The greatest opportunity humankind has ever seen?
What does Leonardo DiCaprio satirical take on climate change and humanity's collective inaction really suggest?
By Will Green Dec. 30, 2021
No, not business opportunity, but one of progress. Growth. But the type of growth that plants thrive on, not railroads.
Against the backdrop of the multi intersecting and interconnected crises we face – from health to wealth to meaning as well as climate and biodiversity collapse. Let’s adopt a child mind for a second. Let’s imagine we’re starting again. Even, let’s imagine a new ending of Don’t Look Up. Not the part when civilisation as we know it is destroyed by a comet but the part 22,000 years from now when cryogenically frozen survivors arrive in an ark on an uninhabited planet teaming with life. It’s easy to imagine what labels of wealth, status and control that went into the ark might quickly evaporate with new challenges they face.
Bringing our knowledge of history, mistakes, failures and successes. How would we set about to do things differently? Ok, maybe the only stretch is that we’d need a few different ideas beyond those we could expect in the film’s survivors. Let’s imagine what outcomes we want to build into our new social organisation. What journey do would we want to experience? Does the life of urban productivity living for the weekend provide the inspiration for collective progress? Socially organised in such a manner that only a few select individuals will win at the game of turning life into leisure? Where a disproportionate level of people scaled on the sociopathic or narcissistic index contain the ideal ingredients to stepping up levels?
Food and subsistence might be the only game in town to begin with. Egyptian cotton and the looms to weave it would still be a hundred years away from re-engineering, if not more. Would this life be one of purgatory, devoid of happiness and laughter? Well for some weighed down with the memory of Michelin stars, Sunseekers and stuff there may be wistful memory of a way of life gone. For others a sense of opportunity with a clean slate. And with the birth of the next generation – and the joy this would inevitably bring to anyone – there would be new child minds, free from constraints to imagine again completely new.
Our biggest impediment to growth as a species is that we already believe ourselves to be grown up.
Perhaps this time with grace we’d understand that to nurture the child mind is the most sacred of projects. As we grow up, the emergence of self awareness, of the ego, artificially implants the idea of separation. An illusory parameter we see in our everyday. Our biggest impediment to growth as a species is that we already believe ourselves to be grown up. How wrong could we be? We have built a society of make believe like adolescents, petulant to a higher order, as if to parents, insisting that the reality we’ve made is anything but imaginary. Rules and doctrine, rhetoric we are unable to disentangle ourselves from. Aching as a society to get past these delusions but unable to see them for what they are.
It’s all made up. Nothing is as it has to be. The social organisation we imagined hinges on the mindset of separation, of yours and mine, of lack. Lost on the tonic of Darwinism (– ignorant to his full vision). All we lack is the remembrance of playing in the sandpit; of the natural instinct see joy in giving, of sharing. There is enough to go around. Our misguided values, our sense of who we are, has just skewed our capacity to imagine a system to share it. Competition has its role in joy too, no child hates building the biggest sandcastles, but we need to slide back the scale. Our progress in many ways hinges on bringing the unconscious instincts from the child mind through the portal of the “adolescent grown up” to a new order of maturity.
How does this happen? Progress is not inevitable. Yet in the sandpit we trip, we fall, we hurt, we learn, we get back up. We fall again. We cry, we smile, we grow. Failure is the engine of progress. Adversity is the necessity. A catalyst to stimulate the laziness of stagnation. Can we imagine an adversary so big as to wake us all from our slumber and push us to merge the concrete jungle back with the real one?
The climate crisis may not be the opportunity we want. But it might just be the one that we need.
A meteor hurtling to destroy the planet would provide adequate focus to set aside differences, but say we destroy it, what then? Would we erupt with a new world order or return to business as usual? It would all be over so quickly, there’d have been no space for dialogue about change. By contrast the mercurial problems of the climate crisis, a systemic, slow moving adversary, so big no one person can conceive a solution, forces us to fight and to argue to find ground we all agree on. A multi-generational struggle that pushes us together. To build a sandcastle so big that all the sand and all the hands are required to build it. Where we one day will be able to sit back, look at each other and say: we built that, together.