How to Deal with Our Current ‘Death Spiral,’ Session 7

Special Topics in One World or None

*The Zoom Link for today’s live session is far below.

United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly warned that we are closer than ever to Nuclear Armageddon. Somewhat restrained in this expression, he has stated that we are now entering an “Age of Chaos.”

Guterres is an international diplomat in his final term as Secretary-General. What Guterres terms the “Age of Chaos,” I have been calling for some time the Age of “Collective Suicidality,” or the “Death Spiral.”

Guterres’ profound warnings have received little attention in the U.S. I suspect few reading this today even know he made these extremely critical and consequential remarks more than a year ago, in a major address to the UN General Assembly. Here are a few key quotes:

For millions of people caught up in conflict around the world, life is a deadly, daily, hungry hell….

After decades of nuclear disarmament, states are competing to make their nuclear arsenals faster, stealthier and more accurate. The weapons are being developed without guardrails creating new ways to kill each other—and for humanity to annihilate itself….

We must make peace with the planet. Humanity has waged a war we can only lose: our war with nature. It is a crazy fight to pick…. The climate crisis remains the defining challenge of our time.

Sharing these existential concerns is the reason we recently issued our Prescription for Survival 2025—especially as the Trump administration has escalated the dangers far beyond the point where we were a year ago.

Last month, we at the World Mental Health Coalition issued an urgent and important Prescription, and I urge you to return to it and to ponder it again.

Today, I wish to focus on the second of the three specific recommendations we make in our latest Prescription in the section titled, “Climate Destruction,” which states:

The climate crisis is accelerating. The extreme weather experienced worldwide—the unprecedented ocean temperatures, the more frequent and intense extreme weather events, the rapid rise in sea levels, and the increasingly ominous warnings from scientists—are all manifestations of this dire situation. Yet, unbelievably, Donald Trump has ordered that the U.S. withdraw from the critical Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 and has also ordered substantial cuts, and in some cases closures, of U.S. agencies dedicated to dealing with the climate destruction already taking place, literally before our eyes.

To deal with this situation, our second succinct specific Prescription is:

The U.S. must immediately rejoin and help reinvigorate the Paris Climate Agreement and pursue, on an emergency basis with all international bodies and institutions, everything possible to minimize further climate destruction.

The situation of all humanity is the reason we have resumed and expanded our Prescriptions for Survival, which we began in March 2020 immediately with the start of the Covid-19 crisis, given our professional projection that the dangerously mentally-disturbed president could not be trusted to handle it rationally and scientifically. What in fact resulted was the U.S. suffering the greatest number of deaths for any country in the world!

Indeed, the global climate crisis is accelerating, with 2025 witnessing some of the most extreme weather events on record. Europe and China are enduring unprecedented heatwaves, with temperatures exceeding 47 degrees Celsius (117 degrees Fahrenheit), while May 2025 was the second hottest globally. Greenland’s ice sheet is melting seventeen times faster than normal, fueling sea-level rise. Canada is facing its second-worst fire season, with over 3.7 million hectares (9.1 million acres) burned and widespread evacuations, exacerbated by warming and drought. Brazil, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, and China all experienced devastating floods with hundreds killed and billions in damages, as a result of more intense rainfall driven by a warmer atmosphere. Climate scientists warn that major cities—especially in South Asia, the Middle East, and parts of the U.S.—could become unlivable because of heat stress. Shifting ecosystems are heightening the risk of future pandemics, as disease vectors expand their range.

Major scientific studies have performed computer modeling, such as the one Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began some fifty years ago, and they are now predicting “global civilizational collapse” as soon as 2040! Updating these studies, last year MIT Press published a book titled, A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century.

Recently MIT Press Reader published an interview with one of the authors, which begins with this alarming statement:

We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040….

In response to all of this, the last COP was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas.

MIT Press summarizes the book this way:

Despite efforts to sustain civilization, humanity faces existential threats from overpopulation, globalized trade and travel, urbanization, and global climate change…. A Darwinian Survival Guide [offers] a novel—and hopeful—perspective on how to meet these tremendous challenges by changing the discourse from sustainability to survival….

Drawing on their expertise as field biologists, Brooks and Agosta trace the evolutionary path from the early days of humans through the Late Pleistocene and the beginning of the Anthropocene all the way to the Great Acceleration of technological humanity around 1950, demonstrating how our creative capacities have allowed humanity to survive. However, constant conflict without resolution has made the Anthropocene not only unsustainable, but unsurvivable…. They reveal a middle ground between apocalypse and utopia, with two options: alter our behavior now at great expense and extend civilization or fail to act and rebuild in accordance with those same principles. If we take the latter, then our immediate goal ought to focus on preserving as many of humanity's positive achievements—from high technology to high art—as possible to shorten the time needed to rebuild.

In other words, think like physicians who work with what is and consider first of all the maximal survival outcome. But of course, there is another option that psychiatrists consider, which is to stop self-inflicted wounds and self-destruction altogether. This is the reason I highlighted in my book, published in the months before the last election, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind. We cannot leave out the self-inflicted and elected accelerator of human destructiveness, who for dangerous psychological reasons took over the most powerful position on the planet and implemented the most environmentally devastating policies in U.S. history.

As psychiatrists, we know that this course is not inevitable. We must gather the courage to declare the truth about his dangerous psychology and that his Executive Orders and presidential exertions are actively helping to bring about other, even more disastrous pandemics, more extreme climate destruction, and more devastating international conflicts that may well bring the Doomsday Clock to strike Midnight. We must speak, because we know that change in human behavior occur through change in consciousness.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago, in: “How to Deal with Our Current ‘Death Spiral,’ Session 2.” Now, this same outlaw and convicted felon, even more dangerous than during his first term, is so unbelievably endangering common earthly home and the future of all humanity, that we must call him out. If not psychiatrists, who can explain a “leader” figure as expressing our collective death wish? If not physicians, who can advocate for the survival of humankind?

Physicians have historically played a crucial role in advancing the survival of humanity by advancing public health, combating disease, and promoting health knowledge. In ancient civilizations like Egypt, Greece, and China, physicians developed early systems of diagnosis and treatment. They often risked their lives to save others, such as during the Black Death in Europe. The Scientific Revolution brought significant developments, such as vaccines, antiseptics, and surgical techniques. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, doctors led critical developments such as sanitation reform, maternal care, and infection control, and global disease eradication efforts, such as against smallpox, which dramatically improved survival. Now, as we face the potential mortality of all humankind, physicians and psychiatrists can do so again.

That is the reason I am trying to expand greatly what we have been discussing in this forum, in order to bring ourselves to the level of thinking that more seriously and with greater impact is able to take on the current situation, by establishing Physicians or Global Survival and resurrecting the critically important theme of “One World or None.” With this in mind, our recent Prescription for Survival 2025 concludes with this paragraph:

It is these existential considerations of the greatest consequence that bring us to our decision to expand our efforts significantly by creating a new worldwide organization, Physicians for Global Survival, which will urgently focus on the critical issues outlined in this new, PRESCRIPTION FOR SURVIVAL 2025.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is inviting you to a live session in a series: