Separation Isn’t A Solution

By Jon Eden Khan

The massive rise of nationalist populism (Trump, Bannon, Brexit, Farage, Reform, Bolsonaro, AfD, Marine Le Pen, etc.) is a reaction to a crisis where humanity is facing global scale challenges but has not yet emerged as a global species.

The ecological crisis, wealth inequality, conflicts that come with the transition from a unipolar world to a multipolar world, the legacies of colonialism and systemic injustice, resource distribution, etc., are all deeply interconnected global scale issues.

There is no denying this. And yet humanity remains tribal. We’re fighting for national interests in the face of planetary problems. Very clearly, we have not yet learned how to be a global species that can navigate these issues on the foundation of the one Earth, the one humanity, and the one heart.

The nationalist populist movements offer an apparently convenient solution.

Let go of the global stretch. Focus on yourself, your own nation and your own race. Let others work out their own problems.

It is true that globalism has come at the cost of healthy boundaries for many nations and cultures. In the movement toward global trade, global travel, and global interconnection that has characterised the rise of the neoliberal world, many large groups have been left behind.

And now their angry. They have had enough of globalist establishment power. They’ve had enough of career politicians claiming to speak for them while playing the public relations game and having virtually no real-world connection to those they represent.

And leaders like Trump, Vance, Bannon, Weidel, Le Pen, Bolsonaro, and others, whose shameless self-interest and material pragmatism offers a certain kind of authenticity in a political desert where people are desperate for any authenticity at all, and whose example is a permission slip to the most self-centred voices in all of us, are promising to destroy the current system.

The issue is this approach isn’t going to work. The idea that humanity can wind back the clock and its level of interconnection is not realistic. Not in the era of the internet, information technology, and breakthrough AI. Yes, there can be a resetting of national and trade boundaries that allow the populations of certain nations more prosperity and self-reliance, but only as an evolution of their ability to participate in humanity’s inherent interconnection. Not as an escape from it.

Anyone who has walked a path of self-development deeper into the truth of their own soul knows that crisis is part of how life grows us. Mature path walkers of any tradition and culture are those who have learned to welcome crisis as an evolutionary opportunity to grow into even greater fulness and wholeness.

The crises humanity collectively faces today are also evolutionary. They are asking us to evolve into a planetary species that knows itself as both a sacred One and a celebrated Many, and that can live in harmony with ourselves, each other, and the global ecology.

The nationalist populist movements holding so much power today are more often than not an impulse to escape the pressure of this evolutionary crisis, and as such, they have a very limited shelf life.

Despite their claims, they do not have the answers to the problems we collectively face. And neither does the left, which is still grasping to fathom how the rise of nationalist populism is deeply related to how much the public has fundamentally lost trust in them.

The only answers to those problems are an evolution into greater fullness and wholeness as the one humanity, living on the one Earth, and connected through the one heart.

Separation isn’t a solution. The next days, months, and years will reveal that, and as the promises of nationalist populist governments crumble, new political, leadership, and governance movements must rise to serve what comes next.

Singularity is one of those movements.

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