“Nothing can be changed until it is faced.” (James Baldwin)
Let’s describe our situation in a few sentences:
1. Our societies are sick in many respects.
2. The economy plays a decisive role in this.
3. Climate change is neither reversible nor controllable.
4. There’s an overlooked opportunity: to live in accordance with nature, but that demands a fundamental change in our thinking about the way we build our societies.
Welcome to the “economic letters. Our times are challenging. And when times are challenging, there’s always an opportunity to grow. We have the opportunity to rebuild our societies and communities on healthy paradigms. We can create abundance not by exhausting nature as we are doing but in alignment with nature. That’s what these letters are all about.
So, if you are looking for new ways to act, welcome. If you are thinking for yourself and seeking challenging and enriching perspectives, welcome. If you want to change the world fundamentally by changing yourself, welcome. Together, we will explore the unfamiliar ground, working on the intersection of economy, society, and personality to find new answers to our situation. So let’s begin.
Our societies are socially sick: we are experiencing enormous economic disparity and a lot of social diseases like burnout, depression, and addiction. We exclude and marginalize people, and we build our societies on enormous exploitation, not only of natural resources but of humans as well.
We destroy our livelihood. We devastate almost all ecological systems. We pollute the air and water, and destroy the very ground on which we live. That’s the environmental sickness we must face.
And then there is our political sickness. The rise of polarization endangers democracies worldwide, but it’s not the cause of the problem. Polarization is nothing more than a symptom, reflecting the fact that our political sphere cannot organize societies in an acceptable manner.
The economy is central to all of this. It operates on destructive premises and erodes our societies on many levels. It forces all areas of society to follow economic rules, and this ruins the social fabric healthy communities must be grounded in. The economy sustains corporations according to inhuman ideas of hierarchy and leadership, fosters patriarchalism, and promotes slavery and ecological destruction.
But that’s only one dimension of what we have to face. The second is climate change.
We think we can control or reverse global warming, but that’s an illusion based on the familiar but incorrect premise that humans can control nature. We can’t, and we never will. Climate change is neither reversible nor controllable. We must understand that we are embedded in an overall dynamic called the Earth and the cosmos, which we can only experience but never fully understand.
And if you think technology will help, no, it won’t. On the contrary, it makes us more dependent and unstable instead of resilient. The way we currently use technology and think about it as a means to solve our problems is based on the same old, destructive paradigms that led to the situation we are facing.
To summarize, we are in an already challenging and unpredictable situation, and the means with which we propose to solve it are useless.
In trying to understand how we came into this situation, we soon discover the central and most important point: we aren’t living according to nature—neither our own nor that of the natural world around us—because we fail to understand our predicament. Our thinking is so deeply rooted in the idea that men have to conquer nature that we believe to live by nature would be to surrender. For most of us, it’s unthinkable, stupid, an ecological or spiritual fantasy. But we are still in this mess. And if we pursue the route we have chosen over the last few centuries, we will soon discover that things get worse.
But there is another route: one where we build communities and society in accordance with nature. To go this way, we have to change. This change is not a simple turnaround; it demands that we change our perceptions and our thinking, and reconstruct the foundations of our societies from this point on: another way of doing business, of organizing politics, and another form of power, all built on the agency of everyone, on integration and not exclusion. More on this to follow.
it's a powerful piece.
I really appreciate how you highlight our deep need to live in harmony with nature and how you recognise the illusions of control that keep us stuck.
Your insights are both sobering and hopeful, reminding us that significant change begins with a shift in our thinking.