What is an Extinction Burst?
An extinction burst occurs when a behavior that was previously reinforced, meaning rewarded or responded to, suddenly stops being reinforced. When that happens, the behavior often temporarily increases in intensity, frequency, or duration before it begins to decrease.
In other words, when something that used to work no longer works, our first reaction is often to try harder before eventually giving up on the behavior.
There is so much to grieve right now.
We have lost so much in the last few years.
- Ongoing Gaza Genocide that the US is bankrolling
- The Voting Rights Act
- Roe V. Wade overturned, gutting abortion rights
- The CDC layoffs and bad new leadership
- ICE raids becoming the American Gestapo and putting millions of people in fear (Immigrants with no criminal record now the largest group of ICE detainees (per US Congress) List of deaths in ICE detentions
- Few taking COVID precautions and many still getting sick and dying, up to 36M people at the high end of the estimate.
- The attacks on public lands for corporate interests
- College students protesting the Gaza genocide being tortured, imprisoned, deported and deeply betrayed by the institutions they’re paying thousands to attend.
- Techno Fascism – Surveillance normalized
- AI Data Centers being built over the loud protests of communities
- Global warming going past the point of no return
I could go on.
What if the Trump presidency is part of the American empire’s extinction burst?
It’s obvious that the American empire is crumbling.
What if he is a manifestation of our collective shadow, namely, white supremacy, misogyny, imperialism all rolled into one?
Anton Fedyashin says, “I think we are entering a period of global fragmentation, and that we are certainly entering a period when American hegemony is in relative decline. And I think that Donald Trump, by the way, is a manifestation.
It’s the ‘extinction burst’ of American hegemony, of the unipolar moment.
Washington’s assertive moves, from attacks on Venezuela to threats against Iran and Greenland, reflect the final outburst of a declining unipolar order and may encourage countries in the Global South to band together as uncertainty grows.” said American University history professor Anton Fedyashin in an interview with the China Post.
All of this pain
“It is the moment when the light of consciousness reaches the Shadow, and what is illuminated is often devastating. The grief, the rage, the disillusionment that have characterized this era for so many people- particularly women, particularly BIPOC communities, and most certainly survivors – are not signs of spiritual failure. They are signs of contact with reality after a long period of managed dissociation and suppression. – Brooke Lalone, LMFT
All of this pain, suffering, literal fascism that is impossible to ignore is tremendously destabilizing.
It’s making us question our identities.
Who were we before?
Who do we need to become now, to face this greatest threat to humanity yet? –Georgette Nkwo has ideas
Why Could An Extinction Burst Be A Good Thing?
Because we have to look at the decay, decrepitude and yes, pants-pooping parts of America and say, Well, let’s scrap this and start over.
It’s being pushed in our faces day after day after day.
Lalone continues, “Jung borrowed the concept of enantiodromia from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. The principle states that when any force is carried to its extreme, it produces its opposite. Every system in nature contains this self-correcting mechanism. Push far enough in one direction, and the counter-movement becomes inevitable.”
Mask Off
She writes, “The Trump era, both the first and second administrations… has not created white supremacy, misogyny, or imperialism. It merely has surfaced them and embolden those who hold these values deep to their core, like my hometown. These presidential terms have stripped the institutional language that previously allowed those forces to operate while maintaining plausible deniability.
The mask is off, and while that is horrifying in its direct consequences, it is also from a Jungian standpoint a necessary condition for genuine transformation.
If we were able to look away before, we can no longer look away.
White supremacy depends on an innocence that is false. Many people can no longer pretend innocence. We are being called into a more truthful relationship with America’s own history, abusive structures, and its own capacity for both harm and healing.
Here’s the truth. We have never NOT been fascist.
From the genocide of the Native peoples of this country
From kidnapping the president of Venezuela to all of the CIA takedowns of governments in South America to the economic strangulation of Cuba today
From Trans-Atlantic Slavery to Jim Crow to current prison labor which is just slavery by another name
It’s happening all the time, continually, and it’s BEEN happening.
Our country is founded on genocide and slavery, imperialism, war, and other aspects of white supremacy.
This government is now just making it impossible to ignore, by hurting more and more and more people until white people can’t stick their heads in the sand anymore and pretend it’s not happening.
We’re going to need stronger movements, ones that understand how not to reproduce the destructive systems that have come before.
This system is not coming down without our help.
We have to start unlearning now.
If you want to do some unlearning, check out my new book, Healing from the Nonprofit Sector
You can get my new book and workbooks, Healing from the Nonprofit Sector, here from Amazon, or here from me
