Author Archives: Brutus

Us and Them

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation

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Cold War antipathies between the “free world” and the Communist Block used to be conceptualized (in short) as “us and them” (sometimes “us vs. them”), which meant the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the last two great superpowers. Additional facets to geopolitics were added by China, North Korea, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, and Brazil (mostly members of the nuclear club), but they didn’t figure as prominently in the rhetoric as what was clearly (even then) a false dualism. Binary thinking of this sort continues today in bogus phrases such as “either you’re with us or against us” or “if you’re not part of the solution then you’re part of the problem.” In American politics, the two-party system (Republicans and Democrats) appears to be intransigent and permanent despite political parties having risen and fallen over time both here and abroad. This herd team mentality keeps most political thinkers and observers from examining third-party alternatives with much seriousness the same way it forestalls bipartisanship. A little known fact is that the government-sounding agency called the Commission on Presidential debates is, in reality, a private corporation financed by Anheuser-Busch and other major companies and created by the Republican and Democratic parties to seize control of the presidential debates from The League of Women Voters in 1987.

Close identification with in-groups is learned early in life as cliques form in middle school (or before?) and is reinforced as each of us progresses through life’s phases. For instance, married/committed couples have a divergent set of understandings of personal relationships from unmarried individuals seeking/searching for a significant other. Childless couples have fundamentally differing social perspectives from those raising children (parents’ outlooks tracking with their children’s development). Working class folks have fewer opportunities and prerogatives than white-collar and professional workers. The rich enjoy considerable obeisance from everyone and benefit from undeserved favors and preferential treatment that the lower and middle classes can only look upon with envy and/or resentment. Examples go on and on.

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We cling to these identities with surprising faithfulness, considering how they lump everyone rather imprecisely into categories, not altogether arbitrarily constructed but crude nonetheless. Blends of attitudes and truly creative, outlying thinking don’t figure in discussions dominated by rigid fidelity to narrow rhetoric, sound bites, and talking points. Interestingly, this same us-and-them effect is at work in discussions of collapse and NTE, the players divided unevenly between those who just don’t get it (for a variety of reasons) and those who believe all indications are beyond controversy, meaning, completely obvious: we’re on a hopelessly downward trajectory. Of course, this division omits the bulk of the population for whom the issue isn’t even broached, and even for those who acknowledge the issue, there are a surprising number of positions on the continuum, such as those who get it but haven’t extrapolated far enough, those who get it but lie or deny out of one motivation or another (e.g., self-enrichment or political gain, albeit short-term), and those who don’t get it yet are exceeding well-versed in the evidence (so that it can be argued and spun).

All these dividing lines, rather than being a celebration of diversity, make us a fractured society along multiple faults. Perhaps it’s just my perception, but there seems to be a widening gap between those who openly admit our future must lead ineluctably to doom and techno-utopians for whom future horizons loom bright. I’ve suggested elsewhere that newcomers to the issue of collapse have a lot of catching up to do, but that naïvely assumed a common, shared understanding of our reality upon which to base incontrovertible conclusions. Let me suggest something a bit more radical: the utter failure of the masses to grasp the immensity of the collapse story already unfolding around us while a few intrepid folks call bullshit on the substitute story offered by clever politicians, pundits, and marketeers — rhetoricians all — is equivalent to the divide between a poor, illiterate, itinerant farmer (or hunter or trapper) ca. 1780 and the Founders, a tiny group of landed gentry who were exceptionally well-educated men — Renaissance men, if you will, all having deep understanding of political and Enlightenment philosophy of the day. It must have been nearly impossible for the Founders to communicate effectively with the governed.

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Today, the situation is reversed: mouth-breathing populists are now governing and have seized upon the means to manipulate the masses through disinformation and misdirection. Further, popular leaders and opinion-makers refuse to hear and simply cannot understand what a wizened few are telling them, namely, that unsustainable practices of industrial civilization have reached fever pitch and will soon become a hellscape of our own creation. Like a Revolutionary Era agriculturist or outdoorsman, today’s populists (and the large portion of the population they reflect — who elect them, in fact) may possess narrow expertise at their individual endeavors. Yet ironically, they remain over specialized and cut off from broad intellectual traditions and are thus functionally illiterate. Similarly, the masses to whom they proselytize have at best limited command of reading and almost no critical thinking skills whatsoever. (We never even approached universal literacy, which is a gateway to erudition.) A liberal arts education is to them hollow and meaningless, they are fundamentally immune to what science instructs, and their heads are full of entertainments (e.g., superhero geekery and professional sports) and other distractions that block real knowledge and understanding gained through careful, sustained consideration of an array of sources and perspectives. Contrast them with folks who read voluminously, study trends and scientific reports, and draw conclusions from a wealth of evidence: the two groups might as well be speaking Mandarin and English for all the communication passing between them.

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My sense of the term populist should not be mistaken for leaders who embody the will of the people. That’s obviously not happening. The most basic function of government is to formulate policy and allocate funds to execute those policies. The graphic below shows top policy priorities over the past five years:

Well down the list is dealing with global warming (and I’m guessing the related complex of problems). Protecting the environment fares about 10–20 points better, as though it were a separate issue. What is most important to the public, however, are those things at which our leaders are failing the worst: the economy and jobs; terrorism; and education. Every administration and Congress initially pays ample lip service to priorities with wide public support but then diverts to a different agenda. This paragraph by Joel Hirschhorn captures the sort of populism now practiced.

With the Bush-corrosion of our Constitution and collapse of the economic system after it had been exploited by the rich and corrupt, what better time for revolution? Instead, we got a president with a glib tongue, a terrific smile and a deep commitment to the two-party plutocracy and corporate state. Obama is no populist, not even close. Nor is he a genuine reformer. At best, he is a master exploiter of populism.

It’s noteworthy that Hirschhorn saw through the B.S. five years ago.

A similar disconnect between public mandate and leadership is described in this Truthout article from 2011:

According to the latest poll conducted by CBS “60 Minutes” and the magazine Vanity Fair, 61 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on the wealthy as the primary way to cut the budget. The same poll finds that the second most popular first choice for cutting the nation’s budget deficit, at 20 percent, is cutting the military budget. That is, 81 percent of us — four out of five — would cut the deficit by taxing the rich and/or slashing military spending. Only four percent of those polled favored cutting Medicare … and only three percent favored cutting Social Security … A second poll, this time by CNN, reports that 63 percent of Americans oppose the US War in Afghanistan and want it ended. Only 35 percent say they support the war (now in its ninth year).

With such a disconnect stalling meaningful discussion before it begins, no wonder that controlling rhetoric is defined instead by funding (profit), celebrity (guru glorification, including green-washing types), and false solutionism. They are precisely the wrong kinds of issues, of course. The right kinds might involve the realization that…

  1. in an interconnected world, we all succeed and fail together in this life (there is no us and them anymore),
  2. the time has long passed for solutions and (an attempt at) mitigation is the next step, and
  3. moral choices about how we act in the time remaining us are of paramount importance once deteriorating conditions lead to widespread chaos.

Instead we get slick salesmanship to keep the economy humming (funneling capital to the top) and the masses calmed or blissed-out on gadgetry. We get not-so-behind-the-scenes preparations to cull and quarantine the population when the going gets rough. And we succumb to infighting among those who can’t achieve consensus about what’s to be done. Us and them to the bitter end.

Telling Stories

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by in Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Peak Oil

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One of the many recurring themes and ideas that appear at The Spiral Staircase is that the essential form taken by consciousness is story or narrative. Story enables us to orient ourselves in the world and make it somewhat intelligible. It should not be overlooked that it is we who tell ourselves stories, narrating life as we go via the inner voice no less than attending to the great stories that inform culture. The Bible is one such story (or collection of stories), though its message is interpreted with a scandalously high degree of controversy. (I’m especially intrigued by Paula Hay’s thesis over at Mythodrome that the story of The Fall is really about the loss of animism, not a literal expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The Tao Te Ching and the Qur’an are similar, one might even say, competing stories from other world cultures.) Story has taken on many forms throughout history, beginning with oral tradition. Setting epics in song and/or verse made them memorable, since fixed written forms came rather late in history (conceived in terms of tens of thousands of years). The appearance of books eroded oral tradition gradually, and the transition of the book into an everyday object after the invention of the printing press eventually helped undermine the authority of the Medieval Church, which housed libraries and trained clerics in the philosophical, ecclesiastical, and scientific (as it was then understood) interpretation of texts. Story continued its development in the Romantic novel and serial fiction, which attracted a mass audience. Today, however, with literacy in decline, cinema and television are the dominant forms of story.

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Many categories, types, and genres of story have evolved in fiction. Considering that story arcs typically progress from calm to conflict to resolution, the nature of conflict and the roles we are asked to assume through identification with characters (often archetypal) are a subtly effective vehicle for learning and mind control. Those whose minds have been most deeply and successfully infiltrated are often the same who argue vociferously in defense of a given story, no matter the evidence, with arguments playing out in political spheres and mass media alike. In addition to lighter fare such as RomComs and coming-of-age stories, both of which define not-yet-fully-formed characters through their solidifying relationships, we get hero/antihero/superhero, war, and dystopian tales, where characters tend to be chiseled in place, mostly unchanging as action and events around them take center stage. It is significant that in such tales of conflict, antagonists typically appear from outside: political opponents, foreigners and terrorists, aliens (from space), and faceless, nameless threats such as infectious disease that one might poetically regard as destiny or fate. They threaten to invade, transform, and destroy existing society, which must be defended at all cost even though, ironically, no one believes on a moment’s contemplation it’s really worth saving. Exceptionally, the antagonist is one of us, but an aberrant, outlying example of us, such as a domestic terrorist or serial killer. And while plenty of jokes and memes float around in public that we are often our own worst enemies, becoming the monsters we aim to defeat, stories that identify our full, true threat to ourselves and the rest of creation precisely because of who we are and how we now live are relatively few.

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In light of the story of industrial collapse, probably the biggest, baddest story of all time but which is only told and understood in fleeting glimpses, it occurred to me that at least two shows found in cinema and TV have gotten their basic stories mostly correct: The Matrix (predominantly the first film) and The Terminator (the TV show to a greater degree than the movie franchise). In both, a very few possess the truth: knowledge of our enslavement (actual or prospective) to machines of our own invention. Characters in the matrix may feel a sense of unease, of the projected reality being somehow off, but only a few take the notorious red pill and face reality in all its abject despair while most prefer the blue pill (or more accurately, no pill) and the blissful ignorance of illusion. Traveling back and forth between realities (one known to be quite false), the ultrachic glamor and superhero antics of the false reality are far, far more appealing than the dull, cold, grey reality without makeup, costumes, and enhanced fighting skills. Everyone behaves in the false reality with cool, almost emotionless confidence, whereas in the other reality everyone is strained to the breaking point by continuous stress at the threat of annihilation. In Terminator world, time travel enables a few to come back from the future, in the process spilling the beans about what happens after the Singularity, namely, that machines go on a rampage to kill humanity. The dominant emotion of the few initiates is again stress, which manifests as bunker mentality and constant battle readiness. Casualties are not limited to frayed nerves and strained civility, though; plenty of innocent bystanders die alongside those fighting to survive or forestall the future.

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Those are only stories, reflections of our preoccupations and diversions from the truth available to witness without needing a red pill. But reality is nonetheless a bitter pill to swallow, so few who become aware of the option to square up to it vs. ignore it really want the truth. I judge that most are still blissfully unaware an option exists, though evidence and supporting stories are everywhere to be found. For those of us unable to pretend or unknow what we now know, the appearance of stress, paranoia, self-abnegation, infighting, gallows humor, and nihilism run parallel to character traits in the Matrix and Terminator worlds. Through story, reconfigured as entertainment, we may indeed be working through some of our psychological issues. And we experience some of the same coming together and tearing apart that inevitably accompany the great events of history. But unlike the childish teaser in this CBS News story that the apocalypse has a date, the machinations of history, like death and extinction, are not strictly events but processes. The process we initiated unwittingly but then ignored is beginning its final crescendo. Stories we tell ourselves conventionally end with triumphal resolution, flatly ignoring the destruction left in their wake. I warn: do not look for triumph in the story of industrial collapse except in those tiny, anonymous moments of grace where suffering ends.

Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

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Let’s start with a quote from Wikepedia:

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependency on initial conditions in which a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane’s formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks earlier.

In the popular mind, which is arguably more heavily influenced by myth, fiction, and propaganda than by science (especially something as esoteric as chaos theory), the butterfly effect is often understood as a minor disturbance to a timeline resulting in a substantial divergence downstream. It’s an alteration from one likelihood or expectation to another one, typically carrying major impacts. We have no trouble believing in fates and destinies being fundamentally altered by arbitrary choices and happenstances. Hindsight sometimes even affords the opportunity to wonder what might have happened if one had zigged instead of zagged, knowing that every instant has the unbeknowst potential for a life-changing development. (What bus?) The foresight to recognize those linchpin moments escapes us most of the time, but we believe in them nonetheless.

My reason for bringing this up is to make the observation that with the biosphere now manifesting major impacts that are highly discontinuous from the historical record, we don’t really believe in the butterfly effect, or at least ignore/deny it. Minor perturbances, from population pressure to pollution to paving to purported prosperity, are frequently thought to be too tiny to affect something as large as the planet and its finely tuned systems. Yet ripples and eddies have accumulated over time and are now lapping shores like tsunamis, causing the face of the Earth to be quite different from its state, say, 250 years ago, before the fossil fuels era kicked off in earnest.

This week’s biggest news is a good case in point: an artic vortex has brought dangerously low temperatures and wind chills to North America. This phenonenon, where the mass of extremely cold air slides off its normal center at the North Pole, may not be entirely unknown in modern history, but its reappearance this week reminds us that small changes to the systems of the Earth’s thermal regulation can wreak substantial havok. (Please stop reporting the damage in terms of cost in dollars!) Further, in answer to the question, “Are these cold temps due to climate change?” at least this article at Common Dreams answers unequivocally “yes.” It argues that all weather events major and minor are now attributable to climate change because, like the fate or destiny aspect of the butterfly effect, we have embarked on a new timeline that diverges from a calmer, steadier state we might have enjoyed had we not made unwitting, wholesale alterations to the Earth’s climate systems. This is essentially the same argument made by Bill McKibben in The End of Nature way back in 1989, namely, that Nature (capital N) didn’t really exist anymore because humanity’s imprint is now everywhere: in the air, water, and soil. (Incidentally, this is the book that awakened me to ecological issues that in the ensuing 25 years have only grown progressively gloomier and doomier.) Put another way for the entertainment-bred masses, we now have the equivalent of J.J. Abrahm’s reboot of Star Trek TOS with a new timeline, offering the opportunity to depart from canon as desired. The major difference is that, in our reality, we can only project and extrapolate how it would have been had we not messed everything up — except to say that it wouldn’t have been, well, nearly so messed up.

From my home and workplace in Chicago, it’s been curious to see how people have responded to the extreme cold. Fashion has been displaced in favor of function, with men and women on the street mummified under multiple layers to the point they look like the Michelin Man. Traffic (air, train, bus, automobiles) has not ground to a complete halt but it’s been slowed to a crawl, with many cancellations, delays, and accidents. The huddled masses (read: the homeless and unhoused) are congregating unapologeticaly in warming locations (public buildings such as libraries, underground pedways, on public transportation, etc.) to avoid the very real threat of freezing to death. Nonetheless, several freezing deaths have already been reported. School and business closures kept many at home, with many others calling in to complain of their inability to get to work. Four days of snow just prior to the extreme cold snap has everything covered in snow and ice, and plumes of water vapor behind every vehicle and over every building testify to the ongoing maintenance of an inside/outside temperature delta of 80+ deg. F. In addition, everything is encrusted in salt, which inevitably gets tracked indoors.

The look and feel of this experience may not yet be apocalyptic, but the sense of hunkering down to endure, if not survive, is palpable. Most individuals are cooperative and aware of others facing the same difficulties, but there are always a few douchebags arguing and pushing their way forward as though no one else matters. Such idiots turn out to be yet another part of the entire package to be tolerated, though my suspicion is that worsening conditions in repeat events will eventually lead to intolerance, violence, and mayhem. It’s a sneak peek, perhaps, of what many of us expect when collapse of services and utilities, financial institutions, and infrastructure impacts all of us directly, like the weather is impacting us this week.

Gulf of Despond

24 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by in Climate Change

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Newcomers to the subject of industrial collapse have a lot of catch-up to do behind those in the vanguard. If the abundant evidence, collected over several decades by this late date but foreseen long ago, is evaluated honestly and soberly, the realization might reasonably stun the collapse ingénue into silence. But in the era of instantaneous communications, emotional promiscuity, oversharing, and careerist news reports logged in real time (before events are fully known), who has the good sense to refrain from adding one’s idiotic voice to the din — especially to ask questions and subsequently provide answers that have already been gone over thoroughly and discarded by others? None too many, I venture to say.

Having struggled to understand industrial collapse now for six years or so myself, it has been curious and demoralizing to witness how even the most hopeful optimists and problem-solvers have yielded to the conclusion that what solutions may have existed some decades ago are now long behind us. Given the nature of our institutions and individual characters, we’re actually accelerating toward doom rather than braking. Thus, old-timers often descend into what might be called a Slough of Despond, but collapse newbies still desperate to cheat reality would rather name it a Gulf of Despond. To the old guard, the Slough looks like an abyss, a black hole, a bottomless pit that gobbles insatiably all energies dumped into it. To late-comers, the Gulf, by virtue of its spin-doctored name, must be somehow manageable, bridgeable, traversible, often with a glorious opportunity to establish a new, utopian social order (within a generation, of course, because that’s how history works) using all the wisdom we’ve accrued about imbalances and abuses of power. I have some empathy for those just now getting on board, but for those with a pulpit from which to preach, I suspect misdirecting our energies may be worse than just letting things unfold. Hard to know.

So what exactly produces the Slough/Gulf? The short course is that we’re already in the midst of an epoch-changing shift — a process advancing with alarming celerity compared to precedence found in the geological record — due to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases (released from burnt fossil fuels) that have initiated climate change and the sixth great extinction event, to which we humans are most certain to fall prey. Without bothering to assess blame, the numbers indicate that it is not something about to happen; it’s already in the process of happening and will only get successively worse as delayed effects and feedback loops come fully into play. Let me repeat: this is already happening and there can be no pullback, pullout, stall, or reverse. The worst case scenario is, well, the worst, and we appear to be on track to spring that trap on ourselves. Three foreseeable planet-wide effects are (1) runaway global warming and climate chaos, (2) collapse of the biosphere (basically, anything that lives except for a few extremophiles), and (3) total irradiation from hundreds of nuclear sites that will melt down after being left unattended.

But because the future has not yet happened, though it is laid out before us with inevitability if one is honest, all the preferred hedges and escape hatches in language are utilized (might, could, perhaps, potential, possible, probable, likely, etc.) about what’s occurring all around us. No doubt this quells panic that would ensue if a credible voice began telling the truth, but it also prevents adoption of moral choices still available to us for taking our leave gracefully while demonstrating some concern for the rest of creation. That would be for me the most global moral choice, but there are others far more specific. For instance, we could stop the mad, greedy hustle for more — power, riches, resources, extravagance — and instead live modestly so that those who follow in our wake before the end of it all have something other than abject misery and desperation. We could stop inflicting utterly tortuous lives in cages, feedlots, and industrial barns on animals that eventually become our McNuggets, Whoppers, and bacon. We could share what we have with those truly in need rather than hoarding, doing so without self-serving expectations. We could ease suffering and mistreatment inflicted on others by the pursuit of ever-greater efficiency and profit. We could stop doubling down on all the schemes and antisocial values that have landed us, knowingly or not, in a death spiral. Lots of options out there.

However, again, given our nature, we seem intent on ending none of the stupidity, profligacy, and cruelty done by us, on our behalf, or with our complicity at least partly because Judeo-Christian values that inform industrial capitalism are still revered as sacred. (This is why the radical right has been attacking the center right — including St. Ronnie — for not being righteous doctrinaire enough. It knows its vision of salvation is broken but doubles down in desperation to validate itself.) The most important individual choice, considering our powerlessness to put a stop to the industrial juggernaut and those very real hatchetmen who perpetuate it, may be simply to do our best to understand the world that history has delivered us, represent the truth as well as possible, and go forward while we can with clear eyes and conscience. That means treating others, both villains and victims in this living nightmare, with compassion rather than universal condemnation.

This may be just about the darkest view out there, and it gives me pain to express it, just as all doomers out there struggle with what to do with their awful foreknowledge, but it’s not nihilistic. It’s not Charleton Heston at the end of one of the Planet of the Apes movies saying, essentially, “fuck it” and triggering the ΑΩ Bomb. Rather, honorable moral choices in the face of self-annihilation offers an opportunity to achieve one last, satisfying bit of grace that helps ease the pain of knowing what humans have done to the planet.

Living Double Lives

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

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“The parasite, as any other living thing, aims to reproduce as much as possible, and therefore, exploiting its environment as much as possible. This does not mean that the further exploitation of the host will help to achieve reproductive success of the parasite.”
~ Claude Combes, L’Art d’Être Parasite (loosely translated from french)

The question has been propounded and answered numerous times: “Are we (humans) any smarter than yeast?” The reluctant answer is usually, “No, not really.” Sure, yeast (pl.) possess no consciousness or awareness so far as we can tell, but that may not be a good measure of smarts, it turns out. The salient point of comparison is that yeast consume their environment/habitat/medium until it’s overpopulated and depleted, at which point they die en masse. We’re doing the very same, though it’s taking a long time and we’re not quite done yet. Maybe ionizing radiation from nuclear Armageddon of one sort or another (who’s still watching Fukushima?) will get us before we destroy our own habitat with pollution and anthropogenic climate change (not that nuclear fallout isn’t also destroying our habitat), maybe not. Identical result either way.

A master narrative to explain everything eludes us. True believers are probably content with the idea that god’s will reigns supreme and that, in all his benevolence, he will continue to provide. That’s a comforting fable many have chased into their graves. Those of us bent toward a system of belief based more on evidence see a different future, not so much potential as inevitable.

I realized recently that many of us live double lives: (1) the one we present to our families, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, employers, etc. who have not yet countenanced the idea of collapse honestly for a variety of reasons and (2) the one we sense deep down and are compelled out of a mixture of grief, horror, despair, and commiseration to share in venues like this one. But there’s another kind of dual life that interests me: the life of the body vs. the life of the mind.

Living in Our Bodies

I’ve written before about satiety signals, which basically says that, like yeast, we can’t stop the habit of endless, needless, mindless consumption. We’re insatiable. From there, it may be worth noting the five basic life functions (recycling content from this post):

    • growth — living beings grow and develop
    • respiration — they breathe and respire
    • reproduction — they reproduce offspring
    • nutrition — they eat food
    • excretion — they eliminate wastes from the body

A more fully elaborated list goes like this:

    • obtaining and changing materials into forms an organism can use
    • taking in food from the environment
    • breakdown of complex food materials into forms the organism can use
    • elimination of indigestible material
    • process by which substances are taken into the cells of an organism
    • process by which materials are distributed (moved) throughout the organism
    • release of chemical energy from certain nutrients
    • chemical combination of simple substances to form complex substances
    • incorporation of materials into the body of an organism
    • increase in size
    • process by which cells become specialized for specific functions
    • removal of metabolic wastes
    • process by which organisms maintain a stable internal environment
    • process by which organisms produce new organisms of their own kind
    • the sum total of all the chemical reactions occurring within the cells of an organism

We live to eat, reproduce, and eventually die — all basic functions of the body. In our current ‘Age of Abundance’, those of use hanging out on computers probably have our life-preserving bodily needs met and aren’t scrambling to stave off dehydration and starvation the way those living at the edges do. We easily forget, then, that our bodies fail rather quickly without continued inputs: in a couple minutes without air, in a few days without water, and in a few weeks without food. Thus, when fed and clothed and housed satisfactorily (not that we stop consuming there), we easily lose touch with the life of the body and believe — mistakenly, comically, tragically, take your pick — that we can live in our heads.

Living in Our Heads

As a social species, humans also have certain psychosocial needs that must be met. Failures tend not to be as immediately obvious as when bodily needs go unmet, but results are no less dramatic: individuals run off the rails (drug- and alcohol-related self-destruction, psychosis, violent rampages, suicide, etc.) and societies (if you recognize human collectives as a superorganism) become embroiled in madness. When exactly society/civilization first went mad is probably a matter of opinion (some might suggest, for instance, the French Terror), but in the modern industrial era, I suggest that World War One is the conflict that broke us psychologically. We’ve never really recovered. Follow-on wars (World War Two, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Afghanistan and Iraq (undeclared), and the so-called War on Terror) have all consumed the energies and economies of the world’s superpowers without entirely clear benefits, except perhaps for WWII, which at least ended the Holocaust and for a time stopped Fascism.

Wholesomeness is not a term one could use fairly to describe the attributes of modern American culture, not anymore (if indeed ever). We now live in a Society of Spectacle, and electronics in particular enable omnipresent connection to a firehose-style information feed: pure, indiscriminate volume pointed at everyone all the time. And if ever there were an embodiment of a bottomless pit, an insatiable appetite, our consumption of information is it. Seriously, how many broadcast and cable channels are there, all competing at the juvenile game of made-you-look? Even those of us here at Collapse have what might be called a “spectacular” view of the proceedings.

The Compulsive Explainer has an interesting albeit brief post called “Information Overload as an Addiction” suggesting that our preoccupation with entertainment, especially the electronic sorts (radio, cinema, television, Internet), is for the masses equivalent to giving away one’s mind. Information insatiability has become an addiction, and like political junkies, the media-saturated middle mind of the masses cannot perceive reality through what’s projected by the media at the bidding of cultural, corporate, and political leaders who would keep us calmed and buying. Instead, we live (temporarily) within a giant fiction, a phantasmagoria if you will, nearly a virtual reality, from which there is scarcely an escape even for those who can see the bubble (always from the inside, of course — after all, we’re on computers). While the story continues to be spun, our attention is riveted and our compliance coerced. But never fear: the life of the body will triumph eventually, though only in the negative sense.

History Has Gone Vertical

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

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This blog is cross-posted at The Spiral Staircase. Feel free to comment here or there.

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To orient oneself in life, a person chooses from among myriad narratives, typically assembling a hodgepodge worldview out of diverse parts. According to Oswald Spengler, cultural artifacts (e.g., the arts, humanities, and sciences) arise “needing the guidance of inspiration and … developing under great conventions of form.” The very same can be said of our origin and orientation stories, ancient or contemporary. Narratives intertwine and need not necessarily be discrete, mutually exclusive, or competing, even though that’s what’s often implied by time-worn tensions underlying science vs. religion, sometimes understood more philosophically as logos vs. mythos. Indeed, they cohere despite conflicts of logic and their being ahistorical. The power of subscription and consensus overcomes all objections.

If a master narrative exists, it ought to be simply reality obtained, though that is probably visible to only a small percentage of people able to apprehend the world clearly. For the rest, scales not yet having fallen from the eyes, the considerable benefit of hindsight can help clarify the view, but only if one has sufficient nerve to behold it honestly. Instead, our dominant inspirational narratives promulgate a wide variety of incompletely fulfilled hopes and desires. Few such promises bear much resemblance to reality, those of economists, politicians, and clerics demonstrating the most striking discontinuities from the actuality experienced by ordinary folks. A Chris Hedges article at TruthDig.com called “The Folly of Empire” discusses this departure from reality in his characteristically erudite style (apologies for the long nested quote):

… absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking. “The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. “We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

I don’t usually lump into the mix entertainers, sports figures, gurus hawking self-help books and programs, or media pundits offering half-baked analyses because only idiots expect truth from them, but perhaps I should include them considering their stranglehold on the public’s wasted attention. Most of today’s media-driven narratives rely on conventions, gestures, and rhetoric that are notoriously predigested and therefore immediately swallowed by the guffawing crowd, disinviting additional analysis or careful consideration. This bears a curious family resemblance with intellectual conditions that sparked the Reformation. Further, because such mediated (or should I say medieval?) content is composed largely of fiction, pageantry, and untethered conjecture, no time is needed for the narrative to actualize. Hope functions in the present tense and requires no closure.

Perhaps the quintessential inspirational narrative was trotted out by the Obama campaign back in 2008, which relied on promises (empty, we later found out) to fulfill everyone’s desire for a better life, calling on hope and change to achieve those promises. Another religious hope narrative promises to enhance one’s afterlife, earned in earthly realms through achievements in social justice and the judgment of posterity. Both adopt time-honored conventions and are part of what is described in Morris Berman’s book Wandering God as the ascent tradition. Significant among those conventions is orientation along a vertical axis as seen, for instance, in easy acceptance of the legitimacy of hierarchy (and therefore egregious power, wealth, and class stratification and imbalance) and a longing for transfiguration, transcendence, and communion with god (or the gods) above.

Looking back across history, evidence of “progress” and growth is legion. However, most of those achievements are demographic, material, and technological, each having their unique and unintended blowback. What’s notably lacking as we sally forth into the 21st century is the ability to transcend our own base nature, which is characterized by corruption, violence, stupidity, short-term gratification, and inability to achieve the utopian dreams that populate the minds of many despots. So that same history is marked by downturns and setbacks. One might even say that the overall upward trend of history is pockmarked by periodic scars. Still, nothing just yet has stalled the hubris of history rising (unless domestic peak oil in the 1970s and global peak oil a few years back prove to have been among the first of a series of turning points). And judging from blog traffic and commentary, the steady stream of negative assessments in scientific literature, and news reports telling of weather and ecological calamities with increasing frequency and severity, awareness is beginning to dawn on even the most congenital optimists (plus some fools and the average ignoramus) that what goes up must eventually come down. Since history has gone vertical, hard limits must eventually assert themselves.

