Size Matters

It’s the Apocalypse, Stupid

Size matters—the scale of the problem, the size of your audience, the level of coordination necessary to overcome an obstacle. Tackling the climate crisis has always been an immense and impossible task necessitating a global effort unlike anything preceding it, and with every year, the scale of the problem balloons and as the rational animals approach the heat of their burning future they increasingly lose faith in the institutions that have both created this crisis and failed to adequately address it for a half century. Civilization does not always end the moment the volcano erupts. Sometimes civilizations end because they know the eruption’s coming. Civilization is collapsing in its panic at its coming collapse.

Mark Carney’s Davos speech begins with a simple true statement, “The power of the less starts with honesty.” Its opposite is also true: “The power of the more starts with deceit.” On both the wider global stage and the more localized political one, this is the calculus of our times, but what are they lying about and what truths must we reveal? The world as we know it is ending and it’s them who did it. The global south is being offered up to the flames because capitalism will always put profit first while every year is hotter and it’s inconceivable to us how it can get any hotter than it’s already got.

Power exists in different ways and different ecosystems. There are powerful individuals and powerful entities. There is the power of media and the power to destroy. We can talk about Elon Musk’s power to influence an election and China’s power to revert a global oil crisis.

By the same token, there are also different types of powerlessness. Individuals are powerless on their own—they require a community to accomplish anything beyond the simple fact of living a life. But certain communities are also powerless because they are not recognized by the nation as full citizens: Uyghur, Tibetan, Palestinian, US immigrants (both illegal and increasingly legal immigrants). And island states powerless as they vanish beneath the waves. And regulating bodies that are powerless to mandate their members to limit carbon emissions. We were always going to expect more than the world is able to give.

But is the world as we know it really ending?

In his book, Prisoner’s Dilemma (1993), William Poundstone explains the prisoner’s dilemma like this:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to two years in jail. The prisoners are given a little time to think this over, but in no case may either learn what the other has decided until he has irrevocably made his decision. Each is informed that the other prisoner is being offered the very same deal. Each prisoner is concerned only with his own welfare—with minimizing his own prison sentence.

If the pair works together, they get a moderately acceptable outcome. If one follows the rules and the other breaks them, the one who breaks them gets a much better outcome. If neither follows the rules, they get the worst outcome.

The climate crisis functions in the same way, wherein the world wouldn’t be ending if we could all work together towards the goal of reducing emissions to net 0, but individual economic interests often trump this crisis, such that even when some global actors are genuinely working towards the goal (Europe) others are not (China). Each country is only interested in minimizing its own effects and they have different beliefs and levels of faith concerning how the climate crisis will play out, beliefs that are invariably indistinguishable from their own goals and interests.

It is the belief that climate apocalypse will lead to a collapse of the Western world order that emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine and various apocalyptic scenarios function as the unspoken context for MAGA and AfD and Netanyahu and the Hindutva movement—people will die but not our people—even as we follow our habits into the inferno—because it’s always someone else who will die and someone else who’s responsible. It’s true that industrial culpability vastly outweighs the acts of any individual and China’s continued coal use completely undermines any energy transition in Europe, but in the collective consciousness, this somehow translates to: it’s the immigrants who are destroying America. Point being, there are genuine others undermining any attempts to mitigate the climate crisis but at the individual level, we are interested only in the strangers among us, and cleansing our borders in preparation for the annihilating waves and the many fires tickling across our landscapes and into our living rooms. The others must be kept at bay.

Because despite what any particular hopeful pundit might espouse, the general consensus is that the world as we know it is indeed ending. The 21st century is the Apocalyptic Age because the world is functioning as if this is the apocalypse and are ensuring the apocalypse because of this assumption. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma at planetary scale and we’re all playing and no one wants to be that sucker who finds themselves with their pants down.

In his book, Humankind, Rutger Bregman mentions a thought experiment performed by Tom Postmes, professor of social psychology at the University of Groningen, in which he posits the thought experiment: “Imagine an airplane makes an emergency landing and breaks into three parts. As the cabin fills with smoke, everybody inside realizes: We’ve got to get out of here. What happens? On Planet A, the passengers turn to their neighbors and ask if they’re okay. Those needing assistance are helped out of the plane first. People are willing to give their lives, even for perfect strangers. On Planet B, everyone’s left to fend for themselves. Panic breaks out. There’s lots of pushing and shoving. Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities get trampled underfoot. Now the question: Which planet to do we live on?” Postmes estimates that 97 percent of those asked believe we live on Planet B but in almost every actual case, we live on Planet A. We are kinder than we think.

But then why are people behaving so badly to each other in the here and now?

Bregman’s argument is that it’s a kind of delusion, that the assumption that we are cruel leads to actual cruelty. Although there might be some truth to his claim, it also very much reads like James’ “religion of healthy-mindedness” and sloughs of “as so much excrescence” any example of collective unkind actions, as in the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide are just exceptions to the rule of kindness. People were misled. These are huge exceptions. All of human history is writ in exceptions such a these.

Eichmann was pathological in Bregman’s thinking. Never mind that when Hannah Arendt wrote about him, she was by implication writing about the entire German people, who were also banal and normal and just following orders or doing their jobs. Eichmann was a single instance of the larger “banality of evil” that allowed the Nazi state to function as it did. As are ICE agents an example of the banality of evil. As are the IDF and their machine-learning-driven genocide.

In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti argues that the crowd’s fundamental emotional dynamic is to survive together. In extreme situations a bond builds among those you consider as part of the “in” group. In the case of our plane crash on Planet A, everyone on the plane designates as the “in” group. They have all gone through a traumatic event together. But the problem is, a society in a state of crisis is not the same as a plane. The crisis is caused by everyone on the planet, and by some more than others, but these super-polluters are abstract—nations, industries—to whom we are powerless or feel powerless, and so instead our hatred turns to more tangible others. A crowd needs enemies because it needs the experience of collective survival over those who are not in the crowd. Our genocides and concentration camps are only another coping mechanism, but at what a scale and what a cost. This scapegoating will do nothing to save you and your neighbors but it will give the comforting feeling that something is being done.

But why can’t we all be inside the plane? The designated dying group—the Muslim, the immigrant, the climate refugee—these are a structurally necessary for the crowd to feel its own survival at it is continually being constituted and reconstituted into existence through escalating acts of sadism, rejection, and death of the out group. We can’t all be inside the plane—thinks the crowd—this plane’s too small and maybe it’s your fault that your part of the plane’s on fire, deal with your own part of the plane—as populist politicians rise from both a genuine fear and a disingenuous concern that masks other policy objectives—i.e. what Netanyahu is doing with Gaza, his motives were always going to be the eradication of the Palestinian people and the swallowing up of Gaza and the West Bank into Israel proper.

The politics of the world have turned to these deadly coping mechanisms because they cannot acknowledge their failure to address the actual problem of a warming planet, as the citizens in those countries also cannot face this failure—that the Paris Agreement was only ever going to work if it was binding, which it wasn’t—that the costs associated with the European Union’s real successes are unacceptable to the people who have to bear them—that the Inflation Reduction Act was repealed because it negatively affected the fossil fuel industry in the US—that despite Exxon’s climate models from the 1970s clearly showing accurate predictions of warming, company spent decades publicly denying climate change—its argument that if it stops, it will simply reduce its market share—that individuals were fed a BP advertising campaign to put the pressure on individual carbon footprint in a deliberate attempt to turn attention away from industry and international culpability solved only through regulation and onto the individual, an individual who sees the world warming regardless of whether they reduce flights and buy electric vehicles or not—but the ultimate prisoner’s dilemma is the fiction that these non-binding measures could work, that through some magic a continuation of business as usual could result in Net 0, in the leveling off of CO2, and the righting of the climatological scales. The failure to acknowledge the failure for what it is, this is why the people panic and stop listening to their pundits and their politicians.

There is a quote that’s been haunting me recently. In his documentary series, The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis paraphrases Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers, drawing on arguments Mazur developed in his 1928 book American Prosperity. “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs.” While Mazur outlined this shift, it was Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and inventor of public relations, who figured out how to implement it through the invention of subliminal advertising.

Herbert Hoover, addressing a roomful of PR-men around the same time declared, “You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines. Machines which have become the key to economic progress.”

The story of the end of the world begins in many places, perhaps going back as far as the original adoption of steam in the mid-nineteenth century as Andreas Malm suggests in Fossil Capital, or—closer to hand—the failures of the US government to react when originally presented with the dire warnings of the scientific community in 1989, but it was made possible here in the USA by this shift from informed citizen to citizen consumer, who is—rather than addressed rationally—developed into an irrational and malleable force capable of manipulation and thereby easier to exploit by bad actors.

As long as the wheels of progress were turning, society could continue to progress with a veneer of liberalism and Enlightenment ideals, but the cracks were showing long before the moment our narrative first shifted from one of progress to one of fear in the aftermath of 9/11, when the US government took an act of terror by a single extremist group and used it to turn the world against an entire category of people. Islamophobia is baked into our narrative of the end of the world, but only because—from late stage capitalism to consumer-based individualism—the true villains are both ephemeral and systemic. Sure they include the Koch Brothers and our elected officials, but these are villains you can’t throw out of the country.

Why Muslim and not some other group? As with anti-semitism in Germany in the 1930’s, a powerless minority and a vocabulary ready to hand, different for each, but with the same purpose, to “otherize” and to “demonize.” Muslims are truly global, making the scapegoating of them more practicable in our global times. As in, scapegoating Jews in China and India wouldn’t work because there are no Jews in China or India, but both these nations have a Muslim community ready at hand to conveniently act as sacrificial lambs in their efforts to both placate and unite their people around a common internal enemy.

It also helps that this particular brand of scapegoating fits into a narrative as presented by certain Muslim extremists who also see the world as Islam v the Secular West, but the moment this pogrom against Muslim communities moved East to India, Myanmar, and China it evolved beyond the traditional jihad narrative regardless of what language the ruling party may use. The language of jihad only works in conjunction with the language of crusade. Their history is intertwined. The Chinese government is not eradicating the Uyghur out of fear of jihad but because they’re “crazy” and “all Chinese should be one,” sentiments I heard often towards the end of my 4 years living in China. The Mughal empire is as much India as the Maratha.

But what of the marginalized group? What calculus rules their actions and behaviors? As before, one exists in reaction to the other. The perceived powerlessness of the majority in face of a tsunami rushing at their doorsteps leads to policies whose purpose is to corral, oppress and ultimately annihilate the minority group, but the minority group themselves has no other option than simply to endure—because every violent reaction only legitimizes further repression and increasingly aggressive pushes to annihilate. The slaughter of seven people by knife in a train station is used as justification for the forced sterilization and imprisonment of thousands. The murder of 1,700 Israelis is used to justify the complete erasure of a people.

However, the truth is that increasingly the majority suffer a similar calculus. The sacrificial lambs being offered up by majority communities will not protect them from the famine, disease, and war that are coming in the wake of our exploding ecosystems and upended planet.

We are all asking ourselves yearly how much more can I give up. We see others being made to give up their lives at the hands of their more powerful neighbors and think, “At least I am not being made to give up as much as them.” It is in this way that the minority groups among us, and specifically Muslim communities around the world, are being treated as sacrificial lambs.

I’m willing to concede losing A and B as long as I retain C and D they tell themselves even when C and D are also very much on the table. It is a calculus every prisoner must perform to retain their sanity, a kind of play pretend power that holds them in a state of acquiescence because that’s the only option they have. It is how those in a lesser position maintain a sense of control in a situation they have no control over.

But in the West, Islamophobia also fits in nicely with the concept of the solidarity of the saved. People who are in no way Christian in their behavior, Pete Hegseth will always come to mind here, can conveniently claim their salvation explicitly as the “in” group. Team Christianity won. Their God is the true God. The others will be sacrificed up to the coming fires of the climate apocalypse.

This is something that Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein talk about in their new book, End Times Fascism, a book which fully and wonderfully captures the current political reality in America and what needs to be done to fight that reality. They talk of selective survival—a term which fits Putin’s and Xi’s calculus as much as Trump’s MAGA world entourage. Netanyahu would never be so bold with his genocide of Palestinians if he did not believe the global world order is collapsing, and generally speaking, this belief of apocalypse is both a means to legitimize and/or a genuine motive for the expansion of lands and the eradication of inconvenient others within their borders, real or imagined.

I want to be clear here. The Islamophobia on display in places as diverse as India, Israel and China are owned by those societies. The horrors they are enacting are their own and belongs to them exclusively. The War on Terror was the R&D stage for the contemporary surveillance state and established the template for civilizational solidarity against an internal-external enemy. It doesn’t help that the area most affected by the climate crisis—the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq—are overwhelmingly Muslim-majority.

And every time the minority group or individual can no longer endure the continued pressure and lashes out, the pressure only increases—on the Uyghur, in Gaza, on the streets of Minneapolis. These two entities, call them David and Goliath, the big and the small, are on a collision course and fueled by a climate crisis itself powered by capitalism. In short, fascism is the logical result of our panic and we are the logical prey of its state panic.

This is the human face of the prisoner’s dilemma at work. We are beating each other to death inside our cells rather than trying to break free.

In another Adam Curtis documentary, The Power of Nightmares, he argues that both the neocon movement as initially masterminded by Leo Strauss in the 40s and 50s and Sayyid Qutb’s Islamism, which directly spawned Osama Bin Laden, derived from the same diagnosis—that Western liberal individualism had produced a spiritual vacuum, a society of atomized, purposeless people who had gained freedom but lost meaning. Both movements concluded that the Enlightenment’s promise of rational progress leading to human flourishing was a lie, or at least a failure. Both proposed to replace it with a strong moral community bound by shared values—Strauss’s noble lie for the philosopher-rulers to tell the masses, Qutb's return to Quranic purity. Both defined themselves against liberal individualism as their primary enemy. This loss of faith in liberal progress precedes the events that are usually cited as causing it. The neocons and Islamists didn't lose faith in progress because of Vietnam or Watergate or stagflation or the Iranian revolution. They lost faith in it in the late 1940s, watching postwar American consumer society at its apparent apex, and finding it spiritually empty, only to then, a half century later, declare each other enemies in a civilizational conflict.

The story of the end of the world is not singular because the end of the world is not singular. There are many ways in which a world can end and many of them are not the absolute one hundred percent end of the world. The apocalypse is threefold: political, economic, and ecological.

Just as modernity is a mindset, apocalypse is a mindset, and at each stage, we see the increasing fraying and transition from one mindset (progress) to another mindset (apocalypse), from a paradigm of growth to a politics of fear, but the mindset precludes actual fact of the thing. The shift from the Modern and Postmodern modalities of the 20th century to the Apocalyptic ones of the 21st could be dated back to a reaction to liberalism that occurred both within the Islamist and Neocon movement, a reaction which led to Reagan and then the second Bush, to the War in Iraq and the Patriot Act. Donald Trump was not a break but a culmination. However, Donald Trump also represented a kind of political apocalypse that was only fully actualized in his second term. Donald Trump is the living embodiment of the end of the American led world order and this fracturing will also lead to the end of the global economy, the second phase of apocalypse.

Of course, we can’t blame the end of the world exclusively on one political party—Postmodern relativism has also been notoriously incriminated into the larger breakdown of meaning and collective identity—and just as reactionary forces utilize postmodern logic to attack postmodern politics, leftist political movements also purge from the “in” group in a similar panic of the other, albeit an ideological rather than a racial other—but we are all of us in a feedback loop with actual observable phenomena. As in, we all see the world coming unhinged and are coming unhinged as a result of the unhinging we see out in the world.

Technology no longer leads to utopia but dystopia even as visions of future betterment are stolen by visions of increased climate disturbances. The apocalyptic mindset was bolstered by the economic crisis of 2008 and came into its own with Brexit and Trump’s election in 2016. Does the appearance of the Anthropocene coincide with the end of the age of Enlightenment and its paradigm of progress?

These three apocalypses cannot be unpacked from each other but they manifest at different times and each have their own distinct sets of interdependencies. The unraveling of political norms coincides with the unraveling of the global economy coincides with the unraveling of the weather systems we depend on for our survival, but how do we understand their initial conditions? Did political and economic inequality lead to ecological crisis? Did the ecological crisis lead to the unraveling of political norms which in turn is leading to the unraveling of the economic world order? It would take an entire paper of its own to disentangle causality here, but as to final outcomes, political norms go first (and it could be argued are already gone in the US) and this instability allows for the final collapse of economic interdependence (as may be happening now with the Iran War and Trump’s tariffs), whereas ecological apocalypse would be something like the AMOC collapse or some similar tipping point which overwhelms society’s mechanisms, a real likelihood and considering how the planet has outperformed scientific expectations re climate crisis, something could even happen in our lifetimes.

So—again—is the world as we know it really ending?

I bring this up too often because my style of argument necessitates you understand something that I take for granted. I spent three years living at at Tibetan monastic college in Northern India running their ESL program and one of the things I took from that and has become a key way I see the world is Buddhist logic. In Aristotelian logic, a thing is either true or not true, but in Buddhist logic there are four corners or catuskoti: a thing is true, a thing is not true, a thing is both true and not true, and a thing is neither true or not true. The classic example for third-corner that I’ve heard is the Dalai Lama saying something like, “The flower obviously exists but it has no inherent existence,” it both is and is not, and the classic example of the fourth corner is the “child of a barren woman” i.e. something that is nonsense and therefore meaningless.

I bring this up because of course the world is really ending.

Why and how can I say this? We need hope. We need to believe we can beat this. Yadda, yadda, yadda. We can beat this but civilization as we know it will not survive. It’s ending and it’s not. The world is ending and a new world is being born. And so on and so forth.

International regulation of carbon emissions was never going to work but the fascist project was also always doomed to fail. It is already failing.

Where the fascist project has taken control, it has posited a transactional world of regional dominance—China in Asia, the US in the Americas, and Russia in Eastern Europe—while—returning to Carney’s speech at Davos—the “middle powers” are focused on a world of cooperation. These dynamics also exist due to the hierarchies of power and the perception of power. But how does it play out in practice?

“A reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks fall.” This ancient proverb, not unlike the also famous passage from the Dao De Jing about the flexible grass and inflexible tree, signifies how best to survive turbulent times, and an argument could be made that the superpowers of the world, perhaps as a result specifically of their power, position, and the pride that goes with it, are all making the mistake of the oak by doubling down on their pre-apocalypse policies and isolating themselves from their neighbors while simultaneously attempting to exploit apocalypse to achieve military and other objectives. Again, this stance could date back to 9/11 and the US’s now infamous claims of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” but most notably characterizes US policy under Trump, Putin’s forays into Ukraine, and China’s positioning re the South China Sea, Taiwan and its Asian neighbors. These are all “mighty oaks” and they are all falling.

In practice the larger powers are more hastily accelerating their collapse due to their vision of themselves as dominant powers who can then leverage this to solidify their position in post-apocalyptic geopolitics. Why would China feel justified in its blatant ignorance of international law if not for the understanding that a new multi-polar reality was coming into being? Russia invades Ukraine again ostensibly to defend against NATO—a NATO he perceives as increasingly turning aggressive as the climate crisis worsens or collapsing into marauding states that will rise up against and harass his neo-tsarist Russia. The USA, traditional keystone to the Western world order, the birthplace of an Enlightenment era political system built on human rights and representation in a government built by and for the people becomes an inversion of that ideal—perhaps in part because some players believed those ideals were too strong to break no matter how much they were bent but also in part in direct and intentional opposition to those ideals as incompatible with apocalypse, and specifically as incompatible with an apocalypse where the rich and powerful continue to come out on top.

And you might say, “Well alright, I buy Russia and the US, but China? Isn’t China winning right now?” Let’s talk about Xi and the psychology that rules his decisions. Xi famously didn’t want to be Gorbachev, as in a liberalizing leader watching over the end of his party and the end of his empire. There is however, a crucial difference between the failures of Gorbachev and China at the moment Xi came to power. Russia under Gorbachev was losing, economically, whereas China under Xi had won the economic game of global dominance. It could be argued that Deng was the Gorbachev of China, but in Deng’s case he pulled off his miracle while retaining his stranglehold. Xi has consistently made decisions that put party over country. If he had been able to leave Hong Kong alone, it’s very possible that Taiwanese reunification could have happened peacefully, but he showed clearly and decisively that he would never accept one country two systems in practice in 2014 and more definitively in 2019. Closing off the country has only allowed the party to maintain the facade of its economic growth and strength. As a friend of mine in China said recently, “There’s no future in China.” You just can’t see it because of the total information blackout.

This leaves then the middle powers to nobly hold on through the traditional methods of cooperation and diplomacy and all the traditional tools of statecraft even when the monumental superpowers are not only fracturing alliances but willfully ending themselves with policies and campaigns entirely built around a science fiction future their leaders have taken as fact. Russia killing off an entire population of young men is going to end that nation as a functional state. America starving its own industry through pointless tariffs and starving the global market of its oxygen with the Iran War will also fundamentally end America, is ending America as its been, regardless of who sits in the White House after 2028.

In our proverb the middle and smaller powers are the grass. They can do nothing but bend. Middle powers can join together as Carney suggests and thus strengthen themselves but can these “middle powers” indeed save the world through cooperation? Can they at least save themselves? If the global economy were to collapse or if AMOC were to collapse, is NATO’s strategy a viable option? The answer to this multi-faceted and impossible question is as always yes and no. The answer is always yes and no.

