Radical Freedom and Radical Responsibility in an Age of Collapse

What do we in this age of collapse? How are we to deal with it?

The world is in turmoil. On fire, and that’s not my phrase, it’s from a Harvard Biz professor.

And that’s making things confusing. Bewildering. On a personal level.

What’s your plan if the election goes the wrong way? That’s a tiny example, of a much bigger theme.

In this age, civilizational risk is beginning to rain down on our shoulders, as institutions fail. They’re there to shield us from risk, but when institutions fail, we’re left to pick up the pieces.

Now think of that general lesson, in many forms. Climate change—where to live. A stagnant economy—what profession(s) to choose. A broken politics—how long to try to…stick it out.

I could go on, but I want to distill the lesson.

An age of shock and collapse calls for radical freedom and responsibility.

Radical Responsibility

Let me explain what I mean by that, by way of a little story.

An old friend called me up. In tears. She was frustrated, in despair, at the end of her tether.

She’s European. Many years ago, she’d moved to London. And had a very successful career, helping run—doesn’t matter.

But this last year, she’s been out of work. And worse, she can’t seem to find work. When and where she does have conversations, she’s sort of immediately dismissed.

What do I do, she asked. What am I doing wrong?

Nothing.

She isn’t doing anything wrong.

There are eight billion and counting on this planet. You, I said to her, are in a very, very small group among them. You are a bright and intelligent and highly accomplished woman. How many people have had experience at the higher echelons of a professional career? Not that many.

She paused.

You haven’t done anything wrong. I repeated it, because I wanted her to really absorb, get understand, grasp, the next part.

You are now in a society that has nothing left to offer you. That’s the problem you face.

And I get that it’s hard to face up to it. Because it’s not your fault. But it is the reality.

She’d planned to live where she is, forever. She’s happily partnered up, has a place she loves, a life she likes. But should we still use the present tense? After all, she’s been depressed for a year, because her life is stuck, and the depression isn’t really coming from there—but from the deeper sense that it’s not going to get better.

It’s not. Not where she is. You see, I explained to her, Britain is destroyed for you now. You have experience in managing a certain kind of global company. But after Brexit, those companies have pulled out. They are never coming back. Those jobs don’t exist anymore. They aren’t coming back either. And worse, the British don’t want to be a modern society that has that kind of possibility anymore. They want to be this weird failed state, where modern institutions like global trade or nice things or functioning systems aren’t what anyone can have.

You are now stuck in a society that has nothing left to offer you.

That’s a tough thing to hear, but the next part goes like this.

And you have to take radical responsibility for it, then assume a sense of radical freedom about it.

In her case, I said, all the energy in your industry, sphere, field, domain—it’s shifted to Paris. So what’s keeping you in a place that has nothing left to offer you? Just…inertia. The weight of time. History. But you have to let all that go now. And embrace a sense of freedom.

In Paris, or wherever, doesn’t matter really, in this case, Paris matters because the field we’re talking about is a creative one, and the world’s creative energy has shifted in a massive way from London to Paris—you can have opportunities you don’t have here, and will never have again.

That’s radical freedom—in a tiny way, I imagine, because I’m not sort of saying to her, go rip up your life in some kind of spectacular way, just giving her the common-sense advice that if Britain’s destroyed itself to this shocking a degree (it pays…doctors…minimum wage…now)…it has nothing left to offer you.

And…

Radical Freedom

You had better take some action, of a kind you probably once thought, not too long ago, you’d never have to take. Way, way outside the horizon of what you once thought necessary, practical, sensible, or maybe even possible. That’s the radical freedom part.

You see, what’s bewildering and baffling her is something like the following.

She didn’t fail. But she feels like she did. In truth, society failed, spectacularly, so much so that in Britain, free-fall is the new normal. But all of that falls on her shoulders. Because societies and institutions are there to shield us. From just such moments.

That’s hard for us to grasp. Even if we know it, analytically, in some sort of dry sense, when it happens to us, not being overwhelmed by despair and panic is really, really difficult.

So let me say it clearly. If you feel in any way like the above, you’re probably not the one that’s failing. Society is.

Let’s take another example, to drive the point home. Asheville, North Carolina was recently ravaged by climate change. Now. The people who moved there—one of my dearest friends escaped there for many years, finding a haven—probably did so for entirely good reasons. Like my old friend, maybe they found a community whose sensibilities they valued, friends, opportunities, doesn’t matter.

And then along came the hurricane.

Not their fault, right? That’s my point. It’s something that institutions should have protected them from, and I mean that at a sort of macro scale. We should have done something about it, decades ago, so that all these terrible impacts didn’t arrive. And wreck people’s lives with such injustice.

In life, we almost expect a kind of justice. Moral justice. Though the world around is what it is, we don’t often expect in our own lives that catastrophe will strike, or that, more to the point, the scales will imbalance so far that everything tips over.

Like my friend stuck in a place that has nothing left to offer her. Not her fault. And in that sense, the old way of thinking would say: then it’s not my responsibility, either.

But in this day and age, we have to be smarter and tougher and wiser than that. It might not be our fault, but we still have to assume the responsibility. That failed institutions should have shielded us from. At least if we want to get on with our lives.

