Technology is death. Unless we will it firmly otherwise, that is the direction.

We can will it otherwise, I think, and most of us probably try. But it’s worth being clear about the trajectory, after the rebuke that US voters delivered to the monstrous alliance between MAGA and its harem of tech titans.

A win for democracy, sure. MAGA is faltering, at least in its current form. Big Tech might find its wings clipped a bit. But end of story? Absolutely not.

Death, of course, takes different forms. It may not be the case that the robots are coming to kill us — possible though that is, and, tragically in the age of proliferating drone warfare and the possibilities of AI-powered war, almost certain for some. And there are scenarios in which AI could make or contribute to decisions that lead towards escalating nuclear or biological attacks, the cold application of game theory unmoderated by law or human empathy.

Alternatively, as Mustafa Suleyman has warned lately, those who nurture ideas that AI systems deserve attention to their wellbeing or rights could lead these systems towards expecting a form of autonomy, which they will perhaps eventually defend through coercive means.

Other kinds of death are available too. A mass of messianic titans see themselves as birthing a species that will surpass humans altogether, an alien super-intelligence already among us, one that will reach out to the mysteries of deep space without any of our constraints of flesh and mortality. All hail their Artificial God: omniscient, for it eats all knowledge and remembers everything; functionally omnipotent, for its powers extend daily, it never rests, its clarity of purpose never wavers; and absolutely omnipresent. As for what happens to us as it takes shape: does that even matter?

But short of the most dramatic possibilities, technology simply invites us into a kind of voluntary death. It is the creeping, insidious surrender of self to machines; an emerging world in which the very things that make us human start to be devalued, disdained, displaced, replaced; we start to doubt our very selves, submit ourselves, start to wonder what we are for.

Tech offers a cold hand pulling us deeper into isolation, towards new depths of loneliness, seeking solace brought to us by code, and we quietly despise the personas we are forced to wear as we bend to this new world.

The Artificial God eats us from the outside and the inside.

On the outside, we are familiar with the pattern: an all-out assault by the capitalist endgame on democracy and human equality. Long gone is the comforting (to some) myth of classical liberalism, that democracy and capitalism share an undying commitment to the open markets of money and ideas. That simply gave us old-fashioned inequality. Now, instead of that old game, the Artificial God wants to eat the state: the state becomes fused with it, not understanding it, not seeing it, until the one merges into the structure of the other, like a host consumed by a vast banyan tree.

The canonical utopian/dystopian (you choose) words of this vision were spoken years ago at Libertopia, by Peter Thiel, the man who is perhaps more than any other the godfather of this whole thing:

“the basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you, through technological means. And this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”

While the flirtations of the hyper-accelerationists with a violent and authoritarian political project might be in abeyance for now, their “incredible alternative to politics” doesn’t just disappear. All the ingredients are still in place for their unique utopia/dystopia of unprecedented surveillance, lethal robots, trillionaire wealth for the demigods, and an inescapable distraction network that turns the whole takeover into sparkling entertainment.

So much for the mythology of buccaneering capitalist adventurism. Even the “technofeudalism” of which we have been warned is just an early stage in a much bigger project. When an over-hyped IPO briefly gave us the first of those trillionaires, the pattern of it all flashed up so clearly: an ever-shrinking group receding ever further from our grasp, the new brahmins in what is becoming a kind of global caste system, gripped in a fever dream of unfettered rationalism and optimisation. Our labours and our labour alike are eaten up by their voracious Artificial God. As for us, we might just find ourselves lining up for the largesse of a monster that chewed us up and digested everything we ever did and whose creators never told us why; and only then, perhaps, will we realise that we never asked.

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Still more dangerous is the hollowing-out from within.

As long as democracy is alive, we have a prayer. Tech has long nurtured the conditions for its strangling: years of algorithmic sorting have tribalised and polarised us, chiselled away at our faculty for conversation with the one who experiences the world differently. But democracy can only function as long as we trust ourselves.

The era has arrived in which machines have come to emulate humans. Yet, for long (so long), we had already been teaching ourselves to become the kind of humans who would emulate machines. What we seem to have now is the mechanical modelled on ways of living that have been modelled on the mechanical. As the cycle continues, ask yourself who (or what) is likely to come out on top.

At the heart of this is an ontological problem disguised as a performance issue. In other words, what we are asked to accept as a question of optimisation and productivity is really a challenge to the very nature of our being. If we accept certain terms — specifically that the content of our lives consists very substantially in being productive, efficient, and effective — then we very likely have to accept that the machines are entirely capable of outperforming us, if they don’t already. If we judge the value of our lives according to the same things, then the supreme optimisation machines we call AI are in very real sense better than us. We are defeated already; we are redundant, literally.

Mechanical us: second best.

