We take one step back from the brink and a deep breath. Our spectacles are momentarily rosier. Between the impossible and the inevitable, the possibilities have expanded. We observe two paradigm shifts, one before and one since November 4: first to imagine the possibility of change, now to envision the changes made possible. But the brink remains, as does our denial. The tipping point of a global crisis still looms in our path and the ground continues to shift beneath our feet.
Obama's most radical statements suggest he intends to occupy and speak from a new level of thinking. He said early on that he wanted to "change the mindset that took us to war," and more recently that "denial is not an acceptable response to the climate crisis." He's the first politician in my memory to use terms like mindset and denial. This is the greatest source of hope and the essence of any mandate he assumes. But thinking the mindset will change is not the same as adopting or working from within a broader mental view. Denial is only a few ticks away on the psychological scale from hope, and hope, only a couple more ticks from wishful thinking.
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MISSING INFORMATION
There is always a delay between information and action; it can be milliseconds or decades. Critical information is often missing at the moment the critical decision must be made. Like Rummy said, "We don't know what we don't know."
One of many paradoxes emerges. We are immersed in the densest data environment imaginable, but the information needed to perceive and define the whole of the crisis is missing. The corporate media has ignored, dismissed, denied or hidden so much in the history of imperialism; it's foolish to think we know a fraction of what we need to know. The public conversation is framed by an illusion: that there are many disconnected crises, nominally urgent but isolated, and that they are solvable one at a time. The pattern that connects them emerges too slowly from the fog of mindsets and denial. The public conversation is glutted with details and emotional testimonies but no one is connecting the dots in the big picture. Every sound bite and snapshot is actually a different tip of the same iceberg.
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