Rearview Signs of Bygone Extinction

The main story here is the elites have been robbing us for thirty years and now they’re going to kill us.

Roger Hallam, Extinction Rebellion (XR) Co-founder(1)

Climate once was a natural thing, but it is no more. Two centuries and four cycles of cannibal capitalism masquerading as progress in the name of industrial revolution ended that. The baseline of what once was natural has shifted so far from its true nature in causal reality that reality today is entirely unnatural, and lethally so. Humanity suffused itself in fascism by rapacious oligarchic capitalism, turning nature itself (on Earth at least) so upside-down and inside-out that already our grandchildren may be the last truly human being and presence anywhere. Nature? It’s a bygone myth beyond human ken, thanks to four centuries of Enlightenment modernity that peaked in the fascist capitalism of the 20th-21st century. What we wrongly call ‘climate’ is an unnatural, synthetic, after-image artifact mirage of what once was but is no more.(2)  

Rational civilization never really existed, though human history was stuffed and mounted in mythological effigies of delusion as if it actually had. They lined the hallowed halls and walls of every cathedral and citadel of fascist capitalism, forming scatter-plot imagery of ordered death and destruction with civilization always at ground zero, forever in the crosshairs of human hubris, vanity, and greed. We doubleplusgood duckspoke of such panacea promises as ‘geoengineering’ and ‘genetic engineering’ as if the ideas were ours or new. Our premeditated plunder and malicious exploitation of Earth’s ecosphere and biosphere already ‘engineered’ humanity across the event horizon of our own extinction for sheer profit, with ecocide and genocide as automated manufacture and business as usual. Perhaps we were philosophical zombies all along, with Newspeak our mother tongue since Babel. In dissipating silhouette, dissolving into rearview dissonance, self-inflicted extinction oozing from the inside-out through every pore, we were walking dead long before we killed ourselves.(3)

Never love—always War! Not peace—only Profit! No truth—permanent Lie!

Homo sentiens? Homo sapiens? If ever we once were, we certainly are no more. A living species on Earth? Once we were, but soon we no more will be. The macabre poetic causal justice of it all is that we reaped exactly what we sowed. We turned natural world and human nature into suicidal oxymorons: whatever once was natural to humanity is no more and whatever nature the world once had is dead and gone. We were the artifacts and architects of ecocide and genocide, so it is perfectly just that we should be ordered out of existence by the natural laws of causality, exiled by nature itself from any presence in causal reality forever, for being what was but chose to be no more and trying to take everything with us into the oblivion of our hubris and rapacity.    

Notes

(1) From “On Contact: Civil Disobedience to Stop Ecocide,” Chris Hedges interview with Roger Hallam (Part One), March 9, 2019, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=220tv9Jktmg. See also “On Contact: Extinction Rebellion,” Chris Hedges interview with Roger Hallam (Part Two), March 16, 2019, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfXqq888HPY.

(2) Stephen Pinker and Johan Norberg are silver-tongued promoters of the permanent lies of Enlightenment modernity and the scientismic pseudo-progress it spawned. Apologists for fascist capitalism, they and the like-minded others of blackened heart bask in aristocratic fantasy, denying the dying of the light that never was, fawning pawns of oligarch tyrants securely transcendent in sequestered star chambers of the corporatocracy they own and rule. George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, and most recently Sheldon Wolin, foresaw and foretold the death of semantics (in Orwell’s Newspeak), the fascist rise of scientismic capitalism (Lewis’ scientocracy), and the destruction of human dignity, liberty, and reason (Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism). See Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress; Norberg, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look forward to the Future; John G. West, The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society; Orwell, 1984; Wolin, Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.  

(3) The concept of “doubleplusgood duckspeaking” is from George Orwell’s Newspeak lexicon in his prescient novel, 1984. “The Principles of Newspeak” Appendix to the novel explains:

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)

he concept of a “philosophical (or ‘p-’) zombie’ is explained in Wikipedia contributors, "Philosophical zombie," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Philosophical_zombie&oldid=895282030 (accessed May 3, 2019). See also Robert Kirk, “Zombies,” March 16, 2015, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies. Kirk describes p-zombies as follows:

Zombies in philosophy are imaginary creatures designed to illuminate problems about consciousness and its relation to the physical world. Unlike the ones in films or witchcraft, they are exactly like us in all physical respects but without conscious experiences: by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie. Yet zombies behave just like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness.