Searching for the Anti-Virus | Covid-19 as Quantum Phenomenon
Searching for the Anti-Virus | Covid-19 as Quantum Phenomenon
featured image | Mandala in Rinchepung Dzong, Paro, Bhutan
I’ve struggled to make sense of what is going on. My suspicious mind wandered around restlessly, examining all theories and possible explanations, yet I must admit: I don’t know what is happening. I do know this is a crucial moment of choice for humanity. In this essay, I will not suggest or discuss “what is going on.” I rather want to invite you into a realm transcending the dichotomy of “objective reality” vs “subjective thoughts/feelings,” which underlies most theories, predictions and calls to action in this crisis. Coming from a spiritually-informed holistic worldview, I entertain the possibility that we as humanity – or some deeper part of ourselves, whether conscious or not – have dreamed this moment into existence as a catalyst for our collective evolution. If that were true, how might we engage and respond? Covid-19 could actually present an unlikely possibility for collective awakening and far-reaching system change.
Neither real nor unreal, but dreamlike
“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.”
– Rumi
For over a hundred years, physicists and philosophers have tried to wrap their heads around the manifold wonders of quantum physics. Subatomic entities, such as electrons, they saw, behave in awe-striking and magical ways. They do not simply exist “as such,” as fixed and finished entities; they can appear as a wave in one instant or as a particle in another, depending on whether or not they are observed. This is true. Our perception of the world isn’t just passive, it is creative – it literally in-forms its very being and reality. Quantum physics invites us into a view of reality in which the seeming “objective” reality out there and the “subjective” experience “in here” become inseparably intertwined. Just as the characters and events in dreams aren’t separate from the dreamer, the world, according to the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is but a living symbol, the embodiment of deeper parts of ourselves, which we collectively dream into existence.
Embracing reality in this way, how would we make sense of Covid-19?
Through spiritual experiences and studies, I’ve learned that diseases rarely appear for no reason. They often carry deeper messages. For example, conflicts, longings, and vital drives our minds suppress may resurface in bodily symptoms. Healing often occurs in the moment we realize what we have suppressed. Such insights have the possibility to make us more whole and may, in fact, change our lives. In this way, we can say the healing antidote – or, in this case, the anti-virus – lies hidden within the disease as the treasure of transformative realization. If we exclusively fight the symptoms without exploring the deeper root, we might survive the disease but other symptoms are still likely to materialize.
What is true for an individual disease may also be true for epidemic or pandemic outbreaks. In his provocative book, Selbstzerstörung aus Verlassenheit [Self-Destruction due to Abandonment], the psychotherapist Franz Renggli ascribes the outbreak of the Great Plague in Christian Europe in the 14th century, which killed 30%–60% of the continent’s population, to an “eruption of mass psychosis.” He writes,
My psycho- or rather socio-somatic model is psycho-neuro-immunology: neither a bacterium nor a virus is the core problem, but rather the people within a society who have been shaken by a crisis. If this crisis lasts too long, is too severe or too traumatic, the immune system of the population is slowly weakened and finally collapses. The people become vulnerable to illnesses and finally to death. This model is valid for any epidemic and can serve as a key for a new understanding of history.
In the century preceding the Black Death, he argues, the Catholic Church began advising mothers to separate from their babies during day and night. Children growing up in the 13th and 14th centuries thus suffered a collective trauma of primal abandonment. Renggli shows that regions in which mothers continued to practice close physical contact with their children were spared from the plague. Might we be experiencing something similar right now?
How has the specter of Covid-19 been able to haunt 7.5 billion people and bring the world to a standstill in no time at all? Because the narrative massively resonates with something latent that is both teeming and deeply suppressed in people’s subconscious.
The “mental” coronavirus spread earlier, faster and much more powerfully than its biological counterpart. Covid-19 began to make headlines and people suddenly found an “objective” justification for the fear and despair which had been gathering unconsciously within them for a long time. The feedback loop between the hourly onslaught of fear-inducing headlines in the media and the growing anxious expectations in people’s minds trapped humanity in a vicious neurotic cycle. Every new “case” in our neighborhood or region, every cough in the subway, every stranger coming too close doubled-down on an eerie sense of ubiquitous danger. The more we think about illness, the more afraid we are. The more fear we experience, the weaker our immune system gets. The weaker our immune system, the more likely we’ll develop symptoms. Try not to think of a pink elephant.
The psycho-spiritual dimension has been proven to have a very concrete effect on the material realm. The astonishingly far-reaching physical impacts of the placebo effect are well documented, and likewise, many studies show how emotional stress, chronic fear and loneliness can dangerously weaken our immune system and corrode our health.
Please bear with me. I’m not suggesting Covid-19 is just a hoax, nor am I trying to downplay or deny the tragedy so many people are experiencing.
I’m suggesting we look at it from a different angle: What if Covid-19 weren’t a danger independent from our minds and souls but, in fact, a quantum phenomenon – a shared dream character we’ve collectively summoned into existence? An embodiment of something buried deeply in the realms of the collective subconscious that we haven’t, so far, been able to comprehend? A living symbol of a much deeper infection?
Mind viruses and the magic of fear
Reaching back to the oral traditions of several First Nations, Native American scholar Jack D. Forbes writes in Columbus and Other Cannibals, “For several thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox.” The Algonquin and other Indigenous First Nations identified the mental illness of the white man, upon his arrival to their native homelands in the 15th and 16th centuries, as “Wetiko,” literally translating as cannibalism: “the consuming of another’s life for [one’s] own private purpose or profit.” Forbes concludes by saying, “This disease is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man.”
Wetiko – often referred to as a mind virus – propagates the deep-seated illusion of seeing oneself desperately confined to the cage of a separated ego. From this perspective of isolation, others appear either as competitors or as prey. In a worldview in which fear is the basic condition, fight and exploitation seem rational, empathy ridiculous and sentimental.
After 5000 years of patriarchy, 500 years of capitalism and 50 years of neoliberalism, Wetiko has come to define nearly every area of our (Western) world and lives. The reason we can accept an economic system celebrating the biggest-possible devastation of the natural world as “success” is due to our own infection with the virus. Wetiko has numbed our hearts, blurring our ability to perceive both the sacredness and the pain of life, both outside and inside ourselves. Innumerable beings are perishing due to this chronic inability to feel empathy.
From the compulsive fixation on maximizing artificial values in the economy all the way down to the pandemic of broken and abusive love relationships, the Wetiko sickness has become so normalized it’s no longer even recognized as such. A miserable cult of self-obsession has eroded the social tissue of humanity and desecrated the Earth. As a result, fear is everywhere – fear of abandonment, fear of death, fear of life, fear of sexuality, fear of punishment, fear of the coming collapse… The benign front of bourgeois decency conceals a psychological basement in which the children of fear roam freely: permanent anger, general mistrust, addiction, depression, boredom, perversion, compulsive consumption and control and the secret or open fascination with violence.
The Red Book of Carl Jung
When Jung began his explorations of his unconscious, he recorded his fantasies in a series of notebooks that formed the basis for the Red Book. Some of Jung’s Red Book illustrations resemble mandalas, used in Buddhism and other religions as a representation of the universe and an aid to meditation. Jung believed the mandala was one of the oldest human religious symbols, found all over the world. Jung remarked that “The “squaring of the circle” is one of the many archetypal motifs which form the basic patterns of our dreams and fantasies. . . . it could even be called the archetype of wholeness.” (via Library of Congress | Exhibits)
The Covid-19 narrative has been able to infect humanity at such record speed because fear is so deep-seated and unconscious in humanity that we’re no longer aware of what is happening within us.
The tragedy is that the virus operates in the shadows of our consciousness. We infect ourselves and others unknowingly. As Forbes writes, we’re conditioned by the disease through “authoritarian family structures,” “male dominance,” “subjugating women” and “extremely negative attitudes towards sex” – and on an ideological level, through “notions of racial and cultural superiority.”
Once stuck in this box, we mindlessly perpetuate the disease in our day-to-day interactions, by feeding off and into each other’s blind spots and pain points. As we project what we fear internally onto others or external events, we validate our fear while suppressing where it comes from. We believe danger to be outside of us, so we try to protect ourselves from it and, thereby, often act in ways that perpetuate the very danger we try to protect ourselves from. Jung describes this mechanism as “shadow projection.”
To the extent we’re unconsciously driven by fear, we become susceptible to manipulation. When millions of people project their unconscious shadows onto others, they conjure up the very danger everyone is trying to escape from. Wilhelm Reich made these dynamics explicit during the rise of Hitler (see his 1933 book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism) and they’re the premise of all totalitarian regimes to this day.
