The Sublime Paradox of the Human Dilemma

The failed predictions of widespread famine famously made by Thomas Malthus for the 19th century and Paul Ehrlich for the 20th century have cast a long shadow over, if not completely discredited, similar perspectives. This is both understandable and unfortunate. Understandable because repeated failure usually suggests a mistake in theorem and because depictions of apocalypse have become so commonplace—indeed, entertainment for a world-weary chic—that a little optimism seems refreshingly sincere. It is unfortunate because we are dismissing a horrible truth: overpopulation and famine are not distant mirages; they are present day realities.

Famine Memorial in Dublin: Rowan Gillespie, Sculptor

For the past half-century, humanity has experienced a quiet, nearly invisible, yet continuous famine. At any one time, 800 million to a billion people are severely malnourished; 9 million die of hunger and hunger-related diseases each year; and an unimaginable two to three billion people suffer blindness, anemia, and physical and mental stunting from deficiencies of the micronutrients zinc, iodine, iron, and vitamin A. Unlike famines of the past, civilization’s perpetual famine has not been concentrated in any one country, but rather has proceeded as a chronic event spread unevenly across the globe, thereby losing the kind of solidity that our minds need in order to name and recognize it. To rescue it from vague abstraction, I have named it a perpetual famine.

The future promises to be worse. Much worse. Even without the specter of global warming to exacerbate our problems, even were the future to provide the most accommodating of climates, humanity’s fortunes are now tied to a host of conditions going just right for us. And unfortunately, most if not all of them have gravely worsened in the past fifty years—arable land; water and energy resources; fish stocks; crop losses due to pests; forests and biodiversity; political and economic health. That is, our resource base and Civilization’s flexibility to deal with crises are both rapidly deteriorating at the same time that the human population continues to swell and ask increasingly more from the planet and from our societies. Although we have already turned much of the earth into a vast feed trough for our species, storage granaries stand at all-time lows, leaving us little cushion. Several years of poor harvests in the world’s breadbaskets—due to drought, heat waves, flooding, or disease—will likely set off a pervasive global famine.

Population overshoots and ecosystem destruction are not rare in the geological and archeological records. And neither are species diebacks and societal collapses. Both serve as nature’s self-correcting mechanisms. Unique to our globalized Civilization, however, is that our ecosystem now encompasses the whole of the earth. And we are in the process of destroying it—this it being our very life support system. While nearly everyone studying the problem agrees that the destruction wrought by our species is accelerating and that catastrophe looms near, we still beget more children, blithely consume more products, and squander our extraordinary, unprecedented wealth on outmoded fossil fuel lifestyles, institutions, and war.

Gaki-zoshi (Scroll of the Hungry Souls): Artist unknown, Late 12th Century, Japan

Radical Mind Shift attempts to explain the great paradox of our times and reveal why humanity will likely choose catastrophe over sustainability and how, in the long run, nature will nevertheless force humanity into a sustainable existence. And it offers hope—now—for each individual and collectively for humanity. For the solutions are simple: consume less, produce less, work less—far, far less. And serve more, play more, meditate more—again, far, far more. The solution is simple, but not easy. It is keenly radical. It turns our modern belief system on its head. It weds the common truths of our greatest triumphs—Science and spirituality—and paradoxically requires us to live the kind of life of which our dreams are made. Ultimately, it requires, as Aldous Huxley suggested some eighty years ago in Brave New World Revisited, an internal revolution as much as an external one.

To consider such a sweeping solution, however, we must first completely accept the problem. Radical Mind Shift peers unblinkingly into the environmental degradation and the suffering created, past, present and future, by Civilization, and offers five unequivocal propositions:

(1) There will not be enough food for all the humans projected to exist this century.

(2) This will lead to a massive human dieback (whereby hundreds of millions, perhaps billions will starve), beginning within the lifetimes of most people alive today.

(3) Although there are numerous effective actions we—as a species and as nations and individuals—can take to prevent the dieback, we have thus far remained powerless to enact them.

