A Climate Trauma Informed View of Our Pending U.S. Election
Notes from the Traumasphere by Dr. Tham, the Panpsychologist
Over the past dozen years or so, I’ve cultivated a heightened perspective on the madness of worldly affairs, sharpening my focus from a cultural trauma lens to the higher, superordinate perspective of climate/biospheric trauma. Instead of seeing random chaos in the social pathologies that are playing out on the global stage, I discern the patterns of collective ‘acting out’ as an overwhelmed response to what only a few years ago would have seemed unimaginable.
The “firenadoes” of climate fires. Atmospheric rivers dumping floodwaters onto the land. Insect apocalypse. Heat domes. Mass casualty events (e.g., billions of non-human animals/fish dying in a single climate-related event). Massive prolonged droughts, mass migrations, and the rise of the ignorant masses with the force of authoritarianism. And now, here in the U.S., a demagogue reality TV character who already staged an insurrection and is now trying to start a race war, in order to avoid going to prison.
And the former Democratic and Republican parties coalescing to stop him!
Unimaginable until now, right?
So how does one wrap one’s mind around the polls that consistently show half of the voting republic favoring the candidate who has been convicted of 37 felonies, sexual assault, and fraud; and, who still faces jeopardy for the appearance of trading nuclear secrets to his friends in Russia and Saudi Arabia, as well as racketeering charges for leading a criminal organization that has amassed about a dozen convictions so far in various criminal proceedings?
That’s the question that is on the minds of most sane people in this country.
So since chaos is my specialty, allow me to share the climate trauma-informed answer to this apparent quandary.
This is about much more than an election. We presently find ourselves at one of the most unique pivots in the history of the civilized world. Psychologically speaking, it is not the horse race that the mass media depicts it as. This is not simply about two candidates running for the highest office on planet Earth. That’s just for show. It goes much deeper than that, all the way down to our most primal archetypes, or patterns of behavior.
The Manichean Candidate
The climate and biodiversity crises are not just real and present dangers - they are symptomatic of an existential threat to all life on planet Earth. And because they are human-caused, it is humans who are suffering the most from the psychological ramifications of perpetrating such a lethal threat to ourselves and so many unsuspecting others. At first blush, this triggered all of our unresolved generational traumas, beginning around 2016 - the American Civil War, 500 years of slavery and colonialist genocide, and the malignant misogyny of continuing patriarchal dominance.
All of these inhumane, patterned behaviors, when challenged by the over-arching need to progress and come into more wholesome relationships, collectively trigger the primal limbic system responses in all those who are most closely related to and affected by them, as for example with the people in patriarchal, church-going families who self-identify as social conservatives. Their reflexive responses to the overwhelm of cultural and climate trauma, beyond denialism, describe our politically poisoned social environment now: fight (polarization/rage); fright (othering); flight (conspiracy thinking/substance abuse); and freeze (rigidity of views, or tuning everything out, including truth).
That’s been the case for awhile. However, I suspect that we’re now acting out something that goes even deeper than those performative trauma responses. Instead, I strongly intuit that we’ve arrived at this definitive pivotal moment where, psychologically at least, the forces of darkness are all lined up against the forces of light in a struggle over what our collective future is going to look like. Truly, it is a life-or-death skirmish.
Ironically, from my perspective at least, those forces of darkness include all those who view this as a fundamentally ‘religious’ struggle. They are the most easily manipulated, to the point where they can even overlook the deeply irreligious flaws of their annointed leader in their Machiavellian ploy for power over what THEY view to be truly evil: the Democratic Party and its unholy alliance with science, media, reason, and secular society. Of course, because these are the most traumatized elements of society, it is all projection with them. They are, in other words, projecting their shadow selves onto those who they choose to other.
Of course the most religious among us would carry on the tradition of the Discovery Doctrine, religious persecution of women and oppression of children, sexual repression and misogyny, and willful scientific ignorance. Of course they would embrace a big lie if it serves their holy ends. They have no problem ignoring the calamity of our shared climate, because in their minds God has a plan, and Donald Trump is helping to bring about Armageddon in the MidEast (e.g., by excluding Palestinians from the Abrahamic Accords, which triggered Hamas and October 7, which triggered Israeli extremism, etc.). The world will end in fire this time, according to these sheep, but it’s okay because they are among the 777,000 or so who will be lifted up on Judgment Day. Over 40% of U.S. citizens believe Jesus will return in their lifetime.
So it’s not a political struggle in the minds of Trump’s 75 Million or so followers. It is, instead, a religious drama playing out on the world stage. MAGA is a profoundly religious viewpoint, grounded in White Christian Nationalism, professed or not. This, unfortunately for the rest of us, makes it a self-fulfilling prophesy at the collective level, as we saw with the parading of the Rebel flag on the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. As they said on then, “It is 1776,” and blood must be spilled to preserve their warped ideas of democracy.
These people are insane.
The Forces of Light, in this archetypal struggle, are trying their best to usher in a very different view of the future. It is based not on past failures and grievances, but rather on an emerging kind of solidarity characterized by, yes I will say it, diversity, equity and inclusion. We are Woke! And quite unashamed of waking up from the slumber you call the American Dream, which is fast becoming our worst nightmare!
