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The Pattern of the 21st Century is Predatory Collapse

Sunday, September 8, 2019 19:25

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“The Pattern of the 21st Century is Predatory Collapse”

by Umair Haque

“I’m going to say something pretentious and ridiculous, and you can decide if it’s something worth hearing. We need to decide what kind of people we want to be. I mean that on levels both big and small. What kind of species we want to be. What kind of citizens we want to be. What kind of beings we want to be. Let me explain what I mean by this strange (and pretty obvious) thought, and why it might mater.

When I look around the world today, there’s a common thread, that leaps out at me. A kind of underlying logic to a troubled world and its underlying problems. There’s a general pattern to the collapses the world is undergoing, whether they’re economic, environmental, political, or social. It’s hidden in plain sight.

The problems that we face are variants of what I’ll call in this little essay predatory collapse. Stagnation, inequality, climate change, mass extinction – the Big Four challenges of the 21st century. These problems are all the same problem, in one crucial respect.

They’re different flavors of what happens when you prey, but don’t nourish. We have different terms for this same idea in different disciplines. In economics, we’d call it “overconsumption” and “underinvestment.” In environmental fields, we’d call it resource depletion. In psychology, “burnout”, or “trauma”, or “depression.” Do you see the common thread?

Predatory collapse. What happens to a food chain when everyone’s a predator? Well, the bottom of the chain gets eaten through. Bang! Collapse.

That’s the pattern of the 21st century so far, and it isn’t a good one. You can see it everywhere, once you know what to look for. In nature, the insects and trees and fish and insects are dying off - the most vulnerable beings of all. In society, a new wave of fascists has taught declining middle classes to prey on those even more vulnerable than them. In our economies, the poor are increasingly left to fend for themselves, while the super rich become ultra rich – and so the project of civilization appears to be falling apart.

Predatory collapse. Collapse from the bottom up – because the roots of things, which provide sustenance, have been chewed through. Whether they’re the (literal) roots of our planet, the roots of our societies, or economies, or democracies. These things have all been underinvested in. That is to say, they haven’t been nourished, tended, cared for. They have been eaten away.

Do you see the pattern yet? Predatory collapse is corporations chewing up the planet for more dollars they can never spend. It’s the mass extinction of the little animals. It’s the slow death of democracy. It’s middle classes becoming the new poor – and turning on the already poorer. It’s the ultra-rich jetting off to Mars and uploading their brains and feasting on your kids’ blood to stay young…while longevity, happiness, and wealth all crater for everyone else.

Now, this is an abstract idea, maybe even a difficult one, so let me illustrate with the example of America.

America’s the world’s richest country. But it’s also one in which life fell apart. The average American can’t afford housing, food, healthcare, and bills anymore - hence, he or she dies indebted. What the? Why? Because instead of investing all its wealth – in true goods like public healthcare, college, retirement, childcare, funding research and art and literature and ideas, genuinely building, creating, renewing, transforming…America squandered it. On what? On cheap stuff from China, on fake wars, on endless bank bailouts. It handed all that wealth to more or less the worst people in the country – a class of billionaires so amoral they’d make Caligula blush.

What happened as a result? Well, because all the wealth and income were hoarded at the very tippy top, by the most predatory in society, there wasn’t enough to go around for everyone else. And as Americans fell into poverty, they turned to what imploding middle classes tend to - nationalism, extremism, authoritarianism, fascism.

Bang! Predatory collapse. America squandered its wealth, instead of nourishing itself. It let the predators eat through everything – the economy, society, democracy, the planet. The result was the most epic and spectacular social implosion in recent history. The house crumbled in on itself, as the predators ate through the foundations.

And this pattern – eating your way through a thing, instead of investing in it, nourishing it, tending to it, caring for it, isn’t just at work in something as abstract as democracy. You can see it viscerally, in the warming of the globe. In the dying off of the animals. In the slow death of our economies. In the suffocation of the old values of decency, truth, and equality.

The pattern of this century is this. We’ve been chewing through the things that matter for a very long time now, without really knowing it – the planet, our economics, our societies, our futures, each other, our own happiness and meaning. And now we’re hitting the limits. There isn’t much of these thing left to exploit. The bases of all these things are imploding, having been eaten away, because they are the most vulnerable and delicate and fragile. But they are the most crucial, too – they support the rest of the system, just as the planet depends on the trees, or you and I depend on the soil. Without those most vulnerable parts – bang! Everything comes crashing in on itself, roots ripped apart, foundations chewed away.

Now, I want you to see see the paradox – because it teaches us the answer to my question: “What kind of species do we really want to be? What kinds of people?”

We’ve chewed through the foundations of things, because they’re the most vulnerable. Why bother climbing a tree when you can chop it down? Who cares about the insects, anyways? People don’t need retirements and healthcare! Do you see what I mean? The foundations of things are the very first things that we will target and lock onto as predators – because they take the least work, imagination, and effort to destroy, plunder, pillage, and consume.

But the foundations of things, it turns out, are also the most crucial parts of all. Without them, the rest of the system doesn’t exist at all. No trees? No breathable atmosphere. No insects? By bye, food chains. No middle class – massive poverty? Kiss democracy goodbye. Do you see what I mean? The foundations of things aren’t just vulnerable – they’re also critical.

Now, so far, for most of human history, the problem is that we haven’t seen both sides of this coin. Just one. We’ve only seen that some things are vulnerable, and therefore, they’re easy to take, exploit, seize. And so we do, and have done, with abandon. To the planet, ravaging it, to each other, making endless war for trinkets, and to society, which until recently, was barely democratic at all.

Hence, our ideologies are mostly reflections of the predator’s moral logic – exploit the vulnerable thing! Whether it’s a person, a plant…or a planet. What else do capitalism, supremacy, and patriarchy all basically say?

The problem, though, is that while you can do that for a while, you can only do it for so long. Not just “until the vulnerable things run out.” The systems they depend on will crash long before that. We’ll all die long before the earth runs out of trees, insects, or water. Countries turn to fascism long before they run out of people to demonize and exploit.

So there’s the predators logic – “exploit the vulnerable thing! All the vulnerable things – exploit them as hard as you can!!” And there’s the flaw in it: everything else depends on those vulnerable things…the very same systems that keep even the predators alive, whether they’re planetary, economic, one social ones. When they crash – what happens?

The answer is: collapse. And that we’re finding out the hard way. What happens when the planet begins to super-heat? What happens when the animals begin to die off? What happens when desperate people, driven half-insane by the cruelties of capitalism, turn to fascism, and hope to prey on those weaker than them?

What happens when the roots of a trees wither? What happens to the oceans when the rivers run dry? What happens when the bottoms of things exist no longer?

Collapse does. But in a very specific form. One layer, upwards, a time, in terms of vulnerability, erodes away. Imagine a food chain, getting eaten through, serially. When there are no insects, so go the small mammals. When there’s no sky left to pollute, throw it in the sea. When there are no immigrants and refugees, and the homeland is proud and pure – they’ll come, at last, for you.

Do you see it? I know – it’s a subtle and strange idea I’m trying to express. This idea of collapse from the bottom up, like a volcano caving in, not erupting, like a tree withering from the roots. And yet I can’t help but see it now, everywhere.

And that brings me back to my question. What kind of species do we want to be? What kind of people? For too long, we’ve imagined ourselves as great, grand, strutting apex predators.

But the truth is we’re too stupid to be good apex predators. You don’t see lions or jaguars burning down the forests they live in, or killing each other for fun, or calling the others lesser beings. You don’t see sharks polluting the ocean and taking Instagram selfies at the beach. Only we do that. We’re not apex predators — and yet that’s all we’ve been told we are, since Darwin’s time, and long before, all we’ve been told, really, to aspire to. So what are we then, if we’re not apex predators?

That part is up to us. If all we are is the species that was so arrogant, so foolish, that mistakenly thinking it was the universe’s ultimate apex predator, so it chewed its way through everything which gave it life…then all we’ll be is, well, dead.

And that means, I suppose, that we’re going to learn to nourish, to tend, to to protect, to care for. To elevate things above us. Even if they’re as tiny as an insect, as old as a tree, or as abstract as democracy. In that moment, kneeling before the tiniest things, we prove our grace, our truth, our wisdom.

I don’t know what you call a species like that. Mature? Grown up? Realized? Fulfilled? Maybe we don’t have the words yet. Let us find them, my friends. And become just those kinds of people. Those kinds of beings. Kneeling before every life we are privileged to see, know, meet, whether as vast as a star, or as tiny as a little bug. Because each one lights our long, strange way home.

- https://eand.co/

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-pattern-of-21st-century-is.html

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