Thought experiment.
Imagine a society…
Every dozen years, all laws go to zero.
Every 25 years, all formal systems of governance are reset to zero.
By some formally randomized event occurring every 1-100 years, all debts go to zero.
…
For comprehensible reasons, we are approaching a major systems collapse. This event will be a kind of evolutionary reset.
While I am relieved to anticipate that the worst-case scenario is unlikely to mean the end of all life on earth, this reset could be so devastating as to bring the human experiment to a halt on this planet, and take with it nearly, if not all of life that we could see with the visible eye.
In the best case scenario, some great portion of the world’s poorest humans might see no meaningful disruption, and possibly even an improvement in their quality of life.
Tyson Yunkaporta anticipates a thousand year cleanup project ahead of us. In addition to plastic bags from the forest, micro plastics from the ocean, and toxic chemicals from the rain, that cleanup project will include billions of broken hearts, profound existential confusion, and loss of identity on the part of hundreds of millions and more likely billions of human beings.
One way of confronting this is to ask how we can hold ourselves and one another in such a way that the coming disorientation for our species can be mitigated and the period of confusion shortened to the fewest number of generations.
How do we hold ourselves and one another in love and care while these unsustainable systems unraveland decay? How do we hold our children and grandchildren in such a light that they can see their own capacities and empowerment to make beautiful work of the cleanup and reinvention of the species?
If we wait too long, they inherit Mad Max, if we meet this moment with enough honesty, this identity can die with dignity and some posibility of grace in this period of hospice and midwifery.
…
Nice things we are unlikely to lose in the Reset:
Love
Family
Vitality
Good Company
Music
Sacredness
Community
Beauty
Ritual
Bare feet
Caring
Hearth fires
Bonfires
Sharing
Celebration
Relationship with our Non-Human brethren
Butterflies, if we can help it…
feel free to add to this list…
Things we (in the colonial/industrialized world) are likely to gain in the Reset:
A greater connection to the wild things of the world
Time to think
Quiet
…?
…
I’ve been reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy of late, and can’t help but notice the metaphors so large in the world…
Sauron is Moloch.
The Ring of Power is our current dominant Economic System.
Many are struggling to use the Ring to wrest control for their own complex ideology (in their eyes “good,” in the eyes of others, “evil.”)
The wise have seen the ring passing into the hands of the humble whom, despite its immediate rewards and allure, recognize the need to cast it into the fires of Mount Doom and see it wholly unmade.
That gives me hope.
…
where did l go