The Inanity of Evil

Can you really blame an animal for anything?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but the United States is currently in the throes of multiple prolonged crises. I want to say at the outset that yes, it really is that bad. No, you’re not crazy. If anything, both the crises and the moral failings precipitating them are worse than you’re inclined to accept. You probably never really believed everything would be okay, but you wanted to, because of course you did. I did too. Unfortunately, essentially all of our problems are ultimately attributable to the vagaries of human behavior—our behavior specifically, and that of our parents, and that of their parents. That is, these are not things happening to “us,” they’re things we’re doing to “us.”

Our economic system—long propped up by prison (i.e. slave) labor at home and coercive and exploitative practices both at home and abroad—is running out of humans to turn into gristle so that unhappy sociopaths can compete in a game of ‘who can horde the most wealth most garishly.’ Burdened by the need to, y’know, put up the money to care for all of the people who actually work to feed, clothe, and house everyone, our political and business elites have simply elected not to. They’re bringing back child labor instead. Puts all the handwringing about birthrates into perspective, huh?

Speaking of children, how are you supposed to afford them? According to some estimates, it can cost as much as $30k/year. Then again, having children might not be such a good idea, given that we’re either already in a global food crisis or are on the cusp of one, depending on whether or not you’d use the word crisis to describe nearly a billion people going hungry in 2020. Given that agriculture is dependent on stable climate patterns, the future of food security is looking pretty bleak, even before considering that we’re running out of fresh water.

In other news on hunger, Israel and the “west” are currently starving Gazans to death on purpose, so if you’re reading this from your kitchen or a cozy little cafe in the US, maybe open a new tab and berate your senators and the president for just a minute or two. It won’t make you feel better, and it’s not likely to change anything. Still, it’s better than nothing, though probably not better than doing literally anything that might actually shut down this murder machine before it aims its bloody maw at Iran.

I will remind you that if you’re an American, you’re living in a country that has NEVER fully reckoned with any of its worst crimes. Mainstream politicans to this very day refuse to admit that motherfucking slavery was a horrendous crime against humanity, one worthy of reparations and a public moral reckoning. Many are still mourning the Civil Rights Act like it was a death knell for American greatness instead some basic shit that didn’t even go far enough. Our country has never, will never, understand, much less seek to repair, the horrors we wrought upon Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to name just a very few. Think about that: your politicians and fellow (mostly but not exclusively white) countrymen can’t even admit that killing millions of innocent people was a mistake, let alone learn from it. Instead they’re itching to do it again! You can’t make this shit up.

Peace and War - 1867 - Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (French, 1824–1898) on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The federal government isn’t the only American beast licking its chops, either. 25 state governors have announced their support of Texas’s intention to ignore federal law so Greg Abbott can keep letting innocent people drown in the Rio Grande. It’s enough to make you wish Santa Anna had Alamoed the rest of Texas’s aspirational slaveholders. Will this become a full-blown constitutional crisis and precipitate yet another civil war? Probably not yet, at least, but I am extremely fucking terrified that the only two people being allowed to compete for the presidency are the people who got us into this mess. At this point it feels like I’m being asked to choose between having a non-functioning democracy where all the bad things I don’t want still happen and a non-functioning autocracy where all of my worst nightmares come true.

Have you had enough yet? Sorry, but I’m going to talk about climate change now. Climate change will continue to make every single problem we have worse. A lot worse. Our food systems, as mentioned, are particularly vulnerable. Fishery collapse is inevitable at this point, with total collapse coming somewhere around 2050, if current trends continue. A big if, given that climate change appears to be accelerating much faster than basically every IPCC report has predicted, something they themselves admit in their most recent report. With sea levels rising and hurricanes becoming stronger and more frequent, it’s only a matter of time until cities like Houston are no longer livable.

Meanwhile, many entire regions of the world will become uninhabitable for large numbers of people, whether because they’ve turned into deserts or because it’s so hot they just die. This means hundreds of millions of people at a minimum will be displaced, and where are they going to go? In the last five years, between 16,000 and 200,000 people a month have been crossing the southern border of the US. Our business, media, and government classes consider these people expendable at best and an “invasion” at worst. What’s going to happen when over 500,000 people are crossing each month? A million?