The plethora of charts, tables, graphs, and infographics that evidence not just rising trends but verticality is frankly astonishing. Sometimes a gradually ascending slope is observable within a short timeframe, such as receding glacial ice documented in Chasing Ice. Other times it takes long traces of historical, evolutionary, or even geological time to observe. Even short timeframes often conceal effects that lie handily beyond normal perception, but we luckily have scientists trained to recognize short- and long-term trends. Too bad they’re uniformly ignored and/or pilloried by a public spoon fed the blandishments of corporate marketing and political propaganda. Typically, ascending curves (whether geometric, logarithmic, or exponential) don’t appear to be walls (limits) when viewed from the far left or from within a narrow time band, meaning microscopically close. Zoom out or to the right, however, and the trend pointed into the stratosphere is readily apparent, such as in the following video (animation) of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere:

Similar x-y coordinate graphs showing, for instance, energy use per capita and human population growth demonstrate the same trajectory but at much briefer durations. Trendlines are mathematical abstractions, like fiat currency being printed into existence. At some point, gravity takes hold and drags everything back to earth (reality), though that eventuality can be forestalled for a surprisingly long time. The return trip down various vertical trends is approaching ever more quickly as lift skyward fizzles like an Icarus nightmare. Or in the case of atmospheric carbon, we can’t stop the rising trend we unwittingly initiated from blowing through the roof and rendering the earth uninhabitable.

It’s often said there is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole. Presented with the likelihood or certainty of battlefield death, holdouts succumb and cash the eternal-life insurance card of a last-minute profession of faith. Same as death-bed conversions. Thousands of years of philosophy and religion might prepare us to face our inevitable demise if we bothered to learn anything worthwhile besides how to make money, and yet in all our frailty, many of us cannot accept that our final departure is merely a fact of life, not a gateway or journey to somewhere else. (Um, opinions vary on this, obviously.) The final departure of Homo sapiens sapiens is even harder to contemplate.

So what foxhole moment awaits us? Here’s one: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in late September 2013 a publication by Working Group I of the Fifth Assessment Report, which presents the underlying physical science behind climate change (used to be called global warming). The IPCC website states that “The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is being released in four parts between September 2013 and November 2014. It will be the most comprehensive assessment of scientific knowledge on climate change since 2007 when Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was released.” Preparation of these reports has been ongoing for decades already, and the difficulty of their assemblage assures that they’re already out of date at the time they’re released. Being the work of governments, AR5 is also reputed to be remarkably conservative in its conclusions, as contrasted with prophesying near-term human extinction (NTE or NTHE) as those of us unconstrained by geopolitics have begun to do (mostly taking our cues from Guy McPherson of Nature Bats Last). That’s not a gambit for attention, BTW. It’s about a soul-destroying a realization as there is, and no one comes to admit it easily.

The likelihood of anyone plunging into the 2216 pages of this first of four parts of AR5 is, well, dismal. One could easily level the accusation that the IPCC is burying its findings behind pages and pages (and pages) of prefatory material; acknowledgements; missing or incomplete figures, tables, and citations (to be inserted when?); technical and executive summaries; glossaries; references; and dry obfuscation. That’s not really the case, though; the data and discussion are abundant and available for anyone capable of deciphering it. Technical and scientific analysis and discussion is exactly what Working Group I delivers in these chapters:

  1. Introduction
  2. Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
  3. Observations: Ocean
  4. Observations: Cryosphere
  5. Information from Paleoclimate Archives
  6. Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles
  7. Clouds and Aerosols
  8. Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing
  9. Evaluation of Climate Models
  10. Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional
  11. Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability
  12. Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility
  13. Sea Level Change
  14. Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change

I downloaded the report and sought something succinct to quote, such as an answer to the question “Just how fucked are we, anyway?” but the technical summaries proceed with this sort of dry, useless, blank, uninformative text:

The primary purpose of this Technical Summary is to provide the link between the complete assessment of the multiple lines of independent evidence presented in the 14 chapters of the main report and the highly condensed summary prepared as the WGI Summary for Policymakers. The Technical Summary thus serves as a starting point for those readers who seek the full information on more specific topics covered by this assessment. This purpose is facilitated by including pointers to the chapters and sections where the full assessment can be found. Policy-relevant topics, which cut across many chapters and involve many interlinked processes in the climate system, are presented here as Thematic Focus Elements, allowing rapid access of this information.

The WGI Summary for Policymakers is not contained within the larger report but both can be found at this link. It’s unclear how much of the report was used in preparation of this story at National Geographic, but the story provides five takeaways from WGI:

    • On the extreme weather front, the report concludes it is “very likely” that cold days and nights have decreased, while warm days and nights have increased, since 1950 …
    • The oceans have warmed with “virtual certainty,” the report concludes, at a rate of about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.11 Celsius) per decade since 1970 in the upper 246 feet (75 meters) of surface water …
    • What about those polar bears? Sea ice (as well as glaciers and ice sheets) has declined overall since 1970 …
    • Sea level rise has happened, and will happen in the future, as a result of global warming, the report finds …
    • More than half of the global warming observed since 1950 has a human cause, largely from the greenhouse gas effects of gases such as carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels ….

The ellipses indicate brief discussion behind each takeaway. The conclusions are hedged, of course, relying on observations of what’s happened so far and omitting extrapolation of trends that go vertical. Even the three levels of confidence communicate not certainty of our fate (exact details TBD) but hope that projections are subject to change or we can do something to reverse things or at least forestall the worst. Like IPCC, National Geographic is yet to have its foxhole moment even though the evidence is staring them ghoulishly in the face. If one is at all engaged in this subject, I suppose it makes sense to stay hunched in the hole chain-smoking cigarettes and making do with what meager rations and sleep are available. My sneaking suspicion is that the go order will come quickly enough to catch lots of shivering, quivering, wavering souls before they get to their last eternal hope. In the meantime, the fat lady is singing, the coal-mine canary has expired, pigs are flying, and hell has frozen over. We’re vertical against the wall, facing the firing squad, and what’s left to do, though no one knows just quite when, is to get horizontal.

The Point of Focus

08 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by in Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex

≈ 65 Comments

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This blog entry is cross-posted at The Spiral Staircase.

