Your plans for revolution don’t work. Nothing we’ve tried works.
By Caitlin Johnstone
27 March 2019
(Medium) – All the old ideas for uprooting the status quo have failed. I point this out not to depress people, but to persuade them to stop twisting on locked doorknobs. The old ideas don’t work, so we need new ones.
The political process has failed. Capitalism has failed. Socialism has failed. Libertarianism has failed. Marx has failed. Populism has failed. Anarchism has failed. I say this not because of any glaring flaws in any of those ideas (in theory any of them could potentially work in an alternate universe), but because we are hurtling towards extinction in the fairly near future, and none of them have saved us.
“But Caitlin!” you may object. “My particular favorite ideology would have saved us long ago if only everyone had gotten on board with it!”
Okay. But they didn’t. And now we’re on the brink of Armageddon. That means it has failed. It doesn’t work.
We are well on our way to extinction via climate collapse or nuclear holocaust, and even if we miss those by some miracle we are headed toward an artificial intelligence-led tech dystopia in which our consciousness is permanently enslaved by a propaganda network that is far too advanced for there to be any hope of escaping into truth.
We are witnessing a mass extinction the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, with some 200 species going extinct forever every single day. The very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is vanishing underneath us. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years, and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Fertile soil is vanishing, and so are forests. The oceans are choking to death, 90 percent of global fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished, the seas are full of microplastics, and phytoplankton, an indispensable foundation of earth’s food chain, have been killed off by 40 percent since 1950. Science keeps pouring in showing that global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted, and there are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, causing more feedback loops. […]
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The reality is that as long as powerful people control the dominant public narratives, no ground will be gained in steering our species away from the status quo trajectory that’s killing us, because you won’t be able to awaken mainstream consciousness to what’s going on. The only thing that has any hope of prying the oligarchic hands off the steering wheel is the mainstream public seeing what they’re doing and using the power of their numbers to force drastic change in a wildly different direction. If we can’t make that happen, we’re all just banging on locked doors while the curtain closes on humanity. [more]
Your Plans For Revolution Don’t Work. Nothing We’ve Tried Works.
Caitlin is incorrect. The Nature cultures of indigenous people all around the world worked just fine for thousands of years. In the case of the Australian aborigines, It worked for at least 80,000 – 120,000 years.
The reason the other things don’t work is because they are predicated in a false understanding of reality. Those many “ism’s” are all human creations.
The Earth isn’t a human creation. Using the Earth to create the “world” we want is insane and counter to the reality of biological life. We needed to take care of the Earth we had, and plenty of people knew exactly how to do that for a really, really long time in the known 300,000 years of human existence. In fact, the latest IPCC report makes much about how the “values” of indigenous people protected the environment.
We were superior to them, however, because they were “ignorant” and “superstitious.” We know what is valuable and what is not. We think.
Hi Susan,
well, perhaps on purpose Caitlin did not mention
your points! (and one can not write everything in a
short article)
but in case, I am sure you know some of the writings
of Derrick Jensen!