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Failure?

The two most pressing issues regarding the continuation of organized human society have been known for decades. Very little has been done to mitigate them, and the question now seems to be which will destroy us first, the climate or nuclear weapons?

Fun fact! They can all represent the four horsemen of the apocalypse (double-featuring Death).

Climate catastrophe – Famine, Death

The ice shelves of West Antarctica are almost certainly going to melt – this is now unavoidable, even in the best case scenario, which we are not even on track to meet.

To avoid dramatic sea level rise, not only would carbon emissions need to stop immediately, carbon would need to be captured from the environment. No nation is coming close to completely cutting out carbon emissions (as even green energy, at the very lease in the creation of their infrastructure, requires mining and fossil fuels – at least with current technology). Carbon capture technology is still basically just an idea and not something which is actually ready to be deployed.

Even taking this recent study (linked above) as not being a perfect study, the West Antarctic ice shelf is not the only tipping point we are approaching. The Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025.

For all the chaos climate change has already caused and can cause (such as epidemics and famines), there’s a much worse option.

War, Conquest, Death

War does all sorts of awful things – one of which is contributing to climate change. But aside from that, it’s much more likely to just kill everyone, and rather quickly at that.

(Tangentially, war is extremely profitable – a short book written nearly 100 years ago reads like it was written this morning, particularly when rumors circulate that a nation has hinted that a war might stretch on for years)

The only thing I wish to delve into in relation to the latest atrocities in Gaza is that it brings the world closer to nuclear war, during a year where it was already closer than it has ever been.

The Doomsday Clock was set to 90 seconds to midnight at the beginning of this year – largely due to the war in Ukraine. Adding another conflict with a nuclear-armed power cannot help. The alliances and friendships between the nations involved does not help, either.

Unfortunately, it is not an exaggeration to say that an all-out nuclear war between the US and Russia would kill almost every human on Earth. The initial blasts would be dreadful, but their longer term impacts would lead to global food shortages – within two years, more than half of the people on Earth will have starved to death.

Should we just call it quits?

None of this is guaranteed to happen – some of these problems, particularly in relation to climate change, may be entering the realm of being too late to completely avoid, but these outcomes ultimately rely on choices which we all must make.

The primary way to avoid utter climate disaster is to move away from an extraction-based, consumption-based economy and to a form of organization that is not reliant on profit-seeking but on well-being.

A large issue with moving to this sort of economy is that there either must be a revolution, or those holding the reigns must act against their own greed. The problem with a revolution being that we must avoid the sort of thinking which created these problems – that is, at least in large part, patriarchal. A more gentle approach is required – and yet how does one gently forcibly replace the underlying ideology of society? Is there a gentle way to prevent recently displaced capitalist warlords from staging a counter revolution? This ideology needs some fine tuning. Time will tell if there is time for that.

If we are on a ship (which happens to have some organizational and equitable problems) heading straight for an iceberg, it is everyone’s best interest to divert from the iceberg and worry about the new course after immediate danger has passed.

This same solution (and problems with it) would help to avoid nuclear war. The only way to truly avoid a nuclear war is to dismantle nuclear weapons and for all parties to agree to never use them. This is easier to imagine taking place in a gentler society that is not based on competition and power.

What does it all mean?

Doodley-squat.

Human beings ceaseless search for meaning in a meaningless universe – it is Absurd.

Recognize that Absurdity and seek unity beyond it – that is the start of this gentle way, to see that none of us are truly that different from one another, we can all live better lives building each other up rather than tearing each other down.

I would rather keep trying and fail than to give up. Giving up will not solve anything. Being gentle is not the same as being weak.

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When I Fell Victim

[Sniff] Ideology.

Ideology runs deep. If you think you have no ideology, you are mistaken.

It has come to my attention that some things I wrote for last year’s non-fiction posts were steeped in ideology and at least somewhat reliant on propaganda which I had unknowingly digested.

