What if things turn out better than we fear?
Is apocalypse really necessary?
Daily, we are barraged by incoming information in this age of connectivity, much of it fearful, bad, full of warning and foreboding. You and I know this narrative well. Things are horrible and are only going to get worse! Apocalypse is on our doorstep - insect apocalypse, climate apocalypse, weapons of war will bring nuclear apocalypse. We are in an apocalypse of plastic, of toxins, of poisons, modified genes, infectious agents, and now, holy cow! AI is going to destroy us! These are just of few of the awful, scary things coming across our screens and into our senses with our 24/7 connectivity. Just today, we in the United States are emerging from weeks of dire warnings that some our politicians were going to cause a global financial meltdown in order to impress their constituents, leading to all sorts of awfulness for all but a few. That now appears to have been yet another version of political theater, of news-o-tainment, but I fell for it and was worried, stressed, even lost sleep over the possibility. How about you? Tomorrow or next week, there will be something else to dread.
Here in the United States, we are warned every few days by media reports that we may be heading towards another Civil War due to the degree of polarization and unrest among the heavily armed among us. Subgroups of citizens actively hope for and prepare for this possibility. As someone descended from English colonialist settlers who came as many as eleven generations ago; I have ancestors that fought on both sides of that war. Another civil war is a very bad idea, a terrible way to address our disagreements. Memory of the horror of that war seems to live on in my biologic encoding in my bones, in my very marrow passed down from my ancestors, where it remains still unreconciled, like a nightmare unclearly but viscerally remembered. We Americans ended human chattel slavery but our ancestors continue their battles through us until we recognize it and say “Enough!”
And so, we are vulnerable to frightening news and encouraged to be very afraid because something very, very bad is coming (again)! Have you noticed this is happening? My animal nature knows to register these threats and to heighten my senses. Watch, get ready to flee, fight, freeze, or faint. I feel it in my body when I pause to notice. How much of the time am I reacting to these concepts of threats without my awareness, I wonder? My brain responds to these ideas of threat by generating stories: possible exit routes, tales of how I might survive, running worst-case scenarios in case I need to act on them. I do this automatically. You probably do, too. Almost all of it happens unnoticed in the unconscious workings of my day-to-day human mind. We are getting ready for the worst. We expect it. We may sometimes wish the expected apocalypse would just happen already so we can get it over with.
For all of my sixty-some years on this planet, I’ve seen movies, books, and other art forms full of themes of the imminent demise of the world we know. These stories prepare us for a dystopian, burned-over earth on which a degraded humanity engages in endless vicious warring over ever more scarce resources. Recycled in endless varieties of plots and themes, they all tell the same story. Humanity and Earth are doomed. Ah, but if I am lucky, strong, righteous, or enough of whatever theme supports the story, then I just might be one of the few who survive all that and begin again. I want to be a survivor, right? Don’t you? Or maybe you want a quick and early exit?
I grew up in a church where pastors preached sermon after sermon warning we congregants that we were in the End Times. One must always be ready because the trumpet call announcing the beginning of the battle for the end of the world is coming any day now! All the signs are there! The Apocalypse is nye! Repent, accept the church’s teachings so that when things get really bad, well, god will see your righteousness and snatch you up, just in time. There were even movies and books dramatizing it. Now, I’m not intending disrespect the beliefs of any religion; I’m just asking you to consider how we’ve been indoctrinated. I suspect most (white) Americans my age learned these apocalypse stories as children before we could distinguish metaphor from physical earthly reality thus, perhaps it’s not surprising we created conditions that look like apocalypse is imminent. We continue to enact the metaphors; clothing them with new book covers and modern lingo.
Flowing continuously into our daily lives, the ever-available news and information appears to support that, yes indeed, humanity and earth are on the verge of collapse, or explosion, or some other form of awfulness, so hey, why not buy some stuff? That will make us feel better, right? Or look, why don’t we blame that group or that person?This mess must be somebody’s fault. Somebody must be causing the threat. Let’s take them out! Quick! Get ‘em! Feed the fear, feed the hate.
