We Are the Threat: Reflections on Near-Term Human Extinction

We Are the Threat: Reflections on Near-Term Human Extinction

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

Nature is master of none before continuing, let me qualify a bit some of what I have just said. By “near-term,” I mean quite possibly within my lifetime (I am 22 years old) and even more probably within the 21st century in general. By “extinction,” I mean to evoke the simplest sense of that word – complete disappearance of humans from existence – but, more accurately, I mean something like “sudden, drastic reduction or even total eradication of human population concomitant with the collapse of complex advanced industrial society.” I mean “ecological” in the standard – if rarely truly applied to humans – sense of that word, and I mention thermodynamics because of the centrality of energy, specifically fossil fuels, to the causality of near-term human extinction.

Section I: Content Warning, Mortality Salience, and Irruptions of Extinction Awareness

This essay explores an unsettling topic: the probability of near-term human extinction.

Before I continue with this exploration, let me issue two caveats. First, in writing this essay I am thinking through, grappling with, and attempting to synthesize an enormous and diverse volume of information. This is an important exercise for me as I prepare to embark on writing a dissertation informed by this content. So, although I have full confidence in the analysis and theorizing that follows, this essay is an incipient, not a final, representation of my thoughts on this issue.

Despite my thinking’s nascent state, I am sharing this essay because – given what I take to be the urgency of this matter – I want to offer something like a preview and a guide for those readers who may wish to pursue their own independent research regarding this topic.

This leads me to the second caveat. I want to emphasize in the strongest possible terms that the reader should carefully consider the gravity of joining me on this journey. If you are in a fragile state of mind, or if you wish not to enter into a fragile state of mind, you might want to stop reading now. This is a sincere warning: what follows not only has the potential to induce existential crisis, but I am intentionally presenting it for the express purpose of inducing existential crisis. 

Still here? Very well then. Let me begin with a concrete example that, I argue, is representative of the kind of awareness that will soon begin imposing itself more and more frequently on more and more persons.

Now, even if we accept my cursory description of the phenomenology of these events, why do I make the strong and perhaps outrageous seeming claim that they are indicators of near-term human extinction? Here we must make recourse to and then build backwards from an application of first principles; particularly, principles of ecology. In other words, we must come to see how fundamental ecological principles operating on the global human population render near-term human extinction an ecological, or even a thermodynamic, certainty.

Once this truth is grasped, it becomes obvious that although the particular instantiations of these irruptions can and will vary, sometimes chaotically and their general appearance as antecedents to a foregone conclusion – extinction – is as definite as a pressure drop heralding the onset of a storm.¹¹ Put differently, the specific ways in which these irruptions will arrive are more or less undetermined, but that they will arrive is certain. Therefore, as a class of phenomena, events that produce irruptions of extinction awareness ought to be thought of as portents, omens, foreshadows, or harbingers of extinction. By learning to read and prognosticate about these signs, that we are living through a chronicle of an extinction foretold.¹² 

Finally, I ask the intrepid reader to open his or her mind and, at the risk of becoming unmoored, receive what follows with maximal charity. What I am about to discuss will likely challenge many of your core beliefs and assumptions about yourself and the world. These notions will have to be washed away, for, in the words of “The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”¹³ And contemplating death, or extinction, is about as visionary as thinking gets.

¹⁴ In other words, we contemporary humans normally relate to time not much differently than did the ancient Greeks, who experienced “the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.”¹⁵ Our lot, it seems, is perpetually to take ourselves by surprise.

 However, we humans also have tremendous powers of foresight. Indeed, foresight is the complement to memory “striking similarities between remembering the past and imagining or simulating the future, including… a common brain network [that] underlies both memory and imagination.”¹⁷ In other words, many of the same brain regions are “commonly engaged by past and future event construction.”¹⁸ This should not surprise anyone who has ever dreamed.

Thus one way we can use our powers of foresight, is to “try and imagine our current situation as the past present for a future historian.”¹⁹ In this way and others, we can glance over our shoulders at the future that lies behind and yet ahead of us. Indeed, that is how some perspicacious observers were able to predict. But, importantly, all humans do or can have access to this power of perception, for “[we are] human; nothing human is alien to [us].”²⁰ 

So, please: remain humble about what you think you know, and become comfortable with the possibility that you may be capable of knowing more than you think.

