Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh III

Grieving: There Are No ‘Solutions’ to Overshoot

Jan 17, 2024

[NOTE: Beginning to post these thoughts of mine here on Substack; so please bear with me as I become familiar with this platform. I began a couple of years ago posting them on Medium but have found that the subscription practices there are somewhat restrictive. I will attempt to post one or two of my past Contemplations here until I am caught up, as well as new ones going forward. You can check out my website and/or Medium page at any time—see more at the end of this post.]

August 14, 2020 (original posting date)

Grieving: There Are No ‘Solutions’ to Overshoot

My comment posted on The Tyee in response to an article highlighting the increased occurrence of earthquakes as a result of hydraulic fracturing by the oil and gas industry in an area of British Columbia, Canada, and imperilling local infrastructure and construction of a large hydroelectric dam.

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Until and unless there is a complete dismantling and dismemberment of the current sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems in place globally, these type of situations and associated abuses of people and the planet will continue will little disruption.

I realise that a significant majority of people believe democracy, technology, and human ingenuity can save us from ourselves but this is highly unlikely (impossible?). We are so far down the rabbit’s hole that such magical thinking is likely common so as to reduce our cognitive dissonance en masse (and compounded by the constant propaganda thrown at us). It does nothing to resolve our dilemmas; in fact, it might actually hamper ‘solutions’ by avoiding more effective pathways and harvesting our finite resources even faster.

I truly believe we need to move quickly through Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief, getting past the denial and bargaining (for this is what is happening as more and more people come to realise we are pursuing unsustainable and suicidal ways, but don’t want to face the uncomfortable and negative consequences that are becoming increasingly obvious; they engage in magical thinking to convince themselves we’re okay with just a tweak here or a tweak there).

We need to come to accept that our chasing the infinite growth chalice must stop, and that all the ‘baubles’ promised from this pursuit by the sociopathic ‘leaders’ that profit from their control of the wealth-generating and -extraction systems that arise from this economic/political quest of growth are not worth the journey over the cliff ahead.

If we do not choose to stop this insanity now, we can be assured that nature will do it for us and we are not going to enjoy the choices nature makes for us to reset things to some sort of balance. The collapse that accompanies overshoot is never ‘fun’ for the species experiencing it.

And we have a species that will be fighting over the scarce resources remaining with the most destructive weaponry in human history. In fact, this fight has been going on for some decades (one could argue it’s been going on since humans first ‘arrived’ on the planet) and seems to be intensifying quickly (and has little to do with the left/right political spectrum disagreements, but a result of diminishing returns on our exploitation of resources). If we should have learned anything from the spread of Covid-19, is that exponential growth moves much faster than we imagine and can overwhelm a system in no time.

While it is very likely (guaranteed?) that our sociopathic ruling class will not stop this insanity (for it is their revenue stream and base of power), it is up to each and every one of us to remove ourselves as much as is possible from the Matrix and all the components of it that supports the unsustainable systems we are enmeshed in.

The journey will not be easy nor straightforward, but if we reach a tipping point of world citizens that reject the systems imposed upon us by the ‘elite’ we may just have a chance…maybe.

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