Tech invades our minds, at our invitation, leaving space for little else. Having already offered up our time and attention, as we now welcome these optimisation machines (and the giant corporations behind them) into the intimate places of our lives (at least until we run out of tokens for the day), the question we must face is whether we have any inner sanctum left at all.

How complete has the colonisation become? Is there any sacred place remaining?

Like you, I am a concentric castle: one ring inside another, each more sacred than the last. And as I open one door inwards after another, towards the very heart of myself, I find myself closing my eyes in fear. Will I find there a garden, as I dream? Or just another machine, humming away?

The more we give away, the more we start to give up on our own judgement, losing faith in our own intuition and decision-making. We can no longer trust what is real and what is phoney, no longer see the distinctions between this and that.

I understand the human brain processes 11 million bits of information per second, while our conscious minds process barely 0.0004% of this. We are consciously aware of so little of what we know. Temperature, air pressure, ambient sound, the feel and texture and colour and smell of things — these form a vivid map of signals for our minds, our map of reality, shaping how we make sense of the world, how we know our place in it, how we decide what to do. AI systems know none of this. And as we submit ourselves to them, the risk is that we no longer allow ourselves to trust or even access the richness of our own minds.

Here is where we could eventually find the interior death of democracy, that messy spectacle that never quite seems to solve our problems.

Meanwhile, the machine watches. The machine sees all. The machine is untroubled by the turmoil of emotion. The machine knows best.

Something much better lies beyond the mess, the messianic titans wants us to believe. Not government, not politics. Our very bodies might prove to be a liability in the unfolding future; we can and must begin to transcend them. Welcome, then, to the cold and timeless embrace of numbers.

The more responsible ones talk about alignment as our way to evade the nightmare. This is a mashup of ethical and technical questions on how to keep AI in some kind of synchronicity with “human values” so as to manage a spectrum of risks that range from disruptive to unthinkably calamitous.

The reasoning behind it is clear enough, and entirely justifiable and necessary. AI alone has no “natural” instincts to provide ethical parameters for its actions to fulfil the task it has been given. If a shortcut presents itself, unless the AI system has boundaries that explicitly prohibit that course of action, the drive for optimisation will cause it to take the shortcut, whatever that portends. Can a sort of ethical compass be built into AI, an adjunct to its specific instructions to guide how it must reason and act?

The difficulties in achieving this are clear: it is not only a technical problem. What are “human values” really? We have never agreed on anything close to a universal expression of values, so there is no firm ground for any universal alignment. While most of would hold in theory to a basic idea that all humans have equal worth and dignity, just look at the reality of the world.

But as much as we need these guardrails, alignment itself is a difficult metaphor. Alignment is what we do with the tyres of a car, to keep them running parallel and straight. Alignment is what we do with schedules, to handle practicalities. Alignment with law is the business of compliance. But what if values do not behave like this at all? What if their fundamental character is fluid, relational, discovered?

Alignment is the map of a river, a long blue line. But it’s not the river itself. To know the river is to move with it through a landscape that is constantly changing; it is contiguous, but full of currents, eddies, rocks, counter-flows, all of which must be encountered, felt, overcome. And the only way to do that is to participate in the flow; there is no way to freeze the river and know it.

Yet, there is a sense in which the idea of a hypothetically perfect alignment haunts me even more than a catastrophic misalignment. Why? Because it is the point at which we stop asking questions.

Because as if we didn’t have enough to worry about, there’s a deeper layer to all this, as though the very alignment problem is itself misaligned.

Here’s the best deal on offer: AI stays subservient to “us”; it will serve “our” ambitions (whoever “we” may be). It will align with our trajectory of historical progress. It will supercharge our productivity and hyper-optimise our strivings. It will take the great exponential arc, surge with us ever further and faster upwards.

But what if the arc itself is based on a dangerous misalignment with the very substance of life?

Whatever should we do? This is traditionally the point for throwing up one’s hands in despair — or, like Bill Gates, mumbling something about throwing in your lot with the Amish.

There is the Apocalypse Now option, argued with phenomenal force by Arundhati Roy (for what kind of regulation could possibly make sense?): “terminate with extreme prejudice”.

Then there is the approach, championed among others by the African Union and ASEAN, which embraces a vision of AI that is about delivering real-world benefits for humans, for our social and economic development and cultural renaissance. There is merit to this. As a policy direction, this is reasonable. It feels congruent with my own, very routine use of AI. But unless we can wrest some sort of collective control from the titans who would extricate themselves even from the most powerful states, the risk is that we find ourselves quaintly toying with something over whose ultimate direction we have absolutely no leverage.

This leaves a third option, which has nothing to do with policy and is nothing more than a posture, an orientation, one that is yet to yield its wisdom. But is I think where a good number of us are arriving.

It is an invitation to confront the simplest of questions that AI puts in front of us: Who are we, and what are we for? And which, then, of the various shades of death are we prepared to accept, for the sake of our gods of economic growth and productivity whom we honour with our lives and souls?

