Building New Planetary Hope
By: Mike Meyer
Tags: Economics, Climate Change, Culture, Future, Politics

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ February 3, 2020

Saving ourselves from the escalating climate disaster and concomitant political collapse requires us to overcome our problems with truth, knowledge, belief, and faith. We need to come to an agreed understanding on how to deal with these things to preserve ourselves, our planet, and its biosphere.

That planetary public life, itself, needs to be defined, understood, and agreed to as a foundation of 21st-century civilization. This change is not going to be easy, but that makes little difference because it is what we must do.

What we are facing is a planetary problem, but it is currently at its most extreme in the lead, post-modern societies. The US is now facing the expected failure of the long-overdue impeachment of Trump as a primary symptom of a failing political and economic system. Great Britain and other countries are also struggling with growing instances of this illness.

These symptoms include racism, xenophobia, and archaic tribalism, loudly offered as a means to escape international, or non-native, standards and controls. The reasons for this are vague because they are of primary benefit only to the late-stage capitalist oligarchy. Mass support, as a distraction, is generated purely by fear and bigotry.

An important fact is that faith and belief are now in formal opposition to truth and knowledge. We must restore a publicly shared understanding of reality, and that can only be possible in a secular public world. This new reality must come from science and also precludes the use of political positions as objects of unquestioning faith. Political propagandists declaring heresies left and right must be ignored.

Our species has always had a problem in confusing our myths and stories with reality, but it has not been a potential cause of species extinction until the late 20th century. Understanding this problem and what is required to prevent it from killing us is not simple or easy. Many people see this problem but are unable to stop fighting old battles that are no longer relevant.

Part of the rise of fatal belief systems that have corrupted representative government in America and elsewhere over the last forty years was an effort to return to older absolutist systems that are assumed to have once provided unity to Western Civilization. The need to restore common standards is very much a valid concern. Still, the rise of vicious and destructive religious groups in collaboration with authoritarian political movements has hijacked this concern to capture political power. We are watching this growing disaster daily.

As an example, the US Republican Party, acting as a tool supporting racism, bigotry, xenophobia, and willful ignorance has linked these destructive religionist groups with criminal opportunists for political control. Allowing this to happen is culturally suicidal and could lead to species extinction.

The planetary conversion to a completely secular society is not an attack on human spirituality or spiritual health. Spiritual health has been long ignored in Western cultures resulting in the growth of unhealthy belief systems. These distorted belief systems resulted in the logical and steady decline of religion as mythologically based ritual systems lost meaning and relevance in modern societies incidentally producing unbalanced and, often, alienated populations.

At the same time, there has been a steady growth in new, personal spiritual systems evolving from select philosophers and diverse religious traditions that were not inherently crippled with old institutional and mythological baggage. In post-modern urban societies and among the younger generations, this is most recognizable as mindfulness, compassion, and the resurgence of adapted animistic traditions relinking our species with our planet, its biosphere, and the universe around us.

The convergence of the climate crisis, personal diversity, and penetration of accelerating scientific knowledge into expanding educated populations have opened significant rifts between these groups and older, less urban, and less well-educated communities. The rise of reactionary political movements under various banners results from the declining religious systems efforts to profit from the disruption caused by massive cultural changes.

The result is a mess in many societies that is blocking critical social and intellectual change. We need a planetary, cultural house cleaning. That will necessitate, in this era of paradigmatic shift, removal of old and dangerous furniture, objects, and tools. What to throw away and how to reorganize a shared living place is a classic cause of family conflict, but the threats to health and welfare require this.

It is understandable if we see what is happening now as a kind of family dispute resulting from the need to simplify our household in preparation for an emergency move resulting from a pending environmental disaster. The initial critical debate is defining the failure and agreeing that the step is essential. There are always those in the family who will insist that nothing needs to change and refuse to see reality until they are physically moved or abandoned. There are always those who choose to stay in severe storms and die or put many other people at risk to rescue them.

We are at that precise stage now. There is time to act and to move, but that time is short at the scale of planetary climate. Yet another indication of this is the discovery of warm water under the Thwaite glacier in Antarctica. This is the doomsday glacier that could raise sea levels ten feet if it detaches from Antarctica. Just as in other human time-sensitive decisions, there is always plenty of time until there isn’t.

We know that psychopathic behavior can be socially transmitted; the trail of ruined lives in the wake of Trump’s three years in office shows the endemic nature of this. The least of these are the political leaders who have the responsibility to stop any descent into insanity and national criminality. Allowing a psychopathic criminal to act as president and holding unquestionably to that decision is itself a sign of insanity.

The portion of the population exhibiting more severe symptoms of sociopathy need to handled quickly. The historical acceptance of this at a national level excused by national sovereignty is no longer viable. The nation-state is now a part of our species pathology. That needs to become a significant part of the planetary conversation.

With luck, the people affected may be able to recover, but until then, they cannot be part of public life for reasons of urgent public safety. How do we do that?

Not by pursuing the same political process that created this disaster. We must dismantle the system that produced this condition must. That is a massive task that will take years, but it needs to start now before time runs out.

I am using the US as an example as it is now an extremely dangerous victim of group insanity. With the final collapse of the party system, the only remaining hope is the current national election. Those are now so quickly and effectively manipulated that this is a dangerous delay in beginning the removal of the Trump regime and dismantling of the diseased capitalist based political system.

Moving beyond the capitalist economy and the nation-state is no longer an arbitrary political position but one of species survival. Over the last year, the core of climate change models had become frighteningly hotter, suggesting that the original Paris goal of holding to 1.5°C is already gone, and we may have a deadly 5°C of warming by 2100. This quick increase may be a modeling error, but that may take another year to determine. We are already in a full climate emergency with an option for it to be much worse than projected.

We know we must eliminate fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. Implementing this at the planetary level will require us to begin removing the stubborn power of the old nation-states while reducing the death grip of the old capitalist oligarchy, still heavily funded by fossil fuels, on the planet’s economy.

Again these changes are no longer optional. They must happen now. If we wait until later, it may be too late.