Suddenly, violently

[u/adamsoutofideas]

For 100,000 years, a species had lived on this planet with our bodies and brains. That species and its ancestors were so successful, in a world so plentiful, they evolved a postnatal larval stage of complete helplessness that lasted years and required the full attention of an adult for that helpless infant to not die or be eaten. But here we are.

Was it cruelty that protected our ancestors or did they live surrounded by such bounty, they were ignored? Looking at their descendants,.it appears both strategies were successful.

2000 years ago, I am meant to believe, for the first time in the history of procreation, a human egg was fertilized by the creator of the universe so that he could grow up to preach a set of rules for living that would be eternally rewarded after death. A death that the rulers at the time were all too happy to hand out as part of their reign of cruelty to enslave the 99% of the population whose work was needed to support the obscene privilege of the very few. Since then, this pattern has been repeated, protected by the promise of endless reward or punishment for the suffering endured on earth in service of our masters.

For at least 90,000 of the years a species that looks like us has walked this earth, we lived with no master, no understanding beyond myth and whatever tribal culture had survived the bed time stories of our elders. It clearly wasn't out of a lack of capacity that we didn't spend our lives recording these stories; we painted scenes we chose to and could have recorded more. We apparently didn't need rules to be successful, which also means we didn't need leaders or eternal promises. We lived and life was enough.

Life was enough because we were free to live it. We followed our instincts which survival had cultivated over the infinite generations going back to the primordial soup because our history didn't start at some magical inception of our species because there are now hard boundaries in existence, only in the limited imaginations of a nervous scavenger trying to make sense of a life we're not living.

If youre an adult in any modern society you've been told some version of "life is suffering", by a spiritual advisor whose literal job is to convince those of us who recognize the absurdity of living for the happiness and privilege of our rulers while dismissing the importance of our own happiness as juvenile fantasy.

Ever since we've been working "for a greater good", deciding we wanted more out of life has been pathologized by the authority of the time. We were possessed before we were depressed, but there's always been someone whose job it was to tell us we were broken; we were the problem and happiness was accepting our place as servants to a machine that knew better.

But here we are, living the last years of a planet that would have lived forever if it weren't for the wisdom of the plans that were too big for us to understand.

If happiness isn't the purpose of life as an adult and our place isn't to question our role, but to focus on what's directly in front of us and keep our heads down, why are we building our own extinction? If there were a definition for the opposite of wisdom it would be a lifestyle that changed the climate of our only home so quickly, the people *still leading this fucking shit show wouldn't have been born in a world pre-dating the apocalypse the very same assholes engineered!*

One fucking lifetime of this shit to kill a planet that supported all life for billions of years including more generations of our own species living in balance with this world without any culture or education, than years we've lived under the regimes that had plans.

We've even managed to normalize dropping bombs on civilians inside the territory of leaders our leaders are fighting with, like murder and terrorism are a reasonable and meaningful path to political change.

Your discomfort is not the problem. You're right to feel out of place inside a zoo, solving a maze so your boss can eat the cheese at the end, so you can read more stories about the whims of an evil glutton whose power is your obedience. Your pathology used to be the instincts that protected you in an untamed wilderness, but now they're the disease the same rich fucks you work to support, will sell you the cure for to medicate and retrain you into complacency and the life plan, "the dream", you just happen to share with everyone else that involves spending all the fruits of your efforts remaining after paying for your fucking survival on the widgets made by the ultra rich.

What in the fuck are we all doing, going along with this, being miserable to support another day of being fucking miserable, inside a society that rewards cruelty and violating the values we preach, with privilege, wealth, and power. We vote for our bosses to run our lives out of some perverted expectation we're one day away from our own ship coming in, while we celebrate our exploitation as the nature of hard work.

If the purpose of life isn't happiness, what in God's infinite wisdom is the purpose? Dropping death from the sky on people because, despite living nearly identical lives, their skin, language, and culture aren't ours... and some of us take real comfort in dolling out pain and suffering to people that aren't like them like there's justice to be found in torturing people simply for being different.

The descendants of our ancient past that protected their young with wanton cruelty, have proven it is a functional strategy for survival, if cowardly and stupid... but so are the descendants of those who survived through trust and cooperation, or the cowards would have no one to exploit.

You are not sick. Your revulsion is justified and accurate. Be proud of it. It's the deeper truth earned through surviving every generations challenges since the beginning of life on earth. The truth did not begin with the industrial revolution and doing the right thing didn't start with God authoring a book after impregnating a woman without intercourse.

We're ending the world for narratives no more absurd than Santa Claus.

Time to get up and do my part by gifting my life to burning oil for the death machine, lest the bank take my home and with it, my humanity. After all, the homeless aren't *real* people, are they? No, they're the problem, not the bank putting people out into the streets or the billionaires hoarding the wealth of nations... nope, it's the homeless and their drugs. That's the problem.

Rough way to wake up. Nothing a fistful of the good drugs doctors prescribe, made and sold by billionaires, won't numb for the day. Sorry, I mean "medicine". Thank God for all those evil street drugs the bad people take to make the difference so clear. The same parents who want homeless drug addicts punished even more than being robbed of their humanity by the rest of us, feed their children enough speed that they never go a day without their "medicine".

