We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Some Fun Facts for a Dystopic Future

Click here to access article by "xraymike79" from his blog Collapse of Industrial Civilization.

The author has taken quite a while to post new material on his blog, and this one portends a future that is the darkest of all of them. If you have a weak stomach for suck bleak facts--the author's "fun facts" are meant to be ironic--you should probably not read this. Instead, I advise you to turn on the boob-tube for escapist entertainment, or turn to your favorite hallucinatory drug of choice. If you have such a weak stomach and still bravely or recklessly decide to read it, I advise you to take some anti-depressant medication before reading it.
We’ve been fooling ourselves for a very long time about what is truly sustainable and will continue to do so as the system falls apart, geoengineering fixes are applied, interstellar space colonization fantasies are dreamed up, and wars are fought for what remains. Humans have constructed a reality incompatible with the well-being of the natural world and the stability of the biosphere, but we won’t be able to escape the rules of physics, chemistry, and biology. We’ve spent generations making the bed we’re going to be lying in, never realizing it’s also our death bed. Time is not on our side.

Most are not listening and our leaders are misleading, so it bears repeating: ‘The Oil Age’ made us all confident idiots with short attention spans.
As for myself, I read it and acknowledge the many truths that it reveals about the future of humans. Still, as long as there is any chance of survival, I will continue to attack the real culprit of our predicament: our relatively recent history of capitalist class rule that has so voraciously consumed fossil fuels to satisfy their addictions to wealth and power. And even if our future is doomed, I still want to attack this class which has so compulsively led us to our extinction.