I was with you until this point. Here we part company. I certainly agree that there is a lack of ideas, and that’s why we are here and having this discussion. But there’s a much bigger problem than that, which is that the Earth is very seriously overpopulated. We are well into what ecologists call “overshoot”. The metacrisis emerges from both these factors, not just the first.
No ideas are going to stop the collapse and die-off now. It is much too late for that. The ideas are going to need to be about how to rebuild after the collapse – we need to see that collapse as a necessary precursor to the ideological transformation we both recognise is needed.
For me this has to be an essential part of 2R, or 2R is pointless. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say it has to be an essential part of 2R or 2R will just be a sideshow and the real paradigm shift will involve a larger group which is focused primarily on collapse and survival rather than ideological transformation.
The past is not fixed. I’ve seen it change. Only the present is “really real” – the future is not fully written and the past is not fully fixed. The future “comes into focus” and the past “decays”. Sometimes this happens in a massive, co-ordinated way.
Look at it this way - you could have been Nietzsche
I must admit a certain fascination with Nietzsche. He was the first person who sensed the scale and nature of the coming crisis, but his proposed solutions led to both Nazism and postmodern anti-realism.
But really, you have way more company than you may have imagined,
There was no internet. I had no way of finding anybody I could talk to about it. Everybody I tried to talk to interpreted it as mental illness.
The challenge problem of the moment seems to involve letting intuition and insight come roaring in with all their thunder, and then presenting resulting insights in a prosaic way for the consumption of wider audiences.
That is another purpose of my book.
But anyone who explains these matters too much or too often to people who are not seeing it will unfortunately be relegated to the fringes of society.
For now. I am convinced it will not always be that way.