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Section II: The Case – Population Overshoot

With that ground-clearing complete, and in the interests of time and space, let me summarize and comment on what I take to be the most clear-eyed account of humans’ precarious position in the world. I am referring to sociologist William R. Catton, Jr.’s convincing claim, in his astounding 1980 book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, that misuse of fossil fuels has enabled the human population to overshoot (i.e., surpass) the carrying capacity (i.e., “the maximum population of a species which a given habitat can indefinitely support”) of the entire planet Earth such that a species-wide crash, or die-off, is inevitable and imminent.²¹ 

The details are daunting, but the premise is simple. Throughout human evolutionary history, the human population has increased over time as humans have gained access, primarily through migration and technological innovation, to ever greater amounts of resources. Here we can point, major developments like the use of fire, the invention of spears and other primitive weapons, horticulture, bronze metallurgy, agriculture, iron tools, firearms, industrialization (i.e., fossil fueled machinery), electrification, and antibiotics. These and other enantiodromic ‘advances’ allowed for the global human population to balloon from an estimated 3 million persons 35,000 years ago to an estimated 7.6 billion persons alive today – an increase of over 250,000%.

As quick as this increase is from a geological perspective, it becomes even more striking when we consider that the bulk of human population growth has occurred in just the last 200 years: since the year 1800, global population has increased from an estimated 969 million to the aforementioned 7.6 billion.²² This kind of precipitous growth represents another, different meaning of the word irruption, in the sense of a bloom, or “the rapid exponential increase of a population after it suddenly gains access to an abundance of the resources it requires.”²³ 

What matters from an ecological perspective is that the rapid growth of human population from the Industrial Revolution onward has been almost wholly dependent upon the consumption of energy from fossil fuels. Though we in the year 2018 take this fact completely for granted, ,

The breakthrough we call industrialism was fundamentally unlike earlier [such breakthroughs in human evolutionary history.] It did not just take over for human use another portion of the web that had previously supported other forms of life. Instead, it went underground to extract carrying capacity supplements from a finite and depletable fund – a fund that was created and buried by nature, scores of millions of years before man came along. The drawdown [i.e., extraction] method that we call industrialism relied for its increase of opportunities upon the use of resources that are not renewed in an annual cycle of organic growth. To expect to “do it again” is to expect to find other exhaustible resources each time we use up a batch of them… In short, industrial life depends on a perpetual hunt for required substances… Now we rely, as members of industrial societies, upon [substances] with renewal times that may be thousands or even millions of times longer than a human lifespan. Their renewal is by geological processes; present stocks of them were put in place by operation of those processes over immensely long stretches of earth history. Mankind cannot realistically hope to assume management of prehistoric events, or to replenish the ores and fuels now being extracted so ravenously. Instead, we must face the fact that, after ten millenia of progress, Homo sapiens is “back at square one.” Industrialization committed us to living again, massively, as hunters and gatherers of substances which only nature can provide, and which occur only in limited quantity.²⁵

It is this fundamental, immutable fact about fossil fuels – i.e., that they are finite – that has allowed humans to overshoot the carrying capacity of Earth. For, tragically, we humans have mistaken the energy afforded us by fossil fuels as permanently rather than temporarily available. This error has prevented us from preparing for what is colloquially referred to as ‘peak oil‘ – even now, over thirty-five years after the publication of Limits to Growth, Department of Energy report warned of the “unprecedented risk management problem” associated with the impending “peaking of world oil production.”²⁶

 

Now, I can already hear the counterarguments seeking to deny this basic ecological reality in which humans are embedded. Most notably, dismantles a kind of technocentrism that the “faith that technological progress will stave off major institutional change even in a post-exuberant world.”³⁹ Cargoism, as an ideology or worldview, falsely justifies a sort of human exceptionalism from the operation of ecological principles. As such, cargoism is one of the primary terror-relieving mechanisms by which humans convince themselves that they are or can be somehow exempted from the Earth’s sixth great extinction event – an event that they have caused and that is presently unfolding all around them.⁴⁰ 

The human penchant for fantasy suggests another major factor for why Overshoot, despite its powerful message – epidemiologist Harold B. Weiss in 2009 said that Overshoot “ranks as one of the most important books ever written, period” – has not attracted more scholarly interest, to say nothing of mainstream attention or acceptance.⁴² Overshoot contains dangerous knowledge; it is a real life Necronomicon or Tome of Eternal Darkness.⁴³ To read it and related texts is to arrive at a crossroads. The path of truth leads to an irrevocable puncturing of the fantasies that underlie human terror management strategies. The path of fantasy, which is the more common choice, ignores or denies truth and leads deeper into delusion. Aldous Huxley well understood this dilemma:

Suddenly to realize that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned – it is a most disquieting experience; so disquieting that most of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge.⁴⁴

Insofar as Catton’s “revolutionary” book itself represents an irruption of extinction awareness, then, it – for the same reasons of terror management described above – unsurprisingly has been disregarded by most people, including academics.

Let me now make two final notes for this section. First, we should not mistake Catton’s analysis for indictment. As a brute fact, the current human situation cannot be pinned on any one person or group of people. And, much to my dismay, overshoot cannot be wholly blamed on capitalism, either. Indeed, although “growth for the sake of growth” is both capitalism’s prime directive as well as “the ideology of the cancer cell,” any non-ecological system of social organization – including non-ecological socialism, communism, or anarchism – would almost certainly have led to the same outcome of population overshoot, albeit perhaps not quite as quickly.⁴⁵  

After all, Julian Jaynes reminds us, “language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.” So, since the very word ‘ecology’ did not even emerge until the late 19th century and did not become popularized until the 1960s, most humans literally could not have seen the sword of Damocles they were collectively positioning their progeny beneath.⁴⁷ Thus we should concur with Catton that overshoot is humanity’s “fate.” For, as sociologist C. Wright Mills explains, fate “is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people.”⁴⁸ This notion of fate as a failure of coordination provides one explanation for why, as Joseph Tainter shows in The Collapse of Complex Societies, civilizations throughout history have regularly fallen.⁴⁹ Indeed, when we recognize that even now, in the age of the Internet, humans are beset by seemingly intractable collective action problems, we have to admit that our history as it actually unfolded never afforded us an opportunity to avert our upcoming rendezvous with destiny. Hence we must forgive ourselves, for we knew not what we did.⁵⁰

Though I lack the space and time here to make as comprehensive a case as Rees’s and others’, before moving on I would like to briefly mention what I see as the most significant risks attending our population overshoot. These risks include (1) accelerating anthropogenic climate breakdown (itself, in all its variegated forms, a function of fossil fuel consumption); (2) the staggering loss of global biodiversity (reflective of our position in the Holocene extinction); (3) the rise of what political theorist Sheldon Wolin calls ‘inverted totalitarianism,’ or increasingly inequitable, extractionist, and repressive corporatocratic neoliberal or neofascist regimes (which, as the folks of Rojava have shown, can perhaps be resisted best through principles of social ecology and practices of libertarian municipalism)

It is to the reminders of these terrors – intrusions into consciousness of extinction awareness, or irruptions of irruption – that I wish now to return.

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Section III: Some Philosophical Implications of The Case

vaguely or precognitively, when they experience irruptions of extinction awareness is precisely the unfolding crash stemming from human population overshoot. In other words, these persons are suddenly, horrifyingly, and ineffably experiencing themselves in relation to the hyperobject to end all hyperobjects – extinction.⁶¹ Thus they are peering behind “the veil of our reality,” glimpsing the “terrifying vistas of reality” alluded to by Lovecraft, and feeling their own “frightful position therein.”⁶² And, like dogs barking before an earthquake, these persons understandably panic in the face of this incomprehensible and ineluctable doom.⁶³

After all, panic “happens when the confidence of society’s members in each other breaks down… and gives way to an ‘every man for himself’ type of scrambling… this can arise from (1) general perception of severe and immediate danger, coupled with (2) belief that the opportunities for escape are limited, (3) belief that these opportunities are diminishing, and (4) an absence of adequate communication about the danger.”⁶⁴ These conditions well match those that arise during events that produce irruptions of extinction awareness. Therefore, as we approach extinction these conditions – which call to mind Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes, or Thucydides’s disturbing account of plague-ridden Athens – will eventually, in a vast, cacophonous crescendo, engulf every human community on Earth

So, then, paraphrasing Albert Camus, there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is extinction.⁶⁹ But what do we do about it? One possibility is to work backwards from our conclusion about extinction’s inevitability to reinterpret in that light the events of today. This might seem to suggest, as paleontologist Michael Novacek puts it, that “the overarching recognition that we live in a world already radically transformed by human activity must frame our strategies for effecting maintenance or recovery of our vital ecosystems.”⁷⁰ But, though I agree with Novacek that “the current biodiversity crisis has one obvious biotic cause: ourselves,” I do not share even his tepid optimism that “the source of the trauma also has the presumed capacity to mitigate its own deleterious impact.”⁷¹ To be blunt, it seems to me that such mitigation would require us to make unprecedented changes on an infeasible scale within an impossible time frame. Can’t we find some humility here at the end?

