We Knew (01)
Why didn’t we fix it?
[Letter #003]
Good morning, son.
There are so many different topics that jump around my mind to discuss with you. So many things that I want to explain. It’s quite the challenge to pin one down. For example, I’ve noticed that most of the religions that are most closely followed today aren’t actually the ones that are ostensibly the “mainstream” religions. I’ve identified at least three new gods that are revered and worshiped by probably most Americans, if not the global population, and I doubt whether a single percent of those faithful even realize to whom they’re actually praying. I’ll get into that new pantheon someday soon. For now, I feel like I have a little explaining to do.
Some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this
– Tool, Ænema
The world around you, that lovely little paradise that you see out your window, presuming that you do actually have a window, is the product of what humans have done for the past few centuries. I don’t yet know if you’re currently experiencing, or have recently experienced, warfare, and I’m not suggesting that humans have only gone to war with each other in the past four hundred years. Indeed, we have refined that art over the past ten thousand or so. I do expect that if you haven’t seen war yet though, you will soon. The reason — the base cause of all of the suffering you see in your surroundings — that’s why I bring up the past few centuries.
Energy is everything, son. I won’t get all “physics class” on you, although I certainly could. What I mean is that all life as we understand it requires energy. Life takes in energy and uses it to make more life. For a very long time, probably a good two-hundred thousand years or so, humans lived more or less within the limitations of what energy we could acquire from the world around us and the sun.
About ten thousand years ago, humans were forced to take up agriculture because of climate shifts. Due to several factors, this led to the practice of storing up food for later. That food was energy, and that energy amounted to wealth as we might consider it today. Wealth in this form was a fairly new concept for humanity. Controlling the food meant that a privileged person or group could control the flow of energy to other humans. That’s where the hierarchies came from that produced “civilization,” which is the practice of developing, and living in, cities.
That concentration of energy was worth killing each other over, apparently. Regardless whether wealth took the form of stored grain, shiny metals, stamped coins, or even human bodies forced into servitude, the resulting prize was energy of one form or another. If it was more profitable to kill and subjugate to acquire that energy than it was to build it up from the earth, then that’s often what happened.
That state of affairs has lasted for the vast majority of the last ten thousand years. A series of mostly agricultural economies of peasantry supported classes of craftspeople, warriors, clergy, and nobility. With only a few notable exceptions, that’s been the shape of “civilization” around the globe through basically all of our recorded history, all killing and dying for the concentration of energy or claims on that energy. As a digression, notice that I’m not saying that it’s all of human history — just the recorded part. Maybe I’ll get into more of that another day.
I’m sure that by now, I’ve taught you quite a bit about the Industrial Revolution. I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. We are clever apes, after all. We would eventually figure out that the flammable black rocks could be harnessed to produce power beyond our or other animals’ muscles. The result of our tinkering with fossil fuel energy is the world you see before you in your day.
Humans have always gone to war with one another over energy, but burning fossils took that to a whole new level. Eventually, we even cracked open an atom to find enough raw energy to destroy the planet several times over. It’s felt like only a matter of time since the first Cold War. Hopefully, by the time you read this, you still won’t have seen another use of “the bomb” since WW2.
What I’m getting at is that we knew this was coming. What you’re seeing around you — the death, the suffering, the sickness, the poverty, the hunger, the climate. We knew it was going to happen. And, we didn’t see it only at the last minute with no time to stop it. No. We knew it long ago. Back in 1972, a group called the Club of Rome put together a study using some early computers to run some calculations. They released the results of that study in a book called The Limits to Growth.
In their book, they took into account the rate that we were burning through the natural wealth of the planet. They factored in the damage that we were doing to our environment in the process, as well as the planet’s ability to heal itself from that damage and recover some of that natural wealth that we were drawing down so rapidly. They found that if we kept doing what we were doing back then, all of our known civilization, society, culture, economy, etc would simply collapse by the middle of our current century. There would be no way to keep up the pace of growth. Of more, more, more each year. It couldn’t actually continue within the physical limits of a finite planet.
I should have a copy on the bookshelf somewhere that includes the update from the early 2020s. Not to spoil the surprise, but it turned out that we were still on the same course in the 2020s as they predicted in 1972. I’m sure you wouldn’t have surmised that, given the world that you inhabit. The results of the study were shocking to the folks back in the 70s, but over the next few decades, they were ignored and largely forgotten.
