BY MOTI NISSANI
This posting reproduces a recent article by Prof. Guy McPherson, an article that deserves far more attention than it is likely to receive in either the mainstream, scholarly, or so-called alternative media. That article, in turn, is followed by a brief appraisal.
No Surrender
Posted by Guy McPherson on March 1, 2017
SAN ANTONIO Belize—(Weekly Hubris)—March 2017—I’m routinely accused of giving up. Worse, it is often written that the message of near-term human extinction encourages people to give up. As the primary messenger of this devastating message, I’m often at the receiving end of messages fueled by ignorance and its frequent companion, hatred.
For what it’s worth—and I suspect my two cents is overpriced this time—this essay serves as a correction to my detractors. I’m neither giving up on the living planet nor encouraging others to do the same.
Giving up is not giving in: accepting our fate is not synonymous with jumping into the absurdly omnicidal mainstream. Just because we’re opossums on the roadway doesn’t mean we should play possum. Resistance is fertile, after all. To employ a bit of The Boss: “In the end, what you don’t surrender, well, the world just strips away.”
Or, to employ a bit of Zen: Let go, or be dragged.
Or, to employ a bit of popular culture: Carpe diem.
Or, to employ a bit of Nietzsche: “Live as though the day were here.”
Climate chaos is well under way, and has become irreversible over temporal spans relevant to humans because of self-reinforcing feedback loops (so-called positive feedbacks). Such is the nature of reaching the acceleration phase of the non-linear system that is climate catastrophe.
As a result of ongoing, accelerating climate change, I’m letting go of the notion that Homo sapiens will inhabit this planet beyond 2026. I’m letting go of the notion that, within a few short years, there will remain any habitat for humans in the interior of any large continent. I’m letting go of the notion we’ll retain even a fraction of one percent of the species currently on Earth beyond 2030. But I’m not letting go of the notion of resistance, which is a moral imperative.
I will no longer judge people for buying into cultural conditioning. It’s far easier to live in a city, at the height of civilization’s excesses, than not. I know how easy it is to live in a city surrounded by beautiful distractions and pleasant interactions, and I fully understand the costs and consequences of dwelling there, as well as the price to be paid in the near future. I spent about half my life in various cities, and I understand the physical ease and existential pain of living at the apex of empire.
Also, I know all about the small joys and great pains associated with living in the country. I spent the other half of my life in the country and in towns with fewer than 1,000 people. I understand why the country bumpkin is assigned stereotypical labels related to ignorance and, paradoxically, self-reliance.
It’s clearly too late to tear down this irredeemably corrupt system and realize any substantive benefits for humans or other organisms. And yet I strongly agree with activist Lierre Keith: “The task of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much personal integrity as possible; it is to dismantle those systems.”
If it seems I’m filled with contradictions, color me fully human in a Walt Whitman sort of way: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Our remaining time on this orb is too short to cast aspersions at those who live differently from ourselves, as most people in industrialized countries have done throughout their lives. Most people in the industrialized world became cultural crack babies in the womb. There is little hope of breaking the addiction of ingestion at this late point in the era of industry, and I’m throwing in the towel on changing the minds of willfully ignorant Americans. No longer will I try to convince people to give up the crack pipe based on my perception of reality.
My continued efforts to speak and write will represent personal perspectives and actions. I’ll no longer recommend to others the path I’ve taken.
Nietzsche’s comment about seizing the day, every day, brings to mind the final words of Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces: “It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”
With the preceding dire news in mind, it would be easy to forget how fortunate we are. After all, we get to die. This simple fact alone is cause for celebration because it indicates that we get to live. As I wrote many years ago, our knowledge of DNA assures us that the odds of any one of us existing are greater than the odds against being a particular grain of sand on all the world’s beaches. No, the odds are much greater than that: they exceed the odds of being a single atom plucked from the entire universe. To quote the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, “In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I that are privileged to be here, privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to wonder why.”
It’s quite a deal, and no surrender is necessary. We get to live. Let’s live. Let’s be fully present. Let’s live here now.
No Surrender: An Appraisal
Posted by Moti Nissani on March 5, 2017
To begin with, Dr. McPherson deserves credit for setting conformity aside and wisely reminding us that, in the ongoing war between humanity and nature, nature bats last.
I likewise agree with him that it is just about impossible to wake up a victim of mind control. Aldous Huxley:
“The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.”
Experimental proof is available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance
I also agree that the climate situation is dire and that we are governed by a criminal enterprise. However, I feel the situation is not as bad as Prof. McPherson seems to believe, and, at the same time, that it is far more multifaceted.
First, not as bad. Rule number one when dealing with complex systems is unpredictability: You can’t be sure about the future of anything as intricate as the biosphere or climate. So Prof. McPherson, as an experienced scientist, ought to revise his statement along these lines: “There is a 90% chance that humanity will go extinct by 2026.” Averring a 100% probability is, in principle, unscientific. See the online version of a 1996 peer-reviewed article for more details: http://drnissani.net/mnissani/pagepub/GREENp&e.htm
Second, our plight is multifaceted. Climate change is just one of the grave threats to the biosphere. There are many, many others, including nuclear power, nuclear war, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and chemical contamination—all part of humanity’s war against nature and against itself. If you take all these together, and if we do not overhaul soon our political system, I conservatively calculated elsewhere the probability that humanity will go extinct in the next 200 years as something like 94%. See: http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/06/the-human-experiment-is-probably-coming-to-an-end/
The take-home lesson is: Humanity still has a chance—a small one, but nonetheless real. If I am right, instead of surrendering, we ought to fight back.
In we choose engagement, our first question might be: What kind of a political system should we strive for? The proven answer we’ve all been brainwashed against is: real democracy. See: https://www.greanvillepost.com/2016/08/12/7-4-billion-cheers-for-real-democracy/
The second question is: How do we overthrow the vicious, suicidal, oligarchy that rules us now? One unpleasant—but logically compelling—answer involves giving our rulers just a bit of their own lethal medicine. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/06/17/the-al-sabbah-brigade/
Paradoxically, one of the most moving calls to arms known to me appears in Prof. McPherson’s own website (http://guymcpherson.com/2011/02/the-people-vs-the-united-states/):
“They’ll talk about change, about politics, about reform, about corruption, but they will never talk about war unless they mean something happening far away. Because to admit the existence of the war waged against us is to admit that we are combatants, and if we see that we are not fighting back, then we would have to admit that we have surrendered. That we have already been defeated.”
Dr. Moti Nissani is an eminent thinker on interdisciplinary environmental issues. Using the Fermi paradox as a platform, he breaks down the fate of the human race and offers a simple and eloquent solution to preventing humanity’s extinction.
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