"Where politics goes, social agendas often follow." - or is it the other way around?
Interesting thought experiment John! No doubt the urge to control in the face of no control will wreak havoc for a time. And it will grab the headlines. But I still see this all as part of the collapse phase. And we will go one of two ways:
1. we will simply collapse to a much lower level of civilization, less complex, fewer humans, call it the next dark ages, likely under authoritarian rule, might last for decades or even longer until it too fails under the false logic of control,
or...
2. In response to the pressures (and not some clever Ted talk by a clown like me) we will pass through the portal of metamorphosis into something none of us will imagine in advance, just as the caterpillar never imagined the butterfly.
The latter is more than a "rebirth". It's a transformation of form. Meta Morphe - "change" "form". My money is on door number 2!
Neither a liberal project nor a conservative project. A LIFE project!
I'm in, John. And, as I argued in my book "The Chrysalis Economy," back in 2001, the old order goes to slurry before imaginal cellos get to work and create the butterfly out of the mess : )
You build a straw man by conflating the right with authoritarianism — a conceptual error in political theory, since “left/right” is an ideological spectrum while “liberal/authoritarian” is a separate axis. By framing right-wing sustainability as inevitably eco-fascist, you reduce complexity to caricature.
The conservative tradition proves otherwise: Roosevelt created national parks, Nixon founded the EPA, Thatcher warned about climate at the UN, and Scruton argued in Green Philosophy that oikophilia — love of home — grounds a conservative ecology. Right-wing sustainability can be prudent, community-based, and innovative, without lapsing into the authoritarianism you assume inevitable.
This is an important discussion. As a thoughtful and committed intellectual and political conservative in college who became a progressive populists and sustainability entrepreneur - I have developed opinions on this. The dialectic between Order and Freedom is beautifully articulated in the following video. I reject its techno salvationism but appreciate its sophistication, and explication of the search for a “Third Attractor” and I love its high production value and Pink Floyd soundtrack track. If our alway growing global community of sustainability leaders is ready to recognize our Universal Human Dignity as the “coherence beacon” organizing the Third Attractor or the third attractor itself, we may just help save our wounded world. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5dBRmjF8mc
Have you seen our report which explores this - and the alternative, which centrally involves the climate majority (including reasonable conservatives, business folk, etc) taking ownership of a strategy based on adaptation, before the hard/Far Right potentially does?: check it out: https://climatemajorityproject.com/safer-2/
Thanks for these timely reflections John. I'm fully aligned with your general message, but I also want to distinguish "order" from the neo-fascist agenda (which is clearly on the increase). I think it's useful to separate out order from domination, control and exclusion. Without order, there can be no real justice.
Perhaps we might also ask: "What does order look or feel like when it is in service of life?"; or "How might this kind of order be enacted at every level, every day, to promote restoration?".
Sounds dangerously utopian but it's not.
A deep understanding of order informed the cosmologies of many indigenous societies. In Southern African agro-pastoral societies, the understanding of order evolved as progress (agro-pastoralism) was seen to come with unintended consequences.
By maintaining a deep understanding of the "natural order" of life, people embraced innovation while enacting a constant "return to place". This ritual return to order formed a natural brake on progress, helping to keep it just and within the bounds of nature. This required deep discernment rather than dichotomies. I think we can learn from that.
Interesting thought experiment. I would expect a lot of the energy infrastructure would also be a lot more centralized, where mega corporations would own and run the windmills, solar cells, batteries and other clean energy infrastructure and we would have failed to seize the opportunity for a more distributed and citizen owned and operated energy system
Another very thoughtful post -thanks John. But are you confusing 'rightwing' with 'populist'? Centre-right used to mean 'liberal'. No-one seems to be defending the free market any more but what might a centre-right articulation of sustainable business look like? I would have thought 'self-sufficiency' would be centre stage, alongside 'energy independence'? The Burkian defence of the status quo was always that rapid change poses catastrophic risk (like climate change - it's conservative to follow the science). On social issues, I have also wondered why the protection of national worker standards (decent wages to reduce welfare dependency?) couldn't fit the new narratives too.
