Dear Friends and Family,
Here I am at the end of the year, reflecting on what I’ve learned, and what I’ve done and will do in 2025. As I think about the new year, and the future, I’m synthesizing ideas I’ve read and heard that discuss how to prepare for a future much different from today. Not like a ‘prepper’ with material goods, but with connections, with social capital. Podcaster Nate Hagens speaks of the inflexion point ahead as the need for bending and not breaking, economist Umair Haque views it as collapse into a convulsion. Both speak of the need to act now by either finding havens or building pro-social capital.
Umair Haque’s views on collapse, convulsions and havens:
When I talk about re-negotiating our relationship with the world that’s collapsing, I think every facet of it should be structured around havens. Havens — from careers to places, communities to relationships, ideas, institutions, organizations, networks, societies. We need to structure our lives around havens in a constructive and expansive way — to start finding, building, discovering, creating them. I think we, you need to start right now.
The world is not going back to what it was. The world is not capable or interested in going back to what it was. We are seeing an unravelling now. Unless you really grasp it, feel it, see it, you will not be able to create or find your havens. Without a sense of urgency, immediacy or necessity, you’ll be trapped in the panic-despair-bewilderment spiral — perpetually surprised, and perpetually paralyzed.
So, the first step is understanding that the imperative of havens thinking is real. An era of history is now coming to an end, and as has happened in the past, it is accompanied by convulsions.
What happens when empires collapse? Societies? World orders? Anything from war to financial crisis. Things crescendo then they convulse. Convulsion is the stage after collapse. It is where we’re heading. This is the point at which history gets scary. Currently, your gut may be trying to tell you something with feelings of fear. Don’t ignore it. It’s wiser than your mind.
For many, collapse hasn’t been pleasant, but it’s been livable. If you have enough money, if you’re still relatively affluent, have savings, a nice home, etcetera, if you’re among the last lucky few who are living the dream, and can sort of wall yourself off…
The convulsive stage is not like that. This is what your gut is telling you. When societies, when organizations, when worlds convulse, then just walling yourself off doesn’t really work anymore. Sure, if things are slowly, creeping in the wrong direction but you’re still in your nice house with your nice cars, as David Byrne might have said — what’s the Big Deal?
Convulsion isn’t like that. What happened in 1935 in Germany? What began in 1930 in America? How was it to live through the time of a really decadent Roman Emperor? Convulsive stages are when stuff gets real. When it gets really scary, because now anything can happen — and all can be lost, just like that. And that’s not the worst part. After the convulsive stage, it’s that much harder to act. Nearly impossible. After convulsion, you’re trapped.
Before convulsion is the time you can still do something. But after the convulsive phase begins, accelerates, intensifies? Then you are stuck. Havens are that much harder to find, create, discover, after a convulsive phase is intensifying.
Let’s take a simple example, which is from an era I won’t name. When a convulsive phase began, certain kinds of people lost everything they had, and it was that much harder for them to…
There is a BC and AC. Before Convulsion and After Convulsion. Where are we now? That depends on where you are, and where you are in life, but mostly, we’re right at the edge.
An example of a society in a post-convulsive phase is Britain. It entered a convulsive phase, twisted itself apart in a kind of madness of spite and lunacy. Its people lost their healthcare system, their money, their savings, their possibilities, their futures, and perhaps most relevant to this particular point, the ability to create lives for themselves elsewhere, like in Europe, which they could easily do before the convulsive phase. This is BC and AC. Take that seriously, because right now, most places in the world are still Before Convulsion. Even if it’s fast approaching. We’re at the point at which you must develop havens thinking — fast.
After Convulsion? You can’t escape. You can’t flee. You don’t have the rights, resources, money, whatever. The chances are over. The game is up. I want to underscore the urgency, because the point is to develop, create, find, discover them before it’s too late. And there is a too late, in ages like this, where eras of history end — the point of Convulsion.