After 9/11, we were told that our enemy was the Muslim world; now the “enemy” is invisible and might await us at every door handle, or creep into us as we kiss, hug or even breathe. The more extravagant the neurotic cinema that’s playing in our minds, the easier it is for external powers to control and use us for their interests.
The great unveiling
Much more than just a difficult trial for humanity, the Covid-19 outbreak also holds the possibility for collective healing from the predatory mass infection of Wetiko. We can make sense of it as a global somatization – or symbolic simulation – of the underlying Wetiko disease. As with every outbreak of severe disease, the deeper patterns are now coming unstuck in plain sight at the global level.
We’re now witnessing a simultaneous unveiling, breakdown and intense exaggeration of Wetiko:
- On an ecological level, Covid-19 originated as a direct result of our civilization’s insatiable greed for exponential growth. Probably wild animals transmitted the virus to people after the natural ecosystems which were home to them were destroyed by the ecocidal steamroller of civilizational “progress.” And now we’re equally astonished to see how quickly the air can clear in China, the speed at which wildlife returns to urban areas, and how suddenly old ecocidal endeavors collapse before our eyes (e.g. the S. fracking industry).
- On an economic level, Covid-19 has been the straw that’s broken the camel’s back, setting off the chain reaction of a long overdue financial collapse. The lockdown has sent our globalized economy into a full-blown, rapid “evaporation,” with entire industries halting, millions of workers being laid off from one day to the next and stock markets crashing. The fossil fuel industry faces its “gravest challenge in its 100-year history,” from which it may never recover. The Federal Reserves are currently lending big banks an additional $1 trillion a day, which is to say, we’re now barely keeping the economic system on life support.
- On the social and psychological levels, we see both a collective frenzy of extreme Wetiko behaviors and also many people breaking free. On one hand, social atomization, the desire for control and egoistic panic are reaching surreal pinnacles. We are seeing a massive surge in domestic abuse and the rapid conversion of liberal societies into police states; even leftists are praising the strengthening of top-down government and restrictions on civil liberties. On the other hand, thousands of local grassroots initiatives practicing mutual aid have popped up from one day to the next. Millions are entering a rare moment of reflection and of asking “what’s essential?” While locked down in quarantine, we’re confronted with ourselves, our longings and our lives. And many recognize how deeply we’ve been “socially distanced” all along – divided up by the competitive ideals of a precarious labor market and our own inability to engage in authentic interpersonal connection.
A parting of ways
What will happen next is uncertain, but we can predict that the chain reaction of economic devastation may be inevitable. The global emergency may have come to stay. In other words, we may not go back to normal anytime soon, or perhaps ever again.
What will happen in the next few weeks and months will likely shape the world for many years to come. Rather than resisting the forces of entropy and indulging in faint hopes of a return to normality, the future will be on the side of those who are able to embrace chaos and disruption as an opportunity to propose a different vision for global society.
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, says: “If there is one thing history teaches us, it’s that moments of shock are profoundly volatile. We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites, and pay the price for decades, or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier. This is no time to lose our nerve.”
Burdened by astronomical debt and commanded by the imperative for exponential growth, the globalized capitalist system has come to an irreversible breaking point. The powers that be will either have to make way for system change or will stubbornly continue to prop up the old order with ever-more brutal force. While there may be many possible futures in front of us, I want to highlight the stark contrast of the historic choice we’re facing, in two contrasting future scenarios:
- Scenario #1: Surveillance capitalism
After many months of lockdown, people have accepted the new era of quarantined existence. Governments have dismantled civil liberties, human rights and environmental protections and, under the pretext of health and safety, deployed unprecedented levels of surveillance technology. Mobile apps are used not only to track people’s physical movements but also their biochemical reactions. As Gideon Lichfield writes, “intrusive surveillance [is] considered a small price to pay for the basic freedom to be with other people.” In the background of a daily onslaught of fear-invoking messages, governments further redistribute wealth from the bottom 99% to the elites. Banks, fossil fuel and airline industries are bailed out with taxpayer’s money, while social security and public health systems are further dismantled. Austerity measures and the abolition of cash further marginalize working people, the poor and the homeless. General apathy and numbness have reached a dimension where the daily shooting of migrants at the borders and other atrocities no longer provoke any moral outcry. Locked into their flats, afraid of infection, monitored by digital body sensors, the powers that be have almost entirely crippled people’s ability to organize themselves and resist. Should protests or strikes still occur, the mass media can report on new dangerous infections spreading so that governments can swiftly impose new curfews to “keep our communities safe.” At some point, with climate breakdown, water crises and food shortages worsening, the system is no longer able to disguise its collapse. Chaos and violence can no longer be contained. The rich retreat to their gated compounds in remote areas, while masses of people find themselves trapped in disintegrating urban centers.
- Scenario #2: Ecological and social emancipation
In the months of uncertainty and economic disintegration, millions of people begin to organize themselves at the local grassroots levels to cover their basic needs. In this time of hardship, they rediscover the power of community, solidarity and localism. As people help each other through sickness and challenge, a spirit of empathy and interdependence spreads. After many months of unemployment, public chaos and food shortages, hopes for strong government and a return to normality have finally faded. Many realize that either we live out collapse alone or we get through this together. The emergency initiatives of neighborhood aid now turn into more long-term initiatives of social, economic and ecological re-organization. People start collective gardens and food cooperatives to supply themselves with local organic crops and open solar energy task forces to decentralize and democratize their energy supply. More and more people leave the cities to found communities in the countryside, where they engage in restoring ecosystems and radical social experimentation for a more trust-based and loving way of living. People work together with progressive governments on large-scale ecological rehabilitation in response to the climate crisis, while governments support citizens’ agency through introducing Universal Basic Income. In the background of this astonishing social and ecological movement, a profound cultural and spiritual transformation takes place – a shift of consciousness from the Wetiko drive for domination to cooperation with all living beings, from atomizing mass societies to communities of trust, from the patriarchal condemnation of Eros and the feminine to a culture that celebrates sensual love in its freedom and dignity, from subduing the Earth to honoring her inherent sacredness, from fearing death to acknowledging our eternal existence.
System change: the time is now
The dangers of totalitarianism are dire and real and are becoming concretized in many countries already. But we mustn’t forget that those measures are the last resort in prolonging the death of a system that’s already on its way out. At this point, globalized capitalism is only being kept alive by our fearful projections and our inability to imagine something new, which is to say, if people can leave fear behind and unify around a shared vision of the future they want, nothing can stop the inevitable transition.
I see the keys to system change lying in three essential realms of our lives:
– The spiritual sphere
Having exaggerated Wetiko to unthinkably surreal heights, Covid-19 strangely invites us into a dimensional shift of being. As Paul Levy, the author of Dispelling Wetiko, maintains, the anti-virus hidden with the Wetiko disease is the awakening to its dream-like nature – a realization which has the potential to radically change our world.
If we continue to react to the embodiments of Wetiko outside of us (e.g. viruses, external enemies or the dangers of totalitarianism…) as if they were separate from us, we will continue to act in ways that feed the very dynamic we’re afraid of. But if we begin to see Wetiko playing out within ourselves, it loses its grip on us. Compassion opens our eyes to understanding that which we previously could only fear, judge or hate. Trust reconciles us with the world and our fellow beings. Compassion and trust are the ultimate anti-viruses of Wetiko.
We may suddenly wake up and realize how all systems of domination have never been “real” as such, their “reality” has always only existed through our consent. Money, authority, society, pandemics – we can now see the dreamlike nature of what we believed to be rock-solid and unchangeable.
To awaken from the fearful web of Wetiko is to simultaneously awaken to the interdependent web of Life. This is such a profound shift from where we come from in the Western world that it’s hard to even find words for it. The fear-stricken mind always asks for immediate conclusions, solutions, fixes. But maybe there is no such “fix” right now. Maybe, what this moment calls for is for us to let go of all our notions of self-importance, superiority and domination and to surrender to a greater-than-human intelligence and guidance, to inquire for orientation from the Earth and the Indigenous wisdom of cultures centered around the Earth. In this experience of communion lies a truth that is unambiguous, absolute and deeply healing: all life is sacred. This isn’t only a private experience, but an insight into the inherent matrix of Life. In alignment with this matrix we stand outside the vicious cycles of fear, infection and violence.
– The social sphere
As Wetiko plays out relationally, its dissolution is a collective endeavor; a historic project of developing ways of living together in which we can heal our broken relationship to the Earth and each other, and develop deep trust among ourselves.