My pessimism about mitigation notwithstanding, if any members of our species are to have any hope of surviving our self-inflicted extinction event, we must indeed resolve our ongoing failure to recognize that we are in it. We should, then, devote all our efforts to facilitating what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls “the climate swerve,” or “our evolving awareness of our predicament.”⁷² To that end, I propose, following Catton, that we can gain a far more adequate understanding of our world if we shift – in the manner described most famously by Thomas Kuhn In so doing, we can come to see how historical and current events – like Trump’s ‘election’ and swift normalization, the water crisis nearing Day Zero in Cape Town, the American opioid epidemic, the famine-genocide in Yemen, and the abrupt loss of Arctic sea ice – can be read with foresight as the kinds of omens or signs I mentioned above.⁷⁴ 

But not only can an ecological paradigm help us demystify much of the suffering that has accompanied our pre-ecological ignorance, it can also – more significantly for our future – empower us to take the steps that we must take in order for some small number of us to perhaps survive our current predicament. For, as Plotinus writes, “the knowledge of future things is, in a word, identical with that of the present.”⁷⁵ Thus there is “profound peril in continued flagrant misperception of the very nature of the human situation” in what we now call the Anthropocene.⁷⁶ Indeed, the peril of seven and a half billion Wile E. Coyotes looking down all at once – yikes!

To be sure, “misperception is the problem to be overcome by a paradigm shift, and only a paradigm shift can overcome it.”⁷⁸ Yet effecting this paradigm shift is a task of appropriately colossal proportions. How, if at all, can we hope to educate others for this kind of transformation of consciousness?⁷⁹ How can one teach an unspeakable truth to those who lack the ears to hear it?⁸⁰ Put differently, how do we overcome the quandary of Nietzsche’s madman, who, after speaking plainly his truth, sees that he has not been comprehended?

“I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.⁸¹

It seems that the madman’s only option is to find a way to reduce the distance between “the ears of men” and the “deed.” This, then, is the task to which I can and must now bring my entire being to bear. Not because I think I will or even can succeed; surely my efforts will amount to little more than polishing the brass on the Titanic. But I must do this because – knowing what I know and being who I am – I feel obligated, or compelled, to try.⁸² 

I hope that you, reader – having come to understand the human situation for what it is – now feel similarly. For we are going to need each other’s help “as night closes in.”⁸³

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Section IV: Conclusion

Before concluding, first let me say that if you’ve read this far, I applaud and thank you – it takes courage to confront this truth and perseverance to endure my unsparing writing style. Second, and since “what’s past is prologue,” I want to briefly describe my preliminary approach to closing the gap between ears and deed.

The problem of misperception about the human situation is an epistemological one. This epistemological conundrum, as I see it, has three major dimensions: (1) cognitive, (2) ideological or worldview-based, and (3) existential. More verbosely, the most significant obstacles blocking from human awareness the reality of impending extinction stem from (1) cognitive limitations (e.g., common cognitive biases, such as time preference, and the inability of most persons – primarily resulting from their having been miseducated, not from innate intellectual deficiencies – to think in the mode of what I call formal operational thinking, to say nothing of the more advanced and far less widespread modes of dialectical thinking, vision-logic, and systems thinking, among others); (2) conceptual blind spots stemming from various systematic ideological misconstruals of reality (e.g., false consciousness or misrecognition of one’s place in hierarchical and classist society, capitalist dogma like the unquestioned and unquestionable value of unlimited growth [which makes degrowth unimaginable and therefore impossible], and Catton’s cargoism); (3) inability and/or unwillingness to ask existential questions and to confront one’s own mortality even under optimal conditions (i.e., death denial as described by terror management theory), and, therefore, an almost unbreakable attachment to the illusory pseudosubject of the individuated ego.

Taken together, these impediments prevent our moving from a pre-ecological to an ecological paradigm. To overcome them, we must do deliberately and compassionately what irruptions of extinction awareness do violently and indiscriminately. That is, we must systematically deconstruct our paradigmatic limitations in a way that, from their rubble, offers reconstructive resources for the developmental move from a less to a more adequate species-wide paradigm or worldview. Then with eyesight nearer to be able to see that “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”⁸⁶ 

In a sense, this amounts to an idea of education as simulated near-death experience – fitting, given our proximity to extinction.⁸⁷ This framing emphasizes the fact that, rather than focusing our efforts on trying to change the seen, we must instead attempt to alter the seer. For the goal is not to persuade humans that things are different than they think they are; rather, the goal is to empower humans to disclose to themselves a state of affairs that is already the case but that is going misperceived by them. Therefore, as adult education scholar, we must change humans’ perspectives on their world – a process which necessarily entails changing their conceptions of themselves.⁸⁸ What I am suggesting, in other words, is that there is a mode of being that is as qualitatively distinct from conventional adulthood as conventional adulthood is from childhood, and that this more advanced level of development is what we should be trying to realize in ourselves as a strategy for surviving extinction.⁸⁹

Ironically, then, the only way for us to save ourselves from extinction is to die to what we are and to become reborn as something we are not. An important part of this process will be the heeding of “know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”⁹² Tragically, not all will hear this injunction, and so we must consider the plight of the children who will continue to be born even as our species draws nearer and nearer to extinction. These youths – who will not be burdened by any obligations to a dysgenic, filicidal system of social organization that has doomed and declared war on them from before the moment of their conception; who, having been thrown into this world, will not hesitate to acknowledge the self-evident reality of the human situation that their indoctrinated elders embedded in the gerontocracy self-servingly deny – will likely be our species’ only hope for survival.⁹³ Educating this final, fated generation for undergoing – and, perhaps, overcoming – extinction, then, is the labor with which wise adults will soon be (are already) tasked.

I have much more to say about how we might organize to systematically perform this labor (recognizing, of course, that in reality there is not enough time left for us to actually complete it), as well as about what form my own contribution to this labor might take. However, this essay is not the place to go further into detail on these points – that is what my future research, including my dissertation, is for. Until then, I will say that my fool’s hope lies in the kind of work being done by scholars focused on the nexus of developmental psychology, deliberative democracy, critical pedagogy and psychagogy, and cosmopolitanism. In particular, political theorist Jack Crittenden’s book, Wide as the World: Cosmopolitan Identity, Integral Politics, and Democratic Dialogue; futurist Jennifer Gidley’s book, Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures; integral theorist Ken Wilber’s ouvre; and much of the thinking being done in certain academic journals like World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research and the Journal of Transformative Education stand out as the most compelling sources of inspiration for promoting radical, species-wide change.⁹⁴ 

In the meantime, what matters is that all of us come to grips with the human situation. Crucially, each of us can do this on his or her own – we do not need to wait for utopian institutional change to guide us.

edge.”¹¹⁴ 

So gaze long into that abyss, friends – and drop off! Light a lantern as you fall through a tesseract beyond the veil of our reality, and, once you cross Owl Creek in the Mountains of Madness, find a human with whom to share an amontillado.¹¹⁵ In other words, do as Jesus said and “leave the dead to bury their own dead.”

We best start believing in human extinction – we’re living through it!

Irreplaceable

Irreplaceable 

Stop calling people who don’t call you. 

Stop visiting people who have no idea where you live. 

Stop spending money on people who would never spend on you.

 Don’t make time for people who have no time for you. Stop thinking about people who don’t think about you. Stop bankrupting yourself emotionally. 

Treat people the way they treat you. Stop giving more than you’re getting back.  Stop giving love when it’s not returned. 

Life is too short to be begging people for their love and attention.  Surround yourself with people who genuinely care about you. 

Love yourself. Enjoy your own company for a change. It’s better to be alone than to be with people who don’t give a Damn about you. You deserve to be with someone who chooses you over and over again without pause. Without a doubt. 

Stop degrading yourself for scraps of attention. Stop allowing people to use you. You’re unique. There is no one else out there like you. Start acting like it. 

 Be With people who see YOU.

Love doesn’t mean anything if it’s not given genuinely

Stop letting people treat you  like you’re replaceable.

@bigthinker 

success formula

A seed grows with no sound* but a tree falls with huge noise. Destruction has noise, but creation is silent. In your success remain silent as there is power in silence. Grow Silently. Cultivate Silence
A farmer discovered that he had lost his watch in the barn. It was no ordinary watch because it had sentimental value for him. After searching high and low among the hay for a long while, he gave up and enlisted the help of a group of children playing outside the barn. He promised them that the person who found it would be rewarded. Hearing this, the children hurried inside the barn, went through and around the entire stack of hay but still could not find the watch. Just when the farmer was about to give up looking for his watch, a little boy went up to him and asked to be given another chance. The farmer looked at him and thought, “Why not? After all, this kid looks sincere enough.” So the farmer sent the little boy back in the barn. After a while the little boy came out with the watch in his hand! The farmer was both happy and surprised and so he asked the boy how he succeeded where the rest had failed. The boy replied, “I did nothing but sat on the ground and listened. In the silence, I heard the ticking of the watch and just looked for it in that direction.” A peaceful mind can think better than a worked up mind. Sometimes the noise in our life is so much with no clarity on what to do. The mind seems so occupied with lots of thoughts that promote fear, discouragement & anxiety. Let peace guard your heart all the time. Consciously clear your head and mind; be patient and listen.
MAY WE SUCCEED EVEN WHERE OTHERS HAVE FAILED.
GOD BLESS US AL