They aren’t coming to save us, you see. Britain is never coming back. The jobs are gone for good. There is no chance she will ever have a decent life there again—zero. Nobody is going to help her, at least in the context of “a society should probably try and fix an economy in free-fall.”

So where does that leave her? If she doesn’t assume responsibility for this crazy, insane, bewildering failure, she will be stuck there forever, and feel like a failure. In other words, unless she assumes responsibility, she’ll go on internalizing the failure. But the right answer is to place the failure where it belongs, with institutions, while taking responsibility for changing that situation, at least to the extent you can.

That’s radical responsibility and freedom. And we’re going to need to take more and more of it.

The Pendulum and the Top, or How to Think About Your Life in an Age of Collapse

Because things are never going back to normal, in more and more cases, and in more and more disturbing and startling ways. Another, more formal way, to put that is: the tectonic shifts we’re seeing unfold around us aren’t temporary or cyclical or homeostatic. They’re structural, macro-scale, and permanent.

The climate is never going back to what it was. At least not in any meaningful sense on a human timeline. And so these days, if you’re not factoring it into your decisions about everything from where to live, to where to invest, to what kind of home to buy, to what kind of work to do—well, that’s pretty unwise. Even if you do, after all, you can still get unlucky, which is what I mean by “macro scale shifts.” They are hitting all of us.

Another example is…the election. I’m pretty sure that there are tons upon tons of liberal Americans who are nervously pondering how to move right about now. Canada, Europe, Asia, wherever, doesn’t matter. And at the same time, I’d bet many are conflicted. Feels a bit much, dramatic, maybe too a step too far. Do I really have to rip my life up?

Won’t things go back to normal?

No, they won’t.

You see, we live in a different world. The homeostasis of the old world is now going, by the day. The way to think about the world today is that there are better chances things won’t go back to normal than that they will.

This is what “civilizational risk” means at a personal level. It’s a kind of step change in the nature of volatility and probability itself.

If things now have better chances of never going back to normal than normalizing, then our attitudes, too, must undergo radical change.

When things destabilize, the correct answer isn’t to do what we’d do in the old world. Grit our teeth, and try to ride out the storm. Buckle up, hunker down, and wait it out. In this age, the correct answer, given the step change in the nature of risk, is to do the precise opposite: when things begin to destabilize, assume radical responsibility, understand radical freedom, and take radical action.

Think of a pendulum, slowly running out of momentum. Now think of top, spinning, destabilizing.

The old world—we still think about ours that way, and our macro or meta mental model is a pendulum. A storm arrives, a discontinuity happens, something bad occurs—but it’ll all slowly come to rest. It will pass. Things will go back to normal, which is stability. The pendulum’s normal is a lack of motion. If you’re riding the pendulum, you wait.

The new world is a top, destabilizing. And you’re a tiny, tiny figure perched atop it. What’s the right thing to do, in that situation? You jump at the optimal point of destabilization, which is close to the beginning. Because the more and more the top runs out of juice, the faster and harder it destabilizes, and the worse and more unpredictable your fall is going to be.

JBDA, or Jumping Before Destabilization Accelerates

So. We’ve derived a third rule, which is a kind of corollary. Let’s call this one JBDA. The Rule of Jumping Before Destabilization Accelerates. Sort of inelegant, but it makes the point. In the old world, we’d wait, wait, wait it out. In the new one, the correct move, the optimal one, is to move quickly. Because the longer you do, the worse destabilization gets.

Let’s go back to my friend. If she’d already moved to Paris, when Brexit happened…her life would be so much better than it is now it’s almost funny. She’d have a thriving career, have had a new place, gotten to know a new neighborhood, made new friends, etcetera. But now? All that’s that much the harder, because she’s waited, and so the costs have risen, too, as time’s gone by.

But it’s not too late. And yet the longer she waits, even now, the harder and harder it gets. At some point, she has to—has to—take radical responsibility, and radical action, freeing herself from the iron grip of institutional failures.

Don’t sink with the ship. Maybe we can restate this new rule, this corollary, that way. DSWTS. If you get the vibe, it’s sinking, get off the damned boat.

Now, that’s not always easy, and I’m not saying that everyone can do it. That’s not my point. It’s just to help you understand navigate these rough seas. To establish some new rules for mental meta models, or how we think about the world without even often knowing we think about the world.

She called me the next day. And I asked her how she was feeling. About what I said. Want to know what she said?

She laughed, and said: I was really depressed after you told me all that. I didn’t think about it that way, that maybe things are never coming back. Even though I sort of knew it, deep down. I just…I just never planned for this, you know?

I know, I said. So why are you laughing?

Because I’ve already started applying for jobs there, she said.

I felt really, really happy about that. She deserves a better life than what her failed society can give her. It’s not her fault that any of this happened to her. She didn’t make it happen. But it is her responsibility to change it, and she needs to get radical, in times like these, to have the life she deserves, thinking way outside the box, letting all those old expectations and dreams go, not just sort of hoping things will one day go back to normal, and until they do, I’m the problem here.

It’s not like that. You’re not the problem here. None of us are. Our institutions are. They have failed catastrophically. And now it’s time to get radical about living our lives, anyways. Responsibility and freedom have always governed how we grow. But in implosive times like these, they’ve never mattered more.

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