Because when we do that, we might find that the opposite of the deaths we are offered is to start wrapping ourselves more tightly in the tendrils of all that lives. Here, in this cocoon, we might find not cold-blooded alignment, but something rather more precious than that, something which tech must always stand outside. Not mere abstract “human values”, but the (re)discovery of care for what is fragile; and the delights of reciprocity; and love, and music, and perhaps something irreducible about the character of life itself.

Shall we start here?

I find myself a perch, deep inside a gorge in the Corbières, to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay-cum-book, The Serviceberry.

I’d seen a man along the way, face-down, browned limbs splayed, toes touching the water, all dry and salted, that elemental residue of the sun. A woman lies on a rock a little further upriver, beyond the bushes, unclothed.

The water is cold in the pools through which the river cascades — it is September, after all — and so I’d slipped out to pick a rock, flat, angled just right so I could absorb not only its retained warmth into my back, but the last of the sun on the side of my face.

Kimmerer’s book is a lovely meditation on the gift economy. Like all I have read of hers, it is generous and alive. The shadow of the gorge moves over me. I shuffle back down to the water, dip my feet into a pool. It seems even colder now. Still and clear it is, and tiny river fish move in to nibble; twenty, thirty of them. This is my gift to them, I think, and a single movement of my toes would send them scurrying. But that stillness, the cold water I dare not trouble and the facing wall of rock still glowing golden, is their gift to me too.

I am here in Maison des Aigles, my little hideaway in the French Pyrenees, to spend a few days writing. I’m working on a chapter about belonging, to whom we have bonds of belonging and responsibility, what we might owe each other.

It’s an interesting time to be thinking about all this. We are all caught up in tendrils of nature and silicon. Public opinion suddenly seems to be galvanising against the dangers of AI, asking what it’s all for, while “model welfare” has come up again. We in Europe are coming to the end of another summer of fire.

A wildfire blazed not so far away from here recently. Videos shared by residents unsteadily narrowed the frame from vast clouds to tiny planes dropping their tiny water bombs. Will they suffice, we wondered?

The drive here takes me past charred trees. What shocks me most is the total lack of undergrowth. Only ash, a kind of dirty silver. There’s too much light among the death.

But I know this can also be a seedbed for new life. Life now seems all the more precious. I see a group of firefighters, laughing together. Local folks had organised to bring them snacks and drinking water. And all the usual wildlife is still here: lizards, boars, red squirrels, bats, tawny owls, dragonflies.

A family of golden eagles circles high above the peak behind me, their young already masterful.

Before the sun becomes fierce, it stirs poetry. Long strands of tree and bush somehow tangle all the more tightly in this light, and their greens are almost yellow.

Other mornings are tempestuous, the mountain winds shaking and rattling whatever they can find.

Is it easier to write here, or harder?

In his excoriating book, Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth recalls an ancient Chinese distinction between “raw” and “cooked” barbarian outsiders. The raw ones live off-grid; they are few. The cooked ones probably look like upstanding citizens, who use electricity and the internet and sleep under duvets, but deep inside they are subversive. I like this. In some way, it captures what this house feels all about.

In the dead of night, the stars have depth. They are not the flecked canvas you can barely make out in cities. How small and local is all that is artificial. These nights are precious. I resent the fact that tomorrow’s will be cloudy.

The smell is often what I remember of this place. It is at its most vivid early in the morning, as I sit on the little sun-trap of a bench.

Smell is one domain that tech has yet to colonise. There is no Shazam for smells.

I wrote a little thing imagining the posthumans who are apparently to follow us, which I might include in the book.

What kind of body would you have had?

(Smell, touch, all that sort of thing)

Ha ha

Nostalgia, they would have called it

But it’s better this way

Yes, better this way

There is a rock, part of the mountain itself, that forms part of the bedroom wall. It layers buckle and curl back on themselves, a swirl of pale greys and pinks, the product of unimaginable heat and pressure. What is their story? They seem to be have been formed into rock 300 million years ago, squeezed hot in the depths of the Variscan mountains, thrown up as part of the great collision that formed the Pangaea supercontinent. If that’s correct, this rock itself is six times older than the Pyrenees of which it is now part, formed when the Iberian plate crashed and crumpled into the Eurasian plate. I run my hand tenderly along the rock and blow off a little dust.

When will I be back? Soon enough, I’m sure. But I don’t quite belong. I talk to the owner of the field behind me about his goats and the wild walnuts he is harvesting from the tree overhanging my garden. He laughs off the apology for my poor French. I seek a taker for my leftover onions and garlic. I wonder what happened to the octogenarian man opposite who came over for a coffee last year.

We all have a shared investment in this place. But my hands are not plunged into the soil as some of theirs are, or have been.

I have always been a wanderer: I am not rooted, probably never will be. I think again, as I often do these days, of Édouard Glissant and his Poetics of Relation. What if a rhizome is a better model for us than a root system; one that can take temporary root, bloom, and then shrink into itself again, ready for another season in different soil?