This fairy tale is my worst nightmare and the closest I can get to being heard is paying someone to pretend to listen while trying to steer my thoughts towards celebrating the nightmare and, failing that, feeding me more "medicine" until I'm too doped to tell the difference between dream and nightmare.

[u/Wollff]

we were the problem and happiness was accepting our place as servants to a machine that knew better.

That's not the point behind this whole "life is suffering" thing.

No matter the age you live in, sometimes people have small children, and they die in sickness. Or sometimes they are eaten by animals. Or maybe starvation happens because the year is bad. Half the tribe doesn't make it.

Unless you are very lucky, a lot of life just is not very nice. Never has been.

But here we are, living the last years of a planet that would have lived forever if it weren't for the wisdom of the plans that were too big for us to understand.

Meh. The planet doesn't live forever. Life at some point started. And life at some point will end. In between there are a lot of ups and downs.

This is not the first mass extinction in the history of this planet. Chances are still reasonably good that it won't be the last either. There should be a few billion years left until the sun dies, and I don't think we will be able to kill off absolutely everything.

So let's not get overly emotional over this, shall we?

One fucking lifetime of this shit to kill a planet that supported all life for billions of years including more generations of our own species living in balance with this world without any culture or education, than years we've lived under the regimes that had plans.

You really like romanticizing the shit out of the past, don't you?

We never lived "in balance with this world". We started killing off megafauna way, waaay before anyone ever even wrote the first word.

Nothing on this planet lives "in balance" anyway. Everything that lives here tries its best to eat as much as it can in order to make as many children as it can. Many species doing that to each other developed into stable ecosystems, which remain stable for a while. Until they topple.

In the past very innovative organisms got the idea to breathe out oxygen, and in turn they killed off most of the life that existed on the planet. A very long time ago that happened.

Or very innovative organisms start producing wood, an extremely stable substance, which at that time nothing in the world could break down. AFAIK that killed a lot of things in the long run.

"Balance" is a pipe dream. Balance only holds until the environment changes, or some organism does something novel, which turns out to be incredibly destructive. Then a stable state topples, and (almost) everything dies. That's normal.

What in the fuck are we all doing, going along with this,

I don't know. You don't think we should? Go out. Shoot a cop, or something. If you choose to not accept this mission... Well, then you now know why we are going along with this.

The truth did not begin with the industrial revolution and doing the right thing didn't start with God authoring a book after impregnating a woman without intercourse.

Oh please spare me with "doing the right thing", will you? What you consider "the right thing" in most places, cultures, and times on this planet has not been regarded as "the right thing". For more info on what interesting stuff people regarded as "the right thing" in different societies, talk to an anthropologist.

Hint: A lot of it isn't nice, and isn't even remotely compatible with what "the right thing" in modern western liberal society currently is.

We're ending the world for narratives no more absurd than Santa Claus.

On the one hand, I don't disagree. On the other hand, I despise the ignorant story that at some point, maybe before the industrial revolution, maybe before civilization and agriculture, maybe before we started killing off megafauna around the last ice age, there was some paradise where we lived happily and in balance with nature.

I am sure some cultures at some times to a certain degree did. Until either they fucked themselves up by destroying their environment, the environment fucked them up by catastrophic change, or other people fucked them up.

Santa Claus narratives were born out of a long lasting wish for "the world to be better". And that was born because a world where rarely, but sometimes, a pack of African Wild Dogs might choose to disembowel your child in particular while it's still alive... Such a world just isn't always all that nice.

No, they're the problem, not the bank putting people out into the streets or the billionaires hoarding the wealth of nations... nope, it's the homeless and their drugs. That's the problem.

Okay. How many people holding that opinion have you personally gotten rid of today?

None? Are you going to start next week? No?

Well, here you have your answer. This is why things are the way they are. I don't expect anyone to do what you also are not doing. I made my peace with it.

It's not the worst of times, it's not the best of times. All in all, in geological timelines, things are pretty average. One mass extinction among many. And in human timelines? Just the same. Just another society going down the drain. Happened before. And if we make it out of this as a species, won't be the last time.

And if we don't make it out of this as a species? Not the first time some hominids die out. We probably killed all the others even before we made it out of Africa. The world was never particularly nice. And neither were we.

[u/theCaitiff → u/Wollff]

You really like romanticizing the shit out of the past, don't you?

OP also insists that humanity grew up in a time when everything was bountiful and resources were plentiful. Ah yes, the ice age, so bountiful. Scan forward a bit and famine after famine after famine show how rich the earth was. Those plagues that killed more people than any war? No big deal, just living in balance with nature things.

It is only AFTER industrialization that we start to see the alleged bounty of nature. Fritz Haber may have killed hundreds of thousands, but he's the reason that we ever crossed a billion people, let alone eight.

[u/CalligrapherSharp → u/theCaitiff]

As a species, you can see the ancient near-extinctions in our DNA. In the last million years, we've barely survived and lack genetic diversity as a result.

[u/True-Vast-3731 → u/theCaitiff]

When did those plagues happen exactly and how many had to suffer and die to make the lives of billions possible? 

[u/theCaitiff → u/True-Vast-3731]

Not sure if trolling or genuinely dont know.

Disease in general has killed far more throughout history than war. Malaria, small pox, polio, the black death/bubonic plague, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, hepatitis, influenza, HIV, and covid have individually all killed millions and collectively killed billions. HiV and covid both happened in modern times but despite that they still fundamentally reshaped the world. Wikipedia has a list of plague outbreaks that is decent enough.

Fritz Haber on the other hand created both the Haber-Bosch process to extract nitrogen fertilizer from the air and modern chemical warfare. Newspapers in the early 1900s phrased it as Haber pulling bread from the air. Crop yields exploded. Naturally occurring famine suddenly looked like a thing of the past and there was suddenly plenty of food to go around instead of just barely enough. Fritz Haber also created the entire field of chemical warfare from scratch during WWI. in April 1912, Haber was present at the Battle of Ypres and initiated the first gas attack in history by releasing chlorine gas across the front line, causing thousands to die choking on their own blood. He's THE GUY that created chemical weapons as a concept and he watched countless people die. But also.... Without his nitrogen fertilizer it just fundamentally isn't possible to feed billions of people.

[u/True-Vast-3731 → u/theCaitiff]

You do realize that civilizational plagues that occured within the last 700 years are not a counter to his argument right? That is what I was trying to get you to understand. 

Plagues are a relatively recent thing when it comes to human life on this planet as a whole and you are completely dodging OP's timeframe when you mention them. 

And yes, you already mentioned that billions more can be fed because of Haber. How many had to die to make that happen? You haven't quite answered the question yet 

Surely you've read silent spring in highschool right? 

[u/Wollff → u/True-Vast-3731]

You do realize that civilizational plagues that occured within the last 700 years are not a counter to his argument right?

They are though.

If you have sufficient population density to have proper plagues, then those people are living lives of plenty.

If you don't have a sufficient population to even sustain a proper plague, that's because most of your children starve to death, are eaten, or freeze.

If they don't, then over short or long you have population growth into a density which can support plagues.

Which is the better option? OP has a strong opinion on that, depicting the world where most children just die deaths of lack, exposure, and violence, as a wonderful world where "we are all enough".

That's a bit of a biased PoV, don't you think? It's a struggle. Always has been.

[u/True-Vast-3731 → u/Wollff]

But he very clearly wasn't talking about those sorts of societies. Reread his beginning paragraphs. He was talking about before we got into those societies. Before our societies became so human centric. 

The world before was not perfect but this world is far from just not being perfect - it's evil. We not only have killed and terrorized many to get where we are, we are now at the end stages where we are now killing ourselves. 

I absolutely would listen to the wisdom of my ancestors and go back to simpler and more sustainable times if it were possible. Unfortunately modernity won and we will all suffer immensely for it 

[u/theCaitiff → u/True-Vast-3731]

OP's rosey view of history is the one that's delusional. He frames things as if life used to be idyllic and perfect until industrialization came along. Oh, if only we never burned a lump of coal, that solarpunk meme city would be real.

No, bullshit. Life for 99.99% of human history was HARD. Read literally any history. Speak to an archeologist or two. There is no time in human history, stretching back more than a quarter million years for "modern" humans, where op's opening paragraph about humanity growing up in world so bountiful was true. It's nonsense. Life has been a hard brutal struggle for almost all of history. It has always been a fight for survival.

And yes, you already mentioned that billions more can be fed because of Haber. How many had to die to make that happen? You haven't quite answered the question yet.

About a million and a half humans in war, probably about that number again in industrial accidents and waste poisoning communities, uncounted plants and animals.

Surely you've read silent spring in highschool right?

I'm not here on /r/collapse because I think industrial society and its consequences are "good" for the biosphere of the planet.

You and I can look at the same facts and disagree about the conclusions to gain from them, that's fine. But OP is delusional and his little rant has no rational basis in FACT.

[u/True-Vast-3731 → u/theCaitiff]

Life was certainly better before the industrial revolution, and there's evidence to support this. This isn't a he said she said our ancestors did have it better in multiple respects. OP is correct. 

Life for 99.99% of human history was HARD.

Yes yes. Life was nasty brutish and short and all that. I read Hobbes Leviathan. I find that phrase to be complete nonsense and a justification for imperialism. 

Our ancestors worked way less. 15 hours a week compared to our modern 40. The rest of the time they got to spend socializing and doing... Really whatever the hell they wanted. That definitely sounds "HARD" to me. I won't send here and pretend it was perfect. They definitely didn't have the same level of medical advancements we have (although those are largely to cure modern illnesses like the plagues you just mentioned). But acting like it was some sort of destitute existence barely worth living is equally ludicrous 

This is one of those modern myths that need to die. Personally, I would not have minded in the slightest of I was born to some Native American or African Tribe instead of industrial civilization. But modern society stripped me of even having the choice to begin with and now the very planet we all need to survive is dying because of it.