Author: jembendell

I'm a British national living in Indonesia. I am known for my work on societal collapse risk and response. That includes the Deep Adaptation paper and Breaking Together book. I cofounded Scholars’ Warning to help academics communicate about a post-Sustainability agenda for reducing harm in the face of catastrophic ecological change. I cofounded Bekandze Farm School to enable smallholders to switch to organic and resilient farming methods. Last year I quit my full Professorship to focus on deep adaptation to societal disruption and collapse.

Taking time to reflect, remember, and recommit – year end thoughts

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The following notes are my end-of-year reflections, which I sent to people who subscribed to receive that from me. I think they may be useful for prompting your own reflections, ahead of the next Metacrisis Meeting, so am posting them here as well. Wishing you bright times in the year ahead, no matter the darker stuff that surrounds . Thx! Jem

When I look back on a year I don’t just consider what I experienced, contributed and accomplished. I always wonder what I have learned, and how I want to apply that in future. I had that in mind recently when I was interviewed by the e-zine Grist. One of their journalists is aware that the creeping collapse of societies has become a more credible framing amongst both experts and members of the public. She was interested in what can happen from such an awareness. So she asked how that awareness has shaped me over the years, and what’s been changing. I realised my own journey might help you with your own reflections, so I wrote them up for this personal newsletter that I send out twice a year… 

Becoming collapse-aware doesn’t mean the process of collapse suddenly concludes around us. Like me, most of you reading these words are fortunate enough not to be living in destitution. We live in the society as we find it, with our identities, assets, skills, networks, responsibilities and desires — which have built up over time within that society. So with collapse awareness, or even collapse acceptance, there are many types of response.

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Reclaiming “Kyrie Eleison” this Christmas

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by chiyo hiraoka

From a plea for pardon to an invitation to heal within a universe of unconditional love. 

Across centuries of liturgy, the solemn chant “Kyrie Eleison”, often translated as “Lord, have mercy,” has echoed through churches and cathedrals. It is one of the most recited phrases by congregations of Christians around the world, and can convey the idea that believers are penitent persons before an omnipotent judge. I heard it regularly during my childhood, in Anglican, Catholic and Evangelical contexts. After I stopped going to church, for decades I didn’t think about the meaning of the phrase. Not until I was in a field in Thailand, with two hundred people from different faiths, as we sang and moved in prayer. That set me on a journey into the meaning of the phrase “Kyrie Eleison”, and a discovery about the loss of Jesus’s original message, as quoted in the Gospels. This realisation is opening up the possibility to reconnect with my roots in a new way, through a Christianity more mystical than the institutions of religion convey. 

To understand the true meaning of the phrase “Kyrie Eleison”, it helps to journey back before the Gospels. It had been a common Greek plea, where “Kyrie” invoked a divine power. They had many to consider, from Asclepius to Zeus. The word “eleison” had a poetic meaning, because it was not only the verb “to forgive”. Our dance leader in Thailand explained it sounded similar to ‘elaion’, which meant oil. In ancient Greece, as in modern times, oils were used for various forms of healing, including wounds and aches. Thus, “eleison” meant something other than a cry for forgiveness from a sinning or guilty person. Instead, it was a plea, or an invitation, to “anoint me, soothe me, and heal me.” It is important to remember that the worldview at the time, across many cultures, regarded illness as a symptom of spiritual or relational disorder, rather than a random physical misfortune. To cry out “Kyrie Eleison” was to ask the divine to restore a person’s wholeness.  

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Let’s not become attached to collapse

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There are moments when life confronts us with such undeniable pain that our hearts split open. For many people I know, that moment came with the realisation that our civilization is unravelling – that the seas are rising, the forests are dying, and the systems built to sustain our comfort are breaking. In that shock, there can be a strange grace. For a time, we awaken from the trance of consumption, routine and ambition. We see more clearly the suffering of the Earth and of each other. That often inspires compassion, and a yearning to live differently. It is a process I’ve often described in my past writings. It is why I encourage people to talk about societal collapse more openly, including our desires to reduce harm. Which is why, when I founded the Deep Adaptation Forum in 2019, I proposed that its ethos would be to “embody and enable loving responses to our predicament, so that we reduce suffering while saving more of society and the natural world.” Over the years I have witnessed people of all races, creeds, and economic classes, find their own ways to pursue that noble goal. It’s something I celebrate in the newly released video of Chapter 12 from my book. However, I have had to accept that something quite different can happen when we awaken to collapse, which might suppress presence, service and creativity. I wonder if that happened in me and others who participate in communities formed around an awareness or acceptance of collapse. If you are in such a community, I hope the following reflections on not becoming attached to narratives about collapse will be useful. 

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Bedtime Doom

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Lying in bed, I was too tired to read but not yet asleep. “Can you read me a bedtime story,” I said, half jokingly. “Sure,” my partner replied, and began to read aloud. Drifting off to sleep, I suddenly heard a word I never hear in normal life — relinquishment. “Huh, nobody uses that word.” My partner laughed, as if it was really funny. “Is this a Deep Adaptation story?” Rolling over, I looked towards her phone, and saw the text on the screen, which looked like the output of a chatbot. “What was your prompt?” She scrolled back up to show me: “Write a short story that Professor Jem Bendell would enjoy.” 

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Blinded by The Light (newspaper)

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As with many countries in the Western world, the UK has seen a rise of ethno-nationalist politics in recent years. One politician who led the Brexit agenda to leave the EU, is Nigel Farage. Not being able to blame the Eurocrats anymore, the lie took hold that Britain’s ills could be blamed on poor immigrants rather than greedy elites. Recently, Farage has come under fire for his alleged expressions of antisemitism. Although that focused on his childhood, his appearances on the podcast of alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was also discussed. During an appearance, Farage claimed that ‘globalists’ are trying to override national sovereignty by creating one world government. Some critics have claimed that it was ‘dogwhistling’ about threats from Jewish elites. The concern arises because Jones and Farage claim there are evil cabals of people, rather than members of a transnational capitalist class, who are serving the extractive demands of international capital. They don’t discuss capitalism in an intelligent way, because then they would be criticising their friends, funders, and the system that has promoted their views to huge audiences. Discussions in the mass media about who ‘globalists’ are and whether we should be concerned about them (and the structures of capital they serve) could be welcomed, if those discussions go beyond the lazy and nasty tropes of antisemitism. Unfortunately, such discussions seem difficult to have in the UK and elsewhere, as political discussion is often febrile and superficial. I was reminded of that recently in the town of Stroud, where one independent newspaper seems to have generated new debates and fractures between people who previously worked together for social change. In this essay, I want to share what I noticed from reading that newspaper and from experiencing the community fractures that emerge around its arguments. If the mass media weren’t so badly misinforming people in order to protect elites, perhaps this situation would not be so difficult. But in such a poor information system, there is work to get people talking about what can be done together at community level as life gets increasingly difficult for so many.  

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After the Alarm: Artificial Intelligence, metacrisis, and societal collapse.

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The breakneck acceleration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved the discourse on its benefits and perils from science fiction to boardroom and government-level concern. In the last few months there has been a series of articles by the BBC about AI trends and potential dystopias. One article was about how some leaders in AI are anticipating societal collapse and getting their bunkers ready. We also read that some ‘tech bros’ even want such a collapse, as their technotopian futures involve a break with life as we know it. One BBC article mentioned that the ‘AI Futures Project’ predicts AI may achieve ‘super intelligence’ by 2027 and then human extinction, or something like it, will occur within 5 years, via an AI deliberately engineering superbugs. Supposedly, it would do that after deciding that humans are a major problem without a remedy other than mass murder. I haven’t seen the authors of that study receive the kind of aggro I got since 2018 from predicting societal collapse due to climate change. Maybe that’s because we are used to sci-fi dramas where robots kill nearly everyone. But their prediction might be part of a ‘wake up call’ for wider societal engagement and responses to AI, so we might head off the worst scenarios. Maybe I’m naive, but these dystopias certainly woke me up a bit, and so here I am writing about AI and collapse. After the jolt, I read into the nature and scale of some risks, with the aim of exploring how people who want to behave well in these times of societal disruption and collapse — including myself — could use AI responsibly. That exploration is still ongoing. 

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A Personal Message on Covid-19

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I was surprised recently that someone close to me likely had Covid-19 again less than 3 months after her previous infection. She didn’t take a test for it either time, but the symptoms suggested it wasn’t the flu. Fever, headache, lethargy, loss of smell, but no sneezing or phlegm. As the initial symptoms didn’t put her in bed, sick, we didn’t take it too seriously. But this second infection has lingered, and created recurring lethargy and insomnia, while also bringing back some old health problems. That encouraged me to look into the latest information on Covid-19. What I found concerned me. I am sharing about it here for the same reasons I did so in the past. Since looking into it more closely in 2021, I have thought that the policy orthodoxy on Covid-19 has been counterproductive. Additionally, I have been concerned that most commentators in the environmental field are aligned with the orthodoxy and thereby turning many people away from the environmental cause. Thirdly, pandemics have often played a key role in societal breakdowns and transformations in the past, and so the risks of the Covid-19 pandemic, and future ones, is within my field of analysis and comment. Looking back, one sad aspect of speaking out over the last four years has been that many people assumed that questioning the orthodoxy means caring less about this disease, or public health in general. Such prejudice was produced by Big Pharma and their supporters in politics, the medical establishment, and mass media. In sharing on Covid-19 now, I don’t expect to have much influence, but if some of you, my readers, take the following ideas seriously enough to check them out for yourself, then at least a few of you might benefit. 

My past essays on the topic were always well referenced, and I provided links to credible sources, such as official data sets or peer-reviewed papers. I wanted to be as factual and precise as possible, and avoid the misleading spin from various commentators. This post will not be like that. I write not to influence agendas but to nudge those of you who follow my blog to act to be healthier than you might otherwise be… that’s if you look into the information for yourself and agree. You could use an AI chatbot to check some of my statements that will follow and look for relevant data. I think if we don’t do our own checking then we don’t convince ourselves enough to change behaviours. 

Anyway, here goes, with my personal message on Covid-19…

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“Resilient Life” oracle cards for challenging times

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Given what’s happening in the world, it can be tiring to stay engaged. But if we don’t remain involved in community life and some forms of political organising, then are we being true to ourselves? For me, the ongoing issue is how to stay engaged and maintain some balance in life. Over the years, I’ve benefited from knowing people who have found a deeper source of calm and creativity. They have helped me to both broaden my own activities and continue to engage in societal conversations, through my work on societal disruption, ‘metacrisis’ and collapse. My wish to help other people with similar intentions in this disruptive era moved me to create something I could not have imagined in my previous life – a pack of oracle cards for challenging times. 

Some of my friends have found resilience through spiritual teachings, while others learned from surviving various forms of suffering and tragedy. One such friend is Dean Powell, who I play devotional music with. He made a set of oracle cards for our ceremonies. They became helpful daily prompts for me to come back to what’s most important in life. So that inspired me to make a set of cards with him, so we could help others to find more resilience and resolve during challenging times. 

The “Resilient Life” cards also integrate some ideas from the frameworks of “Deep Adaptation” and “The Work that Reconnects”. Unlike other oracle cards, they don’t assume, or pretend, that our situations are stable and everything is possible. Instead, they help us find a realistic positivity, whatever the situation.  

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