What is left if we lose it all?
We are being stripped, unceremoniously...but I think many of us know there is a larger point to it, no?
Hello! You’ve landed at the final section and one of the final chapters of my book about how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world. You’re new here? You can also choose to start at the beginning or go and check out the rest of the book using this Table of Contents.
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PART 4: Becoming more human
The final section in which we realise an existential point to this whole devastating affair.
I think it’s important to share that when I set out seven months ago on this Book Serialisation journey, I did not know if or how I’d arrive at some calm, uplifting (or otherwise) spiritual or philosophical landing. When you write a book that tackles a complex, difficult quandary, you need to have such a landing. You need a salve, a mindset to hand to readers that they can be inspired onwards by, or at least some kind of redemptive twist in the plot.
It would be wonderful to have this firmly in mind before putting pen to paper, but I have always had to set out with the reader (perhaps a few steps in front), in real time, and wrangle my way to the landing as I write (and as the reader reads). I have never felt comfortable writing from on high, speaking down to the reader from some position of superior knowing. Apart from anything else, I don’t think anyone ever knows. We will always be in the muck and the mire.
That said, I always have a hunch. I only set out to write a book because I have a visceral sense - a smell? I can feel the vibration? - of what we’re aching for as a collective, what we feel we’re missing. The hunch builds into a quiet certainty over the course of 80,000-odd words. The ideas and openings, all the threads, somehow weave their way in and around the hunch and we - the hunch, the threads, you, me, Life - weave our way to the final pages.
Which is where we are now. In the final pages. I’m still not wholly sure where I’ll drop us all off. But I know, per the line I quoted from American philosopher Jonathan Lear in the Truth chapter at the top, that it somehow entails having a “hunch that we are onto something important about being human”.
I also want to loop in a few remaining questions that challenge many of us here.
OK, let’s find out where this behemoth lands…
RECKONING
“What is the joy that even death cannot destroy and how do we discover it?”
- Meister Eckhart1
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“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorised and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
- Charles Bukowski
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There comes a time in any kind of devastating life journey when a vulnerable human needs a point to it all, to be able to keep showing up. We seek a meta-reason for why something so terrifying and wrong is happening. To us. Right now. And why we must suddenly do such deep, courageous work. As Viktor Frankl shared, humans must have a loftier “why” to handle the treacherous “how” of our predicament.
With this journey we’re all on together here, I have found that I can be propelled for some time by the satisfaction of having worked something out, of finally understanding that this is a systems collapse picture, a metacrisis that is moloch’d to the hilt, and that all the absurd, unprecedented WTAF?! things are, well, the one (almost neat) thing. The cognitive relief that something is making sense2 remains palpable. So, too, the sense of camaraderie after feeling so lonely for so long holding such dark knowledge. Ditto, the validation as yet another absurd, unprecedented, terrifying news event rolls in. But such snug sentiments don’t hold me for long.
I think for most of us here, we need to know that what we’re doing is heading somewhere.
*
“What if we are wrong about this? What if we create these islands of sanity and the rest of the world moves on without us? What if we are seeing things through muddy lenses rather than rose coloured party sunnies?”
*
Oh, Steve, I have asked myself many versions of this question at every stage of this journey. I have kept a working document where I write down all my doubts, any possible cognitive biases I might have fallen victim to, all my smugnesses. And I go back over them, and cross-interrogate myself.
There is no certainty here. Indeed, the world is more groundless than it’s ever been. But there are truths.
We are already in collapse. This (the overnight oligarchical rule in the US, the LA fires, the wars and famines that wage in collapsing nations such as Sudan and Somalia that the West deems “no longer worth saving”, the masculinity crisis, the 4G movement…) is what it looks like. The centre is not holding; the system is no longer working. Indeed, whichever way we go now, the decline is inevitable. If we continue with BAU growth, the climate and resources systems crumble, domino’ing the other systems in time. If we halt growth or switch to a green energy economy, this will tip the global economic system, reliant as it is on exponential growth. We are not wrong about this, whether we choose to call it “collapse” or merely very very “unprecedented”.
Further, the world will not be moving on in any kind of BAU manner, most certainly not in our lifetimes or our children’s. The ultra-privileged might be able to live a simulation of the “old normal” for a short while, but not with any ease, human juiciness or clear conscience. Theirs will just be a different kind of hell.
Of course, there is room for this systemic decline to be a matter of degree. And, granted, the argument can also still probably be made that collapse could be like some of the previous collapses where a society is not fully wiped out and is able to rebuild decades or centuries later.
But - and here I think we start to get close to this point that we are seeking - would it be right to? Would you want to preserve or reinstall the old normal?
Or, more crucially, given what we now know, would you want to go the “islands of sanity” path anyway?
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When things collapse, rot is exposed. As our civilisation crumbles, the saddest of realities is being revealed: we have been humaning all wrong. We have not been living even close to fully.