The Gift Contract

“The usual story of change is that there is a problem with the system that needs to be solved… Our analysis has a different starting point. It begins with an examination of how violence and unsustainability are conditions that are necessary for the system (that is ‘not working’) to exist, how we are part of this system (and complicit in harm) and how this system has screwed (all of) us up… Without this cognitive, affective and relational ‘decluttering’, we will only be able to want and imagine different versions of the same thing… We need to interrupt the cycle of vilification/pathologization and romanticization/idealization… There is a mega-storm coming, and our only option is to go through it, together.”