Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Continued exponential economic growth is impossible, but the S-curve of slowing growth followed by a steady state is not the only other alternative. If the goal is maintaining GDP at the highest possible level, then the S-curve is the best case scenario, but in today’s world that isn’t necessarily desirable or even possible.
Free trade and the freedom of capital to move across borders have been the cutting edge of globalization. They’ve also led to the succession of crises that have led to the widespread questioning of capitalism as a way of organizing economic life — and of its paramount ideological expression, neoliberalism.
My opinion that the design process at the core of permaculture currently lacks soundness and coherence. As a result, in spreading permaculture (which is above all else a design system), we are unintentionally spreading ideas that are unsound and incoherent. Ideas that will, if inadvertently, undermine the ability of permaculture to deliver real solutions in different domains. To deliver on its incredible promise.
I think it is urgent that we overcome our fears of articulating grand narratives and lay out a vision that spells out the overcoming of the present world blighted by Capital through common struggle, with the end being the construction of societies that harness men and women’s deepest instinct— cooperation.
We CAN navigate the turbulence of our times by recognizing that the real state of power is culture. What I mean by this is that it is cultural narratives that drive our behaviors.
Today the theater state is shown in high definition and 3-D, and it resembles in its own way the grand Berlin pageants of Albert Speer as much as the scenes from Apocalypto. Mad-Men have refined the manufacture of consent, to use Chomsky’s phrase, to a fine science, and as in Classic Maya times, military recruitment is viewed as a fortunate outlet for the unemployed.
My argument is that a healthy democratic society is inherently participative and if it is not then the institutions of democracy will wither away as a smaller group take all the decisions, in their own interest, shutting out everyone else.
What would it be like to be mobilized by my government — and I emphasize “my” because as far as I’m concerned, Donald Trump’s version of it doesn’t qualify — into some collective effort to make this country a better place.
Ultimately the direction of history is decided by values. The years I spent working on my book The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, taught me that each unique culture shapes its values, and those values shape history. By the same token, the predominant values of our civilization are what will shape the future.
In growth-based societies, the cessation of growth means prolonged economic recessions, an explosion in poverty, an intensification of productivist or extractivist activities and setbacks in democracy. But social progress, prosperity and living well are possible without economic growth; in fact, they require a shift towards post-growth or degrowth societies.
The big takeaway from a week of multiple epiphanies and new friendships was the product of the students’ imaginations themselves. They are seeking to model and scale up a form of patient and profound knowledge-building they call “critical thinking communities” (CTCs)…
We’re aware that we can’t look to anyone but ourselves to start generating forms of political activity that both overcome the unwelcome return of nationalism, and that genuinely increase the prospects for just, ecologically sound and equitable ways of organising our societies. These will necessarily be aimed at the end of capitalism and the nation-state, and towards democratically organized societies held in common.