We know that the future demands of us that we come together as a people, as a species, with the best and brightest being called forth from among us, once again responding to the collective call to do what the forces of light have always done before: overcome impossible odds.
This is not the first Dark Age. There was once a plague. There have been holocausts, genocides, and world wars. We have overcome a lot. We have a way of facing into the storms.
Of course, we are well past the stage of collective hope - Obama dashed whatever hopes we had of heeding the scientific consensus and acting in a timely manner to head off the worst effects of global warming. Instead, we’ve arrived collectively at the stage of faith. We must have faith in the resiliency of Nature, and we must cultivate faith in the efficacy of humanity in the face of the Holocene’s collapse. To state the matter more fundamentally, we must recover our faith that the forces of light shall always dispel the malevolent forces of darkness.
It’s the story of Shambhala, in which the forces of darkness gather strength and dominance before devouring themselves like Ouroboros. This Manichean archetype that views the world as a cyclic interplay of bi-polar forces, of darkness and light, goes back even further to the times of Zoroaster (2000 B.C.), which in a sense represented the birth of the religious impulse itself:
“Zoroastrianism holds that within this cosmic dichotomy humans have the choice between Asha (truth, cosmic order) - the principle of righteousness or "rightness" that is promoted and embodied by Ahura Mazda - and Druj (falsehood, deceit), the essential nature of Angra Mainyu that expresses itself as greed, wrath, and envy.” (Wikipedia)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t “Greed, wrath, and envy” the MAGA Trinity? After all, Trump began his 2024 campaign of terror in Waco, TX, the home of the Davidian Cult, with a chilling promise that “I will be your retribution.”
If you listen to the horse-race political perspective of pollsters and pundits, you will have the impression that this election could not be any closer. The forces of darkness and light have reached that Ying/Yang moment where the polarity is suddenly reversed, like a quantum leap or phase shift, from the existing outer valence to a new, unprecedented valence.
This is also fully in accord with Prigogene’s theory of dissipative structures, according to which a new order can only emerge when chaos has maxed the system out to the point it simply cannot withstand anymore. Are you feeling me?
What does this look like in political terms? A country on the verge of Civil War 2.0?
The forces of light are yearning to be free from the shackles of all this ignorance and vice. The reason we crave a new kind of solidarity is because we know the human race is capable of so much more. We are all about coming into proper relationship with all our relations, even across the great divide between indigenous and heterogenous people. And we embody, collectively and individually, an emerging valence of consciousness that feels like humanity’s next evolutionary advance, one that promises one day, when all the dust has settled, to yield an ecological civilization.
A humane civilization. Almost unimaginable at this point, isn’t it?
This new form of consciousness that is emerging is very much, I assure you, a real phenomenon. It is arising out of the global connectivity and interpenetrating interdependence that has blossomed in the last 25-50 years, since humans gazed upon Earth from outer space, and the advent of the world wide web. It is obscured by all the lowest-denominator applications of that interconnectivity, like social media algorithms, porn-on-demand, and viral conspiracy-mongering. But it is alive and well in the zoomiverse, nonetheless. You can experience it on Thomas Hübl’s Collective Trauma/Healing Summit, and all that has spawned.
The light of this emerging quantum consciousness finds expression in a higher kind of love, one that is characterized by expanding empathy, compassion, and awareness, all in the service of the continuing human quest for greater knowledge and understanding of ultimate, and not just relative, reality, or truth (dharma). It is often experienced personally as a kind of “gnosis,” or direct knowledge, whenever we permit the veils of self to be drawn aside - either in solitary contemplative practices, in virtual incubators of new ideas and ways of thinking, with the aid of plant medicines generously provided by Nature, or in simple community with like minds who have done their integration homework.
So there you have the opposite poles of the great global struggle that has reached its most critical pivot point right now. The middle cannot hold. This all is going to break one way or the other on November 5, as the U.S. is both the world’s biggest troublemaker and its best hope (I first heard that from H.H. Dalai Lama in Washington, D.C.).
Nothing less than the future of life on planet Earth depends on which way this breaks. Either we begin to come together in this new kind of solidarity, based on shared responsibility and human ingenuity, or we gather on the battlefields of Armageddon.
The choice has never been, and will never be, more stark.
Here is the great secret of life: the forces of light always prevail in the end. Light is life and love. Darkness, hatred and malevolence are merely the absence, respectively, of light, love and life.
So I’m telling you right now: the polls are wrong. Once again. They simply no longer reflect reality. Kamala Harris is poised to win a wave election by much larger margins than predicted, with the good people of this country finally dispelling the ascendent forces of darkness like so many cockroaches across the kitchen floor.
Collectively, our survival instinct demands that it be so. Organismically, Gaia demands this of us as well.
The demented orange harbinger of the Four Horseman will be turned back by strong women and the men who support them, regardless of their political affiliations or what they are willing to tell pollsters (or even neighbors). The women of our nation have the force of light on their side now.
And they are not interested in going back to the Dark Ages when women were considered sinful creatures, children were born evil, and non-caucasian people were considered to he inferior heathens worthy of slaughter. No, that way lies the road to perdition.
And we are not going back.
There is only one road left open to us now, as the floodwaters recede, and the sign up ahead says:
FORWARD - TOGETHER
Yes and people still need to vote. I swear that’s why T won the first time - too many people thought it was too improbable to happen.