I was originally going to call this blog “The Power of Crisis,” until I discovered that world-class scam artist Tony Robbins had beaten me to the name. The name was evocative because it seemed to crystallize the idea that there is opportunity in the impending collapse of much of our way of life. The inertia and apathy that helped to cement the post-war order can’t survive when the people who hold its assumptions can no longer breathe.
A crisis is what happens when one factor slips in a previously tolerable situation. Those living in the situation know, or should know, that things are getting worse. They patch or ignore the symptoms of the problem, hoping that things will get better or tell themselves that things are not so bad. Then the thing that allows them to practice this self-deception disappears. In a moment, a bad but tolerable situation becomes untenable in a way that no amount of self-deception can disguise.
A crisis is a fork in the road of our lives. It can lead us to death or to a kind of rebirth. Time and memory are divided into pre-crisis and post-crisis. It can rob us of everything we need to survive and adapt, or it can provide us energy, discipline and determination that we didn’t know we had. These resources can allow us to tackle the challenges we face. We can, if we are lucky enough to survive it, come to see a crisis as our salvation.
Other civilizations have declined, of course. Neither the Romans nor the British were famous for their ecology or human development. But the scale and global appeal of the American Dream threaten a human future on this planet in a way that neither of those civilizations could match.
Recent history is full of crackpots who foresaw elements of the current crisis. These contemptible nutcases drew guffaws if they were noticed at all. Meanwhile, the sober men of sound judgment built and maintained a civilization that has eaten the world then turned upon itself. People who can see beyond the present are more necessary than ever when the old answers have simply stopped working. So many of the ways in which we live our lives are just habit hardened into institution. The details of our daily life often have more to do with the interests of a few powerful people than with efficacy or the possibilities available to us. Instead of turning off our minds and ears when unusual people say unusual things we should be asking ourselves why we find them so threatening. Even those with so much invested in current practice could always adapt and reinvest in better ways of thinking and living. Why is change so scary?
I think people have learned to cope with the insane by pretending that it is normal. When our world is shown to be dangerously out of balance, it threatens this carefully-cultivated ignorance and the sense of well-being it allows. When Dr. Strangelove was released, it was beloved by younger audiences but reviled by older ones. Its undeniable picture of the lunacy of the Cold War was unacceptable for those who had helped construct that world. It caused them to feel the fear and shame which were the natural human responses to a thoroughly unnatural way of living. The reverence and consensus reality needed to stave off these uncomfortable feelings melted under the dark humor at the heart of Kubrick’s film.
We will have to learn to accept how unreal our world is. Our homes, our jobs, our politics, our culture and our lives are built around a series of expectations formed during a unique moment in history when the world was nearly destroyed and America alone stood unscathed, unrivaled in wealth and power. Those days have long passed, and the plenty they promised faded into memory for all but a few.
We can recover and even thrive in the years to come, but it will mean accepting new ideas regardless of the source. Workable ways of building a human future are not going to come from people saying the expected things and behaving in expected ways. They are going to come from the strange, the unusual, and the awkward. We need to be able to think in a way that allows us to perceive the value of ideas even if they scare us a little, because accepting the status quo is the most frightening idea of all.