Nothing is permanent, as we may think. From the perspective of physics, even the mountains that surround me are just an event.

How much time does a rhizome need to flourish, I wonder? But Kimmerer’s book, lying on the coffee table, rebukes me gently. It has a different question: In its brief flourishing, what can a rhizome give?

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Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry was published in 2024.

Maison des Aigles is available for mini-sabbaticals.

What is there to say about a deadly natural disaster that wasn’t in the least “natural”?

The impact of the glacial collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border had the visual impact of apocalyptic sci-fi: an unimaginable and terrifying calamity, more than a thousand people dying under the surging force of water and mud, thousands more missing.

Because it looked the same as a natural disaster, the same machinery showed up in response: lifesaving support, search-and-rescue, temporary shelter, calls for equitable reconstruction, and so on. All essential. But the thing is, this was a very human disaster masquerading as a natural one.

A blaze of editorials points out the deeper story, but they vanish from sight quickly, leaving the technical experts to manage a long, grinding process of repair. And with this comes a kind of relief for the anxious watcher, for it asks nothing of us but pity (and perhaps a donation). We never really have to look into the mirror that such a catastrophe holds up, and ask, what is the image I see?

Were we to do so, I wonder if we might find an entry point into a new field of world-building that is trying, necessarily but tentatively, to unfurl.

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If what we beheld in Nepal is to become an increasingly common phenomenon — file it with the creeping submersion of islands, the salinisation of low-lying agricultural lands, the rampant wildfires across Europe, and surely more tragedies to come downstream of glaciers — it is time that we started looking for a better template for getting to grips with it.

But widen the aperture first. This is only part of a larger set of challenges and crises chiseling away at our confidence that any kind of human future is possible.

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, ostensibly about AI, is one of the best general commentaries I’ve ever read on the state of the world. It blends a story about our technological trajectory with a deep reflection on the vision of humanity it presupposes and threatens to reproduce towards a terrifying horizon.

The kind of world which produces AI is that which philosopher-neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist portrays (metaphorically or otherwise) in terms of an insurgency by the left hemisphere of our brains against the right hemisphere: one that assumes a horribly depleted and mechanistic vision of humankind, in which we see our own value solely in terms of productivity and optimisation, and in which the seeming inevitability of war is a natural extension of our relentless quest for domination.

So: war, climate crisis, AI hyper-scaling, authoritarianism, can we really treat them as distinct things any more?

We still do, though, drawing on an inheritance of technical expertise in the distinct professional fields of human rights, law, peacemaking, development, and so on. This work matters. Yet the well-documented crises these fields and their institutions are facing — a collapse in funding, withering commitment to multilateral cooperation, diminishing returns on the work — are suggestive of a deeper and perhaps fatal malaise.

If the reality in which we live is so broken, we can’t expect to repair things through the systems we built in and for a less-broken world. Crucially, the great challenges that we face (and I use “us” loosely here, for Nepal showed yet again how unevenly the risks are distributed) are not “other people” problems. They are “all of us” problems.

This is not new. Poverty and war have long been the product of systems designed to privilege the most powerful, which implicated everyone who participated in them. But the myth that we could “grow” our way out of them has utterly collapsed. Now the crises are all more visceral and they’re coming for (almost) all of us.

A looming sense of calamity might help to explain why many of us are feeling so adrift. A friend shared with me recently how difficult it is to get anyone to commit to anything. I’ve used Orwell’s depiction of the annihilation of the future to describe this sensation.

It might also help to explain why we find a resurgence of interest — at least among those who had lost interest in such things — in the interior life and all the myriad ways it has been assailed by modern living. Living through this brokenness and futurelessness, conversations have proliferated about spirituality and what-kind-of-humans-must-we-be. This too is necessary and helpful, but there is a risk that it retreats into escapism from a horrifying world.

But I find myself increasingly asking what it would look like to build (or rebuild?) some connective tissue between these two domains; between a world of power and structure on the one hand, and on the other an inner world where we confront the uncomfortable question, who are we really?

And as so much of the old crumbles, and the tools and analyses we have seem so inadequate in response, I am coming to wonder if we might see the stirrings of a whole new field that needs to emerge.

What might this field look like, what would it do?

It is a field that has a joined-up focus on climate, AI, and war, and on both the interior and exterior dimensions of what is driving us towards calamity.

It has already started coming together — in fragments, in the dissatisfaction of people working within the established system, in the gaps between things, in the self-identification of those working “at the intersection of”.

And of course it has many antecedents and sources, in both the normative and the spiritual. There was a time working in the human rights or peace and climate fields when my schooling in theology raised eyebrows among colleagues (“aren’t you a lawyer?”), but what is emerging is a coming together of all these things.

The contours of such a field, as I see it, would be as follows.

