnormalities in their DNA that cause them to ignore regulatory feedback from neighboring cells, leading to uncontrolled proliferation. Some see this kind of dynamic in global capitalism, which requires perpetual growth in production and consumption of resources just to remain stable. Rather than viewing humanity as a species overwhelming nature, they see the system of norms, laws, and power relations instituted by global capitalism as the source of this massive disruption. As such, they suggest that the “Anthropocene” is a misnomer: it unfairly lays the blame for climate breakdown and ecological collapse on all humans throughout history, whereas it’s really only a small minority of humans in the past few centuries. The numbers back them up: the advanced OECD countries, representing only 18 percent of the global population, account for 74 percent of global GDP, and are responsible for 73 percent of the carbon emitted since 1850. On average, a single U.S. citizen emits five hundred times as much carbon as a citizen of Ethiopia or Cambodia. The true name of our era, they argue, should be the Capitalocene.

Explore The Web of Meaning further on Jeremy Lent’s website. The book is now available for purchase in the UK and in the USA/Canada.

Primary Underlying Causes

What to Expect in the Next Few Years

Charting a Way Forward

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Holding and honoring conflicting truths

An integrative pathway to peace

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The alignment problem

Conceptual and animate intelligence

Toward an integrated intelligence

Aligning with integration

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The elephant in the room

An economy based on perpetual growth

The profit-based path to catastrophe

There is an alternative

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The following book review is included in the July/August issue of Share International. We feature this early because of its relevance to our present world situation and as an early heads-up that Jeremy Lent will be a guest interviewee in a Share International webinar on 24 October.

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A four-billion-year reversal of entropy

The ideology of human supremacy

The “quantum jazz” of life

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The nonlinearity of history

The rise of an ecological worldview

Is the Great Transition already under way?

Coming back to life

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Shifting baseline syndrome

The Great Dying

The ideology of human supremacy

Anthropocene . . . or Capitalocene?

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