To build trust, we need conditions which no longer force us to lie, disguise or protect ourselves. We need ways of living, loving, working and relating in which we can truly recognize each other and dare to show what we actually think and feel, love and desire. “Trust” is a word often used, but what does it mean in the delicate realms of our souls, such as love, sexuality and spirituality, where our vulnerabilities tend to be the greatest? This entails nothing short of a social revolution. Dieter Duhm, a mentor and teacher of mine, and author of The Sacred Matrix, writes, “Trust is not only classified as psychological; it is above all a political term – the most revolutionary of all – for we need to renew the entire societal structure to bring about sustainable, systemic trust.”
This revolution may not occur in mass movements immediately, but it can begin in small groups – wells of coherence – and extend across society from there, by virtue of raising a new field of consciousness. Based on 40 years of radical experimentation, the “Healing Biotopes Plan” offers a respective vision for such comprehensive transformation.
– The political and economic sphere
Freedom in the long-term requires our capacity to resist any restriction to civil and human rights in the short-term. In this time of social distancing, let us stand in solidarity together, especially with all those who are marginalized, rejecting any narrative of “us versus them.”
As the globalized system crumbles, localization will be the key to the future. Now is the moment to decentralize supply systems for water, food and energy, to invest in regenerative agriculture and practices of ecosystem restoration, to create seed banks and exchange, and to establish networks and economic mechanisms of mutual aid, resource sharing and reciprocal gifting. Localization not only offers food sovereignty but also a path to political autonomy – as we take charge of our own basic needs, we can come together to make collaborative decisions from the bottom up. From various ecosystem restoration practices to the permaculture, seed saving and ecovillage movements, all the way to large-scale social movements like Extinction Rebellion and experiments of radical grassroots democracy like Rojava and the Zapatistas, the world offers a thousand examples showing that this path is viable.
Because the spiritual, social, and economic-political spheres are so inseparably intertwined, successful system change will rely on profound structural transformations in these three realms in parallel. It doesn’t mean we must all do everything at once, it means we must support each other. May we each listen deeply for what we’re now called to do and be, while remaining aware of each other. As much as narratives of isolation and social distancing threaten to keep us afraid and separate, our ability to go through this crisis relies on our ability to organize and build alliances, remembering that we are community.
Whatever we may do, may we remember that this is a moment of unique historic possibility. As Julian Assange told Yanis Varoufakis from his prison cell by phone, “Anything goes… Everything is now possible.” And if there’s one thing that Covid-19 has taught us, it is that dramatic shifts of collective behavior can actually occur overnight.
Coronavirus Spells the End of the Neoliberal Era. What’s Next?
Coronavirus Spells the End of the Neoliberal Era. What’s Next?
Originally published in Patterns of Meaning
Coronavirus is a political crucible, melting down and reshaping current norms. Will the new era be a “Fortress Earth” or a harbinger of a transformed society based on a new set of values?
Think Bigger
Whatever you might be thinking about the long-term impacts of the coronavirus epidemic, you’re probably not thinking big enough.
Our lives have already been reshaped so dramatically in the past few weeks that it’s difficult to see beyond the next news cycle. We’re bracing for the recession we all know is here, wondering how long the lockdown will last, and praying that our loved ones will all make it through alive.
But, in the same way that Covid-19 is spreading at an exponential rate, we also need to think exponentially about its long-term impact on our culture and society. A year or two from now, the virus itself will likely have become a manageable part of our lives—effective treatments will have emerged; a vaccine will be available. But the impact of coronavirus on our global civilization will only just be unfolding. The massive disruptions we’re already seeing in our lives are just the first heralds of a historic transformation in political and societal norms.
If Covid-19 were spreading across a stable and resilient world, its impact could be abrupt but contained. Leaders would consult together; economies disrupted temporarily; people would make do for a while with changed circumstances—and then, after the shock, look forward to getting back to normal. That’s not, however, the world in which we live. Instead, this coronavirus is revealing the structural faults of a system that have been papered over for decades as they’ve been steadily worsening. Gaping economic inequalities, rampant ecological destruction, and pervasive political corruption are all results of unbalanced systems relying on each other to remain precariously poised. Now, as one system destabilizes, expect others to tumble down in tandem in a cascade known by researchers as “synchronous failure.”
The first signs of this structural destabilization are just beginning to show. Our globalized economy relies on just-in-time inventory for hyper-efficient production. As supply chains are disrupted through factory closures and border closings, shortages in household items, medications, and food will begin surfacing, leading to rounds of panic buying that will only exacerbate the situation. The world economy is entering a downturn so steep it could exceed the severity of the Great Depression. The international political system—already on the ropes with Trump’s “America First” xenophobia and the Brexit fiasco—is likely to unravel further, as the global influence of the United States tanks while Chinese power strengthens. Meanwhile, the Global South, where Covid-19 is just beginning to make itself felt, may face disruption on a scale far greater than the more affluent Global North.
The Overton Window
During normal times, out of all the possible ways to organize society, there is only a limited range of ideas considered acceptable for mainstream political discussion—known as the Overton window. Covid-19 has blown the Overton window wide open. In just a few weeks, we’ve seen political and economic ideas seriously discussed that had previously been dismissed as fanciful or utterly unacceptable: universal basic income, government intervention to house the homeless, and state surveillance on individual activity, to name just a few. But remember—this is just the beginning of a process that will expand exponentially in the ensuing months.
A crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic has a way of massively amplifying and accelerating changes that were already underway: shifts that might have taken decades can occur in weeks. Like a crucible, it has the potential to melt down the structures that currently exist, and reshape them, perhaps unrecognizably. What might the new shape of society look like? What will be center stage in the Overton window by the time it begins narrowing again?
The Example of World War II
We’re entering uncharted territory, but to get a feeling for the scale of transformation we need to consider, it helps to look back to the last time the world underwent an equivalent spasm of change: the Second World War.
The pre-war world was dominated by European colonial powers struggling to maintain their empires. Liberal democracy was on the wane, while fascism and communism were ascendant, battling each other for supremacy. The demise of the League of Nations seemed to have proven the impossibility of multinational global cooperation. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the United States maintained an isolationist policy, and in the early years of the war, many people believed it was just a matter of time before Hitler and the Axis powers invaded Britain and took complete control of Europe.
Within a few years, the world was barely recognizable. As the British Empire crumbled, geopolitics was dominated by the Cold War which divided the world into two political blocs under the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon. A social democratic Europe formed an economic union that no-one could previously have imagined possible. Meanwhile, the US and its allies established a system of globalized trade, with institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank setting terms for how the “developing world” could participate. The stage was set for the “Great Acceleration”: far and away the greatest and most rapid increase of human activity in history across a vast number of dimensions, including global population, trade, travel, production, and consumption.
If the changes we’re about to undergo are on a similar scale to these, how might a future historian summarize the “pre-coronavirus” world that is about to disappear?
The Neoliberal Era
There’s a good chance they will call this the Neoliberal Era. Until the 1970s, the post-war world was characterized in the West by an uneasy balance between government and private enterprise. However, following the “oil shock” and stagflation of that period—which at the time represented the world’s biggest post-war disruption—a new ideology of free-market neoliberalism took center stage in the Overton window (the phrase itself was named by a neoliberal proponent).
The value system of neoliberalism, which has since become entrenched in global mainstream discourse, holds that humans are individualistic, selfish, calculating materialists, and because of this, unrestrained free-market capitalism provides the best framework for every kind of human endeavor. Through their control of government, finance, business, and media, neoliberal adherents have succeeded in transforming the world into a globalized market-based system, loosening regulatory controls, weakening social safety nets, reducing taxes, and virtually demolishing the power of organized labor.
The triumph of neoliberalism has led to the greatest inequality in history, where (based on the most recent statistics) the world’s twenty-six richest people own as much wealth as half the entire world’s population. It has allowed the largest transnational corporations to establish a stranglehold over other forms of organization, with the result that, of the world’s hundred largest economies, sixty-nine are corporations. The relentless pursuit of profit and economic growth above all else has propelled human civilization onto a terrifying trajectory. The uncontrolled climate crisis is the most obvious danger: The world’s current policies have us on track for more than 3° increase by the end of this century, and climate scientists publish dire warnings that amplifying feedbacks could make things far worse than even these projections, and thus place at risk the very continuation of our civilization.
But even if the climate crisis were somehow brought under control, a continuation of untrammeled economic growth in future decades will bring us face-to-face with a slew of further existential threats. Currently, our civilization is running at 40% above its sustainable capacity. We’re rapidly depleting the earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, freshwater, even the topsoil we require to grow our crops. We’ve already transgressed three of the nine planetary boundaries that define humanity’s safe operating space, and yet global GDP is expected to more than double by mid-century, with potentially irreversible and devastating consequences.
