Quote Of The Year. And The Next. And the One After
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I very rarely read back any of the essays I write. But maybe that’s not always a good thing. Especially when they deal with larger underlying issues b
[See the full post at: Quote Of The Year. And The Next. And the One After]Such a good essay and so so true. When you said “this is because we – inadvertently – allow the more psychopathic among us to play an outsize role in our societies” it made me think how the old fashioned word that the word “psychopath” replaced was a much better description of such people. The condition used to be called “moral insanity”.
I see no, zero, nada reason for optimism. Optimism is an infantile failure to recognize the reality of day to day life on planet earth. Infantilism is the curriculum of modern education; the end product of 12 years of forced education.
Being a hearing human who also can read makes it doubly difficult to fight off the onslaught of lies designed to keep “us” in the system. And pliant subservience as well.
See it or don’t; it no longer matters, except on an individual/personal basis…“Punctuated Equilibrium” is the evolutionary model where resources feed an expansion and mixing of genetic traits in “good times”, then select the most successful combinations in “bad times” of 90% die off, and so on.
It’s harsh. It’s easier to die quickly. Accepting the hard assignment before it is assigned, and with foreknowledge of the implications, probably contributes to survival of linked subsets of the gene pool, like families with foresightful grandparents.
sigh…Looked at from a perspective of geologic time, the few seconds that are the realm of man on this dirt ball, pale in comparison to the grand scheme of things.
As the planet “evolves” from a period when most species could not have existed in the harsh early environments, through the brief period we are in now, where conditions are perfect for biological entities, it will continue it’s progress for some billions of years after man is extinct.
During this short sojourn, Homo S. will either eat himself out of house and home, pull the nuclear trigger or manage to stick it out until Mother Earth simply shakes him off her back like so many fleas. Maybe a population thinning plague will come along and slow the inevitable process, who knows.
Meanwhile.
Asking organized governments to solve all our problems is not advisable. For the most part, the apointed, anointed leaders of these organizations simply fail at the task by default, (since it was they and their predecessors that created most of the trouble?) and instigate bloody wars to cover their tracks.
As hard as it is for most “social” animals to accept, we really are on our own. We are, each of us, the world’s smallest minority, individuals. Each of us acting in our own best interest, but not really able to force others to comply with our own preconceived opinion of how the world should be. A good thing?
Collectively, though, like any mob, we find that “strength in numbers” grant us power. Caesar, Atilla, Alexander, Stalin, Adolf et al had that figured out, as do the anointed of Capital Hill, The Kremlin, Ten Downing and other “Departments of Public Safety” the inmates have constructed for themselves, only to force “others” to toe the line, mind you.
Change that? To what?
Rule of Law no longer gets it because it has been watered down to irrelevancy, by,,,wait for it,,,too many laws!
So, until further notice, the chaos will continue. Utopia is nowhere in sight. There would need to be too many Utopias to please everyone anyway. No one can know the future, and the past is gone, so I guess the now is all that we have.
So, until The Mighty Quinn’s arrival,
May the governments and mobs that pillage and govern best, pillage and govern least.
Another good article that describes the unwelcome reality that is looming up in front of us. In Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William R Catton, Jr., he describes our predicament in these terms. We have effectively created a phantom carrying capacity that enabled the human population to grow beyond the earth’s long term permanent carrying capacity. This phantom carrying capacity was based on “anywhere” ghost acreages, in other words current acreage not within a nation’s boundary that can provide the additional food it cannot produce for itself. The other ghost acreage was “anywhen” fossil acreage that represents prehistoric acreage that produced the biomass that became fossil fuel, because the 20th century green agricultural revolution was based on the use of increasing amounts of fossil fuel, such that today from plough to plate we use on average ~10 calories of fossil fuel energy to provide ~1 calorie of food. As the dominant species living on the earth we are rapidly changing our environment in ways that will undermine our dominance, by changing our environment and reducing its suitability for continuation of our dominance. This situation arises from the principle of ecological succession based on seral stages. In our case, the excessive production of pollutants by our industrial global society that have the potential to reduce the earths long term carrying capacity for ourselves and most other species, in this instant climate change caused by CO2 produced from burning our finite fossil fuel resources as our primary energy source.
