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Police snipers opposite Kreditbanken where Jan-Erik Olsson held workers hostage for six days. Photo from AFP.
Most people know the phrase Stockholm Syndrome from the numerous high-profile kidnapping and hostage cases – usually involving women – in which it has been cited.
The term is most associated with Patty Hearst, the Californian newspaper heiress who was kidnapped by revolutionary militants in 1974. She appeared to develop sympathy with her captors and joined them in a robbery. She was eventually caught and received a prison sentence.
But Hearst’s defence lawyer Bailey claimed that the 19-year-old had been brainwashed and was suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome” – a term that had been recently coined to explain the apparently irrational feelings of some captives for their captors.
More recently the term was applied in media reports about the Natascha Kampusch case. Kampusch – kidnapped as a 10-year-old by Wolfgang Priklopil and held in a basement for eight years – was reported to have cried when she heard her captor had died and subsequently lit a candle for him as he lay in the mortuary.
Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped as a 10-year-old by Wolfgang Priklopil.
While the term is widely known, the incident that led to its coinage remains relatively obscure.
Outside Sweden few know the names of bank workers Birgitta Lundblad, Elisabeth Oldgren, Kristin Ehnmark and Sven Safstrom.
It was August 23, 1973 when the four were taken hostage in the Kreditbanken by 32-year-old career-criminal Jan-Erik Olsson – who was later joined at the bank by a former prison mate. Six days later when the stand-off ended, it became evident that the victims had formed some kind of positive relationship with their captors.
Patricia “Patty” Hearst • 19-year-old American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped and held hostage by little-known group the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1974 • She was apparently brainwashed into accepting their ideas • In April 1974 she was caught on CCTV helping the group to rob a bank • She went on the run, but was caught by the FBI • Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison, but was released after three years • She was pardoned in January 2001 by President Bill Clinton
Stockholm Syndrome was born by way of explanation.
The phrase was reported to have been coined by criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot. Psychiatrist Dr Frank Ochberg was intrigued by the phenomenon and went on to define the syndrome for the FBI and Scotland Yard in the 1970s.
At the time, he was helping the US National Task Force on Terrorism and Disorder devise strategies for hostage situations.
His criteria included the following: “First people would experience something terrifying that just comes at them out of the blue. They are certain they are going to die.”
“Then they experience a type of infantilisation – where, like a child, they are unable to eat, speak or go to the toilet without permission.”
Small acts of kindness – such as being given food – prompts a “primitive gratitude for the gift of life,” he explains.
“The hostages experience a powerful, primitive positive feeling towards their captor. They are in denial that this is the person who put them in that situation. In their mind, they think this is the person who is going to let them live.”
But he says that cases of Stockholm Syndrome are rare.
So, what went on in the bank on Stockholm’s Norrmalmstorg square that enabled the captives to experience positive feelings towards their captors, despite fearing for their lives?
In a 2009 interview with Radio Sweden, Kristin Ehnmark explained: “It’s some kind of a context you get into when all your values, the morals you have change in some way.”
It was Ehnmark that, according to reports, built up the strongest relationship with Olsson. There were even erroneous reports afterwards that the pair had become engaged.
Employees taken hostage in the bank’s vault by Jan-Erik Olsson.
In one phone call from the bank’s vault to the country’s prime minister Olof Palme, Ehnmark begged to be allowed to leave the bank with the kidnappers. One of Olsson’s demands had been the delivery of a getaway car in which he planned to escape with the hostages. The authorities had refused.
Telling Palme that she was “very disappointed” with him, Ehnmark said: “I think you are sitting there playing chequers with our lives. I fully trust Clark and the robber. I am not desperate. They haven’t done a thing to us. On the contrary, they have been very nice. But you know, Olof, what I’m scared of is that the police will attack and cause us to die.”
American journalist Daniel Lang interviewed everyone involved in the drama a year later for the New Yorker. It paints the most extensive picture of how captors and captives interacted.
The hostages spoke of being well treated by Olsson, and at the time it appeared that they believed they owed their lives to the criminal pair, he wrote.
On one occasion a claustrophobic Elisabeth Oldgren was allowed to leave the vault that had become their prison but only with a rope fixed around her neck.
She said that at the time she thought it was “very kind” of Olsson to allow her to move around the floor of the bank.
Safstrom said he even felt gratitude when Olsson told him he was planning to shoot him – to show the police understood he meant business – but added he would make sure he didn’t kill him and would let him get drunk first.
“When he treated us well, we could think of him as an emergency God,” he went on to say.
Stockholm Syndrome is typically applied to explain the ambivalent feelings of the captives, but the feelings of the captors change too.
Police officers wearing gas masks escort Jan-Erik Olsson from the bank.
Olsson remarked at the beginning of the siege he could have “easily” killed the hostages but that had changed over the days.
“I learned that the psychiatrists I interviewed had left out something: victims might identify with aggressors as the doctors claimed, but things weren’t all one way,” wrote Lang.
“Olsson spoke harshly. ‘It was the hostages’ fault,’ he said. ‘They did everything I told them to do. If they hadn’t, I might not be here now. Why didn’t any of them attack me? They made it hard to kill. They made us go on living together day after day, like goats, in that filth. There was nothing to do but get to know each other.'”
The notion that perpetrators can display positive feelings toward captives is a key element of Stockholm Syndrome that crisis negotiators are encouraged to develop, according to an article in the 2007 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. It can improve the chances of hostage survival, it explained.
But while Stockholm syndrome has long been featured on police hostage negotiating courses, it is rarely encountered, says Hugh McGowan, who spent 35 years with the New York Police Department.
McGowan was commanding officer and chief negotiator of the Hostage Negotiation Team, which was set up in April 1973 in the wake of a number of hostage incidents that took place in 1972 – the bank heist that inspired the film Dog Day Afternoon, an uprising that came to a violent end at Attica prison in New York and the massacre at the Munich Olympics.
“I would be hard pressed to say that it exists,” he says. “Sometimes in the field of psychology people are looking for cause and effect when it isn’t there.
