Let’s Be Evil, pt. 06

Here’s a deal many people would take: you get to live in the First World and enjoy the ample albeit temporary benefits of a modern, post-industrial economy, but to enable you, people in the Third World must be brutally exploited, mostly out of sight and out of mind. (Dunno what to say about the Second World; comparisons are typically hi-lo. And besides, that Cold War nomenclature is probably badly out of date.) There no need to say “would take,” of course, because that’s already the default in the First World. Increasingly, that’s also the raw deal experienced by the lower/working class in the United States, which now resembles other failed states. People without means are driven into cycles of poverty or channeled into the prison-industrial complex to labor for a pittance. That’s not enough, though. The entirety of public health must be gamed as a profit center for Big Pharma, which wrings profit out of suffering just like the U.S. prison system. That’s one of the principal takeaways from the last two years of pandemic. Indeed, from a capitalist perspective, that’s what people are for: to feed the beast (i.e., produce profit for the ownership class). For this very reason — the inhumanity of exploiting and subjugating people — critics of capitalism believe the ruthlessness of the profit motive cannot be tempered and the economic system is ripe for replacement.

Arguments that, “yeah, sure, it’s a flawed system but it’s still the best one on offer” are unconvincing. Rather, they’re a rationalization for lack of imagination how a better, more equitable system might be developed and tried. Human nature, frankly as “animal” as any other animal, also discourages anyone from rising above social conditioning or breaking from the herd. Instead, history forces fundamental change only when decrepit systems no longer function. Late-stage capitalism, having reached nearly the full extent of easily exploitable resources (materials and labor), is creaking and groaning under the weight of its inbuilt perpetual growth imperative. The dynamic is nonnegotiable, as measures of gross national product (GNP) are only acceptable if a positive index, the higher the better. Whereas previous social/economic systems failed in fits and starts, transitioning gradually from one to the next, it’s doubtful capitalism can morph gracefully into a new system given its momentum and totalizing character.

For many millennia, slavery was the solution to labor needs, which became morally intolerable especially in the 19th century but was really only driven underground, never truly extinguished. That’s the point of the first paragraph above. Terminology and mechanisms have sometimes been swapped out, but the end result is scarcely less disagreeable for those on the bottom rungs. Globalization brought practically the entire world population into the money economy, which had been irrelevant to peasant and subsistence societies. Apologists often say that the spread of capitalism enabled those peoples to be lifted out of poverty. That’s a ridiculous claim while wealth/income inequality continues to launch the ultrarich into the stratosphere (literally in the infamous case of at least a couple billionaires) compared to the masses. Yes, refrigerators and cell phones are now commonplace, but those are hardly the best measures of human wellbeing.

So what’s person of conscience to do? Born into a socioeconomic system from which there is no escape — at least until it all collapses — is there any way not to be evil, to not exploit others? Hard to say, considering we all consume (in varying degrees) products and services obtained and provided through the machinations of large corporations exploiting humans and nature on our behalf. When it all does collapse in a heap of death and destruction, don’t look for high-minded reexamination of the dynamics that led to that endgame. Rather, it will be everyone for themselves in a futile attempt to preserve life against all odds.

Mad World Preamble (redux)

I use the tag redux to signal that the topic of a previous blog post is being revisited, reinforced, and repurposed. The choice of title for this one could easily have gone instead to Your Brain on Postmodernism, Coping with the Post-Truth World, or numerous others. The one chosen, however, is probably the best fit given that compounding crises continue pushing along the path of self-annihilation. Once one crisis grows stale — at least in terms of novelty — another is rotated in to keep us shivering in fear, year after year. The date of civilizational collapse is still unknown, which is really more process anyway, also of an unknown duration. Before reading what I’ve got to offer, perhaps wander over to Clusterfuck Nation and read James Howard Kunstler’s latest take on our current madness.

/rant on

So yeah, various cultures and subcultures are either in the process of going mad or have already achieved that sorry state. Because madness is inherently irrational and unrestrained, specific manifestations are unpredictable. However, the usual trigger for entire societies to lose their tether to reality is relatively clear: existential threat. And boy howdy are those threats multiplying and gaining intensity. Pick which of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with whom to ride to the grave, I guess. Any one will do; all four are galloping simultaneously, plus a few other demonic riders not identified in that mythological taxonomy. Kunstler’s focus du jour is censorship and misinformation (faux disambiguation: disinformation, malinformation, dishonesty, gaslighting, propaganda, fake news, falsehood, lying, cozenage, confidence games, fraud, conspiracy theories, psyops, personal facts), about which I’ve blogged repeatedly under the tag epistemology. Although major concerns, censorship and misinformation are outgrowths of spreading madness, not the things that will kill anyone directly. Indeed, humans have shown a remarkable capacity to hold in mind crazy belief systems or stuff down discomfiting and disapproved thoughts even without significant threat. Now that significant threats spark the intuition that time is running perilously short, no wonder so many have fled reality into the false safety of ideation. Inability to think and express oneself freely or to detect and divine truth does, however, block what few solutions to problems remain to be discovered.

Among recent developments I find unsettling and dispiriting is news that U.S. officials, in their effort to — what? — defeat the Russians in a war the U.S. is not officially fighting, are just making shit up and issuing statements to their dutiful stenographers in the legacy press to report. As I understand it, there isn’t even any pretense about it. So to fight phantoms, U.S. leaders conjure out of nothingness justifications for involvements, strategies, and actions that are the stuff of pure fantasy. This is fully, recognizably insane: to fight monsters, we must become monsters. It’s also maniacally stupid. Further, it’s never been clear to me that Russians are categorically baddies. They have dealt with state propaganda and existential threats (e.g., the Bolshevik Revolution, WWII, the Cold War, the Soviet collapse, being hemmed in by NATO countries) far more regularly than most Americans and know better than to believe blindly what they’re told. On a human level, who can’t empathize with their plights? (Don’t answer that question.)

In other denial-of-reality news, demand for housing in Sun Belt cities has driven rent increases ranging between approximately 30% and 60% over the past two years compared to many northern cities well under 10%. Americans are migrating to the Sun Belt despite, for instance, catastrophic drought and wild fires. Lake Powell sits at an historically low level, threatening reductions in water and electrical power. What happens when desert cities in CA, AZ, NV, and NM become uninhabitable? Texas isn’t far behind. This trend has been visible for decades, yet many Americans (and immigrants, too) are positioning themselves directly in harm’s way.

I’ve been a doomsayer for over a decade now, reminding my two or three readers (on and off) that the civilization humans built for ourselves cannot stand much longer. Lots of people know this yet act as though concerns are overstated or irrelevant. It’s madness, no? Or is it one last, great hurrah before things crack up apocalyptically? On balance, what’s a person to do but to keep trudging on? No doubt the Absurdists got something correct.

/rant off

Why the Sun?

After a hiatus due to health issues, Jordan Peterson has reappeared in the public sphere. Good for him. I find him one of the most stimulating public intellectuals to appear thus far into the 21st century, though several others (unnamed) spring to mind who have a stronger claims on my attention. Yet I’m wary of Peterson as an effective evaluator of every development coughed up for public consideration. It’s simply not necessary or warranted for him to opine recklessly about every last damn thing. (Other podcasters are doing the same, and although I don’t want to instruct anyone to stay in their lane, I also recognize that Joe “Talkity-Talk” Blow’s hot take or rehash on this, that, and every other thing really isn’t worth my time.) With the inordinate volume of text in his books, video on his YouTube channel (classroom lectures, podcasts, interviews) and as a guest on others’ podcasts, and third-party writing about him (like mine), it’s inevitable that Peterson will run afoul of far better analysis than he himself can bring to bear. However, he declares his opinions forcefully and with overbearing confidence then decamps to obfuscation and reframing whenever someone pushes back effectively (which isn’t often, at least when in direct communication). With exasperation, I observe that he’s basically up to his old rhetorical tricks.

In a wide-ranging discussion on The Joe Rogan Experience from January 2022 (found exclusively on Spotify for anyone somehow unaware of Rogan’s influence in the public sphere), the thing that most irked me was Peterson’s take on the climate emergency. He described climate as too complex, with too many variable and unknowns, to embody in scientific models over extended periods of time. Seems to me Peterson has that entirely backwards. Weather (and extreme weather events) on the short term can’t be predicted too accurately, so daily/weekly/monthly forecasts give wide ranges of, say, cloud cover, temperature, and precipitation. But over substantial time (let’s start with a few decades, which is still a blink in geological time), trends and boundaries reveal themselves pretty reliably, which is why disturbances — such as burning enough fossil fuels to alter the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere — that upset the climate steady-state known as Garden Earth are not merely cause for serious concern but harbingers of doom. And then, as others often do, Peterson reframed the climate emergency largely in terms of economics (same thing happened with the pandemic, though not by Peterson so far as I know), suggesting that the problem is characterized by inefficiencies and grass-roots policy that would be magically different if more people were raised out of poverty and could advocate for solutions rather than simply struggle to survive. Dude apparently hasn’t grasped that wealth in the modern world is an outgrowth of the very thing — fossil fuels — that is the root of the problem. Further, industrial civilization is a heat engine that binds us to a warming trend. That’s a thermodynamic principle flatly immune to half-baked economic theories and ecological advocacy. Peterson also gives no indication of ever having acknowledged Jevons Paradox.

So let me state somewhat emphatically: the climate emergency is in fact an existential crisis on several fronts (e.g., resource depletion and scarcity, ecological despoliation, extreme weather events, and loss of habitat, all resulting in civilizational collapse). The rate of species extinction — before human population has begun to collapse in earnest, 8 Billion Day looms near — is several orders of magnitude greater than historical examples. Humans are unlikely to survive to the end of the century even if we refrain from blowing ourselves up over pointless geopolitical squabbles. I’ll defer to Peterson in his area of expertise: personality inventories. I’ll also grant him space to explore myth and symbolism in Western culture. But speaking on climate, he sounds like an ignoramus — the dangerous sort who leads others astray. And when challenged by someone armed with knowledge of governing principles, grasp of detail, and thus analysis superior to what he can muster (such as when debating Richard Wolff about Marxism), Peterson frequently resorts to a series of motte-and-bailey assertions that confound inexpert interlocutors. “Well, that depends on what you mean by ….” His retreat to faux safety is sometimes so astonishingly complete that he resorts to questioning the foundation of reality: “Why the sun? Why this sky? Why these stars? Why not something else completely?” Also, Peterson’s penchant for pointing out that the future is contingent and unknown despite, for instance, all indicators positively screaming to stop destroying our own habitat, as though no predictions or models can be made that have more than a whisper of accuracy in future outcomes, is mere rhetoric to forestall losing an argument.

As I’ve asserted repeatedly, sufficiency is the crucible on which all decisions are formed because earnest information gathering cannot persist interminably. Tipping points (ecological ones, sure, but more importantly, psychological ones) actually exist, where one must act despite incomplete knowledge and unclear prognosis. Accordingly, every decision is on some level a leap into the unknown and/or an act of faith. That doesn’t mean every decision is a wild, reckless foray based on nothing. Rather, when the propitious moment arrives (if one has the wherewithal to recognize it), one has to go with what one’s got, knowing that mistakes will be made and corrections will be needed.

Peterson’s improvisational speaking style is both impressive and inscrutable. I’m sometimes reminded of Marshall McLuhan, whose purported Asperger’s Syndrome (low-grade autism, perhaps, I’m unsure) awarded him unique insights into the emerging field of media theory that were not easily distilled in speech. Greta Thunberg is another more recent public figure whose cognitive character allows her to recognize rather acutely how human institutions have completely botched the job of keeping industrial civilization from consuming itself. Indeed, people from many diverse backgrounds, not hemmed in by the rigid dictates of politics, economics, and science, intuit through diverse ways of knowing (e.g., kinesthetic, aesthetic, artistic, religious, psychedelic) what I’ve written about repeatedly under the title “Life Out of Balance.” I’ve begun to understand Peterson as a mystic overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of existence but simultaneously horrified by unspeakably awful evils humans perpetrate on each other. Glimpses of both (and humor, a bit unexpectedly) often provoke cracks in his voice, sniffles, and tears as he speaks, clearly choking back emotions to keep his composure. Peterson’s essential message (if I can be so bold), like other mystics, is aspirational, transcendental, and charismatic. Such messages are impossible to express fully and are frankly ill-suited to 21st-century Western culture. That we’re severely out of balance, unable to regain an upright and righteous orientation, is plain to nearly everyone not already lost in the thrall of mass media and social media, but so long as the dominant culture remains preoccupied with wealth, consumption, celebrity, geopolitical violence, spectacle, and trash entertainment, I can’t envision any sort of return to piety and self-restraint. Plus, we can’t outrun the climate emergency bearing down on us.

Born at the Right Time

I’ve often thought that my father was born at just the right time in the United States: too young to remember much of World War II, too old to be drafted into either the Korean War or the Vietnam War, yet well positioned to enjoy the fruits of the postwar boom and the 1960s counterculture. He retired early with a pension from the same company for which he had worked nearly the entirety of his adult life. Thus, he enjoyed the so-called Happy Days of the 1950s (the Eisenhower era) and all of the boom years, including the Baby Boom, the demographer’s term for my cohort (I came at the tail end). Good for him, I suppose. I admit some envy at his good fortune as most of the doors open to him were closed by the time I reached adulthood. It was the older (by 10–15 years) siblings of Boomers who lodged themselves in positions of power and influence. Accordingly, I’ve always felt somewhat like the snotty little brother clamoring for attention but who was overshadowed by the older brother always in the way. Luckily, my late teens and early twenties also fell between wars, so I never served — not that I ever supported the American Empire’s foreign escapades, then or now.

Since things have turned decidedly for the worse and industrial civilization can’t simply keep creaking along but will fail and collapse soon enough, my perspective has changed. Despite some life options having been withdrawn and my never having risen to world-beater status (not that that was ever my ambition, I recognize that, similar to my father, I was born at the right time to enjoy relative peace and tranquility of the second half of the otherwise bogus “American Century.” My good fortune allowed me to lead a quiet, respectable life, and reach a reasonable age (not yet retired) at which I now take stock. Mistakes were made, of course; that’s how we learn. But I’ve avoided the usual character deformations that spell disaster for lots of folks. (Never mind that some of those deformations are held up as admirable; the people who suffer them are in truth cretins of the first order, names withheld).

Those born at the wrong time? Any of those drafted into war (conquest, revolutionary, civil, regional, or worldwide), and certainly anyone in the last twenty years or so. Millennials appeared at the twilight of empire, many of whom are now mature enough to witness its fading glory but generally unable to participate in its bounties meaningfully. They are aware of their own disenfranchisement the same way oppressed groups (religious, ethnic, gender, working class, etc.) have always known they’re getting the shaft. Thus, the window of time one might claim optimal to have been born extends from around 1935 to around 1995, and my father and I both slot in. Beyond that fortuitous window, well, them’s the shakes.

Borrowed Time is Nearly Up

/rant on

Since deleting from my blogroll all doom links and turning my attention elsewhere, the lurking dread of looming collapse (all sorts) has been at low ebb at The Spiral Staircase. Despite many indicators of imminent collapse likewise purged from front-page and top-of-the-broadcast news, evidence continues to mount while citizens contend with other issues, some political and geopolitical, others day-to-day tribulations stemming from politics, economics, and the ongoing pandemic. For instance, I only just recently learned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC — oh yeah … them) issued AR6 last month, the sixth periodic Assessment Report (maybe instead call it the State of the Union Address Planet Report). It’s long, dense reading (the full report is nearly 4,000 pp., whereas the summary for policymakers is a mere 42 pp.) and subject to nearly continuous revision and error correction. The conclusion? Climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying. And although it’s true that mundane daily activities occupy center stage in the lives of average folks, there is simply no bigger story or concern for government leaders (I choke on that term) and journalists (that one, too) than climate change because it represents (oh, I dunno …) the collapse of industrial civilization and the early phase of mass extinction. Thus, all politics, geopolitics, economic warfare, class struggle, Wokeism, authoritarian seizure of power, and propaganda filling the minds of people at all levels as well as the institutions they serve amount to a serious misallocation of attention and effort. I will admit, though, that it’s both exhausting and by now futile to worry too much about collapse. Maybe that’s why the climate emergency (the new, improved term) is relegated to background noise easily tuned out.

It’s not just background noise, though, unlike the foreknowledge that death awaits decades from now if one is fortunate to persist into one’s 70s or beyond. No, it’s here now, outside (literally and figuratively), knocking on the door. Turn off your screens and pay attention! (Ironically, everyone now gets the lion’s share of information from screens, not print. So sue me.) Why am I returning to this yet again? Maybe I’ve been reviewing too many dystopian films and novels. Better answer is that those charged with managing and administering states and nations are failing so miserably. It’s not even clear that they’re trying, so pardon me, but I’m rather incensed. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of knowledgeable experts compiling data, writing scientific reports, publishing books, and offering not solutions exactly but at least better ways to manage our affairs. Among those experts, the inability to reverse the climate emergency is well enough understood though not widely acknowledged. (See Macro-Futilism on my blogroll for at least one truth teller who absolutely gets it.) Instead, some lame version of the same dire warning issues again and again: if action isn’t taken now (NOW, dammit!), it will be too late and all will be lost. The collective response is not, however, to pull back, rein in, or even prepare for something less awful than the worst imaginable hard landing where absolutely no one survives despite the existence of boltholes and underground bunkers. Instead, it’s a nearly gleeful acceleration toward doom, like a gambler happily forking over his last twenty at the blackjack table before losing and chucking himself off the top of the casino parking structure. Finally free (if fleetingly)!

Will festering public frustration over deteriorating social conditions tip over into outright revolt, revolution, civil war, and/or regime change? Doesn’t have to be just one. Why is the U.S. still developing and stockpiling armaments, maintaining hundreds of U.S. military bases abroad, and fighting costly, pointless wars of empire (defeat in withdrawal from Afghanistan notwithstanding)? Will destruction of purchasing power of the U.S. dollar continue to manifest as inflation of food and energy costs? Is the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture actually doing anything to secure food systems, or does it merely prepare reports like the AR6 that no one reads or acts upon? Will fragile supply lines be allowed to fail entirely, sparking desperation and unrest in the streets far worse than summer 2020? Famine is how some believe collapse will trigger a megadeath pulse, but I wouldn’t count out chaotic violence among the citizenry, probably exacerbated and escalated as regimes attempt (unsuccessfully) to restore social order. Are any meaningful steps being taken to stop sucking from the fossil fuel teat and return to small-scale agrarian social organization, establishing degrowth and effectively returning to the land (repatriation is my preferred term) instead of going under it? Greenwashing doesn’t count. This headline (“We Live In A World Without Consequences Where Everyone Is Corrupt“) demonstrates pretty well that garbage economics are what pass for governance, primarily preoccupied with maintaining the capitalist leviathan that has captured everything (capture ought to be the trending word of the 2021 but sadly isn’t). Under such constraint, aged institutions are flatly unable to accomplish or even address their missions anymore. And this headline (“Polls Show That The American People Are Extremely Angry – And They Are About To Get Even Angrier“) promises that things are about to get much, much worse (omitted the obvious-but-erroneous follow-on “before they get better”) — for the obvious reason that more and more people are at the ends of their ropes while the privileged few attend the Met Gala, virtue signal with their butts, and behave as though society isn’t in fact cracking up. Soon enough, we’ll get to truth-test Heinlein’s misunderstood aphorism “… an armed society is a polite society.”

Those who prophesy dates or deadlines for collapse have often been slightly embarrassed (but relieved) that collapse didn’t arrive on schedule. Against all odds, human history keeps trudging further into borrowed time, kicking cans down roads, blowing bubbles, spinning false narratives, insisting that all this is fine, and otherwise living in make-believe land. Civilization has not quite yet reached the end of all things, but developments over the last couple months feel ever more keenly like the equivalent of Frodo and Sam sitting atop Mount Doom, just outside the Cracks of Doom (a/k/a Sammath Naur), except that humanity is not on a noble, sacrificial mission to unmake the One Ring, whatever that might represent outside of fiction (for Tolkien, probably industrial machines capable of planetary destruction, either slowly and steadily or all at once; for 21st-century armchair social critics like me, capitalism). All former certainties, guarantees, sureties, continuities, and warranties are slipping away despite the current administration’s assurances that the status quo will be maintained. Or maybe it’s merely the transition of summer into fall, presaging the annual dormancy of winter looking suspiciously this year like the great dying. Whatever. From this moment on and in a fit of exuberant pique, I’m willing to call the contest: humanity is now decidedly on the down slope. The true end of history approaches, as no one will be left to tell the tale. When, precisely, the runaway train finally careens over the cliff remains unknown though entirely foreseeable. The concentration of goofy references, clichés, and catchphrases above — usually the mark of sophomoric writing — inspires in me to indulge (further) in gallows humor. Consider these metaphors (some mixed) suggesting that time is running out:

• the show’s not over til it’s over, but the credits are rolling
• the chickens are coming home to roost
• the canary in the coal mine is gasping its last breath
• the fat lady is singing her swan song
• borrowed time is nearly up
• time to join the great majority (I see dead people …)
• the West fades into the west
• kiss your babies goodnight and kiss your ass goodbye

/rant off

Review: Soylent Green

Watched Soylent Green (1973) a few days ago for the first time since boyhood. The movie is based on a book by Richard Fleischer (which I haven’t read) and oddly enough has not yet been remade. How to categorize the film within familiar genres is tricky. Science fiction? Disaster? Dystopia? Police procedural? It checks all those boxes. Chief messages, considering its early 70s origin, are pollution and overpopulation, though global warming is also mentioned less pressingly. The opening montage looks surprisingly like what Godfrey Reggio did much better with Koyaanisqatsi (1982).

Soylent Green is set in 2022 — only a few months away now but a relatively remote future in 1973 — and the Earth is badly overpopulated, environmentally degraded, overheated, and struggling to support teeming billions mostly jammed into cities. Details are sketchy, and only old people can remember a time when the biosphere remained intact; whatever disaster had occurred was already long ago. Science fiction and futuristic films are often judged improperly by how correct prophecies turn out in reality, as though enjoyment were based on fidelity to reality. Soylent Green fares well in that respect despite its clunky, dated, 70s production design. Vehicles, computer screens, phones, wardrobe, and décor are all, shall we say, quaintly vintage. But consider this: had collapse occurred in the 70s, who’s to say that cellphones, flat screens, and the Internet would ever have been developed? Maybe the U.S. (and the world) would have been stalled in the 70s much the way Cuba is stuck in the 50s (when the monumentally dumb, ongoing U.S. embargo commenced).

