“This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century” – E.O. Wilson

Anything can happen. Including a cultural break deep and far-reaching enough to permit the earth’s humans to live in harmony with each other and the planet in just a few decades. Such living requires the break, and the right break(s) may be enough to bring on the living. Easy, in the sense that culture is essentially a collective way of thinking and understanding, subject to rapid change on occasion. But this takes deliberate effort.

We are currently living in a Dark Age. This one is no darker in appearance than the dark ages of old, which only dimmed in hindsight. Having reached the global carrying capacity for human life on planet earth, we just might burn out from here. Dark to gone. The opposite transition, from dark to paradise may not be substantially less painful in the short term than complete burnout. Who knows?

Anything can happen. Predicting burnout seems like a solid bet, examining the data and extrapolating. It is presumptuous, though, and betting on burnout is also a gratuitous waste. So is identifying and counting all the obstacles to creating a healthy and sustainable future for the world. We don’t know, especially when we predict through the lens of our current cultural awareness. We’re deep in our own fog.

It’s like dangling from a vine off a 200-foot cliff and pausing to weigh your chances of pulling yourself up to the cliff and also imagining what nasties might await you up there instead of giving your all to hoist yourself up. Paradise, or something at the very least much, much better than what we have now, awaits our struggling world as a possibility. Our chances improve when we stop predicting and betting, shrinking into pessimism and, most of all, when we stop putting our greatest effort into keeping our McNikeWalmart-world-headed-for-burnout chugging along, into the polluted sunset.

This world, our dark age world, has been often and appropriately compared to the sinking but otherwise unsinkable ocean liner Titanic. Our culture is fascinated by this tragedy. Graft the notorious slave ship, Amistad, to the bottom of the ocean liner and we get an even finer sea-going metaphor: ‘Titanistad’. An unsurpassable mode of living that nevertheless requires the exploitation of most of the passengers to keep the high life humming on the upper decks. Life is miserable way down below. Harsh travelling conditions coupled with humiliation. But as the boat scrapes the iceberg, the behemoth begins to rock a bit, compromising life on all levels.

If those for whom the system is intended most to serve were ever rewarded with genuine human happiness, those rewards appear to be slipping away. Nausea on the upper decks, certainly in the middle ones. The growing discontent among those for whom the system should be working may be the hinge of cultural collapse and breakthrough. Our culture is becoming unhinged, quickly now, nowhere more obviously than in the eyes, hearts and minds of young people losing faith. Most (not all) Sixties student radicals and civil rights activists assumed a ‘loyal opposition’ posture in order to make the systems and structures of their world more democratic, fair and responsive to the common good generally. Though the WTO, Social Forum and Occupy resistance initiatives reflect a degree of the same flavor of loyalty, many youth activists in these movements clearly donot share this faith, and today’s comparatively less political youth just don’t give a shit about the system, clearly not eager to ingest and absorb and pledge allegiance to the world their parents are feebly trying to pass on. Theadults don’t have confidence in the program, though the doubting may be sealed into the subconscious of many.  To eke out a living, young people will go through the motions, but with little faith. This is a culture leaning on the cemetery gate.

As the North Atlantic ocean began to fill the hulls of the ocean liner, there must have been an engineer or other crew member who became convinced that the emergency response must hop from water management to abandoning ship. Just one of the crew, while every other human on board assumed they were staying put and coping with the leak. Then the hectic conversation. A good leader is someone who can communicate bad news without overwhelming. It was likely a painful conversation. The message “get everyone in lifeboats” needed to find traction and go viral.

This is how cultural change occurs. Much like the growth pattern of our world’s population, resource depletion and money supply, cultural innovation can spread at an exponential pace – slow at first, it seems, then all of a sudden, apparently. The vast, vast majority of people mimic what people around them are doing. This tendency is usually bemoaned; “People are sheep.” Further, this conformity is often cited as an obstacle to change. “They’ll never budge from their comfort zones.”

Some Titanic passengers never did budge and went down with the ship…