Dear Future

 Dear Future,

I’m writing this to you – sending these words to a possible Thereafter – not knowing if you will be, or if you will stumble upon me, or if you will ever understand my words. Now is most certainly not your time, but perhaps your time will come; perhaps things are not so bleak as they look.

It is late August 2024. I anticipate a collapse into totalitarianism over the next few years, primarily in the West, but perhaps also globally; these things are infectious. Since late March 2020, I have been trying to make sense of whether such a collapse is underway, and if yes, what chances it has of coming to pass. But the pace of events has been electrifying and I am but a humble man making my way with a family in tow, in Leeds, on a very low income. I have put my shoulder to the grindstone of various endeavours and found the veracity of both my efforts and theirs sorely wanting. 

My assessment, for what it's worth, is that we are too far gone, that our humanity has atrophied too much. Totalitarianism is the obvious consequence, given other factors such as global mass media. To the degree this slide into debauchery and mob violence was planned, it is an incompetent plan. So if it is indeed a conspiracy, it is a conspiracy of idiots crashing down on the society of idiots that spawned them. We are all variously to blame.

Something about humanity, especially in the West, gave up. One reason for this must have been the curious juxtaposition of convenience and abundant consumer goods on the one hand, and ever more squalidly busy lives on the other. Another aspect is undoubtedly the grotesque wealth disparities between the many peoples and classes of the world. Another is the rapidly accelerating breakdown in our ability to engage in healthy and productive dialogue across personal and cultural divides. Another is defensive and hubristic arrogance. Another is our ugly tendency to dehumanise. There are many other reasons.

All this fused together in the world pot to poison trust and decency, wisdom and love, in its foul brew. No one knows anything any more. Everyone has their own hot and bubbling opinion. Everyone else is controlled opposition, not to be trusted. A world without trust is ripe for catastrophe.

What has remained doggedly resistant to my own analysis is specialisation. Are societal/civic trust and specialisation mutually exclusive over the long term? I’m not sure, but suspect this cannot be answered unless money’s influence, as civilisation’s dominant measure of value, is taken properly into account. There is a simple reason for this; money cannot measure the value of trust, love, wisdom, etc. While money-value decides the vast majority of what a society does, these deeper values atrophy so slowly it is extremely hard to detect. At some point, human-cultural sensibilities become so dysfunctional, insufficient self-awareness is available to the broader public to identify the root cause of what ails them.

So, if you are reading these words, dear Future, if you are indeed dear and you are a healthier time and place than ours, please learn most deeply the importance of trust and how it grows healthiest from the good soil of love and wisdom. If you get this foundation right, I’m sure the rest falls sweetly into place.

Today is ash

I read the news today, o boy. One million Ukrainians dead or horribly wounded, said one commenter. Israel, tried for genocide at the ICJ, accuses the Palestinians of crimes justifying Israeli actions, said another. 

Pathetic, that’s what I am. Pathetic for wanting it to end. These words are not crocodile tears. When will the hatred stop!?

Somehow, something mechanically compulsive grinds on unaware of its essential ugliness and destroys trust, decency, honesty, dignity everywhere it moves and acts. Or is it aware? Could it be truly aware and carry on? This is what I ask, this is what consumes me: How is so much ugliness possible?

But I’m tired of dreaming up yet another writerly angle on the same theme. To what end? My efforts too feel like compulsion spawned between the horns of an insoluble dilemma: “I must do something!”, and “Doing nothing beyond sustaining a loving peace of mind leaves more space for that ugly machinery to dominate”. In response to the mechanical monstrosity I want to dissolve, I react mechanically. Cause => effect => cause => effect. On and on it grinds, turning everything into itself.

Another commenter speculated history is about to consign the Palestinians to history’s dustbin. Might makes right. I am no mighty nation; what can I do to stop it. Peoples have been wiped out before. History is merciless. What difference will two more peoples, Ukrainians and Palestinians, make. The list stretching back through time is countless because ultimately unknowable. Such cool pragmatic rhetoric is as familiar to me as it is discomfiting, ugly, soul-sickening.

On and on it grinds.

I am pathetic. I want people to notice love is the way forward, love is the mystery that can dissolve this wheel of historical enmity and hatred, but when rage and outrage reign, nobody wants to hear it, precisely when we need to heed it most. Vengeance fills hearts, throats and eyes across the world, and its appetite is insatiable, feeds and feeds and feeds upon its flesh until…

Until what? Until it stops because of some mix of exhaustion and realised goals, some calculation that the utility of this historical phase has been bled white, so now switch gears to ‘peace’. Twas ever thus. This is how civilisation rolls. Better the devil you know. 

