Hokusai Saw the Great Wave Coming

Note: I am making a documentary film this year entitled “How to Save Democracy,” and I’m planning to have the film come out before November’s election. In support of it, I have launched a crowdfunding campaign to help fund the making of it. You can learn more about the campaign and contribute here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/how-to-save-democracy/x/1658357#/

We live in a tumultuous, volatile, and uncertain age, when the pace of change is dizzying and it feels like things could spiral out of control at any time.

There have been many times like these over the centuries, but these times feel especially precarious.

It is the time of what is now called the age of the permacrisis. In 2022, the word permacrisis was named the word of the year; the word was created by merging permanent and crisis, signifying the multiple crises we face.

In 1831, the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai created one of the most recognizable and enduring works of art—The Great Wave. It shows the surge of a giant wave that looms over three small fishing boats, with Mt. Fuji in the background.

To this day, the image symbolizes the feelings of dread and hope that come with swift, unpredictable change.

In other words, Hokusai saw the great wave coming.

It’s the perfect embodiment of our time—a time of great disruption, one in which the potential exists for both great opportunity and great danger. In times of turmoil and chaos, such as the time we live in, it is possible there can be a reboot, and we can find our way to a transformation that allows for a more positive society and world to unfold.

But make no mistake: the volatility we face is no guarantee we will journey into that more hopeful future.

Democracy, which despite its flaws, is the system that allows for the greatest potential for human and societal flourishing, is under assault as never before. Only 20 percent of the world’s nations currently exist under democratic governance, down from 40 percent a few decades ago.

And one of those 20 percent, the U.S., finds its democracy treading water—the U.S. is currently considered a flawed democracy.

The threat to democracy in the U.S. primarily comes from right-wing extremism, a faction that has been pushing an authoritarian agenda. As society make progress toward a more egalitarian state in which all citizens are capable of flourishing toward their greatest capability, an opposite reaction has been empowered, one whose aim is the rolling back of the rights and privileges of those who have lived on the margins for years.

As this happens, citizens turn on other citizens, blaming them—which happen to be those most marginalized—for all of society’s ills.

The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned in 1926 for defying Mussolini’s fascist takeover of Italy (and who died in prison in 1937), said in 1930, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

You could say we currently live in an interregnum, an in-between period in which the old is dying—the paradigm of domination, greed, cutthroat competition, patriarchy, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, and religious fundamentalism—and we find ourselves aspiring toward that something new waiting to be born.

What is waiting to be born could be considered a multiracial, multicultural democracy, one in which the capitalist model of greed and dysfunctional and toxic individualism is replaced by a collaborative spirit that embodies the idea of the Commons—that certain segments of society are removed from the profit motive and instead designed for the use of anyone, for free.

Thomas Kuhn, the scientist who wrote the landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, stated that eras on the cusp of consequential change tend to exhibit the sorts of dissonances that are identified as signs of the beginning stages of a paradigm shift.

It is impossible to escape the dissonances we see now, those morbid symptoms that Antonio Gramsci mentioned are the hallmark of the interim period when the old dies and the new struggles to be born.

At a time like this, life feels absurd and unstable, as if everything is one big political satire. On top of that is a planet becoming more inhospitable, with killer hurricanes and deadly wildfires and once in a century floods occurring yearly.

There is also the spectacle of the U.S.—the world’s richest nation—fracturing and teetering between democracy and religious extremism, autocracy, and plutocracy.

In the 19th century, Karl Marx stated that capitalism was a crisis-ridden economic system. In the 21st century, Marx’s words sound prophetic, as it is capitalism that is the root cause of the permacrisis.

Underlying the permacrisis that capitalism has wrought unto us is a historical fact: over the past 140 years, whenever a financial crisis occurs that is caused by capitalism’s excesses, there are seismic political shifts. Far right parties gain ground; polarization and fragmentation intensify; uncertainty rises; and governing becomes more difficult.

In times like these, and we are experiencing one such time now, people are unsure of who or what to trust, leaving a large void that often becomes filled by demagogic psychopaths. In the 1930s, this scenario led to Hitler’s rise to power.

Nowadays, we are so overwhelmed with information that it has become challenging for many to know what is and isn’t true. Buckminster Fuller once estimated that until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century; by 1945, knowledge was thought to be doubling every 25 years. In 1982, the doubling occurred every 12 months or so; today, by some estimates, thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence, knowledge doubles every 12 hours.

That is a lot for people to process. With so much information coming our way, it has caused a susceptibllity and vulnerability for some to a new brand of propaganda, one that exploits this information overload.

It’s a form of propaganda that has been called “the firehose of falsehood” (Steve Bannon uses the phrase “flood the zone with shit”): it pelts people with high volumes of lies, contradictory facts, disinformation, half-truths, and noise that cause people to grow numb from the overload. This leads to cynicism and resignation, along with the unconditional acceptance of what they’re hearing, without question.

“When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re falling apart,” said the writer William Gibson. This is what we face today.

As things fall apart, we have the opportunity to put them back together in a wholly new way. After all, the Chinese have a proverb about crisis that states, “a crisis is an opportunity riding a dangerous wind.”

The German historian Gershom Sholem once said that times of turbulence and chaos can create what he called “plastic hours.” He defined this as crucial moments when it is possible to act. These crucial moments, Sholem said, are times when history is in volatile flux, “when migrations of peoples and changing political alliances dissolve the status quo and radical transformation becomes a possibility.”

We are watching the status quo dissolve, and as this takes place, it becomes our opportunity for radical transformation. The challenge is to act quickly and decisively—both for the well-being of democracy, and for the well-being of the planet.

Some see our current time as an inflection point in history that could open a door not backward into a much darker epoch, but outward toward what has been described as a more united, more interconnected future.

There is no guarantee we will rise above the darkness into a brighter future. It can only happen if those of us who understand this, and who desire a brighter future, act in whatever way we can. We need to become activists for the future.

Even if this activism is expressed by living a life of kindness toward others, along with a generosity of spirit, that by itself can shed light onto the world.

For as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Going forward, that light needs to be shined at the highest radiance possible.