Articles
by Carolyn Baker and Friends from Around the Net
It’s Time To Start Calling Evangelicals What They Are: American Taliban, By J.C. Weatherby
In doing these things, evangelicals are advocating a religious extremism that is no different from muslim extremism, which projects religious authority over all people in their domain, which limits the rights of women, controls and limits education, and enforces strict adherence to a moral code, which naturally rejects and punishes all forms of “decadence,” including; “deviant sexuality,” science, reason, and any questioning of authority. Christian fundamentalists, if given the power, will do the same things.
Extinction Illness: Grave Affliction And Possibility, By Deena Metzger
The animals know this and now all humans know this as well. Sensing the imminent death of all species, the cellular understanding of our common fate is making us ill. Our nervous and physical systems cannot bear this terrible knowledge. The growing understanding of the reality of the human caused 6th Extinction is resulting in Extinction Illness.
(Why) The World is So Messed Up: We’re Inventing New Forms of Trauma, By Umair Haque
The 21st century must be a time of Eros, if we are to heal this broken, troubled world. Not because I say so. But because we need to heal from the ruinous malaises of the ages of capitalism and technology. The anxiety and fear and isolation and meaninglessness they brought with them. We need to grieve, and grieve deeply, for all that we harmed, hurt, lost, abandoned, and ruined, in order to live again. And that is what is really being tested in this strange, difficult, century. Whether or not we want to live again. The alternative is, as it has always, been, death. The age of Thanatos is coming to an end. But will the age of Eros begin? That, my friends, is the question.
The Talking Cure For The Climate Crisis, By Zhiwa Woodbury
When it comes to the climate crisis, what nobody wants to talk about is precisely what everybody needs to be talking about. Up until now, the climate debate has been premised on a false dichotomy between climate science deniers and everyone else. What the Paris accords have revealed is that this overweening emphasis on the science of anthropogenic climate change fails to answer the real question: Why the disconnect between what we know to be the threat and how we are choosing to respond to it?
I’m Burned Out On Collapse And I Bet You Are Too, By Umair Haque
It’s not easy living in a time like this. It sucks the life out of you, drains you, changes you. Just being there. Just watching it all go down. Just going on to fight through another day. That’s the truth. Give yourself a round of applause. You deserve it. Cry a little tear for yourself. You deserve that, too. You’ve been tested — in a difficult, deep, and painful way. But let’s think about what all those emotions really mean.
Finding Hope In Hopelessness, By Margaret Wheatley
As the world grows ever darker, I’ve been forcing myself to think about hope. I watch as the world and the people near me experience increased grief and suffering, as aggression and violence move into all relationships, personal and global, and as decisions are made from insecurity and fear. How is it possible to feel hopeful, to look forward to a more positive future? The biblical psalmist wrote, “Without vision, the people perish.” Am I perishing?
Fighting The Spiritual Void, By David Brooks
Our society has tried to medicalize trauma. We call it PTSD and regard it as an individual illness that can be treated with medications. But it’s increasingly clear that trauma is a moral and spiritual issue as much as a psychological or chemical one. Wherever there is trauma, there has been betrayal, an abuse of authority, a moral injury.
The Unseen Elephant In The Room, By Carolyn Baker
The elephant in the room that is not seen in the United States or in Canada or in most parts of the world is the trauma we experience each day as even a small part of us feels consciously or unconsciously the gargantuan loss of our ecosystems, the loss of species, the loss of each other, and the loss of our own souls.
How American Collapse Is Becoming American Implosion, By Umair Haque
In such a society, there is only one route left — each stratum, each caste, must prey on the one below it, punching it down further, for the illusion of prosperity to appear. Bang! Already, perhaps you see the problem: now, such a society is descending into the abyss. There is nowhere to go but lower when everyone is pulling the next now down a little further. Where is the bottom, exactly?
The Psychology Of Fascism, By Robert Burrowes
Fascism is a political label but, like any such label, it has a psychological foundation. That is, the political behavior of those who are fascists can be explained by understanding their psychology. Of course, all behavior can be explained by psychology but I will focus on the psychology of fascist behavior here.
A Psychologist Explains Why Billionaires Are Building Bunkers For The End Of Days, By Nicole Karlis
Many of the world’s richest seem to earnestly believe that some kind of apocalyptic “event” [3] is coming, and have prepared accordingly. You might have read about this before — such as in the New Yorker’s deep dive [4] back in January 2017 — but billionaire doomsday preppers are back in the news again thanks to a new viral article penned [5] by professor and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. In it, Rushkoff gives some insight on the grave manner in which some of the business elite are going about preparing for a doomsday, which he learned first-hand after receiving an invitation to speak with some one-percenters.
Why Catastrophic Climate Change is Probably Inevitable Now, By Umair Haque
My friends, catastrophic climate change is not a problem for fascists — it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? Please don’t mistake this for conspiracism: climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to stop climate change — but do everything they can to in fact accelerate it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it.
Why American Democracy Was So Easy To Destroy, By Umair Haque
But like all resurrections, something must die, for old America to live again. And that thing is new America. And that, my friends, means that democracy is the brief period American had in between two dark oceans of apartheid and authoritarianism
Healing Our Trauma Together In An Insane World, By Zhiwa Woodbury
If it is true that Climate Trauma is continually triggering all our traumas, creating a psychological milieu of perpetual powerlessness, what does healing our trauma look like? The first step is the most obvious. What do we do in the natural world when a threatening storm is approaching? We find a place of refuge
12 Reasons Why People Refuse To Address The Idea That We’re Headed For Near-Term Societal Collapse, By Jem Bendell
As I have been talking with people about this topic over the past few years, I’ve become aware of the barriers accepting near-term societal collapse and therefore barriers to rigorous and creative thinking and discussion about what we might do about it, personally and collectively. I have also become aware of the barriers I had for a few years to avoid addressing this topic with the seriousness it merits. So before outlining either the analysis of our environmental predicament or the new agenda this opens up, it may be useful to outline some of these barriers to useful dialogue. I do that as part of my invitation for you to either avoid – or momentarily suspend – such responses and adopt a “what if” perspective on societal collapse. Only then can one explore what a deep adaptation agenda might mean for oneself, one’s work and wider society.
Do Americans Really Understand What’s At Stake In The Mid-Terms? By Umair Haque
Do Americans really understand what’s at stake in the midterms? Now, before you cry, “of course they do!”, perhaps it’s worth considering in a little more detail. Why? Because at every juncture of American collapse so far, the risks of, well, all this happening, have been vastly, fatally, lethally understated — minimized, denied, pooh-poohed away. Haven’t they? It’s not just that not a single mainstream pundit or thinker (go ahead, think about it) didn’t predict any of this — it’s that they actively refused to allow even the possibility, mocking and taunting those who did predict it. Instead, election season was spent pretending Trumpism was a joke, and the next year, sternly warning from on high that you and I mustn’t use words like “fascism” and “authoritarianism.”
The Drones Are Coming, The Drones Are Coming, By Anna Kucirkova
What is clear is that drones are priceless tools to many industries, while many applications will emerge as technology improves and breakthroughs allow other tools and devices to be combined with drones to create applications like firefighting and farming drones for other industries.
What’s Really At Stake For America This Autumn? By Umair Haque
Reposted from Medium How Fascism Hardens into National Socialism, and What it Means It was the cruel and shocking summer which overwhelmed us with collapse. When our worst fears were realized. A nightmare summer, when all the direst warnings came true. Camps....