It all started with writing post after post on how the “energy transition” is nothing but a fairy tale we tell ourselves to avoid facing reality; and how we need a psychological transition into adulthood — not a material one into oblivion.
The idea I keep coming back to in your writing is that, "we'll never have a civilization even close to this again."
Our fossil fuels took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate. The concentrations of usable ores might be a one-time bounty from the creation of the earth itself.
Given how much entropy we have created on this planet, after civilization collapses, will a society even on the level of Ancient Athens be possible? After all, as the Greeks themselves knew, it was only readily available iron and bronze ores that made their civilization possible.
The level we will fall to is terrifying. We had a bounty that took billions of years to create, and we squandered most of it in a giant party lasting a few decades. We use smartphones, and in generations we can count on our fingers, our descendents might be using tools of bone.
Culture and biology are the only truly renewable resources, in the view of Dr. Shane Simonsen. Future societies may look like something entirely different than what has come before, based on low-tech purely biological technology rather than extraction of resources. Intriguing to consider. You may enjoy the zeroinputagriculture substack.
I'll check it out! That quote reminds me of some the fascinating aspects of recent scholarship in archaeoastronomy. In Homer's Secret Odyssey, the authors demonstrate how Homer's poems preserved complex astronomical knowledge by encoding it in their mythological metaphors. Culture as a renewable resource indeed!
Will humanity eventually result to similar schemes to preserve the essentials of geometry or calculus?
Feel free to elaborate, that is interesting for sure!
I personally question the usefulness of geometry/calculus in a low-tech and low-energy future, but I could be wrong. But yes, oral tradition and storytelling/mythmaking are powerful tools. Some of the stories we still tell today are Greek and medieval European versions of 40k and 100k year old Hunter-gatherer stories, from before the migrations out of Africa! Fascinating to think about. The YouTube channel crecganford has a lot of content on this subject if you like it
Yes, crecganford is awesome. There is a little of this in Homer's Secret Odyssey. The authors discuss how there are many other versions of the Cyclops episode in other cultures as well.
Here's what I find mindblowing, though. About 100 years ago, an Oxford scholar named Gilbert Murray hypothesized that the Odyssey was organized around the Metonic cycle, the 19 year correspondence between the cycles of the Sun and Moon. For instance, if there is a new moon on the winter solstice, it will happen again exactly 19 years later. (This is exactly what the Odyssey seems to express.) Murray believed that scholars were misreading the original Greek to think that Odysseus was gone for 20 instead of 19 years (because the Greeks counted inclusively for years. e.g. the Olympics were a "five-year" because they started the day the fifth year began since the last one.) For the past hundred years, a loose collection of amatuer scholars has found a lot of additional evidence corroborating this claim. I read Ancient Greek myself. Not well, but enough to understand the source of the confusion. I also understand enough about astronomy in general to know what humans could figure out with only the naked eye and counting.
The thing, though, is that the Metonic cycle was supposedly "discovered" by Meton of Rhodes in 430 BCE, about 300 years after the Odyssey! Of course, scholars know already that the Babylonians beat the Greeks to it in the mid 500's, but Homer predates even that discovery. This was no minor astronomical discovery either. It made Meton a celebrity and caused the entire Greek world to synchronize their calendars based on the 19-year cycle, which they called a "great "year"".
So, how can we possibly explain the Metonic Cycle showing up in Homer, and furthermore, how do we explain the Greeks themselves not identifying the astronomy their own legends are based on? Is astronomy the "skeleton" of the Homeric Cycle, that is, the way the Greeks maintained the integrity of the legend over time without significantly changing it? Most relevantly to this blog, does the astronomical knowlege in Homer pre-date the Bronze Age Collapse?
If so, we might have a case of humanity intentionally preserving scientific knnowlege through oral tradition after a societal collapse. However, if this was the case, then this attempt ultimately failed (at least in part) because the Greeks had to rediscover the astronomical knowlege that their own legends were based on. Something to ponder as we collectively consider the dynamics of preserving essential knowlege in our own time.
I'm sorry, I typed the comment in a hurry and I confused the astronomer Meton of Athens with Memnon of Rhodes, the mercenary general who fought against Alexander. The shame....
Outstanding essay, B, as always much respect for your work. Some much-needed "food for thought." All this quite nicely mirrors a few thoughts I myself have had before, although I could have never put it as eloquently as you did in the above.
I start to see a sort of convergence in worldviews happening, and I'm very pleased about this. The more people agree on where we're heading (plus a rough time frame regarding the *when*), the sooner we can start working towards & implementing *real* responses to the metacrisis - not just "more of the same" - en masse.
And here I was thinking that I was just trimming my information sources down to the very niche-est of subjects. It does seem like there is a sort of ‘convergence’ between different fields coming along, an awareness that we are truly in a spiritual crisis and that the answer won’t and can’t just be more of the same.
Every nation is a colonizing nation at one point or another in history. For instance the Arab slave trade of Africans began in the seventh century and lasted until the 1960s! Slavery in Sudan has existed for thousands of years, and still exists today. It would seem the wetiko spirit has been with us humans for a very, very long time. Some (e.g. Lyle Lewis, author of Racing to Extinction) put the beginning to the time when humans developed a shoulder that could throw, and so we invented the spear, and we began decimating the megafauna of the world. Perhaps that shoulder and the spear it was throwing were the beginning of the wetiko infection of our minds. More, more, more we said, and here we are.
“Large civilizations, don’t crash and burn in a day though. They go through a multiple decade (if not a century) long decline, as people try to adapt and slow down the fall.”
I find this sentiment to likely be wishful thinking. Arguably the multi-generational decline part has already been happening in the West since the 1970’s. In Joseph Tainter’s ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ he found that while the buildup to a society failing could take decades/generations, the actual “collapse” phase takes no more than 10 years. We are already in energetic and ecosystem freefall and will likely hit a very hard floor sometime in the 2030’s if I had to guess. Buckle up indeed.
The multiple decade thing ... I will assume... was placed in the article so as not to panic the mob reading this... they will take comfort in the fact that collapse won't likely happen in their lifetime nor that of their immediate progeny... and that they can continue to pillaging without interruption.
Exactly. It’s a strange form of copium. The writing is clearly on the wall, but don’t worry, you don’t have to *do anything* about it. Just keep on just like you are, it’s basically just a thought exercise apparently. Even though he’s talking about peak energy extraction in one freaking year. lol
'Intelligence'... is a burden.. a flaw... an aberration... a defect...
Try to explain that to 99.999999% of humans... and they will consider you insane... an idiot... send this fine article that you have written to a human... and virtually every single one will reject the premise...
Which confirms that the premise is correct.
Could this Grim Ending have been Prevented?
The only way we could have prevented the imminent and permanent implosion of civilization would have been for hunter gatherers to have strangled the baby in its crib many thousands of years ago.
When the first man or woman approached the tribal leader and exclaimed ‘look I have harnessed fire!’ - that person should have been put to death.
And anyone else who tried to innovate should have been burned alive because one thing leads to another and before you know it you have Steam Engines, Automobiles, Airplanes, Tee Vee, Computers, the Internet, Facebook, Snapchat, Tik Tok - basically a Clown World with 8+ billion chowing down on oil on the precipice of extinction.
It's meaningless to ask how it *could have* been prevented - it happened, therefore it was not prevented.
Imagine being a stone-ager, many millennia ago. If someone said 'look I have harnessed fire!’, there's no way you'd have thought 'this person must be killed for taking the first step towards industrial civilization'. You'd just have gone 'whoa! That's amazing!'.
There's also no way to remove 'intelligence' from h sapiens. The only way to prevent the whole shitshow from happening *again*, is by a shift in perspective (consciousness, whatever), so that future manifestations of Wetiko / pyschopathic greed are stillborn. That point is nowhere near.
It requires a rejection of hierarchies, exploitation etc. to consign human 'progress' to the bin.
I reckon the only way this stops is for the species to go extinct.
Cuz every single human is infected....
