At Stade de France, 85,000 fans sing Mylène Farmer’s famous (outside the anglophone world) protest song about youth alienation, Désenchantée (disenchanted: “nothing makes sense anymore, nothing works properly, it’s total chaos”) tous ensemble — all together. At 06:30 of the video, she just turns her mic around and lets the crowd take it. The video is quite exhilarating to watch.
The title of this post is a French expression meaning something like “All together now!”
As I watch our ‘civilized’ world slowly coming apart, fragmenting, sluing towards self-obsessed hyper-individualism, I think about all the occasions over my lifetime when I’ve witnessed the power of collective ‘leaderless’ organization, the power of trust in each other, the power of collaboration, the power of taking collective responsibility, and the power of collective identity and collective association. Work bees. Strikes. ‘Ensemble‘ performances. Group-organized projects that accomplish, without ‘supervision’, ‘management’, ‘leadership’ or ‘authority’, what ‘directed’ events can’t hope to achieve.
This is a brief lament for a society that has lost its way. A major contributor to that loss, I think, is our growing incapacity to do things together. We don’t learn this in school, or at work, or in activities where we are merely spectators. In fact, we learn the opposite: that everything important, every significant accomplishment, is the result of individual effort. We are gauged all our lives on what we achieve ‘on our own merits’, not on being a ‘mere’ part of a grand collective effort. When a skill is not taught, and not practiced, it is soon lost, even if it is something innate to our nature, like collaboration.
We are encouraged to identify as individuals, not as part of the collectives, and places. to which we belong.
We are encouraged to wait to be told what the options for action are, instead of working those options out with others facing the same challenges.
We are encouraged to trust no one, and to obey authority — those with the power to compel us to do what they want. So we act (and fail to act) out of fear, not trust and shared passion.
This, I think, is a terrible tragedy. This growing incompetence at working and living collectively, collaboratively, cooperatively, diminishes us all. It renders us horribly dependent, fragile, alienated, and feeling helpless. But like the other facets of the polycrisis, it is a predicament, not a problem, and it has no ‘solution’.
We imagine ourselves apart, rather than ‘a part’. That is how our culture has conditioned us, estranged us from home, from connection, from all life on Earth. All unintentionally, hoping it will make us safer, stronger, more resilient, survivors in a world that, when we suddenly conceive ourselves to be separate ‘individuals’, seems unbearably harsh, uncaring, and dangerous. All of it a misunderstanding, that we perpetrate now, generation to generation.
This month I’m starting a new series of articles — opinionated, fanciful writings — about The World After Collapse. It draws on what I’ve learned about pre-civilization humans and other large-brained creatures, and speculates on how we might have turned out very differently, and how the remaining humans, after civilization’s fall is complete — probably centuries from now — might be unrecognizably different from how we behave and think now. But maybe also ‘recognizably’ similar to how we know, deep down inside, we really are, and always have been.
The series is not intended to provide hope, or solace, or a prediction, or least of all a pathway to change. Instead, it’s an attempt to reset the context for how we understand the human experiment on Earth to have unfolded. We cannot save the world, or our civilization, but it might be helpful, in some strange way, to appreciate how, with the best of intentions, we made such a mess of it. How the world, with a smaller number of us, or without us, might look long after those of us living through the fall have gone.
