Planet: Critical Folgen

What if the answer is all of us?We need to change the system. But if the system is made up of individuals, should we start there? On this week’s episode, Colombian changemaker Isabel Cavalier negates the binary of systems vs individuals, explaining that while cultural change starts from within, its impact and progress can be non-linear—much like climate change. Isabel effortlessly weaves political strategy with spiritual knowledge to explain how culture is the solution to the polycrisis, emphasising that we must re-embed individuals within communities to embody a politics of a better world.Isabel is a former diplomat who held advisory roles on environmental issues at the Colombian Mission to the United Nations in New York and at the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bogotá. After leaving international politics, Isabel co-founded Transforma, a prominent Bogota-based environmental think tank. She is a writer, story-teller and potter, who trained as a lawyer and in socio-cultural studies at the University of Los Andes. She has a Master of Laws from the University of Cambridge. She has worked and published in diverse fields including human rights, racial and gender discrimination, and climate change.“We are able to reinvent ourselves infinitely. That's the capacity of life on earth. Reality is fractal. What we see in a city is a reflection of its inhabitants. What we see in a community is a reflection of people who are part of that community. This means that. It's not that you need to forget the systemic vision; the cultural shift we are looking at is not a cultural shift of becoming more individualistic and autonomous. It’s the opposite. It's understanding that we are interdependent, that we live in systems and not in isolation. Nobody can survive in a bubble by themselves. Not an individual, not a local community, not a municipality, not a city, not a country. Nobody.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

How can we know so much and yet continue to live so dangerously?Gregg Henriques has been working on this problem for over 20 years. He believes the problem lies with our knowledge systems, which arise from the Enlightenment but fail to make sense of the fundamental system through which we understand the world—ourselves, our own psychology. He says we need a second enlightenment, enlightenment in order to repair our relationship with ourselves, the world, one another, and with knowledge so we can respond to the climate crisis and build a better world for all.“Science afforded us a partial understanding of the world which emerged in the enlightenment. What I'm saying is they gave us physics and chemistry and biology pretty nicely. But it broke at the level of psychology, the social sciences and, in particular, how to connect sciences to the humanities.“As a function of that breakdown we built this entire institutional structure—but we don't have the wisdom to coordinate ourselves. We're flying blind with an enormous amount of power, but not wisdom. Part of the reason we don't have wisdom is because our knowledge systems are inadequate and broken.”Gregg Henriques is a a Full Professor and a core faculty member in James Madison University's Combined-Integrated Clinical and School Psychology Doctoral Program. He’s the author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology, and writes the Theory of Knowledge blog on Psychology Today. He’s a leader in the Unified Psychotherapy Movement, which attempts to  use meta-theory to achieve an effective integrative scheme for the various psychotherapy paradigms. He’s also interested in synthetic approaches to philosophy, and leads a group called the Theory of Knowledge Society, which hosted its first conference in April (2018), titled: Toward a Big Theory of Knowledge. He is currently developing a systematic evaluation of character functioning and well-being (called the Well-being Checkup), examining an approach to psychological mindfulness called "CALM MO" (which stands for developing a Curious, Accepting, Loving-compassionate, and Motivated toward valued states of being Metacognitive-Observer) and researching the college student mental health crisis and what might be done about it. Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

"Here we are at a crossroads of human history. There's never been this historical confluence of war, political instability, economic vulnerability, on top of the impending ecological apocalypse.Here we are, just marinated in death reminders. And what we know from our research is that that turns us into depressed, demoralized, proto fascists plundering the planet in our insatiable desire for dollars and dross in an alcohol-oxycodone-TikTok-twittering stupor.This is not a great position to be in."Are you afraid of dying?Sheldon Solomon has been researching death anxiety and its impact on our behaviour for decades, finding that unmitigated death awareness drives mindless consumption, political polarisation and more disordered behaviour. In short, our fear of death could be driving the climate crisis.We discuss the link between death awareness and self-awareness, how cultural beliefs are used to anesthetize death anxiety, how Western culture has the ironic effect of exacerbating that very anxiety that it's trying to solve, and why the solutions lie with imagination and creativity.Sheldon Solomon is Professor of Psychology at Skidmore College.  His studies of the effects of the uniquely human awareness of death on behaviour were featured in the award winning documentary film Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality.  He is co-author of In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror and The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe