Guest post: We’ve come to believe our own press clippings
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on They appointed an expert group.
I strip you naked and stand you out in the savannah in front of a hungry lion, you will understand. Biology rules not only us but lions…tigers…bears…spiders…snakes…etc etc etc
We’ve used our intelligence and technology to smooth over some of the rough edges of material existence. Unfortunately we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we’ve completely escaped all that biology stuff, and that we are beyond the jurisdiction of the rules that govern the rest of life.
In a very short time, most of us in the West have become divorced from the basic processes that sustain the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed. Food comes from a supermarket. Electricity comes from a hole in the wall. We can get almost anything, from anywhere, delivered to our doorstep with a few clicks of a button.
We’ve come to believe our own press clippings, and think we’re a self-made species. “Natural Selection what? Underclass who?” This ease and this ignorance has come at a price.
In the process of creating our comfortable, insular lifestyle, we’ve degraded and destroyed the natural foundation upon which it’s all actually based. It’s now a disaster to be without electricity, or the internet. People will die without them; this is how dependent we’ve become on the civilizational sandcastle we’ve built for ourselves.
This second order dependence masks the deeper dependencies we thought we’d left behind on the savannah. Much of what passes for wealth is completely disconnected from the physical facts of material existence, and depends on data in computers; a mighty Empire built on nothing, calling the shots. Even now, while the world burns, trillionaires-in-the-making are planning their moves; our fate is in the hands of the spiritual heirs of Ozymandius.
But while their influence is indeed powerful, it is not supernatural. We are all on the savannah; it’s right outside the office cubicle, waiting. You’ll get by for a lot longer without a bank than you will without clean air, clean water, and food. Unfortunately, the banks have discovered that we can live (for a while at least) on dirty air, dirty water, and a bit of food, which is fine, so long as we pay our credit card bills every month, which are the only bills they think are important enough to pay.
We’re told all the time that we shouldn’t live beyond our financial means, that we should avoid debt. (Or at least that’s what we non-billionaires are told; restraint is for you, not your betters.) Well, we as a civilization are living way beyond our physical means, overextending our “credit” against what the planet can support in anything beyond a very short term.
In 2022, Earth Overshoot Day (“the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year”) was July 28. Anything used after that day was either from the proceeds of theft, or burning up capital. If you eat your seed corn, you have nothing to plant. This is also true if you buy, or steal your neighbour’s seed corn and eat it. At some point there’s nothing to plant and nothing to eat. Bankers seem not to have cottoned on to this concept, nor have they realized that at some point, they’re going to run out of clean air, clean water, and food. It’s all connected, and all the high-finance shenanigans in the world won’t change that.
Indeed. There are people who understand this, however, and are unsettled by it, so they teach themselves the old ways. Not nearly enough people to be able to make a difference for the rest, though, if the next move by Putin (or someone else) manages to topple the whole shaky edifice of “civilization”.
But even if everyone learned the old ways, I don’t think Earth will support eight billion humans living off the land. There are just too many of us. We can soften the blow and mitigate our impact, but with this many of us, that impact is going to be huge, whichever lifestyle we ratchet down to. Agriculture for eight billion is still a disaster for the rest of the living Earth, even if we go vegetarian or vegan*. The re-wilding required for hunting and gathering would take too long and require several Earths, because hunting and gathering needs a lot more “undeveloped,” “natural” ecosystems than are available (or possible) to support eight billion large, social primates and allow for continued regeneration and growth, even at bare minimal levels of extraction.
Every solution gets easier as our numbers decrease, along with our impact on and demands from the rest of the biosphere. But the problems we face are multiple, and interwoven. Energy use, production, transport and consumption of food and other necessities of life, pollution, resource depletion, soil erosion, water shortages, declining biodiversity. To name just a few. Failure to find a satisfactory and timely solution to any one of these crises might very well end us. We’ve got so many flaming hoops we have to jump through that it’s more like a flaming tunnel of indeterminate length, and unknown destination.
No pressure.
*Abandoning animal agriculture would be, technically, relatively simple: just stop raising animals once the current generation have gone through the system, or been given their freedom from it. Of course it’s not as simple as this, since everyone employed by the current animal husbandry, slaughter, packaging, transport, and sales regime would need to find other ways to make a living, and other protein sources introduced to replace the meat we would have given up. Just as there would be a need to find alternative means of transit and transport if everyone just stopped driving tomorrow. Logically possible, but practically, not so much.
I’ve wondered, for some years now, whether this isn’t a reason so many women, especially young women, embrace gender ideology.
Until a second ago, in historic terms, women and girls could not escape the realities of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation. Nor could we afford to ignore the fact that men are bigger and stronger and more aggressive than we are.
But now we can. Given birth control pills, even periods have become optional. And while men remain stronger than women, our social and legal constraints mean that some lucky women won’t have experienced male violence.
We are alienated not only from the natural world without, but also from our own bodies. Our bodies aren’t us, they’re plastic masks to be surgically and hormonally altered to fit each individual’s fantasy avatar. You there, troubled young woman, you’d rather be a boy? Go for it! Your new life is just a prescription (and maybe a swipe of the surgeon’s knife) away.
Lady M:
I must have missed something in Biology 101. How can a course of hormones and a swipe of any kind of knife convert a girl into a boy.? Boy into a girl with some parts still missing, maybe; particularly in the dusk, and with skilful backlighting. But girl to boy…? A dildo implant maybe?
(Aside) The mind boggles.
Oh, I don’t disagree with that, at all. I’ve been saying for some years now that humanity and civilization are far past the point of sustainability; the great fall of humanity is not only inevitable, I think, but it’s coming far sooner than most people probably expect. My comment that “there are those who have taught themselves the old ways” is not a call for humanity to return to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, it was simply an observation that there are people who do that. Because they lament the state that we’ve gotten into, among other reasons. It’s not going to save humanity.
Look, we’ve got maybe a decade and likely even less before climate crises become our #1 problem, and that is something over which we very much do have control, even with relatively minimal changes to our lifestyles, and we cannot even manage those minor changes. Every few years our besuited representatives gather at public expense to eat fine meals and somberly agree to carbon-limit targets which we all then cheerfully ignore until the next somber meeting where the previous targets are tweaked and re-agreed-upon while everyone else is busy doing things like obliviously generating “Living the RV Life” YouTube reels wherein they drive around the world in enormous land-yachts consuming resources at a furious pace, instilling envy into their followers, and economists loudly bemoan the fact that the growth of that kind of self-absorbed earth-killing living is “only growing at a 4% adjusted yearly rate”. Yeah, we’re doomed.
This has been your monday-morning dose of PNW cynicism.
[…] a comment by James Garnett on We’ve come to believe our own press […]
According to the self-styled Experts, of course, no medical intervention is really necessary at all.
But in case you’re seriously wondering what I had in mind, I was thinking of the double mastectomies that seem to be de rigueur. (So, two swipes, I guess. Wince.)
Phalloplasty is still relatively uncommon among these girls. Good thing too, as it’s a terrifying procedure with an appalling rate of complications.