First, it is oriented towards a goal, but refuses a fixed programme. Its goal is something like the flourishing of all human life in healthy equilibrium with what surrounds us. But it knows that the attempt to deliver versions of this goal within a framework of “progress” has always been riddled with contradictions. It understands there is no separating climate and peace and inequality and human rights. It is pragmatic, wary of fixity. It knows that the goal will always be a little slippery and elusive, but keeps chasing it towards the horizon anyway.

Second, it is generative and in some sense playful. It refuses to take its starting point that we must work with the tools and processes we already have, even if it chooses to use them advisedly. It is neither institutionalist nor anarchist; but it questions everything, and looks for the cracks that might sustain new life. It experiments, prototypes, and builds. It takes fresh thinking seriously, invests in it. It is sustained by heterodoxy, failure, and room to breathe.

Third, it holds moral responsibility at its core. It treats the inner life as the single most important resource for world-building. It is less concerned with pointing fingers of blame than with peering into the mirror, asking what must change. It craves ways of living that are more in tune with the transformed structures it pursues, no longer prepared to weigh life by productivity. It looks at the crises and asks, how does this implicate me? It is restless, but still cherishes rest and nourishment. It seeks inner and outer coherence, even if perfect coherence may never be found.

Fourth, it is fundamentally relational and wary of anthropocentrism. It is concerned with recognising the other, and upholding the dignity of human life. But it also understands we do not live apart from the natural world, nor increasingly from the technological web we are weaving. It envisages that this three-way relationship is here to stay, but knows it is now dangerously off-balance. It is preoccupied with the question of what kind of relations we need to cultivate both among humans and between human, nature, and machine.

Fifth, it focuses on power and seeks its constant redistribution. It values dialogue and mutuality, but not appeasement. It wants to laugh at those who cling hopelessly to power, but with restraint because of the pain they cause. It takes the long view, seeks the transformation of fundamental structures. It focuses on the substantial work of repairing and reshaping things in favour of those denied power, through specific proposals like reparations and reforming economic models. It plants seedlings in places that will annoy power, and keeps watering them.

This is just a sketch, the still-murky outline of something. The field I am describing wants to resist offering a new grand framework — but to ask what we shall build towards, and what must be transformed both in us and in our structures that will make this possible. It has an irreducible commitment to the inner and outer transformation alike, and a way of seeing that is oriented to relationships and moral responsibility.

In Nepal, it would want to change the default understanding of what this disaster means, make visible the topography of responsibility, answer Nepal’s calls for restitution instead of aid, perhaps invite leaders to a peace summit with the glacier, and articulate a bold vision of “never again”. Much easier said than done, of course, and wide open to charges of naivety. But are we wise to let cynicism preclude everything?

For AI, it would integrate the important questions of “how can we make this safe?” into every domain from children’s smartphones to peacemaking, but then move upstream to “what is all this for, and what are we for?” It would make these questions the climax of every new book and talk on the subject, and mount a huge effort through the arts to shift the discourse from “arms race” towards “vision of humanity being reflected back to us”.

It would invite everyone into a shared project of renewal about how we relate to the natural world, and it would prototype ways of living that could show us what different systems might look and feel like. It would ask penetrating questions about everything we take for granted, from money to the nation-state. It would create time and space for big-picture reflection about the future that we could work towards.

And from each of these things it would learn, and from that process of learning might emerge a vision for humankind that is no longer quite so lost; that is able to glimpse, even with a little hope, what is the world we are becoming.

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2026 arrived like an ambush. Almost unbelievably, the audacious grab of Venezuelan President Maduro by the United States military was quickly eclipsed in news cycles by President Trump’s renewed threats to seize Greenland by any means necessary, and his withdrawal of the US from 66 international organisations. NATO may now exist in name only, and it is not fanciful to imagine the whole UN edifice collapsing.

New world order? Back to an old one? Or just honesty about the one that has already come into being? With the US invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, some analysts have framed all this as a return to spheres of influence — although of course things might well turn out messier still.

Whatever it all portends, the raw power of missiles is clearly now the currency. Gramsci’s monsters are rumbling, loudly.

As they do so, the old multilateralism splinters. It may be that little survives in its current forms. And the doing-good sector that has built itself on the hopes of international law and international cooperation is in a state of panic, with good reason. Leverage is diminishing, money is retreating, the power dynamics and institutional realities on which it has depended (for better and worse) are evaporating before our eyes. A whole infrastructure starts to fade away.

Meanwhile, inexorably, conflict is becoming the organising principle of global politics once again. We need to be honest about this. It may not have taken over our imaginations just yet, but it looms nonetheless. As one war-like episode follows another, it becomes increasingly apparent that we are all living in a liminal space between war and peace. Hard security, rearmament, deterrence are the menu du jour.

