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If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.
Recent articles and books about artificial intelligence offer images of the future that align like iron filings around two magnetic poles—utopia and apocalypse.
On one hand, AI is said to be leading us toward a perfect future of ease, health, and broadened understanding. We, aided by our machines and their large language models (LLMs), will know virtually everything and make all the right choices to usher in a permanent era of enlightenment and plenty. On the other hand, AI is poised to thrust us into a future of unemployment, environmental destruction, and delusion. Our machines will gobble scarce resources while churning out disinformation and making deadly weapons that AI agents will use to wipe us out once we’re of no further use to them.
Utopia and apocalypse have long exerted powerful pulls on human imagination and behavior. (My first book, published in 1989 and updated in 1995, was Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age; it examined the history and meaning of the utopian archetype.) New technologies tend to energize these two polar attractors in our collective psyche because toolmaking and language are humanity’s two superpowers, which have enabled our species to take over the world, while also bringing us to a point of existential peril. New technologies increase some people’s power over nature and other people, producing benefits that, mentally extrapolated forward in time, encourage expectations of a grand future. But new technologies also come with costs (resource depletion, pollution, increased economic inequality, accidents, and misuse) that evoke fears of an ultimate reckoning. Language supercharges our toolmaking talent by enabling us to learn from others; it is also the vehicle for formulating and expressing our hopes and fears. AI, because it is both technological and linguistic, and because it is being adopted at a frantic pace and so disruptively, is especially prone to triggering the utopia-apocalypse reflex.
Messages about both the promise and the peril of AI are often crafted by powerful people seeking to consolidate their control over the AI industry.
We humans have been ambivalent about technology at least since our adoption of writing. Tools enable us to steal fire from the gods, like the mythical Prometheus, whom the gods punished with eternal torment; they are the wings of Icarus, who flies too close to the sun and falls to his death. AI promises to make technology autonomously intelligent, thus calling to mind still another cautionary tale, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
What could go right—or wrong? After summarizing both the utopian and apocalyptic visions for AI, I’ll explore two questions: first, how do these extreme visions help or mislead us in our attempts to understand AI? And second, whom do these visions serve? As we’ll see, there are some early hints of AI’s ultimate limits, which suggest a future that doesn’t align well with many of the highest hopes or deepest fears for the new technology.
As a writer, I generally don’t deliberately use AI. Nevertheless, in researching this article, I couldn’t resist asking Google’s free AI Overview, “What is the utopian vision for AI?” This came back a fraction of a second later:
The utopian vision for AI envisions a future where AI seamlessly integrates into human life, boosting productivity, innovation, and overall well-being. It’s a world where AI solves complex problems like climate change and disease, and helps humanity achieve new heights.
Google Overview’s first sentence needs editing to remove verbal redundancy (vision, envisions), but AI does succeed in cobbling together a serviceable summary of its promoters’ dreams.
The same message is on display in longer form in the article “Visions of AI Utopia” by Future Sight Echo, who informs us that AI will soften the impacts of economic inequality by delivering resources more efficiently and “in a way that is dynamic and able to adapt instantly to new information and circumstances.” Increased efficiency will also reduce humanity’s impact on the environment by minimizing energy requirements and waste of all kinds.
But that’s only the start. Education, creativity, health and longevity, translation and cultural understanding, companionship and care, governance and legal representation—all will be revolutionized by AI.
There is abundant evidence that people with money share these hopes for AI. The hottest stocks on Wall Street (notably Nvidia) are AI-related, as are many of the corporations that contribute significantly to the NPR station I listen to in Northern California, thereby gaining naming rights at the top of the hour.
Capital is being shoveled in the general direction of AI so rapidly (roughly $300 billion just this year, in the U.S. alone) that, if its advertised potential is even half believable, we should all rest assured that most human problems will soon vanish.
Or will they?
Strangely, when I initially asked Google’s AI, “What is the vision for AI apocalypse?”, its response was, “An AI Overview is not available for this search.” Maybe I didn’t word my question well. Or perhaps AI sensed my hostility. Full disclosure: I’ve gone on record calling for AI to be banned immediately. (Later, AI Overview was more cooperative, offering a lengthy summary of “common themes in the vision of an AI apocalypse.”) My reason for proposing an AI ban is that AI gives us humans more power, via language and technology, than we already have; and that, collectively, we already have way too much power vis-à-vis the rest of nature. We’re overwhelming ecosystems through resource extraction and waste dumping to such a degree that, if current trends continue, wild nature may disappear by the end of the century. Further, the most powerful humans are increasingly overwhelming everyone else, both economically and militarily. Exerting our power more intelligently probably won’t help, because we’re already too smart for our own good. The last thing we should be doing is to cut language off from biology so that it can exist entirely in a simulated techno-universe.
Let’s be specific. What, exactly, could go wrong because of AI? For starters, AI could make some already bad things worse—in both nature and society.
Just as there are limits to fossil-fueled utopia, nuclear utopia, and perpetual-growth capitalist utopia, there are limits to AI utopia. By the same token, limits may prevent AI from becoming an all-powerful grim reaper.
There are many ways in which humanity is already destabilizing planetary environmental systems; climate change is the way that’s most often discussed. Through its massive energy demand, AI could accelerate climate change by generating more carbon emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, “Driven by AI use, the U.S. economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement, and chemicals.” The world also faces worsening water shortages; AI needs vast amounts. Nature is already reeling from humanity’s accelerating rates of resource extraction and depletion. AI requires millions of tons of copper, steel, cement, and other raw materials, and suppliers are targeting Indigenous lands for new mines.
We already have plenty of social problems, too, headlined by worsening economic inequality. AI could widen the divide between rich and poor by replacing lower-skilled workers with machines while greatly increasing the wealth of those who control the technology. Many people worry that corporations have gained too much political influence; AI could accelerate this trend by making the gathering and processing of massive amounts of data on literally everyone cheaper and easier, and by facilitating the consolidation of monopolies. Unemployment is always a problem in capitalist societies, but AI threatens quickly to throw millions of white-collar workers off payrolls: Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei predicts that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, while Bill Gates forecasts that only three job fields will survive AI—energy, biology, and AI system programming.
However, the most horrific visions for AI go beyond just making bad things worse. The title of a recent episode of The Bulwark Podcast, “Will Sam Altman and His AI Kill Us All?”, states the worst-case scenario bluntly. But how, exactly, could AI kill us all? One way is by automating military decisions while making weapons cheaper and more lethal (a recent Brookings commentary was titled, “How Unchecked AI Could Trigger a Nuclear War”). Veering toward dystopian sci-fi, some AI philosophers opine that the technology, once it’s significantly smarter than people, might come to view biological humans as pointless wasters of resources that machines could use more efficiently. At that point, AI could pursue multiple pathways to terminate humanity.
I don’t know the details of how AI will unfold in the months and years to come. But the same could be said for AI industry leaders. They certainly understand the technology better than I do, but their AI forecasts may miss a crucial factor. You see, I’ve trained myself over the years to look for limits in resources, energy, materials, and social systems. Most people who work in the fields of finance and technology tend to ignore limits, or even to believe that there are none. This leads them to absurdities, such as Elon Musk’s expectation of colonizing Mars. Earth is finite, humans will be confined to this planet forever, and therefore lots of things we can imagine doing just won’t happen. I would argue that discussions about AI’s promise and peril need a dose of limits awareness.
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, in an essay titled “AI Is Normal Technology,” offer some of that awareness. They argue that AI development will be constrained by the speed of human organizational and institutional change and by “hard limits to the speed of knowledge acquisition because of the social costs of experimentation.” However, the authors do not take the position that, because of these limits, AI will have only minor impacts on society; they see it as an amplifier of systemic risks.
In addition to the social limits Narayanan and Kapoor discuss, there will also (as mentioned above) be environmental limits to the energy, water, and materials that AI needs, a subject explored at a recent conference.
AI seems to present a spectacular new slate of opportunities and threats. But, in essence, much of what was true before AI remains so now.
Finally, there’s a crucial limit to AI development that’s inherent in the technology itself. Large language models need vast amounts of high-quality data. However, as more information workers are replaced by AI, or start using AI to help generate content (both trends are accelerating), more of the data available to AI will be AI-generated rather than being produced by experienced researchers who are constantly checking it against the real world. Which means AI could become trapped in a cycle of declining information quality. Tech insiders call this “AI model collapse,” and there’s no realistic plan to stop it. AI itself can’t help.
In his article “Some Signs of AI Model Collapse Begin to Reveal Themselves,” Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that this is already happening. There have been widely reported instances of AI inadvertently generating fake scientific research documents. The Chicago Sun-Times recently published a “Best of Summer” feature that included forthcoming novels that don’t exist. And the Trump administration’s widely heralded “Make America Healthy Again” report included citations (evidently AI-generated) for non-existent studies. Most of us have come to expect that new technologies will have bugs that engineers will gradually remove or work around, resulting in improved performance. With AI, errors and hallucination problems may just get worse, in a cascading crescendo.