In 2017 over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued an ominous warning to humanity that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late,” they wrote, “to shift course away from our failing trajectory.” They are echoed by the government-approved declaration of the UN-sponsored IPCC, that we need “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid disaster.
In the clamor for economic growth, however, these warnings have so far gone unheeded. Will the impact of coronavirus change anything?
Fortress Earth
There’s a serious risk that, rather than shifting course from our failing trajectory, the post-Covid-19 world will be one where the same forces currently driving our race to the precipice further entrench their power and floor the accelerator directly toward global catastrophe. China has relaxed its environmental laws to boost production as it tries to recover from its initial coronavirus outbreak, and the US (anachronistically named) Environmental Protection Agency took immediate advantage of the crisis to suspend enforcement of its laws, allowing companies to pollute as much as they want as long as they can show some relation to the pandemic.
On a greater scale, power-hungry leaders around the world are taking immediate advantage of the crisis to clamp down on individual liberties and move their countries swiftly toward authoritarianism. Hungary’s strongman leader, Viktor Orban, officially killed off democracy in his country on Monday, passing a bill that allows him to rule by decree, with five-year prison sentences for those he determines are spreading “false” information. Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu shut down his country’s courts in time to avoid his own trial for corruption. In the United States, the Department of Justice has already filed a request to allow the suspension of courtroom proceedings in emergencies, and there are many who fear that Trump will take advantage of the turmoil to install martial law and try to compromise November’s election.
Even in those countries that avoid an authoritarian takeover, the increase in high-tech surveillance taking place around the world is rapidly undermining previously sacrosanct privacy rights. Israel has passed an emergency decree to follow the lead of China, Taiwan, and South Korea in using smartphone location readings to trace contacts of individuals who tested positive for coronavirus. European mobile operators are sharing user data (so far anonymized) with government agencies. As Yuval Harari has pointed out, in the post-Covid world, these short-term emergency measures may “become a fixture of life.”
If these, and other emerging trends, continue unchecked, we could head rapidly to a grim scenario of what might be called “Fortress Earth,” with entrenched power blocs eliminating many of the freedoms and rights that have formed the bedrock of the post-war world. We could be seeing all-powerful states overseeing economies dominated even more thoroughly by the few corporate giants (think Amazon, Facebook) that can monetize the crisis for further shareholder gain.
The chasm between the haves and have-nots may become even more egregious, especially if treatments for the virus become available but are priced out of reach for some people. Countries in the Global South, already facing the prospect of disaster from climate breakdown, may face collapse if coronavirus rampages through their populations while a global depression starves them of funds to maintain even minimal infrastructures. Borders may become militarized zones, shutting off the free flow of passage. Mistrust and fear, which has already shown its ugly face in panicked evictions of doctors in India and record gun-buying in the US, could become endemic.
Society Transformed
But it doesn’t have to turn out that way. Back in the early days of World War II, things looked even darker, but underlying dynamics emerged that fundamentally altered the trajectory of history. Frequently, it was the very bleakness of the disasters that catalyzed positive forces to emerge in reaction and predominate. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—the day “which will live in infamy”—was the moment when the power balance of World War II shifted. The collective anguish in response to the global war’s devastation led to the founding of the United Nations. The grotesque atrocity of Hitler’s holocaust led to the international recognition of the crime of genocide, and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Could it be that the crucible of coronavirus will lead to a meltdown of neoliberal norms that ultimately reshapes the dominant structures of our global civilization? Could a mass collective reaction to the excesses of authoritarian overreach lead to a renaissance of humanitarian values? We’re already seeing signs of this. While the Overton window is allowing surveillance and authoritarian practices to enter from one side, it’s also opening up to new political realities and possibilities on the other side. Let’s take a look at some of these.
A fairer society. The specter of massive layoffs and unemployment has already led to levels of state intervention to protect citizens and businesses that were previously unthinkable. Denmark plans to pay 75% of the salaries of employees in private companies hit by the effects of the epidemic, to keep them and their businesses solvent. The UK has announced a similar plan to cover 80% of salaries. California is leasing hotels to shelter homeless people who would otherwise remain on the streets, and has authorized local governments to halt evictions for renters and homeowners. New York state is releasing low-risk prisoners from its jails. Spain is nationalizing its private hospitals. The Green New Deal, which was already endorsed by the leading Democratic presidential candidates, is now being discussed as the mainstay of a program of economic recovery. The idea of universal basic income for every American, boldly raised by long-shot Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, has now become a talking point even for Republican politicians.
Ecological stabilization. Coronavirus has already been more effective in slowing down climate breakdown and ecological collapse than all the world’s policy initiatives combined. In February, Chinese CO2 emissions were down by over 25%. One scientist calculated that twenty times as many Chinese lives have been saved by reduced air pollution than lost directly to coronavirus. Over the next year, we’re likely to see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions greater than even the most optimistic modelers’ forecasts, as a result of the decline in economic activity. As French philosopher Bruno Latour tweeted: “Next time, when ecologists are ridiculed because ‘the economy cannot be slowed down’, they should remember that it can grind to a halt in a matter of weeks worldwide when it is urgent enough.”
Of course, nobody would propose that economic activity should be disrupted in this catastrophic way in response to the climate crisis. However, the emergency response initiated so rapidly by governments across the world has shown what is truly possible when people face what they recognize as a crisis. As a result of climate activism, 1,500 municipalities worldwide, representing over 10% of the global population, have officially declared a climate emergency. The Covid-19 response can now be held out as an icon of what is really possible when people’s lives are at stake. In the case of the climate, the stakes are even greater—the future survival of our civilization. We now know the world can respond as needed, once political will is engaged and societies enter emergency mode
The rise of “glocalization.” One of the defining characteristics of the Neoliberal Era has been a corrosive globalization based on free market norms. Transnational corporations have dictated terms to countries in choosing where to locate their operations, leading nations to compete against each other to reduce worker protections in a “race to the bottom.” The use of cheap fossil fuels has caused wasteful misuse of resources as products are flown around the world to meet consumer demand stoked by manipulative advertising. This globalization of markets has been a major cause of the Neoliberal Era’s massive increase in consumption that threatens civilization’s future. Meanwhile, masses of people disaffected by rising inequity have been persuaded by right-wing populists to turn their frustration toward outgroups such as immigrants or ethnic minorities.
The effects of Covid-19 could lead to an inversion of these neoliberal norms. As supply lines break down, communities will look to local and regional producers for their daily needs. When a consumer appliance breaks, people will try to get it repaired rather than buy a new one. Workers, newly unemployed, may turn increasingly to local jobs in smaller companies that serve their community directly.
At the same time, people will increasingly get used to connecting with others through video meetings over the internet, where someone on the other side of the world feels as close as someone across town. This could be a defining characteristic of the new era. Even while production goes local, we may see a dramatic increase in the globalization of new ideas and ways of thinking—a phenomenon known as “glocalization.” Already, scientists are collaborating around the world in an unprecedented collective effort to find a vaccine; and a globally crowdsourced library is offering a “Coronavirus Tech Handbook” to collect and distribute the best ideas for responding to the pandemic.
Compassionate community. Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell, documents how, contrary to popular belief, disasters frequently bring out the best in people, as they reach out and help those in need around them. In the wake of Covid-19, the whole world is reeling from a disaster that affects us all. The compassionate response Solnit observed in disaster zones has now spread across the planet with a speed matching the virus itself. Mutual aid groups are forming in communities everywhere to help those in need. The website Karunavirus (Karuna is a Sanskrit word for compassion) documents a myriad of everyday acts of heroism, such as the thirty thousand Canadians who have started “caremongering,” and the mom-and-pop restaurants in Detroit forced to close and now cooking meals for the homeless.
In the face of disaster, many people are rediscovering that they are far stronger as a community than as isolated individuals. The phrase “social distancing” is helpfully being recast as “physical distancing” since Covid-19 is bringing people closer together in solidarity than ever before.
Revolution in Values
This rediscovery of the value of community has the potential to be the most important factor of all in shaping the trajectory of the next era. New ideas and political possibilities are critically important, but ultimately an era is defined by its underlying values, on which everything else is built.
The Neoliberal Era was constructed on a myth of the selfish individual as the foundational for values. As Margaret Thatcher famously declared, “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” This belief in the selfish individual has not just been destructive of community—it’s plain wrong. In fact, from an evolutionary perspective, a defining characteristic of humanity is our set of prosocial impulses—fairness, altruism, and compassion—that cause us to identify with something larger than our own individual needs. The compassionate responses that have arisen in the wake of the pandemic are heartwarming but not surprising—they are the expected, natural human response to others in need.