Is this the story we want to keep telling ourselves? Does it really have to be this way? Our poor frightened inner mammal is just trying to keep us safe, but we going to need more than our primal natures to navigate this interesting time. Fortunately, we do have other abilities, if we can learn to catch ourselves as we inadvertently empower the old repeating storylines and use our considerable capacities differently.
Another version of the story of our time embraces denial. It goes like this. Let’s pretend that everything is fine. Yep, everything will turn out just fine. Nothing to see here. We create our reality, right? Well, my reality is just fine, happy, and abundant, thank you very much! Never mind the floods, fires, war, racial and environmental injustice, political unrest, etc. You must be doing something wrong if your reality isn’t working out. So hey, maybe if we watch enough ‘Leave It to Beaver’, or ‘The Brady Bunch’ reruns, or go to the right workshops and retreats, then we’ll create that happier world that never was. Let’s do that! We’ll return to those ‘simpler times’ when everyone knew their place and the world was white and (cis heterosexual) male.
Seriously, that isn’t going to help. A bit of relaxation and entertainment is in order at times, so binge watch on, but as a navigation strategy denial is a recipe for staying lost. As a flip side of apocalyptic thinking, this escapism or spiritual bypassing embraces the idea “I say so, therefore it is”. We enact our inner toddler in the world. I’ve tried it and don’t recommend it.
And so, we act like frightened deer, or toddlers, or cornered bears and from that place we generate stories of disaster and despair from our unconscious body-mind. I do it all the time. Sometimes I catch myself in the act. Then I can pivot.
But what if things turn out better than we fear? What if we don’t totally blow up our environment, have nuclear disasters, fall into endless cycles of pandemic after pandemic, or war upon war? What then? Despite dire predictions, things have turned out better than expected for we humans before. What if better than expected is even the most likely outcome?
Like many of you, I grew up under the threat of total nuclear war in the 1970s and I was certain the world would be destroyed before I made it to 30. But just in case, I decided on a hedge, that I should probably get a good professional education just in case I was still alive at 31 and needed to support myself. Thankfully, nuclear war didn’t happen, so having a good profession was handy. In our current predicament, I’m thinking we might be wise to be enacting some alternate plans just in case things turn out better than we are being led to expect.
For myself, I’m finding that envisioning alternate, non-disastrous possibilities is pretty hard. I’m so used to the current plot! We are navigating through novel, unknown territory and through a tight evolutionary bottleneck, so the solutions are going to be new, emergent. Can we recognize them, or will we get caught in old thought traps?
Our unconscious animal and toddler natures are definitely not up to the task of these times. With our familiar thought patterns, we’re seeing a thing that needs fixing (a lot of things, in fact) and we are used to using our hammer. That thing isn’t a nail, and we don’t know what it is, but hey, hit it with the hammer. Bummer, that made it go all wonky. Better hit it with the hammer again, harder. Oh my, not good. Hey, how about a bigger hammer?
This is what we’re doing as humans now. We’re stuck in our story ruts, using our same old tools. We tell ourselves we must blame somebody or some group or that only our version of solutions will do. Or let’s pretend nothing’s happening. When these fail, well, let’s blow the whole thing up. There! Good ending! Next story?
I think it’s time to come up with healthy, novel approaches. If I knew what those were, I would tell you now. Sorry, I don’t, at least, not yet. I’m guessing those novel paths can only come into view if enough of us are willing to look for them, to create them, enact them together. What I do know is that they will be emergent, and they will involve loving and caring for one another and our planetary biosphere. Novel might be key here. We will need novel responses to the novel and emergent environmental, technologic, cultural, social, and even biologic conditions.
We will need to make new assumptions. One new assumption could be that a good, interesting, thriving future is possible for humans and our earth home. That’s pretty radical. And what if we tell ourselves radical truths about where we have been and where we are right now? That requires difficult leaps in truth telling, dropping our history-of -the-victor narratives that animate our current assumptions. What if we become honest about what we have done, what we have lost, how we have treated each other and the other life here on planet Earth? We have all been through a lot. We all have our trauma, our suffering, our histories, our ancestors’ issues, our guilt, our grief. It’s really a lot to bear. Is it any wonder that we give ourselves the apocalypse as a way out? It’s easier than facing what’s really happening, how we feel, and what we can and cannot do. This is really, really hard.
What if we don’t need perfect solutions? What if a good enough life on a good enough planet might actually be our most likely outcome despite the noise of now? What if such an ending well is not only possible, but probable? How would you live then?
Humanity has made radical changes before. The American founders pulled it off in the 1770s and 1780s with the original Declaration and Constitution, far from perfect though they were. Around the same time, Europe abolished slavery and serfdom and moved towards democratic governance. Those moves certainly weren’t perfect, caused many harms as well as benefits, and are seriously in need of upgrades to their operating systems now, but at the time, these were big changes. Our times seem to call for monumental, creative actions, ones that may not be evident yet. But let’s not have another American Civil War. Let’s not buy into the inevitability of apocalyptic endings. Let’s not blow everything up. We need to, and can, reconcile the trauma of our wars, develop systems that make war unnecessary, and come up with new ideas for handling our problems.
Whether we admit it or not, we all know that human society and culture are changing in ways that can and will lead to a different future. That much is certain. We just don’t know what that future looks like yet (and so our scared inner mammal assumes it will be bad, very bad). So much has changed during just my lifespan. We saw the earth as a planet floating in an enormous universe for the first time in the 1980s. Seeing this image totally shifted the thinking of many from a local to planetary awareness. I still feel awe when I see those images. We’re less that 100 years from realizing we could blow up the whole biosphere with our weapons, something that changed what we know about ourselves as humans. What an awesome and fear-inducing responsibility to have! How do we process that? Well, we haven’t yet, but we need to do so. Public consciousness and conversation on gender, race, and sexuality have changed in ways few could image in 1960. And what was once a mere hint of concern about our environment in the 1960s is now majority knowledge that humans have caused extensive damage to the systems of our planet in ways threatening our very continuance as a species. Much has changed and we’ve handled it, messily perhaps, but we’re still here.
We know we can destroy ourselves, so hey, if we need to continue to test that idea out by all means, let’s try it out in movies, games, and books. That’s definitely safer than actually doing it. But haven’t we told that story enough now? We know how it ends. Badly. I for one am tired of those stories. I want to see fresh stories that turn out in new ways. We need to calm down from our collective meltdown, wind down our tantrums, and start to think more clearly, like grownups…thinking more about us, all of us together in our shared living planetary habitat.
Recent knowledge about mothering might provide an example that might help us a bit as we consider this. For much of modern history, mothers have been blamed for most of what goes wrong with people. Frigid mothers caused autism. Cruel mothers caused schizophrenia. Bad people are caused by bad mothers and on and on. We tell ourselves, if only our parents, and especially our mother, had been different, we’d be happier, healthier people. Poor us, we’re stuck with our problems because our parents were messed up. But there’s good news! Work in human development shows that what really matters for secure relationship (attachment) between a mother and child is “good enough mothering”. Do you get that? Good enough! A mother only needs to respond to her child’s needs enough of the time for the child to feel secure enough, to develop effective tools for life, to turn out ok. Not perfect, but ok…good enough. And enough isn’t all that much. What a relief for moms everywhere[1]! Similarly, until recently our common knowledge said that the brain didn’t develop after childhood and thus, any damage was permanent. Now, we know that the human brain continues to grow, change, and develop as long as we are alive. And so, even without a good enough mom or parent, even in a difficult society where we experience trauma and oppression, we can heal our emotional, mental, and many physical wounds. We can learn new skills and information. We can continue to grow and adapt throughout life. These things are possible, and they happen every day. The old victim/villain stories are easier and more emotionally charged to tell, but they’re not really true.
