The great, dying sycamore is now shedding limbs like a leper, but buds still sprout from its remaining branches this spring. The sky is an incredible blue, a blue that almost hurts your heart when you gaze up at it as you sit beside the stream.
The most graceful of falcons, the kites, which flutter in place before parachuting to the ground for prey, are gone. Around the empty, ugly monstrosity of a new courthouse, they’re ‘developing’ a large business and residential park in what a few years ago was the habitat of kites, long-eared rabbits, coyote and pheasant.
The city of Chico had alternatives, and this area could and should have been preserved as an open space, but like the viewshed to Upper Park, which the city council destroyed by allowing monster houses to be built at the mouth of the canyon, greed and stupidity obliterated it.
The Earth is so beautiful; must man continue to decimate it? How many life-giving planets are there as beautiful as the Earth in our galaxy? Do they matter to the cosmic mind? Is there a cosmic mind?
I feel so, and it’s clear that the human species will only stop fragmenting the earth when enough people awaken and bring about a psychological revolution.
There is great urgency. Perhaps you don’t want to feel urgency, like most people don’t want to feel disturbance. Both are true things however, essential to bring about radical change.
A few are awakening, but are enough doing so for our age? We have to hold the question: Can the transmutation of human brain, heart and mind occur now? That is what psychological revolution means.
Most days I feel not, but one has to follow through with the question, since it could be hundreds of years before we have another chance like this.
Photo by Martin Lefevre
Many people sense that a catastrophe of some kind is approaching, and cannot be averted. That isn’t to be apocalyptic, merely to read the writing on the wall. Even a global catastrophe does not mean the end of humanity.
The end of the last world order, the bipolar superpower (dis)order, was marked by the simultaneous collapse of the USSR outwardly and the US inwardly. Since that clearly foreseeable event was not prepared for (and nearly 30 years later is still denied by elites in the USA), things have degenerated and returned to an even more dangerous form of the Cold War pattern, with the shells of the American and Soviet empires unable to impose order.
Now humankind is facing an even greater imminent collapse—of the post-World War II international order. And indeed, of the nation-state system (“Westphalian sovereignty”) itself.
Westphalian sovereignty, which began with the “Peace of Westphalia” in 1648 (!), “is the principle of international law that each nation state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers, on the principle of non-interference in another country’s domestic affairs, and that each state, no matter how large or small, is equal in international law.”
These key phrases have become irrelevant and completely destructive to the human prospect: “exclusion of all external powers;” and “non-interference in another country’s domestic affairs.” “Exclusion” is unworkable; “external” has become meaningless; and “non-interference” never existed.
As I repeat ad nauseum in this column, all people now live in a global society. Countries are secondary; people and peoples are primary. The only meaning to sovereignty now is the sovereignty of humanity.
But we get philosophically challenged writers and editors in the drainstream media like the New York Times spreading regressive contradictions such as, “There is nothing natural about the idea of the nation… [yet] for the foreseeable future nationalism is likely to remain a defining political force… [therefore] nationalism can and should be reclaimed for liberals.”
The same so-called thinkers then evince a great wailing and gnashing of teeth over tribalism. These nincompoops refuse to see that nationalism IS tribalism.
To end tribalism, which is as old as man, a psychological revolution is required. What is eminently necessary is imminently possible.
However a psychological revolution has to ignite, and the foundation for a true global order has to be poured, before the collapse of the international order occurs. Then the best of the old order, including relevant institutions for effective global governance, can be salvaged and reformed.
Clearly, we cannot manifest a psychological revolution outwardly until we ignite a psychological revolution within ourselves. Then we may find there is little difference between inwardly and outwardly.
Martin LeFevre