You might ask yourself: How am I structuring my money around financial havens? How am I structuring my professional life around institutional havens? How am I structuring my personal life around people who get havens, and aren’t wasting time and energy pretending everything’s going to be fine? How am I structuring my mental life around havens thinking — learning, developing, understanding, whether it’s history, economics, society, etcetera? How am I structuring my emotional life around emotional havens? Am I just doom-scrolling it all away? How am I structuring my creative life around creative havens? Am I just sort of glued to YouTube or whatnot, sapping my ability to really create anything, like the life I want?
I don’t know if I’m interpreting him correctly, but I am spending my time uplifting alternatives to capitalism, uplifting workers and uplifting efforts to help people in my community. Anywhere I see a spark, I aim to provide oxygen for a flame. In order to have the time to find and support havens, I have made the choice to spend time this way.
I feel fear. My gut tells me that all around me people are not as concerned with global heating as they should be. Not concerned with the welfare of the people around us, of society. The other day a hardworking anti-airport expansion activist said to me, “Why don’t I hear about this?” when presented with some scary climate facts. “Because there’s no money to be made in folks knowing this,” was the answer from several activists in the conversation.
I am supporting the many people and organizations fighting airport expansion. What am not doing? I am no longer flying. I no longer look to vacations as something I need — a getaway from my daily life. My vacation is every day that I wake up and choose what I want to do to create havens. My vacation is going for walks with friends, inviting neighbors over for game night or dinner, biking to Alki beach.
I am supporting unions as havens. I spent December 22nd through 24th flyering Starbucks employees and customers in support of the Starbucks Union. I enjoyed talking with customers in support of the union, chatting with my activist friends, being part of a nationwide effort for more Starbucks stores to join the union. I enjoy being part of the change I see coming. It’s better than being paralyzed and afraid. Better than avoidance.
I find a haven in groups working to end military air shows, support rail travel, protect urban trees. I am able to do this because I have structured my life in a way such that, by living simply, (and receiving financial help at critical junctures), I have time to support many causes and join communities doing the work.
I have found a haven in the West Seattle Time Bank, a group focused on helping each other not with monetary recompense but with their time. With the White Center (the name of the town I live in) Solidarity group — working to form relationships and support each other and those in need through solidarity, be it renters or undocumented or unhoused. With the White Center Food bank, a genuinely fun place to volunteer where people are treated with respect and provided access to good, culturally appropriate food.
I have found haven in activist and teacher friends, book club, tennis, neighbors. Always with the theme of building community and fighting fascism and inequality. I feel more at home out protesting the Starbucks CEO commuting to work on a private jet and making $57,000 an hour than going out to a bad Hollywood movie.
I hope that you are finding your havens — aware of the precariousness of our situation and of the privilege you may have.
Nate Hagens and The Great Simplification
I highly recommend Nate Hagens’ Great Simplification Podcast where he has talked with hundreds of scientists and scholars. To start, I would recommend episode 100, where Kate Raworth, author of Donut Economics, interviews him.
He also produces “Frankly” musings.
In Frankly #78, “A Brief Clarification on Human Behavior,” he stated,
Two weeks ago I had a ‘Frankly’ on the battles of our time and I want to issue a clarification on something I said on human behavior about the fact that in today’s world only 3 to 4 percent of humans are going to do the right thing and appeal to the better angels of their nature. I want to clarify what I meant by that…I am confident… that our brains and our neural architecture and behaviors are as much a product of our evolutionary past as our bodies…our brains and our behaviors, our jealousy, envy, status, our short term focus, cognitive biases, all of those things are a product of 290,000 years living in small bands in the Pleistocene.
Most of our evolutionary past, we did pro-social things. That was the driver of our strong reciprocity behavior in small bands, where we not only punished cheaters, but we punished those who didn’t punish cheaters. This exists in the animal kingdom. There is grooming, and punishing of alpha males in ape species if they are too hard on another ape. There are lots of examples of social reciprocity in the animal kingdom.