The film’s star is Charlton Heston, who had established himself as a handsomely bankable lead in science fiction, disaster, and dystopian films (e.g., The Omega Man and The Planet of the Apes series). Though serviceable, his portrayal is remarkably plain, revealing Heston as a poor man’s Sean Connery or John Wayne (both far more charismatic contemporaries of Heston’s even in lousy films). In Soylent Green, Heston plays Detective Robert Thorn, though he’s mostly called “Thorn” onscreen. Other characters below the age of 65 or so also go by only one name. They all grew up after real foodstuffs (the titular Soylent Green being a synthetic wafer reputedly made out of plankton — the most palatable of three colors) and creature comforts became exceedingly scarce and expensive. Oldsters are given the respect of first and last names. Thorn investigates the assassination of a high-ranking industrialist to its well-known conspiratorial conclusion (hardly a spoiler anymore) in that iconic line at the very end of the film: “Soylent Green is people!” Seems industrialists, to keep people fed, are making food of human corpses. That eventual revelation drives the investigation and the film forward, a device far tamer than today’s amped up action thrillers where, for instance, a mere snap of the fingers can magically wipe out or restore half of the universe. Once the truth is proclaimed by Thorn (after first being teased whispered into a couple ears), the movie ends rather abruptly. That’s also what makes it a police procedural set in a disastrous, dystopic, science-fiction future stuck distinctively in the past: once the crime/riddle is solved, the story and film are over with no dénouement whatsoever.

Some of the details of the film, entirely pedestrian to modern audiences, are modestly enjoyable throwbacks. For instance, today’s penchant for memes and slang renaming of commonplace things is employed in Soylent Green. The catchphrase “Tuesday is Soylent Green Day” appears but is not overdriven. A jar of strawberries costs “150D,” which I first thought might be future currency in the form of debits or demerits but is probably just short for dollars. Front end loaders used for crowd control are called “scoops.” High-end apartment building rentals come furnished with live-in girls (prostitutes or gold-diggers, really) known as Furniture Girls. OTOH, decidedly 70s-era trash trucks (design hasn’t really changed much) are not emblazoned with the corporate name or logo of the Soylent Corporation (why not?). Similarly, (1) dressing the proles in dull, gray work clothes and brimless caps, (2) having them sleep on stairways or church refuges piled on top of each other so that characters have to step gingerly through them, (3) being so crammed together in protest when the Tuesday ration of Soylent Green runs short that they can’t avoid the scoops, (4) dripped blood clearly made of thick, oversaturated paint (at least on the DVD), and (5) a sepia haze covering daytime outdoor scenes are fairly lazy nods to world building on a low budget. None of this is particularly high-concept filmmaking, though the restraint is appreciated. The sole meme (entirely unprepared) that should have been better deployed is “going home,” a euphemism for reporting voluntarily to a processing plant (into Soylent Green, of course) at the end of one’s suffering life. Those who volunteer are shown 30 minutes of scenes, projected on a 360-degree theater that envelops the viewer, depicting the beauty and grandeur of nature before it had disappeared. This final grace offered to people (rather needlessly) serves the environmental message of the film well and could have been “driven home” a bit harder.

Like other aspects of the film’s back story, how agriculture systems collapsed is largely omitted. Perhaps such details (conjecture) are in the book. The film suggests persistent heat (no seasons), and accordingly, character are made to look like they never stop sweating. Scientific projections of how global warming will manifest do in fact point to hothouse Earth, though seasons will still occur in temperate latitudes. Because such changes normally occur in geological time, it’s an exceedingly slow process compared to human history and activity. Expert inquiry into the subject prophesied long ago that human activity would trigger and accelerate the transition. How long it will take is still unknown, but industrial civilization is definitely on that trajectory and human have done little since the 70s to curb self-destructive appetites or behaviors — except of course talk, which in the end is just more hot air. Moreover, dystopian science fiction has shifted over the decades away from self-recrimination to a long, seemingly endless stream of superheros fighting crime (and sometimes aliens). Considering film is entertainment meant to be enjoyed, the self-serious messages embedded in so many 70s-era disaster films warning us of human hubris are out of fashion. Instead, superpowers and supersuits rule cinema, transforming formerly uplifting science-fiction properties such as Star Trek into hypermilitaristic stories of interstellar social collapse. Soylent Green is a grim reminder that we once knew better, even in our entertainments.

Guilt by Participation

Guy McPherson used to say in his presentations that we’re all born into bondage, meaning that there is no escape from Western civilization and its imperatives, including especially participation in the money economy. The oblique reference to chattel slavery is clumsy, perhaps, but the point is nonetheless clear. For all but a very few, civilization functions like Tolkien’s One Ring, bringing everyone ineluctably under its dominion. Enlightenment cheerleaders celebrate that circumstance and the undisputed material and technological (same thing, really) bounties of the industrial age, but Counter-Enlightenment thinkers recognize reasons for profound discontent. Having blogged at intervals about the emerging Counter-Enlightenment and what’s missing from modern technocratic society, my gnawing guilt by virtue of forced participation in the planet-killing enterprise of industrial civilization is growing intolerable. Skipping past the conclusion drawn by many doomers that collapse and ecocide due to unrestrained human consumption of resources (and the waste stream that follows) have already launched a mass extinction that will extirpate most species (including large mammals such as humans), let me focus instead on gross dysfunction occurring at levels falling more readily within human control.

