How can we change without changing?
This is really the truth of most change initiatives. Let’s appear to change. Or tinker with change so we can feel good.
Climate Action is almost entirely professing change without changing, for if there was an integrous commitment to change, then people would confront that it will only come with whole systems change. The very operating system of Western hegemony needs to be dismantled.
So we gather at places like COP and various Climate Action weeks, and we play the game of rearranging the deck chairs on our Spaceship Earth Titanic, drinking cocktails and cheering the polished guardrails of our efforts.
While our Spaceship sinks the band keeps playing.
Poverty – the same. The commitment is not to end poverty, but to appear to be working on ending poverty. To end poverty the entire capitalist system needs to be composted.
Colonisation – well in some parts of the world territorial colonisation is alive and very well, cheered and applauded by the Masters of the Art of Colonisation themselves, the colonised being wrapped in the taint of being the terrorists while their terrorist colonisers gloat over spoils. And on our entire Spaceship Earth data colonisation has infected almost all the citizens, our thoughts, emotions, art and creativity sucked and scraped to be turned upon us as both weapons and means of profit extraction. We, the artists, pay for our art at least twice.
I wonder, sincerely, when, or if, the penny will drop and it will dawn on us that the change we need is not tinkering and rearranging.
It is monumental. Every single existing operating system that coordinates humanity needs transformative change. Monetary. Capital. Housing. Health. Wealth accumulation. Accounting. Measuring. Education. Legal. Governance. Politics. Food.
All.
So shall we dispense with the BS of the big corporations and their green initiatives? The government committed to emissions reductions as they agreed to new coal and gas mines. The need for Impact Investing to make a profit is its first imperative. All of it, all of it, lives in a Molochian world – the big black box with an opaque algorithm that traps us in the death spiral.
I am not sure we can pull out of the death spiral. But I know that the only way we can pull out of the death spiral is a complete end to the very tools, systems and structures that seeded the death spiral.
No time to lose.
Photo Taken July 28th 2024, Article written October 16th 2024
