At some point along the continuum of language and culture, metaphor becomes character: a word evoking our situation by drawing on a parallel or a similarity or a comparison morphs into the situation itself, “figuratively” gives way to “literally,” and rather than being like something, we are that something.

And so it is withAmericaand “Fat.”

“Getting Fat” was once invoked to chastise laziness or self satisfaction and identify their consequences, but those consequences have long since come home to roost.  Fat is now who and howAmericais, our social fabric rather than a cautionary possibility, indistinguishable from our background reality and hence useless as a linguistic device with which we can gain perspective.  Where Fat is concerned, our metaphor is now our identity.

This is a subject that always comes up for me this time of year when I travel cross country to vacation in upstate New York, changing planes in Chicago.  Oâ€Hare Airport there is the proverbial Mecca of Fat.  One year, my daughter, Sophie, and I were waiting for our connector flight, sitting on the edge of the flow of passengers, just watchingAmericaon the move.  It was a constant parade of very very large people, arms jiggling, bellies extending a foot or more over their belt line, hips half again as wide as their shoulders.  Sophie, still a youngster, rolled her eyes.

“How does someone get that fat?” she asked incredulously.

“I think you have to work at it,” I said.

Judging by my annual Oâ€Hare samplings over the years since, that work has clearly burgeoned.  At least a quarter ofAmericanow qualifies as physically obese or close to it, and most of the rest of us are thicker than we need to be.  This question, however, keeps coming up for reasons that far transcend just how we look or how far we tip the scales in the morning.  It is the way Fat has permeated our collective being that holds my attention.  Fat has become a verb, a way of living in which we steadily consume far more than we use, take far in excess of what we replace, choose passivity and indulgence over discipline and activity, and serve our appetites rather than our values.  That ubiquitous dynamic is now marbled throughout our society and will leave us almost helpless in the face of the disruption about to be generated by the blowback from two centuries of ceaselessly burning carbon.  Living as Fat as we do is now a clear and present danger to our collective survival.

This summer, instead of just sampling at Oâ€Hare, I decided to make a list of five ways (not necessarily involving fast food) in which we act Fat, and how we might change them:

1. We consume a lot more than our share.  With barely four percent of the worldâ€s population and more than a quarter of its wealth, we are a hog at the trough.  This arrangement has proved workable as long as the trough keeps expanding, but as physical limits begin to constrict the worldâ€s potential for wealth, our Fat will become increasingly unacceptable to the rest of the species.  At that point, it will be consume less or fight.  If, however, instead of waiting, we use our current status as lead dog to reduce, redistribute, and reframe our consumption, we might just show the way through climate Armageddon.  Vanquishing this Fat requires taking “Less Is More” as a personal and political mantra and enforcing it on all fronts.

2. We give little thought to consequences.  It is the nature of Fat that its acolytes are guided by appetite to the exclusion of virtually everything else.  Perhaps the most dangerous effect is our failure to calculate the reality of our impact and incorporate that verifiable impact in our accounting of the costs and ultimate viability of our collective behaviors.  For example, the damage done in the process of harvesting and burning carbon is never included in the price of the energy we generate with it.  This Fat can be counteracted by recalculating our behaviors, assessing the aftermath of actions in advance of taking them and insisting on focusing on real costs that take the entire chain of production into account.

3.  We devalue sustainability.   Fat is fueled by our self indulgence and premised on the assumption of growth.   For the Fat, More is a constant, in both our economics and social organization.  Everything is designed to escalate, often beyond all healthy proportions.  And that addiction to growth is about to hit the proverbial wall as More becomes increasingly hard to come by.  The antidote to this Fat is the identification and pursuit of behaviors which donâ€t require More and More and More.  The first questions we need to ask are, Will it last?  Can we keep this up for the foreseeable future?  Does it require a pyramid shape to endure?

4.  We prioritize the short term.   A corollary to Fatâ€s reliance on More is its confinement to Now.  This restriction to the immediate generates heedlessness and indulgence, with little thought to how our behavior plays out over time or even recognition that it does.  If there is only Now, we have no chance to gain control over the Fat thatâ€s about to become our principal nemesis.  The issues facing us are how to generate behaviors that actually improve over time and how to collectively defer to those yet to come.  We need to plan in decades and centuries rather than days and weeks.

5.  We assume our dominance.  Fat attempts to enforce its primacy on everything and everyone it encounters.  Always being first in line generates smugness and self satisfaction and we have weakened our bond with much of the rest of our species as a consequence.   Believing we have been chosen plays out a lot like narcissism down where most people live.  This strain of Fat only disappears when we treat importance as something we share with a host of others rather than as our own signature condition.  We desperately need a planet upon which we are all sideways to each other rather than on the top or on the bottom.

As our approaching circumstance compels us to rethink our communal paradigm, individual persons will be both the essential building blocks and the architects of that transformation.  How we each participate is critical.   Indeed, a revitalized approach to citizenship may well be a prerequisite for survival.  Without transformative behavior at the social base, our species will surely fall short in the radical challenge framed by climate deterioration.  We need to reformulate what it means to be a member of society and the obligations and behavior that accompany it, and then embody that new common denominator in the roles we play.

“What we have now is a kind of consumer model of citizenship,” my friend Leon observed.  Leon teaches American history.  I ran into him while attending his universityâ€s graduation ceremonies last weekend and when I told him I was about to write something on citizenship, he spoke right up.  “As consumers of society, we pick and choose off its menu,” he pointed out.  “It is essentially a passive posture—empty receptacles at the social tap, so to speak, with a remarkably disconnected social presence.  This consumer mentality insures that the social flow is largely top down rather than bottom up.  It also disconnects us from a sense of responsibility for the outcome of our social behavior and empowers the tendency to defer to the social producers—such as politicians, financial elites, and advertisers—who supply us with the options we consume.  This approach essentially defines life as a standardized multiple choice test rather than an essay question.  It also pretty much insures that the inertia of the status quo will hold sway when it comes to social invention.  I suspect if we pursued a producer model of citizenship rather than our current consumer one, both the social process and outcome would shift considerably.”

When the graduation was finally over, I used Leonâ€s exposition as a starting point and launched into trying to figure out how such a “producer” model of citizenship might operate.  I came up with a list of Eight Commandments for the Practice of Citizenship:

1. Take personal ownership of our communal existence.  Rather than an Other, society is us.  However we try to distance ourselves from it, we cannot.  Rather, we should accept and propound society as an extension of ourselves and cultivate that mutual identity instead of treating it a condition imposed from outside and over which we have no control.  Even if it doesnâ€t avow as much, society—essentially a collective consciousness and behavior—is by definition participatory.  Our actions make society what it is. Recognizing that is the first step towards holding it and ourselves accountable.

2.  Engage with each other.  Modern life can often be diagramed as a sea of separate cells, each linked to a central hub but not cross linked with each other, an often stultifying arrangement that effectively depletes societyâ€s tensile strength and the energy and vitality at its base.  Changing that deficiency requires developing social and political communities of interest among the citizenry that generate focus and nurture communal intelligence horizontally, without using empowered elites to intermediate.  The point is to revitalize democracy at its roots with a campaign of cross fertilization within the citizenry.

3. Pay attention and get smarter.  Citizens need to be keen observers who prioritize learning about who we are and what is going on.  Without that intellectual openness and curiosity, society rigidifies, addicted to dogma and its propaganda, without a fresh flow of insight and understanding that informs all its members and will allow us to adapt quickly and with a minimum of dislocation.

4.  Embody democratic values.  It is not enough to pledge allegiance.  Citizenship in our dislocated future requires us to carry out our values in our daily life and social organization, guided by self knowledge and honest self examination.  In this way, citizenship is more a verb than a noun.  It is a behavior that has to be carried out in order to be real.  And the means it adopts have to reflect the desired ends.

5.  Assume responsibility.  If society isnâ€t an Other, then itâ€s not someone elseâ€s problem.  The future will not allow us to kick the can down the road as we have become used to.  Our dilemmas must be solved by ourselves.  And part of assuming responsibility is holding ourselves and each other responsible when that is called for.  Accountability must be developed as both a personal virtue and a collective requirement, generated from the bottom up.  When the shit hits the fan, individual discipline and self regulation will often be the only option for providing stability.

6. Generate empathy and compassion.  Citizenship will have to include appreciating, understanding, and looking out for each other—providing a support system and an avenue for reconciling our differences and integrating them into a common bond.  Helping and caring for others are essential virtues when faced with the necessity of making more out of less.  Without an empathetic and compassionate approach to each other, there is no way to make that social arithmetic work.

7.  Initiate.  As things now stand, there is an ingrained cultural assumption that the ball is put in play at the top and an accompanying reluctance to provide the bottom with more than an opportunity to accept or reject.  This is another way we empower inertia.  Practicing citizenship means not waiting for the top to figure things out.  Without such initiative, society is denied full use of its communal intelligence and of the genius of individual citizens.  Citizens shouldnâ€t just play defense.

8.  Dedicate ourselves.  Citizenship is a practice, in the religious and spiritual sense of the word: a daily exercise and discipline that has to be carried forward with devotion.  This requires citizens who give that role a central place in their sense of themselves and commit themselves to developing their social membership to the fullest extent.  As such, they will provide the shock troops of our transformation as the future bears down on us.  The citizenryâ€s ability to remain steadfast in the face of disappointment, danger, and disintegration may well be the difference between foundering and prosperity.  We will all need to take the human outcome as a personal mission if we are to have a chance.

One of the games I play is called Reading History Forward.

As a writer of histories, I am used to anchoring accounts of an event or series of events to an occurrence that precedes their manifestation but foreshadows the story to come and embodies the forces that will drive it.   A writer about the Civil War, for example, might open with the Dred Scott decision during the preceding decade, long before the shooting started, as the moment when the Civil War became inevitable and the warâ€s narrative truly begins.   Reading History Forward involves trying to identify such signals of the world to come—the more obscure, the better—as they rush past us in the real time present tense and then project those forward, framing windows into the future and extrapolating the grist of events to come.

Yesterday, I played a round of Reading History Forward after stumbling over a short item in a British newspaper based on a press release from the International Energy Agency.  I was waiting for my friend Lynn to come by to drop off some research material.

The British headline read, “Worst Ever Carbon Emissions Leave Climate on the Brink.”  According to the IEA, charged by its 28 member nations with monitoring world energy use and supplies, “Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach.”  The Agency identified holding the coming temperature rise to 2 degrees C as the only way to avoid triggering a cycle of “dangerous climate change” that will disrupt and displace billions of people.  To contain that rise, “the IEA has calculated that… annual energy related emissions should be no more than 32 gigatonnes (of Carbon Dioxide) by 2020.  If this yearâ€s emissions rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule, making it all but impossible to hold warming to a manageable [level].”

When I eerily cast a line forward from that article towards the likely 4 degree rise by 2100, my knees got a little weak:

Shorelines are inundated.  Food production has plummeted.  Almost every significant collection of ice has melted and drought is endemic in broad swatches of what was once temperate geography.  Precipitation all but disappears from certain latitudes.  Disorder abounds.  Nations war over access to resources, intent on protecting and enlarging whatever relative advantages they can gain.  Authoritarianism is rampant, as is terror among the earthâ€s drastically shrinking population.  Hundreds of millions of refugees are generated, far exceeding anyoneâ€s capacity to minister to them.  Multiple disease epidemics are under way.  Natural disasters are legion and far more extreme.  Survival itself is the issue for the human species, while the number of other species has been reduced to a mere fraction of what had existed a century earlier.

Lynn showed up when those pictures were still flashing in my head.  I told her what Iâ€d been up to and she had her typical response.

“Play all you want,” she warned.  “But donâ€t jump on the bandwagon when you do.  It doesnâ€t have to turn out this way, whatever the experts say.  That story you found could also be the marker for when the humans got it, when a massive epiphany led to a radical change in direction and seeming wholesale disaster was averted in favor of far lesser disasters or maybe even no disaster at all.  The people who wrote that article account for that possibility, even if itâ€s slim.  Why donâ€t you write about what we have to do to realize that underdog option instead of filming disaster movies in your head?”

So I spent the afternoon after Lynn left generating a list of four radical actions that will allow us to avoid the worst.  All four will be required if we are to stop ourselves before reaching the tipping point for climate Armageddon.  I call them The Two Percent Solution:

1. Wage War on Carbon.  As far as warming goes, burning carbon is by far the worst activity in which humankind is currently engaged.  Abolition of that practice has to be our first priority, even if that involves the sacrifice of a number of our sacred cows along the way.  Our goal has to be reducing the bond of energy and carbon to as close to zero as we can, as soon as we can.  In the current emissions emergency that means abandoning coal and petroleum while maximizing our investment in all other energy technologies that do not include CO2 among their byproducts.

2. Retrofit and Redesign the Pattern of Human Habitation.  The time to either abandon or protect the urban clusters along our coasts is now rather than later.  Anticipating disaster is the first step to avoiding it.  Sea walls need to be built and populations resettled.  And while this requires a massive commitment, it is doable with the lead time we currently have.  If we wait until the changes wrought by global warming are all over us, however, the only option is to be victims and try to mitigate our suffering as best we can.

3.  Rewrite Our Lifestyle.  Accomplishing steps 1 and 2 will require a concentration of resources, attention, and energy, much of which is currently given over to non essential consumption.  Cutting such consumption in half will be essential.  That means living with less but it doesnâ€t have to mean diminishing the quality of our lives.  Adopting a kind of selfless discipline that is, for most, a foreign practice is imperative.

