Self-Extermination

Greetings good citizen,

The hard won holiday has ceased activity on the NYSE, sparing the world from its toxic influence.

Um, a (now long neglected) common theme of my posts is desperation. People will do unimaginable acts of violence if they are ‘desperate’ enough.

It underlies everything I predict, such is the incredible ‘power’ of desperation. Increasingly we are seeing the acts of the desperate and the cowardly corporate owned media is covering them up as the random acts of the ‘psychologically unstable’ (which the feckless capitalists abandoned shortly after ‘privatizing’ health care.) Yet another stick pin on the social map with St. Ronnie’s name on it!

It may be just me but ‘gold bugs’ are very practical when it comes to money (although they don’t get the ‘funny’ part, which sort of erases the appeal of their arguments regarding the ‘conservation of value’.)

Then we have guys like Mr. Hedges here, who have their fingers firmly on the pulse of civilization but take the same ‘wicked left’ when it comes to solving those problems.

How blind do you have to be to see that only the truly wicked claim to ‘speak for God’?

Republicans regularly go ‘on record’ as having had ‘personal dialog’ with ‘the supreme being.’

In most circles this is evidence of insanity but not in US politics where the feckless corporate owned media is involved!

But I, as usual, digress. Let us move forward with today’s offering:

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”

As Mr. Hedges indicates, there WILL be a ‘kill-off’ that will be disguised as a ‘Die-off’ (through gross mismanagement.)

Worse, the bought and paid for media will play it as a ‘natural disaster’…although the capitalist’s deliberate mismanagement of the economy has already begun the nutritional squeeze that will lead to the most devastating ‘global pandemic’ the world has ever seen.

Slip an unintended whoopsie in there (such as a real ‘natural disaster’) and it could spell extinction for our already ‘reproduction challenged’ base population.

But the ‘What if’ game is always a ‘dead-end’, we won’t ‘know’ until we get there.

Worse, the rhetoric surrounding climate change has taken on a harder edge, which is making it less credible. Global warming didn’t kill the dinosaurs and it sure isn’t going to kill us!

Which is to opine that we won’t ALL drown and sustainability (along with what it takes to get there) remains an ‘unknown’.

If we are to save ourselves from extinction (by self-extermination) we must manage the resources that remain to reduce desperation to an absolute minimum. (It wouldn’t hurt to put the brakes on the predatory capitalist's worship of gratuitous violence either! The hatred and the killing of your own species is a learned thing, it is NOT natural.)

The article misses another important point and that has been the cessation of all ‘forward scientific advance’ to preserve the ‘patents’ (profitability) of past discoveries.

Again, we need to refocus on the definition of ‘progress’ as the benefit reaped by all mankind from discovery and research rather than the imaginary benefit reaped by a few over the rest of us.

So we have it that stagnation, driven by self-interest, has resulted in creeping ‘desperation that is shredding the fabric of our civilization…so ‘a few’ can be ‘rich’.

When true progress makes us ALL rich!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner