So there are a few things I have,
to say in response to the Planet of the Humans
and its take on our dilemmas and trilemmas.
One is that it covers the same essential ground that the most recent of my Theses for a Degree covers, except that it’s a documentary film, and my version was a pseudoreligious belletristic exercise.
The movie does a much better job of explaining why using technology to solve technological problems is a fool’s errand.
What I wrote, with all due fake humility, does a much better job of explaining why we got here in the first place.
The movie essentially places the blame on the Profit Motive and its bastard child Capitalism.
Which IS NOT wrong, but …
It doesn’t explain why we’re truly doomed.
If it were purely and simply true that capitalism were the root of the evil, then by transcending capitalism, and ‘reversing growth’, as the film prescribes–as hard as that would be–we could pull back from the brink of extinction and planetary collapse.
But that’s not going to happen, and the reason goes back ten thousand years to the that one time where we all decided to stop being hunter-gatherers, and "settle down"; to quit moving and adopt what the anthros call "sedentarism".
Why did we choose that shit?
The answer is greed, but not the moustache-twirling Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimond kind alone. Not even just the softer greed of the Sierra Club succumbing to gradual rot for financial reasons.
Your greed and my greed too, but of a kind that we don’t even think of as greedy.
We stopped moving and settled because we wanted "a better life" for ourselves, and a "better" life "for our kids".
And we could argue about whether we got that, in the short term, and I would say no, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe modern medicine and scientific enlightment DO prove that we got Better. More. Life.
I think you can probably see where I’m going with this by now.
More and Better are absolutely and exactly what’s killing us.
It’s not enough to gently reverse growth. Because for every one of us that begins to live thoughtfully and slowly and simply for the good of the species, there will be a thousand other warm human brains out there that would really just like something to eat, and a place to sleep out of the rain.
And once they have that much, they will move on to wanting More and Better food, and a Bigger and Fancier place to sleep, and finally they will find someone to fuck, and get pregnant with, and breed. At this point, the truly ruinous thing will kick in, the tragic want that will doom the whole species.
They will want a Better Life For Their Kids, the Devil’s own mantra.
They will hold their hands together and pray to Oprah’s Gospel of Prosperity and they will not give one single fuck about Earth Day, if taking the earth seriously gets in the way of the desire for prosperity that consumes their souls.
Which desire is hard-coded into their DNA by now for sure, so deep they can’t even see that it is Greed, at all.
The question now is not about whether we can pull back from the brink.
The species is doomed, and we’re going to take a majority of the other species down with us. That last part isn’t a prophecy. That last part is already true.
The orangutans are next, followed by the poor miserable drowning polar bears, and the rest of your totemic big-mammal favorites, along with thousands upon millions of other forms of life from birds to bees to already mutant toads.
The question, rather, is how to live in the End of Days.
I’ll start on that subject tomorrow.
Cliffhanger!