This is the fate that eventually awaits us all. I have very little confidence that human beings have the intelligence or the willpower to go against their recently awakened addiction to modern consumerism. People will not curb their appetites or their reproduction, and the combination will doom most of us to conflict, overexploitation of the biosphere, and an early death. Rather than wasting research effort on erectile dysfunction, we should be working on effective contraception that can be made widely and cheaply available to women, with or without the consent of their often chauvinistic, religion-addled and pig-ignorant husbands. Rather than wasting our time trying to stimulate the economy in the hope that jobs will result as a byproduct of capitalist greed, we should be expropriating the wealth of the idle rich, turning the workplaces over to the workers, and shrinking the economy by emphasizing sharing rather than everyone having his own private copy of every commodity. Rather than trying to one-up the Chinese in climate talks and using them as an excuse for doing nothing ourselves, we should be cooperating with them to get both nations off petroleum and coal, and the minute executives or investors in the fossil fuel sector make a move to sabotage the efforts to switch to renewables, we should stand them up against a wall and shoot them for treason to their home planet. But such will not be the program, at least not until it is too late. As Jared Diamond has documented for past societies in Collapse, our conservative elite will prevent necessary change that would threaten their power and wealth until we are past the point of no return, and like the Greenland Norse, like the Easter Islanders, like the Anasazi, Like the ancient Maya, we will ride our doomed culture to self-destruction, all the while soothing ourselves with fairy tales about Jesus or Allah swooping down to save the faithful or some such nonsense.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 05:14:00 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015