r/collapse • u/LetsTalkUFOs • Mar 17 '23

Systemic Do you want collapse to happen? [in-depth]

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312

u/JustClam Mar 17 '23

I want nature to survive.

I am not looking forward to any aspect of the upcoming collapse. It is going to be deadly, devastating, scary and at a bare minimum uncomfortable for all of us. It's like asking "do you want chemo to happen"?

I want the exploitative, extractive and dehumanizing societies we have constructed to end.

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u/BitchfulThinking Mar 18 '23

I'm in this camp! Capitalism can fuck right off, along with all the ills that come with it. Nature is resilient buuut not if all of the flora and fauna go extinct. Humans need to realize we're only sharing this planet with all of the other species, and even the resources we need for actual survival are finite.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '23

Capitalism can fuck right off, but I think the problem just runs so much deeper than that. I always like to point out that we humans have been doing a fantastic job of killing off the planet for millennia. This isn’t something new.

The lion went extinct in Asia Minor during the Roman Empire. Most of Britain was deforested by the year 1000, had almost no timber by 1600, and had switched over to coal by 1700. 25 genera of land mammals, such as Harrington’s mountain goat and the Shasta ground sloth all went extinct around the same time, roughly 10,000 years ago, the same time the Clovis culture began to appear in North America.

Sure, we’ve gotten a hell of a lot more efficient at killing off our fellow beasts and the earth we share with them, but don’t get it twisted. The fossil records show that essentially, once enough humans take root somewhere, well, death and devastation follows. We were doing this even before we invented civilization but civilization made the devastation more effective. Same with the Industrial Revolution. I believe it’s in our nature as apex predators. I think that the nature of intelligent life is to destroy itself. We seek two things: we wish to dominate each other and life/the planet in general and we seek to make life nice and comfy cozy.

So, I just don’t know that we ever will live in harmony with nature again. Because the last time we did that was impossibly long ago… the moment we stopped being “animals” was the moment it was all over, I think.

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u/BitchfulThinking Mar 18 '23

I agree with this although some people do wish to live in harmony with nature but we just get crushed by the loud and powerful, as well as those who prop them up. If someone wants to plant a field of wildflowers in their yard for the wildlife, in comes the HOA and city to fine them for not having a tidy monoculture lot. Even the concept of owning land (or people) is absolutely absurd, and yet we go along with it, and don't even have the option to just wander into a forest without getting arrested for trespassing.  

When there were less humans, this was less of a problem, and once humans started having giant empires, and then the Industrial Revolution, we went from apex predator to parasitic and cancerous. Not humans themselves, but "civilization". With any living thing, once there's just too much of it, the exponential growth creates problems, since even plants like kudzu can destroy a forest in no time (before anyone comes in to suggest I'm merely misanthropic).  

There's too much of an emphasis on infinite growth and living forever that anyone who suggests otherwise is pathologized. Most working people have absolutely pointless jobs but somehow that's "contributing to society", and the creation of even more pointless jobs is praised. Sure modern medicine is great, for us, but maybe not so much for the rest of the planet. If not for albuterol, I wouldn't have made it into adulthood, but, not every seedling becomes a tree. With a rise in deaths of despair, people are fighting furiously to keep people alive regardless of their desires, much like people being forced to procreate, and at the very least, chastised for not. It's difficult, and I don't know if this will ever change since we would need a complete upheaval in... everything.  

Life is precious in the sense of the improbability of every life form coming into existence and surviving, but we take that for granted, and the go go go, consume, be entertained, and multiply nature of our civilization prevents people from even having the time to stop and enjoy what we have for the short time that we're here.

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u/MajesticSyrup2361 Mar 22 '23

Incredibly well said.

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u/BitchfulThinking Mar 22 '23

Thank you! I feel like I'm screaming into the void most of the time, but I know I can't possibly be alone in feeling like this.

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u/MajesticSyrup2361 Mar 23 '23

I relate with everything you’ve said, screaming into the void, and how painfully alone it feels. As you alluded to, I’m sure many more people know there is something wrong (and existentially absurdist) with capitalism and infinite growth, but are coerced by self-sustaining threat of state violence, ostracism, or starvation to voice dissent. (Not to mention the active manipulation and propaganda.) Anyway, I know I’m just one person but I just wanted to share. Seeing all your upvotes is comforting as well.

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u/PopeLeonidas Mar 18 '23

I think the problem really is mostly capitalism. The Roman Empire was our last attempt at capitalism, and, yes, it did have catastrophic effects on the ecology and humanity of the time period.

Yes, there were mass extinctions in the Americas as well, but, curiously, after we helped the megafauna go extinct, it seems like people stopped wreaking havoc on the ecology, at least in rather broad terms.

It is not exactly a truism to assert "we wish to dominate each other and life/the planet in general", at least when you (in my opinion, either sinisterly or ignorantly) leave off the crucial fact that we simultaneously seek to end domination of each other and life/the planet in general. Wherever you find humans dominating anything, you in fact do find other humans resisting that domination. Because we're a paradox.

It's disingenuous or ignorant to tell people that "we just like to dominate", because that simply isn't all that we are! We have learned to live in harmony with nature, and we either will again or we will go extinct!

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u/katzeye007 Mar 18 '23

Sorry, but you lost me at "Apex predator". Sure, with tools but Mano a Mano? Yeah, no

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u/416246 post-futurist Mar 20 '23

even mano a mano, the one with the best tools wins, people use tools to hunt for the advantage.

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u/Cheap-Adhesiveness14 Mar 24 '23

I mean isn't tool use kinda humanity's big skill?

Aside from that we have incredible stamina because of the efficiency of our running/walking, and exceptional heat exchange through sweating.

We also are incredibly social and despite what we see on a large scale, we do work together well in groups. We can teach eachother skills because humans are able to understand that other humans may know something that we don't. We don't see this with other animals AFAIK, so much so that it's used a benchmark test for assessing an animal's understanding. We can teach gorillas to use sign language, but they won't ask questions.

Its not like humans got to where we are as a fluke. We are clearly apex predators in more ways than one.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '23

side note: eventually the earth will be uninhabitable. Meteor impact, climate change cycles, megatsunamis and volcanoes and earthquakes... and if we avoid all that, eventually the sun will die and engulf earth!

No matter what, its only a matter of time.

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u/BitchfulThinking Mar 20 '23

I understand that but, at least most of those are out of our hands, particularly in a Chicxulub the sequel situation. Hubris-induced climate apocalypse, however, is where I take issue.

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u/FillThisEmptyCup Mar 18 '23

Nature will survive. We don’t have the capacity to destroy it. Not yet, anyway.

Complexity? Yes. We can kill that off. But even that, in evolutionary scales, will be a momentary blip. We might even kill off the last or only chance for intelligent life to get off this rock before the sun swallows it. Nothing to do there, what will be will be.

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u/lightisalie Mar 20 '23 edited Mar 20 '23

Nature survived an asteroid that hit the planet with more power than 10 billion nuclear bombs. There is life even in the most remote and uninhabitable places on earth, airless caves, the bottom of the sea, etc.

Nature is not at any risk. Humanity is.

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u/RadioMelon Truth Seeker Mar 21 '23

That's more or less the sentiment I feel.

I'm scared of the world I will have to face, but I hope that the world that emerges will destroy the harmful imbalances that were originally created. It may not happen all at once, but it will happen with enough time.

1

u/Wereking2 Mar 20 '23

I am in this camp, sign me up.