Thank you for your thoughts and inspiration on a working Saturday night Karen, - together we matter! What an wonderful end of the blog with having Charlie back. I wish he got to meet his brother Bob in Lofoten <3
Thanks for sharing your article, Gean. I had no idea that "curiosity killed the cat" was linked to Schrödinger's thought experiment! I like your idea that "ignorance killed the eco" and will continue reading the translation!
I am sorry to hear about your family’s cat. A year ago, I wanted my Buki back more than anything. The idea that he took himself off to die, or that he had been stuck up a tree and my cat sitter was responsible for his unnecessary death by not contacting me nor looking for him properly for 3 days, was awful. I looked for over a week, sometimes collapsing in exhaustion during the day and setting an alarm to go out at night when my voice would travel further. Spraying my urine for a mile radius to help him find his way home helped add a tragicomic aspect to the search. I’d try anything, and my cat lover friend told me it might work. That was despite in an altered state of consciousness from exhaustion on the 1st day of my searching, i had a vision and feeling of him being dead and his life force leaving this world, taking a bit of mine with it. It felt like through our love on this plane we conjoin with the consciousness of that which we love, in ways which go, attach, or imprint somewhere when they or we die. However, when some people told me to keep believing he was alive, similar to simply pretending that, my reaction was stronger than I’d imagined. I felt that they didn’t appreciate this situation enough to live in reality. Their invitation was for me to pretend, not to redouble my search or come up with new ways to search. Their idea was to convince myself he was alive in order to magically manifest that reality. It was then that I realised my own repulsion at that worldview, where I regard it as a cowardly solipsism. Yes strong words, but that is how I saw it. I did more than most people I know to search for my cat because I had a compulsion to try as hard as possible. At ten days I gave up. But I felt on that first day it was in vain.
“They do not matter” is what you wrote about people who share the Deep Adaptation worldview and ethos. Have you talked to many of us? Or seen research on the social engagement of such people? Both experience and research show we don’t think we don't matter. We don’t know if we matter or not at a large scale. That seems rational. But we know we can matter in many smaller ways and we don’t need stories of scale or lasting impact to motivate us. You repeat, when you wrote “If we believe that collapse is inevitable, we are unlikely to engage simultaneously with the practical, political, and personal spheres of transformation to shift the very systems and cultures that are having devastating outcomes for people and the planet” Again, research and activist testimony proves otherwise. We are living radically differently, some as full time climate activists, precisely because we have a catastrophic outlook. And we don't equate collapse of modern society as the end of everything. Stella Mbau wrote about it well here, including some links to relevant psychological research.
Your statements are not uncommon. They might be projections revealing your own value system rather than those you write about. It might be you think you need a story of impact at scale to motivate you to engage to create change. If you look into why you need that then it might reveal to yourself that you don’t need that after all! Instead, you may actually do a lot of things because it feels right to do it. Keep looking for the cat, not because you think he is alive or have the capacity to pretend he is alive, but because looking for the cat is the right thing to do... for a time, and not at the expense of many other priorities in your life.
I said during the seminar that my view is any fractal contributions we each might make at deeper quantum levels are not merely the ones we intentionally choose as ‘good’ actions. Rather, our reproduction of the tropes of our culture (e.g. consequentialist ethics) and our participation in its institutions (e.g. debt, credit, savings) etc, are all creating the current abnormal, which is the daily advance of omnicide that we have learned to be normal within the era of Imperial Modernity. It is our culture that has separated things into economic and normal, rather than political and unjust, and thus directed the desire for change into things which are secondary, rather than fundamental. Thereby preserving the current system.
Thank you for your thoughts and inspiration on a working Saturday night Karen, - together we matter! What an wonderful end of the blog with having Charlie back. I wish he got to meet his brother Bob in Lofoten <3
Thanks Berit! I miss Bob -- and Lofoten. You are not the only one working on a Saturday night!
Beautiful!
I have written a article on LinkedIn which I like to share, see link bellow.
Curiosity killed the...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curiosity-killed-gean-van-erp?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&utm_campaign=share_via
Thanks for sharing your article, Gean. I had no idea that "curiosity killed the cat" was linked to Schrödinger's thought experiment! I like your idea that "ignorance killed the eco" and will continue reading the translation!
I am sorry to hear about your family’s cat. A year ago, I wanted my Buki back more than anything. The idea that he took himself off to die, or that he had been stuck up a tree and my cat sitter was responsible for his unnecessary death by not contacting me nor looking for him properly for 3 days, was awful. I looked for over a week, sometimes collapsing in exhaustion during the day and setting an alarm to go out at night when my voice would travel further. Spraying my urine for a mile radius to help him find his way home helped add a tragicomic aspect to the search. I’d try anything, and my cat lover friend told me it might work. That was despite in an altered state of consciousness from exhaustion on the 1st day of my searching, i had a vision and feeling of him being dead and his life force leaving this world, taking a bit of mine with it. It felt like through our love on this plane we conjoin with the consciousness of that which we love, in ways which go, attach, or imprint somewhere when they or we die. However, when some people told me to keep believing he was alive, similar to simply pretending that, my reaction was stronger than I’d imagined. I felt that they didn’t appreciate this situation enough to live in reality. Their invitation was for me to pretend, not to redouble my search or come up with new ways to search. Their idea was to convince myself he was alive in order to magically manifest that reality. It was then that I realised my own repulsion at that worldview, where I regard it as a cowardly solipsism. Yes strong words, but that is how I saw it. I did more than most people I know to search for my cat because I had a compulsion to try as hard as possible. At ten days I gave up. But I felt on that first day it was in vain.
“They do not matter” is what you wrote about people who share the Deep Adaptation worldview and ethos. Have you talked to many of us? Or seen research on the social engagement of such people? Both experience and research show we don’t think we don't matter. We don’t know if we matter or not at a large scale. That seems rational. But we know we can matter in many smaller ways and we don’t need stories of scale or lasting impact to motivate us. You repeat, when you wrote “If we believe that collapse is inevitable, we are unlikely to engage simultaneously with the practical, political, and personal spheres of transformation to shift the very systems and cultures that are having devastating outcomes for people and the planet” Again, research and activist testimony proves otherwise. We are living radically differently, some as full time climate activists, precisely because we have a catastrophic outlook. And we don't equate collapse of modern society as the end of everything. Stella Mbau wrote about it well here, including some links to relevant psychological research.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-26/misplaced-positivity-on-climate-is-harmful-preparing-for-breakdown-could-help/
Your statements are not uncommon. They might be projections revealing your own value system rather than those you write about. It might be you think you need a story of impact at scale to motivate you to engage to create change. If you look into why you need that then it might reveal to yourself that you don’t need that after all! Instead, you may actually do a lot of things because it feels right to do it. Keep looking for the cat, not because you think he is alive or have the capacity to pretend he is alive, but because looking for the cat is the right thing to do... for a time, and not at the expense of many other priorities in your life.
I said during the seminar that my view is any fractal contributions we each might make at deeper quantum levels are not merely the ones we intentionally choose as ‘good’ actions. Rather, our reproduction of the tropes of our culture (e.g. consequentialist ethics) and our participation in its institutions (e.g. debt, credit, savings) etc, are all creating the current abnormal, which is the daily advance of omnicide that we have learned to be normal within the era of Imperial Modernity. It is our culture that has separated things into economic and normal, rather than political and unjust, and thus directed the desire for change into things which are secondary, rather than fundamental. Thereby preserving the current system.