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| Drone footage of displaced family tents in one settlement in Badghis, Afghanistan, due to ongoing drought and climate change. There are thousands of makeshift homes spread between mountain hills on the outskirt of Qala-i-naw city. (Source: NRC/Enayatullah Azad) |
"‘Rebellion’ is not enough. We need to build new systems from the ground up, right now
"We have been trained to believe that voting every once in a while in
parliamentary systems suffices for effective democratic action that
serves our legitimate interests. We now know that this is not enough.
Our democracies are not just broken, beholden to special interests
belonging to an interlocking network of energy, defense, agribusiness,
biotechnological, communications and other industrial conglomerates
dominated by a tiny minority.
Our
democracies are in a state of collapse: incapable of addressing the
systemic complexity of the crisis of civilization. As they fail, they
are veering toward rejecting their own democratic ethos toward
increasing authoritarianism — shoring up centralized state powers to
ward off dangerous ‘Others’ and unruly citizens. And so it is only
natural that we feel the most immediate response must be to react against
this state of abject failure. Yet this response itself is a function of
the same sensation of helplessness and paralysis induced by the system
itself.
The
problem is that liberal democracies in their current form are in a
state of collapse for a reason: they are, indeed, incapable of
addressing the systemic complexity of the crisis of civilization. No
amount of nonviolent resistance will provide our existing political
institutions with the capacity to address the crisis. Because the
problem runs much, much deeper."