It is all we know.

So why, dear Toby, why do I and millions of others yearn for something more? Because we are pathetic? I loathe my own impotence, an impotence that has its nose rubbed in the tawdry fact of its existence as it watches events develop, a permanently remote observer. This fact tells me plainly there is nothing I can do. It is a horrible thing to swallow, like watching a child tortured through a glass darkly. If I were not separated from the child, I could save it. On the clear evidence that the torture goes on, it is clear none of the actions available to me work. 

And it is yet more horrible still that whatever suffering meted out to me from this sad fact is nothing compared to the suffering of that child: the Ukrainians, Russians, Israelis, Palestinians, and so many others dealt far more terrible fates than mine. My concern is to not virtue signal, to not just bleat the platitudes I hear bleated around me, to not beat the drums of hatred and war. This tiny thing, in conjunction with my urge to gently persuade whomever will listen that there is far more to love than meets the modern mind, this pallid comfort is all I have. There are days when it feels like ash in my heart. 

Today is one of them. Something about the news of Gonzalo Lira’s death hit me hard.

Malady, meet tortured reason

What are the ramifications of faith? What is the price of knowing “God’s got this”? Do I lean back in comfort and let history do what it will, an observer of events who knows it will all work out in the end? Just as I can never be outside God – All That Is –, so I cannot be outside history. My leaning back would be as much a part of events as my becoming President of the United States. And who can really tell which has the most impact in the fullness of time. Who really knows how to assess the full and final impact of any ‘isolated’ ‘thing’ among the infinitely mushrooming and devilishly interconnected networks of non-linear ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ that constitute reality. If I accept this and refuse to judge right and wrong – knowing I am not worthy – am I a coward? Surely right action requires me to Choose A Side. Is there truly a division between The Human Condition and The Hereafter? Is there a side to choose?

And how similar this sophomoric reasoning is to that common in materialism! Clouds of dynamically shifting patterns of matter and energy of which I am but a tiny part of vanishingly small import.

The devil of earthly existence – and beyond? – is in the detail just as organically as grain is in wood. If in the space between the two poles of any paradox God’s Eye is to be found, does this truth paint the All-seeing Eye of Mordor? Is this observation a defence of the devil? If everything is God, the devil is of God, too. This is obvious. But is the whole an eternally neutral Yin and Yang, or is the whole in fact concerned with love, which is health – which wisdom knows?

Choose a side. Doing so is an act of free will, and free will is in all this mysterious machinery, all this unknowable ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, this endless living patterning, just like the devil is in the detail.

A disjointed quartet of cartoonish provocations

The perils of automation

When human societies specialise into a fracturing myriad of skills, when they establish money and global markets, when, further, they automate large swathes of global production processes, what they also accomplish is a growing dependence on remote abstractions of what humans actually depend on. 

(Is this a negative of monstrous productivity?)

Instead of being intimately responsible for our survival – instead, in other words, of knowing with organic vitality how to survive and thrive – we drift from the intricacies of our immediate environment and learn how to prosper purely in terms of status, money-profit and power-gain. But such things can only ever be proxies for what we really need: that which yields rich meaning. Moreover, such conveniences seduce us, each from the other, into idiosyncratic bubbles we autistically demand and fashion from modernity’s brilliant but sterile cornucopia.

(Is this a bad thing, a fragile, precarious thing?)

As we automate production and distribution processes, as we make life ever more convenient for ourselves, we forget how to live; we diverge far from immediacy and float blindly into the multi-threaded abstractions that make up modernity’s dazzling web. Its dazzle clouds our ability to discern what is going on, blinds us to our addictions to highly complex networks of automated systems that cannot care about us – except as addicted users –, and so dehumanise us, denature us, plump us up for rot. 

We are Hansel and Gretel afraid to see how caged we are.

What else describes modernity? What am I artfully omitting?

The fruits of automation

I love my slaves. One is taking accurate dictation from my busy fingers this very moment. This, my favourite slave, is so totally obedient to my whims I could not love it more. It is so excellent, so elegant, I can comfortably overlook my dependence on it.

Thousands of years ago, my dependence would have been on the vicissitudes of my jungle home. Today, I am at the mercy of the caprices and techno-organic vicissitudes of my gadgets and the web of remote technologies that sustains them, and connects me to you, stranger.

