The bottom-line of our denial manifests as our preoccupations in daily life and lack of awareness and effective, necessary action.
SELF-OBSERVATION
With the realities of the Internet, satellites, and television, etc., we have entered the era of communication. In the long-term, the human capacity for self-observation and self-reflection may begin to intensify - enabling more and more of us to observe ecological devastation, massive famine, and civil unrest. We will be faced with tremendous stress and challenge, as we are confronted with an unavoidable awareness of things falling apart.
Once we recognize the extent of the damage, our planetary situation will at many moments seem to be hopeless and incapable of solution.
No doubt some will continue to deny and rationalize this state of affairs as long as possible. We won't want to look at what we have created; many of us will insist on avoiding becoming aware of (or justifying) our egocentric, ethnocentric, and xenophobic mental habits.
It seems probable that in the next decades the difficulties we will encounter will, at many moments, seem overwhelming; there will be nowhere to escape. Caught in a web of complexity and complicity (given our unavoidable participation in society), it will seem that humanity is rapidly approaching the breaking point. Our choice will be inexorable: the world will either descend into chaos or ascend in a process of global transformation.
The fact is that we will need each other to both process our grief and generate social creativity in the face of multiple, dire, harrowing problems. If humanity remains divided and unwilling to work for the advance of all, the world will likely collapse into planetary feudalism, resource wars, misery, and poverty. Calamity is likely to descend upon the planet.
Edgar Morin, a French systems theorist and sociocultural scholar reminds us that, given the inter-retroactions between our different problems, crises, and threats, we can accurately name our situation in its totality as "a poly-crisis."
Peter Russell has summed up our global situation this way:
"If, however, humanity does find ways to resolve the various problems and conflicts facing it, it will have proved it can adapt successfully. In this respect crises not only serve as evolutionary catalysts, but also as evolutionary tests, examining the adaptability of the system. Indeed...we may have reached the final test of our viability for further evolution.
"This test, of course, is not a physical test. It is a test of our consciousness. It is an assessment of whether or not humanity is psychologically and spiritually fit to live on the planet Earth, whether we can change at a very fundamental level the way we relate to others and to the environment, whether we can work in harmony whether we can balance centuries of material progress with an equal amount of inner growth."
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The first step on a path to recovery is - as AA puts it: to admit to ourselves that our lives on Earth have become unmanageable. Many of us will find this a difficult and humbling process.
Morin, who has deeply considered our planetary situation, offers the following suggestion:
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