4.  Act as a Species.  None of the above can be accomplished without thinking and behaving as humans first, nations second or less.  Where the issue of climate is concerned, there is only one sovereignty.   All peoples have to subscribe to that concept if weâ€re to contain our rise to 2 degrees C and keep our dilemma manageable.

That is, of course, a daunting list.  Obviously only a monumental Urgency will be sufficient to carry it forward.  But then again, the stakes involved are the biggest for which humankind has ever played.

Genuine communication is vital if weâ€re to have half a chance of navigating the disruptions to come:

Democracy cannot function without the capacity to share information and perspectives, to sort and debate options, and to reach an accurate understanding of whatâ€s going on. Limitations cannot be overcome without learning in common. Power cannot be diffused without maintaining a robust communal epistemology that is fed by interaction, discussion, deliberation, and good faith exchange and expression in the public arena.  And society cannot be successfully steered through the necessary resource reallocation, cultural transformation, and political reformulation without a rigorous spirit of critical intelligence to guide it.

Unfortunately—for us now and to come—this process of shared knowing is sucking serious wind.

I was reminded of that in a conversation with Wanda several days ago.  She and I first met when we were both covering a Presidential campaign several decades ago, out in the middle of Iowa.  Iâ€ve seen her every now and then since—the last time right after she was laid off in the stampede of newspaper downsizing.  When we started to catch up last week, the first thing on her mind was “what passes for journalism these days.”

“Itâ€s a bloody circus,” Wanda complained.  “Shallow.  Hysterical.  Uninformed.  Devoid of perspective, context, depth, and sophistication. And more often than not, just plain dumb.”

“Geez, Wanda,” I kidded her, “Why donâ€t you tell me what you really think?”

My attempt at levity, however, hardly slowed Wanda down.

“And the scariest part of all is that a media that mediocre is actually giving most of us what we want.  Itâ€s a symbiotic relationship.  Dumbness begets dumbness begets dumbness.  That much is obvious in the lowering of our standards of proof, information and even just plain serious thought.  The biggest loser is intelligence itself.  Not to mention our capacity to govern ourselves.  We need to know things and these days most of us donâ€t know shit from Shinola.  We canâ€t survive if we donâ€t turn that drift around.  You want to make another one of your truedog lists?  Make a list about how we dumb ourselves down.”

I told her I would, so here it is, Four Practices Which Only Make Us Dumber:

Gossip.  The search for personal negatives consumes an enormous amount of our intellect and emotion.  We invest our identities in transmitting such negatives, often without ever even attempting to ascertain their truth or falsehood.  We then shape our social order around the impulses generated by our Gossip, discrediting people, ideas, and even institutions in the stampede to know each others†secrets, real or imagined.   Curiosity is generally a virtue, as is information, but the curiosity and information Gossip generates is prurient, implicitly antagonistic, unproductive, and often outright violent.  It is certainly divisive at a time we desperately need to make and enlarge bonds, particularly with heretofore strangers.  And it consumes our attention when we need all of it to appreciate each other and our circumstances.  Gossip embodies our lesser selves, which, of course, will be of little if any help to us when climate disintegration begins defining our world.  We ought to at least greet Gossip with the question, “So what?” and refuse to pass it on until we have a good answer.

Marketing.  This is dumbness generated intentionally, with a confined focus, with the object of controlling or directing behavior and, of course, selling products.  It seeks to engender reflexivity, the opposite of considered action.  Marketing gets us to do what the marketer wishes, ideally without even noticing what we are doing.  And Marketing is, of course, a one way street.  There is no interplay between the knower and the known, no conversation.  Marketing is simple in the worst way—simple minded, if you will.  It ignores complexity and the ongoing examination complexity requires.  The point of Marketing is to make us less aware, less informed, and less questioning.  There is no mutual engagement in marketing, only manipulation.  There is no rumination, no uncertainty, only a seemingly absolute truth that eventually seeks to establish a reality all its own, whatever the actual evidence might be.  Perhaps our best defense against Marketing is to literally or figuratively hang up once we identify weâ€re being marketed, like when strangers selling timeshares call on the phone.

Social Cannibalism.  Our media obsessed culture features a cycle in which individuals are inflated beyond human dimensions for our vicarious identification and then gutted or destroyed in feeding frenzies of attention.  Over the last fifty years, we have either devoured much of our leadership in this process or emasculated it with the threat of such treatment.  The result is that public recognition now often resembles balancing over a buzz saw.  We make too much of our icons and then destroy them when they donâ€t live up to our expectations.  We are far better off avoiding the celebrity process in the first place—it carries with it hierarchy and dehumanization—but in any case, visibility should not be a ticket to destruction or disfigurement.  We are better off keeping our leaders in proper perspective, stripped of the trappings of elevation and image, and then accepting their failings and missteps and disappointments as indigenous to human activity.  Otherwise, they quite naturally turn vacuous and intimidated in self defense.