For example, some of the things I wrote about Russia, China, and North Korea, could use further examination. The claim that they do not have good intentions is, frankly, baseless. While they certainly do have some problems regarding human rights, to highlight them alone tacitly implies that their “enemies” are meaningfully different in this regard. To go as far as to not even define what “good intentions” relies on simply eating out of the trashcan of ideology. A more accurate way of expressing what I was really thinking is that these nations have perspectives and goals which do not fall in line with what the United States wants other nations to do.

North Korea is an easy target, but this is largely because the Korean War has more or less been shoved own the memory hole in the United States. North Korea’s attitude towards the United States and their consequential desire for nuclear weapons (which, if they were a country which submitted to US business interests, would be seen as deterrent rather than war-mongering) only makes sense through the lens of history. The fact is the United States ran a genocide campaign in the Korean War, carpet bombing targets of no military value. The United States has “forgotten” about this, but this memory is very much alive and well in North Korea, and very much informs their foreign policy. Of course war is not something to be wished for, and nuclear war even more so, but see North Korea developing nuclear weapons as a bad sign is only half of the story. North Korea is sanctioned by the world and is trying to protect their own interests, and is operating from the perspective that, if well enough armed, they will no longer be considered a viable military target by anyone sane enough to actively avoid nuclear war. This is the reasoning behind basically any country to develop nuclear weapons, to create a situation where out-right full-scale war is unthinkable. Obviously, a better option is diplomacy, but it takes two to tango.

Russia is another easy target. Their war in Ukraine is unjustifiable, but that alone overlooks the complexity of the issue, including the role other nations have played in this conflict. For one thing, this conflict began much earlier than 2022, and the current media coverage overlooks not only this fact but how that conflict actually began with any amount of nuance.

And then there is China, who the United States seems dead-set on provoking a war with. Have you noticed how it seems China can only do wrong in the US media? They are either viciously adept authoritarians or bumbling fools. If the Chinese government prioritizes stopping the spread of COVID-19, then they are trampling on their people’s freedoms and are an authoritarian regime who just simply dislikes freedom. Yet when they ease up on their restrictions, they are a weak state that can’t handle a pandemic. Never-mind if the protests they did this in response to may have involved the United States government paying people to protest, or how their government met protest by listening to their demands rather than brutalizing the people. As far as US media is concerned, if China does something, it must be bad. If China has a weather balloon go stray, it simply must be a spy balloon. Even if it was a monitoring balloon, US officials have acknowledged the very real possibility that it was blown off course and not intended to spy on the US. Any other balloons detected are a threat from China and worth shooting down with missiles worth several thousand dollars–even if these detected balloons turn out to be 12$ hobbyist projects. The US was in such a hysterical state following the balloon incident that they were openly speculating that aliens may be responsible.

My previous “analysis” left out the nation which most countries see as the greatest threat to world peace, the nation with the most military spending, and the nation with the most out-sized military presence outside of their own borders as being a potentially bad sign of things to come. And that is because acknowledging these facts leaves the status quo, it is not mentioned day-after-day in the media, it is not refreshed in the mind of its citizens constantly.

Parroting the status-quo does not need sources, it is taken as “common sense,” while anything even one step removed from it requires pages of text to justify. Case in point: if I saw Mao was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths as part of a brutal regime, this is accepted at face-value. Refuting this point with what actually happened takes about 40 pages.

My article regarding the partisan split was missing a large enough part that it is worth writing another article specifically on it–that the gulf between political parties in the United States is largely imaginary. Yes, the people are polarized, but what both parties actually value and represent are capitalist business interests, they just focus on the handful of social issues where they disagree. In the United States there is a right-wing party, and a far-right party. You can you choose between the capitalist party and the other capitalist party. To be sucked into the illusion that these two groups really have that much difference between them is yet another example of eating out of the trashcan of ideology.

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In Defense of the Unquantifiable

Humanity has gained a lot through using the scientific method, but we must not allow hubris to reduce the whole of existence to what is quantifiable.

The subjective experience, inherent at the very least to humans, and possibly inherent to matter itself, does not lend itself entirely to measurement. Mental experiences may be correlated with brain activity, but, perhaps, the extent to which one causes the other may not be knowable.