Today, barring the wildly improbable, I can stroll safely to a supermarket and forage for a bag of pre-picked (and washed!) salad leaves, a loaf of packaged and sliced bread, a tub of fresh humus, and stroll safely back home to make myself a sandwich. 

Is this heaven, or what!

Maybe I’m a member of a gym. At the gym my multifaceted needs for physical fitness and adventure can be almost assuaged by various machines that can put my body through its paces in a variety of ways. I can even admire myself in mirrors as I sweat and bulge. Sweet! (And safe, too!)

And the entertainment, the culture, the art … the cornucopia at my fingertips is endless!

Is there anything else I am deliberately omitting?

Modernity spills out of itself and into itself to become modernity again, forever

It has been modernity since the year dot. 

Way back when, the Big Bang was the very latest technology. Later, flints to tame fire and whittle spears were cutting edge. In between, all sorts of things like cells and vegetation were breathtaking evolutionary accomplishments.

Whichever way you slice it, stuff is always cutting edge right now. But when we look back, we tend to infer “old fashioned”. In a certain light and mood, we can even discern progress. Such are deceptively informative perceptions that reveal much.

I’ve come to understand my efforts here as concerned with wisdom, another word for which would be love. Health is yet another. For me, these three are mutually explanatory synonyms. 

I have come to think that they are very important, pivotal even, to our historical moment. Call me a romantic, but I feel something evolutionary at work in the very fabric of reality. I intuit our position as a species, which is in many ways this universe’s vanguard, situated at a most profound inflection point, a crucible if you will, whose fascinating complex of pressures worry us towards the very maturation in wisdom needed to navigate it well. 

Either we choose maturation, or regression to something ugly, something Orwellian. 

But while both vectors are theoretically possible, my intuition also informs me that we’ve got this. The maturation vector will take everything we have, but the crucible is such that it can only induce exactly that from us; the best and the worst, with the best winning out as it must.

Whereupon we shall want to notice that more care is needed in how we go about living. Whereupon we shall want to notice that the right kind of care, grounded in love, is the best way to treat each other. And it will be from this very noticing, this deliberate mindfulness, that a new way of doing civilisation will arise. 

But, where once in my idealistic naïvety I chose to sense a mighty global awakening, I now welcome the slow and steady growth of this new thing from the fertile rot of the old. I feel its contours and content will surprise us all.

The Way is hard

We have also been accelerating. Bumps in the road, born of unintended consequences, spill much of history’s baggage this way and that. Our load lightens abruptly, regrows slowly, lightens again as we hit another bump. 

Yes, our pace has been accelerating of late, I’d wager as never before. In my eyes, the landscape is now whizzing by like white noise, the baggage heaped atop our crazy vehicle has grown mountainous. 

I want to squeeze my face shut and scream “STOP!” I crave peace, affection, beauty, calm. I want my efforts to have an effect.

I see us as a convolution, a grotesque of locked-in souls bound to what we have become by the exhilarating pace of change, the pressures of life, the glittering distractions, the hurts, the crimes, the spiralling temptations. I find it hard to blame anyone for anything.

To point this out is to wound. 

Today, to be true is to betray. 

If these are accurate, though colourful, observations, we are indeed at a burning crossroads. To select a different vector beyond this point surely requires of us a different quality of being; one quality of being led us here, a different quality will lead us elsewhere.

The journey is the destination, the means are the ends. If the contorted grotesque we have become (who is we?) grew directly from too much fear and greed, then self-correction towards wisdom and love will lead to something healthier, will manifest that different quality of future we long for.

To me, this is coldly logical, not airy-fairy. I am unaware of any sound counter argument. Those that cast human nature as our fixed doom grossly underestimate how flexible we are, and how powerful health is.

(Can a cynic be happy? Why is cynicism sickly? Why does pride suffocate courage?)

One way or the other, we will always be in modernity. We will always perceive problems, fix those problems, and thereby create new problems we will then try to fix. Accepting gladly this is how we are is part of the new way forward. 

But what do I mean by “new?” Well, not love itself, nor wisdom, nor health. I mean the context in which we rediscover their value, their essence, their organic vitality. What will be new is how we relearn that object and context are inseparable: reality as ever changing flow.

Mindfully and culturally holding in our awareness the contorted entanglements we can create for ourselves as a species will require more time for reflection and dialogue, with far less systemic pressure to accumulate more and More and MORE! stuff. And much else besides will need to co-evolve to facilitate that wildly improbable transformation. The task seems impossible, laughable! But surely it will all emerge naturally from a simple desire to find our way back to love, deliberately, over and over again. 