Many traditional cultures regard the heart, situated at the center of the torso, as the body’s principal organ, having special processing powers directed to emotion. A heart-felt sensation is regarded as irreducible truth because emotions can’t be wrong. Indeed, the passions, as emotions are also called in their extremity, are something to be harnessed as motivation, at least until they run afoul and have to be restrained. For instance, a charismatic can inspire or inflame the passions and lead people along unwise paths.

In the modern industrial world, however, the eye and the perceptual faculty it provides has usurped the heart as the principal organ, at least in terms of cognition (ignoring the fact that the brain is the actual processor). The primacy of vision can even be seen (read: understood) in terms used to describe two major eras in Western history: The Dark Ages and The Enlightenment. Such visual metaphors stretch much further back in time, but the emergence from darkness into the light — the overarching story of modernity, religious salvation, and techno-utopianism — is clearly a central feature of Western thinking. For example, in the late 18th century, the U.S. incorporated symbology tracing back to Egyptian antiquity, namely, The Eye of Providence, into the Great Seal of the United States, which even now is displayed on currency shown at left (detail from the one dollar bill). It is noteworthy that, similar to emotional emanations of the heart, the eye is depicted with rays or beams shooting out in all directions, suggesting its other name, The All-Seeing Eye, its view being omnidirectional. That the function of the eye could be understood as both a receiver/processor and projector was apparently well-known long before modern physics revealed that the observer influences the observed by the mere act of observation.

Another version, one of many, actually, can be seen at right. Think of the eye’s function as the light on a miner’s hat, illuminating whatever the wearer brings into view. Much more than the heart, which is responsive and far less prone to intentional direction, the eye can cast its view upon whatever one elects at any moment, bringing the observed into awareness, into the mind, and into focus. (It’s no surprise then that poor eyesight — poor focus — makes for fuzzy thinking. Those who can’t see well uncorrected have diminished powers of observation.) This metaphor may be more accurate than the all-seeing eye for an important reason: a large percentage of information gathered by the eye is discarded. The eye’s narrow point of focus is a relatively small portion of the entire visual field; the rest is peripheral. If this were not so, conscious awareness would be subject to stimulus overload from just one perceptual channel. Other senses compete for attention (especially kinethesia), further limiting what can be brought into conscious awareness at any one time. This limitation is sometimes called the bandwidth of consciousness, a sort of built-in bottleneck. 

Another telling expression of the eye’s power of projection is found in the superhero genre, where good guys and bad guys alike frequently possess the ability to shoot lasers, x-rays, or power rays from their eyes. Everyone has experienced the similar if less hoary effect of a withering look (or the hairy eyeball), which may signal an underlying emotional state but is understood more commonly as an aggressive or intimidating behavior. With superpower eyebeams, eyelines drawn into illustrations connecting the viewers to objects of interest (familiar dotted lines used to track the viewer’s gaze) are thus amplified into beams of intense destructive power. The source of the power is unclear, as with most superpowers, but the fact that it is delivered by a look is an indication of the mythical power behind the eyes, which is known poetically as the window to the soul. 

It is not a difficult stretch to suggest that directionality, whether omnidirectional or pinpoint, also brings the world into being in the sense meant by New Age gurus and adherents to theories of quantum reality. At a more mundane level, each of us pursues interests that appeal to us and gain familiarity and expertise accordingly. Subjects that sustain one’s interest and focus are often later distorted through professional bias and cherry-picking support, as when a religious person turns to scripture for justification or a scientist relies solely on data to substantiate an argument or theory. This is also what’s meant by the old saw that to someone holding a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail to be pounded down. After a fashion, tools of thought can become weapons.

One could easily dismiss all this as mere perspectival diversity, where some interpret the world in one fashion while others take different approaches. However, I intuit that something deeper is going on, namely, that a sort of blindness develops when one learns how to see the world primarily or even exclusively from one perspective. Everything can’t be illuminated at once, so where one turns one’s attention and the habits of mind that develop from focused expertise can render the viewer/thinker fundamentally blind to other valid interpretations. More specifically, to the capitalist, the wholesale commodification of human activity as well as the world’s resources makes it so that the only possible view is in terms of money and/or profits. Such folks aren’t starry-eyed dreamers, they’re dollar-eyed gluttons. And to them, collateral effects such as increasing class tensions, social upheaval (and eventual regime/institutional collapse), pollution, resource degradation (e.g., overfishing or soil depletion), and climate change lie outside their scope/view, making denial easy to assert without lying outright. This doesn’t excuse conscientious blindness to reality, but if one is ever dumbfounded that others can’t see what seems glaringly obvious, this explanation might being to shed some light on why.

Addendum: Even in the portion of the blogosphere taking collapse as its subject, bloggers adopt highly idiosyncratic approaches that fit their styles, interests, and expertise. For an incomplete survey, let me summarize a few. (I could be wrong about some of these. Don’t hesitate to correct me.)

  • At The Collapse of Industrial Civilization, the focus seems to be chronicling the onset of collapse with copious citation of news reports and other blog entries. The news is sometimes cited as support when a summary or report of a scientific finding, but more often, the news is soundly derided because journalists in the MSM are obviously carrying water for the military-industrial-corporate complex.
  • At The Spiral Staircase, though not solely a doomblog, the focus lies with causes and available responses (even if only in attitude) related to the culture surrounding or giving rise to eventual collapse.
  • At Clusterfuck Nation, the focus is on exposing corruption at the heart of empire, with a healthy self-awareness on the part of the blogger and reticence to engage commentators in dialogue.
  • At now-defunct Deer Hunting with Jesus, the approach was a wickedly colorful combination of memoir and explanation of the redneck perspective, which accounts for a surprising percentage of the population that barely had a voice in the conversation until Joe Bageant appeared.
  • At Dark Ages America, the focus is chronicling the waning of empire, with special attention paid to the utter stupidity of the American public and mining cultural history for reasons how Americans in particular got to be such corrupt and incompetent buffoons.
  • At Nature Bats Last, with diverse content, many guest bloggers, and a robust commentariat, the focus is wide-angle, with the result that NBL is often in the vanguard with respect to recognizing developments and drawing sound conclusions.
  • At How to Save the World, the focus has shifted from organizing grass-roots, transitional, and intentional communities to a full-on retreat into inner life following the recognition that absolutely nothing is going to prepare us for or stem the tide coming in.
  • At TomDispatch.com, the focus lies with nonmainstream reporting on mostly American politics and society.
  • At TruthDig, commondreams, and elsewhere, (specifically) Chris Hedges reports primarily on political and military corruption and scandal.
  • At Club Orlov, the focus lies with comparisons to previous regime collapses and prepping.
  • At The Automatic Earth, the focus lies with financial analysis in light of anticipated upheavals.