Ask yourself -- if you work for someone -- and they said bro - I am gonna try to cure your infection by reducing your salary by 25%.... would you say -- yes please do ... I need to be cured...
Every human in the 'civilized' world is infected, yes, but indigenous tribes still exist in remote jungles etc. who don't adhere to notions of technological 'progress'. They're happy without central heating, smartphones etc. etc.
(Far) future humans, ideally, would all end up following a similar, non-exploitative path.
If someone is in a position to impose a 25% salary cut on me, then they are part of a hierarchy, which all large organisations are. They, by their nature, are systems of exploitation / slavery.
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
Indigenous tribes make war on each other and take slaves from other groups, they practice infanticide to keep their populations in check, etc. but this is not considered wrong in their societies like it is in ours. So I guess you could say we have progressed just a bit, at least we acknowledge that certain things are wrong but then do them anyway!
Not *all* indigenous peoples behave in the manner you describe. The main point is that they don't destroy the environment, upon which they depend to survive.
Good article. I haven't read any of Ian McGilchrist's work but, to me, invoking the 'left brain' for the current mess is unconvincing, as this idea is based in the scientism which is *itself* part of what got us here...
A murderer can't stand in court and say 'it wasn't me - my left brain made me do it'. Blaming the 'left brain' seems like absolving people of responsibilty. But 'people', not separate from their brains (both hemispheres), made modernity.
Instead of left/right brain pop psychology, the idea of 'Wetiko' feels nearer the mark IMO. It's a way of thinking - yes, a 'mind virus' - that infects people. Ultimately, only by consciously rejecting the path of greed can humans be free.
Respectfully, you say “I haven’t read any of Iain McGilchrist’s work but…” yet you assume McGilChrist writing is pop psychology. His work couldn’t be further from Pop psychology. He is remarkably qualified to speak on the brain and the roles therein. Definitely recommend spending some time with his writing or lectures.
Yes, the conquest and subsequent exploitation of Americas was strongly motivated by greed. And sure enough, after Europeans mastered trans-atlantic navigation then fossil-fuel energy, things dramatically accelerated.
But indeed, it goes way back and things were not fundamentally different when Julius Cesar conquered Gaul. Or when Mongols, Chinese or Aztec carved up their own empires at the expend of their neighbours.
Depending on the historical period, they were all ruthless conquerors. After all, Tamerlane might have killed 5% of the then world population.
It's not so much a matter of capitalism. The main difference was that they didn't have the same resources.
So even if after they pass the bottleneck, humans still suffer from the Wetiko, they will probably never be able to do so much harm.
Wetiko's origins actually go back even further, all the way back to the Kurgans, with the advent of patriarchy (and with it, the greater kyriarchy as well). But patriarchy is NOT timeless: it has a beginning, and it has an end. The beginning was about 7000 or so years ago, and the end is coming very soon.
You have presented an intriguing way to think about how we have come to this point in human history. Thank you for writing about wetiko.
Science and shit have the same etymology, 'to cut, split off. separate.'
Jacque Camatte said somewhere that 'science' is 'capitalism'...
I keep in mind that every new-born learns dis-trust by the failure
of its mother to be there for it...
I keep in mind that childhood trauma constrains, influences how
adults think (thus behave) (You are always a suspect in a cop's way
of thinking - projected unconscious guilt make you guilty in their eyes)...
My environment forces left-hemisphere thinking on me...
Both the external human environment (dis-trust gives rise to clay-
table records), and the internal emotional environment compel
reliance on left-hemisphere (defensive) thinking...
Keeping accounts - we've all become (emotional) accountants -
keeping accounts being the essential of Capitalism...(And there's
St Peter 'Keeping The Books". Santa Claus "keeping The Books'-
Christianity and Capitalism remain entangled)...
Hi B!
The idea I keep coming back to in your writing is that, "we'll never have a civilization even close to this again."
Our fossil fuels took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate. The concentrations of usable ores might be a one-time bounty from the creation of the earth itself.
Given how much entropy we have created on this planet, after civilization collapses, will a society even on the level of Ancient Athens be possible? After all, as the Greeks themselves knew, it was only readily available iron and bronze ores that made their civilization possible.
