Failed States and Trigger Points

Finding opportunity in chaos

Drought conditions across the globe are accelerating due to extraction technologies and climate change.

I will be in several shows and publications. In one way or another, they all are about ecocide. The causes of drought are the corruption that has led to unfettered climate change, The consequences of drought may be a cascade of failed states, Some people see that cascade as a lucrative opportunity to amass great fortune at great cost to others. That is how a narcissistic system works: destroy the other for selfish gain.

Tonight, 2 drawings each from my series, “Tolstoy & I,” and the diary I recently kept on Governors Island from my recent residency work for the inception of “Tidal Flushing,” will be in a show opening at the Anita Rogers Gallery @ 494 Greenwich St. NYC. Sunday, a video of one of the iterations of the Blued Trees Opera will be opening for a showing at The Parsonage Gallery in Searsport, Maine for their summer show. Tonight I sent the proposal for an expansion there of The Blued Trees Symphony to HONGGEER, in Inner Mongolia, for their summer symposium. And this weekend, I hope Gale Elston and I will be completing our final submission for the ms of our anthology for Routledge on art and environmental justice. These are the tasks I have been completing during my recent stay in NYC, which will come to an end this weekend. They are all projects that address the causes and consequences of ecocide but also the opportunities I see to chart another course through the exercise of art making.

In a random FB scroll this morning on the subway, I caught a brief podcast from Sarah Chayes. She made the point that corruption is not the opportunistic consequence of a failed state but rather the strategic goal for the purpose of capitalizing on chaos.

There will be no greater failure than global ecocide. Sarah’s analysis would be consistent with what we are currently witnessing in the USA: an explosion of corruption guiding a failing state for the profit of a few billionaires. She made the further point that the same opportunity for evil greed is also an opportunity to intervene. The systemic function of such an intervention, what I would call a trigger point, can rearrange agents. I believe that is the task of art. See things differently. See the interactions between agents differently. That is my task. Art can accomplish that task by simply witnessing and revealing what is otherwise hidden. What is hidden right now is the towering scale of destruction created by agents of climate change.

In previous essays here, I have described how narcissism recapitulates a toxic and extractive patriarchal system publicly and privately. There is no antidote I am aware of to that behavior, but by recognizing it, it may be defanged: the emperor really does not have clothes. The reflecting pool in DC really was not attacked by anti-fascists. Narcissism operates by weaponizing fear and anger after offering the sugar of false promises: follow me and you will be happy. Narcissism is the exercise of a short term strategy to exert control over others.

What I admire about Indigenous societies, such as the horse culture I am studying now in Inner Mongolia or the fishing culture I have studied for almost forty years in Maine, is the respect for long term needs of other species if they are going to sustain us; the recognition of interdependence. Narcissism gets in the way of a sustainable future because control is not the answer to a quest for abundance, not even for the narcissistic. Bullying others into subservience is a denial of interdependence. When our real dependencies are denied, there is no end to the hunger for control. That delusional control is the goal of the fascist bullies now trying to impose themselves on the rest of the world. Death is the ultimate control. The delusion is that control will appease their inner demons. It will not. It will only mean death to the planet we depend upon.

If we are to avoid total collapse into a failed state in this country and elsewhere in the world, we are past time to consider all the ways we have internalized a tolerance for narcissism that culminates in global ecocide. That is where we will find our trigger points to forestall the failed states lurking on our horizon: in facing down the modern bullies and rooting out our own denial.