There are many other blogs and bloggers who go unmentioned, but it’s clear that a huge amount of information is out there, hand-picked and curated from a variety of perspectives. In addition, the comments section behind each, if not populated by trolls and deniers, are often as worthwhile as the posts themselves. An odd sense of community comes from connecting (virtually) with others who share a perspective that still eludes the so-called great unwashed masses, who are still gorging themselves (typically through debt spending) on the bounty of the modern age. Whether by innate character or conditioning, some of us never required much by way of convincing. The science and larger historical trajectory becomes fundamentally clear upon even modest inquiry. Chronicling our descent only reinforces conclusions reached intellectually, namely, that the path before us is unavoidable. Dissenters may assert that conclusion is pessimistic, defeatist, fatalistic, or nihilistic (is there a continuum for negativity?), but with so much going wrong with the world, evidence overwhelms denial.

In Search of … Solutions

12 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot

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One of many aphorisms about problemsolving goes something to the effect that the first step to finding a solution is proper identification of the problem. The redneck version of this is, “Well, that there’s yer problem!” as though all problems were duh! obvious. Both presuppose the existence of the problem and an eventual solution, getting cart and horse, chicken and egg, cause and effect, and other teleological dialectics hopelessly mixed up. If you’re a business guru, an image consultant, a press agent, a campaign manager, an ad man, a lobbyist, or a lawyer, you can simply sidestep redefine problems as work to be done, an opportunity to seek profit, or a messaging issue, any of which causes mouth-breathers to go chasing after misdirection, much like an errant charge of racism completely derails rational thought. Those with a few still-functioning synapses are more likely too gobsmacked by your own idiocy to retain focus. Same result.

Inside the Beltway — a proxy for the halls of power distributed predominantly along the East Coast and populated by an insane clown posse coterie of one-percenters who truly do regard setbacks as profitable opportunities in disguise — the preferred term is optics, meaning that any given problem is really only about visual appearance, and even then, only so long as it stays in the public’s fickle viewfinder. Thus, we get meaningless canards such as “clean coal” and “energy independence” that fly in the face of, oh I dunno, physical reality? We also get the impossible levitating act of fiat currency and indeed the entire growth paradigm. Yes, the growth paradigm, stated here accurately and succinctly as “grow or die.” Alternatives probably don’t include a steady state, frequently greenwashed as sustainability, because all species expand and contract their populations according to available food/energy. That’s just basic biology, and homo sapiens are crowning proof of it ever since we figgered out how to exploit ancient sun-blood in the form of fossil fuels and went into full-blown population overshoot. Well, let me suggest, that there’s yer problem!

The problem begs for a solution, of course, but aye here’s the rub: all things have their moment, and ours is running out. Our civilization will inevitably join those before that have sputtered and spluttered out (though ours probably has a few loud bangs left in it), and far and away sooner than expected, homo sapiens will join the pantheon of species to fall into the dustbin of evolutionary history, meaning quite plainly that we go extinct. That’s a whole different sort of existential crisis from the one that defines (among others) the human condition: præscientiam mortem or foreknowledge of death.

Lest anyone believe that this is a new problem, let me point out that from at least the beginnings of monotheism millennia ago, the response has been the same: launch a public relations campaign and adopt new optics. For the Christian faithful, that means being saved from death and delivered to eternal bliss in the company of god. For the Islamic faithful, the afterlife specified by the Quran — at least for male martyrs — is 72 virgin maidens in paradise. (Female martyrs can expect to find their husbands in paradise, which sounds like a cruel joke to Westerners.) Maybe that’s not so bad, except that the mutual exclusivity of such dogma guarantees that they are in fact just publicity, grappling with the problem of perception. Who’da thunk, then, that atheism, which calmly insists that this life, here and now in all its earthly manifestations and embodiments, is the real show, the only show in fact, so let’s try to do it right and equitably and with what integrity can be mustered, who’da thunk that atheism would turn out to be a better expression of humanity than the various rape-and-plunder-the-earth, go-forth-ye-and-multiply versions of faith?

The Nature of Mankind

04 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by in Empire, Intro, Pollution

≈ 10 Comments

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Xraymike was kind enough to invite me to post on this site as a collaborator, and I don’t want to delay too long before putting something up. Although I have ideas to pursue, my limited time prevents me from collecting my thoughts and publishing blog posts with much frequency. So what I have to offer with this introductory post is short and derivative, fitting perhaps for the weekend funnies.

I was hipped to an animator, Steve Cutts, whose style and content appeals to my way of thinking. In his video animation, he reveals humanity to be pretty hideous in the way we treat the natural world (ours to kill, consume, and trash at will). Yet we remain blithely unperturbed right up to the end, when we get stomped flat like the bug at the beginning:

Cutts has other animations and media at his website with similar themes. The mixture of truly baleful criticism and jokey tone, with mildly to extremely distorted caricatures, makes them entertaining yet simultaneously hard to watch. But we have a vicarious, narcissistic, rubbernecking streak in us, so it’s doubtful anyone will look away to preserve their innocence (if anyone can be said to have any left).

Whereas many websites absorbed by industrial collapse rely on some combination of scientific reports, journalism, argument, and activism as source material, I tend to go instead for arts and letters, which contribute a dimension lacking in less creative endeavors. Indeed, if the arts are in some fashion an ongoing search for ourselves, expressing our innermost natures and dreams, the sad realization that we’re monsters enacting our own worst nightmares is not a perspective available to most types of people, excepting artists and perhaps political and military leaders.