The level we will fall to is terrifying. We had a bounty that took billions of years to create, and we squandered most of it in a giant party lasting a few decades. We use smartphones, and in generations we can count on our fingers, our descendents might be using tools of bone.
What a planet. What a universe...
Culture and biology are the only truly renewable resources, in the view of Dr. Shane Simonsen. Future societies may look like something entirely different than what has come before, based on low-tech purely biological technology rather than extraction of resources. Intriguing to consider. You may enjoy the zeroinputagriculture substack.
I'll check it out! That quote reminds me of some the fascinating aspects of recent scholarship in archaeoastronomy. In Homer's Secret Odyssey, the authors demonstrate how Homer's poems preserved complex astronomical knowledge by encoding it in their mythological metaphors. Culture as a renewable resource indeed!
Will humanity eventually result to similar schemes to preserve the essentials of geometry or calculus?
Feel free to elaborate, that is interesting for sure!
I personally question the usefulness of geometry/calculus in a low-tech and low-energy future, but I could be wrong. But yes, oral tradition and storytelling/mythmaking are powerful tools. Some of the stories we still tell today are Greek and medieval European versions of 40k and 100k year old Hunter-gatherer stories, from before the migrations out of Africa! Fascinating to think about. The YouTube channel crecganford has a lot of content on this subject if you like it
Yes, crecganford is awesome. There is a little of this in Homer's Secret Odyssey. The authors discuss how there are many other versions of the Cyclops episode in other cultures as well.
Here's what I find mindblowing, though. About 100 years ago, an Oxford scholar named Gilbert Murray hypothesized that the Odyssey was organized around the Metonic cycle, the 19 year correspondence between the cycles of the Sun and Moon. For instance, if there is a new moon on the winter solstice, it will happen again exactly 19 years later. (This is exactly what the Odyssey seems to express.) Murray believed that scholars were misreading the original Greek to think that Odysseus was gone for 20 instead of 19 years (because the Greeks counted inclusively for years. e.g. the Olympics were a "five-year" because they started the day the fifth year began since the last one.) For the past hundred years, a loose collection of amatuer scholars has found a lot of additional evidence corroborating this claim. I read Ancient Greek myself. Not well, but enough to understand the source of the confusion. I also understand enough about astronomy in general to know what humans could figure out with only the naked eye and counting.
The thing, though, is that the Metonic cycle was supposedly "discovered" by Meton of Rhodes in 430 BCE, about 300 years after the Odyssey! Of course, scholars know already that the Babylonians beat the Greeks to it in the mid 500's, but Homer predates even that discovery. This was no minor astronomical discovery either. It made Meton a celebrity and caused the entire Greek world to synchronize their calendars based on the 19-year cycle, which they called a "great "year"".
So, how can we possibly explain the Metonic Cycle showing up in Homer, and furthermore, how do we explain the Greeks themselves not identifying the astronomy their own legends are based on? Is astronomy the "skeleton" of the Homeric Cycle, that is, the way the Greeks maintained the integrity of the legend over time without significantly changing it? Most relevantly to this blog, does the astronomical knowlege in Homer pre-date the Bronze Age Collapse?
If so, we might have a case of humanity intentionally preserving scientific knnowlege through oral tradition after a societal collapse. However, if this was the case, then this attempt ultimately failed (at least in part) because the Greeks had to rediscover the astronomical knowlege that their own legends were based on. Something to ponder as we collectively consider the dynamics of preserving essential knowlege in our own time.
I'm sorry, I typed the comment in a hurry and I confused the astronomer Meton of Athens with Memnon of Rhodes, the mercenary general who fought against Alexander. The shame....
Wow. Very fascinating to consider indeed. Thanks for taking the time to explain that, I definitely found it interesting!
Outstanding essay, B, as always much respect for your work. Some much-needed "food for thought." All this quite nicely mirrors a few thoughts I myself have had before, although I could have never put it as eloquently as you did in the above.
