Amidst the rise of surveillance/police states that are no longer just pre-Arab Spring/Classified/Cold War throwbacks (thanks Chelsea Manning) one gets the sense that, as a species, we have gotten no closer to regaining our collective shit than at any point since the Agricultural Revolution. I've become very well acquainted with the sensation of a rapidly accelerating crisis. It's a bit like the Fukushima Daiichi reactor 1 shortly after the tsunami smashed the facilities, when it lay destroyed, creeping by steady degrees out of control... the edifice of control revealed as the folly of unreal maniacs, watched by clueless and frightened idiots, the situation only tempered by the courage and knowledge of those who were once considered alarmist, disposable, and ignorable.
Nobody wants to curb the debilitating spread of convenience consumerism. There is lots of talk. Everyone seems stupefied about the political landscape. We waste our breath to summarize it. Nothing distinguishes our era more than waste. Businesses, governments, and shills are all absolutely overjoyed to be part of a world economy that is premised on the insane principle of unlimited growth on a shrinking planet, of the useless squandering of resources. Profit is king, and governments are its thrall. Moderates are toothless, the countercultures are all dead or miniscule, the relentless march of progress goes on, shitting where we eat and belching poison fumes into the air we breathe. Human potential is squandered and used up at the same rate: who can blame the junkies now? The capitalists stand unchallenged, they who were as evil and soulless as the communist exploiters they reviled and nearly destroyed the world to curb. In the most powerful country in the world, host to the most powerful multinationals you can't even begin to imagine, a corporation is legally equivalent to a person.
The junkies, at least, are honest in their self-destructive pursuits, and probably contribute less to wastage than the respectable classes of citizen-consumers, whose per capita throughput of plastic garbage is enough to bury an entire small property each and every year. Let's not even get into energy or food waste. The wealthy are smug and spit on the middle class, who smugly spit on the working class, who wearily spit on the working poor, who accidentally spit on the destitute. Respect is rarely earned or given to or from any of 'the little people'. Respect is a commodity. Self-interest in the age of individualism has led only to the abandonment of societal and individual progress. Self-denial is less than a relic: it is the ghost of an unheard-of type of human... all else is myth but gratification. We will become lower apes yet, at this pace, while the descendants of humanity spit on us, completing the cycle. Likely they will be too cruel and abstracted to actively exterminate our relict populations.
And in this atmosphere of toxic and vile and inhuman activity, is it really any wonder that cruelty and hatred grow freely? Is it any wonder that laws cannot protect people from themselves, or children from each other? The people who are surprised by the modern world are obviously blind to what it really is. I can't blame anyone for being a junkie, a consumerist whore, or willfully ignorant and distracted (three increasingly similar things) and there are not many who can lay blame for it. What is important is that the entire situation of the world is becoming too alarming, is growing too quickly, and is passing far too quickly out of the hands of common people (you know, the abused slaves and serfs of yesteryear, who stood to gain the most from modernity and progress). With technology as a crutch it is very tempting to see the next generations of humanity as nothing but unnecessary, mentally-truncated cripples ruled by a new aristocracy.
"There is bad, yes, but there is also good in the world." I never declared that hope was dead, I was suggesting that hope itself is currently as endangered as any crumbling, over-harvested species in any pillaged environment. Things like OWS just alienate hope from reality. There are not enough skeptics and too many cynics, but both are outnumbered by shills and apologists. I'd take the world's bitterest cynic over any shill apologist - I prefer honesty to optimism where my entire species, its homeworld, and its livelihood are in question. Nobody has successfully taught the lesson of unity without coercion... true moral and philosophic problems go unanswered while we charge into the minutest details of quantum physics. Values are changing, but you ought to get top value for your dollar. We should take something back, even at this late point, to prove to our doomed descendants that we were not just fickle, feckless, fussy cowards with fine words and utopian ideals.
We are shocked and offended that nature would take anything back that we gleaned from it. Yet, we come from it, and owe our all to it. This is absurd. We consider ourselves entitled to pillage not 'the environment' alone but in fact all of life which we commonly see as nothing but a means to wealth, contentment, and satisfaction. We do not treasure or honor life for its own sake and therefore we will not solve the pathological behaviors behind the ecological and social problems we claim to want to solve. Mostly we have failed to understand nature... we force it into models and theories instead of learning from it. We hate the idea of nature reclaiming its 10% so much that we will stop at no lengths, not even poisoning ourselves, to prevent a weed from growing or an insect from feeding. Meanwhile we make such noise about unborn babies that our callousness in other regards seems schizophrenic.
Why wouldn't I hide in a narcotic haze, or try to buy my way to peace of mind (irony!), or even kill myself? More and more I have no answer, can barely see around myself, and realize that awareness is no substitution for action, for a coherent response to an increasingly incoherent world. It's a pity that radicals are marginalized to the point where they have no alternatives and tiny audiences. It's a pity that the only moderates who are allowed to speak are the ones telling us that we have done no wrong, that we have nothing to regret and a bright future. It's a pity no side in any of the day's big arguments has any respect, any foresight, any capacity to entertain alternative world-views. I guess I should give in, and just passively wait to be subsumed in the coming wave of tech-oligarch globalist worthlessness and wretchedness, into the hopeless and shit hell we deserve, into the ongoing death of the world we barely knew. Lambs for slaughter: I tell you I wouldn't mind being a child again...