“Stockholm was a unique situation. It occurred at around the time when we were starting to see more hostage situations and maybe people didn’t want to take away something that we might see again.”
He acknowledges that the term gained currency partly because of the bringing together of the fields of psychology and policing in the field of hostage negotiating.
There are no widely accepted diagnostic criteria to identify the syndrome, which is also known as terror-bonding or trauma bonding and it is not in either of the two main psychiatric manuals, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD).
But the underlying principles of how it works can be related to different situations, say some psychologists.
“A classic example is domestic violence, when someone – typically a woman – has a sense of dependency on her partner and stays with him,” says psychologist Jennifer Wild, a consultant clinical psychologist at the University of Oxford.
“She might feel empathy rather than anger. Child abuse is another one – when parents emotionally or physically abuse their children, but the child is protective towards them and either doesn’t speak about it or lies about it.”
Forty years on and the term is evoked nearly every time an abductee is found after many years out of public sight. Some argue that its very nature implies a criticism of the survivor – a weakness perhaps.
In a 2010 interview with the Guardian, Kampusch rejected the label of Stockholm Syndrome, explaining that it doesn’t take into account the rational choices people make in particular situations.
“I find it very natural that you would adapt yourself to identify with your kidnapper,” she says. “Especially if you spend a great deal of time with that person. It’s about empathy, communication. Looking for normality within the framework of a crime is not a syndrome. It is a survival strategy.”
This article was originally published on August 22, 2013, by BBC News, and is republished here with permission.
The Lord God, Maker of Heaven and Earth, was rushed into emergency surgery after accidentally shooting Himself while cleaning His gun. Hear what doctors have to say about His chances of recovery.
Noted TV personality and public science advocate Bill Nye made an unusual pitch for NASA funding this week: We should fund the space agency because its research could nail down whether humankind is descended from ancient life on Mars.
“If life started on Mars first, it’s extraordinary but not crazy to suggest that you and I are descendants of Martians. That is an extraordinary hypothesis,” he said in a new interview with Politico. “It’s not that much money to change the course of human history.”
Big Pitch
As the head of the influential Planetary Society, Nye is lobbying Congress to crank up the funding for NASA. He told Politico his top priority is supporting the space agency’s upcoming Mars rover mission, which will attempt the first-ever feat of sending Martian rock samples back to Earth.
“The first thing every congressman said is… Are they worried about contaminating the Earth with Martian dust?” Nye told the site. “My answer is yes! If you thought of it, they thought of it. Those rocket scientists thought of it.”
Space Case
Even more fundamentally, Nye sang the praises of space as an ideological project that represents hope and progress for humanity.
“Space is optimistic,” he told Politico. “If you stop looking up and out, what does that say about you? Whatever it is, it’s not good.”
FEBRUARY 21, 2020 by VICTOR TANGERMANN (futurism.com)
Brain Jar
In a new interview with British magazine The Face, singer and visual artist Grimes revealed her wild plans to travel to Mars.
When asked if she’d “rather go to Mars or upload your consciousness to the cloud,” the renowned musician — and Elon Musk love interest — couldn’t make up her mind. But she settled on a spacey alternative.
“I guess I’d like to upload my consciousness, and then when it’s technologically possible, have my consciousness live in some kind of humanoid vessel that can speak and move freely, and then that body can go to Mars and other planets with my mind inside it,” she pondered.
Promo Tour
It’s been a turbulent couple of months for the Canadian performer. First, she made an appearance at the 2020 Game Awards and then announced she was having a child.
Her long-awaited fifth studio album called “Miss Anthropocene” also dropped today, to widespread fanfare.
Grimes also spoke of her new “digital avatar, aka my digital self,” which she calls “WarNymph,” a freaky-looking computer generated alien humanoid with enlarged eyes, copious amounts of virtual cosmetics, and wearing the newest duds by fashion house Balenciaga.
Identity Potential
This avatar takes the brunt of the grim bullshit humans have to put up with in 2020.
“The avatar allows us to play to the strengths of digital existence rather than be a human trying to navigate a world that isn’t made for us,” she told the magazine. “For example, the digital body can age, die, respawn, change her face… There’s so much identity potential!”
“I wanted to untether my digital self from my humanity,” Grimes said. “WarNymph can take on the burden of the new world. I can live more freely IRL.”
“This
is the City – Los Angeles, CA. I don’t carry a badge and my
name’s not Friday, but here are the facts:
My
name is Lashonda Bates. I live in Skiatook, Oklahoma.
Let
me tell you about my trip to California and my first Prosperos
Assembly almost two years ago. It was an unforgettable experience in
more than one aspect. There were times of joy in site seeing, and
there were trials in truths. It is hard to describe and sum up the
feelings that arose during this trip, but I will try my best to
demonstrate the feelings of passion that arrived in discovering the
meaning of “being”.
The
first day in California was a very warm welcome down at the ballroom
of the hotel. We shook hands and we hugged. Not a single person in
the room went without a hug and a simple “aloha”. “Aloha” was
the theme. The center of the atom that we call “The Prosperos”.
This was an exciting event. The thirst for knowledge, and most of
all, love, was in the air. Everyone came together, shared stories of
the past when The Prosperos was in it’s infancy. Laughter
overpowered any other sound in the room. All I can describe is how
warm it felt in that welcome. That night we had an elegant dinner in
the ballroom. The setting was incredibly calming. We had great, deep
conversations that got even deeper after a few glasses of wine.
Everyone was relaxed, as they should be. I, myself, ended the night
with some much needed quiet time in a bubble bath. I have to note
that the hotel’s bathtubs were extremely roomy!
The
next day was the beginning of the real fun, the start of the Assembly
of the
Prosperos.
The first lesson that caught my attention was on “Saturn Cycles”
as I learned I had entered mine, which explained a lot going on in my
life. I was already having so much difficulty in this cycle. It felt
like everything was crashing down around me. I was desperate for
answers on how to change out of the destructive pattern that I had
found myself in.
