Editorial: Fear of The Now
Don’t believe what you read in the papers. It’s not about the economy, or energy, or pollution or population. There is only one crisis: the crisis of transformation. I was reminded of this as an old friend, Rachel’s Democracy and Health newsletter, published its final edition last month. Rachel’s was a deep pool in an increasingly shallow world and it will be greatly missed.
The newsletter revisited a 1969 paper, published in the journal Science, which posited that it wasn’t any single future crisis that would bring us to our knees, but the sheer speed with which multiple crises would be presenting themselves if we didn’t change course. Of course the Ecologist has been saying much the same thing for all these years too.
How is it, when the facts have long been at our fingertips, when it was perfectly possible to see where our unrestrained and outrageous selfishness, violence and stupidity was leading, that we have failed to act? What have we been doing all these years to have missed the boat so comprehensively?
The answer lies not in our fear of the future but in our fear of the here and now. It’s the fear of our peers, of doing things differently, of speaking out, and worst of all, of being rejected by the tribe for doing so. It’s understandable to want to belong – we’re only human after all. But we have to ask, just what is it we belong to these days? And why?
True individuals are often seen as a threat, and yet individuals strengthen the tribe, not weaken it. This month’s edition features profiles of 10 extraordinary individuals. They aren’t famous; instead what links them is their vision of a better world and the courage of their convictions about how things could be if we could only get some critical mass behind the idea of change.
The pain of transformation is hitting us all on both the personal and the collective levels. The multiple crises we face require a radical response that can’t be met simply with technology or any other kind of magic that ‘someone else’ is responsible for. It must also encompass the realms of individual human consciousness and potential. Everyone is frightened, but like young children playing hide-and-seek, so many seem to be closing their eyes and hoping the crisis won’t find them. In the meantime they keep flying, keep consuming, keep engaging in behaviours and relationships and addictions that are no longer valid, no longer support who they are and no longer contribute to their own or the greater good. Worse, they keep arguing the same old arguments against change as if the narratives of our lives are fixed, and are completely disconnected from each other and from the greater whole.
In my years of campaigning for evidence-based healthcare, the biggest hurdle was always an unwillingness to embrace change. Doctors would continue to perform the same pointless surgeries, recommend the same useless tests and prescribe the same dangerous drugs because that is what they had always done. To change that behaviour was, to them, an admission that they had founded their beliefs and behaviours – indeed, their lives – on something less than solid. That admission was too painful to face, so many chose to continue to be a part of the problem rather than take a personal or professional inventory and become a part of the solution.
As the psychoanalyst RD Laing said, ‘the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain’ – our own and others. Let’s wake up to the moment in which we find ourselves, embrace it even if it is painful, and live it as if life really mattered.
- This article was first published in the April 20090 edition of the Ecologist.
