What is a revolution? It is an uprising of bottom-up channeled power that works to overthrow the dominant system. So why overthrow the dominant system? Just read the book entitled A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen and you will understand. The world has become worse and worse in its atrocities up until today, although they have done a much better job at hiding them. The exploitation of every living being, including humans except for the super rich has completely bankrupted our planet and will continue to do so until there is nothing and no one left to exploit. I don’t blame us for this. This is what we are hardwired to do. Our genetics and our situation 30,000 or 10,000 years ago forced us to adapt to a new way of living and its natural (or unnatural) progression has led us to the point we are at today. There was something big that happened that forced us to start controlling our food supply instead of doing what we had always done for approximately 3 million years. 30,000 years is but 1 percent of our existence on this planet and we’ve only been involved in heavy industry for 0.01% of our time here. That is one one-hundredth of a percent. Which comes down to 1/10,000. And we’re not even given a choice of how we want to live. It’s to live in this industrial complex or be converted/killed.
This society can only expand and never contract because it’s ever-growing food production leads to ever-growing population, which then leads to ever-growing resource consumption, which leads to more and more exploitation, and so on and so forth. We shouldn’t be surprised about anything, no matter how horrific, that comes from a system of continuous and escalating exploitation of those who happen to be born in the wrong country or in the wrong social class or even as the wrong species. The current system has no respect for life on its own terms, just certain animal and human life, but only the life that will work with the current escalating and exploiting system. This is the only life we know and we are constantly trying to “get ahead” of everyone else, in a world of zero-sum competition. We willingly work against nature and balance to create an entire world of our own making, bending our environments to fit ourselves rather than adapting to them. I would say that the human race is much smarter intellectually than most animals, but is emotionally and spiritually bankrupt due to the immense lack of empathy for other living beings. Native humans used to worship the animals. Now we simply exterminate them, unless they serve us in some way or are cute enough to be saved.
Human population is approaching 7 billion faster every day and the more people there are, the worse things get. Being crowded causes all sorts of psychological problems and aggressiveness due to the perceived lack of space and resources. We spend most of our lives indoors, in cubicles or climate controlled homes, with no real time spent in what our home used to be–nature. We have no more intuition or instinct because our culture takes it right out of us through years of social conditioning. We have to learn so much information just to survive, hundreds of times more info than primitive man had to learn, which overloads our brains to the point of sheer madness. It gets to the point where we don’t know what to believe or what we need to know to survive.
We create a toxic world. Most of our food is highly processed, devoid of nutrients, and full of poisons and genetically modified concoctions. It’s no wonder many people thrive on a whole foods, organic diet with pasture-raised meat or even certified humane meats. It is the way of our ancestors, the way we have evolved for the past 3 million years, sparing a few hundred due to industry. There are toxic pollutants everywhere from almost every industry, factory farms and chemical plants being two of the most egregious offenders. We receive millions of radio waves passing through our bodies every day and the EMFs surrounding us in every appliance and electronic we use is astronomical in comparison to early man, which gives rise to many illnesses that were never present before all of these technologies went into place. And let us not forget the toxic medical care system, which only serves to perpetuate sickness at an escalating level on par with age to maximize its own profit at the expense of all of us, even themselves. The medical industrial complex has once again put us on a path of self-destruction, of our home and of ourselves. Do any other organisms on this planet behave this way? I think not.
But how can we change? How can we put a stop to the dominant system before it destroys us all? Would it even be worth it, seeing how we would most likely eventually fall back into it when another trauma strikes this planet and we are again faced with shortages of food and need to improvise quickly or we risk going extinct? Are we doomed to keep building up civilizations and watching them fall for the rest of our existence or can we learn from this mistake and find a new way to live that is both environmentally responsible and less consumed with hierarchy and materialism? Is there a feasible way to exist on this planet without completely decimating it while simultaneously lowering populations to between one half and one billion, just so that we can live lightly on the Earth and help to restore it to its once perfect state? Or is it better that the human race just go extinct and allow smaller and more adaptable species to flourish for awhile until yet another large, fierce, and intelligent species evolves to the point we have and start the cycle all over again?
It’s no question that the world would be a better place without us, but it is going to take awhile for this system to completely collapse. Will it be 10o years or 1000? In terms of the Earth, does that really matter? After we are gone, the Earth is perfectly capable of regenerating itself and there will be all sorts of new species and some old. There will be an abundance in diversity not seen since before we existed and it will make the Earth’s creatures more resilient because the more diverse an environment is, the better suited it is for long-term survival. This is why our mono-humanism needs to end and we need to see ourselves for what we are–just another one of the creatures inhabiting the planet, nothing more, nothing less. This kind of thinking is revolutionary because we haven’t thought like this in tens of thousands of years and it will change the world in such profound and constructive ways that not living as other creatures do will inevitably lead us down a path of extinction of ourselves and most all other life on Earth. The complete opposite of diversity. What a mess we humans have made of this planet. But at least we can live in the comfort in knowing we won’t be killing the Earth forever. Something has got to give.
Edit: Also, a couple more Derrick Jensen books for you to read: Endgame and The Culture of Make-Believe.
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