The Apocalyptic Cost of Losing Trust.
Fossil fuels are an addiction. Like a heroin addiction
most of the global population are hooked on. Think of the oil industry as
pushers, pimps, dealers. They have profited handsomely from your addiction.
Their job is to keep this addiction going. In 2022 we have half the planet
burning, and half drowning, and it’s going to get worse. There is no time for
rehab, we have to go cold turkey. It’s going to be tough. Laying real hardship
(which will come whether we act against climate change or not) over
hyper-inflation, mass-surveillance, existing feelings of social isolation,
pointless jobs, free-floating anxiety and frustration, is pretty much a make or
break situation for humanity.
We have poor choices. Many would prefer to ‘die like
heroes rather than die like sheep’. Those are words stolen from the Warsaw
ghetto, when it was already too late to change the trajectory of the Nazi
genocide. If we act now against the rush of climate change we might salvage
something other than cockroaches for the living world. If we do not act now,
then we die like sheep and take every living thing with us.
To act, we need the catalyst of good leadership. There is
none. We have been told lies, half-truths and omissions by politicians, by the
corporate media, by the church, and even by science, where our proud
institutions have subsumed their treasured independent thought beneath the
pursuit of funding. This easily gives credence to well-crafted conspiracy theories
and the rise of charlatans with their empty promises. In this cacophony of
useless noise we are missing the leadership we need. For example: Truss or
Sunak? Biden or Trump? A false choice based on elementary salesmanship. Do you
prefer the shoes in blue, or maybe the yellow ones? The only important thing is
that you buy the shoes. In the case of western leaders, it is only important
that you buy the false solutions of neo-liberal ideology.
Meanwhile the private armies grow. Their unaccountability
hidden. Fascism peers from under the covers and judges the time is almost
right. Well trained militia, armed and ready, lurk in every country. White
supremacy regains new strength and neo-nazism readies itself across the world.
Coups against democratically elected governments abound. Refugees desperately
cross the world and climate change is weaponized. Democracy slips out of our
hands.
I believe there is a way out. We can keep on the present
course of inevitable destruction, view ourselves as a biochemical machine that
has to be entertained, dumbed down, kept in the perpetual anxiety of debt and
technological surveillance, or can we reach out and find our truth in the
beautiful language of nature. The first choice is the ‘do nothing’ option. We
stay as sheep and are herded into oblivion. The second choice will uplift us.
It does not guarantee we will win, but if we lose, we will have lived the truth
and die as heroes.
