How Deep Does The Human Crisis Go?

How deep does the human crisis go? As I’ve often written, I feel humans today face an unprecedented crisis of consciousness itself.

First the facts. As Christiana Figueres, head of UN climate change during the Paris agreement negotiations, recently said:

“Two years on from the signing of the landmark biodiversity plan, we continue to finance our own extinction, putting people and our resilience at huge risk. Estimates are higher than previously thought – with at least 3 trillion dollars now funding the destruction of nature, endangering the chances of meeting our nature and climate goals.”

Notice how what she did not say, and how she did not frame the disaster in the usual anachronistic language of the mass media, such as:

“Governments continue to provide billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies and other spending that directly work against the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the 2022 Kunming-Montreal agreement to halt biodiversity loss, with countries providing direct support for deforestation, water pollution and fossil fuel consumption.”

Figueres spoke in the language befitting the planetary ecological crisis, and the language of the global society that has superseded countries and cultures.

Viewing the decimation of the earth in the fragmentary terms of nations is the problem. But the global media insists on reinforcing nationalism by mindlessly adhering to the obsolete nation-state framework. That makes them complicit in the very Sixth Extinction and human extinction they’re reporting and opining on.

Most progressives believe that national governments must reclaim their “sovereignty” in order to enact laws at the national level, which will then somehow harmoniously globally converge. That’s a pipe dream for two reasons. First, because human history has moved beyond the nation-state as an organizing principle; and second because nations will always operate out of their own self-interest.

It’s impossible to square the circle between national self-interest and the wellbeing of the earth and humanity.

The mindset of nationalism, which ineluctably leads to “belligerent nationalism,” often bleeds over into the attitudes of war in progressive thinking: “We are at war with an authoritative power structure hell-bent on killing every living thing in their defense of a “belligerent nationalism.” It’s a war we must win.”

The world is spending more than two trillion dollars a year on subsidies that drive global heating and destroy nature, an increase of a trillion dollars in the two years since the UN Kunming-Montreal biodiversity agreement at Cop15 in December 2022. The increase was driven by the consequences of the war in Ukraine, which sharply increased fossil fuel subsidies.”

That is where the identification with nations has brought us – to the brink of ecological collapse, as well as nuclear war. We must end patriotism and war within us, not follow some fantasy of mass mobilization against an authoritarian power structure.

Is the problem, as boilerplate progressive philosophy maintains, “our allegiance toward capitalism embedded in systems of dominance and species exceptionalism?”

That explanation for man’s destruction of the earth has become a Procrustean bed. It’s true as far as it goes, but it cuts off the legs, head and root of the problem – the misuse of conscious thought – to fit the narrative of a “global fascist regime.”

Even most academic philosophers are blind to the unprecedented nature of the present crisis. One I read recently made the best case for conventional, “nothing-is-essentially-different- now” thinking:

“Anyone who thinks the conflict in Ukraine or the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented is suffering from a severe case of historical myopia. Were young people any less anxious in 1916, as they were struck down in the hundreds of thousands by the “Spanish” Flu? Were parents more sanguine in October 1962, as global nuclear war was imminent?”

These are classic straw man questions, something philosophers are the first to knock down, because they aren’t relevant to the present polycrisis, but distract from it.

The larger and truer question is, are the challenges that humanity now faces different enough in degree to make the human crisis different in kind? Clearly, they are. Never before has humankind faced a planetary ecological crisis wrought by our own hands. Never before has a machine, in AI, posed a threat to the human mind and brain, even if its danger to our very existence is overblown.

So we return to my initial question – how deep does the crisis go?

As deep as the human mind goes. Man is a creature of symbolic thought, and consciousness based on thought, which is inherently separative and fragmentary, has become untenable for the individual and humanity. A higher and immeasurably truer order of consciousness awaits our transmutation.

That can and must occur within the individual. And it has nothing to do with mobilizing and going to war against capitalism or any other damn thing.

Martin LeFevre
lefevremartin77@gmail

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