For a society that does everything in its power to distract itself from its mortal predicaments, it is an irony that it is host to an economic system which worships death through and through, down to the core operating principles of its foundation.
Brings to mind the false notion of human exceptionalism—the belief that humans, through their cleverness and technology, can flourish outside the biological constraints of all living organisms.
A very timely piece. I wonder how much 'people' can be be blamed for buying into the oligarch's stories, but perhaps blame isn't necessary. Fooled, because of human nature and sharp marketing, we are living in a world where inauthentic oligarch-ians (and only a tiny percentage of them are called Ian) repeat the cosmology of a super-someone they are ashamed to not be.
I believe the root of our problem is our very minds, the way we are wired and evolved to be. Even if some cultures found a way to circumvent our flaws, there’s no way to do so indefinitely. Most cultures falling into the fossil fuel trap will succumb to temptation. And even if not, all it takes is one, as it will outgrow and overpower the rest, exactly as happened.
The hedonictic treadmill is perfectly and fully captured by the profit motive of capitalism, which corrupts most behaviour into the pathalogically immoral. It takes tremendous intellectual integrity and honesty to resist it, and narcissists, sociopaths, psycopaths and all manners of lesser evils (merely greedy, selfish, lazy, dishonest, stupid people) have no desire to - on the contrary. Even good people are fighting their own primitive urges to such a degree that I hold it isn’t even capitalism itself that is the main problem. It’s our mammalian brain. No -ism can correct for its flaws.
You are spot on Jan. There is a huge evolutionary basis for all this. More of an evolutionary dead end I argue. I’ll be posting here some of my older essays on this but check out William Rees. He also mentions me at 17:00 minutes https://youtu.be/YBkl2kCdW-w?si=61xQ8yOzhoMs-EB5
Rees is brilliant; almost everything he produces is a whopper. I saw that episode too; it’s excellent. I have learned a lot from him and link to him often.
Yes, William Rees is brilliant Jan, except for one major flaw he’s an Apocaloptomist, a believer in Hopium that human exceptionalism through ingenuity, creativity and inventiveness will resolve any problems its created. Humanity in discovering, and then how to use FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils, just like any animal given the opportunity of accessing a free energy source will go on a feeding and procreating binge until said energy source is diminished, and dissipated through entropy, creating so much pollution in the process it ends up ultimately killing itself. In humanities case the poly and meta-crisis it now finds itself in, crises that are characterized by multiple, overlapping, and intensifying environmental and social challenges that threaten planetary health and human well-being. Key ecological problems contributing to these crises include climate heating, biodiversity loss, pollution, and resource depletion, but these are now beyond being problems they’re predicaments, whilst problems may have solutions, predicaments have no solution just outcomes and that’s the state we’re in. To quote George Carlin “The Planet isn’t going anywhere we are”, and as B. Sidney Smith in his series How To Enjoy The End Of The World explains the why: “HTETEOTW Chapter 5: Ecological Overshoot 👉 https://youtu.be/KtQG9EiDr9k?si=xiCSK3XU3_X77erY 🤔
There are numerous articles and videoed interviews of William E. Rees, Andrew, I’m sure you’ll have read and viewed a few already, I’ve link but one below👇, they go through the dire consequences of humanity being in ecological over shoot, exasperbated by the demise of FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils to keep modernity (GDP) growing, but do nothing to reduce anthropogenic global (AGW) heating predicament (in fact it’s more than likely that as lack of access to Oil in particular, and NGas we’ll revert to using Coal in huge amounts never seen before to keep modernity growing), AGW’ CO2s is already baked in for however long it takes for the planet to correct itself, which could be anything from hundreds to maybe thousands of years. William E. Rees's work, combines the stark warnings of ecological collapse with a slim hope for humanity's salvation through radical action, aligns with the Apocaloptomist label. His views, while debated, are rooted in extensive research and data, making him a pivotal voice in sustainability discussions. The balance between his dire predictions and proposed solutions, such as ecological tax reform and controlled economic contraction, encapsulates the essence of cautious optimism within a framework of potential catastrophe. That is my view and that held by the University of Google. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-11-12/dont-call-me-a-pessimist-on-climate-change-i-am-a-realist/ 🤔
Thanks. Yes, I am very familiar with him. I read this post, too, snd still don’t see any optimism. I do see some suggestions for responses (and why they won’t happen).
I guess I don’t see him spelling out that we are doomed (like I do). But it does seem very implied by him.
