Not a light piece. With systems theory.
Note: This piece is about two years old. I refer to it in another one, but it is awfully apropos of our current predicament.
Note: This piece is about two years old. I refer to it in a more recent piece, but it is awfully apropos of our current predicament.
I’m in between semesters and have been trying to avoid stress. We just got over a massive stomach flu, and my immunity wasn’t great to begin with from overwork. But holy crap, I just can’t with this country anymore.
I’m a cynical optimist. I know humans are deeply flawed creatures, but there is so much that is amazing in our species. And there is so much that is malevolent. Right now, no matter how badly I want to unplug from the news and the chaos and the constant decay of our democracy and society, I just fucking can’t with it. So two things.
Here’s the deal. We are, as the badass preacher at the royal wedding reminded us, one family. We are one species. We have overrun our planet and our planet is really pissed off at us right now. Try to think of the earth as a massive organism (this is a theoretical thing btw, not just woo-woo talk). It’s a huge, unbelievable complex system with all sorts of redundancies and checks and balances built into it. We can’t possibly understand it, let alone control it. We create stimulus (pollution, emissions, destruction of species, and smaller ecosystems) and it responds. We are not destroying this amazing system, but we are making it sick. Its immune system is responding the way any immune system does; throwing off symptoms as it fights the alien intruder bacteria or virus. This is not a battle we can win. We are simply an errant part of the system that has grown out of control and needs to be rebalanced. We cannot control Nature, we can only fight her and lose.
We are amazing creatures, capable of not only self-awareness but universal awareness. We need to help nature fix what we’ve fucked up, and we need to start about a century ago. No amount of oil drilling, fracking, bear hunting, deregulation, water hoarding, or any of the other latest ideas out of our brain trust phony government will work. It will just hasten the vast reduction of our species. We could do that ourselves. We could take population control seriously and environmental preservation seriously and green energy and industry seriously and maybe have some agency in how this goes down. But that means thinking beyond our basest, and currently loudest instincts: individual survival. Which brings me to my other rant.
“But what about the economy?” Nature don’t give a fuck about the economy. We have conceived of capitalism as a system that can grow forever and somehow never run out of resources or consumers. This is unadulterated bullshit, and we are morons to believe it. And it speaks oh so directly to the fundamental problem that seems to be infecting our species yet again, but at a time when technology is so advanced that we actually have other options, if we could finally pull our heads out of our asses.
Man (and by this, I mean white people in particular in the US) cannot deal with the inevitability of 1) their own deaths and 2) their fundamental irrelevance. This is not an anti-religious statement. Most religions, at their cores, say that we are all children of God, all family, and that we will be dying rather soon and so please try not to be horrible while we are here. Blessed be the meek. Blessed be the poor. Your imaginary yacht and McMansion and accumulation of random stuff don’t mean shit to God. You are not special, because everyone is special and unique, and beloved. EVERYONE. If you don’t believe in God just leave out the beloved part, but that’s where I sit with it.
We have collectively lost our minds countless times in history. Humanity has this freaky eject button that jettisons our frontal lobes and causes this mass projection of our most destructive urges onto others. Obvy, Hitler, the Salem Witch Trials, Every Holy War Ever, etc are just a few awesome examples. Underlying the projection is just massive existential fear. The specter of our own death is something we struggle with over our entire lives. It can make us compassionate, neurotic, depressed, loving, or enraged. And when that rage turns outward–when it becomes ingrained in the Zeitgeist and suddenly police lynchings of black people and mass incarceration of immigrant children and violating the fundamental rights of children in favor of the momentary emotional relief of a few terrified, privileged white people with deadly weapons becomes the norm? We have a very serious problem.
Here’s the thing: You can hate Jews for some weird made-up reasons about Jews that have never made sense but lead to 5 million of them being murdered less than a century ago, and you will still die. You can kill black men and children and women for making you uncomfortable, or call the police so they can do it, and you will still die. You can rip families apart who are trying to flee horrible conditions for a country that for so long promised something better, and you will still die. You can blame teenage girls for school shootings by white boys so fragile that they can’t tolerate a moment of shame or misery, and you will still die. You can allow white men to keep their murderous febrile attachment objects at the cost of thousands upon thousands of innocent lives, and YOU WILL STILL DIE.
There is no cure for existential fear. We all die. We all have difficulty facing that reality, and many people distort reality in such extreme ways that somehow killing, or accepting the killing of someone deemed different, momentarily relieves this fear. But you will still die.
Humans have this freaky ability to make it all about them. We all do it, and it can be a benign and even healthy way to deal with the many traumas of life. But faced with overwhelming evidence that the Earth is not taking our shit anymore, we are retreating to this gleefully self-destructive individualism that is so self-defeating I can’t even believe it’s happening. We need to stop treating each other as enemies and start figuring out how to make sure our grandbabies have a non-apocalyptic world to grow up in.
As a species, we have had to develop socially and emotionally really, really fast. The holy trinity of Darwin, Freud, and Marx figured all this out in the late 19th century.
Darwin: We are actually animals descended from apes. Whoops, religious exceptionalism.
Freud: We all behave largely based on unconscious urges. Laters, aristocracy.
Marx: Important people are actually parasitic and don’t matter and labor is vital. Bye, social hierarchy.
Much of the subsequent century+ has been about grappling with these basic observations and getting our limited psyches to get on board and find better ways to do society and humanness. We are sucking at it right now. Yes, there have been some massive awakings since our government went to shit, and I hope that they will lead to some vital changes in our country. But that stubborn, socially supported need to center and protect the egos of white adults at the cost of our society and environment has got to end. If not, it will be the end of us. There is much that is lovely about humanity, and I want to imagine it rising to higher levels of connectedness after I am long gone from this earth. But until we fully understand that protecting children and protecting the earth and its glory is the primary function of our lives, rather than the constant defense of an ego that will be dead in a celestial blink, then humanity will continue to run-up to the expiration date we (or God) stamped on our foreheads when we became sentient.
To summarize:
Please stop letting the fears of privileged men and women supersede the basic human rights of everyone else. It’s not a good look on you, humanity.
Stop avoiding the inevitability of your death and instead help ensure there will be a place to live for everyone else forever. Start making up with Nature, because you will not win this contest.