Once the crucible of coronavirus begins to cool, and a new sociopolitical order emerges, the larger emergency of climate breakdown and ecological collapse will still be looming over us. The Neoliberal Era has set civilization’s course directly toward a precipice. If we are truly to “shift course away from our failing trajectory,” the new era must be defined, at its deepest level, not merely by the political or economic choices being made, but by a revolution in values. It must be an era where the core human values of fairness, mutual aid, and compassion are paramount—extending beyond the local neighborhood to state and national government, to the global community of humans, and ultimately to the community of all life. If we can change the basis of our global civilization from one that is wealth-affirming to one that is life-affirming, then we have a chance to create a flourishing future for humanity and the living Earth.
To this extent, the Covid-19 disaster represents an opportunity for the human race—one in which each one of us has a meaningful part to play. We are all inside the crucible right now, and the choices we make over the weeks and months to come will, collectively, determine the shape and defining characteristics of the next era. However big we’re thinking about the future effects of this pandemic, we can think bigger. As has been said in other settings, but never more to the point: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
The Treasure of Our Living, Relational Commons
The Treasure of Our Living, Relational Commons
As I have learned about the social life of trees and the intimate bonds that indigenous peoples have with various lifeforms and rivers – and as I pore through recent ecophilosophy that explains aliveness to the western mind — I’ve concluded: We really ought to be talking more about animism and commoning.
Scientific rationalism and economistic thinking may be the dominant forces of our time, but they aren’t so good at creating social purpose and meaning. Which may help explain why evidence of a new animism keeps popping up as a way to re-enchant the world, often finding its voice through commoning. This should not be too surprising, suggests ecophilosopher Andreas Weber, because the biology of life points to an understanding of reality itself as a commons.
Commons are realms of life defined by organic wholeness and relationality. They stand in stark contrast to a modern world whose hallmark is separation — the separation of humans from “nature”; of individuals from each other; and a separation between our minds and our bodies.
To be sure, animism has a problematic history. Early anthropologists generally projected their own worldviews onto tribal peoples, denigrating them as backward. As staunch Cartesians and moderns, they saw body and mind as utterly separate. So anyone who ascribed a living presence to animals, mountains and natural forces could only be seen as “primitive” and “superstitious.”
But today’s animism (as seen through western eyes) is different. It sees the experience of life as a dynamic conversation among the creatures and natural systems of the Earth. It is about surrendering an anthrocentric vision and seeing the world as “full of persons, only some of whom are human,” in which “life is always lived in relationship with others,” as religious studies scholar Graham Harvey has put it. Animism is “concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons.” It resembles the “I-thou” relationship of respectful presence proposed by theologian Martin Buber.
For me, two recent readings have brought animism into sharper focus. The first is a piece in The Guardian by British nature writer Robert Macfarlane (November 2, 2019) that points to “new animism” on the rise. He starts by mentioning a number of “rights of nature” laws that have been enacted around the world. Ecuador and Bolivia are the most famous cases, but did you realize that the City of Toledo, Ohio – on the banks of Lake Erie – approved a referendum in 2019 that gives “legal personhood” to that troubled lake? Lake Erie now joins the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India and the Whanganui River in New Zealand in enjoying legal standing in their respective nation-states.
Macfarlane explains the significance of the Lake Erie Ecosystem Bill of Rights:
Embedded in the bill is a bold ontological claim – that Lake Erie is a living being, not a bundle of ecosystem services. The bill is, really, a work of what might be called “new animism” (the word comes from the Latin anima, meaning spirit, breath, life). By reassigning both liveliness and vulnerability to the lake, it displaces Erie from its instrumentalised roles as sump and source. As such, the bill forms part of a broader set of comparable recent legal moves in jurisdictions around the world – all seeking to recognise interdependence and animacy in the living world, and often advanced by indigenous groups – which have together come to be known as the “natural rights” or “rights of nature” movement.
Macfarlane goes on to say that a “’radical re-storying’ is presently under way across culture, theory, politics and literature, as well as law” that can be seen in “the creative protests of Extinction Rebellion; in the “new animist” scholarship of Isabelle Stengers, David Abram and Eduardo Kohn” and the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer. I would add the ecophilosophy of Andreas Weber (“Biology of Wonder” “Matter and Desire”) and Stephan Harding (“Animate Earth”).
All these efforts, says Macfarlane, “seek to recognise something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors,” in the words of Amitav Ghosh.
I have also been quite taken by Eduardo Kohn’s 2013 book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Kohn boldly asks the modern mind to show humility in how it thinks about and represents “nature.” It asks that we try to see the more-than-human world as a vast living system of “biosemiotics” – embodied, living organisms that are constantly creating meaning as they interact with each other.
Kohn warns that we moderns are “colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality…. Without realizing it we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own, and then, to compound this, we narcissistically ask them [nonhumans] to provide us with corrective reflections of ourselves.”
So in our modern world of separation, we assume that “nature” is all about individuals striving to survive a dog-eat-dog market competition, ignoring the deep symbiosis and cooperation that is a major part of all biological life. We also assume that the natural world is inert, unfeeling, and without meaning – a mute backdrop for the drama of humankind.
Kohn spent four years doing ethnographic fieldwork among the Runa of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador, an experience that forced him to rethink the meaning of “real.” He brilliantly argues that our planet is alive, literally, and therefore we humans, as biological beings, are deeply implicated in “a complex web of relations that [he calls] an ‘ecology of selves.’”
Whether an organism presents as a threat to others, a sometime-cooperator, or a distant support through the landscape, living creatures must always invent a “self.” The whole process of generating and sustaining living selves creates “meaning” embodied in the shape, behavior, and expression of an organism. Or as Kohn puts it, “All life is semiotic and all semiosis is alive.” Life and meaning cannot exist without each other.
Hence the explanation for the book’s title. Kohn argues that forests think as its constituent living organisms interpenetrate each other in highly complicated ways, giving rise to an ecosystem of selves, whether plants or animals or microorganisms.
That’s what is so difficult for we moderns to understand — the aliveness and relationality that pervades our planet! It’s not just humans who are alive and having thoughts. All sorts of living organisms are creating selves and meaning, independent of human observation and activity. “The rain forest, writes Kohn, is “an emergent and expanding multilayered, cacophonous web of mutually constitutive, living, and growing thoughts.”
The question is, Can we tune into that frequency, the “vast ecology of selves” that are inscrutable to modern epistemologies and ways of knowing? Can we moderns allow ourselves to enter into the logic of how forests think? Can we learn to see the relations between plants and soil, for example, or between human and jaguar, as forms of living representation and meaning, even if they lie beyond linguistics?
We are so accustomed to seeing ourselves as separate and apart from “nature” – as the apex predator that can reshape “nature” however we wish – that we have trouble situating ourselves within the flows and constraints of a living planet. We presume to be masters of “nature” – a presumption ratified by language itself. Western cultures have a strong preference for using generic, abstract nouns whereas indigenous cultures tend to use precise verbs that name relationships and interactions with living systems. Indigenous languages reflect the idea that “there exist other kinds of thinking selves beyond the human.”
Free, Fair and Alive: Relationality as the core of commoning
I resonate to the new animism because, like the commons, it is about honoring relationality as a core reality of life. That’s a theme that Silke Helfrich and I develop in our new book Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishers). We offer a foundational reconceptualization of the commons as a living social system, moving away from the standard narrative of commons as “unowned” economic resources.
From cohousing and agroecology to fisheries and land trusts and open-source everything, people around the world are increasingly turning to “commoning.” They see it as a way to emancipate themselves from a predatory market/state system. They see commons as a way to enter into enduring relationships with each other, and to escape the often-predatory and destructive character of what we call the market/state system. Markets and nation-states are not so much adversaries as joint partners in a system based on ceaseless economic growth and technological innovation, an inability to set limits on the exploitation of natural systems, and the private appropriation of our shared wealth and planet.
We see the commons as a way to help re-think the very meaning of “the economy” and to validate the importance of ecological stewardship, care work, and social cooperation. But since so much discussion about the commons relies on the very discourse of modern economics, we came to see that the commons needs to be reinterpreted. The commons needs to be understood as relational and alive. We try to explain this reality through the Triad of Commoning, which describes the relationships that lie at the heart of social life, peer governance, and provisioning in a commons.