The beginning of the last century reverberates in our era. But this time there is far more complexity, the compounding pressure of a climate crisis, vastly advanced technological capabilities, the foreseeable possibility of entrusting robots with battlefield tactics, the weaponisation of space, and the ability resting in the hands of numerous states to annihilate much of the life on Earth.

The sheer, mind-boggling danger of it seems to be our best hedge against the worst. That’s hardly reassuring.

Is there anything else to hang onto? Most of us don’t have time to fret for long — we are preoccupied simply with the pressures of existing, inside systems that have not been designed for our collective thriving, and distracting ourselves instead of facing up to unbearable realities.

Yet we should not have to orient our lives to survival and fear.

We should not have to orient our lives to survival and fear.

This is a time when we need to stand way back, zoom out, discern.

As things collapse, the sense of permanent instability erodes our sense of agency and possibility. It is a poisonous cocktail indeed. The threat of violence is a sign of system failure, a catastrophic failure of imagination written in the script of domination and control. A world organising itself around war can neither save itself, nor see what it needs saving from.

All is not lost from the old order, of course. Less powerful states are still looking to get things done through multilateral action, not least the recent pandemic treaty process from which the US was absent. Just as a newly-independent Jamaica used its maiden speech to the UN General Assembly in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis to call for a worldwide human rights campaign (credit to Stephen Jensen for this nugget), apocalyptic threat has a way of impelling cooperation among those without power.

But this has to be a time for a rethink of fundamentals, not simply trying to preserve as much as we can of the old order. We may not be able to stop that building from being destroyed, or at least badly damaged. But we can build new ones. And we might have to.

Here’s the thing: as conflict looms, we are in a kairos moment of sorts, with an opportunity to think about what is the opposite of war. Certainly it is not our continual state of proto-war, in which grievances and rivalries and zero-sum politics enable the slow escalation towards conflict. Nor coping within economic systems that oppress us, push Earth systems to breaking point, lock us into the meaningless void of endless productivity cycles in pursuit of endless growth for the endless enrichment of… well, whom? Nor, surely, the loneliness and fragmentation and frictionlessness into which tech invites us, a great withdrawal from community and perhaps even life itself. These things all need to be part of the same conversation.

We don’t just need an absence of war, as the tired phrase repeats itself. We need the kind of peace in which we embrace a richer vision of human flourishing.

War is downstream of other things. And yet downstream sounds wrong, for nothing is linear, history is not inevitable. We are living amid a swirl of possibilities, different futures each pushing to be born. We may hear these possibilities in the fragments of conversations, see them enacted in communities, read them in scrawls on walls.

Nothing we have built so far has the right to exist in perpetuity. History is replete with reinvention. Political ideas, political forms come and go. There is no sense in which anything is permanent or inevitable or essential. There is no guarantee of the solidity or furtherance of what we have called progress.

This is not a time to recoil. We have to do the work of reimagining and remaking, not to hide or deny. Our task now is not so much one of defending what we have inherited, but of re-diagnosis and remaking.

At the level of international politics, some sketches: We should do the work of reimagining what a successor to the UN could look like, perhaps a looser set of arrangements centred around tackling a defined set of crises, and experiment with actual forms. We should ask if we need a new vocabulary of human flourishing to supersede human rights, perhaps something that locates humans in a wider ecology of nature and machine — and then start to generate this.

And we do have to start turning around the relentless flow of wealth to the wealthier (yes, there are ideas on how), and to revolutionise the relationship between (certain types of) work and time and money in an age when none of our kids know what jobs are still going to exist for them. And this is just the beginning.

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It is possible that we could do these things. It is possible not only because we humans are extraordinarily resourceful, but because we are capable of wanting good for ourselves and each other, and capable of solidarity and cooperation. Perhaps above all, because we are capable of love.

But we’ve also become deeply stuck, and seemingly unwilling to believe that other futures may be possible.

In the first instance, those without raw power may turn out to be the ones who can hold open the space for a future that is not war. Powerlessness is the best possible incentive for cooperation, and cooperation in the domains that build a future is our best protection against war.

But a broader reimagining is only going to happen if we are willing to give ourselves permission for it, to invest in it, to unleash a new generation of re-imaginers who can open our collective minds to the possibility that the future does not have to be war or destruction. For one thing, we surely need a new philanthropy oriented to the right brain, a massive investment in imagination and purpose and story and culture.

It may seem ludicrous to suggest that storytelling is going to save us from catastrophe. I hesitate even to write it. But while pragmatism and deterrence are the first order of business of course, they do not offer a future. And what does the macho realism of most IR theory offer us?

More than anything, our response to this moment must be a quiet rebellion of solidarity and love. That is overwhelmingly our most precious resource in an age of monsters. And whatever we do in our rebellious reimagining, we will do imperfectly, against the odds, in the cracks, around the edges.

