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Avoiding Authoritarian Responses to our Predicament

At the request of the DAF Diversity and Decolonizing Circle and with their help, the DAF Core Team created this statement to clarify DAF values. Related Statements include the DA Forum’s Non-Violence Statement and Charter.

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We want the Forum  to be a welcoming space for all who are waking up to difficult realisations about societal disruption and collapse; and we’re committed to non-violence in both action and words. 

Our current predicament largely stems from wrong ideas about the separation between people, as well as between people and the planet. These ideas have been used for centuries to justify exploitation and oppression. Our current predicament is the result of them and the power structures they have led to.

The DA Forum actively seeks to replace these mistaken narratives with more connected and loving responses, and with better ways of relating to people and the other-than-human world. We welcome all who come here seeking these peaceful and loving responses, and actively discourage community members from promoting non-loving or violent views. 

The idea of societal disruption and collapse can evoke strong emotions and extreme reactions, and we recognise that there’s a risk these could encourage tolerance for exploitation and oppression of people and nature. Below you’ll find examples of some such comments, which we see from time to time on our platforms and which we actively resist. We have explored each one and offered a challenge. We’ve also listed some resources at the end of this document, to help you think about this further.

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❌ “‘Overpopulation’ is the chief cause of our global social and ecological predicament.”

❤️ Typically, this comment refers to the population of the Global South (the ‘majority world’ or ‘global majority’), not the Global North (‘global minority’). This is likely because populations in the Global South are growing faster than those in the North. However, it downplays the overwhelming responsibility of the minority world for the social and ecological crises the world faces, through its history of colonisation, extractivism, and dispossession. It also ignores the fact that even poorer or middle-income people in the minority world exceed the per-capita consumption, and carbon footprints, of people in the majority world many times over.

❌ “Drastic population control or decrease must take place in the majority world.”

❤️ It’s true that climate breakdown is already causing tremendous harm around the world, particularly in the majority world. Tragically, this means that some places may no longer be able to support a growing human population. But talk of ‘stringent population control measures’ can lead to tolerance for harmful public policies like forced abortions or sterilizations, enforced by authoritarian means – sources of deep trauma, particularly among women. They might also open the door to eugenics programs – in the past carried out in a number of authoritarian regimes, and which have still surfaced in more recent times and supposedly more libertarian countries. In effect, these policies pave the way for publicly-accepted state-sponsored genocide.

This is why such a statement conflicts with the DA Forum’s ethos. An approach more consistent with that ethos might call for any of: international humanitarian action and solidarity efforts, efforts supporting women’s education and empowerment, the equitable redistribution of wealth and resources, and economic degrowth policies in the Global North.

❌ “It is inevitable that large portions of the human population will die as a result of climate change / societal collapse.”

❤️ Our unfolding predicament is already killing people around the world. The first and worst hit are those in the majority world, and marginalised people everywhere (especially Black, Indigenous and People of Colour). Middle- and upper-class populations, especially in the minority world, mostly still benefit from buffers of wealth, privilege, and/or access to (admittedly shrinking) social security systems.

So who are the people whose deaths we accept as “inevitable”? Or is this just an excuse for the more privileged among us not to take humanitarian action, and make uncomfortable changes in our lifestyles, to reduce suffering?

❌ “The impacts of climate change / societal collapse can only be reduced by relying on stronger forms of authority and curtailing individual freedoms”

❤️ This suggests that:

  • People are inherently self-centred and self-serving; 
  • These same people are the ones mostly responsible for our predicament; and therefore that 
  • The situation can only be addressed by controlling their behaviour through more authoritarian forms of state control. 

However, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary – i.e. that:

  • Humans are just as able to be altruistic and kind, as they are to be self-serving;
  • The impact of our social and economic structures, and the behaviour of states and organisations, is much greater than that of individuals;
  • History shows that authoritarian regimes always serve the interests of a minority, and not the collective well-being. Therefore, authoritarian policies – even if they’re purported to be for ecological reasons – aren’t likely to benefit people or planet. They also embed unhealthy ways of being and of relating to one another, because they’re based on a desire for control; this is, arguably, at the root of our current predicament.

❌ “Humans are a cancer upon the earth”

❤️ This statement is problematic because it depicts humanity in its entirety as an inherently destructive species – with everyone seen as responsible for the global social and ecological predicament. But this isn’t true. Only a small portion of humanity (Euro-Americans) colonised and exploited large parts of the world, and extracted fossil fuel deposits to fuel their industrial revolutions. They did this with a “modern” mindset: that is, assuming that humans are separate from “nature,” and that some are worth more than others. Meanwhile, people elsewhere on the planet had long found ways to live in harmony with the rest of the living world. For example, Australian Aborigines had maintained complex societies for thousands of years without harming their environments. 

So it’s understandable that some people feel pessimistic about modern humans. But let’s keep in mind that it’s these past violent processes that have led to the destructive values and lifestyles now spreading around the world. This has been at the expense of, and imposed on, people who were previously living far more sustainable ways of life. Those more sustainable lifestyles, built on connection, mutual care and respect for other species, have been the norm throughout most of humanity’s past. Many Indigenous communities still uphold them to this day.

❌ “We need to build lifeboat communities”

❤️ The desire for safety in a chaotic world is understandable. Self-contained community  living may be one way to achieve this, whilst also reducing one’s impact on the planet.  But it’s important to ask: Who is welcome within such “lifeboats”? Are these communities accessible to less privileged people, who are already more exposed to climate-related risks and impacts? Do they take into account the needs of people elsewhere in the world, who may be at far greater risk in a climate-damaged world? Do they guarantee that a privileged few will have access to certain kinds of private property – to the exclusion of less-privileged others? 

These are difficult questions. But it is worth remembering that lifeboats, by definition, can only contain so many people. If we – in the DA Forum – aim to embody and enable loving responses to collapse, we should avoid metaphors that justify excluding a majority of people from benefits available to fewer and fewer people.

RESOURCES

On “overpopulation”:

On population control:

On humanitarian impacts of climate change:

On authoritarian measures:

On human societies’ historical impacts on the planet:

On lifeboats:

Other useful resources:

diversity and decolonisation, non-violence