Only the brave hearted dare to listen
"If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst" [T. Hardy]

Their collective existence would soon expire
The sparkle in a friend’s eye would forever disappear
As a result of spiralling despair
And of the quiet sadness she could see in the eyes of every parent
The melancholy story of industrial civilisation

Were not violence, misery and injustice
Rife in every corner of the world?
Could existence ever be justified?
With wilful blindness
Mother Nature be damned
In the midst of this perfect storm
Asleep at the wheel

Even when we see our world falling down around us
Calling for an urgent and sustained response,
We divert our gaze
We complain that nobody warned us,
That we could not possibly have known.
But we were warned, we did know,
And now our inaction looks not just foolish but shameful.

We’re at the crossroads
Choosing our fate
The disintegration of Empire
We’re at the crossroads
And God it’s late
Shake ourselves awake

Industrial civilisation had been born
Founded upon fossil fuels
The heartbeat of Empire
Globalising the American Dream
The myths of growth, technology and affluence
Dangerously outdated
Which were structured to privilege profit above people
It’s economy ate away at the nature life support system
A snake eating its own tail
Unmistakably a collective psychological disorder
Violence against the oceans, the forests, and the skies
Is akin to self-harm
Growth itself to death
Like a cancer cell
Technology could not save Empire
Because efficiency without sufficiency is lost
It was as if our parent civilisation had committed suicide
This is the fate we were given
So this is the fate we must love

We’re at the crossroads
Choosing our fate
The disintegration of Empire
We’re at the crossroads
And God it’s late
Shake ourselves awake

The growth model of progress as we now know
Turned out to be severely flawed
Although dislodging it from the social imagination
Proved to be exceedingly difficult
When Empire finally choked on its own way of life
What was surprising was not so much how quickly its existence came to an end
But rather why so few had foreseen its collapse
For was not collapse the painfully obvious outcome of an economic system
Whose internal logic was that of limitless growth on a finite planet?
Empire, like Thanatos, had a death wish
An unconscious desire to annihilate itself
And everything that stood in its way
Leaving industrial civilisation limp and in tatters
A stunned and fragmented humanity was left to build new worlds
In whatever ways it could
Out of the warm ashes of Empire

We’re at the crossroads
Choosing our fate
The disintegration of Empire
We’re at the crossroads
And God it’s late
Shake ourselves awake

A snake eating its own tail
Unmistakably a collective psychological disorder
The heartbeat of Empire
Growth itself to death
Like a cancer cell
Shake ourselves awake
We complain that nobody warned us,
We complain that nobody warned us,
We complain that nobody warned us,
We complain that nobody warned us,
But we were warned, we did know,
The melancholy story of industrial civilisation
Shake ourselves awake
This is the fate we were given
So this is the fate we must love