Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXLIV

Enough Already You Malthusian Doomer!

Apr 03, 2024

August 7, 2023 (original posting date)

Enough Already You Malthusian Doomer!

Today’s Contemplation is my comment on The Honest Sorcerer’s latest article that highlights the finiteness of our world, diminishing returns upon our extraction of the minerals most necessary to support our current exceedingly complex global-industrialised world, and how this is playing out in the financial/economic and geopolitical realms.

Another great summary of our predicament.

Amazing to me how many folks continue to employ boatloads of the magical thinking necessary to deny/bargain with/rationalise away the biogeophysical realities showing that the utopian future they believe in and are fiercely advocating for cannot come to fruition; and it doesn’t matter how innovative and ingenious our species might be.

In fact, what they are promoting is an array of industrial processes and activities that are simply making our ecological overshoot predicament worse — much worse. It isn’t a stretch to argue that our ‘success’ is contributing to our demise, and that of most other species, in an increasingly dangerous and exponential fashion.

I have little doubt (given past precedents) that worsening consequences (particularly environmental degradation) will be ignored, attributed to some other non-consequential cause, and/or countered with arguments along the lines of “we can do this [i.e., destroy the planet’s biosphere] in a much ‘cleaner’ way…here’s another ‘breakthrough’ experiment/prototype/small-scale example to prove it” and the destructive practices will continue/expand — and I’m confident it has little to nothing to do with the fact that the world’s profit-takers are enriching themselves through this (#sarcasm).

As various people have been credited with stating: “There is no difference between theory and practice in theory, but there is often a great deal of difference between theory and practice in practice.”

It doesn’t seem to matter one iota about the signals the planet and its quickly disappearing other species are sending us. We will continue our harmful actions until Nature forces our hand…and then we will continue them further because ‘human ingenuity’ and ‘progress’; in fact, there’s a very good argument that this is exactly what we’ve been doing for some time (perhaps since the first complex societies arose).

Those who monitor our predicament and sound alarm bells — and challenge the stories weaved by our governments and the industrial/financial complex — will likely be increasingly ostracised and or silenced through burgeoning narrative management processes (e.g., disparagement, deplatforming, censorship, financial isolation, arrest). The masses likely will be forced to abandon recent historical ‘benefits’ (e.g., relatively inexpensive food, shelter, personal transportation, leisure activities, etc.) for the ‘collective good’ (e.g., the ‘war’ against climate) whilst the ruling caste witnesses increasing wealth accumulation and buffers itself (temporarily) against the headwinds of overshoot.

Perhaps most immediately ‘problematic’ will be the increasing geopolitical stress as ‘resource wars’ intensify. That all players are being conditioned to view global competition over resources as simply some evil other and their nefarious aspirations is not novel since it’s a strategy long-employed by a region’s ‘leadership’ to ‘rally the troops’ and justify/rationalise a host of draconian policies — particularly increased siphoning of ‘wealth’ from the masses via price inflation and tax increases. And it’s certainly not hyperbole to suggest that the current situation (that’s been brewing since the close of World War Two at least) could at any moment go thermonuclear; which, if nothing else, will put an end to the arguments about all this.

Overall, though, I continue to be baffled by the apparent fact that our species, for the most part, currently interprets virtually everything through the lens of socio-economics and -politics while ignoring/denying/rationalising away the physics, chemistry, and biology that has the ultimate say in how this all plays out. Perhaps it’s because the human-contrived narratives about the power of economics and politics has been around much longer than the physical sciences and the laws and principles we’ve discovered from them, and are thus not easily overcome — to say little about the fact that humans desperately want to believe they have agency in their lives and it comes via our sociocultural institutions, not Nature.

Raise these red flags about the dangers of perpetual growth and our complex technologies, and the significant negative consequences of them, and the hounds of the ruling caste and their hangers-on pounce and claw your eyes out shouting about ‘progress’ and ‘human ingenuity’ you Malthusian doomer!

But seriously, what could possibly go wrong with infinite growth on a finite planet?

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