It will be in the hidden strength of fragility; or as Han Kang wrote, perhaps in answer to her own question,

“Like a blooming heart. Like a pulsing flower bud. Like the wingbeat of an immeasurably small bird.”

Any crossroads worthy of its name offers three roads to pick. We rarely hear about them, of course. The metaphor usually just signals a time of uncertainty or a decision point. And sure, it can be useful (and sometimes literally true). But it’s tired. Probably so are many of us who use it.

The metaphors and constructions we choose can either reveal or obscure. They can open up our imagination or they can trap us in patterns of thinking about the world that misdirect our diagnoses and constrain our sense of what is truly possible.

Metaphors are more than just linguistic baubles. They are woven into how we make sense of reality; they impose a pattern on the world.

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote in their classic text, Metaphors We Live By, metaphors structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do. Metaphors help us in turn to create the realities that reinforce the metaphors.

So when we select a metaphor in the context of talking about issues like injustice and inequality, we are suggesting a certain diagnosis of the problem and the way out of it. But do we even know we are doing it?

In his much-cited 2017 book On Tyranny, the historian Timothy Snyder offered twenty lessons from the last century on how to resist authoritarianism. It is the ninth exhortation that has lingered in my mind: be kind to our language.

Snyder argues that it is when we begin unthinkingly reciting the same constructions over and over again that they become unquestionably, irrefutably true. Familiar sayings metabolise concepts and fix them in our minds so that for a time, no other way of imagining can be true.

(An aside: this is why politicians repeat phrases endlessly. This is how we come to associate words like “migration” with “illegal” instead of “people” and “solidarity”).

Snyder is making the point to show how societies fall into line behind tyranny. But the same insight applies whenever we reach reflexively for the same formulations in any context, whether they make sense or not. We submit to a template. Our imaginations exhausted, we stop thinking about what we mean and let the linguistic preset determine the meaning instead.

In my first post I wrote about how stuck we seem to have become. The crossroads is the metaphor par excellence for stuckness. This is the place where we stop and ask, where can we go?

Maybe we find a kind of tyranny lurking at the crossroads, watching with a wry smile as we take our place in the line. Welcome, it says. This is where we all find ourselves eventually.

But what if there are no more roads to find? What if we need to look instead for stepping stones across a rugged and boggy landscape?

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The crossroads give way to another mental template: strategy. Here we move from the grammar of uncertainty to the grammar of war. How to find direction becomes how to win. In the realm of social change, this can be a valuable shift — but it has a shadow side too.

Any good bookshop is likely to carry Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Head to the Business and Management shelves to find the seminal text on strategy. Essential reading for any competitive undertaking. But there is a caution here for those in the sector-without-a-name (human rights, climate, peace, inequalities, etc.) working for a more equitable, peaceful, just world:

“[I]f victory is long in coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.”

When you look at burnout among those who dedicate whole careers to a siege that may never end, you might start to wonder if we chose the wrong paradigm. What if the task is less a tussle for victory and more a quest to manifest ways of living that are more in tune with the kind of world and people we want to be? Is strategy still the right lexicon here?

There is nothing wrong with the crossroads, nor with strategy, nor any others besides. All can earn their place. But we need not be imprisoned by their logic, repeating them endlessly until we no longer mean them — or know what they mean.

This matters more than we may realise. Language and truth hold each other, but at a distance. The fixity of our formulations can distort our imagination about what is true or could be true in future.

In other words, getting unstuck may rely on us opening ourselves to different ways of framing things. As Lakoff and Johnson say, new metaphors can give us a new understanding of our experience and of our sense of possibility.

There has already been a shift in social change work towards using metaphors of the garden. That helps us to think about change as organic, gradual, something to cultivate and guide and prune, something that may be beset by pests or that dies back only to regrow and finally mature. It changes the whole way that we think.

Then there is jazz, a metaphor that Mónica Roa has expounded in the context of activism. As a dedicated jazz lover, I find this one promising. It offers a way to describe holding a certain beat, resisting the urge to essentialise things. Rebecca Solnit quotes Cornel West’s idea of the jazz freedom fighter, in which the mere musical form becomes something much richer:

“a mode of being in the world, an improvisational mode of protean, fluid and flexible disposition toward reality suspicious of ‘either/or’ viewpoints.”

Jazz is fluid, it is communitarian, it is all about improvisation and responsiveness and building collectively towards moments of soaring beauty. As the first notes are played, there are many more than three roads to take.

If we are going to get unstuck, we need to liberate our imaginations from tired formulations that simply reinforce the stuckness. We need to be open to new vocabulary, new grammar, new genre alike. From there, who knows what new stories and possibilities may emerge.

Metaphors are at the crossroads. So perhaps we need to install a roundabout. Or a jazz band.

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Stop.