An Empire of War

Long overdue U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan has already yielded Taliban resurgence, which was a foregone conclusion at whatever point U.S. troops left (and before them, Soviets). After all, the Taliban lives there and had only to wait. Distasteful and inhumane as it may be to Westerners, a powerful faction (religious fanatics) truly wants to live under a 7th-century style of patriarchy. Considering how long the U.S. occupied the country, a new generation of wannabe patriarchs came to adulthood — an unbroken intergenerational descent. Of course, the U.S. (and others) keeps arming them. Indeed, I heard that the U.S. military is considering bombing raids to destroy the war machines left behind as positions were so swiftly abandoned. Oops, too late! This is the handiest example how failed U.S. military escapades extending over decades net nothing of value to anyone besides weapons and ordnance manufacturers and miserable careerists within various government branches and agencies. The costs (e.g., money, lives, honor, sanity) are incalculable and spread with each country where the American Empire engages. Indeed, the military-industrial complex chooses intervention and war over peace at nearly every opportunity (though careful not to poke them bears too hard). And although the American public’s inability to affect policy (unlike the Vietnam War era) doesn’t equate with participation, the notion that it’s a government of the people deposits some of the blame on our heads anyway. My frustration is that nothing is learned and the same war crimes mistakes keep being committed by maniacs who ought to know better.

Crony and Vulture Capitalism

Critics of capitalism are being proven correct far more often than are apologists and earnest capitalists. The two subcategories I most deplore are crony capitalism and vulture capitalism, both of which typically accrue to the benefit of those in no real need of financial assistance. Crony capitalism is deeply embedded within our political system and tilts the economic playing field heavily in favor of those willing to both pay for and grant favors rather than let markets sort themselves out. Vulture capitalism extracts value out of dead hosts vulnerable resource pools by attacking and often killing them off (e.g., Microsoft, Walmart, Amazon), or more charitably, absorbing them to create monopolies, often by hostile takeover at steep discounts. Distressed mortgage holders forced into short sales, default, and eviction is the contemporary example. Rationalizing predatory behavior as competition is deployed regularly.

Other historical economic systems had similarly skewed hierarchies, but none have reached quite the same heartless, absurd levels of inequality as late-stage capitalism. Pointing to competing systems and the rising tide that lifts all boats misdirects people to make ahistorical comparisons. Human psychology normally restricts one’s points of comparison to contemporaries in the same country/region. Under such narrow comparison, the rank injustice of hundred-billionaires (or even simply billionaires) existing at the same time as giant populations of political/economic/climate refugees and the unhoused (the new, glossy euphemism for homelessness) demonstrates the soul-forfeiting callousness of the top quintile and/or 1% — an ancient lesson never learned. Indeed, aspirational nonsense repackages suffering and sells it back to the underclass, which as a matter of definition will always exist but need not have to live as though on an entirely different planet from Richistan.

Human Development

Though I’ve never been a big fan of behaviorism, the idea that a hypercomplex stew of influences, inputs, and stimuli leads to better or worse individual human development, especially in critical childhood years but also throughout life, is pretty undeniable. As individuals aggregate into societies, the health and wellbeing of a given society is linked to the health and wellbeing of those very individuals who are understood metaphorically as the masses. Behaviorism would aim to optimize conditions (as if such a thing were possible), but because American institutions and social systems have been so completely subordinated to capitalism and its distortions, society has stumbled and fumbled from one brand of dysfunction to another, barely staying ahead of revolution or civil war (except that one time …). Indeed, as the decades have worn on from, say, the 1950s (a nearly idyllic postwar reset that looms large in the memories of today’s patrician octogenarians), it’s difficult to imaging how conditions could have deteriorated any worse other than a third world war.

Look no further than the U.S. educational system, both K–12 and higher ed. As with other institutions, education has had its peaks and valleys. However, the crazy, snowballing race to the bottom witnessed in the last few decades is utterly astounding. Stick a pin in it: it’s done. Obviously, some individuals manage to get educated (some doing quite well, even) despite the minefield that must be navigated, but the exception does not prove the rule. Countries that value quality education (e.g., Finland, China, Singapore, Japan, South Korea) in deed, not just in empty words trotted out predictably by every presidential campaign, routinely trounce decidedly middling results in the U.S. and reveal that dysfunctional U.S. political systems and agencies (Federal, state, municipal) just can’t get the job done properly anymore. (Exceptions are always tony suburbs populated by high-earning and -achieving parents who create opportunities and unimpeded pathways for their kids.) Indeed, the giant babysitting project that morphs into underclass school-to-prison and school-to-military service (cannon fodder) pipelines are what education has actually become for many. The opportunity cost of failing to invest in education (or by proxy, American youth) is already having follow-on effects. The low-information voter is not a fiction, and it extends to every American institution that requires clarity to see through the fog machine operated by the mainstream media.

As an armchair social critic, I often struggle to reconcile how history unfolds without a plan, and similarly, how society self-organizes without a plan. Social engineering gets a bad rap for reasons: it doesn’t work (small exceptions exist) and subverts the rights and freedoms of individuals. However, the rank failure to achieve progress (in human terms, not technological terms) does not suggest stasis. By many measures, the conditions in which we live are cratering. For instance, Dr. Gabor Maté discusses the relationship of stress to addiction in a startling interview at Democracy Now! Just how bad is it for most people?

… it never used to be that children grew up in a stressed nuclear family. That wasn’t the normal basis for child development. The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another. People don’t work where they live. They don’t shop where they live. The kids don’t go to school, necessarily, where they live. The parents are away most of the day. For the first time in history, children are not spending most of their time around the nurturing adults in their lives. And they’re spending their lives away from the nurturing adults, which is what they need for healthy brain development.

Does that not sound like self-hobbling? A similar argument can be made about human estrangement from the natural world, considering how rural-to-urban migration (largely completed in the U.S. but accelerating in the developing world) has rendered many Americans flatly unable to cope with, say, bugs and dirt and labor (or indeed most any discomfort). Instead, we’ve trapped ourselves within a society that is, as a result of its organizing principles, slowly grinding down everyone and everything. How can any of us (at least those of us without independent wealth) choose not to participate in this wretched concatenation? Nope, we’re all guilty.

Climate Change = Climate Emergency

This article at Scientific American argues in support of a fundamental change to its style sheet. A style sheet, for the uninitiated, is a guide to how a publication presents its output, including formatting, commonly used spellings, and preferred grammar. For instance, should ordinals (i.e., 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) be raised? Or should web be capitalized when referring to the World Wide Web? The change Scientific American just adopted is dropping the term climate change in favor of climate emergency. Well, good for Scientific American, I guess. My lack of enthusiasm or urgency — the very urgency signaled by the revised term now that the emergency is upon us (um, has been for decades already if one thinks in terms of geological or evolutionary time rather than mere decades of human history) — stems not from the truthfulness or effectiveness of the arguments but by my assessment that the problem is flatly unsolvable at this late date and that, as a global civilization, we’re doing almost nothing to combat it anyway. That’s been the case since the basic problem swung into public view in the 1970s, and it’s been the case since James Howard Kunstler published The Long Emergency in 2006.

Climate emergency deniers have claimed that recent volcanic eruptions in the Caribbean, Iceland, and Hawaii have erased or nullified all the efforts by humans to stem the release of greenhouse gases from industrial activity. According to this link, that’s comparing apples and oranges: peak volcanic activity vs. a sliver of human activity. Since 1750 (a conventional start date of the Industrial Revolution), it’s human activity driving the climate emergency, not volcanic activity. Moreover, industrial activity shows no signs of abating, at least until is all creaks to a halt when the infernal machine will no longer crank. The blocked Suez Canal and deep freeze in Texas both remind how fragile industrial infrastructure is; just wait for a Carrington Event to fry everything at once. This link explains human carbon emissions (also mentions volcanoes), which continues to increase in volume every single year. (This past year might (might!) be an anomaly due to the pandemic, but things are already ramping back up.) And besides, humans can’t control volcanoes (did someone suggest dropping nukes in them to “seal them up”?) We can’t even control ourselves.

Some while back, I purged from my blogroll all the doom links and determined that industrial civilization is in its death throes, so why bother blogging about it anymore? Similarly, the last time I cited the Doomsday Clock in January 2020, it was (metaphorically) 100 seconds to midnight. The Clock today still sits at that harrowing eve of destruction, and I didn’t link to the January 2021 statement, which includes discussions of the novel coronavirus, nuclear threats, and climate change (the older term), summarizing them together as a wake-up call. Really? So now it’s time to get serious? Nope, don’t think so. The proper time is long past due, the catastrophic future is already locked in, and we’ve been steadfastly pretending there is nothing to see (so that there will eventually be nothing to do — a self-fulfilling prophecy). It’s merely unknown when members of the human species begin dropping like flies.

All Grown Up

Happy to report that humans have finally outgrown their adolescent fixation, obsession, and infatuation surrounding technology and gadgetry, especially those that blow up things (and people), part of a maladaptive desire to watch the world burn (like a disturbed 14-year-old playing with fire to test the boundaries of control while hoping for the boundary to be breached). We are now in the process of correcting priorities and fixing the damage done. We’re also free from the psychological prison in which we trapped ourselves through status seeking and insistence on rigid ego consciousness by recognizing instead that, as artifacts of a hypersocial species, human cognition is fundamentally distributed among us as each of us is for all intents and purposes a storyteller retelling, reinforcing, and embellishing stories told elsewhere — even though it’s not quite accurate to call it mass mind or collective consciousness — and that indeed all men are brothers (an admitted anachronism, since that phrase encompasses women/sisters, too). More broadly, humans also now understand that we are only one species among many (a relative late-comer in evolutionary time, as it happens) that coexist in a dynamic balance with each other and with the larger entity some call Mother Earth or Gaia. Accordingly, we have determined that our relationship can no longer be that of abuser (us) and abused (everything not us) if the dynamism built into that system is not to take us out (read: trigger human extinction, like most species suffered throughout evolutionary time). If these pronouncements sound too rosy, well, get a clue, fool!

Let me draw your attention to the long YouTube video embedded below. These folks have gotten the clues, though my commentary follows anyway, because SWOTI.

After processing all the hand-waving and calls to immediate action (with inevitable nods to fundraising), I was struck by two things in particular. First, XR’s co-founder Roger Hallan gets pretty much everything right despite an off-putting combination of alarm, desperation, exasperation, and blame. He argues that to achieve the global awakening needed to alter humanity’s course toward (self-)extinction, we actually need charismatic speakers and heightened emotionalism. Scientific dispassion and neutered measured political discourse (such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or as Al Gore attempted for decades before going Hollywood already fifteen years ago now) have simply failed to accomplish anything. (On inspection, what history has actually delivered is not characterized by the lofty rhetoric of statesmen and boosters of Enlightenment philosophy but rather resembles a sociologist’s nightmare of dysfunctional social organization, where anything that could possible go wrong pretty much has.) That abysmal failure is dawning on people under the age of 30 or so quite strongly, whose futures have been not so much imperiled as actively robbed. (HOW DARE YOU!? You slimy, venal, incompetent cretins above the age of 30 or so!) So it’s not for nothing that Roger Hallan insists that the XR movement ought to be powered and led by young people, with old people stepping aside, relinquishing positions of power and influence they’ve already squandered.