They blur. Populism on whatever side of the political spectrum tends to go science-free, so neither likely to be helpful to agendas with long-term time horizons and which need minds able to handle complexity.
Following on to Richard’s comment, I wonder if you have thoughts on how better to engage with the center-right (non-populist) wing of conservatives. I think often of Jonathan Haidt and the conclusions from The Righteous Mind regarding this. How does one speak to center-right values and bring them along with their own motivations, without tipping into the populist and unjust dark vision that you paint in this article?
Shouldn't we focus on engaging the center-left? The center-right may be more engageable if and when we've convinced our own basis to actually stand up and decamp from the status quo that many of us are very comfortable in, more so than many now voting for the far right.
On the Comfortocene: "In the essay After Comfort (2019), architectural historian Daniel A. Barber posits that we live in the age of the Comfortocene – times wherein comfort is demanded as a right by the privileged, no matter its planetary cost. The commodity of comfort is unevenly distributed, often seen as a symbol of economic success, notwithstanding incumbent geographies, global resource inequalities and colonial histories, allowing a fraction of humanity to evade facing the consequences for its collective actions. As Barber argues, we cling to comfort to manufacture our built environments, and yet, this very control feeds the unpredictability of our future. This evasive attitude is deeply embedded in our everyday lives, as we prioritise a good night’s sleep over long-term survival, losing sight of the embedded dichotomy therein: what makes us comfortable also makes us vulnerable. The storms strike harder, the rising waters engulf lands and the air grows ever more searing against the skin. While some of us hide from this chaos in our air-conditioned snares, the not-so-privileged populace and, ultimately, entire ecosystems bear the costs. This is just another example of the many tacit agreements that define the so-called global order." https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-back-to-the-start-how-the-intro-to-the-venice-biennale-confronts-the-comfortocene?utm_source=autosuggestion_search&utm_medium=stirworld_search
"Where politics goes, social agendas often follow." - or is it the other way around?
Interesting thought experiment John! No doubt the urge to control in the face of no control will wreak havoc for a time. And it will grab the headlines. But I still see this all as part of the collapse phase. And we will go one of two ways:
1. we will simply collapse to a much lower level of civilization, less complex, fewer humans, call it the next dark ages, likely under authoritarian rule, might last for decades or even longer until it too fails under the false logic of control,
or...
2. In response to the pressures (and not some clever Ted talk by a clown like me) we will pass through the portal of metamorphosis into something none of us will imagine in advance, just as the caterpillar never imagined the butterfly.
The latter is more than a "rebirth". It's a transformation of form. Meta Morphe - "change" "form". My money is on door number 2!
Neither a liberal project nor a conservative project. A LIFE project!
I'm in, John. And, as I argued in my book "The Chrysalis Economy," back in 2001, the old order goes to slurry before imaginal cellos get to work and create the butterfly out of the mess : )
I missed that one! Was busy quitting my job back then... would not have understood a word...
You build a straw man by conflating the right with authoritarianism — a conceptual error in political theory, since “left/right” is an ideological spectrum while “liberal/authoritarian” is a separate axis. By framing right-wing sustainability as inevitably eco-fascist, you reduce complexity to caricature.
The conservative tradition proves otherwise: Roosevelt created national parks, Nixon founded the EPA, Thatcher warned about climate at the UN, and Scruton argued in Green Philosophy that oikophilia — love of home — grounds a conservative ecology. Right-wing sustainability can be prudent, community-based, and innovative, without lapsing into the authoritarianism you assume inevitable.
This is an important discussion. As a thoughtful and committed intellectual and political conservative in college who became a progressive populists and sustainability entrepreneur - I have developed opinions on this. The dialectic between Order and Freedom is beautifully articulated in the following video. I reject its techno salvationism but appreciate its sophistication, and explication of the search for a “Third Attractor” and I love its high production value and Pink Floyd soundtrack track. If our alway growing global community of sustainability leaders is ready to recognize our Universal Human Dignity as the “coherence beacon” organizing the Third Attractor or the third attractor itself, we may just help save our wounded world. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5dBRmjF8mc
Well said, John.
