From “Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart” by Brian D. McLaren
Over recent centuries, more and more people have found their old religious narratives to be unbelievable… and dangerous too.
Relatively few people have seen the folly and danger of their economic narrative. All they can see are the profits it keeps adding to their investment accounts, for now at least. Even those who have been exploited by the capitalist narrative keep buying it, like a lottery ticket, hoping they’ll get lucky and win big…tomorrow.
Those who lose faith in their religious and economic framing stories face a shared problem. What new story will replace the old one?
For many, the only alternative story to conventional Christianity and capitalism is nationalism, or white supremacy, or hedonism, or narcissism, or nihilism, a belief that meaning and morality are delusions. Those stories have one thing in common: they are equally careless about justice and the Earth, and they do not support the virtues and values needed to help us constructively face the times of turbulence that lie ahead.
If we’re going to evade the Collapse/Extinction scenario, it’s going to require a lot of people making a break with the old religious and economic stories that aid and abet ecological overshoot. We’re going to have to step away from the harmful stories that brought us here, the stories that give us a self-righteous “our lives matter and to hell with everything else” spirit. Deconstructing failing stories and reconstructing new ones, we might say, is not just a matter of personal spirituality or ideology, it’s now a matter of planetary survival.