We know the way out of this. It is the wisdom to accept rather than solve the intractable paradoxes of life. On a practical level, we have to stop making things that sell, and make things that help. We have to discover, again, that our fate does not lie with government, or with capitalism, but with each other. And we must rediscover a sense of humor.
Laughter makes our straits no less dire but certainly more bearable, less tyrannizing.
In my life I have had the privilege of traveling in several parts of the world with Indigenous people. One of the lessons that has come from that experience is to understand the past not as a record of mistakes and imperfection, but as a source of wisdom. In this way, we differ little from Aranda people in the Northern Territory, or Araucanians in Chile, Inuit on Ellesmere Island, or Kamba living in Nairobi. It is these stories, not the storytellers, that are indispensable. And if there are heroes among us, it is the readers, I think, not the writers, who are heroic.