Sadly, the system needs damaged and immunocompromised bodies for the medico-pharmaceutical industry to thrive. In a strange sense, healthy people – like healthy peace – are a liability in today’s world.
This privatisation of distress fragments our capacity for solidarity. When everything is pathologised – burnout, fear, grief – the political roots of pain are obscured.
Our future is really not in building an urban civilisation but in saving the forest, in saving our forest homeland, our global natural heritage. We need ‘mega-forests’ not mega-cities. We need to let forests be. We need to redesign cities with forests. And, we need to grow forests. We need to listen to the voices of the indigenous peoples who listen to the forests. In that listening lie our spiritually inspired sustainable futures. That listening, and learning, needs new pedagogical methods, new socio political orientations, new language, new institutions and new personhoods.
We plant trees while simultaneously supporting, through our indiscriminate consumption behaviour, distant extractive industries that despoil the earth. We raise voices for peace, yet rely on intricate supply chains and resource networks built on exploitation far beyond our sight or support the war industry that spreads destruction and death through our taxes. Our daily acts of kindness, so often celebrated, risk complicity in perpetuating suffering precisely because they remain disconnected from the complex layers of structures that generate gross injustice. This is the crux of our predicament. Is not goodness, then, haunted by complicity? Is there, behind every act of compassion, many acts of cruelty we are not aware of?
The world needs radically new narratives, new lifestyles, new institutions, and new ways of knowing and being. Stories of rags to riches are not helpful anymore because of their hidden ecological costs. We really do not need them in the midst of material, moral, and spiritual crises.
...I am more and more convinced of what the UN SDGs are really all about – giving the capital accumulation process another global fillip and saving capitalism from being transformed. Ironically, it is supposedly a global ‘transformation’ programme to remain on the same track! It will certainly not be business-as-usual but it will be business-as-always!