There
were many great speakers during this assembly. There was so much to
take in that you literally felt full in the stomach of your
knowledge. That is the only way I can describe this particular
experience of learning. It’s important to have an open mind during
these assemblies. Set your judgment aside and just listen. Meditate
on the words, feel yourself in the scenarios and stories. Just open
your mind and imagination, because there is so much more to life than
what you see and feel with your physical senses.
Another
reason that it is important to set your ego aside is the fact that
these
assemblies
are incredibly intimate. Those who are veterans of the Prosperos have
already been through the trials and they have let their “hair down”
per say and they share some very intimate things in their life. They
share things that will bring you to tears, because their portrayal of
it is not a portrayal, it is RAW, it is REAL. And you will feel it in
the fibers on your bones. And you will want to feel it, too, the
releasing of the hidden splendor. It’s something I am still working
on to this day. And I will admit, that I have a long way to go.
Before
the assembly started there was a class of Thai Chi instructed by the
Dean of the Prosperos, Al Haferkamp. The class was held in the
mornings at 7 am, for 1 hour. Unfortunately, I was never able to make
it to the class. The time difference between California and Oklahoma
was too much for me in the beginning. But, after another remarkable
demonstration from Al, I have began practicing Thai Chi for better
health, physically and mentally. His demonstration of Thai Chi was a
lot about “flow”. “Flow” is a simple word, a simple meaning,
but in reality, a true flow is a trying reach. I would like to say
that every single one of us who are in the Prosperos are either:
A)Practicing
the flow or;
B)Eager
to reach the flow in order to practice it on a regular basis.
I
enjoy using the techniques that I have learned so much. It has helped
me
immensely.
I still have a ways to go, but I will say that the journey is
extraordinary. Everyday is a new beginning, the past does not define
you as a person, nothing defines you but YOU. And that’s what has
been the biggest asset that I have gained from this knowledge. And
like I said before, I still have a lot to learn, and a lot to gain. I
couldn’t be more thrilled.
The
rest of the trip was amazing. We went sailing on Al’s sailboat. We
had great conversations, more stories and teachings. The view was
amazing. The air was pure. Feeling it on my face was relaxing, and I
took a chance to meditate on things.
A
part of my shell was peeled away on those waters, as I let go of
things that I allowed to hold me back. I was on my way to freedom,
thanks to the “flow” of those waters.
After
Assembly, we stayed in a quaint town, Morrow Bay. The mornings were
absolutely stunning to watch. The sun and all of it’s colors,
showing it’s magnificence while I enjoyed my simple cup of coffee.
We ate at little restaurants that had so much personality. The people
we met were so welcoming. To end, I will say there was a lot of
driving, but we did get to see some sites, and we walked on Venice
Beach and got souvenirs for our family and friends. We had such a
great time, and I look forward to going again sometime. California is
a wonderful place, with some wonderful people with a warm welcome. I
hear Denver is a match for such hospitality.
Aloha
to all the new people I met and all of you I hope to meet.
After searching for the
missing person, named Lashonda Bates, for sometime, the case has been
closed. The detective bureau received the following message:
“The Lashonda you are
looking for is gone forever. She has a look alike, but they are not
the same. And I hear this new Lashonda is a better version of her
former self!”
Some of the following
mug shots are rumored to be of (now) ascended masters. The rest are
on our watch list for those trying to escape:
Thank you
*Beth Kuper for all the pictures. I will be using more in future
flyers.
*Beth Kuper is looking for
a roommate at this year’s assembly. She has a reservation beginning
Friday night ( September 4) through Monday morning (September 7).
Please contact either Beth at bethkuper@gmail.com
or myself at prodolph@gmail.com
.
Cosmic
Intention Therapy
A Two-Day Class
Becoming
a Self-Directed Individual rather than an impulsive reactor DATE: Saturday &
Sunday, April 18 & 19, 2020TIME:
10:00 am – 5:00 pmLOCATION:
The Park Hotel, Madison, WisconsinFEE:
$95 (new); $45 (review)
What
is the Cosmic Intention?
It
is the Impersonal Self within us all. Today, we are living in a
time of profound change. We must be willing to break with
patterns of the past and WAKE UP to our true (higher) potential.
We must stretch our minds toward the PRINCIPLES of the UNIVERSE
to understand the COSMIC Intention and to experience the
fulfillment of our dreams.
Why
is it worth your time to understand the Cosmic Intention?
The
HUGE PROBLEMS that we face in our world today (climate change,
plastic in the ocean, animal extinction, gun violence, war,
etc.) are due to our neglect (personal
and our cultural)
of understanding the meaning and purpose of our common good and
the principles of the larger reality.
As
you consciously align your personal self with your Universal
Self – you will become a more “Self-Directed Individual”;
able to respond from conscious choice rather than from habit.
What
will you receive from this class?
A
full two day class (with lecture, drawing/writing exercises,
open discussion and video).
A
class workbook
A
FREE 1-hour Mentor counseling session
Thane
Walker:“The
future will not care how long it took you to create it – only –
is it beautiful and is it great?”
Margaret Mead:“Never
believe that a few caring people can’t save the world. That’s
all who ever have!”
The viability of our civilisation is uncertain. While opening our eyes means we’ll confront darkness, keeping them shut means it’ll stay dark. Let’s dare to look and start building new worlds alongside the old.
Dear reader
I offer you this essay in the hope that you may find something within it that will keep you buoyed in the years ahead. It reflects my own attempt to understand the converging crises in our near future, and to grapple with the question of what I might be able to offer that will be useful in that future.
It was the birth of my first child that catalysed a sense of urgency to take the idea-threads I had been tracing for some years now and to weave them into a relatively coherent whole. As any conscientious parent will testify, there are few things that will sharpen one’s focus on the future than a deeply felt sense of responsibility for a new being.
I feel obliged to issue a warning that you may find this essay a difficult excursion. If you are already in a vulnerable state of mind, you may consider waiting until you feel more resilient before reading on. The essay begins with a short tour of some bleak themes and my concern is that some readers may become lodged in this place. It moves through this though (kind of). The trajectory of the essay — and my core intent of the entire piece — is to move toward hope. That trajectory, however, requires that we begin with despair.