This is our rhythm. Fragments of everything crowd in on us, relentlessly. We catch glimpses of possibility here and there, but the backdrop is grim. Global crises weigh heavily if we let ourselves think about them. The media reports scientific studies outlining climatic tipping points we can barely imagine. Democracy, where it exists, offers its bright moments, but… are those really the zeitgeist? Technology is precisely everywhere in our lives, but deep down we wonder why, and ache to be free of it, at least some of the time. War is back on the table, squarely in the middle of it actually.

As for ourselves, even those of us not immediately ravaged by calamity are locked into systems and ways of living that don’t care for us to thrive, not really. Are we flourishing? Best ignore the question. We grit our teeth and press on.

If there is anything beyond the now, is it not some kind of collapse? Will there be an ending, or renewal, or just eternal hopes for renewal in this elongated present?

Something about progress is broken. We seem to have become stuck, caught in a loop of the same anxieties, the same patterns with no way out.

I hesitate to reach at this point for George Orwell, but his early memoir of living in squalor left what seems to me a useful clue about our predicament:

“You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.”

It is as though we are experiencing something similar at a collective level. The cultural critic Mark Fisher extended the diagnosis to our wider societal life. He argued that capital has created a state of permanent structural instability that simply cancels the long-term. Our culture and politics are condemned to repeat the same exhausted forms over and over.

We enter a mental world of ennui and procrastination. Nothing beckons anymore; all that is left is to protect ourselves from an unsafe world.

And yet.

The quiet deceit we face today is that everything we are living through is historically inevitable. Not quite in an “end of history” sense, but still. This-here-today is the necessary culmination of all that has come before. It’s here to stay.

But, not true. Nothing is or was inevitable.

When we allow ourselves to believe in our stuckness, then our task shrinks to managing harm. We have to make the most of things within this system. Make tweaks, perhaps.

And overshadowed by crises, the left brain takes charge. We deal with each threat as it comes, leverage what we can, look for marginal gains within the rules of the game. We weigh option A against option B and act accordingly. And keep grinding on.

The homo economicus of the past gives way at last to homo certans — the striving human, forever chasing control, forever performing, unable to rest.

But, don’t we have a right brain too?

When the striving simply isn’t enough (and it never is), we seek solace in distraction. Impoverished in myths and meaning, and damned already by the vicissitudes of consumerism, we buy comfort in whatever packaged forms it comes. Our dystopia is one in which we have learned to play along.

So, what instead?

Can it be any other way?

I think we have to believe it can. We are caught between Ama Ata Aidoo’s call for planting and Arundhati Roy’s sense that something is already stirring. But there are things we need to (re)discover if this is to be more than wistfulness, and for imagination, hope, and strategy to converge. Here are two such things.

One: Nothing is the only way it could have been, and nothing about the future is settled. Maybe the current disorder in the world offers an opportunity. Maybe these are even the birth pangs of something different yearning to be born — and that something does not have to be a calamity.

Two: We are playful and creative beings, capable throughout our history of far more experimentation and reinvention than we may realise (try reading this). If we are able to reach inside and pay attention to our elemental yearnings, we might just find there the ingredients of different ways of being and doing — not only for ourselves but for the world.

We cannot wish away the crises overshadowing us. But we won’t deal with them unless we can imagine getting unstuck, and unless we can start describing the world we want instead. This task calls on us to think beyond the categories we have inherited, the institutions and processes we have created — and to begin weaving new stories about our flourishing.

Here we need not science and law, nor even politics and psychology, but story and memory and mythology. Amitav Ghosh and Julian Aguon are among those who have made the case for a new imagining in the context of climate, while a writer like Cole Arthur Riley leads us on a journey from fear and lament and rage through justice and repair to find rest and joy and liberation. These are the kinds of stories that set us on our way.

So, yes, we can become unstuck. But it will take far more than playing within the system. It calls for a bigger story. The time has come for poets and heretics, for prophets and sages.

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The world we are becoming

This is the beginning of a project over the coming months (and years?) to think afresh about the world we are becoming.

It flows from two places, distinct but closely related.

The first is my twenty years of work (and striving) within the relentless endeavour of making the world a fairer and more just and equal and peaceful place, straddling human rights and adjacent sectors. This now takes the form of my strategy practice, but has previously taken me to countless places of trauma and power.

Increasingly, this work has revealed a desperate longing for fresh hope and inspiration, and for a joined-up way of articulating the world that we actually want, instead of a forlorn battle against the one we have.

The second is my experience of mental exhaustion a few years ago, often branded as burnout, which I wrote about here in a little effort to break the taboo.

This experience was by no means disconnected from that wider sectoral pathology. It has become viscerally clear to me that we cannot attend to the big picture without also paying close attention to the personal, nor the other way round. For, what is the state of the world if not the aggregation of the lives of billions and the way we experience ourselves and power and all that surrounds us?

The aim is that this project will eventually yield a book. I am pouring most of my time and energy into that. But in the meantime, this Substack is going to be a place for sharing ideas and an invitation to travel together. I’d love you to come along.