Normalcy, Denial, Queens and Bonzes

When I look out of my window in the morning, everything appears normal. Nothing seems particularly remarkable: the same houses bathed in pale sunshine, cats in the street, some neighbours walking out of their doors and ready to go about their business, the occasional car, kids going to school on their bicycles… until the daily news’ flow begins its assault on my senses from the screen of my phone and later from every media outlet that I happen to consult or just be casually exposed to.

That is what I call the ordinariness of exceptionality, meaning that the catastrophic nature of what is happening in the world is something that repeats itself regularly, to an extent that our awareness has become so flooded by the drama that we are now mostly desensitized and numbed, almost indifferent to pain and tragedy happening elsewhere. One-third of Pakistan is underwater, thousands of people and animals killed, its crops devastated with millions risking starvation; typhoons in the Far East, forests burning everywhere, armed conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe; cut-throat elections in Brazil, like many other nations polarized between extreme right-wing nationalism and progressive reformism… and all over the planet, the global issue of the climate crisis and mass extinction – the Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of our collective future – constantly slips into the background or is even blatantly ignored or reduced to the routine declarations of intent of vote-hungry politicians.

If you live in the United Kingdom, you will notice that a particular theme is dominating the scene, monopolizing public attention: the passing of the Queen and the succession to the new monarch, her son and long-time heir apparent. Twelve days of national mourning – possibly extended – have been declared. In this period newspapers and television are almost entirely taken over by the spectacle of royalty and the celebration of power. The 70 years of Elizabeth’s reign commemorated from every possible angle, the pageantry, solemnity and pomp of the funeral, the foreign Heads of State and assorted diplomats – from Biden to Putin to the latest Prime Minister who used to be an anti-monarchist – paying their respect, either attending in person or sending grandiose messages of condolence; the inauguration of the new King, the promises of ‘tirelessly serving the people’: a colossal media frenzy painting a picture of reality as a fairy tale of selfless heroes and heroines embodying the spirit of a nation and holding together its destiny as a beacon for humanity.

Whether you find the concept of monarchy anachronistic or not, I think the real message being transmitted here is the hammering into the public consciousness of the inevitability and legitimacy of power. Whether the power is transmitted through hereditary succession or acquired through individual efforts in line with the criteria of meritocracy – it is no mystery that the overwhelming majority of the people who get access to the management of society’s institutions and infrastructures and the ownership and control of the means of production comes from the entitled few or those who can reach the higher echelons of the multi-tier education system, where they are groomed and learn to play the game – the song remains the same: the world is shaped, and history is made by THE ACTORS – the powerful few – while THE SPECTATORS – the ‘common people’, the undifferentiated public, can only applaud or in rare circumstances aspire to their 15 minutes of fame as wingmen and followers. The stage is set, and the 1% controls it, while the other 99% is just supposed to dance to the current tune.

The message embedded into the culture is that the status quo is sacred, and none of the high priests is ready to give up his privileges. You just have to accept it.

The second part of the message is that this spectacle of power is more important and central to our lives than anything else: a huge show of grandeur that serves as a wonderful distraction, making you forget the rising prices, inflation, corruption, environmental degradation, poverty, failing healthcare… the mainstream media play their drums and the audience is drugged, narcotized, soothed to unconsciousness by the display and the symbolism of power relentlessly paraded in front of its eyes.

This vision of reality is cemented into the dominator culture: there are basically two tiers of humanity, the powerful few – entitled by birth or by merits acquired by individualistic ambition, careerism and often unscrupulous cynicism – and the undifferentiated powerless – recipients, in the best of circumstances, of the small rivulets of wealth trickled down from the sea of opulence generated by the few, collecting the crumbs from the table of the rich, looking and applauding, mesmerized; or left, in the worst of circumstances, on the brink of poverty, struggling for survival, abandoned in subhuman conditions, bearing the brunt of the devastation perpetrated by others.

Never mind if Elizabeth Windsor may have been a decent human being in many ways, herself trapped into a system in which she was both an icon and a prisoner, but the point is that her role has cemented and fortified this view of history and the values underlying the dominant narrative. Never mind if Charles Windsor may also be a decent bloke, progressive and ecologically-minded. I wish him the best, to find the strength to be coherent with the ideas he expressed in the past, and not to be entirely swallowed by the system of which he is now a prominent cog. But ‘decent’ queens and kings are not the case in point here. The real problem is the very existence of the pyramidal power structure, the hierarchy of control and enforcement of the aggressive, exploitative, competitive, destructive vision of the world implicit in the capitalist ideology.

We need a different vision of democracy and a reversal of the hierarchical, layered understanding of individual agency in the world. We need a new appreciation and a re-imagination of the part that each and every human being can play for the benefit of all. If the Queen was heroic in her dedication to service – as the current narrative goes – certainly no less heroic is the single mother who has to survive and raise a family on benefits, the gutter cleaner in Calcutta, or the LGBTQI+ militant fighting for human rights in Uganda, or the Yanomami fighting to save her ancestral land in the Amazon, or the First Nation activist resisting pipeline construction in Canada...

I recognise and respect the immense reservoir of emotions expressed by the millions of mourners queuing for hours to salute the deceased British Queen, but I believe that these emotions are probably misdirected, projected on a public object of affection that, in people's psyche, operated as a symbol and catalyst of deeper grief over their own misery, regrets and sense of loss for the richness of a life that could have been, but never was, that could be, but probably never will. Perhaps a sense of loss for the beauty of our planetary home and the possibility of a beautiful future?

The Abrahamic religions are traversed by a macabre fetishism, a morbid fascination with heroes and martyrs, and a sense of innate, primal guilt that celebrates the ethos of sacrifice as redemption. Bertolt Brecht once said "unhappy the land that needs heroes", but in our dominant culture the ‘small people’ become worthy of attention only if they become heroes/victims, aspirational models that give ‘Mr & Mrs Average’ a provisional passport to fame and admiration. Transcending the triviality of the role assigned by our layered society can only be achieved through some exceptional sacrifice. In the logic of the status quo you are normally worthless and expendable – just a consumer of the story written by the elite – but you can fleetingly raise to the pantheon of the great if you transcend your ‘normality’ with an act that has some marketable value, provided that it doesn’t question too much the dominant narrative.

On the 11th of June 1963 Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese monk, burned himself to death in protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government led by Ngo Dinh Diem. He was one of the first bonzes to do that, and the image of his self-immolation circulated the world. John F. Kennedy said of the photograph: “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one”. The picture won the World Press Photo of the Year Award and gave the American administration and the CIA another pretext to instigate a regime change in Vietnam. Later on, after the false flag of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that signalled the unleashing of a full-scale war by the USA to ‘stop communism’, more bonzes burned themselves to death in protest against the war atrocities perpetrated in their country, even if the practice was openly discouraged by senior monks as not in line with Buddhist traditions. But this culture of sacrifice is very appealing to the Western mind and had an impact on the feelings of revulsion for the war that inspired the anti-war movement.

Why did Thich Quang Duc do it? Perhaps for him, it wasn't a sacrifice, but just a purposeful shedding of the body he didn't identify with and limit himself to, the discarding of a merely physical container of the eternal spirit that he had learnt through a long practice of meditation was so much more than his individual ego. Witnesses said that throughout the 20 minutes or so that it took for his body to be consumed by the fire, he didn't flinch, he didn't even move, remaining still in the lotus position. Perhaps he wasn't there anymore, perhaps he had become the fire and the air and the sound. But the western mind, incapable of seeing beyond the veil of materialistic and individualistic identification, saw his testimonial of egolessness through the lens of personal martyrdom and sacrifice. The dualistic western mind was only prepared to perceive suffering and desperation in an act of love.

Where am I going with this? Please bear with me and allow me to follow this train of thought a bit longer.

The ecological movement is going through a wide debate on strategy and tactics, in the face of increasing devastation brought about by the fossil fuel industry, the empty promises and the ineffective or non-existent policies of our governments, and the indifference, or insufficient and superficial concern of a large part of the population in ‘first world’ countries that are still less affected by the global upheaval generated in the age of the Anthropocene.

We need perhaps fresh ideas, and certainly a deep reflection on what to do to shake public opinion from the torpor of a false sense of normality and realize that we all need to act and that we need to do it now because the time is limited. It is not too late, but we are rapidly approaching a number of tipping points, and each one of us can help to shift the balance of power and decision-making in the right direction.

Just to be clear: I am certainly not advocating self-immolation to attract attention or stimulate emotions of sympathy, but I am just expressing my increasing realization that the systemic shift that we need to bring about is extremely deep. We need to examine and question the roots of our culture, what are the emotional attractors that move us to action, what are the triggers that can help us to move from attitudes of passive resignation to life-affirming participation in the web of active kindness for ourselves and all the forms of life with which we share a home. It seems to me that any debate on ‘what to do’ cannot be separated from an analysis of the roots of entitlement, classism, and inequality, and ultimately from an examination of the meaning of identity, our perceptual boundaries and how they shape our sense of “what am I” and “what is my place in the world”.

It has been said that the majority of us are affected by a normalcy delusion, that we live under a normalcy bias, a cognitive bias which leads us to disbelieve, deny or minimize threat warnings. As a consequence, we tend to underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect us, and its potential adverse effects.

This could also be due to the fact that we often live bored and numbed by feelings of dullness, lack of alertness – another word that I like perhaps more than the currently fashionable ‘mindfulness’ – because our psyche and the wiring of our nervous system have evolved along 300,000 years, for the longest part through the immersion into a hunting-gathering lifestyle, while now our modern lives are mainly so repetitive, uneventful, disengaged from the natural flow of life and separated from the contact with the other forms of life unfolding around us. Most of us inevitably feel most of the time ‘turned-off’ by the poor range of experiences we are exposed to. We could say that we are born to be wild, but instead, we have turned tame and domesticated by our disconnected culture. Our awareness of symbiotic participation in the flux of interconnectedness with the whole of life has been obscured by the sense of isolation and separation engendered by the dominating cultural paradigm.

The sense of normalcy has also a shifting baseline: the worse things become, the more we tend to adapt; the more our horizons shrink, the more we tend to retreat inside our walls. Now is the time to become proactive rather than reactive, strategic and comprehensive rather than tactical and limited.

The ‘authorities’ and the 1% do nothing for us and our planetary home, or next to nothing. Indeed, they keep making the situation worse in multiple ways, and when they take some tardy and inadequate initiative, it is only under immense pressure from a great number of people who bring the real issues to attention with the inescapable force of evidence. Most official projects and schemes come anyway with a hidden backdoor where private interests and short-term calculations enter unnoticed: the veneer is a greenwash of environmentally responsible public image, and the undercoat is corporate profit and political expediency.

I believe one of the most current topics of debate is the choice between green growth and degrowth. This deserves a much more articulate analysis than the one I can currently offer in these notes, but, off the top of my head, the concept of green growth seems to me more like a tactical expedient bound to prolong the normalcy delusion, the denial, and designed to not push away the people who can feel alienated by the prospect of dramatic lifestyle changes, while degrowth is more of a strategic realization of the actual gravity and a determination to be serious, to apply sobriety and realism to a situation that is getting increasingly out of hand.

I imagine that this debate will continue along lines of compromise, choices of experimental solutions and hybrid projects, perhaps to be settled in the near future by the accumulation of new evidence that will make the scale tip in one direction, hopefully, the right one.

But one thing is certain, in my opinion: the debate will only be authentic and bring real solutions to the extent that it will take place in a framework of participatory democracy, through people’s councils and local communities united by a clear desire, determination and understanding of global solidarity and commonality of interests. If the main theatre of discussion and the power of decision remain in the gilded halls of elitist ‘representative’ institutions, we will be doomed.

Noam Chomsky, among others, argues that authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and that the burden of proof falls on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority is not self-justifying. He also argues that the GOP is the most destructive criminal organization in history, above all because of its policies of systematic obstruction of every green legislation, and its connections and involvement with the oil industry. The same can perhaps be said, on a smaller scale, of almost every government on Earth, particularly of those of the most powerful countries.

The ecological movement's strongest appeal, I believe, is in the strength of scientific evidence as a basis for action, but also in the inherent peacefulness and inclusiveness of its ethos. The new paradigm is inspired and motivated by a desire to heal, and a demand for true justice and equality that does not see winners and losers, victims and victimizers, but rather, from a larger perspective, what is best for everyone. We are not asking sacrifice of anyone: it is no real loss to do without the superfluous and damaging trinkets of the wasteful and destructive way of life fostered by neoliberal capitalism. An answer to the crisis which demands real loss to anyone would not resolve the problem, but add to it and make it greater, harder to resolve and more unfair. The principle that justice means no one can lose is crucial. There must be a way of halting the capitalist aggression to life that can be firm and resolute, and yet still be kind and fair to all.

We need to explore ways to create projects where the informing principle is one of Private Sufficiency and Public Luxury, as George Monbiot called it. We need to dissipate people’s fear that an ecological society would mean a sombre, joyless, deprived society based on scarcity and renunciation. This demystification can only be achieved through the multiplication of prefigurative direct initiatives, implemented in local territorial realities, and shared as much as possible through volunteer social networks. On the ontological level, what is fear except love’s absence? On the emotional level, what is fear but lack of clarity and connection, borne of isolation and delusional misinformation? We need to show evidence, we need to be kindness, because everyone we meet is fighting a hard battle with their own fears.

Perhaps a universal ideology is not possible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary. The ecological movement must facilitate this global experience of fairness and possibility of survival in harmony.