Reflections on the End of Time
Politicians have articulated the absolute expendibility of most humans beings on the planet. That’s creating new forms of solidarity in the streets right now, and all over the world, as people struggle.
Politicians have articulated the absolute expendibility of most humans beings on the planet. That’s creating new forms of solidarity in the streets right now, and all over the world, as people struggle.
History does not demonstrate that we have left anything in our past. We are only accumulating.
Now is the time to pull the emergency brake.
If we don’t start addressing the connection between capitalism—or capitalist realism, as the late Mark Fisher called it—and the psychopathology of depression, then we won’t get very far in treating the phenomenon.
Even if the Sámi here are pushing for a greater consciousness of what Norwegians are doing abroad, there is still the minister of finance dressing up like Pocahontas.
Climate change is an invitation for all of us to recognize the reality that we’re in, and to ask essential questions of ourselves and each other. What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of our death? How do we wish to live, and how do we wish to die? There’s no getting away from it.
As European and North American powers divided the globe up among themselves and authored horrendous crimes on every corner of the globe, they needed to tell themselves that they were superior and virtuous, and they found a way to do it. That’s what the ideology of progress works for.
We have to think much more carefully about the system, broadly understood, and whether this system is in any way equipped to get us out of this situation.
There is no way that we can get out of the warming condition or prevent climate breakdown without destroying and terminating things that are dangerous.
There is now a political constituency being crafted at the highest level that has fear as a motivating factor. Once the limits are taken off, we end up in this Mad Max world where whatever is politically profitable will be used, no matter how destructive it is.
If we do not take that power back from the people who have it now, they will find ways to maintain it, either in a post-scarcity world where they use things like intellectual property to maintain control, or in a world of more dire ecological crisis, in which they run away and hide while the rest of us die.