Second, Chris Hedges, easily the most erudite and prepared speaker/contributor, describes his first-hand experience reporting on rebellion in Europe leading to (1) the collapse of governments and (2) disintegration of societies. He seems to believe that the first is worthwhile, necessary, and/or inevitable even though the immediate result is the second. Civil wars, purges, and genocides are not uncommon throughout history in the often extended periods preceding and following social collapse. The rapidity of governmental collapse once the spark of citizen rebellion becomes inflamed is, in his experience, evidence that driving irresponsible leaders from power is still possible. Hedges’ catchphrase is “I fight fascists because they’re fascists,” which as an act of conscience allows him to sleep at night. A corollary is that fighting may not necessarily be effective, at least on the short term, or be undertaken without significant sacrifice but needs to be done anyway to imbue life with purpose and meaning, as opposed to anomie. Although Hedges may entertain the possibility that social disintegration and collapse will be far, far more serious and widespread once the armed-to-the-teeth American empire cracks up fully (already under way to many observers) than with the Balkan countries, conscientious resistance and rebellion is still recommended.

Much as my attitudes are aligned with XR, Hallan, and Hedges, I’m less well convinced that we should all go down swinging. That industrial civilization is going down and all of us with it no matter what we do is to me an inescapable conclusion. I’ve blogged about this quite a bit. Does ethical behavior demand fighting to the bitter end? Or can we fiddle while Rome burns, so to speak? There’s a lot of middle ground between those extremes, including nihilistic mischief (euphemism alert) and a bottomless well of anticipated suffering to alleviate somehow. More than altering the inevitable, I’m more inclined to focus on forestalling eleventh-hour evil and finding some grace in how we ultimately, collectively meet species death.

Let’s Be Evil, pt. 04

On the heels of a series of snowstorms, ice storms, and deep freezes (mid-Feb. 2021) that have inundated North America and knocked out power to millions of households and businesses, I couldn’t help but to notice inane remarks and single-pane comics to the effect “wish we had some global warming now!” Definitely, things are looking distinctly apocalyptic as folks struggle with deprivation, hardship, and existential threats. However, the common mistake here is to substitute one thing for another, failing to distinguish weather from climate.

National attention is focused on Texas, expected to be declared a disaster zone by Pres. Biden once he visits (a flyover, one suspects) to survey and assess the damage. It’s impossible to say that current events are without precedent. Texas has been in the cross-hairs for decades, suffering repeated droughts, floods, fires, and hurricanes that used to be prefixed by 50-year or 100-year. One or another is now occurring practically every year, which is exactly what climate chaos delivers. And in case the deep freeze and busted water pipes all over Texas appear to have been unpredictable, this very thing happened in Arizona in 2011. Might have been a shot across the bow for Texas to learn from and prepare, but its self-reliant, gun-totin’, freedom-lovin’ (fuck, yeah!), secessionist character is instead demonstrated by having its own electrical grid covering most of the state, separated from other North American power grids, ostensibly to skirt federal regulations. Whether that makes Texas’ grid more or less vulnerable to catastrophic failure is an open question, but events of the past week tested it sorely. It failed badly. People literally froze to death as a result. Some reports indicate Texas was mere moments away from an even greater failure that would have meant months to rebuild and reestablish electrical service. A substantial diaspora would have ensued, essentially meaning more climate refugees.

So where’s the evil in this? Well, let me tell you. Knowledge that we humans are on track to extirpate ourselves via ongoing industrial activity has been reported and ignored for generations. Guy McPherson’s essay “Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored” has this to say at the outset:

The warnings I will mention in this short essay were hardly the first ones about climate catastrophe likely to result from burning fossil fuels. A little time with your favorite online search engine will take you to George Perkins Marsh sounding the alarm in 1847, Svente Arrhenius’s relevant journal article in 1896, Richard Nixon’s knowledge in 1969, and young versions of Al Gore, Carl Sagan, and James Hansen testifying before the United States Congress in the 1980s. There is more, of course, all ignored for a few dollars in a few pockets. [links in original]

My personal acquaintance with this large body of knowledge began accumulating in 2007 or so. Others with decision-making capacity have known for much, much longer. Yet short-term motivations shoved aside responsible planning and preparation that is precisely the warrant of governments at all levels, especially, say, the U.S. Department of Energy. Sure, climate change is reported as controversy, or worse, as conspiracy, but in my experience, only a few individuals are willing to speak the obvious truth. They are often branded kooks. Institutions dither, distract, and even issue gag orders to, oh, I dunno, prop up real estate values in south Florida soon to be underwater. I’ve suggested repeatedly that U.S. leaders and institutions should be acting to manage contraction and alleviate suffering best as possible, knowing that civilization will fail anyway. To pretend otherwise and guarantee — no — drive us toward worst-case scenarios is just plain evil. Of course, the megalomania of a few tech billionaires who mistakenly believe they can engineer around society’s biggest problems is just as bad.

Writ small (there’s a phrase no one uses denoting narrowing scope), meaning at a scale less than anthropogenic climate change (a/k/a unwitting geoengineering), American society has struggled to prioritize guns vs. butter for over a century. The profiteering military-industrial complex has clearly won that debate, leaving infrastructure projects, such as bridge and road systems and public utilities, woefully underfunded and extremely vulnerable to market forces. Refusal to recognize public health as a right or public good demanding a national health system (like other developed countries have) qualifies as well. As inflated Pentagon budgets reveal, the U.S. never lacks money to oppress, fight, and kill those outside the U.S. Inside the U.S., however, cities and states fall into ruin, and American society is allowed to slowly unwind for lack of support. Should we withdraw militarily from the world stage and focus on domestic needs, such as homelessness and joblessness? Undoubtedly. Would that leave us open to attack or invasion (other than the demographic invasion of immigrants seeking refuge in the U.S.)? Highly doubtful. Other countries have their own domestic issues to manage and would probably appreciate a cessation of interference and intervention from the U.S. One might accuse me of substituting one thing for another, as I accused others at top, but the guns-vs.-butter debate is well established. Should be obvious that it’s preferable to prioritize caring for our own society rather than devoting so much of our limited time and resources to destroying others.