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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black">commonism posted: "by Barry Gills, University of Helsinki, Finland Republished from: ISA Global Dialogue, Volume 10, Issue 3 There is an emerging view in the present
crisis, illustrated in recently burgeoning commentary across the globe, expressing a realization tha"
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<span style="font-size:26.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#464646;font-weight:normal">New post on
</span><strong><span style="font-size:26.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#464646">Common Alternatives</span></strong><span style="font-size:26.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#464646;font-weight:normal">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://thecommonalts.com/?author=1"><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#2585B2;text-decoration:none"><img border="0" width="50" height="50" style="width:.5208in;height:.5208in" id="_x0000_i1027" src="http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/a650098e38856ec326159d7535275bac?s=50&d=http%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D50&r=G"></span></a><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 style="margin:0cm"><span style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#555555"><a href="http://thecommonalts.com/beyond-koyaanisqatsi-reimagining-civilization/"><span style="color:#2585B2;text-decoration:none">Beyond “Koyaanisqatsi”:
Reimagining Civilization</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#888888">by
<a href="http://thecommonalts.com/?author=1">
<span style="color:#2585B2">commonism</span></a> </span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif">by <strong><span style="font-family:"Arial",sans-serif">Barry Gills</span></strong>, University of Helsinki, Finland</span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></h6>
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<span class="cat"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">Republished from: ISA Global Dialogue,
<a href="https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/category/volume-10/v10-i3/">
<span style="color:#2585B2">Volume 10, Issue 3</span></a></span></span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">There is an emerging view in the present crisis, illustrated in recently burgeoning commentary across the globe, expressing a realization that our present form of world order and
civilization has brought humanity and “nature” into a great crisis, and that we must act radically to transform the foundations. The combination, or “triple crisis,” of the three Cs – Climate, Capitalism, and COVID-19 – has brought forward a momentum to address
the fundamental causes of this crisis.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<strong><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">Living in a time of Koyaanisqatsi</span></strong><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">The Hopi people of North America have an important myth with great relevance for our present situation: the myth of “Koyaanisqatsi,” often translated as “life out of balance,” “a
form of life that should not exist,” or “a crazy life.” In this myth, human beings are custodians for all life, and our purpose is to maintain the balance among all forms of life, perpetually. To do so, we ourselves must maintain a way of life that ensures
harmony with all other forms of life. In Koyaanisqatsi however, human beings have “lost their head,” and run aimlessly towards a precipice of destruction brought about by their own actions. Such a culture disregards the fundamental unity and interconnectedness
of life. It forgets the sacredness of all life. It forgets its own true purpose, and it forgets the profound interdependence of human beings with other forms of life. Its actions are “mindless” and destructive. Only a truly profound spiritual awakening and
cultural and material renewal can alter the course of such a culture, and save it and myriad other life forms from the great harm and destruction that Koyaanisqatsi will inevitably bring.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">We are living in a time of Koyaanisqatsi. We have been under the spell of totalizing concepts, such as “progress,” “modernity,” “development,” and “globalization.” They have promised
us a better future. They have promised us material prosperity, a future age of health, safety, freedom. The truth, however, is that they have masked historical processes that have led to this present global crisis.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">The study of the “fall of civilizations” and of “existential threats or challenges” to humanity is now increasingly academically legitimated and even becoming “popular.” That phenomenon
is symptomatic of the situation we now find ourselves in: i.e., that we are living through a “great implosion,” a “world system crisis,” a “general crisis” of our dominant form of civilization. Many causes can be identified for this “general crisis,” this
“great decline,” which even threatens us with the “collapse” of civilization. Climate change is of course a central causal vector of this great crisis, but it is not the only one, and in many ways, climate change itself is the consequence of much more fundamental,
underlying, and long-term historical processes. The historical processes that have induced this great crisis include the over-concentration of wealth (oligarchization); the over-exploitation of labor and “nature” (i.e., the over-extraction of value from human
labor and from the natural world, thus increasing systemic entropy); parasitic and predatory accumulation of capital and wealth surplus and “under-investment” in socially useful and productive infrastructure; and a systemic logic of/obsession with commodification,
marketization, and “economic growth.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">Our dominant economics, as both academic discipline and real practice, has perpetuated the delusion that somehow the economy is without ultimate biophysical foundations or limits.