Though easy to identify, the Way is hard. The pressure to walk it is growing by the day, by the hour. Our choice is as bleak as it is magnificent. Things could not be more appropriate.

Taking stock II: Fitting in

 Introduction

This is a short-form article fitting geopolitical realities to the worldview I have been developing for over a decade. A non-academic exercise to be sure, on several levels, but for what it’s worth an attempt to test its explanatory power. As I have laid out in recent articles, my confidence in my position has weakened considerably over the last few weeks, though certain events in my personal sphere, and others of similar intimacy elsewhere, strengthen it again. 

Key points

1. Scarcity, cultural differences and specialisation
2. Love and consciousness evolution toward global consciousness
3. Love and acceptance
4. Right, wrong and moral relativism
5. Kittens

Scarcity, cultural differences and specialisation

Cultures evolve within defined territories, whether geographical or ideological. So separated, they diverge. Languages, traditions and customs differ to varying degrees, making empathic/sympathetic communication between cultures challenging, while dehumanisation/demonisation is a significant temptation in times of tension, when scapegoats are sought. Tensions develop over some combination of perceived scarcities and said communication problems.

Advanced social specialisation exacerbates this; only a tiny percentage of any people can become ‘expert’ in alien cultures. This makes the rest easy to manipulate in times of tension, hence the irresistibly attractive tool of dehumanisation for those who stand to gain from escalating tensions war.

If we want prevent war, surely we must address these issues. But how?

Love and consciousness evolution toward global consciousness

A couple of days ago, I saw an image that was claimed to be from Hunter Biden’s laptop. I won’t elaborate on its content, but its depravity shocked me. Regardless of whether it was a fake, depravity of unimaginable horror happens. That’s one thing that should humble anyone hoping, as I do, for an evolution in human consciousness toward love. And yet the fact that it is perhaps universally perceived as horror by all healthy humans alive suggests, strongly, that love is the answer, weak as that sounds in today’s bitter turbulence.

The presence of horror, depravity, evil, etc. repeatedly throughout civilisational history suggests to many that its continuous manifesting is due to human nature. My own take is that situation is the driving factor, not biology. Biology is indeed a powerful factor, but exactly how our biology translates into action in the world, how that action is perceived, anticipated, handled, etc., is cultural. Modernity, in my view, handles ‘psychopathy’ very poorly. One example of this poor handling is the curious idea that money-profit should remain a society’s deciding measure, i.e. that ‘free markets’ governed by price discovery produce the best of all possible worlds.

The oldest ‘culture’ I am aware of is that of Australian aborigines, who have been walking their walk for 80,000 years. They fight amongst themselves, kill each other in times of heightened tension and misunderstanding, albeit in better harmony with their environment than does modernity, and with a far healthier relationship, marked by deeper wisdom, with what we think of as psychopathy, sociopathy, etc. This does not mean we moderns should seek to recreate that culture as our own. It means simply that humans are culturally adaptable, less constrained by our biology than, say, cats. This is couched, for the sake of argument, in a dualistic intellectual framework; this is meant to be brief, so I’m keeping it brief.

One of my core knowings is that love is health is wealth, that, therefore, love will prevail over time. However, the cultural impediments to the idea of global consciousness evolving toward love, regardless of the power of love as a universal truth that undergirds the nature of reality, are significant. Cultural inertia is highly significant. It is folly to underestimate it.

Love and acceptance

If we try to be loving, what must we learn to accept … Cultural inertia? Moral decay? Horrific abuse of abductees? Pedophelia? War?

When we learn to be loving, one thing we learn we cannot do is impose our wisdom on others. When we project our power onto an other and force them to “Become wise now! That is an order!”, we fail. Allowing free will the free rein to do what it must is the only way I know of in which wisdom can develop as it should. And yet…

Just as cultures steadily calcify into what they are, so too do individuals. Constraint liberates. In my conception of All That Is, our ‘physical’ reality is specifically set up to effect direct consequences. Our free will is severely constrained by the ruleset that defines our reality. We are not free to fly around at will, to walk through walls, read minds, heal our wounds at will, make that woman love us, etc. More importantly, we makes choices that become the investments in our future selves and systems that narrow and narrow toward correction. This complex of earthly limitations is exquisitely instructive (karma). Earning wisdom in this environment is instructive because its corrections are experienced so intensely.