Just as there are limits to fossil-fueled utopia, nuclear utopia, and perpetual-growth capitalist utopia, there are limits to AI utopia. By the same token, limits may prevent AI from becoming an all-powerful grim reaper.
What will be the real future of AI? Here’s a broad-brush prediction (details are currently unavailable due to my failure to upgrade my crystal ball’s operating system). Over the next few years, corporations and governments will continue quickly to invest in AI, driven by its ability to cut labor costs. We will become systemically dependent on the technology. AI will reshape society—employment, daily life, knowledge production, education, and wealth distribution. Then, speeding up as it goes, AI will degenerate into a hallucinating, blithering cacophony of little voices spewing nonsense. Real companies, institutions, and households will suffer as a result. Then, we’ll either figure out how to live without AI, or confine it to relatively limited tasks and data sets. America got a small foretaste of this future recently, when Musk-led DOGE fired tens of thousands of federal workers with the expectation of replacing many of them with AI—without knowing whether AI could do their jobs (oops: Thousands are being rehired).
A messy neither-this-nor-that future is not what you’d expect if you spend time reading documents like “AI 2027,” five industry insiders’ detailed speculative narrative of the imminent AI future, which allows readers to choose the story’s ending. Option A, “slowdown,” leads to a future in which AI is merely an obedient, super-competent helper; while in option B, “race,” humanity is extinguished by an AI-deployed bioweapon because people take up land that could be better used for more data centers. Again, we see the persistent, binary utopia-or-apocalypse stereotype, here presented with impressive (though misleading) specificity.
At the start of this article, I attributed AI utopia-apocalypse discourse to a deep-seated tic in our collective human unconscious. But there’s probably more going on here. In her recent book Empire of AI, tech journalist Karen Hao traces polarized AI visions back to the founding of OpenAI by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Both were, by turns, dreamers and doomers. Their consistent message: We (i.e., Altman, Musk, and their peers) are the only ones who can be trusted to shepherd the process of AI development, including its regulation, because we’re the only ones who understand the technology. Hao makes the point that messages about both the promise and the peril of AI are often crafted by powerful people seeking to consolidate their control over the AI industry.
Utopia and apocalypse feature prominently in the rhetoric of all cults. It’s no surprise, but still a bit of a revelation, therefore, to hear Hao conclude in a podcast interview that AI is a cult (if it walks, quacks, and swims like a cult... ). And we are all being swept up in it.
So, how should we think about AI in a non-cultish way? In his article, “We Need to Stop Pretending AI Is Intelligent,” Guillaume Thierry, a professor of cognitive neuroscience, writes, “We must stop giving AI human traits.” Machines, even apparently smart ones, are not humans—full stop. Treating them as if they are human will bring dehumanizing results for real, flesh-and-blood people.
The collapse of civilization won’t be AI generated. That’s because environmental-social decline was already happening without any help from LLMs. AI is merely adding a novel factor in humanity’s larger reckoning with limits. In the short run, the technology will further concentrate wealth. “Like empires of old,” writes Karen Hao, “the new empires of AI are amassing extraordinary riches across space and time at great expense to everyone else.” In the longer run, AI will deplete scarce resources faster.
If AI is unlikely to be the bringer of destruction, it’s just as unlikely to deliver heaven on Earth. Just last week I heard from a writer friend who used AI to improve her book proposal. The next day, I went to my doctor for a checkup, and he used AI to survey my vital signs and symptoms; I may experience better health maintenance as a result. That same day, I read a just-published Apple research paper that concludes LLMs cannot reason reliably. Clearly, AI can offer tangible benefits within some fields of human pursuit. But we are fooling ourselves if we assume that AI can do our thinking for us. If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.
I’m not currently in the job market and therefore can afford to sit on the sidelines and cast judgment on AI. For many others, economic survival depends on adopting the new technology. Finding a personal modus vivendi with new tools that may have dangerous and destructive side effects on society is somewhat analogous to charting a sane and survivable daily path in a nation succumbing to authoritarian rule. We all want to avoid complicity in awful outcomes, while no one wants to be targeted or denied opportunity. Rhetorically connecting AI with dictatorial power makes sense: One of the most likely uses of the new technology will be for mass surveillance.
Maybe the best advice for people concerned about AI would be analogous to advice that democracy advocates are giving to people worried about the destruction of the social-governmental scaffolding that has long supported Americans’ freedoms and rights: Identify your circles of concern, influence, and control; scrutinize your sources of information and tangibly support those with the most accuracy and courage, and the least bias; and forge communitarian bonds with real people.
AI seems to present a spectacular new slate of opportunities and threats. But, in essence, much of what was true before AI remains so now. Human greed and desire for greater control over nature and other people may lead toward paths of short-term gain. But, if you want a good life when all’s said and done, learn to live well within limits. Live with honesty, modesty, and generosity. AI can’t help you with that.
It's true that the party isn’t dead... yet. But if it does not seriously reflect on its disastrous 2024 performance—and all that led up to it—the future is beyond bleak.
A few months after the Democrats’ bitter defeat in the 2024 elections, the party convened an Executive Committee meeting. Instead of taking a long hard look at the reasons for their poor performance, the meeting devolved into an orgy of self-congratulations. “We had the best convention ever.” “We raised more money than ever.” “We had the best team and the best cooperation between the White House, the Harris campaign, and the party.”
When one esteemed party leader raised her hand reminding everyone that “we lost” and suggested that the party needed an autopsy to understand what went wrong, her idea was met with indignation. “What do you mean an ‘autopsy’? We’re not dead!”
True, the party isn’t dead, but its 2024 performance was poor. It lost the White House and the Senate. And polls now show Democrats with their lowest favorability ratings in recent history.
Despite denying the need for an autopsy, during the past few months press reports have included advice from “Democratic party operatives” as to what the party should do moving forward and reports of studies commissioned by one or another party entity analyzing the 2024 defeat. The consensus view that has emerged is that Democrats need to move to the “center” and forego radical or “leftist” political ideas. The problem with this assessment is twofold. First, most of the operatives speaking out or the groups commissioned to conduct the studies (reportedly costing $30 million) are the same consultants who dug the hole Democrats now find themselves in. They do not understand the voters they lost or what needs to be done to win them back. Second, their definitions of “centrist” and “leftist” are inventions to suit their own biases. It’s not enough to say “We need to stop being so ‘woke,’ and instead focus on what voters care about,” especially when they don’t really know what voters do care about.
For years, these same consultants have argued that Democrats need to move to “the center” of American politics, which they define as an amalgam of conservative-leaning fiscal/economic policies and more liberal-leaning on some (but not all) social issues. There was no overall theme to this mish-mash of ideas, and candidates who listened to the consultants often tied themselves in knots trying to appeal to voters without a coherent message.
While pre-Trump, Republicans would focus on the Reagan mantra of lower taxes and smaller government, when one asked Democrats what they stood for, they would read off a litany of issues (abortion, social justice, environment, immigration, guns, etc.) leaving it up to voters to find the forest from the trees. Because Republicans’ “smaller government, lower taxes” only increased income inequality and threatened the economic well-being of most voters, they avoided the details on these matters and instead sought to divert voters’ attention by elevating and exaggerating one or another of the Democrats’ stances on social issues. “Democrats want open borders.” “Democrats are soft on crime.” “Democrats want to abolish police.” “Democrats want transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.”
Each time Republicans would lay these traps, Democrats would take the bait, focusing on these issues instead of developing an overarching message that would reach a majority of voters.
Twenty-five years ago, I co-authored a book with my brother John Zogby—“What Ethnic Americans Really Think.” It was based on polling John’s firm had done measuring the political attitudes of voters from several US ethnic groups: Italians, Arabs, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, and Africans. Despite the deep differences that existed amongst the communities included in the study, what came through was that their views converged on several issues. Strong majorities in all groups were proud of and had an emotional tie to their heritages and were attached to their hometowns and their family connections. This was true for those who immigrated to and those born in the US.
Contrary to the consultants’ “wisdom,” all of these communities supported what can be seen as progressive economic/fiscal policies. For example, overwhelming majorities, from the mid-80% range to mid-90%, wanted the federal government to: help underwrite health insurance; raise the minimum wage; impose penalties on polluters; oppose a regressive taxation system; strengthen Social Security and Medicare, and support public education. Large majorities also wanted: campaign finance reform; gun control; and a US unilateral ban on nuclear weapons testing.
On social issues, the views of the voters from each of these ethnic groups reflected a more nuanced approach. Smaller majorities, but still majorities, supported the death penalty, limits on abortion, school vouchers and opposition to racial preferences in hiring.
