In looking to understand what's going on now, we can start anywhere in the network of fixtures and forces and trends, the complex system, in which we are accelerating toward extinction.
To comprehend this, or at least glimpse a reality that beggars ordinary thinking, we should widen our focus beyond which perpetrators committed the latest horror, and just try to locate ourselves in a context wide enough to encompass the condition of the only biosphere we know of in the entire universe.
We could begin with continent-sized ocean gyres of plastic rubbish, or the extinction of the majority of the most prolific species, insects; or the hockey-stick graph of global temperature rise; or the continued expansion of petrochemical extraction and resulting carbon emissions; it doesn't matter. It makes no difference where we start following any strand of this tangled mat of disaster, because a network is entangled, inter-twingled, and going super-critical as we watch.
Rising violence has now reached global scale self-propagating momentum, a rolling snowball promising to become an avalanche. Current all-out wars destroying Ukraine and Gaza each far exceed the scale and intensity of historic events that precipitated (we have always been told) the two previous world wars. We are now, it is reasonable to assert, well into WWIII.
At this writing a tiny Mediterranean state has locked more than a million people in a densely populated city without food, water, or electric power. After weeks of unremitting air and artillery bombardment, all communications are shut down, leaving survivors, already starving and without sanitation, now incommunicado. More than seven thousand are dead, thousands of them children, and unknown numbers buried under their dwellings. The stated plan is to invade the area and shoot to kill. There is no meaningful constraint. Other mass killings now intensify around the world, many without so much as a nod from any media organization. Transnational weapons industry stocks return obscene and doubling profits.
Never mind why; these are merely undisputed facts. It doesn't matter why, when the situation could easily be the end of human existence in this decade. What might help is to understand the how. How it is, and how we might survive.
This is best described as a superlinear network of processes. Terms like "superlinear" and "exponential" may be read as "accelerating in speed and scale" characteristic of falling bodies or explosions. Linear thinking about emissions "targets" decades away are fatuous nonsense. A world of small well-armed and fortified enclaves surrounded by desperate and brutalized populations in toxic wastelands seems likely, but loss of potable water and breathable air will spare us that misery. With surface temperatures that will char your breakfast in seconds, and most cities under several fathoms of polluted seawater, humans will have gone extinct with everything else. With the possible exception of the kind of bacteria or viruses that now thrive in ocean-bottom volcanic fumaroles.
The possibility that humanity will be sufficiently reduced in numbers, and thereby environmental impact, in time to slow temperature rise, is also a monstrous Malthusian vision from hell. Processes we started will continue to accelerate without our help.
To list just a few of the contributing factors and ramifications, then, may help to bring this dire situation into focus, but it is only a thumbnail sketch of our real predicament.
World population:
- Exponentially increasing complexity
- Rising social pressures
- Collective trauma
- Unmanageable political upheavals
Global overheating and Biosphere Collapse:
- Toxic petrochemical extraction
- Hormone disrupting synthetics causing infertility and birth anomalies
- Pervasive environmental micro-plastics contamination, in all living cells
- Fossil fuels generating greenhouse gasses
- Monoculture and GMO crop failures, carcinogenic pesticides and herbicides
- Habitat and microbiome disruption
Feedback loops:
- Infrastructure: collapse/cost of war
- War contagion: the more wars, the more weapons; the more weapons, the more wars; business booming
- War mindset: "full-spectrum dominance", "competitiveness", "inevitability", patriarchal colonial worldview, blindness and outright hostility to indigenous harmonious environmental relationship that sustained homo sapiens for 99% of existence
- War economy: boom & bust "economic growth", "competition"
- More bombs and artillery require nuclear reactors producing toxic and radioactive "depleted" uranium poison lasting 400,000 years
- Invasion-bait: Russa & China
- Global ambient: terror
Glimmers of hope
Our collective behavior is still pushing the accelerating collapse. And if we stop this activity, the collapse must also be reversed, or it will continue anyway on its own momentum. Even if we go extinct now, the planet will continue heating until there is nothing left but fine dust.
Solving one or a dozen of the problems we already know so much about, such as going off fossil fuels completely, establishing a global renewable energy grid, abolishing resource distribution inequalities, everyone going vegan, adopting a caring, ethical economic structure to feed and shelter and heal every person, will not cut it. Remember that as a network, it is a predicament, not a problem
Collective human behavior is, however, amenable to transformation. The key may be the neurological correlation of behavior and perception. Modifying either what we do, or the way in which we understand reality, can shift our trajectory. But behavior modification is too much like trying to back a triple-tandem truck into an alley: instant chaos.
Behavior modification, imposed on others, seems to be our go-to reaction, and it has never, ever been successful in thousands of years, no matter how many bombs we drop. As long as we continue in denial, and try to bomb our way out, we will continue to eliminate ourselves.
Individual experience is our only hope. And this perceptive shift cannot be designed or implemented by authority or democracy or AI-generated PR: it is the inextricable, unalienable property of each individual human being. The way in which we see and understand our world brings whatever is the hardwired correlate to that view, instantly.
To understand the way in which we now see and understand life, look at our behavior. Looking with sufficient honesty can bring substantive change. With today's global communications tech, we may have a chance at sufficient scale. But as various mythologies warn, while flying out of hell, it's a bad idea to look down: so forget blame, and concentrate on the next right thing you can do.
Hence this long but partial list of terrible prognostications: maybe if we take in enough of our real predicament, really see what we are creating with every breath we take, our behaviors will shift enough, in millions of different ways we can never predict or direct, moment by moment, treating all with respect and dignity, to turn this spaceship.
Maybe. If not we are toast. It really boils down to that.
Good luck!
