Modern Human Extinction Is the Condition That Will Come Anyway
“If society does not succeed in changing attitudes and institutions for a harmonious descent, the alternative is to prepare information packages for the contingency of restart after crashing.” — H.T. Odum
“What is the general answer? Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be our biosphere’s handmaiden anew.” — Howard T. Odum, Energy, Ecology, & Economics, 1973
For some reason, modern humans don’t like being told what to do and so can’t, even if it is Gaia’s still small voice speaking to them. The condition of being our biosphere’s handmaiden anew may involve ending the condition of being modern humans.
Envision twenty modern five-year-olds with machetes turned loose on grandma’s garden without any adults around for an afternoon. What could go wrong? Will they do what they have to as commanded by the spirit in their genes, by the gods of MEP, MPP, and MEPP?
How many of our average five-year-old spawn will kill or injury other modern five-year-olds may not be foreseeable. That they will lay waste to their mother’s Mother’s garden is foreseeable, but if they were not modern five-year-olds and had not been given machetes by modern humans… nor taken in modern r-culture with their mother’s bottle’s milk, then maybe there could be a different outcome than we moderns could foresee.
Now imagine 13-year-olds come to school to be schooled and find machetes and guns on their desk. The teacher smiles and announces that all the children’s parents had agreed to have an overnight parent-teacher’s conference at Caesars Palace in nearby Las Vegas.
Until after school tomorrow, when the buses come, everyone can be autodidacts and teach themselves. For student safety, no one will be able to enter the school (or leave). As the school served only 6–8 grades, the 8th graders were told that the guns and machetes were to only be used to protect the younger students should anyone somehow get into the school. (In their hurry to get to Caesars Palace, no adults remembered to mention that fasting for a day or so will be good for them, a valuable learning experience. So the rules were don’t eat, and only use weapons to protect yourself and others).
For a couple of years I used to substitute teach in numerous K-12 schools. We were paid extra to sub in middle schools. We called it combat pay.
Many 13-year-olds are almost fully modern sub-humans. By the time the parents had returned home just before the buses dropped their kids off (the teachers would go home too, certainly not back to the school until they had to on Monday), my guess is that only six students would go home and their first words would be, “Really, it wasn’t my fault — seriously, I didn’t do anything”). As fully modernized sub-human adults, they would have called their lawyer first.
My conjecture is that you could do this experiment anywhere on the planet that children are schooled to serve the economy, with slight variations in outcome. I would add that not everywhere and for all time have children been schooled in pre-labor gulags. No normal hominin ever was. Those who are, are not normal humans. How many years were you schooled? Sorry about that. You might have been one of my students for a day.
I know of a few individuals who have put time and energy into endeavoring to understand the condition (problematique) of modern humans. All continue until they can’t (they die). Evidence is there are too few (or too many of us overschooled ones). Sorry about that.
The shorter of it is that modern humans will go extinct because we are a complex, adaptive, dissipative, but non-evolvable system (like whirlwinds, supercells, and hurricanes). Will/can anyone get out of our fly bottle of consensus storytelling? I don’t know. But I’ll keep trying to understand our predicament (to perhaps thereby be delivered from it) until I can’t.
“We only have a proper understanding of force if we recognize it as the striving for expansion .” — Maximilian Drossbach 1884.
K-culture is the striving to live within limits; r-culture is the striving for expansion — for a time — it being a terminal modern human pathology.