Last summer, I wrote what I think is one of my most important posts about our species’ nature and how it has led to our civilization’s accelerating collapse. My thesis was that what differentiates us from all other species on the planet, including h. neanderthanesis, is our profound distrust, fear, discomfort, and intolerance of creatures (including other humans) who are significantly different from us in their behaviours or beliefs.
My argument was that the cause of this differentiating quality was the unique evolution of our brains, with the emergent capacity to conceive of ourselves as separate and apart from all other life on Earth (which I also argued was delusional, a catastrophic misunderstanding of the actual nature of reality). In other words, we have evolved to suffer a species-wide, severe, and highly-infectious mental illness. This is not merely a belief in our separateness; it is an embodied sense of separateness, one unique to our species and one that is inherently terrifying.
And likewise, I argued that the inevitable consequence of this terrified intolerance of those different from us was a violent propensity to dominate, subdue, and exterminate any life form whose differences caused us to fear that they posed a serious or existential threat to us.
If you’ve been reading my earlier work, you’ll know that I have come to believe we have absolutely no free will, and that our behaviours and beliefs are entirely determined and conditioned by our biology, our culture, and the circumstances of the moment.
And hence I believe that our transformation, over millennia, from a biophilic species to a biophobic and thence biocidal species, has been inevitable, irreversible, and ultimately fatal for our own species and for all life on Earth. Just as we ruthlessly exterminated h. neanderthanesis because we couldn’t tolerate how they were different from us, we are going to keep exterminating other life forms (we’re doing a bang-up job of this as the sixth great extinction accelerates), and also other humans who we assess to be different and hence terrifyingly intolerable, until (with our unwitting help) nature removes us from the planet so we can do no further harm.
This is a brutally negative and pessimistic assessment of the state of our species and of our world, and one that I have fiercely resisted for most of my life. But I’m coming, reluctantly, to the belief that it is an assessment that is entirely consistent with the evidence all around us.
Of course, this assessment and the beliefs and rationalizations underpinning it are neither provable nor disprovable, and I’m not trying to convince anyone of their veracity (nor seeking anyone to disavow me of their veracity). We have no choice about what we believe, any more than we have choice about our (bodies’) behaviours.
Obviously, this assessment does not suggest or offer any course of action to ‘deal’ with it, either internally by trying to ‘rethink’ our own beliefs or externally by trying to change the current trajectory of unfolding events. There is nothing that can be done, and hence no ‘need’ for anything to be done. Even trying to ‘accept’ this assessment and its implications is not something we can choose to do or not do.
Where does that leave us, then?
In my case it seemingly drives me to chronicle this collapse as competently as I can. I am afflicted with the human propensity to try to make sense of things, and that propensity will obviously colour my chronicle. But, slowly but surely, my conditioning seems to be leading me to be a little less judgemental about what is happening, a little less preoccupied with causes and effects. And more attentive to the details — the astonishing beauty, the exquisite pleasures, the delicious, absurd cosmic joke, the wonders of utter unknowing and delightful discovery, and the endless joyful play of just being.
That does not require denying or ignoring (or obsessing about) the ghastly, growing evidence of ugly violence and dizzying chaos and frightening collapse happening all around us. But instead, it entails just setting it aside, at least when the work of chronicling is done, ‘working around’ it so as not to be consumed by it (or consumed by what, we dream, could or should or might ‘otherwise’ be). Fortunately, my conditioning seems to be allowing that, slowly, to happen.
That’s me. It’s not a prescription that I would presume to recommend to others. It’s not as if any of us has any choice in the matter.
self-portrait by AI; my own prompt
