In Deep Response I argued that attempting to ‘solve’ the multiple unfolding crises of the world was to misunderstand the kind of issue we are facing in the 21st century. I claimed that we didn’t actually have a problem, because problems are issues that can be made to go away with some particular set of actions that we call a solution.
What we have here is a predicament. A predicament is an issue that cannot be made to go away as a result of some action. A predicament can only be responded to. In other words, we can’t make the situation go away and return to the previous state. We can only take actions that have an impact on our relationship to the situation.
You and I can’t fix the climate. Significant global climate change is baked into our future. Making climate change go away is not an action available to us any more. We can respond in a variety of ways: we can ruggedize our households and communities, we can move away from threatened coastal areas, we can reduce our carbon footprint and work on decarbonization efforts to reduce the total impact and risk of ultra catastrophic climate change, we can admit that our species has triggered destructive climate change, accept it and grieve it, and then put on our grown-up pants and get on with dealing with the consequences of our species’ actions.
You and I can’t snap our fingers and make boundless clean energy freely available to all. We can recognize that fossil fuels was like hitting a once-in-a-species-lifetime lottery, and that there are serious consequences and implications from increasing per capita energy usage so much, and that it is possible to live good, amazing lives while using a tenth or less of the amount of per capita energy as the first world currently does. We can see the writing on the wall and reduce our own household energy use dramatically, proving that per capita energy use doesn’t have to increase year over year in order to increase overall well being.
I could go on.
Ultimately, and most saliently, Deep Response is about responding to the predicament of global hegemonic consumerism, and all of the downstream crises triggered by running a global civilization on such ideology, by becoming post-consumers, first in our own lives and households and then extending outwards to our communities and societies.
Deep Response is not about how to get the powers that be to stop forcing the disaster of consumer ideology onto us. It’s not about how to stop or change global hegemonic consumerism. It’s not about how to make compassionate green consumer choices and feel better about our participation in a death cult.
It’s about how to reject that death cult and orient towards something else, something truer, in our own lives, without waiting for permission from anybody.
Different people can have different specific motivations for pursuing Deep Response. Maybe you care more about reducing the level of harm and hypocrisy in your lifestyle, the mismatch between your values and the logic of your lifestyle. Maybe you care most about freeing yourself to be able to work on regenerative projects – you want to throw yourself into urban gardening, or an intentional community, or activism, or advocacy, or something else. Maybe the state of the world keeps you up at night and you want to do everything you can to keep your family safe, warm, healthy, and fed, regardless of what specific current crisis is unfolding in your area. Maybe you want all of the above, or something different entirely. Whatever your personal reason for wanting to internalize post-consumer praxis happens to be, it’s fine. Welcome.
So perhaps, in the future, consumer ideology and culture will reach the end of its self-terminating logic and eat itself. Perhaps we can help it get there a little faster with the examples of our own lives and by attracting people to a different way of life, especially as consumerism becomes less and less of a good deal and loses its grip on people’s minds.
We can build pockets of the future post-consumer world in our own homes, backyards, and neighborhoods, like weeds growing through cracks in the pavement, and one day there will be nothing left but stories of the way things briefly were.
For those of us alive now who care about such things, we must understand our lives as prefigurative and thus subversive. We’re living our lives as if the reality of the world we want to live in already exists, and as if the means are the ends. We’re not advocating for the future we want, we’re demonstrating it. To do so is subversive because it doesn’t just claim that the dominant ideology is a lie, it proves it in the day to day reality of our post-consumer lives.
We’re living a transition between the world that is and cannot be, due to its self-terminal logic, and the world that will be. The world that will be will emerge out of the ruins of the current hegemon. The world that will be will NOT be dictated top-down. It will emerge out of the nooks and crannies, the eddies and seed-pockets that we cultivate now and through the next many decades. You and I are, right now, today, building the unfolding future we won’t live long enough to see ourselves.
Recognizing how long this all might take can be both frustrating (I want to see and live in the global solarpunk ecotopia of my dreams NOW!) and liberating. Liberating because in some sense the pressure is off. We probably won’t see the end of industrial consumer capitalism in our lifetimes. It isn’t a failure if we don’t succeed in toppling the Machine and replacing it with whatever we think would be better within the next decade. I suspect it’d cause more harm than good to try to move that fast. I think that kind of thinking is part of what got us in this mess in the first place. We’re playing a long game here. Stay cool. Build good things. Protect the good things we already have.
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