Constant Entertainment. As the availability of Entertainment has ballooned, we have fallen into the expectation that everything must entertain us if we are going to pay any attention.  That, of course, is a one way ticket to Dumb.  Entertainment has its place but not as the entirety of existence.  We need to engage the world in ways that challenge us, demand concentration, make us unsettled, or require serious consideration—not just those that are entertaining.  The self imposed limitation of Constant Entertainment could well prove catastrophic down the line.  We need to know all the things that donâ€t bring enjoyment.  In truth, we likely face more danger from the mundane and boring than we do from the captivating.  And if we only notice lifeâ€s entertainments, we will surely miss the opportunity to be different.

I sent Wanda my list when I finished.  “Nice try,” she answered, “but youâ€ve barely scratched the surface.”

I wrote back, “Why donâ€t you tell me something I didnâ€t already know?”

Perhaps the most crippling shortcoming of our increasingly dysfunctional paradigm is its failure to take full Responsibility for the actions of our communal selves.   Typically, we claim the part we like and turn our backs on the rest.  The result is a long trail of large scale wreckage in our rear view mirror, which we ignore rather than account for.   That lack of reckoning in turn makes it next to impossible to pursue any significant change in our collective footprint or the behavior that generates it.  And without such a change, we will enter the coming planetary contractions adrift and broadside to the flow of events.  Meaningful ownership of the impact of our actions and the damage they do has to be the starting point for any civilization that intends to survive and prosper as our climate loses its moorings.  Taking responsibility is the foundation of transformation.

And it has at least four aspects:

1. Identifying and examining the realities.

It is impossible to behave responsibly without taking a clear look at all of what is going on and facing up to it.  Avoidance and Denial are the height of irresponsibility.  Our depredations against the planet are perhaps the poster children for this unconsciousness.  We close our eyes to the deterioration we donâ€t want to believe is happening, even though it is out in plain sight awaiting examination.  And we end up treating it as though it doesnâ€t exist or has no connection to ourselves.  As a consequence, holding the perpetrators accountable is problematic and ameliorating the damage is never even figured into the financial cost of the behavior that generates it.  War is another classic example of the irresponsibility of self enforced ignorance.  Our armies produce enormous reservoirs of pain, disruption, destruction, and anger, which we rarely address or even recognize in warâ€s aftermath.  Yet when we decide to fight, those leftovers define the outcome as much as the combat itself.  You canâ€t be responsible and then close your eyes, look the other way, or just ignore, even if reality is frightening, disillusioning, or offensive.

2. Acknowledging our role in those realities.

Part of Responsibility is self examination.  Once we have identified the true extent of the footprints we leave behind, we need to admit to ourselves that they are indeed ours.  This requires recognizing the legion of connections that grow out of our participation in society, shedding our insulation, and appreciating the ways we all contribute to collective behavior, even if we arenâ€t the ones who set it in motion.  Responsibility requires taking society and its byproducts personally and accepting that ownership of the consequences is part of our individual and collective identity.  Indeed, as social beings, we are inseparable from what we are collectively doing or have done, even when we donâ€t acknowledge as much.  Acknowledgement allows us to explore that identity, adjust the way we act, and, of course, take Responsibility for ourselves.

3. Attending to the consequences.

While the first two steps towards Responsibility will no doubt involve significant changes for most of us, this is the step that will bring drastic revisions to our customary activity.  It means that we can no longer define our behavior by just the path from intention to objective, but by all the collateral damage along the way as well.  And addressing and rectifying those “side effects” are inseparable from the action itself.  So genuine prosperity is only reached when we have accounted for the process of getting there, or military success when all the wounds are healed and destruction rebuilt.  We are judged according to the widest panorama of our engagement.  One immediate impact of this approach will be a new set of calculations in advance of anything we do, as we assess just what resources will be required to do it.   Everything becomes a bigger deal than we heretofore assumed whenever we hold ourselves responsible for its entirety and not just its most narrow expected outcome.  Everything becomes slower when we no longer limit ourselves to trampling the world under foot making things happen and hold ourselves responsible for everything we step on.

