POWER & AGENCY IN TIMES OF CHANGE
We can choose to be passive consumers of reality living silly, superficial, even senseless lives in an era of unprecedented challenges, or even worse, we can open our eyes to the complexity, dangers, and pain that billions of other people, animals, and living beings on earth and fall into lives of quite despair, overwhelmed with confusion and fear — or we can plunge into the river of life in all its vitality, power, and glory, risking our all as the only sensible path to fully become whom we truly are…
The world has always been a magical, curious, scary, and awesomely, strangely, wonderfully beautiful place… ever more so in these turbulent and trying times.
Life on earth has always been dangerous, wonderful, and challenging — but perhaps never as much as now that we all, without exception, face unprecedented tidal waves of profound and potentially overwhelming challenges with climate change, the 6th massive extinction of species, the demographic explosion, robotics, nano and biotech, artificial intelligence, and so much more.
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No matter who you are, no matter who I am, all human beings — and all living beings on earth — are faced with existential challenges of a kind and on a scale unlike anything any of our ancestors ever confronted:
> Starting with the very definition of what it means to be and to become human, from how we reproduce to how we learn, grow, live, work, make love, fall ill, recover, heal, despair & comfort ourselves and one another, to how we define our moral boundaries, our sexual identities, our states of being, and even to how — and if — we die in any formerly conventional sense…
> Living in the midst of a literal explosion of a news species of things and machines and their increasing transformation into what is starting to look like entire new species of increasingly sentient and life-like creatures and the parallel decimation, often outright invasion and devastation of the very living systems that support life on earth and of almost all other species and billions of other living beings…
> Knowing or unknowingly and willing or unwillingly finding ourselves catapulted (by these new machines born in our own minds) into a blasting, chaotic deluge of data and information; into stunning, often confusing marketplaces with no beginning or end; into ever more babel-like cities, some which pop up right around us and in which ever more people of ever more disparate backgrounds strive all too often to merely survive, confused and thrown around by forces that few of us can make sense of and all too often with almost little to no time, power, agency or control…
> Participating, whether we like it or not, in the opening up of unprecedented frontiers into our unfathomable inner and outer spaces and the ensuing loss of familiarity, standards, and security, accelerated and exacerbated by our ever growing power over all other creatures on earth and over the very building blocks from which we are made of with the paradoxically concomitant risk of losing any meaningful agency and control over our own lives and even less so in our interactions with the increasingly diffuse collectives we once relied on and still try to find meaning in — family, community, nation, church…
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As never before, life, circumstance, and history call on us to take action to once again seize control of our individual and collective destinies — or to simply give up, go with the flow, and allow other people, other forces, and increasingly, other things including those created in our own heads, to control our destiny, choosing through such a decision to accept, for better or for worse, the outcomes of whatever happens in the years and decades ahead, whether we like it or not.
It is in our power to be the change we want to see, to become changemakers and co-creators of a new and better world in which all human and sentient beings can not only survive but live and thrive and in which we each regain agency — understanding, meaning, focus, direction, power, and control — inside our own being, within our own lives, and rippling out into our core relationships, communities, networks, ecosystems and the broader intellectual, social, political, and environmental movements that they, and ultimately each one of us, are part of.
For those who have not yet chosen, the time has come, or will soon come, to make decisions. May we all make the right choices to regain, and through these choices, gift ourselves and all other sentient and living beings with that which truly matters: Life, liberty, love, peace, and the right, the ability, and perhaps most important of all, the desire to be happy, truly and wonderfully happy.
Lund, February 1, 2018
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