Our book is a rare inquiry into commoning – the verb, the social practices, the moral relationships – which is quite different from the commons — the noun, seen as resources and their exchange value. The further that my coauthor Silke and I got into studying and rethinking the commons, the more we realized that prevailing categories of thought are simply too reductionist to capture what is really going on within actual commons.
Standard economics, property law, and policy assume the reality of rational, autonomous individuals, as reflected in the idea of homo economicus, the philosophy of modern liberalism. These disciplines presume a separation of humanity and “nature.” But we regard these assumptions as fundamentally misleading. They fail to understand humanity in a biological sense. We humans are all inscribed within larger collectives – ecological, cultural, political – that make us who we are. It’s time that we began to acknowledge that life is far more relational than transactional.
Commoning is all about the peer construction of relationships, including with the large ecosystems in which we live. Fortunately, the new “rights of nature” laws, scholarly literature on animism, and the proliferation of countless commons are fueling the great OntoShift that is needed. Aliveness and the relationality that makes it possible are starting to get their due recognition.
Fragile Gold
Fragile Gold
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay. – Robert Frost
There are many forms of currency—and the critical ones needed now to build a regenerative planetary era are the currencies of attention and response to the ephemeral and fragile nature of complex living systems, so that we might use our material resources to understand, protect, and restore them. Biodiversity is a required condition for survival, and so among the greatest forms of wealth. This is an unprecedented moment in the great cosmic drama, when a single species has so interfered with the structure and functioning of Earth, Gaia, Eden, that the glorious and lyrical era of the Cenozoic—the last 65 million years of emergent creativity—has all but ceased its stunning fluorescence.
In our modern, industrial, materialist society, a poetry of ideas (and music!) alone may have the power to evoke in human consciousness the psychic energy needed to ignite the new axial age; to, as Thomas Berry says, “reinvent the human at the species level”; to become a mutually enhancing presence within the community of life systems. Another way of identifying or naming the power sufficient to trigger rapid restructuring of both the immense physical and psychic human interrelationship, is the experiential cosmology of what David Bohm called, the “undivided wholeness” of being. It is a state of full bodily engagement and spiritual/emotional connection to the natural world, more frequently experienced in primordial, indigenous cultures. To experience such abundance only requires surrendering to the great gift economy of Earth, where no living being takes more than it needs without being rebalanced into the stupendous web of life.
With the emergent gifts of our creativity and imagination, we are born with a capacity to freely roam among the galaxies, through eons of time, and into the unfathomable eyes and hearts of loved ones. Meadows of flowers, seashores, streams, and countless other forms of common wealth, for tens of millions of years, have been abundantly available for all living beings.
Frost’s exquisite poem, with a gentle yet compact ferocity, expresses the knife edge upon which we balance between death and life—between the dullness of “day” and the ecstatic mystery of “dawn”—between disintegration and becoming. In an Old Cosmology, “Eden sank to grief” when we became like God by taking a forbidden fruit—the knowledge of good and evil. But in a New Cosmology of an astonishingly creative, evolving Universe, we now can understand that the real forbidden fruit is not knowing the difference!
All wealth is derivative of Earth—most of all, values and wisdom. They are among the most recent emergent properties of our Universe’s 13.8 billion years of inexpressibly glorious creativity, complexification of matter and energy, and deepening of consciousness.
And material wealth—most of all, money—is only an idea of value mainly owing to the “Earth deficit”: the uncompensated or unreciprocated extraction of resources too often used exclusively or ultimately to obtain economic, social, or political dominance.
Frost’s poem begins, “Nature’s first green is gold”—not the shining element overvalued as money—but the far greater value toward which the Universe and Life continually move—BEAUTY! That “leaf subsides to leaf” is the grief and loss that is the ultimate cost of cosmogenesis, the gift of dying supernovas—stardust that becomes a planet that births oceans that birth living cells that become love, poetry, and music. Fragile Gold is a simple tribute to the power of beauty to transform historical trauma and to evoke the cultural currency and urgency needed to turn an industrial, acquisitive, exploitative economy into a new planetary era of radical sharing.
The music, like the poem, is relatively uncomplicated, yet deceptively capable of evoking a continual deepening of perception, understanding, and insight. It isn’t necessary to know what Frost meant, or how the music arose as it did; only to experience the flow of meaning and sound, allowing yourself—as in the moment of slipping into a cool stream on a hot day—to get wet, to be fulfilled and know you are alive.
Our gifts are most surely needed, first in the crucible of our own desire and passion, where they gain power and attraction that draws others; and then—without looking back—given freely, both in the moment, and in careful, just, sustained generosity, to the world.
The world is where we are, and despite ten thousand years of tolerating a domination system of mutual exploitation and self-interest, we have somehow managed, in some measure, to learn to love. And if love is extravagant, selfless concern and action, it has emerged within a Universe of staggering creativity, complexity, and beauty—but also of danger and loss. Our responsibility is to use our great gift of intelligent compassion to help our species recognize the emptiness of affluence, the injustice of poverty, and the incomparable capacity of creativity and beauty to be the basis for a new economy in a new planetary era.
greenplanet-blueplanet | Sacred Economy and Caring
greenplanet-blueplanet | Sacred Economy and Caring
Rising Generation | Julian Guderley
I’m on a quest to identify and interview the top 500 key players in the Regenerative Movement. My podcast, GreenPlanet BluePlanet, amplifies the voices of leaders and visionary creators on a wide range of topics, including sustainability, regenerative economics, consciousness, spirituality, and symbiotic relationships.
Now more than 160 episodes in, I see that my mandate is to support the successful accomplishments of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to inspire others to create a holistic vision for our planetary future.
Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein
Julian | You have written a book called Sacred Economics. What does a sacred economics look like? Because everybody talks about blockchain, everybody talks about cryptocurrencies. But when are we actually going to start using currencies to exchange an experience, or a time spent on a piece of land, or helping build a community center, or something like that?
Charles | The book, Sacred Economics, is not about abolishing money. It’s about how does money have to change to be more aligned with the principles of gift, or more aligned with a world of ecological and social healing. So, it’s about the evolution of money, not the abolition of money. And one of the key features that it needs to have is de-growth, as I call it.
The monetized realm, the realm of exchanges, the realm of transactions, the quantified realm has grown beyond what is ideal for human happiness. We pay for a lot of things that we should not be paying for, that should be part of a gift economy, that should be provided in community. It’s not that everything should be provided in a local community. Like maybe microchips—probably they are going to be produced by strangers. But as far as cooking, childcare, maybe most entertainment—people can sing together, people can play together, people can heal each other—there are so many things that can be returned to the people that have been professionalized and outsourced that would bring life into a more local, more communal, more intimate, more relational phase.
And that requires de-growth. Because every time you reclaim something into the realm of gift, community, and relationship, you’re demonetizing it. You’re saying this is no longer a good and service that a company can provide and add to GDP by doing so. Like, “We’re going to do this ourselves now.”
Celine Cousteau on Seventh Generation
Celine | Kids are extraordinary. They ask really good questions. And if we could just stop what we’re doing for a second and put our phone down and actually think about what they’re asking and answer them honestly… maybe you don’t know and you say, “you know what, let’s go talk to somebody. Let’s go look it up. Let’s go listen to somebody speak about the unconscious, or death, or the soul.” Well, then all of a sudden we have a generation of kids who are not undermined, who are not underestimated, who are deeply connected, who, hopefully, will become good human beings, which I think is a pretty good service to the planet.
Julian | I have a followup question. It goes a little broader and this is the ethos that’s really alive in me. I believe there is an expansion into a seven generational thinking required, and what I mean with that is not going back to the indigenous, but just to embrace the knowledge and the wisdom that’s on the planet. And so that preface, I would love to just ask you like, what is your Earth vision? What is your dream, your hope, your desire for Pachamama?
Celine | You mentioned seventh generations. If you look ahead that far, you start to realize that everything we do matters. I was just having lunch with a friend today, and she said, “I just don’t know that people care enough.” That’s my fear. Apathy is my fear. So I think if I have one hope, it would be that people start to care more and not worry about how much that’s going to impact them or if it’s going to hurt or if it’s going to be hard, but to not turn their back on caring.
…a conversation with Julian
Kosmos | What key insights have bubbled up for you through the process of engaging in 160 conversations so far?
Julian | I have been on this journey of interviewing about three people each week for two years. I have asked people about trust, about their dream for the earth, about purpose and happiness, as well as their views on how to transform education. One recurring theme or insight is that your actions matter. What we do matters—how we show up in the world, how we connect with others in relationships, in our communities, and across the planet as a whole.
When guests answer the question about purpose, I recognize purpose is many things to many people. One constant in regards to purpose could be explained as the connection between spiritual purpose, or planetary purpose, that unites with entrepreneurship or innovation on a business, technology, or social level. When we unite this “bigger than me” experience and feeling with a form of philanthropreneurial thriving, we are set for magic.
The 2020s could serve as a golden decade in which we build and facilitate trust through peer-to-peer learning and exchanges. The most common answer to the question of “What is required for you to trust?” is along the lines of finding internal awareness, self-love, and trust in oneself. From that place we can extend and connect, create with the world around us in deeper layers of peace and trust. As Socrates said: “Know thyself”!
Kosmos | What is true wealth, in your view?
Julian | True wealth is health, well-being, access to abundance, thriving ecosystems. In other words, true wealth is expressed and lived in community, families, and relationships of friendship. Thriving ecosystems start with regenerating soil health and waterways. Also as true wealth, I believe we could see people-power being lived, embodied, and guiding us into higher states of harmony. When we look at people-power and wealth, it can easily be connected with technology and how we use peer-to-peer technology to decentralize old paradigm power structures to transfer wealth and access to abundance to every person on the planet.
Kosmos | How can people consciously prepare for the profound changes that lie ahead?
Julian | The best preparation in my eyes, for any moment in time, is to deepen the inside experience.
When life connects from the INSIDE out—rather than from the external circumstances in—our ability to respond and interact with life seems to be augmented. So, as we individually and collectively deepen our internal space, we can reflect, build, co-create, and facilitate higher harmonies. In other words, being real, and choosing a direction of optimism.
That process of getting to know myself is a practice of discipline, devotion, and self-love. My personal access tools for this have been breath, meditation, kriya yoga, qi gong, and song.
And let me say: find your tribe, find your community and participate. When we are surrounded by community members that see us and hold us in our power and strength, and have our back in our blind spots and weakness, we can truly embody the human superpower of collaboration.
Last but not least, a great pathway forward to consciously prepare for profound changes in our times can be planetary innovation labs in various locations around the world. These are places where those who do the inside world meet their communities and peers of genius to create, innovate, and reinvent the way we live life on Planet Earth.
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Love Letters from Seaweed
Love Letters from Seaweed
Love Letters from Seaweed was created during the summer months I spent exploring mid-Coast Maine. Each day just before sunrise, I biked to Birch Point Beach to witness the shore’s changing topography and the traces of ocean life spilled by the tide. Intrigued, I photographed spontaneous configurations of seaweed and natural artifacts in unworldly colors, brought together by spume and sand.
Sugar kelp, bladderwrack, Irish moss, and sea lettuce, among other marine algae, covered the shore in calligraphic gestures and rune-like symbols. The next high tide would erase these remarkable assemblages in 12 hours and others would take their place—always a reminder that time and action are evolutionary agents moving everything toward something else.
Here I was, literally, on the front lines of climate change – barefoot on the land that will eventually be swallowed by melting glaciers. This awareness lends an urgency and relevance to my photographic work because ocean warming and acidification are forcing some species of seaweed into decline and affecting ocean biodiversity significantly. I am curious about the algae in our rapidly changing environment and I wish to become their ally (as they are a potential resource for mitigating some of climate change’s deleterious effects).
Love Letters from Seaweed reflects, in part, my studies of Canang Sari (formal flower offerings created each morning by Balinese Hindus) and Picasso’s constellation drawings. The Balinese offerings are transitory and organic, like the assemblages I’ve photographed. And both Picasso’s line drawings and my images walk the tightrope between abstraction and figuration. They spring from the same source and impulse—a collaboration of nature and human that is instinctual and intelligent.
The Seaweed series is an expression of much that I value: quietude, synchronicity, unsung beauty, and the natural environment. The images have the potential to inspire viewers to consider what is underfoot and generally unseen, yet of great aesthetic and ecological importance.
Wrestling with Wealth and Class
Wrestling with Wealth and Class
It was one of those big fundraising dinners. Honoring a major donor, charging who-knows how much a plate to bring in more money and put the event squarely on the radar of the local high society. This time it was my grandparents who were the major donors, and I was sitting at a big circular table with my cousins who had gathered to celebrate and support our beloved grandparents. It was one of those tables with the white cloth, artfully folded napkins, and more sizes of forks than I really knew what to do with. I felt an uncomfortable, but not unfamiliar, combination of gratitude, guilt, pride, and shame.
My grandparents are incredible. Perfectly imperfect products of their time motivated by love of family and search for security and belonging amongst a society that was completely alien to their own immigrant parents. Their rise to wealth had something to do with my grandma working two jobs to help my grandfather through med school; something to do with my grandfather becoming a cardiologist in South Florida as Medicare made the profession more profitable; something to do with my grandparents betting it all to buy some real estate just before a boom; something to do with my grandmother managing that real estate epically; and something to do with more real estate and a skillful navigation of stock and bond markets. And all this happened during a time when folks didn’t want them living on their block because they were Jewish.
The story also has do with the fact that passing as white afforded them some opportunities. It has to do with the growth of the American economy, generally, which in turn has to do with rules about who was able to participate where and when; the foundations laid by slavery; the attacks on organized labor; the development of convoluted financial markets; the wars and policies created to maintain the value of the American dollar; and the relentless extraction of life force from people and planet that weave themselves into the story of the American dream and the growth of the American economy that created the possibility for my grandparents’ investments to grow.
Everything’s connected.
I love my grandparents. I’m grateful for them. I’m impressed and amazed by them. They have given me material security inside an economy that preys on insecurity. This security has created respite from the constant water-treading that characterizes most lives inside capitalism, and that respite has provided the space for me to focus on my integrity, my love, and my gifts.
That’s where this familiar swirl of gratitude, guilt, pride, shame, and responsibility comes from. But as I sat at that table with my cousins, the whole thing hit another gear.
The crowd watched a video celebrating my grandparents. It focused mostly on the collection of Latin American art that they had recently pledged to a museum. We heard them share about their journey into collecting, their resonance with artists, and their love for each other as the video took us around a home populated by pieces from artists like Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Wilfredo Lam.
When I looked away from the screen, I saw the catering team standing at the edges of the massive room, watching along with us; they were about 95 percent Latinx.
One of Diego Rivera’s paintings came up on the screen. Rivera was a communist whose work critiqued capitalism and the ruling class. He said that “the role of the artist is that of a foot soldier of the revolution.” A revolution to change the exact social-political-economic reality that we were all sitting in at that very moment.
The painful irony of the moment didn’t seem to escape much of the catering team. I saw sadness, horror, and confusion. I saw it trapped behind the reality that there was nowhere for it to be expressed, and that when the video ended, these folks would be clearing the plates.
I felt as resentful of capitalism as Rivera did. I longed to connect with the catering team because it seemed like they were seeing the same reality as me, but here I was, with five different silver forks in front of me.
I walked out of the room and got a drink. A few I think.
In some ways I’m always sitting at that table. Torn between worlds. Longing to belong. Always struggling to navigate all the things I inherited: the money, the karma, the love, the possibility, the heart, the values, the society, my place in it, all of it.
A few months ago I turned 30, which meant I received access to a trust that had been established in my name. It’s been passively invested in a fund indexed to the American economy, which includes companies like Amazon, Exxon, and Lockheed Martin. Up until recently, I could avoid really looking at all this. It was out of my power to change. But now it isn’t.
When Trump was elected, I was watching the results with my housemates and my partner at the time. All of our hearts dropped. Fear. Despair. Whisperings of internment camps. Within months, the S&P 500 went up, and my grandparents congratulated me on the benefits of my “Trump dividend.”
Part of me wants to give it all away. The other part is afraid. I know that this economic system we live in doesn’t take care of those without money, so I am afraid to release my position. But the more folks are afraid to release our positions, the more the system continues to exploit and destroy.
Right now, I’m just trying to lean in deeper, and more authentically. I’m using some of the money to sustain me as I work in solidarity so I can focus on the impact of my actions, as opposed to whether I will be able to make money from them in the short term. Trying to be generous with the loved ones close to me, while also desegregating who’s close to me. I’m learning more about exactly what options are out there for me to move the money into economies that are aligned with my values. And I’m feeling into how I can leverage the fact I have access to spaces of money and privilege to help reorganize wealth far beyond the modest sum over which I have direct agency.
I’m scared to share all this. I’m afraid of how it will change how you see me and relate to me—especially the folks that I’ve been organizing in solidarity with for years. Will you see me as a whiny trust fund baby? Will you judge me for how I’m approaching my situation? Will you stop seeing the value of my heart, mind, and contributions, and only see me as someone who could give money? Will you avoid what comes up inside you when you hear this story and avoid me? Will you be afraid of giving me feedback and slowly disconnect? Will you give harsh feedback that doesn’t hold me in the dignity of my messy process of learning to be human? Will folks who might otherwise want to work with me not want to engage or trust me because of my class-position?
