An uncomfortable world view in the 'dog days' of August 2026

 First an Editor’s Note: 

Welcome to new readers in the Seychelles Islands....In the last month, some 2.5 thousand page reads in this space from the ‘Seychelles’ are reported by Google. Thank you for reading!  

Please feel free to respond with comments, suggestions, questions and/or criticisms. 

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Now some distopian perspectives on the state of the world, from an octogenarian Canadian, whose hope and optimism about the world we are leaving to our grandchildren dims daily. 

Let’s start with James Hillman’s proposition that we are all suffering from chasing personal, private solutions to collective and shared problems. That paradox will drive any reasonable, mature sentient adult into apoplexy. The pain of that disconnect should, will and has been doing so, without public acknowledgement for decades. It is not only that the proposition is unsustainable; it is another example of the kind of psychic and cognitive and perceptual entrapment that never releases. One of the most glaring incongruencies about this psychic, political, ethical, moral and existential dilemma is that while millions of individuals around the world are energetically engaged in personal growth and development, the shared collective and mounting global problems continue to erupt, explode, and shed metaphoric volcanic ash everywhere....without any acknowledgement in the public arena of the cumulative impact of this ‘ash’. 

The background of a universal fixation, fascination, obsession, preference and predilection for the focus on the individual is historic, academic, legal, economic as well as religious. We all live in a ‘backyard’ somewhere; the local customs traditions, faith groups, schools, games, facilities and world views. The human perspective engendered by our backyards is, and cannot be otherwise, parochial, provincial and local. We each have our ‘home’ so to speak. From each of those backyards, there are other friendly backyards, distant and detached backyards, foreign backyards and both mystical and terrifying backyards. Local leaders attempt to address local issues, often with or without the aid of other government levels of both taxation and legislation. And, there is for all clusters of backyards, ultimately a boundary—geographic, perhaps linguistic, perhaps ideological, perhaps ethnic and certain suspect of untrustworthiness. 

Trust of local, ‘known’ people often exceeds a preliminary ‘trust’ of those who ‘come from afar’ as Newfoundlanders might put it. The prevailing perception of ‘care’ begins ‘at home’ with the corollary that those ‘others’ can look after themselves. A local provincial parochial attitude struck me in the face some decades ago in the mid-eighties when I aired a radio editorial in support of a massive baseball stadium being proposed in Toronto, some three hours south of where I was then working. With its original name, Skydome, given a moveable roof permitting games in all kinds of weather, a colleague cast darkness on the notion as being too expensive, too irrelevant for local athletics and too distant to matter to anyone where we lived. Some 37 years on, the stadium is filled with 40+ thousand fans for every Toronto Blue Jay baseball game. Looking into the future, as a matter of personal choice, often stretches perhaps into the year of graduation of a child, or perhaps the date of the next class reunion. Ordinary citizens are neither expected to, nor are they/we familiar with or knowledgeable about, the various variables in large projects, even if they are confined to a single building proposal. ‘Out-of-sight' and ‘out-of-mind' may be somewhat unfair, for some people who cast their metaphoric ‘eyes’ and imagination forward as a kind of ‘psychic game’. 

Perhaps this page is analogous to such a psychic game. 

In a previous post, I argued that the universal denial of and prohibition against suicide, has the potential to blind us to the cumulative impact of many of the developments we are all watching encircle the globe every day. Bringing the subject out of the closet of denial might help to open our collective minds and eyes to the cumulative and summative impact of the many dangers when taken together we all face. 

Both cumulative and summative exercises, the first building over time by adding new facts to old material, the second happening at the finish line, like an end-of-term project, are mental, political intellectual and psychic projects to which ordinary people give little if any attention, except for those matters in their immediate control and responsibility. Sadly, too, governments have generally adopted a limited ‘time frame’ (often the period of their mandate) as the working frame for the determination of their progress with the next election serving as a kind of summative evaluation of their overall performance.  

For ordinary global citizens who are watching the mounting evidence of drought-driven forest fires and the droughts that left dried timber ready for the spark, climate-engendered floods and violent storms endangering coastal communities already, rising temperatures contributing to the extinction of thousands if not millions of species, on land as well as in oceans, rivers and lakes, the migration of biohazards in creatures determined to seek and to find warmer homes, we have to look to the privately funded environmental activists and experts for their assessments, many of which are not mere ignored but actually dismissed by public officials, but never by the insurance companies. Just the health and human dislocation and disorientation aspects of these environmental changes are enough to awaken some public figures, without a perceivable, enforceable and sustainable shared plan of action to prevent, or at least minimize the impacts of the impending disasters. No longer are those disasters ‘potential’...they are going to happen, as are the next waves of virus invasions from animal habitats we are stripping bare with more and more development projects. While insurance costs for prospective victims of fires, floods and coastal erosion and rising waters are already being identified, limited if any specific and credible and collaborative international planning, design, execution and commitment proposals are rising out of the dust of the ashes of our insouciance. 