So in reality, the “center” is not being more moderate on economic issues and more liberal on social issues because the economic and fiscal issues have the support of almost 9 in 10 voters and are the foundation for building a majoritarian party. At the same time, instead locking out, demeaning, and refusing to engage with voters with divergent views on social issues, Democrats need to respectfully discuss these issues within the party,.
The lesson that Democrats need to learn is that “the left” is not primarily defined by where you stand on social issues. Instead, unlike Republicans, Democrats must define themselves as the party that understands the government’s positive role in creating an economy and programs that create jobs and opportunities for working and middle class families—Black, Asian, Latino, and White ethnics. When they don’t embrace these concerns, they cede this ground to Republicans, who despite their horribly regressive policies now claim to represent the working class while charging that Democrats only represent elites.
This doesn’t mean that Democrats should ever abandon their commitment to the range of social and cultural issues party leaders have long embraced as critical for our diverse democratic society. But these issues can’t define the party. For Democrats to win, they must reclaim their history as the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and, yes, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. That they are the party that believes that government has a role to play in lifting up those who need a helping hand, and providing for the working classes and middle classes of all ethnic and racial communities.
We should do our best to accept that we are confronting a major collapse of a way of living that we had taken for granted.
In early January Common Dreams published my forecast of consequential developments in 2025, ones that would affect the way we’re governed and how we live our lives day-to-day. Now that the year is nearing the halfway point, and in the spirit of Memorial Day, it is instructive to review the list, which included the following:
I added the following as caveats to this grim list: uncertainties regarding the targets, timing, locales, extent of severity, and designation of victims.
Broadly speaking the forecast has been accurate. My purpose in conducting this initial review now, however, is not to gloat. Others may have been equally, if not more on target. Furthermore, most of what was predicted was in the wind before the year began. It would be useful at this point to reflect critically, focusing on the caveats noted above, and to address two important questions: “So what?” and “Now What?”
Most telling about what has happened to date in 2025 is the severity, acceleration, and chaos attending several of the enumerated elements, especially those relating to our form of governance and our economic well-being. Even more tragic than the qualifiers just noted is the countless number of innocent victims that have been swept up through indiscriminate governmental action. While the current administration in this country has led the way against those whose main “infraction” has been to exercise their right of free speech, allies like Israel have taken to maiming, starving, and murdering an entire people.
Yes, we should be prepared in the months ahead for even greater severity, continuing acceleration, and unbridled chaos. We should also expect that there will be more victims whose rights are trampled, or lives impaired or destroyed. The strategy of the administration is clear: Do as much as one can as fast as one can, causing as much pandemonium as possible.
So what and now what? What are the implications for those of us who seek to contain a wildfire threatening our political, social, cultural, and economic base? As many others have argued, a more radical, broad-based and well-coordinated disaster relief effort is warranted, involving all those who seek to perpetuate our constitutional republic. “All” here includes notables, leaders of major institutions—judicial, educational, occupational, journalistic, bolstered by millions of ordinary citizens of all ages and backgrounds. This wildfire is barely 5% contained, having engulfed our public life. The stakes are the upholding of a political framework grounded in a set of moral values that has remained largely intact for 250 years.
At the same time, it is important to recognize that individual minds and hearts—yours and mine—are deeply affected by this wildfire. We have been the beneficiaries of this experiment in nationhood, and we are on the verge of becoming its victims. What shall we do with our AMs and PMs beyond joining the “bucket brigade” of mass resistance? What mindset and emotional posture might sustain us going forward?
First and foremost, we must do what we can to quell our fears about the rampant destruction taking place, destruction that is well beyond our control as individuals. Fear breeds a turning inward, a defensive grasping for a way of being that will no longer be available to us. Things will never return to the state they were in before the wildfire broke out. It is better to accept that a large-scale transformation is afoot, one that beckons a personal transformation that we have the capacity to shape.
Essential for countering fear are an ongoing attachment to individual right action, compassionate outreach to others, bearing witness to what is happening around us through conversation or writing, and blessing moral action by others. We can endeavor to heal relationships, both familial and neighborly, and we can seek joy in the most intrinsic pleasures.
Much of what unfolds in the years ahead will cause us to grieve. We should do our best to accept that we are confronting a major collapse of a way of living that we had taken for granted. In place of denial and nostalgia, let’s look for opportunities amid inevitable personal transformation—for durable hope, serendipitous grace, the beauty of human kindness, and the practice of compassion.