I know the stories I’ve told myself about people with money. The judgments I’ve placed on them in order to cope with my own unresolved feelings. I assume people will project some of those things on me; and some of the criticisms will be right. But I’m choosing to stop hiding this part of myself. Praying that I will be received for the love and integrity I am trying to bring to the path I’ve been given.
The reason I’m writing this is pretty simple: I know I am not alone.
I know there is a growing movement of folks with access to wealth that are feeling these things and asking these questions. There is a growing movement from folks who don’t have the same access to money asking those of us that do to get real and show up for the urgencies of our times. And one of the reasons folks with wealth are not responding to the full extent of our power and love is that we are trapped in old patterns that we are reluctant to speak openly about.
We fear not having enough. We fear rejection and exclusion. We fear being manipulated. We feel guilt and shame. The simple fact we have wealth shaped the contours of our experience, which in turn shapes to whom and how we connect, as well as what we believe. And we’ve got all kinds of feelings about that, too.
The deepest irony is that many of us fear that if we start talking about all this openly, we will be rejected and judged by the folks of other classes that we long to connect with, and this fear causes us to collapse, hide, and participate in the very behaviors that we are being called upon to transcend.
It’s a rat’s nest of potential energy. Hiding from it is letting it fester and become toxic to our bodies and our global community. These patterns of thought, feeling, and relating have been inculcated in us for generations, reinforced by our society, preying on our fears and traumas, and they will not unwind themselves unless we welcome them into the light and invite them to transform. And we can’t wait until if feels all safe and warm and fuzzy. Yes, we need to tend to ourselves and our vulnerabilities, but we also need to show up. Now. And if there isn’t a place where we feel safe exploring and unwinding this stuff, then we need to make one.
We may feel fear. But without fear there is no such thing as courage.
We may not know. But without the unknown, nothing new can emerge.
In the Hands of Alchemy
In the Hands of Alchemy
In 1979, I destroyed all the art I had created, gave everything I owned away, and began a new life. I sensed an inner and outer world in perfect order. I sensed that I could become a willing participant in that order, and that it allowed for my individual expression and unique contribution. I know now that my participation was conditional on how well I learned to listen and to see the inherent patterns within the natural order I sensed. The return of a physical creative expression came later, after I learned what was required by the inner life. The new life that I gave myself to required unconditional trust and noninterference. I asked for nothing from any human being. I needed to know if there was a God and I risked my life to find that out. I know now that we risk far more when we attempt to create a life devoid of a personal relationship with our God.
I ate when I had food and I fasted when I did not. I accepted whatever came into my life. It was that simple. I was familiar with fasting; I had done it once a week since I was twenty years old. Now, eating became a miracle. At first, I had something of a small following as an artist, and people were still interested in what I did, so they gave to me. Soon it became apparent that I was not going back into art, and many of these people faded from my life. I had a close circle of friends of the spirit who understood what I had given myself to, to some extent. They had their doubts, and so did I. My life was just too much for our modern western mind to consider. Eventually I saw the ways in which the miracle carried my life. I could never have continued this strange and lonely journey if I had not seen that. My joy and my ability to help others were gifts of that miracle and were my only tools for disarming the fears that were inevitably projected onto me. Fielding the fears of others was probably the most difficult task of the new life. I had to confront the fears within myself first. I had to give to others unconditionally and expect nothing in return. This is a society where everything is not enough.
On the surface, I looked like what most of us put all of our energies into avoiding. I became nothing. I had chosen to make an intuitive and conscious leap into the void so I did not have the luxury of asking for sympathy when the journey became frightening or impossible. Even the least intelligent among us would have suggested that I get a job and feed myself. I knew that I did not have that choice. I knew that once I jumped into the vast and empty ocean I saw before me, there was no measure in between that could save me. I would swim or drown. In water up to my neck, no choices and no turning back would be possible. I knew this was real.
“One of the magnificent things about Jerry is his profound and courageous innocence. He has created a friendship with a part of himself which is in love with the world, and his art displays that. Jerry is one of the few people I know who, in a very quiet way, has actually claimed his happiness in existence.” – David Whyte, author, The Heart Aroused and Crossing the Unknown Sea:
In the cyclical rhythm of life, we eventually come up against a profound moment in which we must decide how much faith and courage we are willing to give ourselves to. Most often, in deciding this, we also establish how much courage we will live with for the rest of our lives. This crucial point usually comes to us at around the age of 30. The opportunities at that time are like no other.
Only the rare human being can leap into a deeper faith beyond that opportune stage in their life. Usually, if we have not done it under the best of circumstances, when the physical and spiritual winds are at our back, then we rarely find courage or reason enough to do it later in life. However, grace has no limits, and this is not written in stone. Only we know what we do with that moment once it arrives in our life, or where we may have set it to rest. Have we chosen the safe life, its foundation rooted in fear? Or have we chosen the Mystery, in which all may be lost or gained? We have only our inner knowing, and as an external indicator, the miracle, which informs us of the power of our choice. No one can judge, yet everyone intuits our choice by the ways in which it resembles their own.
In the Hands of Alchemy | Part 1 of 3
In the Hands of Alchemy: Art & Life of Jerry Wennstrom is directed by Phil Lucas (“Native Americans”) and Mark Sadan (Sesame Street). It includes Depung-Loseling Tibetan Monks blessing a tower that Jerry built. www.handsofalchemy.com
“In the Hands of Alchemy is a delightful film, an alchemical mixture in itself of inspiration, spirituality, art and the story of a remarkable human being.” – David Spangler
Heron Interactive Art Piece
Blaxit
Blaxit
he wants us all
gone from Amerikkka
purge all 52
Main Streets there’s a
main street in every
state your name for the record and
your color state your
color me paranoid color me
afraid of civil war
I would gladly leave this country
voluntarily than stay and be forced to leave this earth
if all the colored people
black and brown go
back where we came from it will
be a pretty bleak bland
picture BLAXIT
all spices are coming with us along with
sweet potatoes / peanuts / mac’n cheese / ribs
all greens are coming also watermelon / peaches / mangos,
all berries / coconut/ pineapple/ avos
pears can stay coffee will come and all manner of liquor and whiskey
we harvest chocolate so it’s coming
gone by sundown
goners we will be if we stay
I don’t have a country but no
matter I will find something
you-all will have
no music it’s
coming with us jazz
and rap and soul and be-bop and
blues always blues
you all can have country
western and classical
we’re taking Beyonce, Toni Morrison,
Oprah, Rihanna you
can have Kanye
Wakanda is us
all black inventions will come like
ice cream / peanut butter
potato chips / guitars
traffic lights / elevators
refrigerators / lawn mowers
baby buggys
we’ll take all living poets of color from
the beat period on
Pete Seeger was wrong: this land IS your land
enriched by OUR blood /sweat / tears
Two Poems by Joy McDowell
Two Poems by Joy McDowell
Those Shoes
Three hours inside
the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum.
….Those shoes. The faces and stories.
A long walk across the mall
….underlines my fortunate life.
Grief nibbles at my eyes.
Then a weekend in Miami.
….A niece appears in the opera,
….The Passenger, a moving work
about Auschwitz and the fear
of a former guard who believes
she has seen one of her inmates
on board a ship bound for Brazil.
….Arias spill the misery and torture
….of that brutal slaughter place.
On the stage, the revolving set
alternates between white ship scenes
….and a color worse than somber
for the filthy camp barracks.
….Bonds develop among inmates.
….Callous indifference directs guards.
Then I am back poolside
at my resort eating fruit and
….watching healthy bodies swim.
The air is balmy, the sounds happy,
only inside my head does it remain
….dark and dim.
From an orchestra of organized
horror the sweet sting of a violin
….needles my mind.
In the Dark
Homeless kids pass midnight
on worn couches, do homework
in out-of-gas cars, search a kitchen
for food and don’t have a shower.
Homeless kids don’t take
vacations. A night at the Mission
doesn’t count. They wait in bushes
while their mother begs.
These kids keep changing schools.
Babies wear saturated diapers.
Good kids lie to cover
for drugged-out dads.
Their world doesn’t rely on wrist watches
or calendars and they can only imagine
a bad day getting better, so they
push anger into mouse corners.
Homeless kids have at least one friend
who is a police officer. Homeless kids
help damaged parents. They sleep light
and recognize bad noises.