Overview

Through prose and poetry, Williams explores the systemic nature of risk to challenge the underlying premises, metaphors and myths that create the conditions of the systems in which decisions are made that continue to accelerate us towards collapse of systems critical for life to continue. In this book, Williams argues that the underpinning of international law defies our understanding of what is now needed as the intergovernmental architecture, and the international legal paradigm, remain firmly anchored in twin unhelpful premises: infinite economic growth (based on the global epistemological domination of resource metaphors and the myth of objectivism) and the untouchable sovereign right of nation-states (based on the global domination of separation metaphors and the myth of individualism). As long as these problematic premises remain the starting points for all efforts towards risk-informed sustainable development, or a regenerative path for all life to flourish, our world will continue to experience dire and increasingly devastating consequences - already a lived reality in many parts of the world. Fundamental reform at the 'rules of the game' level are put forward for the global financial ecosystem (and the international legal paradigm), as is an embryonic suggestion for a care-and-kindness-based operating system to replace the inherently violent abusus-based system once the necessary adjustments have been made to the valuations of assets and liabilities as a result of transparently revealing and appropriately pricing the existential risk (that we now collectively face) into every financial transaction and living system conversion decision. A playful exploratory synthesis of the musings by Freud on the intolerability of life, Camus on the satisfaction in suffering, Gibbon on declension and the inevitability of ruin, West on the repetition of history, Abramovic on acting without consequences, Artaud on the difficulty of thought, Deleuze and Guattari on the desire for repression and his own lived experience of swimming through rocks as an extreme ultra-endurance runner results in a preliminary elucidation of a Unified Theory of Extremity and the ultra-runner as a Jungian archetype. There is much here to fill you with dread and much to fill you with joy, as poetry intermingles with prose Williams weaves a frayed carpet on which we may rest a while and reflect. This is a wide ranging volume of confusion, curiosity, humility, complexity, grief, weirdness, care, loss and love. For even within the careening chaos of the times in which this book was written, love labours on. It labours on. Love labours on.

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