Here’s a virtual toast to your flourishing in 2025. But more so than any other year, our wishes should not just be from person to person, but rather wishes for societies – and the society of societies, global humanity. I haven’t felt so gloomy about politics, broadly defined, in a very long time. A genocide is happening while all of us can see it, and mainstream politics and society tries every trick possible to rationalize and justify what is happening. Our politicians are failing to get us off the path to the deadly collapse of Earth’s ecosystems. The rise of autocracy and fascist policies has now reached such levels that we may start to wonder why so many in the generations of our parents and grandparents risked, and often sacrificed, their lives to free us from fascism – only to give us the freedom to vote the authoritarians and the fascists back into power.
(I deleted all the swear words I included when I wrote the first draft of this post. But I confess, these days I swear a lot when I think and write about politics).
So what to do? There are at least three options: Fight, flee, or freeze. The last one would amount to just let it happen, and hope for the best – that technologies will save us, that democracies are resilient, that we are exaggerating the dangers. Well, I am not sure… is this position supported by the facts? I doubt it, and the risks of being too optimistic or naïve are too large, in my view.
The second, flee, would be to acknowledge the dangers but stop being politically engaged, or not take up the opportunity to become politically engaged, because one doesn’t want to be involved – too risky, too burdensome, too much of a hassle. One can flee into the the world of shopping-malls and consumerism, or the world of yoga and meditation retreats, or just go off-grid and live a simple life in Walden. Or become obsessed with money and one’s own social status. Fleeing certainly has its attractive features – to avoid having to be stressed and risk activists’ exhaustion, and just simply to have an easier life. But except if one does not care that something similar to Apartheid or genocides could reoccur, or that Russian-type “democracy” might spread over the world, it is a position whereby one freerides on the efforts of others to engage in the resistance to evil. [click to continue…]