The media, technocrats, and politicians still crow endlessly about economic growth, too, despite the fact that even our current level of resource use is completely unsustainable, and economic growth is entirely dependent upon a massive throughput of natural resources.¹ People like to pretend that our climate issues will be solved by green energy technology, but experience has shown that increases in so-called green energy have not led to a reduction in fossil fuel use. Further still, fossil fuel use only amounts to 70% of our greenhouse gas emissions. But wait! There’s more! By any reasonable estimate, the amount of CO2 we’d need to emit in order to “pivot” to renewables would put us way past the tipping points we’re fast-approaching, and anway they’re not actually cutting back on hydrocarbon production as renewable energy sources come online—they’re expanding.²

Nothing less than a complete reinvention of our societies will prevent the worst effects of climate change. That’s not likely to happen. The American people and other “westnerners” still hold the reins here, largely, and “western” monkeys are like most other monkeys: they don’t want to give up what they have for the benefit of others. They’re more concerned with the existence of brown people, trans people, and feminists. They’d rather build prisons than new houses. They’ll put you in jail for picking the wrong mushrooms before they’ll do anything that might actually avert the worst crisis in history, a crisis we continuously choose to inflict upon the world with every new fossil fuel extraction permit, every new power plant, every cargo ship carrying tons of plastic future-garbage. In the United States of America, Taylor Swift Superbowl conspiracy theories are more newsworthy than the collapse of animal populations. This country is a death cult run by greedy morons and their spineless sycophants, and your fellow Americans will let a hundred million people die if saving them means giving up their F150. The US didn’t build all those bombs for no reason.

Maybe the worst part is that knowing this shit apparently doesn’t matter. Nobody wants to hear it, even the ones who believe it. Did this knowledge stop me from driving to Quebec this weekend? No it did not, and I have no idea if it should have. Sure, individuals aren’t directly responsible for the worst impacts of climate change. I can’t really choose not to drive to work, after all. I can’t quit eating. I could swear a vow of poverty and travel everywhere by foot, but if I want cats, a guitar, and a girlfriend, I must, to some extent, play the game my society has placed before me. God knows I’d much rather live in a log cabin and work in the fields every day if I could, but it’s not up to me.³ If you want a family, you’re really on the hook. What are you going to do, not work your life away to feed your kids? Generation after generation we repeat the mistakes of our forebears. The beast lurches forward, making war and destroying its means of survival, the sum effect of, mostly, rather petty and mundane delusions and desires.

Humans are capable of amazing things, but the outcomes of their deeds are demonstrably extremely dire and, on the whole, idiotic. If I was an alien observer, I’d probably find this all quite fascinating. After all, human beings are not, contrary to popular belief, divine beings endowed by god with a special place in the world. We’re just another of earth’s many animal inhabitants, and human history is just nature taking its course, like a spider eating her babies. Was it always going to be this way? Apparently. Unluckily for me, I am not an alien observer, and I’m not having a good time down here. To my mind, the only thing even metaphorically divine about human beings is our ability to comprehend and represent our world to one another abstractly—an ability that empowers us to act intentionally and collaboratively toward the collective good. That we consistently refuse to do this when it matters most, and for such stupid reasons, is evil.

But also, it isn’t. As much as I’d like to think of all of this slaughter as abberant, there’s just no way to rigorously argue for something like that. It may be hard to hold, but the simple fact is that both humanity’s greatest horrors and most heroic attempts to avert them are completely natural, objectively neutral activities. And yet, I am not and could never be neutral. I want humanity to change, to respect life in all its forms, and to live within the boundaries of our ecosystems. I fear this task is too great for us, and I hope the humans of the future fare better.

Until then, what do you do with a species so hostile to thinking complexly, so focused on it’s own desires, and so reckless in its actions that our existence is a net negative for the rest of life on earth? I don’t know, but I do know that this self-correcting system won’t tolerate us forever.

1. I highly suggest you pick up The Future is Degrowth if you want to be extremely bummed out while reading a thorough empirical argument about why our current economic system is fundamentally incapable (for multiple overlaping reasons) of addressing the climate crisis.

2. Ibid.

3. Got any decent farmland laying around? Lmk!