Humanity’s Terminal Carbonality Cancer(1)

Five major extinctions and twenty lesser extinction level events (ELEs) have occurred during the Earth’s history. The five lesser ELEs leading into the sixth major mass extinction, the Holocene or Anthropocene Extinction (AX), are listed in this table:(2)

Prior to the Holocene/AX extinction’s beginning 12,000 years ago, humans had been on Earth for about 200,000 years, but their impact on the planet and its biosphere, ecosphere, and all its resources was negligible. That began to change in the later stages of the Quaternary period as our population began to grow. By 10,000 BCE, we were stomping the terra into surrender and submission. Our tyranny against the terroir of our own survival as a species is ongoing, and it has only accelerated since it began.(4)

Fascism is malignant capitalism. This is not political hyperbole—it is 21st century political and scientific fact, and it is the paradigmatic personal and ideological ethos of human being and presence in reality on Earth today. It isn’t about the bogey-beast of the capitalist vs. socialist cliché tragicomedy circus. Genuinely rational natural science explains how it causally infected its human host. We are now on the cusp between stages 4 and 5 metastasis, with brutal morbidity and extinction-level-event (ELE) mortality all but inevitable for humanity.

Fascist capitalism may be called neoliberal or neoconservative but those are just two of the many costumes it wears in the propaganda limelight. By any of the doubleplusgood signs and duckspeaking icons and symbols that infect us all, it is the same mortally pandemic and systemic cancer. Most of humankind is sleepwalking into that catastrophe, nevertheless, born into the nefariously conceived and rapaciously exploited sociopathic world order and global suicide pact we absurdly call ‘civilization.’ For this human privilege of persecution, we have the black-hearted black-hole core of cabalistic kleptocratic oligarchic tyranny to thank.(5)

When the cancer of fascist capitalism has run its course this time, the corpse of humanity as we know ourselves today will dissolve into the superacids of their victory as their history will record it; for all subsequent intents and purposes, never having been present in reality at all. When you can eliminate the 99.9999% enemy-Other and survive the transition, you are all that matters at all; the only difference that makes any difference whatsoever. This is the delusion that proves the rule of absolute power corrupting absolutely. It is the delusion that is running reality to ruin on Earth in our time and climate crisis is the noxious oven of genocide by ecocide. Unless, of course, a few buttons are pushed and a tsunami of WMDs rains down and rids the world of us the Other, no longer people bur raw animal resources to be exploited to death, in a flash. The odds swing wildly from one zeptojiffy to the next on which path we’re taking.(6)  

If human dissonance and insanity unleashed fascist capitalism, sealing our own doom in mass extinction, then only human wisdom and rationality can reverse the malignancy and heal the world and humanity of that cancer. Time is far too short for anything short of a mass human uprising and rebellion to offer any reasonable hope of human survival, rescue, and restoration. The good news is that it is happening with Extinction Rebellion (XR). The bad news is already seen in the rise of reactionary reflex of vehement enmity viewing XR as abject enemy-Other, exactly as the oligarch cabal of fascist capitalists has semiotically engineered them to do.(7)

Stand with XR to oppose and disempower the fascist capitalism that sows tyranny to reap power, wealth, control, and rule, which has created the manifest AX existential threat to humanity.(8)

Notes

(1) See previous posts, “Carbonality,” https://www.semiotic.com/posts/2019/4/23/carbonality; “XR: The One Event,” https://www.semiotic.com/posts/2019/4/19/xr-the-one-event; “Where Have All the Humans Gone?” https://www.semiotic.com/posts/2019/2/16/where-have-all-the-humans-gone.    

(2) See Wikipedia contributors, "Extinction event," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Extinction_event&oldid=892607493 (accessed April 26, 2019).

(3) The table shown here is from The Peak Oil article cited in the opening quote. The five ELEs in the table occurred by force majeure or natural causes following the fifth mass extinction 66 million years ago (66 Ma). It is, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs in particular and 76% of Earth’s biomass at the time. Anthropocene extinction as the Peak Oil article describes is the sixth mass extinction, accelerating toward K-Pg magnitude or greater through the stages shown in Figure 1. Numbered notes in the “Possible Causes”  column originally explained the scientific terms they’re associated with, but they are not functional in this post. The crucial point is that 10,000 BCE was the tipping point that began the sixth AX event caused by humans. Also, the familiar ‘peak oil’ debate and dispute regarding whether or not fossil fuel supplies are depleting toward exhaustion is not relevant to the AX. Whether humans have a dearth or a glut of fossil fuel supply, the crux of the AX issue is not the supply side of the AX equation—rapacious demand and consumption are driving the AX event.   

(4) The sleepwalking metaphor is from the World Economic Forum’s January 2019 Global Risk Report, https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2019. The “global suicide pact” analogy is from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s warning in this video clip from his 2011 World Economic Forum speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Un1UibQnME.

(5) On fascism as malignant capitalism, see Chris Hedges’ Truthdig February 18, 2018 article, “How We Fight Fascism,” https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-we-fight-fascism/, and previous post, “Capitalist Fatuity,” https://www.semiotic.com/posts/2019/4/3/capitalist-fatuity. The idea of “doubleplusgood duckspeaking” is Newspeak from George Orwell’s 1984. According to the book’s “Principles of Newspeak” Appendix:

Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning “to quack like a duck.” Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment. [1984, p. 236.]

(6) The 99.9999% figure is a stretch some would reject as paranoid. A slightly more forgiving and more layered distribution is provided from a conspiracy science perspective in my April 2019 DMin dissertation, “THE END SIGNS! ARE WE GETTING THE MESSAGE?” https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ceP4r7lFzT3K9-GebpRTuEDbOuOxE139.

(7) On “enemy-Other,” see Wikipedia contributors, "Abjection," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title= &oldid=891283587 
(accessed April 26, 2019). The seminal work is Julia Kristeva’s 1980 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (https://smile.amazon.com/Powers-Horror-Abjection-European-Perspectives/dp/0231053479); cf. Jeffrey S. Murer, “Constructing the enemy-other: Anxiety, trauma and mourning in the narratives of political conflict” in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2009) 14: 109. https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2008.33 and James Geary’s 2011 I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (https://smile.amazon.com/Other-Secret-Metaphor-Shapes-World-ebook/dp/B004GUSHZ0).    

(8) See Only rebellion will prevent an ecological apocalypse | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian. To support and join XR Orlando FL, contact this blogger for details or simply fill out this form—https://actionnetwork.org/forms/xr-orlando-sign-up-form. Also, visit the XR Orlando Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pg/xrorlando/posts/) and the public group site (https://www.facebook.com/groups/XROrlando/). For general information about XR US and the rebellion in general, see https://extinctionrebellion.us/ and https://rebellion.earth/.