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The end is at hand
by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Sept. 25, 2006
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This week's madness lies in trying to absorb the news on the climate.
Factually, there is nothing really new here, at least for me
personally, except for a growing awareness in the population at large
of the immensity of the changes that are taking place.
I have been
following climate science for a couple of decades. For me, and many
thoughtful observers I suspect, it has been like watching a tsunami
gathering height in the distance as the waters edge raced away from
my spot on the beach. What is different,
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and maddening now, is the
emotional contagion from the crowd as it too, suddenly, becomes aware
of its peril.
Who did not expect that pumping vast quantities of
carbon dioxide, methane and other infrared absorbing gasses into the
atmosphere wouldn't have vast and probably cataclysmic consequences?
Apparently a lot of people, including all the major decision makers
on the planet. So now we have to adjust to the fact that, as the
disheveled man with the sandwich board on the corner proclaims, the
end is really, truly at hand, at least for modern technological
culture. The good times are over. The age of massive, mindless self
indulgence for the few is coming to an end. The rapid, and
accelerating onset of climactic changes around the world, some of
which are evident to even the least involved, begin to make it clear
that it is really all over, except for the shouting of course.
Don't get me wrong. It is more important than ever to take remedial
action, to reduce patterns of consumption to the barest minimums in
every way possible. Whereas the evidence points to a tipping point
having been passed, we can not be so sure about this as to advocate
taking no action to mitigate the consequences of run away industrial
technology. Maybe we do have a small window left, perhaps ten years
or so, as some argue, in which to take decisive action to reverse
climate change. The fact that the current world situation seems to
indicate that effective action is unlikely to be taken is no excuse
for not trying. Sometimes a Hail Mary pass really does win the game.
The power elite seem to be responding in character. Across the world,
but especially in the US, we see a rush to more primitive
interactions between the haves and the have lesses. Civil standards
enshrined in history as far back as the Magna Carta are being
abandoned pell mell.
In the shadow of the coming catastrophe,
absolute power begins to beckon those who delusionally believe they
have the resources to evade the fate of others. Hoping to save
themselves, they abandon the rest of society to its fate. They
whisper in the dark recesses of the Bohemian Grove, and other
exclusive gathering places, of their masterful plans.
I see it is a comic replay, on a much larger scale, of the theater of the absurd presented by the "civil defense" initiatives of
the fifties. As in, "I've got an idea. Let's survive all-out
nuclear war by hiding under our desks at school."
(I remember getting
in trouble for laughing at the absurdity of this during these drills.)
Or "Let's dig holes in our back yards, stock them with food and
water, defend ourselves with shotguns, and just hide until it all
blows over." Such memories seem silly now, to most of us at least, because we
have a better grasp of what a nuclear holocaust would really
be like. As Nikita Krushchev said, and we now understand, the
survivors of such a war would envy the dead.
It is emblematic of the
insanity of our leaders that they have not vigorously pursued nuclear
disarmament in light of this understanding, much less that they
continue to build new, more destructive weapons.
Like the feudal lords of old they cower in their castles, surround
themselves with mercenary troops, lay in supplies in expectation of
siege, and fill their dungeons with perceived enemies who are
mercilessly and sadistically tortured, not so much in the hope of
making them reveal information as to serve as an object lesson to
anyone contemplating a challenge to the power of the lords.
Those in
power are, as it always must be in an age of domination, the most
primitive thinkers amongst us. They have contempt for, really a
hatred of the natural human impulse toward community, seeing in the
natural urge of people to relate as equals in mutual support, a
lethal threat to the survival of the privileged way of life they are
willing to die to defend.
But the irrational behavior of our
primitive economic elite is just a side show to the real drama that
is unfolding on the human stage.
People with an educated understanding of climate issues are claiming
the likelihood of average temperature rises within our lifetimes
that will completely wreck modern technological civilization and
drive a remnant of us to the poles. Depopulation seems inevitable,
with educated speculation reduced to arguing about what small
percentage of the human population will remain after the earth settles into
a new, much hotter climatic equilibrium, if in fact the human species is
capable of surviving at all.