Can middle powers mitigate threats through cooperation? Yes. Could middle powers survive something as catastrophic as AMOC collapse? No. Or, specifically not Europe because in this case it really is front and center of the danger and its northernmost territories would become completely inhospitable in the winter while summer temperatures would also continue to increase. Is cooperation the right decision? Yes. Is regional and small power cooperation really the only option many nation states have? Yes. Will middle powers continue to function as nation states if/when other entities (Russia, US, China) turn largely or completely dysfunctional? I don’t know.

And the “small powers,” places like Vanuatu and Nepal? Cooperation can also be the key to their at least temporary survival, but in practice for very small powers this often translates to diplomacy. Qatar is perhaps most emblematic of the diplomatic solution and as such serves as a warning case for the world. Qatar worked with everyone, playing itself off as a Switzerland of the middle east, was home to the Al-Jazeera news network that so infuriated its Arab neighbors but was also willing to host extreme terrorist groups alongside their enemies. It was an essential component to the taming of the Middle East image. But when the US invaded Iran, Qatar could not stop Iran from striking Ras Laffan. The strategies that work in normal times become fragile when larger powers no longer calculate long-term relationships.

The other, more extreme position for any small power is isolation. That’s to say, small powers tend to buddy up with larger ones where they can but in extreme cases evolve into hermit kingdoms. I always think of on the one hand, North Korea as a chaotic evil isolationist and Bhutan as the lawful good version. Isolation may at the very least immunize a nation state from the dangers of global financial collapse, and does offer a path forward through a larger climate crisis if that isolated community is self-sufficient, agrarian and blessed by a more favorable geography. My money’s on yes Bhutan, no North Korea, but Bhutan’s proximity to SE Asia (also on the frontlines, especially if AMOC collapses and the monsoon belt moves south) could also prove a death sentence.

Tuvalu is another case of small state impotence, although this is at the level of climate action. Tuvalu is set to be the first nation to vanish as a result of the climate crisis and by July of 2025 more than 80% of the island nation’s population (appr 8,750 people) had applied for an Australian climate refugee visa. That’s one strategy.

There’s an article by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann called Climate Leviathan in which they talk about four possible global responses to the climate crisis, Climate Leviathan, Climate Behemoth, Climate Mao, and Climate X. Climate Leviathan works to maintain a both/and of “planetary sovereign” and capitalism—planetary sovereign here represented as a supranational body that can regulate nations such that they limit or cease in their use of fossil fuels—think Paris Agreement—which was the model for most of the past forty years and has been a disastrous failure outside of Europe for the simple reasons that a) they are not in fact sovereign, as in have no actual power, and b.) if capitalism was going to give equal or greater importance to the climate crisis, the climate crisis was never going to be resolved. The second, Climate Behemoth is capitalism fighting back against planetary sovereignty and ignoring the climate crisis in favor of profit, which is exactly what the MAGA movement represents, whereas the third would be a world in which capitalism was rejected in favor of a planetary sovereign regulating the world under a socialist model, i.e. Climate Mao. Then there is Climate X.

“What constitutes climate X? Let us begin by defining it formulaically: climate X is a world which has defeated the emerging climate Leviathan and its compulsion for planetary sovereignty, while also transcending capitalism. In other words, we argue that only in a world that is no longer organized by the value form, and only where sovereignty has become so deformed that the political can no longer be organized by the sovereign exception, is it possible to imagine a just response to climate change.”

In short, Climate X is a case of neither/nor. It is not sovereign control or capitalist. It is the world defeating Climate Leviathan and any Behemoth or Mao offshoots to instead create some as-of-yet-unforeseen alternative. It is yet again a failure of imagination, which is how filmmaker Adam Curtis framed the climate crisis. It is the behind-door-number-three option. It also is exactly what’s emerging at the grassroots level. It is communities rising up. It is what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor would describe as Hereness.

Further down they quote Minqi Li: “Hopefully, people throughout the world will engage in a transparent, rational and democratic debate which is open not only to economic and political leaders and expert intellectuals, but also to the broad masses of workers and peasants. Through such a global collective debate, a democratic consensus could emerge that would decide on a path for global social transformation that would in turn lead to climate stabilization… This may sound too idealistic. But can we really count on the world’s existing elites to accomplish climate stabilization while meting the world population’s basic needs? Ultimately, climate stabilization can only be achieved if the great majority of the world’s population… understand the implications, relate these implications to their own lives, and actively…participate in the global effort of stabilization.”

