169) The despair you are feeling right now: Dead children, bombed hospitals, the lies of tyranny in a dying world, and the crushing hopelessness of “What the hell can I DO about any of this?”
What can we do, in the midst of a genocide? What can we do, in the midst of tyranny that’s been happening, and strengthening, since before we were born? We can we do, in a world that burns its own living flesh, due to the greed of the most-privileged minority who clamour for ever-more wealth and power?
None of us want this.
145) Coming Full Circle: Part 5 — The Bleeding Hearts and The Artists Make Their Stand
There’s no sense pretending we are not in this situation, just like there’s no sense in a budding sapling pretending it didn’t germinate in poor soil, if that’s the reality.
No, that sapling has to grow those roots deeper, and proliferate its root system so thoroughly that it gets the life energy it needs to survive and thrive. Right there, in the poor soil it was planted it. Or, it dies.
144) Coming Full Circle: Part 4 — My Personal Piece of Performance Art
It’s not ideas that will make the difference, so much as it’s people connecting to their gentle, and passionate, animal hearts, their sensuous flesh, their mortal vulnerability.
How many of us, truly, have dug down into our guts and done the deep, soul-work necessary to heal our wounds and fill our hearts with love for our neighbours?
143) Coming Full Circle: Part 3 — Screaming into the Void
I know I might be screaming into the void here. But we have to talk about this. We have to change it. How the hell can we face the future, and look in the eyes of tomorrow’s children, unless we can at the very least say, “I really tried to do what I could”?
142) Coming Full Circle: Part 2 -- Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land
From the perspective of “how can humans manage their societies on this planet?”, the best understanding that we now collectively have, is, in essence, the common wisdom that is shared among indigenous cultures.
141) Coming Full Circle: Part 1 — Me, this blog, Pink, and a Scathing Diatribe against The System, maaaan
I feel really, really grateful for you all. All the people who have been reading this and sharing thoughts, a whole community of people who share ideas on Facebook especially and in comments here — it’s just awesome to have experienced all this. Blogging is (for me anyway, lol….) a pretty personal thing, like writing into your diary….but then for some ungodly reason sharing it with the world.
108) War, Part 4: Solutions?
It seems to me that war stops only when one of two conditions are met. Neither of these conditions are very likely, or easy. They are definitely easy to critique, easy to dismiss. But the alternative, as we discussed previously, is more war in a world, bristling with weapons, poised on the brink of global ecological collapse. So….yeah, we can have that, or we can figure out which of the following conditions we are most likely to be able to meet.
107) War, Part 3: The 21st Century
Can you imagine how you’d react if, in each of those stories, just as the Enemy is at the gate and the Heroes are gathering for their courageous final battle, the whole thing just….stops? The heroes decide at the last moment to just say fuck it and go do something else? Like, instead of battling for the Earth, let’s take our IronMan suit and Captain America shield and let’s go fuck something up, take over a country maybe, and make ourselves rich! MWAAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!
105) War, Part 1: Love
“Hey Mommy, Daddy, Grandpa, Grandma…..What did you do during the Great War?”
Have you ever thought of how you will answer questions like that? Because your future will, if you are lucky, arrive, and you will have lived through whatever atrocities humankind inflicts on each other in the present days and coming years. And someday, someone you will care about very much is likely going to ask you that question. … Nobody wants to know, “deep down inside”, that when it really mattered, they failed.
91) The great unraveling: A horror story of life on Earth
When I started teaching at the UofT, in 2002, I still believed a citizen-led evolution of politics would be enough to reinvent the economy and turn things around. Not in time to save the natural world as we used to know it, but in time to save enough of it that we wouldn’t experience large-scale collapse, leaving humanity to fight each other for the scraps left on a dessicated, charred planet.
I still try my damnedest, day to day, to believe that, because giving up that belief is to give up the belief that “we will make it”. But honestly? Most of me doesn’t believe that anymore; I just cling to it in order to stay somewhat sane in the face of a global holocaust.
