I was asked during an interview by an American institution what choices do we have in the current environment: Trump, fascism, etc. As a determinist, I don’t believe choice exists. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for choice, but the chances of avoiding the inevitable demise of humans are slim to none.
The US political system is a litmus test for what happens to a country with infinite consumer choice yet abysmally low political IQ: politics has long ago been bought out and branded into red and blue toothpaste, both equally corrosive flavours representing global capitalist totalitarianism and civilisational overshoot. Their only difference is where they choose to draw their votes from.
Politics creates an illusion of choice: all parties represent overshoot, dressed up in various ideological frameworks to appeal to different voters. The global sharp turn towards fascism is a desperate move of voters to reclaim the choice that they never had, only to realise, too late, that they merely surrendered even more of their choice to yet another power-hungry group of mobsters.
The only choice we have, should we “choose” to take it, is the only one that has ever worked in human history: resistance and revolution. Yup, that’s right, I’m afraid you will need to turn off Netflix for a while and get off the couch and call in a few days sick at work to join picket lines.
Exactly. Didn’t think you’d be up for it.
In the US especially, this seems unlikely unless a deeply divided populace manages to put aside its ideological, racial and class war and fights the real enemies: the Democratic and Republican parties that “milk” these wars to gaslight their followers into thinking they are fighting for an ideology, while in reality they are fighting to secure access to wealth for their respective corporate stakeholders.
In any case this revolution, if it ever happens, will not include nature and the environment. Politics has become irrelevant when the most important voter and stakeholder, Nature, is not even being consulted. People will be fighting to end poverty, racism, inequality and expensive energy bills, all of which are exclusively human issues. They won’t be fighting for the climate and ecological overshoot that brought us here in the first place. These issues have already been forgotten, globally.
The dots are too far apart to connect. Therefore there is no choice other than the flavour of global civilisational collapse, ranging from burned toast to radioactive deluge. As I recently wrote, there is no escape velocity once you have come too close to the black hole of extinction. The tariff wars are indicative of the global struggle over land and resources that is only intensifying, and could turn even more violent at any moment.
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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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