Further, as “Will Humanity Be Left Home Alone?” by John Gray, (https://www.greatchange.org/othervoices.html ) agricultural overproduction and habitat destruction for supplying food to feed an exponentially growing human population, applies a competitive pressure on other species capable of driving them to extinction. This loss of species diversity reduces the resilience of habitats rendering them vulnerable to sudden changes such as climate and the emergence of novel pests as this extract explains:
“The lush natural world in which humans evolved is being rapidly transformed into a largely prosthetic environment. Crucially, in any time span that is humanly relevant, this loss of biodiversity is irreversible. True, life on earth recovered its richness after the last great extinction; but only after about 10 million years had passed. Unless something occurs to disrupt the trends under way, all future generations of human beings will live in a world that is more impoverished biologically than it has been for aeons.”
Ilargi – great essay! “…all we’ve done now for five years plus running is trust a band of bankers and shady officials to fix it all for us…That those [the degrees and/or the money] can also be used for something 180 degrees removed from the greater good doesn’t seem to register.”
No, it doesn’t register because most people – most – are not conniving and manipulative. Most people go about their business, raise their families, and don’t cause too much chaos. The petty/lesser criminal types might want to take something that’s not their’s to take, but they usually don’t think it through or act compulsively, and then get caught. Whoops! But there is another type, the methodical/planned/scheming thief, who is often brighter, yet lacks empathy and has a severely undeveloped conscience.
If someone could magically give them a conscience/empathy, even just for a few minutes, it would blow their minds. They live the way they’ve lived their whole lives, doing exactly the same thing, creating so much chaos. Really, the world would be so much better without any of these people. But don’t look for them to “off” themselves anytime soon because only people who are not self-centered tend to do that.
Zero Hedge had a good article on the Baltimore Police Force. To get their numbers down, in order to make the new mayor (who had higher political aspirations) look good, they fudged the numbers. The police officers, wanting promotions and more pay, arrested as many as they could, got double-time for going to court, etc. Same thing there: too many incentives for bad behavior.
“The sad part is we aren’t even trying to change the incentive structure of status quo criminality. This is because the current generation of power players were trained and molded by the same types before them. This is all they know. Money and power are their gods. Crime is their religion. We have no choice but to stop them. […]
So much of what was said there characterizes the perverted culture in Washington D.C. and on Wall Street. People are financially incentivized to commit fraud, crime and deceive customers. Those people are then promoted and train the next class. And the beat goes on…”
Psychopaths training budding new psychopaths.
Psychopaths make it their business to know how you think, what makes you tick. They put themselves forward as being much more knowledgeable than you are (only they have the answers and know best). Most people aren’t going to argue because, although their instincts tell them to step up, they feel they just don’t know enough. They know this about people. They know if they just make themselves out to be the authority, most people will back down and defer to them. They’ve got the language skills, good use of terminology (the more difficult, the better, so no one understands what they’re talking about), and they’ll convince you that black is white because lying is what they do well. Their whole lives have been a lie. They are empty inside, yet they don’t even know it. The laugh is really on them!
The common person just does not see them because they cannot for one second imagine something so evil.
I would like to respond to this statement in the article:
Without getting into specific predictions the way Cousteau did: If that is as true as I suspect it is, the one thing it means is that we fool ourselves a whole lot. The entire picture we have created about ourselves, consciously, sub-consciously, un-consciously, you name it, is abjectly false. At least the one I think we have. Which is that we see ourselves as capable of engineering proactive changes in order to prevent crises from blowing up.
That erroneous self-image leads us to one thing only: the phantom prospect of a techno-fix becomes an excuse for not acting. In that regard, it may be good to remember that one of the basic tenets of the Limits to Growth report was that variables like world population, industrialization and resource depletion grow exponentially, while the (techno) answer to them grows only linearly.
Is the conclusion that technological growth invariably occurs linearly true? Hasn’t there been exponential growth in the IT and solar sectors? The same may be taking place in the field of nanotechnology. A number of technologists, among them Robert Zubrin, author of “Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil”, argue that Malthusian analyses of our energy quandary fail to account for viable alternatives that would allow for sustainable growth. Alcohol-based fuels dervied from agricultural waste and solar power could account for the vast bulk of our energy needs. What is lacking is the social and political resolve to implement them. The proven exponential potential of technological development is outlined in the work of Ray Kurzweil. In my opinion, a resort to fatalism (“Resilience”) isn’t called for…yet. The wall in front of us is looming, but there’s still time to pull back and switch to sustainable technologies to meet the needs of an advanced global civilization. To achieve this happy outcome will require the spread of a revolutionary spirit that conjoins the efforts of millions of determined people to halt and reverse the juggernaut of corporate greed. I am not arguing against the author’s point that human beings tend to blunder into avoidable crises, only that a “techno-fix” is an undisputed “phantom”.
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