4. Committing to the process.

And, finally, Responsibility has to be consciously incorporated in our social fabric as well as our individual perspective.   This will allow us to identify and avoid some consequences in advance, rather than always trying to make good on damage already done.  Responsibility works best as a social staple rather than a moralistic luxury.  We will not do well without it.

With it, however, we will be far better equipped for our future.  Responsibility allows us to avoid mistakes we wouldnâ€t otherwise be able to, anticipate issues that would otherwise catch us by surprise, and be clear about what we are up to in ways that would otherwise be obscured.  It will also ground our communal selves in the necessity of taking care of each other and not abandoning the species to billions of separate fates.

Unsure whether any of this makes sense at ground level, I decided to try out my ideas about Responsibility on Faoud and Maha, two refugees from Iraq.  Iâ€ve known them since they first arrived.  They lost everything in the war and occupation of their homeland and, thanks to the efforts of an American charity, are now trying to start all over here after months in a Jordanian transport camp.  We talked in generalities for a while, then I asked how they felt as the beneficiaries of some Americans†sense of Responsibility for what had happened to them.

Faoud looked at the floor for a while before answering.

“We donâ€t want to seem ungrateful,” he finally said.  “After all we would have been lost without American generosity and sense of responsibility.  Coming here may have saved our lives.”

He paused again.

“But,” he finally continued, “Americans are also the reason our lives were at risk.  What are we doing here?  Wouldnâ€t it have been more responsible to have left us be in the first place?”

Faoudâ€s response is, of course, key: The most productive Responsibility is always exercised ahead of time.

One of humanityâ€s ongoing puzzles is, of course, just how to make our desires actually come to pass.  To function as social, economic, and political beings, we visualize and often act as though a straight line connects our intentions, their implementation, and the eventual outcome of our actions. Unfortunately, it seems there are almost no straight lines where humans are concerned, particularly when it involves our behavior and its consequences.

I was reminded of that during the celebrations following Osama bin Ladenâ€s assassination.  I was riding home on the airport bus.  My seatmate was Danielle, a lawyer whose older brother and I turned out to have been classmates.  She noticed the picture on my newspaper featuring throngs of mostly young people waving flags and cavorting outside the White House.

“Whatâ€s to celebrate?” Danielle exclaimed.

I looked at her, waiting for the punch line she quickly supplied.

“He won,” she said.  “Bin Laden won.”

I understood what she meant, but Danielle explained herself anyway:

“Osama bin Laden propounded a version of Americaâ€s identity in order to underwrite, recruit, and carry out an assault on the United States and strike a blow at ‘the empire of the Crusaders.† The result was carnage in Americaâ€s two most important cities. We responded with outrage and a seemingly righteous and justified response to the wanton murder of thousands of our citizens.  We set out to get the people who had done this to us and ‘defend our way of life.†It seemed so very simple at the time.

“But check it out ten years later.   Weâ€ve squandered multiple trillions of dollars, leaving wreckage—both foreign and domestic—in our wake.  Our army is now suffused with brain trauma and stress disorders. We—the victims of Pearl Harbor before we were victims of 9/11 —have, for the first time in our history, adopted preemptive strikes as an official staple of our foreign policy, with no more basis for our aggression than our own often unfounded suspicions.  We have adopted kidnapping and torture as staples as well.  We have assaulted and forcibly occupied two Muslim nations and have likewise targeted our own domestic Muslims for communal ostracism and distrust.   We have killed numerous people who didnâ€t like us, some people who actually were affiliated with the assault on 9/11, and a whole lot of people who had nothing to do with anything that had ever been done to us—all that with little other than bin Ladenâ€s scalp to show for it.  Take a look at us.  We are acting like Crusaders.  Osama bin Laden has turned America into the America he claimed we were in the first place.

“So, even though weâ€ve bagged him, the jokeâ€s still on us.  Osama proved his point and America lost its character.  Doesnâ€t sound like much of a victory to me.”

“No, it doesnâ€t,” I said as the bus reached my stop. “More like Brer Rabbit and the tar baby.”

The larger backdrop of our conversation resurfaced after I grabbed a cab home:

With this fresh evidence that no straight lines connect intention, action, and consequence, the conundrum remains.  How is it that people with seemingly appropriate motives and the best of intentions end up creating anything but what they had in mind?  What did they miss when they imagined their undertaking? And how can we approach the situations that face us in ways that give us a better chance of avoiding the damage we inadvertently do to ourselves and others?