I start to see a sort of convergence in worldviews happening, and I'm very pleased about this. The more people agree on where we're heading (plus a rough time frame regarding the *when*), the sooner we can start working towards & implementing *real* responses to the metacrisis - not just "more of the same" - en masse.
And here I was thinking that I was just trimming my information sources down to the very niche-est of subjects. It does seem like there is a sort of ‘convergence’ between different fields coming along, an awareness that we are truly in a spiritual crisis and that the answer won’t and can’t just be more of the same.
Every nation is a colonizing nation at one point or another in history. For instance the Arab slave trade of Africans began in the seventh century and lasted until the 1960s! Slavery in Sudan has existed for thousands of years, and still exists today. It would seem the wetiko spirit has been with us humans for a very, very long time. Some (e.g. Lyle Lewis, author of Racing to Extinction) put the beginning to the time when humans developed a shoulder that could throw, and so we invented the spear, and we began decimating the megafauna of the world. Perhaps that shoulder and the spear it was throwing were the beginning of the wetiko infection of our minds. More, more, more we said, and here we are.
Thank you B🙏
nailed it, B.
Thank you
“Large civilizations, don’t crash and burn in a day though. They go through a multiple decade (if not a century) long decline, as people try to adapt and slow down the fall.”
I find this sentiment to likely be wishful thinking. Arguably the multi-generational decline part has already been happening in the West since the 1970’s. In Joseph Tainter’s ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ he found that while the buildup to a society failing could take decades/generations, the actual “collapse” phase takes no more than 10 years. We are already in energetic and ecosystem freefall and will likely hit a very hard floor sometime in the 2030’s if I had to guess. Buckle up indeed.
The multiple decade thing ... I will assume... was placed in the article so as not to panic the mob reading this... they will take comfort in the fact that collapse won't likely happen in their lifetime nor that of their immediate progeny... and that they can continue to pillaging without interruption.
Collapse is obviously imminent
Exactly. It’s a strange form of copium. The writing is clearly on the wall, but don’t worry, you don’t have to *do anything* about it. Just keep on just like you are, it’s basically just a thought exercise apparently. Even though he’s talking about peak energy extraction in one freaking year. lol
'Intelligence'... is a burden.. a flaw... an aberration... a defect...
Try to explain that to 99.999999% of humans... and they will consider you insane... an idiot... send this fine article that you have written to a human... and virtually every single one will reject the premise...
Which confirms that the premise is correct.
Could this Grim Ending have been Prevented?
The only way we could have prevented the imminent and permanent implosion of civilization would have been for hunter gatherers to have strangled the baby in its crib many thousands of years ago.
When the first man or woman approached the tribal leader and exclaimed ‘look I have harnessed fire!’ - that person should have been put to death.
And anyone else who tried to innovate should have been burned alive because one thing leads to another and before you know it you have Steam Engines, Automobiles, Airplanes, Tee Vee, Computers, the Internet, Facebook, Snapchat, Tik Tok - basically a Clown World with 8+ billion chowing down on oil on the precipice of extinction.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-species-ever
Compare humans https://media-cdn.list.ly/production/218321/1430249/item1430249_600px.jpeg ... to this https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8Mjuf1p9zt/
It's meaningless to ask how it *could have* been prevented - it happened, therefore it was not prevented.
Imagine being a stone-ager, many millennia ago. If someone said 'look I have harnessed fire!’, there's no way you'd have thought 'this person must be killed for taking the first step towards industrial civilization'. You'd just have gone 'whoa! That's amazing!'.
There's also no way to remove 'intelligence' from h sapiens. The only way to prevent the whole shitshow from happening *again*, is by a shift in perspective (consciousness, whatever), so that future manifestations of Wetiko / pyschopathic greed are stillborn. That point is nowhere near.
It requires a rejection of hierarchies, exploitation etc. to consign human 'progress' to the bin.
I reckon the only way this stops is for the species to go extinct.
Cuz every single human is infected....
Ask yourself -- if you work for someone -- and they said bro - I am gonna try to cure your infection by reducing your salary by 25%.... would you say -- yes please do ... I need to be cured...