Have you seen our report which explores this - and the alternative, which centrally involves the climate majority (including reasonable conservatives, business folk, etc) taking ownership of a strategy based on adaptation, before the hard/Far Right potentially does?: check it out: https://climatemajorityproject.com/safer-2/
Thanks for these timely reflections John. I'm fully aligned with your general message, but I also want to distinguish "order" from the neo-fascist agenda (which is clearly on the increase). I think it's useful to separate out order from domination, control and exclusion. Without order, there can be no real justice.
Perhaps we might also ask: "What does order look or feel like when it is in service of life?"; or "How might this kind of order be enacted at every level, every day, to promote restoration?".
Sounds dangerously utopian but it's not.
A deep understanding of order informed the cosmologies of many indigenous societies. In Southern African agro-pastoral societies, the understanding of order evolved as progress (agro-pastoralism) was seen to come with unintended consequences.
By maintaining a deep understanding of the "natural order" of life, people embraced innovation while enacting a constant "return to place". This ritual return to order formed a natural brake on progress, helping to keep it just and within the bounds of nature. This required deep discernment rather than dichotomies. I think we can learn from that.
Interesting thought experiment. I would expect a lot of the energy infrastructure would also be a lot more centralized, where mega corporations would own and run the windmills, solar cells, batteries and other clean energy infrastructure and we would have failed to seize the opportunity for a more distributed and citizen owned and operated energy system
Not a great outcome! Not resilient, not democratic and not a bunch of other good things either, I suspect.
Another very thoughtful post -thanks John. But are you confusing 'rightwing' with 'populist'? Centre-right used to mean 'liberal'. No-one seems to be defending the free market any more but what might a centre-right articulation of sustainable business look like? I would have thought 'self-sufficiency' would be centre stage, alongside 'energy independence'? The Burkian defence of the status quo was always that rapid change poses catastrophic risk (like climate change - it's conservative to follow the science). On social issues, I have also wondered why the protection of national worker standards (decent wages to reduce welfare dependency?) couldn't fit the new narratives too.
They blur. Populism on whatever side of the political spectrum tends to go science-free, so neither likely to be helpful to agendas with long-term time horizons and which need minds able to handle complexity.
Following on to Richard’s comment, I wonder if you have thoughts on how better to engage with the center-right (non-populist) wing of conservatives. I think often of Jonathan Haidt and the conclusions from The Righteous Mind regarding this. How does one speak to center-right values and bring them along with their own motivations, without tipping into the populist and unjust dark vision that you paint in this article?
That's the challenge, Paul. My post was simply sketching the extremes to give a sense of what's at stake here.
Shouldn't we focus on engaging the center-left? The center-right may be more engageable if and when we've convinced our own basis to actually stand up and decamp from the status quo that many of us are very comfortable in, more so than many now voting for the far right.
Center-left parties are hemorrhaging https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/25/us-democrats-collapse-in-support-labour-uk
On the Comfortocene: "In the essay After Comfort (2019), architectural historian Daniel A. Barber posits that we live in the age of the Comfortocene – times wherein comfort is demanded as a right by the privileged, no matter its planetary cost. The commodity of comfort is unevenly distributed, often seen as a symbol of economic success, notwithstanding incumbent geographies, global resource inequalities and colonial histories, allowing a fraction of humanity to evade facing the consequences for its collective actions. As Barber argues, we cling to comfort to manufacture our built environments, and yet, this very control feeds the unpredictability of our future. This evasive attitude is deeply embedded in our everyday lives, as we prioritise a good night’s sleep over long-term survival, losing sight of the embedded dichotomy therein: what makes us comfortable also makes us vulnerable. The storms strike harder, the rising waters engulf lands and the air grows ever more searing against the skin. While some of us hide from this chaos in our air-conditioned snares, the not-so-privileged populace and, ultimately, entire ecosystems bear the costs. This is just another example of the many tacit agreements that define the so-called global order." https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-back-to-the-start-how-the-intro-to-the-venice-biennale-confronts-the-comfortocene?utm_source=autosuggestion_search&utm_medium=stirworld_search