Photo: NASA.
Despair
Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum. –Kurt Vonnegut
If we were a more sensitive civilisation, despair could become the defining emotion of this era. We have plenty of reasons to feel it. Then again, if we were a more sensitive civilisation, the things that give us reason to despair would not be things at all. But that is not our world.
I am exhausted from despair. I’m sure you are familiar with the many converging crises that can induce this state. To begin, there is climate change. The impacts that have already occurred — including arctic and sheet ice loss, as well as increasing storm, drought and flood frequency — are at the very worst end of predictions that were made in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, the human activities driving these changes show little sign of stopping. This alone seems beyond our capacity to resolve. Yet it’s only the beginning. There is the depletion of conventional oil and gas reserves, forcing expensive innovation to access deeper and more remote reserves, gradually shrinking the energy return on energy invested toward a non-viable state. There will be supply for some time to come, but the age of cheap, abundant energy is slowly coming to an end. Then there are our topsoils, which are rapidly disappearing. Ocean acidification is rising and overfishing has caused catastrophic dwindling of fish stocks. Worse still is that at sea and on land the sixth mass extinction in the history of Earth is already underway, with the current pace of species loss outstripping the average for the last ten millions years by an extraordinary margin.
Our problems don’t even end there. To our environmental woes we should add the rapid growth in exponential technologies coupled with a fundamentally rivalrous global political dynamic. Similar to the splitting of the atom, the rise of artificial intelligence, bioengineering and nanotechnology hold the potential for immeasurably good ends for humanity and life on Earth. But as with nuclear technologies, the rivalrous nature of our relationships with each other guarantees these technologies will be subject to a weaponisation race. In this way we will multiply both the means by which humanity might extinguish itself and other life along with it, and the likelihood of self-termination.
Finally, there remains the most existential risk of them all: our diminishing capacity for collective sensemaking. Sensemaking is the ability to generate an understanding of the world around us so that we may decide how to respond effectively to it. When this breaks down within the individual, it creates an ineffective human at best and a dangerous one at worst. At the collective level, a loss of sensemaking erodes shared cultural and value structures and renders us incapable of generating the collective wisdom necessary to solve complex societal problems like those described above. When that happens the centre cannot hold.
Threats to sensemaking are manifold. Among the most readily observable sources are the excesses of identity politics, the rapid polarisation of the long-running culture war, the steep and widespread decline in trust in mainstream media and other public institutions, and the rise of mass disinformation technologies, e.g. fake news working in tandem with social media algorithms designed to hijack our limbic systems and erode our cognitive capacities. If these things can confound and divide us both within and between cultures, then we have little hope of generating the coherent dialogue, let alone the collective resolve, that is required to overcome the formidable global-scale problems converging before us. And so it seems, as Daniel Schmachtenberger might say, we are approaching the power of gods, but without the wisdom of gods.
How exactly did we arrive at this place? If you’re reading this in the early twenty-first century, then you were born at a unique point in human history. Our era has been characterised by an unusual degree of political and economic stability and prosperity, owing to a plentiful resource base and an ever more sophisticated ability to exploit it. The harm we wrought with industrial technology was not evident when this chapter began, but even after it became clear we were devouring the very substrate upon which our own livelihood depends, we continued just the same. With each mouthful, each purchase, each flight or road-trip and each delayed remedial effort and externalised environmental cost, we collectively and gradually shaved away a host of better futures. Somewhere along the line, we slipped into the orbit of a terrible mass of our own making.
Some of us still grasp for levers to pull, but they are now mostly beyond reach. We may have been originally responsible for putting the flame to the tinder, but now we are contending with a bushfire beyond our control. The problems before us are emergent phenomena with a life of their own, and the causes requiring treatment are obscure. They are what systems scientists call wicked problems: problems that harbour so many complex non-linear interdependencies that they not only seem impossible to understand and solve, but tend to resist our attempts to do so. For such wicked problems, our conventional toolkits — advocacy, activism, conscientious consumerism, and ballot casting — are grossly inadequate and their primary utility may be the self-soothing effect it has on the well-meaning souls who use them.
I reject the notion that this is pessimism. It is a sober acknowledgement of our collective reality. The evidence is in — even if we manage to avoid the worst applications of exponential technologies, we are at minimum already committed to an environmental catastrophe at a scale humans have never endured, and whose consequences we cannot fully fathom. The implications, for instance, of findings delivered by the International Panel on Climate Change are that, in order to avoid climate catastrophe we should already be achieving massive reductions in emissions today, and if we fail to make up for lost time by 2030, then we will have passed the point of no return. But we aren’t even in the realm of achieving this. Emissions are at record highs and continue to climb with no sign of meaningful abatement. Even complete compliance with the Paris Accords puts us on track for three degrees of global warming, by which time the thawing of tundra permafrost, disappearance of artic ice and melting of the Greenland ice sheet are predicted to set in motion a series of self-reinforcing feedback loops that will see warming spiral well beyond our control. That’s only to speak of climate change alone, let alone the myriad of implications of the other ecological and socio-technological crises.
The world our children will inherit will not be the same one we enjoyed. Today, warnings of civilisational collapse are no longer the domain of street-corner kooks wearing hand-scribed sandwich boards. Such sentiments are also echoed by some of our most accomplished and respected minds. To say that fundamental change is certain renders too benign a picture. Better put, we are somewhat fucked.
So what then is left for us to do except scramble vainly to dampen a world-ending fire?
Well, ‘fucked’ is a spectrum. I said we are somewhat fucked. We’re not completely fucked… yet. Despair is a necessary step, but only the first of many. There is so much to be done. It’s just not what you probably think.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we shall find the hope beyond hope, the paths that lead to the unknown world ahead of us. –Paul Kingsnorth & Dougald Hine
Most of us lack the stories that help imagine a future where we thrive in the midst of unstoppable ecological catastrophe. To borrow a phrase from storyteller Martin Shaw, this is because our imaginations have been colonised by things that don’t always mean us well.