So, what must we accept? Rephrased: Is it wise to demand perfection? Well, everything is always perfect, so must we accept that we are here to learn this truth, come what may? Jung said, “Free will is doing gladly that which we must do.” If we successfully accept this, and deeply, right through our being, what then? 

Then we learn to love our enemies, to have a better idea of how to prevent abuse organically rather than autocratically. But can we poor humans accomplish this?

I don’t know. The process is painfully slow, and very difficult; ego is at the helm for this journey until we learn the very lesson ego does not want to learn. I think this is the point, a point that is very hard to accept because it seems to require terrible suffering until we learn better.

Right, wrong and moral relativism

So, now we’re here. Out There, as I write, Russian missiles are raining down on Ukraine. My heart goes out to those suffering there, as it goes out to abused abductees, to the crippled and terminally sick. Despite all that suffering and our hunger to end it, to heal it, one way or the other we always end up here.

I do not believe that acceptance is moral relativism, that right and wrong are somehow equivalents. My wisdom is that free will teaches best, with constraints operating as structures that effect a certain immediacy, or directness, particular to our ‘physical’ reality. We cannot grow up into true maturity unless we are free to experiment, then taste, fully, the feedback from those experiments. This scales up to the reflex towards autocracy, totalitarianism … to utopias of every hue striving heroically, hysterically, to end or minimise real suffering for real people. From that messy struggle, civilisations rise – which is a bloody process – only to fall later – which is a bloody process.

“Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times. Hard times make strong men.” But this is not moral relativism. This merely describes part of history’s rhyming, of the necessary experimentation of what works when humans try to govern thousands, millions, and then billions, of souls.

This is only part of what human reality is all about. A deeper part is that love is unconditional and foundational. Which brings us neatly to kittens.

Kittens

We have two tom kittens – born of our sole female cat, Firefly – named Ashitaka (brighter tomorrow) and Kashmir: cute little killers oblivious to the horrors of the human world Out There. My family and I abide with them, watch them playing, eating, sleeping. We are responsible for their health and love them unconditionally. One day they may torture rodents and birds to death. We will continue to love them unconditionally. Otherwise, our love would be conditional.

Their trials and tribulations reach us as endearing life lessons they must pass through. We provide the structure that enables their growth. The more freedom they have within the structure we provide, the healthier their growth will be. 

I know the ‘gap’ between humans and God dwarfs that between humans and kittens. To God, our trials and tribulations are never horrors. We are loved unconditionally. What I know through my love of my many family members, human and non-human alike, is that humans can love unconditionally. The challenge is to extend that loving embrace ever outward until we love our enemies unconditionally. But this cannot be rushed, not even by me and my idealistic fervour.

Conclusion

Is it possible that despite our humanity, we can love our enemies? Or is it human to err forever? One of my own many failings is my idealistic, delusions-of-grandeur aspiration to Save The World. Failing at this – as I must – I feel impotent. I hate to watch on as horrors occur. I become angry, frustrated, sick. It’s why I write this blog, now a journal of my spiritual journey to nowhere in particular.

(The kittens are now on my lap.)

I shall leave this open ended, which is best, I think. Love is the way, of that I have no doubt. But we travel at different speeds, scale different heights, endure different appetites and ambitions, push history relentlessly on. And cannot measure our successes and failures, or even tell them apart.

What do you want to do now?

Schoolroom Earth

A teacher sees she is slowly losing control of her class. A small percentage are troublemakers who do little more than disrupt. All appeals to reason have fallen on deaf ears. She enforces stricter rules.

She half expected the move to fail. Prior to cracking down on the class as a whole, even her solid relationship with the good students – who often helped controlling the know-it-alls, the troublemakers – had been showing signs of strain. Perhaps they were losing faith in her. And despite herself, she could not help but notice a certain dangerous charisma about the wilful group, a robust yet unearned self-confidence. So their reaction to the crackdown saddens, but does not surprise her.

Loud, unruly, yet eloquent, the small group make rabble-rousing speeches to the undecided, encouraging them to rise up and overthrow the teacher. She has become, they argue, “draconian”, a “drag on their freedom of expression”. “We don’t need her!”, they bellow in conclusion, pointing at her in open defiance. She watches the small minority flip to a majority with a loud cheer. 

Her loyal students are suddenly off balance, their equilibrium thrown into an indecisive mix of anger and fear. In a burst of uncharacteristically disciplined action, the loyalists are cordoned off as a large group ejects her from the building, and locks her out. 

She finds herself surrounded by the rest of her colleagues, each as dazed as she.