It DOES sound too idealistic. Which is why the world is ending. Democracies barely work on the national level. How are we to expect them to work on a global scale? But something else is happening, which is, not debates—who has time for debates anymore—but action. To define Hereness Klein and Taylor turn to the reaction to ICE in Minneapolis, the Mamdani campaign in NYC. These were not debates but actions. Rational discourse won’t save the world, but people standing up for their neighbors just might.

That having been said, there is no outcome at the scale required that can overcome the systematic barriers to its completion. In part because those systems are controlled by moneyed elite who benefit from the system as it stands and in part because humans were not built to function as a singular “in” group. There’s always an “us” and a “them”.

But we have built mechanisms to override our inherent biological wiring. They’re called religions, and I would argue that Climate X, the unknown response, is specifically and fundamentally a spiritual response. In times of crisis, it is not reason that gets us through but faith. Criticism is necessary as a means to check power, but when the world’s on fire, something else is needed. Not dogma or doctrine but that fetal spark of the first prophet in some primordial grove. We need to connect. We need stories of connection.

Apocalypse naturally lends itself to religion. The impulses that move us in our most extreme moments—whether it’s around a hospital bed or facing off against a tidal way—are ultimately religious whether or not they carry that name. In moments like these, it’s not just our institutions and our leaders who fail us but reason itself. Now is a time to believe, in your neighbors and in each other. Kindness may be naive but opening up your home to the stranger is brave and we need more brave souls. Can you save humanity while at the same time losing your humanity? Is there ever any choice but to care? If you aren’t sure how to answer these questions, that’s the problem.

Think of it like this: Belief in no object. At some point, simply having faith is enough. Whatever happens, it will be alright. Other people matter. I pledge myself to others. The basic. The essential. You can’t expect the whole world to feel this way, only you, but you matter.

Nations are not the answer to the climate crisis. We cannot fight the climate crisis alone but we also cannot fight the climate crisis at the scales we’ve been trying to. Protests don’t work when your representatives are literally drafting documents that were never going to work—because any binding agreement would never be signed. This has been the national and international response since the beginning—choose a path that will never work and hope it will work anyway because the path that would work is impossible.

The populist movement is one that gives up on trying to find an answer to the climate crisis and instead focus on protecting the nation from the inevitable fall-out. But the climate crisis happens everywhere. Regardless of whether your nation is submerged a la Tuvalu, nation states will cease to exist as a reality as the implosion we’re seeing in America and Russia currently spreads with the collapse of the global economy and explosion of extreme weather events. In such a climate, stateless actors are the future—as one Navajo manifesto has put it—the future is tribal.

Tuvalu is going to be submerged. There is no version of this where Tuvalu continues to exist in its current form. But Tuvalu could continue to exist in some form. Tevaogali Elisala nursing her four year-old-son and saying, “I don’t want to leave,” even as the waters eat away at the white sands of a narrow shore. The former prime minister addressing the UN while standing in the ocean in his two-piece suit by the drowning coastline.

The problem has always been that it was a game. A game of power. A game of money. A game in which the lives of the future were already forfeit as collateral damage. We are witnessing several very real genocides but also an invisible genocide that is being played out over the course of our lifetime and into the next. It is a genocide of who-has-the-right-to-live. The global south is being strangled and the global north wants very much to look away.

This article is called Size Matters for a reason. The problem has always been that we try to speak to nations like they’re communities when all we can hope is to reach out to our communities and adjacent communities and work to build our small communities. We are among the powerless, but that is our power. In the game as presented, we have no voice, which is why it’s time to step out of the game.

This is my take on the Hereness. Another way to look at it is, “Love the one you’re with,” as Stephen Stills sang. I have talked about it elsewhere as radical non-participation and radical disillusionment. Boycott the economy. Rely on the physical people around as opposed to idealized leaders. Tend to the disasters at hand.

There are places and peoples that are more favored to survive of course, but we’ll talk about that in a later essay—along with culture wars, preppers and pariahs, and stateless actors. We’re just getting started figuring this all out.

And if you happen to be near one of a great flame—a pillar of fire sprouting from some industrial park somewhere—work to put it out. Because the house is on fire, but we’re only hastening the fire by trying to find a way out for us and ours. Instead, stand in the house as it burns and lend a helping hand as you erupt into a blossom of heat.