- 18 Apr 2013 16:33
#14217121
Wut?
When white men came to the West some of them recognized it was teeming with furry creatures. There became such a scramble for the valuable fur that the natives got into it too. The difference is stark in this example. The whites understood the tragedy of the commons to begin with and were determined to come out on the advantaged end. The virtue of retaining a future source of fur was not just discarded, it was flouted and the Northern wilderness was ransacked so much so that it never recovered.
I don't think anyone, liberal capitalists, or anyone, can call this the deliberate result of an ideology. People have systematically attacked every ecosystem and traditional way of life as if it had a creamy chocolate center, this is not sensible predatory behavior - no predator on Earth but people wipes out its source of food, predators are balanced against their source, they are by mass drastically smaller than their prey, they take the hind most. they tax the margins.
Colonialism has to be reckoned in this way. There was a perceived value in attacking foreigners and even people who didn't really know why or how to get the most of it got into that act. Imperialism isn't discredited because it's wrong to beat your neighbors up - it is discredited because it was taken too far by too many and didn't leave anything nice lying around for the future. This is the main criticism of capitalism too. It's not profit that's the problem. Our population size represents this problem just as well. It's not people having children that's the problem.
If you don't care about the future and loot the sources of the supply of necessities to the bone you are an absurdity in the natural world and you've fucked us all.
Why does this happen?
Why do people cultivate their own extinction?
Words like 'power' and 'wealth' and 'resources' don't cut it - you really have to wonder about godlessness and insanity to even approach the situation with some workable respect.
People who consider themselves a part of the natural world never get very strong (in the modern sense). While it's fair to say that people are the omni-animal, this has been interpreted in the last centuries to mean that people don't NEED anything, it's assumed we could adapt even to a vacume, and this is the test we are running, like it or not. I think it's safe to say that we CAN adapt to a vacume (by dying), the real question is why are people so rude and tedious that they think they don't in fact need things like a natural world or amiable neighbors or a future that is fairly certain..?
This is what we call progress, a big chunk of which is buried in the sweetened tomes of liberalism. First you don't regard yourself as part of a tradition. Nature is a tradition. I don't call this the abolition of man (that was appropriate though in Lewis' time), we are on our own voyage - the abolition of life. Second, unrooted in nature you feel your hungers as desperations, unable to put it in a context of a natural world, you refuse to die, you refuse to go hungry even for a day, you refuse think of life as an aesthetic project, but as a mechanical system. From that vantage point humans... The masters of the world... Are drastically stupider than any random animal.
That is our ideology, eat the future by looting the past - do it quickly, there won't be much left tomorrow.
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Wild geese flying over a lake don't intend to cast a reflection
and the water has no mind to retain their image