As the Western World Implodes, How Will We Replace It?

We have to envision the future we want

Ever since October, 2023, I’ve been obsessed with geopolitical issues. It’s hard to explain to my friends why that is. Here’s what drew me in.

The times we’re living through are unprecedented. First the genocide graphically coming to us on our screens, then the accusation that we’re anti-semitic if we object to it. Now we have the Epstein files, and are discovering that many people we once looked up to have been raping children and worse, and that this is systemic.

Add to that the abject failure of neoliberalism in the west. What was described as the end of history resulted in the destruction of so much of value in the western world. It’s resulted in skyrocketing costs of living, a lack of affordable housing, unemployment, the rise of fascism, crossing environmental tipping points, and the concentration of wealth into fewer hands.

And decades of propaganda have convinced many of us that the west has the right to bomb countries in order to bring them democracy and women’s rights. How has that worked out? Many countries in the world, some of them prosperous, have been bombed back to the stone ages. Think Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

During this profound moment of change, we can’t afford to be asleep at the wheel.

We’re facing nuclear powers itching for war, international law being trampled, and a morally bankrupt ruling class that is drunk on power and in control of the news and entertainment we consume.

How can we believe what we’re being fed through these channels? How can we tell honest news from propaganda?

Here are some news sites I trust in these earlier posts. I wrote this one first, and this one later. A good place to start might be with Danny Haiphong. I listened to two of his interviews today, and they were very informative. Some of the people I mention in these posts have had their funds frozen, some have been jailed, and their sites are not being favoured by online algorithms. Often they wish each other safety after an interview. Some are associated with Wikileaks. Honest reporting can be dangerous these days.

What we learn from these sites are things we don’t learn from mainstream media, and we’re often deliberately misled about.

Based on what we’re witnessing, the elite class considers us disposable. Our economic systems serve them at our expense through bought politicians, price gouging, increased privatization, and war mongering.

How do we navigate this moment? This is uncharted territory, and we don’t have a map. We need to choose a peaceful, just and restorative destination, and then figure out the route to getting there.

Many of us are buying local, boycotting Israel, building community, growing food and doing what we can to prepare for what seems to be an inevitable crash.

And these are all good things.

Assuming that the western world is in the process of crumbling, we also need to articulate a clear vision of the kind of future we want to replace it with.

I recently read Vincent Bevin’s latest book If We Burn, which explores the massive demonstrations that took place all over the world between 2010 and 2020, and how most didn’t bring about the changes people wanted.

Part of the problem was that there was a desire to have horizontal movements where everyone has an equal say, which made it easy for infiltrators to corrupt these movements, misrepresent them, and take them in directions that weren’t originally intended.

This book made me realize that it’s essential that we have a clear idea of the kind of society we want, and a strategy for getting there.

There have been many attempts at doing this. And some have been successful.

In Professor Marandi’s latest weekly broadcast, Demystifying Iran, he outlined how his country constructed a sovereign state rooted in its own Islamic and historical foundations after the revolution in 1979.

I like that it suited their particular cultural heritage, and it makes sense to me that each country tailors their governance systems to their own unique values and priorities.

I’m Canadian, and am happy to share some of the initiatives that give me hope for the future in the Canadian context.

An early attempt at finding common ground among various leaders of movements that wanted to solve major problems in Canada was the Leap Manifesto. In the Spring of 2015, they spent a few days together trying to articulate what they wanted an ideal society to look like. The Leap was ahead of its time, but is worth revisiting to see what they came up with. Here are the points they agreed upon:

As an alternative to the profit-gouging of private companies and the remote bureaucracy of some centralized state ones, we can create innovative ownership structures: democratically run, paying living wages and keeping much-needed revenue in communities. And Indigenous Peoples should be first to receive public support for their own clean energy projects. So should communities currently dealing with heavy health impacts of polluting industrial activity.

Power generated this way will not merely light our homes but redistribute wealth, deepen our democracy, strengthen our economy and start to heal the wounds that date back to this country’s founding.

A leap to a non-polluting economy creates countless openings for similar multiple “wins.” We want a universal program to build energy efficient homes, and retrofit existing housing, ensuring that the lowest income communities and neighbourhoods will benefit first and receive job training and opportunities that reduce poverty over the long term. We want training and other resources for workers in carbon-intensive jobs, ensuring they are fully able to take part in the clean energy economy. This transition should involve the democratic participation of workers themselves. High-speed rail powered by renewables and affordable public transit can unite every community in this country – in place of more cars, pipelines and exploding trains that endanger and divide us.

And since we know this leap is beginning late, we need to invest in our decaying public infrastructure so that it can withstand increasingly frequent extreme weather events.

Moving to a far more localized and ecologically-based agricultural system would reduce reliance on fossil fuels, capture carbon in the soil, and absorb sudden shocks in the global supply – as well as produce healthier and more affordable food for everyone.

We call for an end to all trade deals that interfere with our attempts to rebuild local economies, regulate corporations and stop damaging extractive projects. Rebalancing the scales of justice, we should ensure immigration status and full protection for all workers. Recognizing Canada’s contributions to military conflicts and climate change — primary drivers of the global refugee crisis — we must welcome refugees and migrants seeking safety and a better life.

