Well, shit.

With Systems Theory.

Dealing with all the crap I mentioned in my previous post has meant chilling out this summer and trying to keep my anxiety from spiraling. Watching the federal government’s reaction to the ripping away of women’s rights (and subsequent atrocities) has been less than satisfying. While it’s hard to get a birds-eye on crises you are living through, I’ve had some thoughts lately. These build on a lot of stuff I’ve written about in the past.

The earth is a super complex, intelligent system. Much more intelligent than our species. We are facing the effects of climate change, constant health threats, and mass idiocy because WE ARE INCREDIBLY OVERPOPULATED. In the year I was born, 1971, the world population was about 3.75 trillion. It is now over 7.75 trillion. That is INSANE.

Healthy systems self-balance and change very slowly over time. Our species has ballooned in size and ability to affect our environment in a celestial blink. So the system we are a very small part of—the earth—is rebalancing by trying to wipe us out. That’s how systems work. All the shit we are pouring into the environment, all the areas we are spreading into, are causing our species to suffer from extreme heat and cold, sea level rise, fires, floods, earthquakes, and new diseases. This is a species-level event for us. We need to start approaching it that way.

I’ve always found it bizarre that eco-dystopian fiction usually has us either destroying or fixing the earth. That’s not how anything works. Think WallE. Great film, but the earth will wipe us out long before we decimate it to that degree (let alone come up with interstellar travel that we can live on for generations).

State-mandated population control, whether to increase or decrease it, has never worked and has led to atrocities. But if we educated and gave access to birth control to every woman and girl (and female-bodied) person on the planet, which we could do with our current resources, we would reverse population growth in a generation.

The thing that just grinds my gears is that we have a worldwide economic system based entirely on consumption and growth. Systems that only grow are literally cancers. Cancer, when not controlled, eventually causes enough system failure to kill its host. That’s what our economic system is driving us to do.

But we made it up. We made up money. And capitalism. And the stock market. We are totally capable of re-imagining how to use and distribute resources. People are already doing it. It would be messy and hard, but it would delay our extinction indefinitely. I would like that. I would like my kid to become an adult in a non-hellscape world where there is hope and possibility.

Unfortunately, the worst of human nature is either engaged in a protracted, noxious last gasp or is winning its unfathomable war against non-extinction. All of the lunacy in the US (and particularly my state) is ensuring that we continue to pollute, have babies whether or not we choose to, and struggle with water, food, medicine, education, and energy scarcity. FFS, I live in Texas. We could power the whole goddamned country with the amount of solar energy we could produce.

But nooooo. Our seemingly infinite capacity for creative denial drives us in the opposite direction, to the detriment of all. My theory about the mass lunacy that is QAnon and anti-vaxxers and TERFs and fundamentalists and all the other science-denying assholes are that when faced with the vulnerability and smallness of our lives, these fuckwits turn to fantasy to escape it. In psychodynamic terms, this is psychotic denial. Most of us distort reality in small ways to deal with it all the time. That’s normal. Creating and nurturing harmful and xenophobic alternate realities is not. And much as I love much about this here interwebs, I do not like this bit at all. The internet certainly didn’t start this problem but has allowed it to fester at an alarming rate.

I don’t know what it will take for our species to pull its head out of its ass. How many more ecological disasters, wars, and pandemics? How many more state-sanctioned crimes against humanity before we stop targeting each other and start addressing the root problem? I’m afraid of the answer. We have the collective intelligence and technology to change, but we seem unable to collectively face our current reality. And we must do this as a species. Overpopulation and global warming are species-level threats. We cannot continue to act as if we are not all affected.