Those old stories hide the everyday heroism, resilience, and growth potential of humanity. Our human potential is our vast untapped resource, our emergent path into the unknown, especially if we work together.
So how about it? If enough of us start to live as though we are going to make it through this evolutionary bottleneck, if we set aside our inner toddler and frightened mammal responses, we can begin to explore our “good enough” human capacities. We can free up some of the human potential held captive by our apocalyptic fears and actions. Then we can create and tell a better story. The plot line might not seem as exciting as blowing everything up, but the journey could be endlessly more rewarding, and certainly more heroic and creative.
Imagine the tremendous amount of our human potential that currently lies, untapped, stuck within our stories of disaster. If even a portion of our energy could be freed and focused on embodying a new story, a heroic story of how people in these crazy times averted disasters and created a good enough life for most on a recovering planet, then what might happen? What if enough of us become quiet enough, willing enough, unafraid enough, to become aware of and implement emergent possibilities? What if enough of us open hearted enough to creatively care? Not perfect, not saintly, just enough of us being good enough.
I don’t know how this new story turns out, but I want to find out.
It might turn out well!
[1] This is true regardless of the gender identification of the parent, but most research has been done with moms and children.
Delicious! I ate that up. It reminds me of a recent "miracle" -- when I spoke to my mother last week about a new book she is reading called "Raptureless." She was so excited that her entire perspective had shifted when (from her lensing), all the rapture stories she had been taught in Sunday School had not been biblical, but something made up by man much later and added to certain Christian dogmas. She has for 80 years been resigned to the idea that humanity's plight must worsen in these "end times" and eventually get so bad that Jesus will come back to save us. That takes a lot of motivation away from making things any better and is very pessimistic (except for the few whom Jesus comes to save).
Since she read the book written by a Christian scholar, she is now an optimist and here to create Heaven on Earth, knowing that the rapture isn't coming. That's a BIG SHIFT in world perspective by simply revealing the source of an old story, the truth of which she took for granted and was not allowed to challenge previously. It reminded me that storytelling is the most powerful thing we humans do, and how it changes our perspective on reality -- even when reality may not change. So, there's some truth to the new age idea of "choose your own reality." The circumstances of the world did not change, but because my mother's view of it changed, her experience of it radically shifted, and now her health, attitude, relationships to everything follows. What's the point of caring about global warming if it's just part of the end times (resignation)?
There is an ancient place of refuge down the hill from me here on the Big Island of Hawaii that reminds me of the importance of expanding our view of the world in order to heal it. It's called a Pu'uhonua. The place of refuge was where someone would find refuge if they had committed a crime, and they would be forgiven after completing healing protocols. The assumption was not that they were a bad person that needed punishment to correct their ways, but that those who commit crimes must not be well, and so must be healed before being allowed to return to society completely forgiven (with a tatoo to prove it).
One Hawaiian explained to me that Pu'u means a hill, and honua means the Earth. Together, these concepts come together to mean an expansion of our world view. Sometimes we forget who we are and how we fit into the larger perspective -- and in that spiritual amnesia, we commit "crimes" against each other, our mother Earth and her creatures. This is shared with permission from my Hawaiian teacher who always humbly adds that "not all wisdom is found in one halau (school).
I am moved by the radical idea that changing our perspective, expanding it, can heal ALL of us, and if we are behaving in a way that does not benefit a symbiotic sustainable future, it may be caused by "illness" rather than ill will. I know that when I step out of my everyday life for a retreat (refuge), and when I take the time to care for my body and soul, I come back to my spiritual center and expand to remember who I really am, and from that aligned place, I can bring myself fully and actually contribute to a future that inspires me.
