The Failed Power And the Unreached Glory

If you have by now read Tainter, or any of the others who have understood that all civilizations collapse when the resources are too concentrated, you begin to grasp the issue is a little more than about the preservation of democracy, it is really about a restoration of balance.  Democracy  doesn’t of itself create the balance necessary , but can be a step towards obtaining balance or merely a delusive subterfuge to prevent balance.  

Collapses occur for two reasons, but both are basically the same—lack of access to resources by excessive control of the reasons  by two few players and a changing environment generally caused by too few controlling too much of those resources.

No one needs me to point out we face both today.  There’s really no reason to go into the cure for either until we comprehend that once again we are facing this issue on a global scale, and while there are parallels to Cline’s global collapse of 1177 B.C.E., this is a potentially greater collapse, so global that the entire world might soon be facing everyone’s current favorite word, an unprecedented catastrophe across the globe with potentially massive consequences and realignment of the world’s resources.  

Now it is too late to “fix” or stop that problem and please don’t count on a last minute technological cure.  Of course we’re going to try, and of course it will be absurdly not possible at this point because the environmental realignment has already begun.  There is a point to proceed against cancer but after a point the interventions cease effectiveness and only temporary stopgaps can prolong the life of the patient for a year and yet for some reason the stopgaps are not presented to the patient as such, but as other options to possibly “cure” the disease.

Has anyone continued to follow the “successful” attack on a comet that forced its displacement?  If you just jumped up and down with glee and patted our ingenuity you better reexamine your glee.

Now being the notorious uneducated obnoxious personality I am, I told everyone bad things will happen the moment I heard of the mission and when everyone was marveling over human ingenuity I was grumbling to those nearby it was not the end and I was told to appreciate what we had accomplished. 

Well the comet moved much further than expected.  In fact it is continuing to move and is skeetering rapidly into greater and greater erracity.  It has puzzled all these brilliant technological minds that this could possibly have happened, and it is becoming som erratic in its behavior there is growing concern that this one comment might (and much more rapidly than anyone expected) begin to affect a multitude of orbits and while no one is yet saying it scientifically there is some panic that we better figure out very soon how much we might have altered all of the orbits in our solar skies and if it might create a lot more chaos than anyone even anticipated.  Now rather than trying to gloat, “I told you so” because whatever does happen still isn’t going to happen in time for me to know about it ( I don't think, I hope.) 

But then I really did expect to be around when it was too late  to correct our current environmental change.  For years I wrote to environmental organizations that their approach was wrong and we didn’t need to focus on readjusting our technology to prevent degradation and focusing on ways of reversing   the degradation to the environment.  Of course, I am admittedly brilliant, and have few ideas on how to do that.  One of my totally untenable fallacies is that after massive hurricanes or other so-called disasters, we don’t rebuild, we move from the area and let nature itself rebuild first.   That’s nutty and insane.  People “own” those properties and they have a “right” to restore them.  But a single guess in contemporary history where it has worked, nature is rebuilding (and our species still hasn’t returned) is the contaminated area around Chernobyl where nature has created a miracle of revitalization and regrowth.

Another kind of weird case was the Mayan empire.  I don’t wish to discuss the intricacies of Mayan culture which does have a good-bad story or bad-good, if you prefer, story.  The peculiarity I wish to point out i9s that there were actually several Mayan cultures within Mayan culture.  One culture would come to power and exploit its resources and the peoples of the affiliated cultures  to such a degree in roughly a few generations and the power-center would become uninhabitable, the leadership fell , and the survivors migrated.  A new group within the civilization would take over the leadership, exploit the surviving communities and run their own environment into the ground until they couldn’t survive and then another group took over.  By the time their environment could no longer sustain its inhabitants, the first area had been revitalized and was again ready to be exploited.  And it's all really weird to me and somewhat incomprehensible, but it kind of proves my  point.

Another example could be Amazon.  Recent archaeological evidence and furthered by satellite images have discovered that the rainforest and the basin itself are recent realignments of nature after a thriving civilization that exploited the area to such an extent they disappeared themselves from the playbook of time.  I suppose they moved onto to survive as peasants elsewhere, or they could have moved on and exploited another culture and another environment.

A final observation.  When the first settlers arrived into parts of what is now New Zealand they found such an abundance of both animal and plant species, they wisely developed a technology that enabled them to destroy their endless bounty so rapidly they found the bounty was gone.  They moved away of course and a several generations later ventured back and found the bounty had returned.  This time they played dumb primitive and created a society that did not exploit their environment.  They developed a methodology to actually increase the bounty of nature instead of reducing the resources necessary to survive.

Well that’s my ignorance  shining through in thinking that “civilized’ moderners could remain modern and still try to let nature heal itself.  Of course we all know now we don’t need the environment to thrive because we can just genetically make our own food, we can all go into buildings that are temperature controlled and if we pollute our water we can bottle it up as purified (which it always has not been).  But the wonderful beauty of technology is that we have mastered it and can actually profit by selling water, and forcing people into temperature controlled housing.  No matter at least ¾ of the world’s population can’t afford either.  We have the ability to do it, and if you can’t afford to survive, well online the bleeding hearts complain about that.

Those damnable bleeding hearts who wanted factories to be built with escape routes in case of fire.  

Those damned bleeding hearts that want food inspected.

Those damned bleeding hearts who think we ought to vaccinate people so disease doesn’t spread rapidly.

Goddamn those bleeding hearts.  They even want us to pay labor a decent wage.  They think everyone  should be employed.  Well who’s going to be the backup when those unvaccinated workers are  fed spoiled food and enclosed in buildings with no fire escape?  Come on, get real.  Don’t be woke, well that’s what the bleeding hearts are called down, sorry, my terminology’s out of date.

And let’s not forget the benefits of slavery.  Doesn’t matter that some people are pretend-free.  We certainly can’t let them get woke like those black people who really want to be free.  So we don’t want any woke people, not in this last gasp of our decaying toxicated breaths.  Because if we can just create an AI that can replace people to be our servants.  Then all those unwoke people can sleep peaceably forever and never wake up again.

Damn the bleeding hearts and damn people who think they ought to be able to wake up tomorrow. 

You know Vivek Ramaswamy makes a really good point that I imagine the first man planning to run for king made when he elicited his followers…we’ll survive soo it really doesn’t matter if no one else does, does it?  Who cares about the environment, who cares about people. All we need to do to survive is to technologize our own environment and our own people.

 So God bless the godmakers who created men in the image of Godlessness destruction.  Wake up and go to church and turn into sheep we can drive off the cliff.

Or is that go to sleep while we do so.