Deathwish

Our civilisation is desperate to die. It is doing everything in its power to put itself out of its misery in the most effective, definitive, and determined way. It takes an incredible amount of effort to kill an entire planet. This is why the destruction of the planet’s climate balance and biome will be, if not already, our greatest achievement: greater than space missions or Italian operas.

The processes of chaos, self-destruction and collapse that we have unleashed have the magical ability to be self-perpetuating. They accelerate themselves, like a black hole getting stronger with each object that it engulfs into its gravity pull: more human population growth means more emissions, more climate change, more dwindling of resources, more squabbling over electricity prices and iphones and undoubtedly more conflict and mutual murder. More economic growth means more natural destruction, less food, more inflation, more starvation, and again, more conflict, more murder, more normalisation of war. The fire that is burning underneath this boiling pot is only getting stronger.

As people become angry, hungry, destitute and unable to think, they turn to fake news for comfort and reassurance. They turn to any stories, whether these are real or not, that will help them blame something, or someone, anything or anyone for that matter, for whatever it is that is happening to them: whether a plague, or a war, it is the fault of some invisible “entity” out there that is out to get them: whether it is the QAnon’s paedophilia circuit, or the pharmaceutical manufacturers who have colluded with all governments to create microchips that are injected into all of us through a vaccine, for a plague that never existed. The more obscure and invisible this entity the better. Because as difficult as it is to prove its existence, it is equally difficult to prove its non-existence. Why would paedophiles admit that they eat children? Of course they would hide. Why would governments admit that they are injecting us with microchips? Of course they would do everything in their power to hide it, including creating a plague as an excuse to get these chips into our bloodstream.

People will become more absurd, more stupid, more toxic to each other the more the pot boils. They will keep on stirring the pot, concocting novel, fantastical, prismatically illuminating stories that will help them explain the world around them. They, of course, will walk, completely unaware, into their own death, taking even the sane ones with them.

While we consume ourselves with our pitiful preoccupation of imposing genocide on each other, the climate crisis is working patiently, and silently, in the background, eroding everything: taking apart our entire world, and dimming the lights on the Hollywood movie of our civilisation. The cameras, the film set, the actors, the landscapes, the flowers and the children, they all get sucked into the black hole of the black heart of humanity. It’s just physics, stupid. You can’t escape it. What did you expect. Haven’t you learned from your own history?

George is an author, researcher, podcast host, chemist, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons , listen to his Spotify podcast George reads George, sign up for blog alerts below, or enjoy his books