I LOVED how your blog made me remember how excited I get when we recount our history of humanity's victories -- moments of our greatness (not in a warring sense, but an evolutionary sense). When history teaches us only about wars won and lost rather than victories of human spirit, we get the lopsided and limited view of humanity as "conflict theory." The focus of our history books seems to be a collection of evidence that humans are constantly in conflict with each other and misses all of our cooperation and virtue.
We then impose that assumption on nature around us creating drama that may not be accurate. Darwin's evolution "survival of the fittest" approach suggests that everyone is out to dominate each other and that in order to avoid domination, we must become the dominator and/or destroy anything that competes with us. That story is the norm in corporate American culture and feeds the fear that keeps the worlds military arsenals well stocked. That story conveniently overlooks all the cooperation and interdependence that is the mainstay of most of human history.
I LOVE the idea that if we focus our attention on humanity's evolution toward it's greatest potential and freedom, we can rewrite history to create a bigger picture view of humanity's course. We are advancing beyond slavery, sex trafficking and child labor. Look how far women have come in the last 100 years in America -- far beyond having the right to vote -- a revolution after several thousand years of slavery without firing a shot. People with physical challenges now have more access than ever! Yes, we still have a long way to go in learning to care for one another, but if we don't stop to celebrate our milestones, we may believe that future conflicts and Armageddan are inevitable.
As you know, I have an affinity for Mermaid culture to break me free (for a moment) from the limiting human stories we were born into. I have always loved to swim (respectfully) with wild dolphins because they are so gentle, playful, curious and courteous -- a culture we humans could learn from. Dolphins live sustainably, with sovereignty, in community and symbiotically (for the most part) with nature. They model a way of being in the world that I long for -- especially their freedom. They don't pay rent, wear clothes or go to work every day. They eat, sleep and play in highly intelligent ways. They give me hope for a seemingly simpler, but more fulfilling lifestyle. I say seemingly because their language is so complex that we have not decoded it yet. I'm excited that Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be able to help us with that soon.
The story of AI could be doom and gloom if we prefer, or we could focus on it as a tool of human evolution and expansion -- a diving board into our wisest sapien selves because wisdom is exactly what we'll need to handle the amount of knowledge AI promises. AI is just the bottleneck we need to take humanity to the next level. Our survival depends on it.
I love the concept you brought up of "good enough" vs. perfection, as well. In my experience, not being "good enough" is an epidemic in much of humanity's psyche -- a mental illness of sorts -- where so many of us have low self-esteem that it just feels like the norm. In my Christian upbringing, this belief was fed by the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden where many was 'cast out' and needed to atone for being a sinner (not good enough in the eyes of God). We were SO BAD, that God had to sacrifice his own son so that we would be forgiven, and yet women still need pain in childbirth as punishment for tempting man. When my father left the family (I was 3 yrs old), I decided there must be something wrong with me. I must not be good enough, and I set out to make up for that belief by overachieving. That's an exhausting story that adding awards to my resume doesn't seem to fix!
What a wonderful new story for humanity to embrace . . . "good enough." I'll take that on as my new mantra and see how it unfolds. Thank you for your deep dive, your REAL shares and struggles so the rest of us can remember we're all in this together.
Cynthia.. Thanks for the perspective shift of "What if it turns out better than we expect", rather than worse.. more apocalyptically? I haven't really framed that question before.. being caught, as you suggested, in the current perceptual brainwashing we get through the media. I like to think of your challenge to really look AFTER a shift in that thinking to answer the question : 'How would you live then?' Really starting to focus on what outcomes I DO want to see operating as we survive the planetary challenges we are engaged with as a species. The first challenge I am going to take on, is to see us surviving the "bottleneck" we appear to be going through. Thank you for that metaphor, as it feels like a clear way to begin to visualize and make the perceptual shift to the better outcome of seeing us moving out of that bottleneck! Besides pointing out the negative neysayers, I also loved that you took to task the New Age "deniers" .. the ones who believe that they alone create their reality, denying the obvious that, like it or not, we are all in this together.. We will sinki or rise together....