How I Saved the World From Modern Humans
A story I wrote in 2050
[Note: This story will be submitted Feb. 14 to an essay contest I will not win (yet information may be shared by doing so). Corrections/suggestions will be addressed, so bring’em on. The contest premise is you write a story in 2050 about how you saved the world.]
That I may live to be 97 years old should not surprise me. All my recent ancestors I know of minimally lived into their 90s. My mother’s mother lived to 96 and two of her older sisters both lived to 106. As a child I recall grandma, who lived with us, having some odd words in her vocabulary learned in the Appalachian hills of West Virginie.
As a young pedant, I determined the words were Elizabethan English, which tells me when my/her people arrived in the area. One great grandad had a country store. I inherited the special pliers he used to pull teeth. He was also likely the closest thing to a doctor in the area. For 400 years, I’m guessing, childhood mortality was at least 50%, hence there was a cleansing of the family gene pool, but for which I would not have saved the world.
And how do I know I wrote a story about how I saved the world? Well, I don’t. I do have random access to Wikipedia as it appears to exist in the future. The latest entry/date is from June 2353. The device I found appears to be of alien manufacture (I call it the WayForward Machine — WFM). For some reason, it only works for a few hours once a year.
It had never occurred to me to search for someone born in 1953 by whatever name I may come to be known by. I prefer learning about the future’s recent past, i.e. the next 329 years. But I found references to someone about my age called Mooper Dude.
The last time I was on the WFM I was reading more about the Mooper Dude, who had saved the world per some sources, and following one of the 143 references I found speculation that the Mooper’s real name was Eric Lee.
The Dude developed something of a cult following and in 2050 the Dude had written an essay about how he had saved the world, not the Suave Ones who claimed they had (at the time, they were busy writing revisionist history that had allegedly been proven wrong by 2353 when everyone believed in the Dude’s version — but what could I know?) .
Okay, so I found and read the WFM entry on the Dude’s essay. As most Wikipedia entries are, it is way too long — too many cooks, and so I’ll summarize. Of interest is that, up to 2024, everything the Dude claims is as I remember.
As for the next 26 years, I suppose I’ll “believe it” when I live it, but probably not (my future may be influenced by the story, but it cannot determine my future).
The next time I have access to the WFM, I could find out when/how the Dude died, but I don’t believe anything I read on Wikipedia now, so why should I believe claims made by a machine I found while making crop circles? [And sorry about that, joining the Crop Circles Guild and making crop circles in my travels is the only thing I can regret doing, as so many people were fooled — I must feel bad about that.]
Wiki claims don’t always check out now, but most other sources (e.g. all social media) are not worth reading, so 99% of the prattle (tavern talk to MSM) doesn’t even merit being known of, to then not believe it. I don’t remember when I stopped reading Scientific America (after it went over to the dark side to become a pop-sci rag for experts), but some journals are still trying.
Death can come at any time, and someone could have used my obscure life as a starting point in creating a fictitious person (who allegedly saved the world), so they could command and control humans as usual (and save the empire, see history 101 — JC Superstar). But for those who are easily amused, I’ll share the Mooper’s story.
He had been born an idiot, skipped kindergarten, and when tested by the local school, his mother was told he was functionally “too immature” to start first grade, but he was put in school anyway (mother knows best).
He had no memory of his first two years in school (traumatic amnesia), and made his first friend at the start of third grade in a new school (who asked about the school he had been going to, and all he could remember was it was a light green color on the outside).
He was assessed to be uneducable, and so was on the receiving end of the then policy of “social promotion” to prevent the harm of pointlessly failing a student and having them repeat a grade level (at public expense). He never did homework nor asked questions (he had noted it annoyed the adults, so he stopped). He couldn’t follow what teachers were saying, so he stopped trying.
In his senior year of high school, the Dude became extremely discombobulated by evidence he was not an idiot, but he was the only one aware of the evidence (apart from one teacher). After the last day of his public schooling, he didn’t go to do the graduation thing. He decided to be a lifelong learner and never graduate.
He bought a bus ticket to the US desert southwest (to Flagstaff, he was too terrified to walk alone to the Wichita city limits and hitchhike). Once out of the Arizona bus station, he had no choice but to find a road and hold his thumb out. It was 1970. It was common, almost normal, to do this. He ended up doing migrant farm work summers for the next ten years.
