In the dawn of a new world, one which faces not only a imminent overturn on the patterns of macroeconomics and geopolitics, but which comes with a decline in industrial production and energy availability, the so-called 'energetic descent' and 'deindustrialization', which many people still, much to my dismay, insist on denying, it is important to educate oneself in order to be prepared to face the world that is coming, for us and the future generations.
So it is my quest, the quest in which I have been put, not by my own hand, but by what seems to be a higher power, call it God, or vicissitude.
Now I am here and, being a person of continuous learning, I engage in my primary activity, of reading and researching, into different topics that are of relevance today. Topics about politics, society, economics, and ecology, put in broad strokes. The time for a revolution is here, and we each must take action to bring about the world that we believe should be encouraged to come forth. Despite the many voices I still find clinging to past ideas, there seem to be just as many -at least in the online circles I frequent- that embrace the need for change. I can sense a broad category of ideas that are close to my own, or to the ones that I've favored in my readings. Degrowth, permaculture, and to some extent, "anarchical" ideas (though I do not consider myself an anarchist, I can't help but sympathize with many of it's proposals), seem to be taking hold among those of us who see the harm of the industrial society and of Capitalism in general, who seek to resist the wholesale destruction of ecosystems and of the living base on which we all, by necessity, depend for our continued existence.
Now, my education in these regards can go in roughly two directions: bottom up, or top down. The empirical sciences after Newton have come to emphasize a bottom-up understanding of the mechanisms of nature, from the constitutent elements, such as are atoms and molecules, up through layers of increasing scale, to attempt to understand the whole of nature. This has been, simply put, catastrophic, and it is the underlying philosophy of technocapital. It is the reductive notion of emergent complexity which nonetheless misses the forest for the trees, and considers the forest, and the life of it, as a mere "illusion" created by an equally illusory perception rooted, as everything else, on a primordial soup of molecules, bouncing back and forth mindlessly and seemingly producing a strange phenomenon, an apparent autonomy which is, nevertheless, nothing but the net sum of all these purely mechanistic interactions of myriads of independently floating who-knows-what.
The top-down notion, on the other hand, has been thoroughly discredited, not so much by actual progress in understanding, but by a purely ideological approach to the world, one that is rooted on the profit of a few who would have the world become a lifeless collection of mechanistic parts in order to profit from the callous exploitation of it.
And yet, the world has indeed been shown to be composed of these constitutent parts, that it, indeed, displays a kind of "emergent complexity", allowing for what is ultimately, a false dichotomy between both views: that of a bottom-up determinism of mechanistic parts, and a top-down design of metaphysical entities "piloting", as it were, this crude matter. Cartesian thought has thoroughly divorced immaterial life from merely reacting matter, precluding the idea that matter itself may be, to some extent, alive, that it may be so disposed as to coalesce into ever increasing complexity against it's very own dispersive nature.
So it is that, on the one hand, study of nature can be seen from a couple perspectives: either we learn about the mechanical functioning of the parts of nature, or look to a wholistic approach. Yet, one cannot fully understand the wholistic approach without having a notion of the parts. A game of chess, after all, is played with individual pieces, otherwise there would be no chess to play at all!
We ought, then, to look at the world from both of these perspectives, now from the top, now from the bottom, acknowledging both the independent force that moves each apparent individual in pursuit of it's own benefit, as well as it's place in the whole, it's contribution to it along with it's dependence to that whole. Only when "individuals" are taken to be separate from the very fabric of which they are composite parts, members of an integral whole without which it would not be possible, and which in turn depend on such a whole to be able to sustain themselves and maintain their apparent individuality, only then, I insist, can we reach a meaningful interpretation of the world we live in, one that allows us to live in it and whit it and not merely to pillage it and declare ourselves lords and conquerors of a world that is breaking apart beneath our feet.