It is our biggest cognitive impediment that we have only learned to exist as a species who extracts and exploits. We remain as the teenagers walking up to the fridge, taking whatever they need without ever wondering who went grocery shopping, how much it cost, and who paid the electric bill. We never grew out of this phase, and it is looking unlikely we ever will. We are destined to die staring at an empty fridge, unable to put two and two together: understand where things come from, where our place is within The Vastness, and actually make something of ourselves.
In financial terms, everything this civilization has achieved is built on ecological fraud: stolen habitats, consumed resources, assassinated species. Economic growth itself is an illusion: all that we have grown was made possible through a series of heists which bankrupted this planet. What we proudly call civilization is effectively a shopfront for a money-laundering operation concealing the pillaging of natural resources, chief fraud against the Bank of Earth, and mass genocide of its 10 million species.
Ever since our baby steps we have been in debt, printing fake currencies to finance this unsustainable civilization: every single increase in GDP can be traced back to a bailout loan by our one and only lender, the Bank of Earth. We have accumulated so much debt towards the Bank of Earth that we are literally made of debt. Everything we have is stolen and all human currency is purely symbolic, the only real currency being the physical resources of this planet. Human civilization is a Ponzi scheme. It is a business which has never turned an honest profit, has too many dependents on its books, and is prepared to take everyone down with it as it collapses into bankruptcy. We know of no other way to exist, besides theft. Our future aspirations, dreams and ambitions are predicated on the foolish assumption that this ecological fraud will be able to continue. The Ponzi scheme is collapsing though. The planet has come to collect the debt. Liquidation of assets is ongoing, as we speak. There is very little left to extract, exploit or drive to extinction. We’ve burned the house down and burned ourselves out in the process. Our generation will be the last one on Earth unless it miraculously discovers a completely new way to exist: one which no generation before it ever achieved, especially at the 8 billion population level.
However fragile they might be, the planet’s resources can never be tamed or owned. They will always have the last word: because when there are no resources, there are no humans. We will most likely become extinct before learning the most basic lesson in economics: that on Earth’s economy there is no yours or mine, predator or prey, weak or strong. We are all just molecules, continuously converting into one another regardless of currencies, bargaining, stock markets, or other vehicles of ecological fraud. The real economy of this planet is its forests and oceans. Its currency is water, food, oxygen, sunlight. Its stock market is the ecosystems and climate systems which regulate the allocation of these resources, and its stakeholders are its 10 million species. The Bank of Earth is the only sustainable bank to ever have existed. There are no doors, no tellers, no bankers, and no cash machines, because all transactions are free. There are no bank accounts or debt, because no one owns anything. Everything is either shared or loaned, and eventually returned to the bank. No one is poor, yet no one owns “rights” to anything. Those who withdraw funds at the expense of others are punished by the ecosystem and the physical laws of the universe.
Our approach to economics has been as empty, incomplete, and limp as our approach to happiness. Metrics, currencies, profits and budgets can only quantify, not qualify. They cannot “valuate”. How much is this planet worth? This is not a numerical question. What is happiness? This is also not a numerical question. The numerical value of life on this planet is infinite, and way beyond what any currency can purchase. But necroeconomics has put price tags on ecosystems, on a flower, on a smile. It has devalued, in the cheapest way possible, things which are of infinite, immeasurable value, condemning them to obsolescence.
As the lies which this civilization had to tell itself come crashing down, the farm of consumatrons must continue, even on a dishevelled planet. To do this, even more controlling dystopias and self-contradicting narratives need to be created. To keep the civilizational lie alive, humans have to continually dispute their own algebra: although basic math is a prerequisite for economics, most economists idiotically advocate for an absurd, growth-based economic system which simply does not compute, even to a 3-year-old. This demonstrates the power of the Mind Prison to corrupt even the most indisputable facts, even at the heart of ivy-league academia.
