The human race is in trouble. So is all Life on Earth. Yet most of us spend our time arguing over how to treat the symptoms of the disease that is killing the planet rather than trying to eliminate the source of the disease.
A disease is not cured by putting band-aids on the symptoms. To be rid of the disease, the source must be eradicated. The source of the disease that’s destroying our Life support system is industrial civilisation. The end of civilisation as we know it is prerequisite to the continuation of human Life on Earth.
This is not to say that the human race must become extinct. But, after many years in denial, during which time I clung desperately to a utopian illusion of a sustainable, enlightened, techno-industrial society, I have finally reached the conclusion that industrial civilisation must be brought to an end or the human species will effectively destroy itself and possibly all Life on Earth.
Acculturation to the compartmentalised nature of industrial civilisation makes it extremely difficult for its individual members to reach an understanding of its inherently mortiferous nature. The forest cannot be seen for the trees as it were. People just don’t see the big picture. They are consumed with their own pet issues, their specialised functions and their own self-interest. They are incapable of taking a holistic viewpoint.
What is the big picture?
It should, by now, be getting a lot easier for people to see that this system cannot be fixed, that we can’t get things back to “normal”, that our “civilised” normal is the problem, not the solution.
That the extraction and consumption of non-renewable resources without restraint cannot go on forever should be self-evident to anyone. Yet this culture not only consumes non-renewables with reckless abandon but devours or destroys renewables, like land, trees, food, air and water, at a rate far surpassing that of their recovery. Any culture or species that depends for its very existence upon such a system cannot endure.
Industrial civilisation is unsustainable and irredeemable. Its members, both rulers and ruled, will not voluntarily enact the changes needed to transform it to a culture that is rational, sustainable and natural. Therefore, it will collapse. It is not a question of if but only of when.
Civilisation will collapse into utter chaos in due course without any more help from us than we’re already providing; or it could be dismantled voluntarily, logically and rationally with the aim of making the transition as painless as possible.
Balance will be achieved during the next big resource war because it wont be fought with boots on the ground, it'll be fought with weapons of mass destruction and a lot of people will die.
Indeed. Perhaps the Yellowstone Super Volcano will get us first, or the Chilean one. The Chilean one is only twenty or so miles from a volcano that exploded at the beginning of march, which might suggest instability in the region as that particular volcano very rarely actually erupts. Then again, it might not.
We don't take such a nihilistic view in the Green Party, OP. We have plenty of activists that would be happy to tell you how we can forge a sustainable future without wiping the Earth clean of our existence.
Personally, your views would more-or-less mirror mine if you swapped out the term 'industrial civilisation' for 'capitalism' in your little speech.
There is, in fact, more likelyhood of modern communist factories polluting "so much less". That's because it costs more money to be sustainable and 99% of companies care more about their profits than sustainability, and 100% of politicians care more about the economy.
Because socialist and communist factories care so much more about sustainability over productivity, as history has repeatedly shown us. Good points lad. Encouraging to see the Green party with such sharp minds backing them, I'm sure they'll do well next election.
A few years ago, I was in a similar boat to you. I had just watched the film 'Collapse' with Michael Ruppert and it had a profound effect on me. I was fairly confident that the world was definitely fucked and it was definitely going to come soon. Be it as a result of peak oil, global warming or many of the other myriad of disasters which could snuff us out without breaking a sweat.
I was a teenlad at the time and upon reflection it was a rebellion of sorts against growing up and becoming independent and responsible for my own well-being and situation. Why should I join the rat race when odds are, the world will either end quickly or there will be a race to the bottom? I'm not trying to trivialise your position or detract from you point though, OP, just that I either outgrew it or became apathetic to it.
I don't think humans are particularly well organised. Most government and economic policy is reactionary, very rarely is it steered or directed towards a specific goal and some of the horror stories from the USSR or China attest to what that can descend into. Many of the technologies that cause monumental leaps in civilisation sneak up on us or seem underwhelming at first.
In terms of what you can do as an individual, I'm inclined to compare it to pissing in the sea. Best case scenario is you may ascend to some pivotal role in science, politics or business but from there how much of a difference could you actually make? If you have no prospect of enacting any major change, then why waste energy worrying about this sort of thing? There's no harm in being conscious of your own energy usage or carbon footprint but in terms of the whole species or the planet then it just isn't our cross to bear. The world will keep on turning, whether there are 7, 13 or less than 1 billion people on it.
We're not a runaway train just yet, but you can't drive it or stop it by yourself so may as well just sit back down and enjoy the journey, ehh.
I'm of the opinion that civilisation is a collapsed and utter chaos. It can't collapse because it has always been collapsed.
I don't really see a global disaster in the style of the world wars.
>We're not a runaway train just yet, but you can't drive it or stop it by yourself so may as well just sit back down and enjoy the journey, ehh.
This is pretty much the point; humanity/civilisation has such a momentum that it can't be stopped or adjusted. Everything we try is basically more noise into a horrible noisy noise. Having said that, it's a shame because if we all stopped playing by the rules we could have immediate change.
I think the only real option is to be politically active- which is to say the only option is;
I felt like this after watching Falling Down for the first time as a teen.
Life was fucking shit back then though and I thought I might kill myself if this is what life was.
Now it's my favourite film and I watch it every time something happens to upset me to the point where I consider going on a rampage. I am that guy with the psyche held together by tape and benzos you sometimes see shouting at teenagers for littering, their pocket knifes be damned. I'll fucking kill them all!
I'm not trying to proclaim myself any better than you- Of course I still use the ungodly amounts of fossil fuels and electricity any self-respecting individual in a first world country invariably does, even if they do read the Guardian and sort out their recycling every fortnight.
But if we want to avoid collapse, eventually some generation or other has to collectively stand up and take the responsibility. I think it was most succinctly put in that episode of Futurama where they put the huge ball or rubbish on a rocket- Who cares, we'll be dead by then.
At the risk of being the only desenting voice and appearing souless I don't believe there is anything wrong with where industrial civilization is going at it's core.
What exactly is it that you think we are going to do to destroy ourselves specificly?
>>3849 >I don't believe there is anything wrong with where industrial civilization is going at it's core.
Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression had been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of SOME conditions that exist in today's society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable. (Yes, we know that depression is often of purely genetic origin. We are referring here to those cases in which environment plays the predominant role.)
Does anyone remember that scene in HHGTTG when Arthur gets to the bottom of the giant statue of himself throwing a paper cup and finds himself on the planet that was devastated by shoe shops? The archaeologist Lintilla has some sort of device that creates a state of emergency, because she performs better under pressure. It's not entirely relevant to the point I'm getting to, which is that isn't the world always coming to an end? Not in a "life is slow dying" sense but more of just how we see the world. We're running out of resources and there's global warming and the singularity AI will kill us all and there was the Mayan calendar nonsense and the Millennium bug and the Cold War and WWII and The Rapture is always just around the corner and there's going to be a new Flood and we need to keep sacrificing virgins at the top of our stepped ziggurats in the name of Lugus because it's the only thing that stops him from letting Fenrir eat the planet or whatever. Everybody-panic-everything-is-about-to-explode seems to be the normal state of being for humans.
The Roman Empire "fell", or rather, dissolved into a bunch of other things. So did the British one and the Greek City States and Imperial China and everything else. Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost. Everything is changing into something else. Don't panic, it's only anitya.
If you ask me, we're witnessing the birth of a new form of life- civilisation.
Pre-biotic soup had a good run. But then, replicators began, and gobbled a lot of it up. It's still around, but it's tough to be pre-biotic soup these days.
Replicators had a good run. But then, prokaryotes began, and gobbled a lot of them up. They're still around, but it's tough to be a replicator these days.
Prokaryotes had a good run. But then, bacteria, archae and eukaryotes began, and gobbled a lot of them up. They're still around, but it's tough to be a prokaryote these days.
Single-celled organisms had a good run. But then multi-cellular life began, and gobbled a lot of them up. They're still around, but it's tough to be a single-celled organism these days.
... And so on. A new life form emerges from the dominant form of life. It doesn't exterminate its ancestors and evolutionary cousins, but it does seize a good chunk of the available resources, and afterwards things are never quite the same. Never quite... good.
Evolution isn't a ladder that you climb, it's more like a tower that gets built. The cell membrane must evolve before the organelle does, the single cell before the multi-cell. In our case, the convergence of an agile and dextrous body evolving along with a versatile central nervous system gave rise to our species, an animal that could think.
This evolution has given rise to a new 'pool' of life, the noosystem. Just as it took the breaking of a plasmid to create chromasomal DNA before a 'pool' of chromasomal-based life could form, and within which many complex species could evolve, so did the genesis of thought create the noosystem.
It took thousands of years for the noosystem to grow to the point where it could break free of crude hand tools and trivial cultural phenomena. Once civilisation took root, the development from culture of permanent physical structures, it would only be a matter of time before the noosystem could break free from its shackled to primitive, chemical-based life.
Already, we see the physical manifestation of ideas in symbols, which can and do replicate in computers as viruses- memes, which replicate as viruses of the mind. Just as chemical life evolved beyond simple replicators, so too will civilisation itself evolve. Soon, the things we build will cease to depend upon us to replicate, and will build copies of themselves.
Each transformation to a new form of life quickens with each generation. From life's beginnings, to tube worms, to things that crawl, to things that think, the evolution of new forms of life has accelerated. We are witnessing the quickening of civilisation.
It will be very bad for things like us. It's all quite natural, though... in its own way.
>>3850 >Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy
What's your evidence for people being unhappier today than they were before? Have you considered a culture more open and willing to confront mental illness, or greater awareness of things such as depression? What about the possibility of drug companies pushing anti depressants? What about considering whether or not people are genuinely unhappy or they've made themselves feel unhappy about something they wouldn't have been unhappy about in the past? Why do you say it's industrial society's fault and no other factor?
I'm a chemist and I would suggest nobody ever take anti depressants unless they're on the verge of killing themselves. They don't sort out problems, they just cover them up temporarily.
I agree with the lad you're replying to. Most people aren't unhappy, most people never were. They may not be satisfied, but that's a product of expectations as well as outcomes.
>>3855 The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.
>>3857 Paragraphs 59-76 of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. This is a thread of copypasta mixed with original contributions. It seems some people are ill-equipped for that. Google is your friend.
