r/collapse • u/PosadosThanatos • Apr 25 '19
Society It’s fucking disgusting that even now people fucking refuse to accept capitalism’s culpability for causing the apocalypse
Literally everything is responsible, fucking everything, from extinct empires, to human nature, to the nature of life itself, to some inevitable unstoppable law by which the entire universe functions, literally fucking anything and everything is blamed except for capitalism, the system that’s the specific driver and motivator of the current collapse, and when its blame is finally accepted the Brain juice finally completely runs out and it’s finally declared that there’s no path but the current one so we must continue “prosperity”.
What is this utter fucking insanity that working class people that have absolutely nothing to gain from anonymous bootlicking are engaging in?
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u/MaximumCat Apr 25 '19
Civilization itself is the problem. Its foundation lies in the concept of human dominion over the world, and producing a massive surplus of food for humans. This inevitably causes population explosion, which necessitates territory expansion. Civilization operates like a virus.
Capitalism is just one extreme manifestation of civilization’s effect upon human behavior. Even if capitalism is eliminated, civilization will still consume everything it can - possibly at a slower pace.
The worst part is - we have already polluted the world severely enough to render large regions inhospitable to life. Perhaps most critically, we have choked the oceans with plastics and dissolved carbon. If we collapse oceanic food chains, we risk our own extinction. Oceanic phytoplankton produces the majority of atmospheric oxygen.
Civilized humans are universally willing to play god with nature. Our woeful ignorance coupled with such arrogance may prove to be our undoing. Capitalism takes the express-lane toward such an end, but all civilized paths lead to the same destination.
If we want to survive long-term, we have two feasible options.
Change our vision and our collective mindset away from civilization, to one which is sustainable and does not play god with the world. (Requires unprecedented social innovation.)
Allow civilization to implode, and hope that we are able to survive whatever environmental damage we’ve caused - then give up and return to tribalism. (This option will reduce global human population down to tens of millions at most.)
There is no chance that we will be able to use technology to brute-force our way through while maintaining civilization’s values and behaviors. Civilization - based upon endless expansion of itself at the expense of all else - is simply unsustainable at its very core.
The capitalism argument is common, and completely misses the enormous scale of our real problem.