We have been propelled to this point by the myths of progress, limitless growth, our separateness from nature and god-like dominion over it. These myths have shown up in our stories in peculiar ways of late. Since around the turn of the millennium there has been a surge in post-apocalyptic fiction. A steady stream of films, television series and novels have portrayed desolate and barely habitable future landscapes, often roamed by marauding bands of psychopaths, flesh-eating zombies or similar agents of malevolence. The frequent appearance of post-apocalyptic themes undoubtedly reflects our rising collective existential anxiety about our future. But perhaps more telling is the recurring themes of horror, deprivation and dystopian political order that nearly always characterise these depictions of the future. It seems our minds have been so thoroughly colonised by the myths of growth and progress that we cannot imagine how the collapse of the current order could possibly produce a future that resembles anything short of hell.
If we are to find a new kind of good life amid the catastrophes these myths have spawned, then we need to radically rethink the stories we tell ourselves. We need to dig deep into old stories and reveal their wisdom, as well as lovingly nurture the emergence of new stories into being. This will not be easy. The myths of this age are deeply rooted in our culture. The talking heads (even the green ones) echo these myths with the dogmatic fervour of zealots. They talk of “saving the planet” through transitioning to a “sustainable” future, primarily through new renewable energy technologies. They seem only able to conceive of a good life that mirrors our lives more or less as they are now, where the living standard continues to improve and rate of consumption continues to grow, yet somehow decoupled from all the pollution, destruction and guilt.
Their vision is fantastical: growing numbers of people placing ever greater demand on diminishing critical energy and environmental resources in an increasingly unstable climate, amidst fragmented global political will and declining trust in public institutions, and the increased availability of powerful technologies to actors whose intentions may be far from peace, harmony and ecological sustainability. For anyone to think this story plausible, they must lean heavily on faith that a deus ex machina has been written into the script of our near future. They must believe, contrary to any available evidence, that a string of technological quantum leaps and extraordinary political convergences will suddenly occur and save us. In other words, they must believe in miracles.
It’s not that I don’t believe in miracles. It’s just that I refuse to bet my children’s future on one. Evolution is characterised precisely by remarkable adaptations to new challenges that we might call miraculous, yet such shifts tend to transpire over tens of thousands of years. In contrast, we have mere decades at most, but likely less than that. If such a rapid onset miracle does manifest, then wonderful — I’ll be as grateful as anyone. But what if such miracles never come? My children deserve better than “we just thought they’d figure something out in time”. Magical thinking, blame and the expectation that others — including our governments — will fix our problems and save us are the hallmarks of a childlike worldview. In contrast, to take the world as you find it, to assume responsibility for that which you can, and to act as if what you do actually matters, is the mark of a mature adult.
My young children need me to be an adult. They are the reason I feel despair so profoundly. Yet they are also the reason I cannot wallow in it, acquiesce to it, or turn away from the horror. This is the reason I have sought to imagine another way, and to find and focus on that which I might do to usher that vision into existence, and to behave as if what I do really matters for their future. They are the reason I have directed my imagination to the multitude of paths only visible once I looked beyond the myths that have clouded much of my thinking. It is up to me to show them a way beyond grief to a way of life truly worth living for, even if it isn’t the path I had expected to be showing them.
New hopes are able to rise in our consciousness when we relinquish old ones. Opening your eyes means that you will see darkness, but keeping them shut means it will always remain dark. Indeed, on the other side of despair, peering through adult spectacles, I have found a hope. It is more tangible than a miracle, and it’s already being forged. It’s not a call to world-saving action. The time for that has expired. It’s something more on a human scale. No faith in miracles is required. All that is needed is to cross the threshold with ready hands and a sense, even a vague one, of what might be yours to do.
We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibres, our actions run as causes and return to us as results. –Herman Melville
As I’ve hopefully made clear, the jumping-off point for this essay is a regrettable acceptance that a forthcoming energy descent combined with multiple ecological crises will force massive societal transformation this century. It’s hardly a leap to suggest that, with less abundant cheap energy and the collapse of the complex political and economic infrastructure that supports our present way of life, this transformation is likely to include the contraction and relocalisation of some (if not most) aspects our daily lives.
The idea of contraction may conjure a sense of impending doom in some readers. That instinct is perhaps partly what drives someone like Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, to start preparing for the worst. “I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food.”, he said in an interview for The New Yorker in January 2017, “I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.” But survivalist preppers like Huffman have it fundamentally wrong. If the extent of your preparations for the crises ahead consist of building a doomsday bunker or designing the ultimate “bug out bag” and a plan to head for the hills where you’ve buried a cache of food, water, and weapons, then I wish you luck because history would suggest you have overlooked an essential ingredient.
The greatest weakness of survivalism — besides lacking the imagination to envision a future beyond self-preservation, rationing and a descent into depravity — is that the prepper largely conceives their activities as an individual affair. They prepare to protect themselves and perhaps a select few others by erecting barriers and shutting out a crumbling world. This misses a critical point: the resilience of humans depends less on their individual skill and intelligence and more in their ability to pool skills and intelligence, enter into coherent relationships with others, and cooperate on common goals. We even have a name for this kind of arrangement. We call it community. Humans are the only species of hominid capable of forming and sustaining cooperative relationships at scale for the purpose of pursuing mutually beneficial endeavours. On balance, these arrangements tend to generate more value for everyone than individuals can generate separately. Community is fundamental to the human experience, underpinning our capacity to both survive and thrive through difficult times.
When I say ‘community’, I’m not talking about an abstract cosmopolitan global community of citizens or some online virtual assemblage of people with a shared interest in glass mosaics, gardening or dank memes. I’m talking about a community defined uniquely by a place, and a people whose identities and daily lives are inextricably woven into the fabric of that place as well as into each other. It is a community at the human scale whose health is manifest in such things as a thriving informal economy of exchange and gifts, a native code of civility and conflict resolution, a sense of responsibility and mutual obligation, and the confidence and ability to decide its own goals, destiny and the actions it will take to get there.