(4) We will likely not change our unsustainable behaviors because the beliefs that inform our cultures and mythologies are—at their roots— the very causes of the problems. The environmental crisis is a crisis of consciousness.

(5) Nature will insure that humanity complies with its laws by steering us away from our human-centered thinking towards a more integral awareness, one whose beliefs, mythologies, cultures, and societies promote sustainability. To that end, one powerful self-correcting mechanism is Dieback. Another involves the breakdown of our stubbornly unsustainable societies and cultures, leading quite possibly to the collapse of global Civilization.

Because these propositions are provocative enough, the tone remains passionate, yet reasoned, and only the most well accepted sources and consensus data are employed. Given the complexities inherent in such an epic-sized story as this, the discussion can often become dense with reasoning and supporting facts. The goal of this website is to render the subject accessible to nearly everyone, for the message is simple, profound, and crucial. And that message takes the two largest mega-trends of the past century—the destruction of nature and the evolution of consciousness—and places them squarely within the context of our lives.

A voluntary population decrease, a sustainable economy, innovation—we will surely require them all. We will need a significant shift in our consciousness to help us choose wisely from the multitude of available political, economic, and technological solutions that hang like ripe fruit within our grasp. Through the millennia, societies have gone through many shifts in their collective consciousness. Beliefs, worldviews, and behaviors have changed radically, and paradigmatic shifts have occurred with increasing frequency. The present shift has just begun. At its core, it involves the healing of a rift between humanity and the rest of nature. With the magical powers we gathered from agriculture, industrialization, and modernity also came ecological and existential blowback. In becoming dominant over Nature, we became separate from it. The more separated we feel from the rest of creation, the more self-centered we are and the smaller our worldview becomes… and the correspondingly more limited is our repertoire of solutions. Our solutions come almost exclusively from the limited human-centered world of economics and technology. We have come to depend on the magical powers of materialism, or, in reaction to its obvious psycho-spiritual drawbacks, to simplistic, human-created, human-centered notions of the cosmos, codified in anachronistic religions. To be whole, we will reintegrate the “spiritual” in us—the artist, the lover, the mystic, the naturalist. That whole person places herself directly at the center of the necessary change. Her individual shift in consciousness manifests in her behavior and ripples out through the world, helping us all shift a bit. This will be our most difficult undertaking.

Of those matters over which we have some control, our worldview is the most difficult to change. It requires an extraordinary awareness (or luck or grace) and then a generous portion of humility. And so most people remain steadfast in the belief that it is not their worldview that needs revising, but that of many and nameless others. Not surprisingly then, there has been little response to the environmental devastation, to carbon emissions, and to the human predicament, in general. It usually takes a crisis, personal or collective, for a person to be willing to radically change his behaviors. Still, it does appear that the new shift has begun. There are those (mostly quiet) heroes who have begun forging the way forward. And when the soup does hit the fan, we are fortunately a species magnificently adapted to adapt to changing circumstances. Culture is one of our most powerful tools. With a rate of mutation far faster than our genes, indeed faster than even bacterial reproduction, cultural change will lead us forward. Our culture shapes our worldview. We pick and choose a bit, but for the most part we accept some version not very different from our society’s dominant paradigm. As our material world changes in the coming decades and centuries—as we phenomenologically experience the blowback of all the suffering Civilization has caused—our paradigms will change correspondingly. Likely, sustainability and equity will become guiding principles. Sustainability will help resolve the enmity between our species and the rest of the planet, and equity will help dissolve social, political, and psychological tensions. The obstacles to sustainability and equity are principally the inertia of paradigms and the vested interests of those who maintain power through the various institutions—political, business, media, military, and religious. The sooner and more voluntarily we can move into the new mental and existential space, the less suffering our species and all the planet will experience.

The Sublime Paradox of the Human Dilemma

The Dieback of the Human Species

Why Our Solutions are Not Working