Stage one – Wild (Authentic) Human: Humans, as unique individuals in intimate relationship with other unique individuals, creatively accommodating the demands and opportunities of the natural and social environments they inhabit.
Stage two – Domesticated Human: Humans as a conquering and colonizing labor force organized according to hierarchically structured power relations and applied in ways specifically designed to propagate and intensify the power structures themselves.
Stage three – Mechanized Human: Humans as standardized and disposable servomechanisms in an intensely violent globally-expansive geopolitical machine.
Stage four – Nutritive Human: Culturally and psychologically homogenized humans as a digestible source of economic energy to fuel an insatiable planet-consuming leviathan.
From inside a building that once housed a Catholic-run Indian cultural genocide school in NW Indiana
It’s probably time we clear the air of a few things.
First, if you only pay attention to the ridiculous political theater in the brazenly commercialized popular media, then you might not realize that we are deep into a planet-wide crisis of unprecedented magnitude and scope. It is not hyperbole to say that we are completely fucked. In fact, to say that we are completely fucked is a gross understatement.
Global warming isn’t just a series of news-worthy weather events or an excuse to buy an electric car. The largest mass extinction in 66 million years isn’t just a fun fact to share on social media. The irradiating of the oceans and atmosphere doesn’t just mean it’s probably time to upgrade those old rusty nuclear power plants. The industrial sterilization of land and the chemical toxification of rivers aren’t just the temporary price of progress. Overlapping zoonotic pandemics are not just a natural side effect of our biological vulnerability to disease.
These things are all part and parcel of the same mounting and overwhelming and unstoppable catastrophe, a catastrophe that is an unavoidable consequence of how we are being forced to live, a crisis that is synonymous with modern global industrial civilization. To deny this basic truth is the delusional equivalent of believing the Earth is flat and the global economy is under the control of a secret cabal of alien lizards.
Second, despite self-promotional corporate hype and mollifying government propaganda, innovations in science and technology won’t save us from the intensifying crisis. Science and technology are the proximal source of the problem to begin with. Science and technology are directly responsible for climate change. Their collective results have been sending two hundred unique species into extinction each day. They are the reason the oceans and atmosphere are radioactive. The industrial processes they make possible are precisely the ones toxifying the rivers and sterilizing the land. There is no convincing evidence, historical or otherwise, that science and technology can do anything other than make things even worse than they are. And it is absurd to think that the cure is to just add more of the poison that is making us sick.
Third, if you are seeking a cure, if you are looking for a solution that allows civilization to continue intact, prepare to be disappointed because you aren’t going to find one. The most uncomfortable truth of all is that there is no solution to the catastrophe of civilization. The thoughtforms lurking behind the search for solutions are the very ones responsible for the perpetuation and intensification of the crisis.
This leaves us with a single burning question, the only question that really matters: What do we do about it?