Every human in the 'civilized' world is infected, yes, but indigenous tribes still exist in remote jungles etc. who don't adhere to notions of technological 'progress'. They're happy without central heating, smartphones etc. etc.
(Far) future humans, ideally, would all end up following a similar, non-exploitative path.
If someone is in a position to impose a 25% salary cut on me, then they are part of a hierarchy, which all large organisations are. They, by their nature, are systems of exploitation / slavery.
Keep in mind... we descend from hunter gatherers... and they got infected.... I suspect it would happen all over again...
Except that the resources to make it happen again ... are in deep depletion ... and we are headed for extinction https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
I am ok with that.
You're right, it can't happen again, due to resource depletion. Are humans doomed to extinction? Maybe. I don't care either.
A *few* scavenging humans could survive in the far future., under conditions which would bear no resemblance to industrial (or any) civilization.
Maybe then, it might be hunter-gathering until the Sun burned out...
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
http://science.time.com/2011/03/15/a-new-threat-in-japan-radioactive-spent-fuel/
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
https://energyskeptic.com/2017/the-devils-scenario-near-miss-at-fukushima-is-a-warning-for-u-s/
The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16628547/
However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
Indigenous tribes make war on each other and take slaves from other groups, they practice infanticide to keep their populations in check, etc. but this is not considered wrong in their societies like it is in ours. So I guess you could say we have progressed just a bit, at least we acknowledge that certain things are wrong but then do them anyway!
Not *all* indigenous peoples behave in the manner you describe. The main point is that they don't destroy the environment, upon which they depend to survive.
Good article. I haven't read any of Ian McGilchrist's work but, to me, invoking the 'left brain' for the current mess is unconvincing, as this idea is based in the scientism which is *itself* part of what got us here...
A murderer can't stand in court and say 'it wasn't me - my left brain made me do it'. Blaming the 'left brain' seems like absolving people of responsibilty. But 'people', not separate from their brains (both hemispheres), made modernity.
Instead of left/right brain pop psychology, the idea of 'Wetiko' feels nearer the mark IMO. It's a way of thinking - yes, a 'mind virus' - that infects people. Ultimately, only by consciously rejecting the path of greed can humans be free.
Respectfully, you say “I haven’t read any of Iain McGilchrist’s work but…” yet you assume McGilChrist writing is pop psychology. His work couldn’t be further from Pop psychology. He is remarkably qualified to speak on the brain and the roles therein. Definitely recommend spending some time with his writing or lectures.
I will do so, thanks
Another good essay on wetiko: https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1008/1698
Yes, the conquest and subsequent exploitation of Americas was strongly motivated by greed. And sure enough, after Europeans mastered trans-atlantic navigation then fossil-fuel energy, things dramatically accelerated.
But indeed, it goes way back and things were not fundamentally different when Julius Cesar conquered Gaul. Or when Mongols, Chinese or Aztec carved up their own empires at the expend of their neighbours.
Depending on the historical period, they were all ruthless conquerors. After all, Tamerlane might have killed 5% of the then world population.
It's not so much a matter of capitalism. The main difference was that they didn't have the same resources.
So even if after they pass the bottleneck, humans still suffer from the Wetiko, they will probably never be able to do so much harm.
Exactly! Each previous civilization did as much damage as it could with what they had, we just have better tools now, so things are happening faster.
Indeed, about three-quarters of the world's deforestation had alreadyoccurred BEFORE the Industrial Revolution.
Magnificently put. Thank you.
Wetiko's origins actually go back even further, all the way back to the Kurgans, with the advent of patriarchy (and with it, the greater kyriarchy as well). But patriarchy is NOT timeless: it has a beginning, and it has an end. The beginning was about 7000 or so years ago, and the end is coming very soon.
See here:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/william-bond-and-pete-jackson-and-rasa-von-werder/can-female-power-save-the-planet-part-2/paperback/product-57g95my.html?page=1&pageSize=4
The only difference between capitalism and cannibalism is the spelling, basically.
https://thechaliceandtheflame.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-master-and-her-emissary.html