Sorry I haven’t been able to convince you Andrew that Rees is an Apocaloptomist, still there’s time left for an interviewer to ask him “So William Rees just for the record are you saying we are all doomed with no way of escaping the bottleneck of extinction, or are you saying there is a way of avoiding it”🤔
But it can't be the way we were wired and evolved to be, considering that the vast majority of time humans have lived on the planet we did not live like this.
Civilization is an extreme aberration in our species' history, which means that we evolved to live very DIFFERENTLY than this. If civilization is the natural result of our evolution it wouldn't have taken half a million years to develop it.
It's not our biology or our minds to blame for this aberration, but rather some schism FROM our biology and minds, and nature itself. An original cultural wound, if you will, that set in motion a cycle of trauma that inevitably ends with this civilization's collapse.
The native Americans called this "white man's insanity", a psycho-spiritual sickness that European culture carried to other cultures through colonization. They had a word for it for when it popped up in their cultures from time to time: wetiko (or wendigo), which translates to "cannibalistic spirit consumed by greed".
Sorry. Factually incorrect. Jessica is at least partially right in my view. While I believe the 'human state'. While I think the schism she refers to is a universal aspect of human nature, as she points out, it is not a constant through our prehistory and history. Many long lasting cultures - even after the agricultural revolution (I.e. peasant societies within wider societal structures) managed to live for hundreds if not thousands of years in a relatively stable, adaptive and harmonious relationship with their environment. I don't wish to idealise and exaggerate that though - there were sometimes mass extinctions of other species - for some reason. But unlike us if they engaged in destructiveness there's no evidence as far as I know that it was ubiquitous.
You claim this was purely due to these people's less powerful and destructive level of technology. On the surface yes, but more deeply these societies and cultures were aware of the importance of limits and tradition and showed awareness of the dangers inherent in human nature - and for that reason built in countervailing safeguards to keep the 'genies' in the bottle. Many thinkers have written about this from different angles. In political economy for instance take Karl Polanyi, whose theory was based on insights from economic anthropology. In neuropsychiatry take the work of Iain McGilchrist who talks directly about this schism founded in our brain structures, but also our plasticity and ability to seek balance. In philosophy take Giorgio Agamben's examination of the nature of the relationship between human and non-human animals in what he terms the concept of 'the Anthropological Machine'. In my opinion the main weakness in thus work is, as far as I know, he has not examined the Anthropological Machine cross-culturally. If he or someone did then I think they would find evidence of countervailing worldviews and cultural practices precisely to keep the Anthropological Machine in check.
The fact is that there is a schism in our being and nature but what we do with that schism is not inevitable and universal with only one historical trajectory and possible denouement.
Are you insane? When Europeans first arrived in North America Manhattan was ancient oak forest, the plains had literally millions of buffalo, the salmon runs were so thick you it was said you walk across rivers without getting your feet wet, passenger pigeon flocks numbered in the millions, and the central valley of California had herds of antelope in the THOUSANDS.
Now thanks to colonization 95% of the old growth forests on the continent are gone, the central valley is desertified, the plains have almost been entirely plowed and the FEET of sod is now reduced to a couple inches of topsoil, and salmon have vanished from most of rivers and creeks on the west coast thanks to dams and logging, the passenger pigeon is extinct, and the earth in general is currently experiencing the 6th mass extinction in it's 6 billion year history.
To your point there were innumerable cultural experiments on the planet through time. Each would have at some point had to adapt and recognize limits to survive. Those that did lasted thousands of years. Unfortunately while we have increasing knowledge of all of these variations we are steadfast in ignoring them as they seem too ‘simple’ for us.
Yes, we are simplicity-averse. We are actually inaction-averse. All our solutions are about building things. We never see that a solution can be as simple as stopping or pausing or doing nothing. This I believe is hardwired.
What are describing is PURELY a function of CULTURE though, as the vast majority of those other cultural experiments were precisely the opposite: stable and simple where "doing nothing" (just chillin, lying around and enjoying life) was the norm.
I think we're in agreement. I also think I made my point already: we didn't evolve to resist free energy. Maybe some cultures could have, but all could and did not, and those that didn't outgrew and overpowered the rest. The sustainable cultures were eradicated!
We can call it a schism or a fossil fuel trap. We can even call it a minority culture giving in to Wetiko. Whatever we call it, we're not going back wilfully, and so we will collapse.
I'm so curious to know what the world will look like in the year 3K, 30K and 300K. Maybe we will make it through the bottleneck and hard-earned lessons will be embedded almost genetically, passed down through deep time.
Side note: We also didn't evolve to resist super stimuli. So, we get the obesity and opium epidemics and smartphone addiction.
Yep, we didn't evolve to live with any of this technology, and it wasn't designed to actually work with our biology. It wasn't designed for humanity at all, but rather some ridiculous concept of profit motive.
I would also love to know what humanity will look like in the distant future. Creating sustainable cultures were the norm for humanity (this is the aberration), but people have become so twisted and toxic as a result of this toxic culture that I don't know if humanity will ever be able to recover from it. A whole swath of society today would rather die (literally) than even admit they were wrong about capitalism and Trump, just as cult members often let the cult leader kill them rather than choose to leave.
"Primitive stupidity on a collective basis" enmeshed in a violent world capitalist system which has its own on-going forward momentum and proceeds like a juggernaut twisting bending and crushing all before it.
I don't know how much Eternal LSD North Americans and Europeans did and the madness that has ensued but there is certainly no thought about the next generation in our current political and economic situation. Tariffs are not a replacement for taxation. Good goofing god this is Lunacy.
I don't know how much Eternal LSD North Americans and Europeans did and the madness that has ensued but there is certainly no thought about the next generation in our current political and economic situation. Tariffs are not a replacement for taxation. Good goofing god this is Lunacy.
Thankyou George for your articles, the things you write are so very true. I've never read all the sorts of things you articulate. Some others have touched on human behaviours, but none so succinctly as you. It's horrid but true, and it's liberating as well. My thoughts have been like yours but I never knew how to express them to myself. It's so good to read your work. I wish I was in the position to upgrade, but I struggle as it is. Thankyou again.
Brings to mind the false notion of human exceptionalism—the belief that humans, through their cleverness and technology, can flourish outside the biological constraints of all living organisms.
Spot on Trish, you might enjoy “After Skool - George Carlin - The Planet Isn't Going Anywhere. WE ARE!” 👉 https://youtu.be/09FmRNb3Krg?si=bIhbvovoKPm1P6ba 🤔
Thanks so much for this!
A very timely piece. I wonder how much 'people' can be be blamed for buying into the oligarch's stories, but perhaps blame isn't necessary. Fooled, because of human nature and sharp marketing, we are living in a world where inauthentic oligarch-ians (and only a tiny percentage of them are called Ian) repeat the cosmology of a super-someone they are ashamed to not be.
Thanks Duncan
Another beautiful piece.
I believe the root of our problem is our very minds, the way we are wired and evolved to be. Even if some cultures found a way to circumvent our flaws, there’s no way to do so indefinitely. Most cultures falling into the fossil fuel trap will succumb to temptation. And even if not, all it takes is one, as it will outgrow and overpower the rest, exactly as happened.
The hedonictic treadmill is perfectly and fully captured by the profit motive of capitalism, which corrupts most behaviour into the pathalogically immoral. It takes tremendous intellectual integrity and honesty to resist it, and narcissists, sociopaths, psycopaths and all manners of lesser evils (merely greedy, selfish, lazy, dishonest, stupid people) have no desire to - on the contrary. Even good people are fighting their own primitive urges to such a degree that I hold it isn’t even capitalism itself that is the main problem. It’s our mammalian brain. No -ism can correct for its flaws.
Just my 2 cents, anyway. Keep up the great work 🙂
You are spot on Jan. There is a huge evolutionary basis for all this. More of an evolutionary dead end I argue. I’ll be posting here some of my older essays on this but check out William Rees. He also mentions me at 17:00 minutes https://youtu.be/YBkl2kCdW-w?si=61xQ8yOzhoMs-EB5
Rees is brilliant; almost everything he produces is a whopper. I saw that episode too; it’s excellent. I have learned a lot from him and link to him often.
Here’s another goodie from him https://www.whp-journals.co.uk/JPS/article/view/855/522
Thank you.
Yes, William Rees is brilliant Jan, except for one major flaw he’s an Apocaloptomist, a believer in Hopium that human exceptionalism through ingenuity, creativity and inventiveness will resolve any problems its created. Humanity in discovering, and then how to use FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils, just like any animal given the opportunity of accessing a free energy source will go on a feeding and procreating binge until said energy source is diminished, and dissipated through entropy, creating so much pollution in the process it ends up ultimately killing itself. In humanities case the poly and meta-crisis it now finds itself in, crises that are characterized by multiple, overlapping, and intensifying environmental and social challenges that threaten planetary health and human well-being. Key ecological problems contributing to these crises include climate heating, biodiversity loss, pollution, and resource depletion, but these are now beyond being problems they’re predicaments, whilst problems may have solutions, predicaments have no solution just outcomes and that’s the state we’re in. To quote George Carlin “The Planet isn’t going anywhere we are”, and as B. Sidney Smith in his series How To Enjoy The End Of The World explains the why: “HTETEOTW Chapter 5: Ecological Overshoot 👉 https://youtu.be/KtQG9EiDr9k?si=xiCSK3XU3_X77erY 🤔
I appreciate Sid Smith a lot. Especially https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QeYM1L0FfY
I have decidedly not gotten the impression that Rees thinks we will solve our problems. Do you happen to have a link handy?
There are numerous articles and videoed interviews of William E. Rees, Andrew, I’m sure you’ll have read and viewed a few already, I’ve link but one below👇, they go through the dire consequences of humanity being in ecological over shoot, exasperbated by the demise of FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils to keep modernity (GDP) growing, but do nothing to reduce anthropogenic global (AGW) heating predicament (in fact it’s more than likely that as lack of access to Oil in particular, and NGas we’ll revert to using Coal in huge amounts never seen before to keep modernity growing), AGW’ CO2s is already baked in for however long it takes for the planet to correct itself, which could be anything from hundreds to maybe thousands of years. William E. Rees's work, combines the stark warnings of ecological collapse with a slim hope for humanity's salvation through radical action, aligns with the Apocaloptomist label. His views, while debated, are rooted in extensive research and data, making him a pivotal voice in sustainability discussions. The balance between his dire predictions and proposed solutions, such as ecological tax reform and controlled economic contraction, encapsulates the essence of cautious optimism within a framework of potential catastrophe. That is my view and that held by the University of Google. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-11-12/dont-call-me-a-pessimist-on-climate-change-i-am-a-realist/ 🤔
Thanks. Yes, I am very familiar with him. I read this post, too, snd still don’t see any optimism. I do see some suggestions for responses (and why they won’t happen).
I guess I don’t see him spelling out that we are doomed (like I do). But it does seem very implied by him.
Sorry I haven’t been able to convince you Andrew that Rees is an Apocaloptomist, still there’s time left for an interviewer to ask him “So William Rees just for the record are you saying we are all doomed with no way of escaping the bottleneck of extinction, or are you saying there is a way of avoiding it”🤔
But it can't be the way we were wired and evolved to be, considering that the vast majority of time humans have lived on the planet we did not live like this.
Civilization is an extreme aberration in our species' history, which means that we evolved to live very DIFFERENTLY than this. If civilization is the natural result of our evolution it wouldn't have taken half a million years to develop it.
It's not our biology or our minds to blame for this aberration, but rather some schism FROM our biology and minds, and nature itself. An original cultural wound, if you will, that set in motion a cycle of trauma that inevitably ends with this civilization's collapse.
The native Americans called this "white man's insanity", a psycho-spiritual sickness that European culture carried to other cultures through colonization. They had a word for it for when it popped up in their cultures from time to time: wetiko (or wendigo), which translates to "cannibalistic spirit consumed by greed".
The native Americans ALSO destroyed nature. Much less because they had less technology, not because they did not suffer the vague schism you refer to.
Very true, I'm tired of people praising indigenous people's. In my country, Australia, the indigenous people drove the mega fauna to extinction.
Sorry. Factually incorrect. Jessica is at least partially right in my view. While I believe the 'human state'. While I think the schism she refers to is a universal aspect of human nature, as she points out, it is not a constant through our prehistory and history. Many long lasting cultures - even after the agricultural revolution (I.e. peasant societies within wider societal structures) managed to live for hundreds if not thousands of years in a relatively stable, adaptive and harmonious relationship with their environment. I don't wish to idealise and exaggerate that though - there were sometimes mass extinctions of other species - for some reason. But unlike us if they engaged in destructiveness there's no evidence as far as I know that it was ubiquitous.
You claim this was purely due to these people's less powerful and destructive level of technology. On the surface yes, but more deeply these societies and cultures were aware of the importance of limits and tradition and showed awareness of the dangers inherent in human nature - and for that reason built in countervailing safeguards to keep the 'genies' in the bottle. Many thinkers have written about this from different angles. In political economy for instance take Karl Polanyi, whose theory was based on insights from economic anthropology. In neuropsychiatry take the work of Iain McGilchrist who talks directly about this schism founded in our brain structures, but also our plasticity and ability to seek balance. In philosophy take Giorgio Agamben's examination of the nature of the relationship between human and non-human animals in what he terms the concept of 'the Anthropological Machine'. In my opinion the main weakness in thus work is, as far as I know, he has not examined the Anthropological Machine cross-culturally. If he or someone did then I think they would find evidence of countervailing worldviews and cultural practices precisely to keep the Anthropological Machine in check.
