As If There Can Be No Other Way

Can global civilization survive human ambition?

Is flourishing simply through loving life with all its mystery and complexity possible?

Listening to a panel at All-In Summit 2024 with John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey D. Sachs was informative and revealing. I follow their work and have read many of their books. The Israel Lobby is a must-read for understanding US-Middle Eastern relations’ broader context and history. Likewise, if you want context concerning Globalization, read The Ages of Globalization; there is even an online course. These gentlemen have a lot of sound expertise and thinking to share.

However, these conversations always vex me and make me wonder if retreating to apathy and stoic meditations might be the only answer in a world spiraling toward madness.

I am tired of this idea that it is what it is, was what it was, and shall be what it shall be by virtue of having been realism dogma. Realism, as Homo Hubris knows it, is as if humans were not a very malleable conscious mammal that hasn’t had many ways of organizing things over the past seventy-five thousand years during which our species began dominating all habitats on Earth.

Large-scale civilization may indeed be doomed to constant warfare, and there is a vast amount of literature on the subject to delve into. But does it have to be this way forever more? It seems to me we are suffering from a tragic lack of imagination.

If we do not have the vision or will to develop better local governance that isn’t BIG NATURE blind and more stable and powerful global institutions to maintain peace, help manage the flow of vital resources and trade, develop needed infrastructure and technology in a wise way that understands the energy and materials required to meet sustainable objectives that maintain the integrity of complex living systems, then nuclear war it is.

Have a nice time dancing to the band and rearranging deckchairs while it lasts, and come what may. Let’s maintain our omnicidal economic religion for the sake of GROWTH, GREEN GROWTH™, and more power and control for Oligarchs, Plutocrats, Tyrants, Mob Bosses, and their power to program with pernicious ideological algorithms, the plebs, proles, and corporate clerks with narratives/propaganda, bread/addictions, circuses, and blind belief so they won’t upset the Magical Realism that the panel is defending by default.

We must spend our efforts reprogramming the system’s logic or get up and go home, where we’ll wait, rapt by the surreal, kaleidoscopic content on our screens, to starve or vaporize.

It’s incredibly challenging to change one’s behavior when one’s salary depends on business as usual. So let’s keep having the conversation, cashing checks, and doing what we have to do, and come what may, things will change one way or another.