Of course, there are environmental activists among some religious and political groups, but the vast mountain ranges of corporate and private venture capital are continuing to dig their heads in the sand of various arguments and positions such as: ‘too costly’ or ‘too dangerous for job losses,’ or worse, ‘a Chinese hoax’ or ‘technology will take care of it’.  

Meanwhile, technology, that beast with a growing curve of both sky-bound and supersonic proportions, continues to transform military conflicts, cyber security methods and results, as well as personal privacy and security fears. AI, itself, is such a threat that minds familiar with its potential are already calling for a go-slow approach, which is unlikely to have legislative support in any developed country that has already become seduced by both the wonder of tech and its potential profit potential. 

And given the fascination, dare I say obsession (of mostly male political, military, fiscal and security establishments) with the rising ethos of war and the political and economic advantages of the military-mind-set in an increasingly dangerous and unraveling world order, in an increasingly oligarchic-manipulated geopolitical ethos, the developed countries, including Canada (I admit sadly) are determined to have already embarked on a ‘military expenditure’ wave of monstrous proportions. Such a program in many countries can and will only, predictably and inevitably result in diminished social, cultural, educational and environmental initiatives. And the irony of this development, in the cauldron of so much supersonic and epic change, is that social supports are already necessary, and will be increasingly needed...and the budgetary cupboard will already be bare. People living in countries where development is lagging can only be looking at the developed world with sheer terror...not only is their environmental protection and support not even on the horizon. Is their national security even assured? not to mention their need for basic supplies like food, water, shelter, health care, education and work with dignity. 

Ordinary people, leading ordinary working lives, raising a family, attempting to provide an education for their kids and leave them with an environment that has the potential of providing minimal basic needs like clean water, clean air and unpolluted land, face both rising costs of basic life-needs, as well as the conundrum of depleted inspection services for health food and water supplies. 

Underneath all of this turbulence, something that receives little if any public acknowledgement is the undercurrent of how power operates in the geopolitical sphere. Like tidal currents, taken as given, without public awareness, or anything resembling a public disdain, disapproval and protest against, is the conventional manner in and by which relationships are conducted. Distrust, competition, secrecy, and transactionalism all in the pursuit of what might be rationalized as ‘national interest’ or worse ‘national pride’...The behemoths, and here I am specifically thinking of United States, with the inclusion of nations like China, India, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, North Korea, seem to be operating on a ‘distrust, keep secret, compete with all means available baring short-medium-and-long-term impacts’ basis. Treaties, agreements or even ententes previously signed and certified no longer can be expected to be honoured. Tensions, military conflicts, economic bullying, cyber-invasions of infrastructure, election cyber-bot invasions, trade agreements dismissed with the wave of a hand or the insult of social media post. International institutions are increasingly decried, derided, or even dismissed. War crimes go unprosecuted, children die indiscriminately and without either remorse or admission of responsibility, migrants and refugees flee whatever risks to their lives they face, confronting nations unprepared even to process let along integrate their numbers. Governments, in the most civilized, educated, socially and politically advanced are impotent in addressing problems of migration, poverty, military and racial/ethnic/religious conflict rage with limited levers to bring them under control and certainly without consensus to bring them to an end. 

Is it any wonder the consumption of alcohol, amphetamines, morphine, escape pathways and head-in-the-sand approach might be coping strategies in a world ‘gone mad’ as might be attributed to Alice in Wonderland. Is it any wonder that childhood psychic and emotional changes are challenging parents and educators globally? It is not an exaggeration that many perceive, and perhaps even believe that the world is ‘upside-down’ with the less than 1% pulling the strings and the other 99% losing our grip not only on the realities of our personal lives but on the prospect that there might be a future in which we all have a stake and a voice. 

Prayers for sanity in a world whose public collective feet are ‘to the floor’ in an uncontrolled race against time for dominance, immunity (substitute for personal responsibility and public leadership responsibility) and power, for its own sake, and not for any higher, shared survival motive, seem both mere whispers in a world of cacophanies too loud and too inordinately well- funded to be muted. However, it is not the volume of decibels, nor the mountains of money nor the connections of conspiracies that ultimately will rule. It is the ordinary people, fully awakened, fully apprised and fully engaged that will silence those cacophonies, empty those tax havens, strip the levers of power from the hands of the most corrupt class of international leaders in at least a century. (Some will likely argue that point!)   

Trying not to exaggerate our shared risk and shared danger, especially with the insouciance of too many leaders to the global, shared and existential issues, seems like a step too far for this scribe at this moment. 

Mea culpa!