He had built a box on the back of a $200 1954 Ford pickup to live in when not on the road, and for three years took classes at a small (very inexpensive) community college. Then he wondered, why bother? Why not feed directly from the trough (a bigger one) for free?
So he moved to live in the student ghetto just outside UCSB (University of California Santa Barbara) where he spent his days (and nights until 11pm when the library closed) mostly wandering the open stacks for books to read.
Seven years passed. His summers on the road (he added hopping freight trains to his free transportation options) was the needed correction to too many books. He was a fool-errant.
One story of Dude (which is as I recall) is that he once was in the bookstore in Isla Vista and needed to ask the staff a question, but couldn’t — he had lost his voice from disuse (usually his lips don’t even move when he reads).
One fine year he was on his way back to California from picking apples in Washington near the Canadian border. He was watching the Oregon countryside pass, sitting in front of the open boxcar doors. The possibility occurred to him that if he became an agronomist, an “expert,” he could travel to other countries, as another tramp had prior to 1896, to go observin’ matters till he died.
He had never joined the other tramps after payday to spend his money on booze and whores. He just took to the road, and to never be afraid of being jack-rolled for his money, he would buy a money order and mail it to his parents. He had saved up enough to pay his way through three years and two degrees (crop and soil science) at CalPoly, a state land-grant university.
He became an expert, but as he had read H.T. Odum’s Environment, Power, and Society in 1971, he knew that everything he had learned was, in effect, how to turn fossil fuel into food. Going overseas to share this how-to knowledge would make more humans dependent on modern techno-industrial fossil-fueled society (and more food = more people), i.e. he would be doing harm long term.
So he never used his formal education to make any money. After the last day, he skipped doing the graduation thing and spent his summer doing farm work, but not for the incidental minimum wage he was paid. What could be better?
He did apply for a job (no need, no good reason) as an instructional assistant to help special ed teachers. He was chosen, perhaps based on the one essay question (there were over two hundred applicants and a lengthy proctored test given to all in the same place and time, and as he had graduated magna cum laude he likely aced the test), and so worked a year doing what most normal people do (dress up and show up).
Okay, end of school year, been there, done that, so he built a better box on the back of the family’s 1965 Chevy pickup his father gave him, and started living on the streets of Santa Barbara and frequenting the city library.
During his sedentary year of doing the “work” thing, he had taken up computer programing (C64) using a luggable portable(SX64), and he spent a year developing word processor software. He sold it to computer clubs (many at the time) by giving them a master copy, and whatever number of manuals, intro booklets, numbered disk labels, and keyboard overlies they ordered. They could add a dollar for copying and sell to members.
He made so much money (unintentionally) that he became a credible human, president of the local computer club. His status was high enough that 33 years ago (as I write this), a user came for user support, he provided it as usual, and she married him for lifetime user support, which he continues to provide.
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None of this seems to have anything to do with saving the world, and you’d be absolutely wrong again, as usual, if you think you are right. But to seemingly be more on topic, the Dude was “in student mode” until about 2014 when he noticed that he was surrounded by experts (idiot savants) who were cluelessly unaware of how the world really worked, as were those misinformed by them.
So, against all his instincts and better judgement, the Dude felt compelled to become a watchman, to declare what he seeth in front of his pug-nosed face — for posterity’s sake.
He was behind on his studies (domestic life can distract), so he started where his education (as distinct from schooling) had started, by reading the updated version of H.T. Odum’s book, mentioned above, that was published posthumously in 2007. And more books, articles, offerings, conferences followed.
In 2026 the Dude completed his 1742 hours of publicly protesting unsustainable denial (same as the number of times Al Bartlett gave his public lecture on Arithmetic, Energy and Population and for the same reason).
The way the Dude saved the world was by successfully spreading a recognition of humanity’s need to love that well which thou must leave ere long. Like every meme he spread, he had stolen it.
But it caught on. He had won some essay contest in 2024, but what saved the world was a video of him burning the prize money.
He converted it all into $100 dollar bills (so the video wasn’t too long), and in obvious triumph over Plutus, sat at a campfire and, in the pose of a meditating Buddha, burns each.