Something important happens when we gather in pursuit of a common goal. First we form rituals that help us relate to and negotiate each other, everything from a civic tradition that allows anyone with a voice to be respectfully heard, to sharing food and music in the local town hall every Friday night, to a labour system that fairly distributes the burden of work. Then, those rituals that stand the test of time become embedded in daily life. The ritual activities themselves and the good they produce help a community identity take root. As identity strengthens, so too does our sense of connectedness — our sense of affection, responsibility and obligation — to one another. When this happens, we then share a greater capacity for coherence and cooperation. And where we share greater capacity for coherence and cooperation there is also greater resilience: the ability to mobilise skills and resources to support the emergence of collective intelligence in response to crisis, enable rapid adaptation and ensure the continuity of the most important functions and structures of the community. This coherent togetherness and the collective intelligence that emerges out of it is the source of human strength and ingenuity. Within it lies our ability to transition from one evolutionary niche to another, even against the odds.
Of course, community also gives us the very stuff we live for. Families, friends, art, music, stories, conversation, humour, love, belonging, good food and drink. These are the things that nourish us and make crisis and the discomfort of transition worth enduring. When we have these things, we have the good life. In exchange, community asks us a simple question: what do you bring to the table to offer others? What can you help to build? What is your role in this work?
Our age is one inundated by bullshit, where our relationships are mediated by things that sanitise and flatten our humanity. The bullshit distracts us from the fact that the tethers between us are being frayed. Perhaps this is what has produced the crisis of meaning afflicting so many today. The most profound meaning in our lives is located in the ties that bind us together. Many on their deathbed have attested that the quality of our connection with others is that which matters above all else. To that end, the calling is to shed the things that separate us, reacquaint ourselves with one another in our families and communities. In doing so, we reacquaint ourselves with meaning, and only then can we see clearly enough to begin realigning our economies and political structures to serve that which is meaningful.
This is why I do not feel called to stockpile, build a wall, and batten the hatch. Instead I feel called to open up and build the tiny world that may not extend all that far beyond my town. If many of us join together in that task and we do it well, then we will find a good life in our future, despite the collapse of the world we were born into. If we can sustain this good life, we may even discover a way to scale it to our regional, national and global levels. But even if my work only begins and ends on my own street, or my own home, this is important work nonetheless.
If we are to continue to thrive, we will need to know how to find and be with each other again. If our children are to thrive, we need them to know how to build and keep safe these bonds that nourish. That work starts at home.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. –R. Buckminster Fuller
As I see it, my job is not to fix the system or prevent its collapse. This is a fool’s errand. In ecological terms, collapse merely signals a phase shift from an inherently unsustainable ecology to a sustainable one. Of course, in human terms this involves the unraveling of the structures of civilisation upon which we depend — which could last anywhere from decades to centuries — thereby disrupting our way of life. For many species, this is almost certainly a recipe for enormous suffering. But unlike many species, the behaviour of humans is not wholly dictated by their genetic code. Culture also plays a role, meaning that humans have a unique capacity for rapid adaptation as the ecological system shifts. Although some suffering is likely, it may not all be inevitable.
I therefore take my task to be in finding the ways of living that preserve dignity throughout collapse and, more importantly, to create a lineage of ideas, traditions, rituals and institutions that might be useful after it. To that end, my job is to be attuned to the existing system, to work within it to the extent that I must, but to also work in parallel to it, experimenting in building the relationships, tools and structures that may be of use in reestablishing a good life when the centre begins to give way.
It is not clear to me what the work will require of me precisely, but what does seem clear is that there are few threads of work worth following. The first thread is the cultivation of deep humility. Technocratic arrogance, narrowly conceived problems and hastily deployed solutions are precisely the things that have led us to this point. Grand ideologies will not serve us well either. The past tells us that good intentions are not enough, that utopian models of the future are a dangerous mirage, and that we’d be wise to regard simple yet plausible-sounding narratives about our complex world with suspicion.
Instead, deep listening is needed. To listen deeply — to become profoundly aware of all aspects of your environment and your place in that system — is fundamentally a spiritual practice that reveals to us the essential interconnectedness of everything. It changes us as a consequence. Perhaps this is what is needed in order to shatter our sense of separateness from nature. Yet this change won’t occur through devouring propositional knowledge or via rhetorical persuasion. It is knowledge only gained through participation in the practice of deep listening itself.
The second thread is finding coherence, with one’s self, with each other and with place. We don’t know today what things will enable us to solve the problems of tomorrow. Our biggest problems are emergent and non-linear and most won’t be solved with linear thinking. Only emergent collective intelligence can produce non-linear solutions. This requires us to first cultivate our own ability to be present, perceive the world accurately, orient ourselves toward it, and find ways to give creatively. It also requires that we find new ways to assemble with people with diverse perspectives who are capable of coming into coherent relationships with each other for long enough to produce something worthwhile. We can’t come to such spaces laden with off-the-shelf ideologies born of old modes of thinking. As Albert Einstein said, “we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” It must be approached with humility and a beginner’s mind, ready not with solutions, but only the ability and steadfast commitment to observe, respond, fail, learn and repeat.
Coherence is hard. It requires a deep commitment to show up, and to keep showing up, to support each other in building our individual capacities to bring the best version of ourselves into the relationship. It’s a significant commitment, but it begins with simple conversation. This alone may go some way to regenerating the skill of relating to each other deeply. Many of us are out of practice since being largely divorced from community, barely acquainted with our neighbours let alone the wider town or suburb populace. We’ve become accustomed to our relations being mediated by sterile, functional economic exchange. Money has replaced the gift and exchange economy in almost every way, from our milk and bread supply to our means of sourcing care for our very young and very old. Relearning the skill of finding right relationship and coherence with each other in conversation itself may be the most significant part of the work.
We’ve also fallen out of relationship with the places we inhabit. The work necessarily involves moving consciously in these places again, slowly, to allow ourselves the space to learn its rhythms, its patterns, its history and potential. The grain tends toward the global. Yet it has been in part the placelessness of liquid modernity that has ripped us from our roots. We may then need to return fully to the local for a time, to even become parochial, in order to re-root and embed ourselves in the landscape and send out tendrils from our toes. A fundamental folly of modern civilisation is that we have forgotten that we humans are an emergent property of a massive ecology, the whole of which is the ultimate arbiter of our lives, our communities and our civilisation. There is no getting around it. So we must learn to dance with the places we inhabit.