The environment or environmental economics is but a minor sub-field in mainstream economics, and all environmental problems created in the present by the dominant economic system are believed to be solvable in the future, primarily through technological innovation
and via market-conforming principles and mechanisms. This blinkered and Panglossian worldview has already for decades caused seemingly endless complacency, delay, and deferral by the most powerful economic and political actors in the world in regard to radically
addressing the changes necessary to avert impending climate and ecological catastrophe. This Panglossian worldview and the worship of the “market” has become the dominant faith of the age and has been central to the globally hegemonic ideas of “neoliberalism,”
“globalization,” and even “development” as understood and practiced across the globe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">Crisis means breakdown. Crisis means system failure. Crisis in the world today means an existential threat to humanity: the “fall” or even the collapse of our civilization, a civilization
that globalization has supposedly made an unprecedented success.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="mso-margin-top-alt:0cm;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0cm;line-height:16.8pt">
<strong><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">Koyaanisqatsi also holds the solution</span></strong><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">What is the solution? Koyaanisqatsi holds the answer to our riddle. We need a “deep restoration” of our civilization, of our entire culture, both spiritual and material – a notion
I elaborate in my article published in <em><span style="font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif">Globalizations</span></em> in 2020. We need to “reimagine civilization.” The fundamental forms which constitute the dominant templates of power and social organization
in our civilization: i.e., the state, capital, and the city must be profoundly reimagined and radically altered in our future. Humanity must accept its embeddedness in the web of life and fully recognize the reality of planetary boundaries, earth system dynamics,
biophysical foundations, and biophysical limits, ecological and climate change thresholds and tipping points, in what in reality is a unified global system of life. Our future course must consist of a “great restoration” of life on earth, in all its immense
and beautiful diversity. Thus, it must also consist of a “great reversal” of the obsessions of universal commodification, marketization, and economic growth that have hitherto been dominating our collective material life. “Re-commoning” of the world, both
material and social, will be central to this great transformation of civilization. Peace, both domestic and global, will likewise be an essential element in a renewed and reimagined civilization. The age of darkness of the past few centuries, rife with imperialism,
colonialism, neocolonialism, racism, and patriarchal power, should now close.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">History is written later, but the future is written now. The new worldview emerging in the context of the present global systemic crisis is in fact resonant with a very ancient
worldview. The idea of perpetuating the lost pre-COVID-19 “normal” is but a great illusion. The idea of returning to “business as usual” is an inevitably catastrophic idea. Only a radical transformation of the fundamental forms of our civilization will be
sufficient to avert future disasters. Transformative praxis of the many, by the many, and for the many, holds the only realistic promise and source of hope for our collective survival. Now there can be no more excuses, and no turning back.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#444444">Direct all correspondence to Barry Gills <<a href="mailto:bkeithgills@gmail.com"><span style="color:#2585B2">bkeithgills@gmail.com</span></a>><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="meta" style="mso-margin-top-alt:3.0pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0cm;line-height:16.8pt">
<span class="tag"><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#999999"><a href="https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/tag/gills-barry/"><span style="color:#2585B2">Gills Barry</span></a> </span></span><span class="cat"><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#999999"><a href="https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/category/country/finland/"><span style="color:#2585B2">Finland</span></a>,</span></span><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif;color:#999999"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:160%"><strong><span style="font-size:8.0pt;line-height:160%;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#999999"><a href="http://thecommonalts.com/?author=1"><span style="color:#2585B2">commonism</span></a></span></strong><span style="font-size:8.0pt;line-height:160%;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#999999">
| October 31, 2020 at 2:46 am | Categories: <a href="http://thecommonalts.com/?taxonomy=category&term=barry-gills">
<span style="color:#2585B2">Barry Gills</span></a>, <a href="http://thecommonalts.com/?taxonomy=category&term=re-published">
<span style="color:#2585B2">Re-published</span></a> | URL: <a href="https://wp.me/p8cAhr-pP">
<span style="color:#2585B2">https://wp.me/p8cAhr-pP</span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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