Three Goth chicks I met near the beach today
The question that’s on smart people’s minds these days, that is, people who live in big cities, wear glasses and put weird milk in their coffee, is how we lost Earth. The answer they generally arrive at is “capitalism”. I’m sympathetic to the view that most people were just fooled by a handful of American oil corporations that knew what was going to happen and set up a campaign to keep us in doubt for as long as possible.
And yet, the real story is uglier and goes deeper than this. When we blame some mysterious corporate actors, we’re still deflecting blame. Marxists tend to be really good at this. I’ve seen this so many times, where they bring up the argument that 100 corporations are responsible for 71% of CO2 emissions. And thus, there’s nothing we can do, except overthrow capitalism.
But the problem is that what they call “capitalism” is not some external evil force. Capitalism, lives inside all of us. These corporations that produce 71% of emissions together don’t produce products that they then dump into the sea. They sell them to you and me, the average dumb schmucks who want to be sedated.
The real problem is not that the government “isn’t doing enough”, or that “corporations just seek profit”. The real problem is that at a very basic fundamental level, Homo Sapiens Sapiens just does not care enough. It’s not that people don’t understand the problem. It’s not that there are no solutions possible. It’s that people just genuinely don’t care.
At the end of the day, there is exactly nothing that prohibits people from not eating animals. A child can figure out what happens to the animals you eat. I figured it out when I was ten, most people go their whole lives just suppressing the realization of what they are responsible for.
If you live in a city, which most of us Westoids do, you don’t really have a practical need for a car. A car is a luxury object, a status object. Everyone knows we would be better off without them. Every boomer grew up learning how the cars make us dependent on a bunch of Arab oil sheikhs. They all saw the birds covered in oil. They spent their days sitting in traffic, on their way to the office. They just didn’t really care.
And every millennial knows what happens when you fly to the other side of the globe. It’s not difficult to figure this stuff out. But fundamentally, they just don’t care.
They hear on TV that they’re supposed to feel ashamed of flying, because it harms the Earth, so they may adjust to that at some level. But there’s the thing: This desire to keep a habitable beautiful planet is not SUPPOSED to be something the TV has to teach you. It’s not supposed to be peer pressure that makes you care.
It’s supposed to be something innate, something that comes naturally to you. And yet for the majority of people, it’s something they’re taught by their TV, like new genders and cheering for guys in thongs on boats in Amsterdam. It’s not SUPPOSED to be the TV’s job to teach you that your hamburger came from a brutally murdered cow fed soy from Brazil grown in what used to be a rain forest.
You’re supposed to be able to figure this stuff out yourself and you’re supposed to be the one who is demanding that your TV and your politicians do something about this mess. But it’s the other way around. Your TV and your politicians think to themselves “wheh this mess is really starting to escalate” and then you get ANGRY because they dare to point it out to you that we’re walking mindlessly into a dead end.
Because again, you’re not supposed to learn from the TV that none of this is working. If you’re not a FUCKING MORON, you’re supposed to be noticing these constantly escalating droughts. You’re supposed to notice that the insects are FUCKING GONE. And if you have some sort of soul hidden deep within your Godforsaken piehole somewhere, THAT’S SUPPOSED TO PISS YOU OFF. But what happens instead, is that most of you are in fact mostly pissed off when you have this stuff pointed out to you.
You don’t really need to understand climate change. It wasn’t really supposed to ever get to this point. Forget climate change for a moment. If you live in Appalachia and they’re literally removing the mountaintops you see from your bedroom window where you used to walk as a child, just to burn the coal beneath, you’re supposed to be pissed off. If you live in Germany and they’re removing entire villages, to dig up the coal beneath the ground and turn the whole thing into a lake, you’re supposed to be pissed off.
Let’s go further back. As a child I wanted to be a forest ranger. My best friend at the time wanted to be a sheep herder. He became an engineer, I became the mess I am right now. We spent our days hiding in the bushes, building tree houses. If you spend your days as an adult in an office, when you wanted to herd sheep as a child, you’re supposed to be pissed off.
This whole term “climate change” is a bit like “shit drowning syndrome”, which happens when you’re so drunk at a festival that you fall face-first into a toilet bowl and drown in some other guy’s diarrhea. My point is: It was never supposed to get to that point.
A healthy functional society would not have to worry about climate change. When you get to the point where you have to worry about your concentration camps for animals warming up the planet or the risk of drowning in someone’s diarrhea, something went wrong much much earlier.
If I wanted to generate the impression of intellectualism, I would point out the enclosures and theft of the commons in Britain which forced a now landless proletariat to move to the city and work in factories. But I’m not a materialist, nor a historical determinist. And I’m not an intellectual.
This didn’t go wrong with some rich guy who did something evil. This went wrong with all of you. This went wrong in your minds. This went wrong in what matters to you. No, further back. This went wrong in what interests you. What interests you is how you relate to other people.
Most of the non-human world just doesn’t even interest you. You walk past a river and you don’t ask yourself “I wonder what goes on in that river”. You don’t really wonder how snails reproduce. You don’t know the names of the birds, or the mushrooms.
You don’t wonder what the birds are thinking. You can see a bird sitting on a wooden pole all by himself, not looking for food or mates, just doing nothing. But you don’t ask yourself what that bird is thinking, in that very moment. Of course you don’t ask yourself that. You ask yourself what you client is thinking. You have a train to catch in two minutes and you have an important meeting with him today!
But that’s the most important question. And you skip over it. And that’s how we lost Earth.
I’m with you WDS. I’m old enough to notice fewer insects and birds. Freaks me out.
Humans are hopeless. Indeed, no one cares. Unending, unnecessary, consumption. Even the young vocal wokesters don’t try to minimize their footprint.
Base, vulgar yet perfectly natural behavior.
>eat the bugs
Joke’s on you, WEF. They’re all dead.
Oh wait… maybe that was the joke.
Marxists don’t actually care about the environment, the first thing they do when justifying why the USSR and CCP are so great is to point out all the industrial products they made. Marxism is also a very humanist ideology, marxists might deny that there’s any biological difference between groups of humans, but they almost all accept that all animals are inherently lower than us and only exist to be exploited; since we are the only “historical” creature that go through dialectical materialism. I’ve even seen transhumanist commies celebrate the destruction of the “fascist” and “soulless” natural world, and advocate for a earth and humanity completely dominated by advanced technology. This being an example.
https://archive.amarna-forum.net/pet_ownership.html
Marxists are fundamentally the same as liberals at the end of the day. They’re liberals who realize that you can’t have equality under capitalism, as allowing individuals to compete with others will always have winners and losers. The only real difference between commies and liberals is that they disagree on how to organize the economy to achieve max freedom and equality for humanity, that’s basically it. Marxists have some retarded ideas about history too, that liberals don’t have, but that doesn’t mean much in reality at the end of the day, it’s just window dressing. Just like liberals, the environment isn’t a chief concern to marxists, it’s equal to trans right and making sure black people don’t get called the n word, they don’t actually care.
I’m convinced the only people who actually care about the environment are people who explicitly label themselves environmentalists, and even then probably only the more radical ones. Uncle Ted, Linkola, you, Greta, etc. If it’s not your chief concern you probably don’t give a shit. It’s absolutely tragic what’s happening to our planet, but I honestly think it’s hopeless. Our species is complacent and stupid, and the only people who care (autistic whites) are marginalized and powerless. Humanity will deserve whatever happens to it, and it will be our fault.
I spend many hours a week studying how to provide for myself and my family all the necessities of life, and my sporadic part time under the table employment is almost always to that end too.
The goal of this is both personal utility and to figure out where the real line is drawn. Under iron age conditions, what is the least one can get by with, in terms of space, work, and environmental impact?
With efficient fire practices that run on twigs in insulated burn vessels, and with diets revolving around potatoes, squash and supplemental amounts of fish, eggs, chickens, goat milk/meat, rabbits etc, it doesn’t take much.
The thing on my mind lately is the fact that there are too damned many hominids, and that most of the hominids are not just financially insolvent, but create far less tangible value than they consume. People who produce neither homes nor food nor equivalent tangible value, but instead rearrange numbers on spreadsheets all day provided the lesbian quadroons in HR approve of their existence, insist that they are entitled to homes and food.
Our society has destructive practices, but is also overscaled and insane. A tumor under a microscope is a bunch of recklessly reproducing dysfunctional cells that collectively destroy the conditions overall required for tissue survival, and from satellite view most of humanity do not look too different from that. Unfortunately we do not have a chemotherapy to cleanse the globe of dysfunctional excess waste humans.
