Umair Haque writing in Eudamedia and Co begins his argument in his piece The Idiots Aren’t Going to Make It — But What About the Rest of Us? by noting what so many of us have argued for years on end — many people are going to die in the coming decades. War, pandemics, biodiversity collapse, and climate change will take a brutal toll on life on earth. We are already in the age of mass death and extinction; he argues that we just don’t stop and think about that.
Idiots are victims and perpetrators both. In that sense, it’s a pity that they’ll die, in very large numbers. I would never wish any other person or being to suffer. It’s not you or I who are going to eliminate the idiots. They are going to self-destruct, and already are.
The problem is that idiots are quite content with their own self-destruction, even if it means the collateral damage of your self-destruction along the way. In that sense, all this raises the question for the rest of us: how do we survive the self-destruction of the idiots? Can we?
The ‘idiots’ are not just fringe actors anymore. They have too much power for comfort as white nationalism and hate spread like wildfire across the globe. “They’re people who are anti-vaxxers. Anti-maskers. Covid hoaxers. Climate change deniers, supremacists, and neo-fascists. They are the soldiers at the vanguard of a new Dark Age, the shock troops of fanaticism and extremism.”
But the self-annihilation of the idiots will only grow from here — and it will put the rest of us in danger, too. Covid is just the leading edge, probably, of a new age of disease. That is because we don’t have any global public health systems, while we’re encroaching on nature’s last few wild spaces, and that all equals disease, “zoonotic flow,” vectors moving between animals and humans. And yet they will remain just as uninterested as they are now in science, vaccines, precautions — and they will keep pushing their ignorance on the rest of us. What happens when a killer variant or pandemic hits a place like Texas? People die. Yet what happens to the rest of us when Texas turns into a plague state, a giant incubator for newer variants of a virus the rest of us really don’t want to get?
Imagine for a moment the future which awaits us, this time in even more detail. The planet is dying. It cannot now supply us with the once-abundant resources we were told would increase and multiply forever — “growth.” Harvests are failing. Oceans and rivers are poisoned. Fire and flood devastate region after region. The basics of our civilization are now scarce, in shorter and shorter supply. Prices have risen — see how they’re rising now? That’s just the beginning — to astronomical levels. Food, water, energy, oil, gas, medicine, shelter — these consume more than all of your income, and so you are in perpetual debt. Forget luxuries. You are just trying to survive. The shelves are bare. Jobs are scarce and work is hard to come by. With the scarcity of a dying planet comes a dying economy, too.
The next way that idiots are going to die is war. You can see that idiots are already itching for war. Take America’s Trumpists. They’re already killing people in the streets, gleefully. There was a fascist who killed protestors just the other day — and it barely made the headlines. That’s a tiny, tiny taste of the future. Demagogues will hurl armies of idiots at each other, for control of the scarce resources of a dying planet. The idiots will be only too happy to die for their chosen demagogues. The resource wars of the future are already here — that is what Putin’s invasion is really about. And millions upon millions are already eagerly waiting their chance to kill and be murdered at their demagogue’s slightest command. They have been radicalised, just like ISIS or the Taliban, into believing that martyrdom is noble and glorious, a good death.
Then comes climate collapse. Uh oh. Now it’s not just that the economy has failed, and the prices of everything that was once abundant has risen through the roof, leaving you impoverished. It’s that your region starts to feel it. Fires creep in, and incinerate a town. The bridge that connects you to the city is washed away. Insurance for your home or car? It skyrockets. Rent keeps going up, because just keeping a building standing now is a costly affair. What do you do then? Do you move? Somewhere cheaper? Where is that, anymore? Or do you stay, and try to brave it out? And maybe the men with the guns won’t let you go much of anywhere, anyways, or you have to brave a war zone of idiots trying to kill each other to get away from your burning, sinking town.
Meanwhile, Charles HughSmith writes in his blog with excerpts from his new book, Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States, tightly bound systems and centralized systems are essentially designed to fail.
His piece stood out for me as I watched Putin’s warlords on TV murdering people in Ukraine and Syria, Chechnya, and Georgia.
The urban destruction he unleashes is simply stunning. In a world of ever-decreasing resources, due to our overpopulation, there are thoughts of how we will rebuild from scratch the cities that he destroys, that nature destroys, and what war destroys. Those days are over, climate change is destroying cities and infrastructure already, And it kills our food; we may want to consider that we may not survive this.
The foundation of the Landfill Economy is to make stuff that can't be repaired and is designed to fail so you have to buy a new one--and soon. But repair is not guaranteed. If you happen to own a vehicle which was manufactured in the millions, there will likely be third-party suppliers for parts. But time and cost both erode the availability of replacement parts. There is no guarantee replacement parts will be available. Yes, some can be extruded in 3D printers, but there are a great many things that can't be fabbed on 3D printers: specialty wires, computer chips, alloys, etc.
Moving on to larger scale systems: where's the replacement parts when democracy breaks? How about the systems that deliver oil and fresh food over thousands of miles?
The dependability of these unrepairable systems has given us a false confidence in their permanence and durability. As more things become sole-source, as supply chains stretch and add additional points of failure, as the dependency chains increase in complexity, all these systems--political, technological, logistics--become more fragile--the opposite of durable.
The "buy a new one" faith in the infinite powers of substitution has stripped the economy of resilience and the ability to fashion workarounds. Since things can no longer be repaired, nobody knows how to repair anything. Since everything is sealed, nobody even knows what's inside the system. Since we're assured everything can be substituted and replaced, we no longer know how anything actually works. The best and the brightest have never seen a green bean growing on the plant or considered how all the goodies that make their "money" useful-- as in, there are things available for your "money" to buy--were fabricated or grown, cleaned, packaged, shipped and delivered.
As I explain in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States, tightly bound systems and centralized systems are essentially designed to fail. Load the system with dependency chains choked with points of failure for which there are no fixes or substitutes and then stretch those chains across the globe and you get a system optimized for fragility and failure.
What if it breaks? What's your Plan B, your workaround, your fix? What if you can't buy a new food delivery system off the shelf, or a new democracy that all you have to do is unwrap and plug it in? Where are the cheap, abundant substitutions for everything that's now chronically scarce because there are no substitutes?
This post was inspired by a former neighbor of mine on the rising costs of gas and food, trying to goad me into an argument of Joe Biden. I replied that I am more worried about nuclear war and war against the biosphere at the moment. He is a Trumper, the thought of armageddon not even on his radar. Yep, the idiots are everywhere.
I am beyond grieving at this point. Vladimir Putin has brought all the pain and fear home to me in just a couple of weeks that we will suffer unspeakable terrors as the years and decades unfold. We as a species are juggling multiple catastrophes at once, while “idiots” heckle from the sidelines exploit divisions that ensure that nothing is done to address any of them.
We need to win in 2022 and 2024, the GOP is more radicalized than ever.
I have recently begun to watch less news and focus on the Slavic culture and humanity, and there is a strong tie between these nations and dance for example.
It’s not much to heal my broken heart though I get distracted from the grim news, if even for a few moments. There are worries that Georgia is in Putin’s sights. I hope that the war doesn’t expand further. The resources bill is due as it is — we may never recover.
