Societal suicide
Posted: Thu Nov 07, 2024 2:16 pm
As my avatar implies, I know a lot of history and try to take a long view of it. But as parochial as it may sound, in the 5,000 years of human history, I can't think of an example of a society committing suicide as spectacularly as ours just did.
Other societies have chosen to support similarly destructive ideologies, but usually in desperate economic straits or after a humiliating military defeat, and never from the position of power that we held. The United States is the most powerful country in the history of the Earth. It has the resources of a small continent, a position in the world's economic order so dominant that it can easily suck up the resources of many other countries without having to invade them, and a massive population of people who produce goods cheaply because they aren't subject to the protections of native-born workers. Its alliances have been the linchpin of the international order for nearly 80 years, keeping the world's democracies together in a loose sense of solidarity against hostile dictatorships, communist or otherwise. Its middle-class people had more material goods than almost any person who ever existed, and its wealthiest had more material goods than even the richest monarchs of the preindustrial age could have imagined.
And its people just voted to take those alliances apart, expel that population of workers, and shut off that global system of trade. And to continue, and accelerate, the most dangerous hidden costs of shoveling all those resources down our insatiable gullets: digging hundreds of billions of tons of carbon out of the ground and setting them on fire creates insulation that gradually heats the planet beyond what our civilization is adapted for, and mass spraying of pesticides to make our industrial agriculture possible causes massive drops in insect populations, the basis of any terrestrial ecosystem. I don't know if we could ever have implemented alternatives to either of these damaging practices, but we — a society that was responsible for for that damage far out of proportion to its population — chose not to even try.
Because white Christians were angry about not being coddled enough. Because young men were angry about not getting laid. Because people of all varieties were angry about the price of groceries and were too obtuse to realize that the government couldn't wave a magic wand to bring them down. And because millions of the people who, last time around, kept this coalition of the stupid and the vicious in check were too lazy or too bigoted against the candidate to bother voting this time around.
The only hope of reversing this disaster is that the imbecilic economic policies that Americans just voted for will be fully implemented and that they triggers a depression and a political backlash. But it will take years, and the damage that can be done in that time is incalculable.
—
On this forum, I raged against this choice, to the point that reasonable members of this forum who disagree with that choice got angry with me, quite understandably so. You're better people than I am, more charitable to the people who made the wrong choice than I can be. I want to apologize to you, but it would probably ring hollow given what I'm about to say. No matter. I'm scrambling my password and leaving.
To the people who made the wrong choice, your only possible excuse is that you live in a self-reinforcing world of lies fed to you by people who profit from making you as bigoted and paranoid as possible. It's not easy to break out of a bubble like that, but at some point, people have to face responsibility for not trying, and my compassion for such people is spent. A lot of people will suffer and die because of you and the people like you. And I hope you suffer, and I hope you die. Your reward will not be in heaven, because heaven is not there. All we have is this life, in this tiny, fragile ecosphere, in a universe that is dark and cold and unrelentingly hostile. You're hell-bent on making this ecosphere hostile to your fellow humans in every way you can manage, so don't be surprised when other humans want to make it hostile to you.
Other societies have chosen to support similarly destructive ideologies, but usually in desperate economic straits or after a humiliating military defeat, and never from the position of power that we held. The United States is the most powerful country in the history of the Earth. It has the resources of a small continent, a position in the world's economic order so dominant that it can easily suck up the resources of many other countries without having to invade them, and a massive population of people who produce goods cheaply because they aren't subject to the protections of native-born workers. Its alliances have been the linchpin of the international order for nearly 80 years, keeping the world's democracies together in a loose sense of solidarity against hostile dictatorships, communist or otherwise. Its middle-class people had more material goods than almost any person who ever existed, and its wealthiest had more material goods than even the richest monarchs of the preindustrial age could have imagined.
And its people just voted to take those alliances apart, expel that population of workers, and shut off that global system of trade. And to continue, and accelerate, the most dangerous hidden costs of shoveling all those resources down our insatiable gullets: digging hundreds of billions of tons of carbon out of the ground and setting them on fire creates insulation that gradually heats the planet beyond what our civilization is adapted for, and mass spraying of pesticides to make our industrial agriculture possible causes massive drops in insect populations, the basis of any terrestrial ecosystem. I don't know if we could ever have implemented alternatives to either of these damaging practices, but we — a society that was responsible for for that damage far out of proportion to its population — chose not to even try.
Because white Christians were angry about not being coddled enough. Because young men were angry about not getting laid. Because people of all varieties were angry about the price of groceries and were too obtuse to realize that the government couldn't wave a magic wand to bring them down. And because millions of the people who, last time around, kept this coalition of the stupid and the vicious in check were too lazy or too bigoted against the candidate to bother voting this time around.
The only hope of reversing this disaster is that the imbecilic economic policies that Americans just voted for will be fully implemented and that they triggers a depression and a political backlash. But it will take years, and the damage that can be done in that time is incalculable.
—
On this forum, I raged against this choice, to the point that reasonable members of this forum who disagree with that choice got angry with me, quite understandably so. You're better people than I am, more charitable to the people who made the wrong choice than I can be. I want to apologize to you, but it would probably ring hollow given what I'm about to say. No matter. I'm scrambling my password and leaving.
To the people who made the wrong choice, your only possible excuse is that you live in a self-reinforcing world of lies fed to you by people who profit from making you as bigoted and paranoid as possible. It's not easy to break out of a bubble like that, but at some point, people have to face responsibility for not trying, and my compassion for such people is spent. A lot of people will suffer and die because of you and the people like you. And I hope you suffer, and I hope you die. Your reward will not be in heaven, because heaven is not there. All we have is this life, in this tiny, fragile ecosphere, in a universe that is dark and cold and unrelentingly hostile. You're hell-bent on making this ecosphere hostile to your fellow humans in every way you can manage, so don't be surprised when other humans want to make it hostile to you.