The Starkest Collapse Prognosis I’ve Heard

An exploration of how the untreated root cause of our predicament – “the nature of how we relate to the planet and theorise value” – is presenting a “fork in the road.” Johar warns that it now our ‘duty‘ to avoid self-terminating runaway collapse, in favour of difficult-but-viable ‘slingshot economics’ pathways. Johar proposes the need for a profound transformation in perspective, from ‘bio-degradable to ‘bio-nutritious’; ‘power over’ to ‘care with’; towards ‘poly-infrastructure’ with ‘self sovereignty’; recognising that there is no ‘other’: “we’re all implicated, and in that the only obligation is to move together.” For Johar, ‘re-animification’ or ‘re-agentification’ – recognising the vital agency of the rest of nature – is how we can handle otherwise-overwhelming complexity, an evolutionary hack we have lost but must retrieve now. He calls all of us now, in whatever work we do, to be paying close attention to the ‘dark matter’ that underpins our societies, and “expanding what it means to be human” to resist the terminal devaluing of the human by modern economics.