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As the life partner of someone invested in the study of the future, notably future consciousness and the role and impact of science fiction in popular culture, I’ve hesitated to fully embrace the future intellectually and emotionally. This despite my enthusiastic participation in the many conferences I’ve attended with Tom, the endless discussions at home, the engaging relationships with futurist friends, and the thrilling scenarios in books and movies. I’m more of a current-events junkie and a doom-scroller.
Over morning coffee, I pass on news snippets to Tom. All generally alarming. Many reflecting and reinforcing my negative take on twenty-first-century American life: spiraling costs in housing, health care, gas, and food; climate disasters and environmental destruction; increasing inequality; the turn toward fascism in American politics and the corporatization of American life; the threat of AI; the return of monopolies and the gutting of America by private equity. You name it; I’ll stress over it.
Recently my outlook has become even darker. I attribute frustrations with my life to the systems within which I and those I love operate. I see systems as predominant in the way things work in human society, and I tend to despair at my perceived inability to do anything meaningful about the ills I see around me. Worse, I see myself as complicit in them due to my participation in systems of exploitation and oppression and environmental destruction. In my closet hang garments made in Vietnam, China, Thailand, El Salvador. I purchase and eat fruit picked by migrant workers and chicken grown in factory farms. My food and consumer goods come wrapped in plastic. My bank invests in fossil fuels, and I drive a gas-powered SUV. My taxes pay for a bloated military budget and wars. My entire way of life in the richest country in the world rests on the backs of laborers in far-off places and the exploitation of other human beings who increasingly suffer climate catastrophes of unimaginable horror caused by the rapacious practices of hyper-industrialization in the West. (As I write this, a flood in Libya has claimed more than 5000 lives. This on the heels of the earthquake in Morocco.)
The influential anti-capitalist writer Naomi Klein speaks of this “system in which we are all inside and implicated” in a recent New Yorker Magazine interview with Jia Tolentino, in advance of the release of her latest book, Doppelganger. Borrowing from the writer Daisy Hildyard’s idea of the “second body” or the “shadow self,” she shows just how we are implicated: “the idea being that we are not separate from these systems, that, for example, while we’re typing on iPhones, we also exist in rare-earth mines alongside poisoned teen-age laborers.” “There is my body sitting in this chair,” she writes, “and there’s my other body, hovering over the tax dollars funding drone warfare, implicated in oil wars, implicated in the plastic in the ocean. That’s not other people—that’s me, that’s us.”
I despair over this contradiction between my fervently held desire to be part of the solution to these overwhelming problems and my inability to not participate in the very systems that amplify the threat. I suppose it’s the tradition of “left melancholy” of the sort, say, that H. G. Wells succumbed to at the end of his life, having witnessed just how nasty and murderous human beings could be.
Tom frames my current malaise within his idea of future consciousness. As he discussed in Future Consciousness: The Path to Purposeful Evolution, despair and depression are negative anticipatory emotions. They are a failure not only of emotional future consciousness but cognitive future consciousness as well. They carry with them feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. They stymie action, which in turn prevents any change to my miserable situation, which further reinforces my thoughts and feelings that life sucks.
I’ve heard this before, of course. I understand my psychological stalemate. I know that my negative state skews my sense of reality. Things might be bad on many levels, but it’s not the whole picture. Still, I was not applying this to my fixation on systems.
You’re not looking at it the right way, Tom said the other day. You keep railing against the system. The system is an abstraction. Systems are nothing but collections of people. People who have vested interests in maintaining the system to keep their power, sure, but people, nonetheless. You can’t fight an abstraction. Once you view the system as the enemy, you render yourself powerless. You see yourself as embedded in a “meta-individual” reality in which you have no agency.
I still see systems and the way they are interlocked as nearly impenetrable. And yet, I see individuals—people—chiseling tiny cracks in these systems. There is Greta Thunberg amplifying her little schoolgirl voice into an improbable but powerful force. There is Dorothy Stang, a nun and activist for social justice and environmental conservation, murdered in an obscure corner of Brazil by powerful loggers and land developers. And there are groups of ordinary people: Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wallstreet, strikers, activists. All it takes is purpose…another major theme in Tom’s future consciousness framework.
History gives us examples of the little people triumphing over seeming invincible systems. Take the French Revolution. The peasants didn’t see the monarchy as an abstraction; Off with the heads of the royals and aristocrats!
Science fiction also gives us examples of individuals triumphing over, or at least undermining, systems. H. G. Wells’ classic dystopia, The Sleeper Awakes; Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We; the obscure Christian utopia, The Messiah of the Cylinder, by Victor Rousseau Emanuel; and more recently, Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, The Ministry of the Future. In this last book, activists don’t bemoan the elites’ inaction in slowing climate change; they don’t go after the system. No, they kill the elites in their mansion fortresses and blow airplanes out of the sky.
What do we do then when faced with the seemingly overwhelming problems we face today? When our very survival relies on our multiple systems That is the question I ask myself. For starters, I’ll wash out another plastic container, toss it in the recycling bin, and hope that even this is not yet another scam on the part of the manufacturers to make me feel better about the plastic I cannot avoid using.
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Comments and communications regarding this essay can be emailed to Jeanne at: gknee@cox.net
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