Why? Well, a couple of reasons spring to mind.
The most charitable reason is probably that humans just aren’t great at addressing long-term problems. We’re really quite good at responding to immediate crises. Our ancestors learned to run when a big something with large teeth and a deep growl popped out of the bushes. Those who didn’t were promptly consumed, leaving a new contour in the human gene pool. But long-term problems? Well, those will probably work themselves out without much stress, right? No, not this time. While it served us quite well in evolutionary terms to avoid stressing the long-term problems, this is a trait that our species is going to either select against or die trying.
Fret for your figure and
Fret for your latte and
Fret for your lawsuit and
Fret for your hairpiece and
Fret for your Prozac and
Fret for your pilot and
Fret for your contract and
Fret for your car
– Tool, Ænema
The other reason is… complicated. The system of capitalism has been around pretty much as long as our heavy use of fossil fuels. Capitalism rose hand-in-hand with industrialization, and it has become the only thing that most anyone has known about how to organize the production needed to live. Even the so-called “communists” just created a more-or-less capitalist system that was run by the state instead of private interests. Since it was all that the common person knew, it was really the only possible road to take. That, and the governments around the world forced compliance with capitalism under threat of violence. Capitalism must grow constantly, otherwise it falls apart. But not only that, it has to grow at an ever-increasing pace.
So, why didn’t we stop? Well, everyone in the system perpetuated the system. Most knew no other way. Panem et circenses. I’ve taught you some Latin, right? Some amassed great power and wealth and had no reason to encourage anything else. Those who tried to resist were quickly dealt with using violent coercion. The rest felt that it wasn’t worth sacrificing themselves against the machine only to have nothing change at all.
There are many people today who think that we just need to be more involved, raise more awareness, vote the right way, organize more resistance. I’ll discuss this faith in another letter. In my opinion, the only option we have time left to do is to simply hold out as things continue crumbling to pieces. The people in power are those with all the money, and they’ve bought the services of the people who are supposed to be in power. So, the rules are made by those who hold all of the power, and it won’t matter one iota what anyone says in protest or how anyone votes. Things will just continue falling to pieces year after year as everyone becomes poorer.
Unlike this Tool song that I’ve been quoting, which was released in 1996 by the way, I have no reason to believe that the end of things will come swiftly. No. It’s a lousy time to live right now, as it’s too late to bring about a massive change and “save the world,” but it’s too early to convince anyone in the “real world” that life is about to fundamentally change in a way that humanity has never seen before.
Some say a comet will fall from the sky
Followed by meteor showers and tidal waves
Followed by fault lines that cannot sit still
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits
– Tool, Ænema
Of course, we already have the dumbfounded dipshits. Those will be with us until humanity is no more. But, things will continue to fall apart, probably for the rest of your life. If you have kids, it’ll continue through their lives as well, and maybe through another generation or two. A last lyric here:
’Cause Mom’s gonna fix it all soon
Mom’s comin’ ‘round to put it back the way it ought to be
–Tool, Ænema
It might be nice to think, as I did for years, that the singer is simply retreating into a childlike state inside his own head, wherein he’s just imagining away the troubles that he’s describing throughout the rest of the song. Maybe it’s psychopathy, or maybe it’s intoxication of some kind. I never really thought any more about it, until something occurred to me that felt like was probably the far more obvious interpretation — probably the way that anyone else would have presumed long before I did: Mom is Mother Nature. Of course she is, and now the song makes complete sense.
What I expect you’re going through in your day is probably the first obvious phase of a very long process that will play out over a few centuries, maybe longer, depending on how long “Mom” takes to “put it back the way it ought to be.” Academics could argue that it started long before your day, but that’s not important for us. You’re part of an era that will focus pretty heavily on salvaging what remains of my age today. It’s probably a strange mixture of technology that my society would call “modern” and something resembling pre-industrial agriculture.
Unless you’re dealing with that whole war thing, that is. If that’s the case, I hope you’re safe, son.
It just felt important to me to tell you. In case you look around and think, “How could they have let this happen?” Well, we knew it would happen. Some of us did, anyway. I don’t think it could have really been stopped, but I’ll try to describe why I think that in later letters.
Until then, I love you very much, son.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
