Without a willingness to look into the depth of despair and disease present in our human consciousness, we’ll keep trying for misguided solutions to preserve human life on earth.
I feel like you're articulating so much of what I've felt, and haven't been able to access the proper language to write about: this idea that there is something necessary about this plunge into the darkness. Like our collective unconsciousness is trying to lift up all that we're doing - all the pain, all the fear, all the ill-health, all the dislocation - so we can really see it and understand that the path we've been on is out of alignment, shadow as our guide back into the light. As above, so below.
We overthink all this stuff. Plenty of us want to be on this earth and living this life. I agree with you that we are in an unprecedented predicament today, but it's not some result of being undecided whether we want to be here or not, it's an accident of math. The only thing that makes our predicament today unprecedented being our scale. And of course, scale is everything. Our scale is an accident of learning how to harness the colossal energy stored in oil. Our species as a whole is as it has always been as a whole - an unthinking yeast, all lofty and lower motives and ideas and actions cancelling one another out in the petri dish resulting in an amorphous, mindless mass driven by appetite and emotion alone. That's humanity as a whole and it's completely logical where we stand today given this. The escalating chaos and pain is the inevitable byproduct of overshoot leading to decline and fall. The organism has risen, the organism will fall. If any of us remain, we will remain as we have always been, nothing about our orientation will have changed. Only our scale and our means will have.
I think this is what the author is railing against -- the undeniable fact we were born into the escalating chaos the industrial revolution kickstarted, and how difficult that is to comprehend and accept in tandem with simply being alive itself. Especially with a brain that has not evolved with our technological advancements, but is still better suited to being an animal (ie "feel wholly in love with our life when we feel the preciousness of getting to be in a human body"). Teleology would offer that humanity's collective goal based on the direction we are heading is as you say: 'be an amorphous mass driven by appetite and emotion alone'. So the disconnect the author is describing comes from wishing we could change when we are actually doing exactly what we want to be, down to the last individual. The question of ‘is this life worth living’ is in regards to the circumstance we find ourselves in (modernity and all its conveniences and psychological ills), not that life is not worth it at all.
If I understand correctly, you posit that humanity itself is incapable of change but the last ~10,000 years of human history has been mainly social-cultural evolution. Socio-cultural evolution has to take the place of biological if we are to survive beyond the fall of the oiled up human organism -- this 'disease in our consciousness' is the shift of recognizing we should further press to reinvent our blueprint, take what we need (embodiment) and leave what we don't (mindless consumption and reactivity). Those of us who reject that our orientation is unalterable may do more to preserve better lives, well lives for themselves and others, on this Earth.
I feel like you're articulating so much of what I've felt, and haven't been able to access the proper language to write about: this idea that there is something necessary about this plunge into the darkness. Like our collective unconsciousness is trying to lift up all that we're doing - all the pain, all the fear, all the ill-health, all the dislocation - so we can really see it and understand that the path we've been on is out of alignment, shadow as our guide back into the light. As above, so below.
We overthink all this stuff. Plenty of us want to be on this earth and living this life. I agree with you that we are in an unprecedented predicament today, but it's not some result of being undecided whether we want to be here or not, it's an accident of math. The only thing that makes our predicament today unprecedented being our scale. And of course, scale is everything. Our scale is an accident of learning how to harness the colossal energy stored in oil. Our species as a whole is as it has always been as a whole - an unthinking yeast, all lofty and lower motives and ideas and actions cancelling one another out in the petri dish resulting in an amorphous, mindless mass driven by appetite and emotion alone. That's humanity as a whole and it's completely logical where we stand today given this. The escalating chaos and pain is the inevitable byproduct of overshoot leading to decline and fall. The organism has risen, the organism will fall. If any of us remain, we will remain as we have always been, nothing about our orientation will have changed. Only our scale and our means will have.
I think this is what the author is railing against -- the undeniable fact we were born into the escalating chaos the industrial revolution kickstarted, and how difficult that is to comprehend and accept in tandem with simply being alive itself. Especially with a brain that has not evolved with our technological advancements, but is still better suited to being an animal (ie "feel wholly in love with our life when we feel the preciousness of getting to be in a human body"). Teleology would offer that humanity's collective goal based on the direction we are heading is as you say: 'be an amorphous mass driven by appetite and emotion alone'. So the disconnect the author is describing comes from wishing we could change when we are actually doing exactly what we want to be, down to the last individual. The question of ‘is this life worth living’ is in regards to the circumstance we find ourselves in (modernity and all its conveniences and psychological ills), not that life is not worth it at all.
If I understand correctly, you posit that humanity itself is incapable of change but the last ~10,000 years of human history has been mainly social-cultural evolution. Socio-cultural evolution has to take the place of biological if we are to survive beyond the fall of the oiled up human organism -- this 'disease in our consciousness' is the shift of recognizing we should further press to reinvent our blueprint, take what we need (embodiment) and leave what we don't (mindless consumption and reactivity). Those of us who reject that our orientation is unalterable may do more to preserve better lives, well lives for themselves and others, on this Earth.