That is a very good point, most people aren’t going to give up eating meat or technology, only a small minority of autists will do as much, and they’re basically irrelevant in their total numbers. Even if you got rid of industrial meat farming and personal vehicles, you’re not going to save the world just be ending meat eating or forcing everyone to walk, when there’s 8 billion people on the planets. In order to feed a rapidly growing population of 8 billion you still need to clear out huge swathes of land for industrial farming, you still need to use a huge amount of fossil fuels and pesticides to grow all of those plants, and transport them to the mouths of the hungry, and the population is only going to get larger and larger. Sure, it’d be more land and CO2 efficient to focus on eating plants instead of animals, but it’s only treating a symptom of the disease, the disease being overpopulation.
Ideally we would have a global population of no more than 200 million, with people either living in medieval sized cities, or on their farms and homesteads, with most of the world left untouched in its natural beauty. (Suburbs need to go because they’re inefficient in every sense. They take up more space to house less people than cities, don’t produce food like rural farming communities, and don’t allow nature to exist untouched.) This world needs to be eugenic and efficient, every person needs to contribute something tangible to justify their existence, or at the very least, be self sustaining (homesteading) Whether that be producing food, being a soldier, or contributing to their people’s intellectual heritage (I think art and science are meaningful things with tangible value, though these things are different than the “science” and mass produced “art” of the modern day.). As you said, we really don’t need office drones, they’re just useless eaters that take up limited resources without contributing anything to our species.
200 million is sustainable, it was the population of our earth 1800 years ago. Even the consumption of some amounts of livestock is sustainable with such a population, there would be enough land near the cities that people live in to support them without needing to invest huge of amounts of resources shipping meat across continents, and I think that the amount of unspoiled nature left over would offset the negative affects; especially with thoughtful people running things and working to minimize the damage by using less technology in matter of production. I like to think that eventually in such a society, with small numbers and great minds, we could even come up with ways to become permanently sustainable and no longer require finite resources such as fossil fuels. Now I don’t think this is realistic or is what’s going to happen, I think we’re doomed to live in this degenerate overpopulated world until mother nature unleashes her wrath on us, this is just my ideal.
Right. When one stops and thinks about what is ideal, it becomes obvious really quickly that a deeply overcrowded backdrop is not part of it. As radagast said in an earlier blog post, given the choice almost all would choose to be born as aryans in rural Scandinavia. Overall ideal is not possible as the world is. It’s got to get much smaller before ideal even comes across the horizon.
Exactly, and the only way I see the world getting smaller is a global economic collapse, similar to the bronze age collapse. I don’t think a revolution is going to happen, we’re just going to consume and consume until everything falls apart and 99% of us die off; after which maybe the society I or you envision will come about. The only problem with this is that it’ll be too late to save all the beautiful creatures of our world, and all future generations will have to observe is rats and pigeons, which is absolutely tragic. Most people only learn to care about something once it’s gone it seems.
Yes, it’s frightening but global warming has little or nothing to do with the missing birds and insects.
It irks me that global warming is sucking up all the oxygen in the debates over planetary health while so many species are headed towards extinction and it’s not because the world has warmed by a degree.
I grew up in a small town area and spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid wandering through the woods and fields. I wanted to be a spy, but my alternative was to run a shelter for homeless animals. About five years ago I was chatting with a friend of mine who is in her 70s. She told what a good time she had had recently with her grand daughter, who was about seven. They had played “office” together. She showed her granddaughter how to make spreadsheets, and they held pretend meetings, and set up a pretend conference, and wrote reports. Her granddaughter loved it. Wow that was revolting.
Wow that’s terrible.
I find it fucking depressing going to some developing country where everyone rides motorbikes and realizing after a while that they only do it because they’re poor and they will ALL buy a stupid pickup truck as soon as they get enough money to do so (which often involves them living in a wooden shack with a pickup truck parked outside, which is like America but even worse).
There really aren’t any better people on this planet. Rich people who don’t drive fly 10x as much as average people. It’s about status not values.
I want to make a confession.
I am tired of working too much, owning too much, consuming too much, not having time to think about stuff and write substack articles, etc. Constant phone calls from customers annoy me.
My footprint is too big.
I want a small home with a comfy couch where I can spend most of my day except when I spend my (now plentiful) time at the gym or low key visiting places.
I do not need another zero in my net worth statement, business scandals, endless correspondence, repairs of things I do not even need to own etc etc
If I had the means I would buy a couple acres in the middle of nowhere, built a shed and an outhouse, and live while never seeing anyone again. I would bring my swords and my books and live the simplest life I could. Alas, I cannot afford it, and building codes make it illegal to build living dwellings without modern electricity and plumbing. Poverty, that great religious virtue, is only legal for the vagrant