The Death of Dreams

If you’re looking for something to give you hope in these dark times, look to narrative structure.

So here we are. For decades, the environmental movement has looked to small gains in the midst of large-scale movements in the wrong direction. While the side of good has painstakingly improved energy efficiency, the side of evil invented cryptocurrency to suck those gains right out from under us.

While we fought for wind and solar and wave power, the forces of evil started wars on the impoverished with fossil fuel-powered agents of death. We bemoaned the losses but looked to the progress. If we just kept our heads down, and did good scientific work, we could turn the tide. We would slowly change hearts and minds with our facts and our reason.

We could pretend that there was hope, if we just fought quietly on. Until now.

The Trump administration has laid bare the truth that we refused to accept. Our social systems are broken. Our fractured system of competitive nation states can’t work together on planetary solutions. Corporate interests and capitalism weren’t designed for long-term sustainability and the health of future generations. Money and the power it grants doesn’t care about our kids.

The most powerful nation in the world, has shed any semblance of concern for the future of the planet. The EPA, reprogrammed to give total power to corporations. The national park service retooled as an instrument of resource extraction. Green energy railed against and dirty energy incentivized. And all the while carbon concentrations rising far above what scientists have warned cannot sustain the current population of humans on Earth.

We are in the belly of the whale. We are in the place of no hope.

Unless you believe in the hero’s journey.

If we were to insert the place we’ve arrived into Joseph Campbell’s hero formula—the formula by which pretty much every movie ever made, every novel written, every story humans tell themselves was created—than now is the time in which the hero finds his (or her) assumptions destroyed, and must forge a new path, a path not thought of before, in order to rescue humanity from what seems to be its fate. We have arrived at the death of dreams.

OK, that’s great, but what is that new path exactly? Well, for one, it’s not the path that Obama attempted back in 2016—a path of compromise and deals with the devil. We lost that battle.

The path is a path of revolution, a path in which we identify our enemies and defeat them, with heroes leading the way. My proposal is to turn this effort into a game. We identify actions we can take that help the cause, and enemies we fight who are hurting it, and we give ourselves points for success. It’s a cooperative game rather than a competitive, the sum of our points equating, hopefully, to a sustainable planet.

A bit about the game I’m developing here.

Idealistic? Perhaps. But what other hope do we have then to stop playing the competitive games that are destroying us, and start playing cooperative ones that unite and repair?