The fact is that there is a schism in our being and nature but what we do with that schism is not inevitable and universal with only one historical trajectory and possible denouement.
Are you insane? When Europeans first arrived in North America Manhattan was ancient oak forest, the plains had literally millions of buffalo, the salmon runs were so thick you it was said you walk across rivers without getting your feet wet, passenger pigeon flocks numbered in the millions, and the central valley of California had herds of antelope in the THOUSANDS.
Now thanks to colonization 95% of the old growth forests on the continent are gone, the central valley is desertified, the plains have almost been entirely plowed and the FEET of sod is now reduced to a couple inches of topsoil, and salmon have vanished from most of rivers and creeks on the west coast thanks to dams and logging, the passenger pigeon is extinct, and the earth in general is currently experiencing the 6th mass extinction in it's 6 billion year history.
To your point there were innumerable cultural experiments on the planet through time. Each would have at some point had to adapt and recognize limits to survive. Those that did lasted thousands of years. Unfortunately while we have increasing knowledge of all of these variations we are steadfast in ignoring them as they seem too ‘simple’ for us.
Yes, we are simplicity-averse. We are actually inaction-averse. All our solutions are about building things. We never see that a solution can be as simple as stopping or pausing or doing nothing. This I believe is hardwired.
What are describing is PURELY a function of CULTURE though, as the vast majority of those other cultural experiments were precisely the opposite: stable and simple where "doing nothing" (just chillin, lying around and enjoying life) was the norm.
I think we're in agreement. I also think I made my point already: we didn't evolve to resist free energy. Maybe some cultures could have, but all could and did not, and those that didn't outgrew and overpowered the rest. The sustainable cultures were eradicated!
We can call it a schism or a fossil fuel trap. We can even call it a minority culture giving in to Wetiko. Whatever we call it, we're not going back wilfully, and so we will collapse.
I'm so curious to know what the world will look like in the year 3K, 30K and 300K. Maybe we will make it through the bottleneck and hard-earned lessons will be embedded almost genetically, passed down through deep time.
Side note: We also didn't evolve to resist super stimuli. So, we get the obesity and opium epidemics and smartphone addiction.
Yep, we didn't evolve to live with any of this technology, and it wasn't designed to actually work with our biology. It wasn't designed for humanity at all, but rather some ridiculous concept of profit motive.
I would also love to know what humanity will look like in the distant future. Creating sustainable cultures were the norm for humanity (this is the aberration), but people have become so twisted and toxic as a result of this toxic culture that I don't know if humanity will ever be able to recover from it. A whole swath of society today would rather die (literally) than even admit they were wrong about capitalism and Trump, just as cult members often let the cult leader kill them rather than choose to leave.
"raw smash-and-grab primitive stupidity on a collective basis"
It does feel like a riot against the Earth where we all feel like we have to loot what we can to survive! Diabolical how this has been normalized!
Thank you, George! Another article that says it like it is!
Thank you 🙏
Excellent piece.
Thank you
Individuals can see what societies cannot.
For sure..
This is why I consider myself an anarcho-primitivist.
Makes two of us!
Bleak but true. I don't know where to go with that.
Another bull’s eye. 🎯
Thank you Mark
Well done, George. If only we had known about this 50 years ago. What, we did know?
We knew 500 years ago. But hey, profit is the great silencer huh?
Looks like I slipped a decimal point, George.
"Primitive stupidity on a collective basis" enmeshed in a violent world capitalist system which has its own on-going forward momentum and proceeds like a juggernaut twisting bending and crushing all before it.
I don't know how much Eternal LSD North Americans and Europeans did and the madness that has ensued but there is certainly no thought about the next generation in our current political and economic situation. Tariffs are not a replacement for taxation. Good goofing god this is Lunacy.
I don't know how much Eternal LSD North Americans and Europeans did and the madness that has ensued but there is certainly no thought about the next generation in our current political and economic situation. Tariffs are not a replacement for taxation. Good goofing god this is Lunacy.
Thankyou George for your articles, the things you write are so very true. I've never read all the sorts of things you articulate. Some others have touched on human behaviours, but none so succinctly as you. It's horrid but true, and it's liberating as well. My thoughts have been like yours but I never knew how to express them to myself. It's so good to read your work. I wish I was in the position to upgrade, but I struggle as it is. Thankyou again.