By Chris Pang
Something is wrong in the world, and you can feel it in your bones. Every day, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes obviously, the situation gets a little bit worse. The jobs are shittier, the restrictions more severe, the cruelties more apparent. Those in power seem determined to ignore the weather outside their windows even as the furor of a crumbling world threatens to swallow you whole. This much you know because it is written in the news, in textbooks, in the scorching fires and blazing sun. What follows, however, is some predictions of the inner changes to come. It is a map of the mind, rather than the shrinking rainforests or the expanding deserts. This map has three colours that divide three worlds: The dream, the wasteland, and the change.
Let us begin by understanding that "the world" is a fiction. We cannot see the entire world, just as we cannot grasp any more than an infinitely thin slice of its complexities or engage in but a tiny portion of its sensations. Therefore, what we conceive of as a whole "world" is a half-impression formed from the half-impressions of others, conveyed to us via books and language and media and lies. It is possible for the world to end for you without a single blade of grass moving where you cannot see it. To live in a world, therefore, is to subscribe to a set of ideas and illusions about the functioning of the whole that is out of your grasp. To live in a world, therefore, is to believe in one.
What I am about to describe are three worlds, one you may be living in right now, one you may find yourself in soon, and one that—with perseverance, patience, and effort—you may one day reach. They are called the dream, the wasteland, and the change, but they can take many names. After all, everyone's world is slightly different. I hope you will humour these worlds, and see whether you recognise hints of them in your own.
This is the World with a capital W, existence as it is for you now in the imperial core, or at least as the powers that were wish it was. Capitalism has won, and the end of history stretches ever-forwards with the unceasing drumbeat of the neoliberal markets. Climate change is merely a temporary issue, and it will be resolved by market interventions and market innovations. Competition works to create efficiency, and liberal democracy will save us from ourselves. The state, if it exists, merely manages the worst excesses of the system and keeps the most impoverished alive, and soon it shall wither into a beneficient nothing as we bootstrap ourselves into the solar system and beyond. This is the Dream.
If you still believe in this dream, look again. Capitalism's promises of prosperity demand infinite resources and infinite growth. The model of development we subscribe to suggests that there will always be an impoverished Other to pass the buck to, who can shoulder the ugly burdens of industry and pollution while we gracefully advance to service economies. The market's competition creates countless imitators, failures, and inefficiencies as companies squabble for pieces of the pie rather than improve as idealised rational actors in a vaccuum. Resources are spent on destroying competitors, advertising, and protecting market positions rather than providing and improving services, and two people running a race spend twice the energy to go the same distance slightly faster to the detriment of all participants. From the poisonous root all manners of anticompetitive practices and ugly business practices grow, a dark impetus matched only by the need always for more profit for more expansion and more return.
Where the systems of the state are privatised or captured, virtual monopolies and oligopolies form that can dictate the functions of a malformed marketplace, and when those systems fail the systemic risk they pose is so great the state is forced to intervene and support failure. Rampant unchecked financialisation creates ever more volatile market conditions with bets on bets on bets, and there is no guarantee that the markets will act at all rationally - witness the panics and the state-enforced halts in trading, the rollbacks and the bailouts. In short, you have been taught that a game played maximally by parties of cutthroat players will allocate available resources the most efficiently, but the game is both rigged and broken. Meanwhile, the world burns outside your window.
Perhaps you finally reject the lure of greed as the ultimate answer and turn your eyes to the disaster unfolding. Perhaps you witness the decaying soil conditions, the mass die offs of vital species, the ever-increasing climate volatility and the constantly worsening conditions for societies in both the Global South and increasingly the Global North. Increasingly there will come the thought: "It is much worse, much worse than I thought things would be." Sudden heat will destroy crops and farmers only for a sudden chill to bury their corpses. Global food staples such as rice are grown in nations like Vietnam, India, and China, where the effects of climate change will make such continued farming extremely difficult (Vietnam, in particular, will be mostly underwater faster than you think).
Then you see the apathy, the rampant profiteering, the sheer denial and ignorance in our governing bodies, whose minds and policies remain in the Dream rather than recognising what is becoming more plainly apparent day by day. The voluminous quantities of time, effort, and ingenuity that are spent propping up broken systems and brutalising broken populations, the frequent lies and the even more frequent delusional untruths. It is natural, then, to begin to despair, to retreat into paranoid preprations and conspiracies. You now have one foot in the world to come.
Finally, inevitably, the disaster comes. Society falls, political promises are broken, the storm sweeps in and buries your ancestral home, the food stops coming, the water stops running, the lights go out. What was before passive recognition of your weakness and helplessness becomes an active understanding of how little you matter to those in power. Your scraps of security, hard won and once thought to be your everything, are pulverised in an instant yet you still live. Many of your neighbours, of course, are not as fortunate. But you live on, and your faith in the Dream is shattered.
Welcome to the Wasteland.
There are many ways to divide people: White and Black, Male and Female, Old and Young, North and South. Most of these divisions are artificial and devised by a society which does not know how to face up to the multitude of voices within its ranks. Some are devised for the purpose of oppression by those who recognise the ease by which a nebulous Other might be deployed for political purposes. But the one I am about to propose I have seen myself, in the eyes of people from all walks of life, concentrated at first in the deprived regions of the globe but increasingly coming home to the heart of the empires that run it. There are two types of people in this world: those who live in the wasteland and those who don't.
Where is this wasteland, then? It's everywhere and nowhere, in the streets and in the parks and in the blasted regions of nations whose names our newscasters struggle to announce. Except it's in the news studios as well, and in the presidential palaces and the mansions of the lonely rich. Some of us can see it, and therefore live in it—Some of us cannot, and therefore do not. Admission to the wasteland has become increasingly easy: it is offered for free to those whose lives have been destroyed and their confidence in a peaceful future shattered. The wasteland's true domain is in the heart. Thus, yes, those who eke out a living in Syria and Yemen belong in the wasteland, but so too do those who live in crumbling American townships and pound on Chinese barricades. And, as the century progresses, it seems inevitable that the population of this wasteland will continue to expand.
How soon, I wonder, will the population reach 8 billion screaming souls, all yearning for release?
But the time when this essay would have ended thusly is over. There is something different afoot, something new that is born within the ashes of the old. The powerful assume that when their power is retracted humanity will simply revert to their worst forms, that the only thing holding us together is the threat of the gun. But there is a different way. It is only available once the Wasteland has torn the old and rotten ontologies of the Dream from your eyes, but it is just now being born as more and more of us find ourselves in that realm of nihilism and seek an exit.
This new way will not be easy. It will require the forfeiting of transactional accumulation, what was once considered bulletproof logic and the simple necessity of profits and markets. It will require the privileged to give up the security afforded by luxury and oppression to embrace a life of service and obligation (which, in truth, they have always been living, except their share of the obligation was forcibly transferred to others). It will require the death of the shibboleth of money as the ultimate motivator, and the embracing of the understanding that we all live in a shared network of mutuality and that it is only by helping each other that we can survive what is to come.
Gone too, with the carrot, must be the stick, the tools of oppression which have divided the in-group from the out-group. Hatred has no place in peace but it will kill in times of deprivation. Some will say that this is pure fantasy, that the dark evolution-bred urges of humanity will never be overcome. But humanity, if it loves one thing evolutionarily, loves to survive. And between death and cooperation we have seen in the past cooperation wins almost every time. In a world where there is no safe harbour, where there is no wall to hide behind, evil has no abode from which to exercise its power with impunity. This, if we succeed, will be the world of the change.
The enabling of this revolution will not be easy, but it is aided by certain factors. The disasters that birth the Wasteland will also tear down existing structures of power, and weaken the rigid social binds that threaten to strangle those of us still entrapped within the Dream. We are also more connected than ever before, something that can be and is being turned against us but enables a degree of coordination more powerful than ever before. Technology can meet ever more of our needs, and once the shibboleth of transactions between two parties as the only legitimate relations within society is discarded communal uses of technology become evident and relatively easy to implement. If a society is viewed as a gestalt which has some set of raw inputs (labour, natural resources) and produces some set of services (food, security, entertainment), it becomes obvious that any valid means of balancing resource requirements and service production is valid, rather than merely those that operate on transactional relationships at every link in the chain. In short - from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.