With the outlines of this
fate in their minds, it is understandable that those in privileged
situations would indulge in fantasies of using their accumulated
wealth to survive while most of the rest of humanity perishes. By
indulging in this kind of thinking the elite have been reduced to the
status of village idiots, to be pitied rather than hated, because of
their pathetic delusions.
Of course, in the very long run, it may turn out well for our
species. If suffering is, in fact, the only cure for stupidity, as I
suspect is true, then the chance now exists for our human society to
learn a lot. The consequences of tolerating primitive forms of social
relations characterized by large scale violence and intimidation,
exploitation and dispossession, domination and social class, will offer object lessons.
Perhaps, like the Phoenix, our species will survive the coming
hundred-thousand-year heat spell by rising from the ashes with a
memory of the error involved in incorporating concepts of domination,
of each other as well as the rest of nature, into our cultural norms.
Archeology has revealed the fact that, for the vast majority of the
time that modern humans have existed, we lived peacefully, with
relative egalitarian relations and an ethic of living in harmony with
the rest of nature. It is only the
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People with an educated understanding of climate issues are claiming
the likelihood of average temperature rises within our lifetimes
that will completely wreck modern technological civilization and
drive a remnant of us to the poles.
Depopulation seems inevitable,
with educated speculation reduced to arguing about what small
percentage of the human population will remain after the earth settles into
a new, much hotter climatic equilibrium, if in fact the human species is
capable of surviving at all.
With the outlines of this
fate in their minds, it is understandable that those in privileged
situations would indulge in fantasies of using their accumulated
wealth to survive while most of the rest of humanity perishes.
By
indulging in this kind of thinking the elite have been reduced to the
status of village idiots, to be pitied rather than hated, because of
their pathetic delusions.
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Dr. Herb Ruhs & grandson
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There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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last ten thousand years that have
seen the error of technologically aggressive cultural forms. In
particular, the monoculture of grains, what proponents of modern
civilization call the "invention of agriculture," turns out to have
been a horrible mistake that entrained the rest of the destructive
innovations that spell our doom.
We evolved to live in harmony with
the rest of nature and use what could be taken without destroying
natural ecologies. The belief that "progress" consisted of destroying
the natural environment, the felling of ancient forests, the damning
of great rivers, the extermination of ancient indigenous cultures,
was and is a malignant, insane, mass delusion. We didn't evolve
successfully because we honored the idea that one burns down one's
house in order to stay warm. That is a very new and colossally
stupid approach to a philosophy of living that came along with
dominator culture.
Now all we have is hope. And I, for one, value hope above all else.
Hope is a quintessentially mature intellectual response to
overwhelming difficulties. It exists outside of, and parallel to,
reason. Hope provides succor to the human
spirit. It provides a substrate for the imagination, for the
creativity and compassion that we will need to survive as a species
as we cope with the consequences of a primitive and destructive
past. A healthy hope needs to be an inclusive one — one that seeks
for the greatest good for all. Hopes that are selfish, that are
exclusive, self centered, and egotistical are not real hopes. They
are merely primitive, superstitious delusions.
I expect that the first challenge we face is to learn how to deal
effectively with those people amongst us that cling to fatalistic
delusions of superiority. A functional, survivable human family
needs to come to see dominator thinking, attitudes of class
privilege, fantasies of inherited superiority and worthiness, as the
mass mental illness that it is.
The primitive and violently mentally
unstable amongst us will need to be restrained, and if necessary,
confined in order to prevent harm to others and themselves. To
approach them with hatred, fear and violence is to become one of
them. Peace and survival will come as a result of embracing the
logic of love as well as the necessity of firmness. Either the meek
shall inherit the earth or it is likely that no one will.
"The first shall be last." Let us hope that it is so.
© by the author.
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Previous articles by Dr Ruhs:
When spinach becomes a matter of life and death
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And now for something completely different
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Meanwhile, back on Lifeboat Earth
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On facing adversity with courage and good humor
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Why "Free Speech" does not matter
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