No Futures
We don't have to think of the children
I’ve just started Moneyless Society by Matthew Holten, which promises to be one of my favorite books of the year.
In his introduction, Holten makes a compelling case for why we should abandon the money system entirely, and assures us that we can still live well without it. Near the end of his introduction, he makes a familiar appeal to his audience: we need to think of the children.
What happens if we don’t change the foundational structure of our society? Well, maybe not much—to our generation, at least… Even if our society manages to avoid collapse in the coming decades, our children and our children’s children will never forgive us for what we have done to their lives, to their futures, and to their hopes and dreams.
I understand why. Appealing to people’s deep desire to protect and care for their kids, part of which means assuring them a livable future, is a smart move to make. He’s also right that if we don’t change course fast, our children will indeed have a much scarier world to inherit.
It’s just that everyone makes this appeal, from every position and angle, and I think it actually hinders more than helps.
First and foremost, I don’t think Holten is being urgent enough. Collapse is coming in our lifetimes. In fact, in many ways collapse is already here.
Holten reminds us that it’s our children and grandchildren who will suffer the worst consequences of climate and societal collapse, and this is true. But he also admits that we probably only have years, not decades, to make the necessary changes. That means the coming storms will be in our lifetimes.
What exactly collapse means is a topic for another post, but for me 2023 was a canary-in-the-coal-mine year.
highlighted how global average temperatures went off the charts, pushing us over 2ºC of warming for the first time. recently linked to a BBC article highlighting how ocean temperatures broke records every day from May 4th, 2023, and how 2024 is starting out even worse.In light of this, we need to be thinking in terms of deep adaptation, not in terms of trying to prevent collapse. I’m not advocating acceleration — I think our systems collapsing will bring terrible suffering to untold millions, myself included. But if we’re on a sinking ship, we need to make lifeboats from the debris and get out, not try to right the ship again.
If the sinking ship is our whole planet, where is “out”? I don’t mean we should abandon Earth on spaceships. Leave that to the billionaires, especially since they won’t be able to support themselves up there.
Instead, I mean we should forget the children for a moment — or rather, the future they are being used to represent.
It’s hard to let go of the futures we may have imagined, where we continue to live comfortably separate from nature buoyed by the illusion of cheap energy from fossil fuels. But those futures are also illusory. As we run out of oil, our “cheap” energy will only get more expensive, and the devastating costs will become more apparent.
The good news is we don’t need to cling to our current way of life and its comforts. We don’t need to preserve the status quo, or any of the systems we live in — the military, the school, the office, the suburb, the factory farm. We can let all of that slag away and do things differently.
Doing things differently requires us to kill our darlings — again, not our children, but rather a worldview, habits of thought, convictions and values, that we’ve taken for granted or resigned ourselves to. That’s what this newsletter is aiming for: the death of this world.
The Death of God was not a call to slaughter priests and churchgoers. It meant the removal of religion as the cornerstone of society, questioning its authority in our culture and institutions. The Death of Man was not a call for mass genocide, but the humbling realization that we are not the center of the universe, and should not overestimate our capacity as rational decision-makers.
In the same way, the Death of This World is not a call to physically destroy the world (or abandon it), but to let go of the way we’ve always lived; to let go of keeping things the way they are.
Of course we want our kids to be safe, healthy, and happy. I want that no less than anyone else. But we don’t get there by projecting familiar patterns onto their futures. The world will be unrecognizable soon. We don’t make it off a runaway vehicle by waiting for the perfect moment to jump; we take the jump, and hold our kids close.
Matthew Holten makes this appeal to think of the children for many good reasons, like love, duty, and principle, in order to jolt people into action. But I think that’s also misplaced, mostly because this appeal is widely used across the political spectrum not to change the status quo but to preserve it.
This is obviously true of the right, whose reaction against anything progressive, especially socially and sexually, is always couched in child’s terms. It’s also true of liberals who aspire to lesser evils, doing things through the proper channels, and perpetuating the myth of progress: after all, if we keep the wheels of capital and democracy turning, our kids will have money and jobs, which are the best things. Finally, the left and the religious use this appeal in the form of sacrificing the present for a promised future reward, which tends not to materialize.
Almost no one challenges the assumption that whatever we do, we must always do it in the shadow of the child, who looms large as the sacred ground on which society and civilization are based. Again, I am not suggesting children are unimportant or don’t deserve our very best. I am pointing out a pattern whereby this world, by which I mean the systems that structure our lives, maintains itself by appealing to the idea of the child, in order to make us reproduce it.
And this world will be our undoing if we don’t undo it first.
Finally, if you want to reach the widest audience with the message that a moneyless society is possible, it is unfortunately true that many folks simply do not care about anyone but themselves. These people will likely not be moved by thinking of the children, but they might be moved by considering their own interests. No one wins a get-out-of-collapse-free card for having the most money or power. The rich are used to thinking they worked for their wealth. But when collapse reaches them, they will learn very quickly that the only reliable wealth is social capital, and that they have very little of it in the wider world.
Holten picks the right tenor when he concludes:
There are many who fear it is already too late, that we are beyond the point of no return, across the Rubicon, that we have triggered feedback loops that are now unstoppable and will relentlessly pummel our species into oblivion. I certainly hope that is not the case. More than likely, though, we have years and not decades to make massive changes. The signs are all around us if we are wise enough to see them. We must act decidedly, fast, and now should we have any hope of implementing the necessary changes in time.
I’m in that number that believes collapse is inevitable, which is why I’m very interested in learning all we can about stateless and moneyless societies, so that we can prepare a softer landing for our plane that’s about to crash. None of us make it out of life alive, but as a species we just might make it out of this bottleneck into the unknown.
And in the meantime, right here and now, there’s no way I’d rather live in than defiance of the systems of death and destruction.
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