The civilizational lie ignores the existence of the Earth economy – of which the human economy is only a discrete subset, much like a fungal colony in a petri dish unaware that it is growing within an enclosure, surviving on a food source which will soon run out. The only difference between a fungus in a petri dish and human civilization is that while the former is genuinely unaware of its limits to growth, the latter is aware, but in full denial. Humans refuse to cognitively process the simple idea of a limit, as much as they understand what it is. Putting limits on ourselves is a cognitive skill which was useless, and therefore developed very poorly if at all as an abstract concept, during the evolution of our brain. As a species we are literally made to thrive, then crash and burn. If only we could extrapolate into the tragic future which awaits us, we could have avoided it.
civilizations collapse because they don’t even know what a collapse is. It is simply not in their DNA to understand it. Their very mode of existence, and even their self-awareness, are grounded upon unsustainable expansion, ecological fraud, and cannibalism towards the very people who have built that civilization. This is the cognitive wall we are up against, which we have always been up against, collectively as a society and culture.
The civilizational lie exists in complete ignorance of the intelligence and sophistication of the Earthnet of Things, the planet’s own intelligence service: we are being watched and monitored by this planet on a 24-hour basis. This is the most expansive CCTV system which exists. Humans naively call the Earthnet of Things an “ecosystem”, as if this is another one of their machines which they can toy with. But in this machine, there are no opportunities for experiments, “Beta testing”, mistakes, apologies, second chances or magical “undo” buttons. This machine regulates itself, and it can regulate human civilization. Every action within the Earthnet of Things has a reaction. It is recorded, and responded to, in real time. And with every extinction that happens, the Earthnet of Things changes forever as it readjusts itself, moving on into a new state of balance. Humanity’s 8 billion-strong overgrown population will either starve or destroy itself. No man-made magical technology, machine, or “system” will outpower the power of physics, the power of the Earthnet of Things, as long as we continue to be at war with this planet.
In the process of defrauding this planet, humanity has defrauded itself. It has borrowed and spent what it cannot repay, convinced that as long as the party drugs are in good supply, there won’t be a comedown phase. But the comedown phase is already here. We are coming to the end of an economic hallucination which lasted thousands of years as the financial scam of human civilization finally collapses. The tables are turning as nature’s revenge begins, leaving us to steal from each other in this oversubscribed betting scheme we had affectionately been calling “the economy”.
If Earth’s age were to be compressed into a single year, modern humans do not arrive until approximately 11:36 pm on December 31st. Only a terrorist with thousands of megatonic nuclear bombs can do so much damage, in such little time. It is very likely that humans will come and go from Earth without ever discovering happiness or their true purpose. Our concept of prosperity and happiness involves committing so much ecological fraud, telling ourselves so many lies that, being honest at this stage would require denouncing almost all our history and culture.
That would be a great start. But exposing the lies this civilization told itself is a formidable challenge. It requires the humility to enter introspection and the willingness to face the music. To be present, to be visionary, to genuinely want to progress, and to want to do the actual work to inaugurate a new multi-species civilization, one with actual values and principles, not currencies. It is becoming obvious that our entire system needs to be replaced not simply by a different economic model, but by a new concept of economics, and a new model of human existence. We can only do this if we access our Infinity State.
We have been in constant war with nature for hundreds of thousands of years. This narrative of conflict has run its course and reached a dead end, leaving both us and this planet bankrupt. If we want to continue, we have no choice but to replace conflict with cooperation, owning with sharing, and doing with simply being.
As consumatrons we have prostituted ourselves out to capital and condemned the future of our children, just so that we can have iPhones, burgers and travel getaways which they won’t have, shortly before everything collapses. But the consumatron is a thermodynamic impossibility, and a walking contradiction: it is a life form against life itself. The ecosystem is not a supermarket. You don’t get to have whatever you want, whenever you want it. Yet this civilization has stolen from nature and bankrupted this planet, so that its consumatronic zombies can have infinite choice and generate infinite waste.
Our planet recycles everything, including civilizations. Those materials, nutrients or species which are of no use to Earth are always the first to be recycled. Humans have therefore become redundant to the ecosystem. The only way to secure their survival is to become useful to the planet again. And they can only do this if there is significantly less of humanity, and significantly more of the natural planet.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Tsakraklides is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist, and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter, @99blackbaloons, and enjoy his books, A New Earth: The Apocalypse Locus, The Unhappiness Machine and Other Stories about Systemic Collapse,
Beyond The Petri Dish: Human Consciousness in the Time of Collapse, Apathy, and Algorithms, and others.
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