The Despondency of Decline

Despair can be contagious, being in a community of people who care about the environment, biodiversity and the general direction of human society is not for the faint of heart. What may be strange to some is where the feelings of melancholy come from. 

You may think it would be generated by vast increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases like carbon, methane and nitrous oxide, or the rampant loss of global biodiversity. Maybe the destruction of ecosystem after ecosystem, or the ubiquitousness of microplastic pollution. Perhaps the cavernous economic divide between people or the numerous ways in which the fabric of human society is being torn to pieces.

But you would be wrong, it is none of these things.

There is a solution to the climate crisis we find ourselves in, to the rampant loss of biodiversity and ecosystem destruction. There is a solution to the monolith level of pollution on the planet and every single social decline we are faced with. These things are not unsurmountable, we can overcome them and move forward together into a brighter future. 

You see the misery is firmly rooted in the way we misdiagnose any of these things as problems, which leads us to communicate in erroneous ways about them. We see them primarily as separate issues when the reality is they are interconnected symptoms of a deeper seated problem in our global human culture.

After more than a decade of research it has become painfully clear to me that the underlying problem which manifests this syndrome is without question our model of economics. I have covered this in some detail in my article "How Our Economic Social Contract is Destroying Everything and what we desperately need to start doing about it" so I wont belabour the issue here.

In its stead the misery comes from the way we have been manipulated to group together and focus our discussions around symptoms in one way or another. How we have been duped into pretending things like gender identification matter in a world that is literally on fire. In our groups we fight each other, you know for the betterment of humanity - or so we convince ourselves.

With the internet and access to more information we could ever hope to individually take in, we have been divided and conquered by a handful of wealthy corporations. We will fervently discuss anything outside the fundamental component of our social design, which has been marked as untouchable. Anything and everything has been given greater import than the very source of every single decline on our planet.

So here we find ourselves, shrieking at each other, berating each other, canceling each other over whatever we are told matters. So long as it keeps our focus squarely planted on anything but proper system analysis. We have become a family sitting at a dining room table yelling at each other about which bullets to use in the gun we will shoot ourselves with.

It is just sad.