Unfortunately, many things may not be knowable. Take a look at mathematics, particularly logic. While math is often taught as methods to solve problems involving numbers, at its core, it is built upon proofs, carried out by using axioms and inferences. As phrased by Gödel in his famous Incompleteness theorems, math is incomplete – in a consistent formal system, there are statements which cannot be proven nor disproven, including proving that the system is, in fact, consistent.

In other words, there are mathematical problems which can be clearly articulated which cannot be solved, at least not by using mathematical techniques. Logic and math being of the utmost importance in the realm of science leaves open the possibility that there exists scientific problems which can be articulated and not proven – that there more in the universe than conceivable to the human mind. Scientists, at least in part, already agree that the nature of reality we experience is constructed mentally – why assume that what we perceive is the fundamental truth?

To paraphrase the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the universe is not obligated to make sense to us. Everyday ideas, like time, might have more to do with how we as a species experience reality rather than being an actual aspect of it. A understanding of time without respect to human perception may exist, but it is an open question as to whether or not this is knowable. What else falls into this same category?

Simply put, we do not know what we do not know. Maybe someday, there will be a rigorous scientific understanding of luck, of “bad juju,” etc. Maybe someday, there will not be. Whether or not we have this rigorous understanding does not mean that these events do not occur, if nowhere else, in our minds.

Part Four of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.

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The Earth Does Not Belong To Humans

On what authority do humans claim dominion over this planet?

An influential part of the philosophy which politics and laws are built upon (particularly in the United States and similar places) are themselves built upon at least one false premise regarding the nature of property. The nature of conditional logic may lead them to “true” conclusions, as a true premise and false conclusion is the only way which the argument may be considered false, and yet, a false premise with a true conclusion does not make the argument valid (for example, ‘if two is odd, then four is even’).

Take a look at both Hobbes and Locke, commonly thought of as key thinkers in regard to American political thinking. While they may disagree over what the state of nature is, they do seem to agree that in one way or another, the planet was gifted by God to the first humans and thus primarily existing for the sake of humans to use. This is based on what is written in a theological text being used as a historical reference.

The claim simply has not aged well – we know now that Adam, the supposed first human, (to say nothing of this “God” fellow) absolutely did not exist. There was no “first” human, that is not how species evolve, and seeking to find a “first” human mistakes an incremental yet continuous change for one of discrete steps – it is examining the set of all real numbers through the lens of the set of all natural numbers, it misses literally infinite parts. of the process.

Their assumptions of the state of nature do not take into account the way of life and outlook of the planet of the hunter-gather communities, in which humans, in their known entirety, lived in without exception until about 12,000 years ago (the oldest known remains of a modern human is from about 300,000 years old, by the way).

One could read political philosophy and suppose the earth existing for human use is just a decided fact. The proposition that the planet exists explicitly for the purpose of human exploitation is not supported by anything which is not based squarely in mythology.

In other words, the authority of these ideas around the resources of this planet being free-for-taking comes primarily from theology, of which there is no actual proof, leaving the claim with no alternative justification. There is no place for unjustified authority.

If not humans, who does the planet belong to?

Simply put, it doesn’t belong to anyone or anything. Does it have to?

A plot of uncultivated land is not waste. Even considering things purely from the perspective of the impact on the human world, the world of insects and microorganisms is not absolutely distinct from the world of humans. The connection may not be obvious due to the scale of this ranging from things much to small to see with the naked eye to things much to large to directly perceive in their entirety. Trees, for instance, do not exist for the various things humans can make of them – humans and other land animals actually rely on the existence of trees and similar lifeforms to create what we deem a breathable atmosphere. Everyone can agree on that, however, it is the ecosystem of the soil which supports the tree; who knows what else is built upon it? The various ecosystems of the planet are connected, this much is known, how change in one area influences change in another is an observable phenomenon, but the implications of this are unclear.

In any case, seeing the earth as property or as a commodity, is not the only model for society nor is it the only perspective that one can take.

Second installment of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.