There are two candles by the fire, one bill’s length apart, and he remarks at one point that as all poets know, burning your candle at both ends gives a lovely light. It went viral on TikTok, public intellectuals were forced to refute his message (a URL was captioned) to humanity, but couldn’t, and that’s how the world was saved.
The public didn’t care about his message (they just saw the Dude as cool), but so many mimicked the Dude, by repeating his claims to taunt the establishment (to seem cool and get laid), that the intelligentsia (who pretend to be running the show) couldn’t ignore his claims.
It just happened that they were reaching a WTF moment when they realized they didn’t have a clue as to what to do, and that everything they had been doing was having the opposite outcome of what they intended. Worse, everything they thought they knew was falling in a faint glow of ashes all about them.
The Dude seemed to be yet another threat to their keeping on keeping on. They were starting to look over the net energy cliff. They were starting to see the Rocks of Dissolution below. They were afraid, deer-in-the-headlights afraid.
The Dude told them: Stand down.
For the first time in their lives, they could not obfuscate those like the Dude into going away. They who had seen themselves in the form of God on high and not as mere puppets — they could only mutter and mumble low.
Only by standing down from our hubris heights (before we fall down) can humanity hope to come to again love and understand the planet, and live with it properly.
of money changers and give his message, but he refused.
If you don’t love Mother, you are a pathological form of dysfunctional animal. Humans who would rather not be sick-minded, will step down and endeavor to go back to that which worked for our ancestors from the beginning of life to about 75k years ago when we mutated into an expansionist form of animal whose exceptionalism defies Nature.
We have forgotten that we are animals. To again endeavor to listen to Mother so as to thereby persist long term as the millennia pass is not wrong. Endeavoring to keep on keeping on as a non-viable metastatic pathogen is wrong (has no long-term viable outcome for humans, but the biosphere may benefit from our passing — Nature is unkind, but never wrong).
This was the meme that saved the world, changed humanity’s form of civilization. Of course, in 2050, there was still a remnant of rule by political animals who would rather die than see themselves as dysfunctional animals (humans of NIMH).
And they were dying, but they were still pretending to be running the world. They had fought the good fight against the Fascists and won. They claimed that the Dude’s message had been stolen from them, and they wrote 42 books proving they were right. So it was in this context that the Dude had written his essay in 2050.
But the prosperity that was sweeping the world of the formerly hubris ones was not because of the Suave Ones, but despite them. The Dude had also explained why there could be no political solutions, and as this understanding spread, political animals mutated back to being evolvable cooperative animals (i.e. normal).
Conflict between the Fascists and those suavely pretending not to be fascists, was a distraction. The existence of independent sovereign individuals/states IS war. To understand this is to be delivered from your belief in sovereign powers (human exceptionalism)—and so the dream (of Lord Man) ends, Self and Other go away of their own accord. There is no one to blame, not even your alleged self.
The Dude’s radically Rₓevolutionary offerings (stolen from John B. Calhoun) were antithetical to the existence of the Suave Ones, so history in 2353 (403 AA) notes that the Suave Ones could not have been the source of the paradigm shift that saved the world (from expansionist humans).
They incorrectly attributed the change to the Mooper Dude by neglecting to note that he had never had an original idea in his life (neologisms are not ideas). The humans of 2353, as of today, persisted in telling stories that are not true (but their stories are better than the ones we tell and their belief in belief was still on the decline).
The Dude became the imagined source of ideas, a worldview, a mindset, (Mooper called it MILI). Humans came to love and understand the world system again as evolvable animals living within limits that Gaia alone defines. They stood down and again listened to Nature who has all the answers. They learn to think (political animals cannot) in systems, to live properly with Mother (who tells you when you are being good or bad if you will listen).
Humans came to just say no to patriarchy and became matrifocal again. To live cooperatively, in all due eudemonic love and understanding, they started to get over their five-year-olds-with-machetes (and cars) phase and grow up (by standing down in all due humilitus).
And that’s what saved the world (biosphere) from us moderns and posterity too even though they still had to pay our overshoot debt (but because of the Great Renormalization, they did not go extinct and had a relatively prosperous way down).
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A new form of civilization will need a new language to preserve information packages.
“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.” — Howard T. Odum