So, here’s the clarification. What I meant was that in today’s age where there’s an economic superorganism dominant, where we have downward causation, where we have this hierarchical, metabolical, force drawing down, sucking out the best of our natural behaviors because we all are compelled to live within this, profit seeking, extractive, growing institutional structure, that there are only three or 4 percent of humans that will buck that trend and counter it in our current economic institutions and that won’t be enough to meaningfully change the direction of the metabolism of the superorganism.
But that led me to think there are actually three distinct timelines for our work, my work:
- One is the right now. As long as the superorganism is dominant and debt and technology are able to kick the can forward a little more, this is a time when we can be good humans, doing right by our families, our businesses and our world, but only at the margin with respect to the debt and energy fueled economic superorganism. This is a period where we are to prepare and change the initial conditions of the coming moments.
- The next moment is the bend, versus break moment, which in Ukraine and Syria and Madagascar and Afghanistan and dolphin populations and other things has already happened. But for many of us, the bend versus break moment is still ahead. During this period, there will actually be a lot more humans who cooperate and roll up their sleeves for the greater good because it’s going to be a much more obvious emotional situation to them. There are probably the same number of bad actors, sociopaths, Machiavellian, dark triad people alive today as there will be then. Today they’re just hidden, so they will be out in the open then more than now. But there will be a lot of pro social behavior, much more than the 3 or 4 percent I mentioned. That period will go on for some time, I don’t know how long.
- Then there will be a more stable stateafter the financial system, the international trade system, and other things stabilize. We’ll have the stability of knowing, here’s our available energy, here’s our daily economic production, here are our expectations. And again, during that period, we will have a lot more, social reciprocity. Much more than three or 4 percent of our populations, I expect, will follow the better angels of their nature.
So, I wanted to clarify that, human behavior is vitally important. I believe that we are doomed if we don’t create a culture based on the already existing and actually quite dominant intrinsic values that humans naturally hold — of caring for nature and caring for each other. This is the crucible from which we evolved. In the current state of the culture we inhabit, especially in the global north, these values, because of the economic superorganism, because of the hierarchies and structures, have been systematically suppressed and betrayed.
I personally think it’s sad — to have a picture of humans merely as economic men, homo economicus, that are generally egoistic and narrow. This is a desolate and dismal view of human behavior. And it’s not true. There is plenty of evidence showing that it’s not true and it doesn’t lead us where we need to go.
So, please take this as a retraction that there are only 3 or 4 percent pro-social humans. That’s not what I meant. I meant that the metabolism of the superorganism is strong and that we have to use foresight to breathe life into the prosocial pathways that are ahead.
At a conference, I met a neuroscientist who said he watched my Sapolsky episode. He said whether free will is true or not is not the question. The derivative is the relevant question — that those people who believe in free will actually have better immune systems that are better able to engage with the future and are healthier and have a better outlook and are more likely to do impactful things.
It seems true to me that if you believe that we have some agency and free will, you’re naturally more likely to express it. It’s also true that engaging with the meta-crisis, with the coming Great Simplification, and believing that there are pathways ahead that we can intervene in, engage and play a role with, is empowered behavior and will probably lead to a more meaningful and enjoyable life.
So, with that, I will issue my brief retraction on human behavior. I think we are plastic. As we look at the world around us, the biggest predictor of our behavior is conforming to what others do. What others do is going to change. And let’s hope that, we can respond in a pro-planetary, pro-future, pro-social way.
I do see myself as part of this three to 4 percent willing to give up flying to protect the planet and airport communities, willing, happy to spend my time moving the Overton window toward (back to) a more pro-social society. When it is acceptable that a corporate CEO can make 1000 times their employees, when we have for profit health care and prison systems, when our waterways and bodies are littered with microplastics, when we give our political power to billionaires, we find ourselves in a world that doesn’t make sense to our “dominant intrinsic values that humans naturally hold of caring for nature and caring for each other.”
I see it. I feel it. Maybe, I hope, you do too. There is something you can do but you have to want to ‘find your haven’ or ‘appeal to the better angels of your nature’ before we go from collapse to convulsions. The work can be enjoyable and joyful so why not start now?
Much Love,
Andrea
December 2024
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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