The third thread is conservation. For its many flaws, Western civilisation has produced some of the greatest accomplishments of recorded human history. From the rule of law to the sovereignty of the individual, from its art and music to philosophy and science, the western tradition remains rich with value. Our task is to slowly and carefully decide what traditions we will carry forward. Decoupling them from their undesirable effects is difficult, if not impossible in many cases. If we want to keep the baby, we may sometimes need to keep some bathwater as well.
The West is, of course, not the only tradition with value worth carrying forward. Nor is ours the only age containing all that is good. We should expect and encourage a renaissance of sorts, an exploration and melding of cultures including those other than our own, and facilitate a rebirth of that which is old but good. It requires us to be conservatives on one hand, preserving and passing on what we have that is good, and radically progressive on the other hand, ready to meld the old ideas and traditions with new, the familiar with the strange, so that we may give birth to useful novelty.
The requirement for novelty in the face of unprecedented predicaments is why we should pursue the final thread: experimentation. Most good ideas ever tried throughout history have failed, some quietly and others catastrophically. Our traditions are those ideas that emerged over time as the things that worked repeatedly over hundreds if not thousands of years. We don’t know what will work in an uncertain future. The odds are against us, which is why we need as many people attempting as many different things as possible. Most will fail, but if we collectively keep moving, keep talking to one another, and keep moving toward the higher ground, we may eventually stumble upon the paths that will lead us there.
This is not a pursuit of a new shiny utopia. It is a muddling along to find the things that work. What we’ll create will at first seem a hodge-podge assembly of the strange and beautiful. In our lives, we may only ever amount to scaffolders. But in humility we may carry on toiling in the knowledge that we are preparing the way for our children and children’s children to become the architects of something more beautiful and intricate than we can fathom today.
The grand cruise liner of modern industrial civilisation has been taking on water for some time now. The engineers deep in the hull have reported that it’s gushing in faster every day through multiple breaches. They say it’s beyond patching now. They say there’s a very good chance the ship won’t make it unless it’s immediately dry-docked for repairs. But that is unlikely to occur. Those on the bridge have heard the engineers’ assessments, but they are at loggerheads over what to do. Some are ready to act urgently, while others doubt the engineers’ assessment and want to stay the course. Even if the engineers are right, they say, they’ll surely find a way to fix it just in time.
The word has also spread throughout the passengers decks. Some have descended into the hull and have joined the bailing effort. Others have ascended to the bridge and are banging on the windows, demanding those at the helm act swiftly. At some point, some of those pounding on the glass will break through, and in their attempt to commandeer the ship, there will be blood pointlessly spilled. Yet most passengers, even if they’ve heard the rumours, are either too distracted with the onboard entertainment or all-you-can-eat buffet. “If the ship is going down,” they say to each other, “then why are the waiters still refilling the dessert bar?” Meanwhile, others passengers have taken refuge in the bar where they sit, sunken into their chairs, paralysed in despair.
Then there are those who have quietly disembarked the ship. Look overboard and you’ll see them. They’re not fleeing for dry land though. They’re staying close by. You’ll see more paddling toward rafts they’ve built from whatever they could harvest with their own hands. In groups that seem to grow and contract on a loop as if breathing, they are working feverishly, yet creatively and playfully. They’re building structures on the water, only to pull them down again and reconfigure until they settle on a more elegant shape. The more who join the raft-builders, the more elegant their structures become. Some return to the ship for a time to learn, to understand what might be useful, and to bring these things back to the rafts and integrate them into their structures.
Not all newly assembled structures seem to work. In fact, most don’t. They are experimenting with different combinations of novelty and time-tested traditions, rebirthing the latter and fusing it with the former. The results are unpredictable and many rafts sink midway through construction. And so it goes, they muddle along until they find some way of being all at sea.
Some builders occasionally glance back at the ship and wonder if they’ve made a mistake. Right now the ocean liner is afloat. Above the water line, there are few signs of distress. You can even see people sipping pina coladas on the sun deck and playing shuffleboard. The band is still playing. Can this really be what a sinking ship looks like? But they know that once a threshold is crossed, the weight of water filling the hull will drag the entire hulk beneath the waves within mere hours.
The builders do this work because when the ship’s descent into the abyss accelerates, those aboard will need to look to something that will abate the terror. Something to swim towards. They will need to see something that offers a hope beyond hope that they might climb aboard or even emulate. What the builders have created may look shabby now, but all elegant things begin in exactly this way. They know this and they share stories with one another that speed along this transmutation. Their transition may take decades, perhaps centuries. They’ll carry on working. Together, they’re dreaming of a pontoon archipelago where the sun never sets without music.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29. By Rainer Maria Rilke
Acknowledgements
I’d like to acknowledge the thinkers that have influenced this essay, including Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Nora Bateson, Joanna Macy, Wendell Berry, John Michael Greer, Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, John N. Gray, T.S. Eliot, Jem Bendell, Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, Buzz Holling, Daniel Aldrich, Paul Kingsnorth, John Vervaeke, Dougald Hine, Euan Semple, David Tacey, Charles Eisenstein, Bonnitta Roy, Joe Brewer, Bret Weinstein, David Fleming, and David Holmgren.
I commend these thinkers to anyone interested in further pursuing the themes explored in this essay.
A hint of gold where the moon will be; Through the flocking clouds just a star or two; Leaf sounds, soft and wet and hushed, And oh! the crying want of you.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 23, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The Want of You” originally appeared in Negro Poets and Their Poems (Associated Publishers, 1923).
Angelina Weld Grimké was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1880. A journalist, playwright, teacher, author, and poet, she was one of the first African-American women to have one of her plays publicly performed, and was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. She died in New York City in 1958.
