There is no doubt that catastrophe is often a major catalyst for change, simply because human beings want to escape the pain involved. This is most obvious in the AA program where hitting bottom (a nadir experience which can involve jail, loss or relationships or jobs) can lead to transformative change. So the major predictable changes in the upcoming decade will likely create a rich opportunity for transformation.
However, for some alcoholics and addicts the "bottom" is death. Yet, prior to this point if there is even a smoldering ember which might be fanned into flame, the key will be through people of programs that have an understanding and practice of the process of recovery.
The hypnotherapist, Milton Erickson, specialized in understanding and utilizing skillful means for catalyzing positive change before things were utterly lost. He applied techniques which involved inducing surprise, shock, doubt, indirection and confusion to accomplish therapeutic (and lifestyle) change, utilizing the right brain -- e.g. images, stories. I have successfully applied variations oof this approach in working with prison inmates -- both incarcerated and in the community, among others. We will be looking more thoroughly at this approach in future pieces. For now one can reasonably say that the upcoming years will present many opportunities for confusion, disorientation and shock. The key is having voices in place that will be available to suggest and guide us in fresh directions.
With this in mind I invite you to consider the following from a few researchers who have spent years looking critically at our predicament.
French sociologist Edgar Morin (Homeland Earth):
"The planet is in turmoil: the crisis of progress affects all of mankind, everywhere creating disarray" Science is not only a source of enlightenment, it is itself blind as to where the scientific adventure is leading, an adventure that is slipping beyond its control and beyond the reach of its conscience".
Morin continues, inviting all human beings to contemplate another vital dimension:
"the fact of runaway positive feedback, an acceleration that is currently, overtaking all sectors of life. The rate of change is itself accelerating. The question now becomes whether we have crossed a critical threshold in the process of acceleration/amplification that could lead to an explosion or implosion involving any number of deadly global threats."
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Morin asserts that, in addition to the specific problems that we, as individuals, communities, and nations face (serious and daunting as they may be), we must also meet and grapple with "problems of the second order." These "meta-problems" stem, primarily, out of a planetary crisis: "the problem of problems: the inability of the world to become a world, the inability of humanity to become humanity."
And from Philip Mumford, in his 1972 book, the Transformations of Man:
""the supreme achievement of mathematics and physical science in our world is that which led to the equation identifying mass and energy [and] only a mind and method of the highest order could have unlocked these cosmic secrets. But to what end was this consummate feat of intelligence directed? " While these lethal powers were being multiplied [with all the resources available] - the amount of thought spent on creating the moral and political agents that would be capable of directing such energies to a truly human destination was, by comparison, of pin-headed dimensions
[On 1/25/18 the latest Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (of the Science and Security Board, which has been in existence since 1945) announced that the "Doomsday clock" had been advanced to 2 minutes to midnight. (For more details sees https://thebulletin.org/2018-
Mumford goes on to say:
"Never before was man so free from nature's restrictions, but never before was he more the victim of his own failure to develop in any fullness, his own specifically human traits. This extreme state of post-historic rationalism [may very likely] carry to a further degree the paradox already visible"The more rationalized become the means of living - the more irrational will finally become the end product, man himself. In short, power and order, pushed to their final limit, lead to their self-destructive inversion: disorganization, violence, mental aberration, subjective chaos""This tendency is already expressed in America through the motion picture [and] television screen"These forms of amusement are all increasingly committed to enactment of cold-blooded brutality"."
It certainly appears that, at present, the United States is unable to accept the reality that it cannot control the world. The more it tries, the more destruction, death and chaos ensue. This is what the term "deep politics" is all about.
Instead of creating a "world order" that works for the greatest number of people and the Earth, the U.S. keeps creating world disorder. World disorder reciprocally threatens domestic order as more and more of the U.S. wealth and basic human rights are drained off by military expenditures, ideologically-based removal of long-established domestic rights (e.g. habitus corpus) and maintaining a foreign empire.
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