69) Purpose -- Part 2 -- Why the Environmental Movement has Failed (so far) -- Act II: Change or Die
“Change or die” does not work. It convinces basically nobody. Changes almost no behaviours. It’s like being attacked by an enemy. You don’t open your doors to them and welcome them into your home. You barricade your door, dig trenches, lock and load.
This is one of the biggest reasons the “environmental movement” has largely failed. And it’s why it will likely continue to fail. Unless it changes its strategies.
68) Purpose -- Part 2 -- Why the Environmental Movement has Failed (so far) -- Act I: Me & You
I love you.
You might be thinking….”Really? That’s creepy.”
Or you might be thinking….”Really? We’ve never even met!”
Or you might be thinking…..”Why, what’d you have in mind?”
Or you might be thinking…..”Huh? I thought this was about why the environmental movement has failed.”
65) Protesting: What’s the point? It’s just a bunch of activists getting arrested and stopping traffic or some shit, amiright?
I didn’t talk to a single person who wasn’t uncomfortable with, or unaware of the fact that we were inconveniencing people who were “just trying to get to work”. But, The System IS killing us. We’ve spent literally DECADES trying to – do good science — raise awareness — establish dialogue — pass laws — change lifestyles — inspire people — work with governments — etc. etc. etc. etc. And it has not worked. Things are worse in the ecology of our Collective Life Support System than ever before in the history of Homo Sapiens. Everything “normal” has been tried. A thousand times over.
It’s time to misbehave. So these are some of the people I met today who, reluctantly, joyfully, were misbehaving.
63) Jordan Peterson, Part 5: The Perfect House Problem; Subsection 6 -- Lived Experience
Perhaps then, you will start to understand ‘that look’ — that gleam that is so unsettling to the intellectual skeptic or theorist, that unwavering solidity that you see in eyes that are past fear, eyes that have seen so much pain they won’t close to ugliness ever again. When you see the stability in people’s eyes who have witnessed sufficient suffering, you have met a person who can drink in the entire ocean, who can absorb an entire sun, because their hearts are broken into so many pieces they have atomized and become the Universe.
60) Jordan Peterson, Part 5: The Perfect House Problem; Subsection 3 - Jordan's Tarantulas
You show me the "class" of people who you think have their house in perfect order, and let's see who these people are and whether the rest of us think we should actually trust them with the fate of us all.
58) Jordan Peterson, Part 5: The Perfect House Problem; Subsection 1 - He Who Is Without Sin
Jordan Peterson wants to save the world from the horrors of the Gulag, from the 100 million corpses he talks about. But right here, in Rule #6 of “12 Rules for Life,” he gives us close to the WORST POSSIBLE advice for preventing more chaos, more hundreds of millions of corpses.
57) The bleeding hearts and the artists: 'Requiem' for a species
Rational discussion is important. But woefully insufficient. And people’s impatience at others’ ideological closedness, when they themselves have stared into the abyss and wept over the bottomless pit of human atrocity, is perfectly, perfectly understandable.
55) The Wind of Change
Healing happens. Hearts open. Society evolves.
It’s messy. But keep at it. It pays off eventually.
41) Jordan Peterson, Part 1, Subsection 4: Moral Foolishness
It is very easy for a “sort yourself out” message to get co-opted by the standard individualistic identity project that most of us are already struggling with, as we try to ‘self-improve’ and get motivated and “awaken the giant within” and all that. To the extent that the psychology of motivation gets applied in ways that are unwise, that are not conducive to both individual and collective human flourishing but instead could simply be in the service of a person’s ego, the “sort yourself out” approach, can easily become a force of destruction, like a once-cozy campfire that has gotten out of control….
35) Thoughts on Three TEDx Talks
I was trying to take people, right there, in that moment, on a journey, to engage minds and connect with hearts, directly, from me to you, unimpeded by theory and intellectualization. Rather than aiming for a rational appeal that could be communicated discursively, I wanted to engage people in a form of honest, authentic dialogue that transcended mere spoken language but could be conveyed through music, symbolism, story and nonverbal behaviour. So I tossed theory completely out the window and went straight for the heart through poetry, song, story, and drumming.
And it worked