“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love,” a trio of psychologists wrote in their wonderful inquiry into limbic revision and how love rewires the brain. But whom we love equally depends on who we are and who we want to become. Love, like time, is as much a function of us as we are a function of it.
An especially striking illustration of this equivalence, both for its intensity and its unexpectedness, comes from the adolescent love letters the future Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180) to his teacher, Marcus Cornelius Fronto, collected and translated by Amy Richlin two millennia later in Marcus Aurelius in Love (public library) — a most improbable addition to history’s greatest LGBT love letters.
Fatherless since childhood, Marcus Aurelius was raised by his wealthy single mother, Domitia Lucilla. In 139, she hired Fronto — an African immigrant to Rome who described himself as “a Libyan of the Libyan nomads,” by then one of the era’s preeminent orators — to teach her eighteen-year-old son the art of rhetoric in preparation for his political career.
Across caste and rank, across twenty-some years of age difference, the two Marcuses fell in love.
For six years, until Marcus Aurelius’s socially necessitated marriage, they lived in close proximity and exchanged letters of devotion and tenderness, laced with intellectual admiration and erotic longing. Although their love was edged with danger under Roman law, it was not its same-sex nature that imperiled them — a grown man charged with seducing an adolescent male could be charged with adultery, the penalty for which was exile or death. But the seduction, if the term applies to their case at all, flowed the other way: Marcus Aurelius inundated Fronto with ardor that at first received only a timorous echo.
In the preface to the collection, Richlin draws on the early Stoic philosophers’ forgotten axioms of sexuality to provide the deeper cultural context beneath the shallow reach of Roman law:
Zeno (335–263 BCE) and his successor, Chrysippus (280–207 BCE), argued that sex between human beings who have learned the proper principles of respect and true friendship is a good thing, and that the ideal society would be one in which sex was enjoyed freely, without propertarian bonds of marriage. In particular, the young person just turning toward philosophy, the prokopton, should be trained by his mentor first through a sexual relationship, which should grow into an understanding of philosophy.
And so it did for Marcus Aurelius and his mentor-turned-paramour.
It was through the portal of intellectual reverence that the young man marched his heart into love. By the end of 139, he had already become besotted with Fronto. After receiving one of his tutor’s essays, he exults:
Should I not burn with love of you when you’ve written this to me? What should I do? I can’t stop.
Soon, the young man began addressing his beloved as “my Fronto,” unselfconsciously calling him “my number one delight,” “my dearest and most loving,” “my biggest thing under heaven,” “breath of my life.” Fronto, at first, met this ardor with considerable reserve — self-restraint, perhaps — but it was an ambivalent reserve. Aware that Marcus was being courted by another man — not uncommon practice in their time and place — and that this suitor already considered him his “He-Sweetheart,” Fronto writes:
You seem likely, dear Boy, to want to understand… why, pray, I who am not in love strive so eagerly to gain the same Things that Lovers do. So will I tell you first how that may be. By Zeus, that Fellow who is so very a Suitor was not born with a sharper Pair of Eyes than I who am no Lover, yet I in fact am sensible of your Beauty no less than the rest; I might say, more acutely so than your Suitor.
[…]
Me you approach not at your Peril, nor at the Cost of any Harm will you keep Company with me; nay, ’twill do you every Good. Indeed, Beauties are help’d and benefitted more by those who love them not, as green Shoots are help’d by the Waters. For Springs and Rivers love not green Shoots, yet in their going near and their flowing past do they make them to flower and to bloom.
Fronto’s conflicted push-pull message achieved none of the push. With the same stubborn optimism and imperviousness to adversity that would one day make him a great Stoic and a great emperor, Marcus responds:
Go ahead, as much as you like, threaten me, accuse me… with whole clumps of arguments, but you will never put off your Suitor — I mean me. Nor will I proclaim it any less that I love Fronto, or will I be less in love, because you’ve proven, and with such strange and strong and elegant expressions, that those who love less should be helped out and lavished with more.
Two millennia later, W.H. Auden would echo this sentiment in his stunning poem “The More Loving One.”
Marcus accelerates the propulsion of his undeterred ardor:
God, no, I am dying so for love of you, and I’m not scared off by this doctrine of yours, and if you’re going to be more ripe and ready for others who don’t love you, I will still love you as long as I live and breathe.
[…]
Socrates didn’t burn more with desire for Phaedrus than I’ve burned during these days — did I say days? I mean months — for the sight of you. Your letter fixed it so a person wouldn’t have to be Dion to love you so much — if he isn’t immediately seized with love of you.
And then, in a touchingly innocent closing line, he adds:
Because I love you next to my own self, I want to make a wish for myself on this day.
In an imaginative romp through the intellectual and spiritual epicenters of the ancient world, he gathers a posy of blandishments and beneficences for his beloved:
I go down to Athens, and on bended knee I beseech and beg Minerva that whatever I may ever learn about letters should above all journey from Fronto’s mouth to my heart.’ Now I return to Rome, and I call on the gods of roads and voyages with wishes that every trip I take may be with you beside me, and that I may not be worn out so frequently by such ferocious longing. In the end I ask all the guardian gods of all the nations, and Jupiter himself, who thunders over the Capitol Hill, to grant us that I should celebrate this day, on which you were born for me, along with you, and a happy, strong you.
Fronto did not remain unresponsive. “With good reason I’ve devoted myself to you,” he eventually writes, “considering your love for me, which I feel so lucky to have.” Whatever the nature and magnitude of his own feelings may have been, he makes no pretense of denying that he loves being so loved:
Good-bye, Caesar, and love me the most, as you do. I truly love to pieces every little letter of every word you.
Plucked from antiquity when the manuscript was discovered in 1815, and reanimated by Richlin’s painstaking scholarship despite missing pages, illegible handwriting, and untranslatable sentiments, the forty-six letters collected in Marcus Aurelius in Love radiate a testament to an elemental fact I have observed elsewhere: The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse — to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves. The labels we give to the loves of which we are capable — varied and vigorously transfigured from one kind into another and back again — cannot begin to contain the complexity of feeling that can flow between two hearts and the bodies that contain them.