Shifting to an economy in balance with the earth’s limits also means expanding the sectors of our economy that are already low carbon: caregiving, teaching, social work, the arts and public-interest media. Following on Quebec’s lead, a national childcare program is long past due. All this work, much of it performed by women, is the glue that builds humane, resilient communities – and we will need our communities to be as strong as possible in the face of the rocky future we have already locked in.

Since so much of the labour of caretaking – whether of people or the planet – is currently unpaid, we call for a vigorous debate about the introduction of a universal basic annual income. Pioneered in Manitoba in the 1970’s, this sturdy safety net could help ensure that no one is forced to take work that threatens their children’s tomorrow, just to feed those children today.

We declare that “austerity” – which has systematically attacked low-carbon sectors like education and healthcare, while starving public transit and forcing reckless energy privatizations – is a fossilized form of thinking that has become a threat to life on earth.

These are important domestic policy ideas, and I think they’re still relevant. I’d like to add proportional representation to this list. I also love the idea of a public option for grocery stores as proposed by Avi Lewis, who is running for the federal NDP leadership. And some basic ethical and competency screening for people running to represent us politically might be a good idea. I can think of a few politicians who would have been screened out.

Besides domestic policies, we have to look at how our countries interact on the global stage.

With the events of the past few years, many of us are having to question our very identities. Danny Haiphong explores this and other topics with his guest Justin Podur in this highly engaging video. The genocide in Gaza and the Epstein files is at odds with the world we imagined we lived in once upon a time.

We’re in a time of processing. What would a functional geopolitics look like? Who can we trust? What can we do to assert our values of peace and justice in the current context? How can the elite class get away with treating us, including children, as disposable?

Maybe the answers to these questions can help us flesh out a vision for the future.

All children matter. All people should have a home, enough to eat and access to quality health care and education. And our global systems should support that.

People who have been committing the crimes revealed in the Epstein files need to be behind bars. We also need to investigate how many similar operations there are to Jefffrey Epstein’s, and protect children and other victims from these kinds of predators.

We need international laws that are enforceable, apply to everyone, and stop genocide and child predators in their tracks.

And we desperately need a return to diplomacy, so that war can become obsolete as a way of resolving international problems. We can’t afford to cross the limits that nuclear weapons and the environmental destruction caused by war impose.

I recently read a fascinating article that was translated from Italian that calls the phase the west is in the Spodocene from the geopolitiq Substack site, which I highly recommend. It accurately describes the dilemma we find ourselves in. Here’s how this article describes the Spodocene:

For centuries, the system has been able to shift (dissipate) this residue to its peripheries: colonies, expendable populations, degraded ecosystems and, above all, the future. This has been the great material fiction of progress.

But no absorption well is infinite in a closed system such as the Earth. When the absorption capacity is exhausted, the law of thermodynamics imposes itself without any possibility of negotiation: entropy returns to the system and efficiency collapses, not because of management errors, but because of physical and structural limitations. This is what defines our historical present. The planet is saturated as a material sink, societies are saturated as social sinks, and the future itself has been colonised as a temporal sink through debt, precariousness and broken promises. The global system has lost its “outside”. There is no longer a space where contradictions can be discharged without returning amplified to the centre.

This moment has western nations panicking. They’re crumbling within, and itching for war without.

Historically wars have stimulated capitalist economies, but that doesn’t work any longer, with our nations so interconnected and so much at stake. Getting out of the economic, societal and environmental mess we’re in is going to be profoundly difficult.

The push for war, I believe, is driven by faltering western economies, and the hope for the economic stimulus it has traditionally created. Most western leaders are facing low levels of support from their citizens, and they need the distraction wars provide.

But let’s face it: the USA doesn’t have the weapons it wants to sell, allied countries don’t have the money to buy them, and most young people aren’t interested in fighting these wars. After enduring decades of austerity, being punished for opposing an ongoing genocide, members of their ruling class named in the Epstein files, high unemployment and unaffordable housing, why would they?

We need a change of priorities, and a global system based on peace, win-win interactions, environmental restoration, and compensation to those who have been harmed by war, genocide and poverty.

BRICS is trying to do this and is upsetting western nations in the process. Some countries in the global majority, formerly known as the global south, are tired of the predatory western system they have been living under. They’ve been organizing among themselves to create an economic system based on fairness, win-win arrangements and non-intervention.

I don’t expect the west to suddenly join BRICS, but I hope our leaders can pay attention to what this group is doing, learn from them, and start interacting with other countries in a more just and respectful way.

This moment demands that as a global community we grow, or face self-destruction. Capitalism, neoliberalism and the problems they’ve caused have brought us to this point and, along with war and exploitation, need to be left behind and replaced by something better.

We need to articulate the future we want so that we can taste, touch, hear, smell and see it, and then take the steps that will make it real.

If this article convinces you to start paying attention to geopolitical issues, buckle up and hang onto your hat. It’s worth understanding what’s going on in the world, even if it is one hell of a ride.

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I love the BDS campaign and the effect it’s having on Israel’s economy.

Here’s an excellent list of products from Israel: https://boycott.thewitness.news/categories

Here are some factsheets about Israel: https://www.cjpme.org/factsheets

And here’s where you can support Palestine by buying a keffiyeh: https://www.hirbawi.ps/

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A big thank you to my paid subscribers. Your support really encourages me! I so appreciate you, and am glad you value my writing.