I eventually came up with four theorems of social physics:

Nothing turns out as we imagine it.  Reality is not so much subjects and objects as it is verbs.  Every thing bends between here and there and we have to tailor our processes to allow for constant adjustment.  And we have to abandon our attachment to the approach with which we started.  Instead, we need to monitor our behavior and steer it as we move along.  Once committed to an approach, we often mistakenly close our eyes while it plays itself out and having already convinced ourselves how it will work, we refuse to “reopen” the issue.  In real life, however, the issue never closes.

We only get what we do.  We donâ€t get what we think we are doing or what we claim to be doing or what we intend to do.  There is a physical reality underlying human affairs and the times and places where our plans and intentions intersect with it determine social reality. At its most basic, life is participatory—its outcomes determined by how we engage in it.  Our history is structured by the sequence of very specific, concrete behaviors, not by the perceptions or motives or logic that brought us to them.  Actuality always trumps. There is no saving a village by destroying it.  Doing bad things to reach good outcomes is an oxymoron.

Everything is approximate.  Our conceit of precision misleads us into acting on the assumption we can, should, and must get something exactly right.  Such exactitude is impossible because we are always in process and, hence, never located at a fixed set of coordinates, nor embodied in a final product.  We must give it our best shot, get as close as we can to whoever or wherever we want to be, then take another shot and another and another.   And not assume that will ever be different.

What goes around, comes around.  The things we do set the template for what is, in turn, done to us.  This interaction is where much of our social energy is generated.  We need to ground our understanding in role reversal before we act.  What does our behavior look like when weâ€re taking it rather than dishing it out?  Without appreciating that calculation, we condemn ourselves to hypocrisy, vicious circles, and social identity theft.  And, ironically, become our own worst enemy.

None of these theorems are silver bullets, but they may be worth consulting the next time we decide to chase Osama into the briar patch.

The first response to my manifesto came from Ray, my tax man, and he was dubious to say the least.

“It sounds great,” he admitted, “but no way does it happen.  We—and by this I mean the whole human species—is not capable of changing that much, that soon.  Youâ€re trying to put square pegs in round holes, without a knife to whittle with.  No way.”

I pointed out that one of the things that define our species is its malleability.  We are always reinventing ourselves.

“But not to this extent,” Ray insisted.  “Youâ€re talking about transformation on a global scale—something twenty times the size and scope of the Renaissance,  and all crammed not into several centuries, but into several decades if weâ€re to have any chance of avoiding being sucked under by climate meltdown.”

I answered that people who believed in a flat earth sailed west nonetheless, people whose religious faith insisted God made the earth the center of the universe managed to figure out that our planet orbited around the sun.  That must have seemed enormous to them, even if it seems a matter of course to us in retrospect.  They just did what they needed to in the face of what seemed overwhelming odds.

“Come on,” Ray laughed.  “Youâ€re talking about retiring the whole Industrial Revolution—just for starters.  This would be the biggest deal ever in human history.”

I could only shrug.  Ray had a point.  This is a large load of becoming very different over a very short time.

“But all that is trumped by necessity,” I finally responded.  “Big or little, we have to do it.  The option is disintegration and misery.”

Ray said he couldnâ€t argue with that.  “But,” he added, “that doesnâ€t mean it will happen.  People have a long record of making themselves miserable as well as making themselves transcendent.  Plus youâ€re asking them to start their change before their misery shows up.  Wisdom in anticipation of something that hasnâ€t yet happened is a very tall order.  You better have directions to give people, because otherwise itâ€s going to be over most everyoneâ€s head.”

Again I had to defer to Ray.  It is a tall order.

Indeed, my mind spent the rest of the day in the shadow of that tallness, trying to visualize the tasks it imposes on us, and what kind of mindset we need to accomplish them.  My goal was to sketch out a road map of how to get from here to there, but the enormity eventually overwhelmed me.  So what I ended up with was just a list of four large obstacles to taking up the work of transformation.  All of them play prominent roles in our personal and social character.  Since character and the understanding it generates are what will empower us to reconfigure, I figured identifying the obstructions pinning us in place is at least a good way to start starting.  We will certainly get no further until we master at least these four:

1. Fear.  Growing trust is central to transformation and fear, of course, destroys trust.  So in trying to get a grip on how afraid we are, weâ€d best start not with addressing the threats, but rather concentrate on the way fear—appropriate or inappropriate—reverberates through the entire society, going from specific to generalized, from the learned to the anticipated.  Then we can work our way back to engaging fearâ€s primary sources.  Reducing fearâ€s echo requires identifying what weâ€re afraid of whenever it arises and then identifying all the secondary effects that fear generates.  The antidote is pausing to examine and understand rather than acting instantly on reflex.  The goal isnâ€t to eliminate the capacity to be afraid—that would be both pointless and suicidal—but rather to tame it, manage its projections, and replace it as the lens through which we assess the world.   Being fearful will keep us from reaching out and from taking risks.  And we will need to reach way out and take a lot of risks to have any hope of handling whatâ€s in store for us.

2. Self centeredness.  Like merging traffic, transformation works best when we look out for the other and tame our appetite for being first in line.  Making more out of less and apportioning a shrinking pie require empathy and compassion and the willingness to on occasion, defer.  Those traits allow us to integrate our needs with everyone elseâ€s, where the self centered always end up behaving like oil in water.  The pressure the situation will apply to us will be unsupportable unless we can reconcile ourselves with the other.  We act on those more selfless traits all the time when faced with emergencies.  What needs happen is to expand that approach until it becomes a constant in our behavior rather than an exception.

3. Control.   We expect to be in the driverâ€s seat and that need to control ultimately confines us to a very limited set of options.  It is also particularly unsuited to transformation, a process in which everything is up for grabs—and even more so since our transformation is a response to a physical world degenerating into flux, unpredictability, and disruption.  We need to get really good at flowing with developments rather than directing events.  It will feel like being lost sometimes, but it is the only way we can then be found in a very different place than we started out.

4. Anger.  The impulse to rage when confronted with the massive necessity of change is perhaps the most insidious of my four obstacles.  Anger stops everything else in its tracks, disables our sensibilities, and foreshortens the social playing field to just the immediate present tense.  It also demonizes the other and cripples self knowledge and perspective.  We treat anger as an act of nature but, in fact, being angry is a choice we make—perhaps by default but made none the less.  And exercising anger means accepting an entire logic and epistemology that is, again, self constructed.  While anger may be impossible to extinguish, we can decide never to act on it and in so doing, initiate our transformation.

The outlines of our future are unavoidable:

The planetâ€s climate and life support systems are steadily degrading as the chemistry of the atmosphere shifts under the weight of human discharge.  Our mastery of the planet is about to contract accordingly and with that, humanityâ€s margins will be under steady assault.  Instability, limitation, and disintegration will become increasingly commonplace.   Indeed, the physical, social, and economic challenges bearing down on us may very well outstrip our communal vision, destabilize our civilization, and destroy the values we cherish.  Humankind has never been more at risk.

Nor, ironically, have human possibilities ever been more expansive.

Our circumstance requires no less than a reformulation of our collective and personal lives in the image of our better selves.  Communal reordering and the survival of humanity as we know it are now synonymous.  And this reframing of the social contract and reduction of our collective impact is an opportunity to realize our dreams, values, and aspirations as never before.  The task is as unprecedented as the circumstances that compel it, but it needs to be undertaken not only with a sense of urgency and crisis, but with heartfelt vision and the joyful anticipation of our own betterment.

This extraordinary moment requires us to be what seems extraordinary in response:

We need to use less and share more, reconcile with our antagonists and empower our heretofore disenfranchised.  We need to enlarge our engagement with each other and shrink our impact on the planet; relinquish our illusions of superiority and acclaim our universal worth; reduce our weaponry and expand our compassion; lionize diversity and dismiss prejudice; maximize wellbeing and minimize privilege; stop seeking to gain an advantage and start weaving a common thread; pay close attention to what is going on and resist closing our eyes during the scary parts; donâ€t spend resources we donâ€t have and spend those we do have for the widest possible benefit; seek affinity and dignity; avoid delusions of grandeur and domination, however well intentioned; nurture humility; live closer to the ground; help all comers; and keep our minds and hearts open.

Without such a regeneration of our collective and personal selves, we are doomed to fall short of the changes our future requires from us.  And that necessary transformation can only proceed with the assertion of four communal priorities:

Halt and, where still possible, reverse the deterioration of the earthâ€s natural systems and the climate they generate;

Pursue international security through cultural contact, financial interdependence, and transnational law and law enforcement;

Empower the social base with participatory structures that concentrate decision making and administration among the citizenry;

Reduce the differential in wealth between nations and between classes, valuing everyone, without exception.

We are both the problem and the solution, and our best chance of survival requires nourishing commitment to this agenda, to honest self examination, and to each other, individual by individual, community by community—as much a spiritual quest as a political instrument, pursuing an ethos devoted to the compassionate reconstruction of our social footprint.  We need to generate a change of mind, a change of heart, and a change of behavior, and reach out to all, invoking our commonality, turning no one away, utilizing those existing institutions responsive and malleable enough to be different, and inventing new ones when necessary.  The only other option is a catastrophe of unprecedented dimensions.

The challenge is enormous, but no bigger than we are when we so choose.

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