*

So, what happens next?

Out with the old boss, in with the new? Who rules now and in the name of what vision?

Before answering, note that allegorical micro-stories like the above tend to encode assumptions it is always wise to tease out and contemplate. 

How profoundly do context and structure influence behaviour, imagination and worldview? Are separate classrooms a natural law, which must therefore be set in stone as an educational foundation for all time? Should teachers run separated classrooms as if their authority is final? Should any human have final authority? If so, under what conditions? Can a curriculum be perfect, beyond criticism? Should anyone or anything – aside from nature itself – carefully guard the keys to knowledge and wisdom?

What is loyalty? How should it best be effected and expressed? Blindly? Or wisely? Which behaviours constitute “wise loyalty”?

Zooming out: Does socioeconomic specialisation – a property of modern complex society – require hierarchical structures and institutionalised authority? Does constant change work its magic on everything, or do some things remain resolutely constant? Nuclear families? The dichotomy between civilised and wild? Between anarchy and hierarchy? Are these axes axiomatic, or simply cultural artefacts?

More broadly still: Wouldn’t a more nuanced, organic and patient human world be healthier than the frenzied rigidity of modernity? Isn’t consumerism simply the socioeconomics of narcissism, of decadence? Won’t perpetual economic growth and consumerism inevitably collapse around their systemic flaws? If yes, what should follow, and how might we prepare for a next system? Contemplating this, what might authority look like in a post-consumerism world?

Should we attempt to halt technological advance and/or perpetuate consumerism just to keep as many humans as possible economically ‘valuable’? Can value be measured? Must its definition belong solely to economics? Shouldn’t we culturally reassess how we value each other? Or should we leave such decisions to current authorities, yield ever more of our thinking and decision making to The Experts (of the old system), accepting (for the sake of argument) that increasing specialisation is an immutable corollary of civilisational advance?

Is such questioning more harmful than beneficial? If yes, what would that imply for humanity in terms of health, creativity, joy, spirit?

*

Just as it is impossible to be ready for parenthood, it is impossible to be ready for a healthier way of governing ourselves when history comes knocking; a steep and turbulent learning curve always follows the advent of both. But can we learn to want to do what it takes to build something more organic, less mechanical? Or will we choose the ‘security’ of tyranny, even though history shows tyrants devour their children, their adherents, their acolytes?

We stand at an historical juncture, perhaps the most profound humanity has faced. For me, the most problematic aspect of this moment is how few of us are willing to look it, and ourselves, squarely in the eye, and take responsibility for our contribution to the modern situation humanity has earned. If truly we lack that vital courage, we will by default ‘choose’ the ‘security’ of tyranny, of lifelessness; a mechanically rigid world order conceived by the very few, for the very few. Discovering that this is so requires a mix of historical knowledge, dispassionate distance from groupthink, and compassion for the human condition.

The good news is that we needn’t overthrow any teachers in a revolutionary sense. It’s more that we are tasked with learning how to talk to each other across the many gulfs that seem to divide us. Real progress will proceed from sincerely open conversation. That’s precisely what Schoolroom Earth has been slowly bringing to our attention these last millennia. (And no, I do not have answers to the above questions, only the strong sense they are the right ones.)

From my point of view, the core challenge is creatively and peacefully globalising through directly democratic local/regional polities that see the skill of intimate interpersonal and broader intercultural communication as paramount. We will need to figure out how the power to decide global issues can be shared across many thousands of regional polities. An incorruptible science must surely be the cornerstone of such an attempt. To establish that, humanity must first evolve a very different value system, one that is not beholden to the crudity of the price-money-market triad.

But alongside that incorruptible science, we will need to be clear that science only informs. We cannot “follow the science”, an odd phrase that implies powerlessness, blindness, passivity. Decisions come from wisdom – from the heart – no matter how evolved. Data, no matter how scrupulously gathered, is never sufficient on its own. It always exists in context, and can never capture everything that needs to be considered. As such, mistakes that sometimes lead to tragedy will be made, forever; to err is human. But healthy communities weather bad times best; atomised individuals rarely cope as well… We are a social animal. Currently, the system is forcing ever finer atomisation via a mendacious “we’re all in it together” mantra that will produce as dysfunctional and sickly a society – globally – as it is possible to imagine, however short lived. 

The clearest evidence this is so is the vitriol now aimed at those who question ‘authority’. Whom do such divisive tactics serve? The expendable obedient? Or the tiny minority pushing the process forward using the obedient as canon fodder?