Delusions of Independence

The Original Teenage Rebellion

It has been eons since humans committed the ultimate ecosystem hubris:  to dare go it alone, leaving behind the 8 million-strong species they had co-evolved with.  Like rebellious teenagers, clueless of what they wanted to do with their lives, they dashed out the back window one night, abandoning the family who had nurtured them for 3.8 billion years.  Entering the unknown, they hid amongst the dark shadows at the edge of the ecosystem, where they began to morph into a bizarre, sometimes beautiful, but undoubtedly sinister new world: one that was selfishly intended for humans, and humans alone. 

Prompted more by impulse than thoughtful deliberation, the teenagers had forever left behind their little village, trading it in for the big, ugly city they were about to erect.  Free from the rules and supervision of the ecosystem, they could now mold their new environment any which way they wanted:  keeping it as untidy as they liked, surviving on drugs, junk food and rock n’ roll.  They had finally gotten what they wished for, which was to break the rules of the ecosystem, leave all of nature behind, and try to forget the place where they had come from as quickly as possible, as if it had all been one, big, ugly nightmare. 
The city’s architectural style would become a bold statement of independence from nature, as well as a full-on affront, a declaration of war towards Earth itself. It was a vision of a city that was so ugly, so inhospitable to life that no species would ever dare to dwell in it except for humans.  As a matter of fact, within the confines of the city the teenagers had indeed managed to banish almost all life forms, bar the occasional ornamental tree or lingering “pest”.  Without nature’s artistic input to illuminate the dark, urban corners, or soften the sharp, austere spikes of human arrogance, new structures called “buildings” would emerge and evolve into nameless, stiff and desolate monolithic monuments of untold brutality.  These were the new homes of people, secluded on all sides by thick, impenetrable walls which were pretty much sound proof, weather proof, and life proof. The occasional window or balcony would allow some light in, though the typical view was either of another building or a busy polluted road.

Humans tried to give these cities names, so that people would feel less intimidated and visit them.  But as the cities grew in size further and further, the teenagers’ urban vision would come true:  the city would become a place exclusively for humans, given that no other species on Earth would tolerate so much toxicity, noise and violence on a daily basis – 100% of it self-inflicted.  Luckily, humans were extremely resourceful and could tolerate this environment. They were so busy with their lives anyway, that they could not see the ugliness they had created. It must have taken immense greed and ambition on the part of the architects of the city to be so blind to pollution and destruction, and to come to believe that somehow this sterile, desolate and toxic landscape was a vision of progress, an investment into the future, and a place where they would eventually bring up their children. By building megacities, humans had succeeded in shutting nature out while at the same time creating a prison for themselves. 
While impressive as an engineering feat, the story of the city had been one of annihilation and extinction all along.  Today, humanity is responsible for the existence of some of the most abysmally ugly and depressing, hostile, toxic and dangerous environments on Earth, most of them created on lands that were once part of the richest, most habitable and biologically diverse zones of this planet.  Lush river deltas, fertile valleys, sun-kissed coastlines once buzzing with an almost infinite array of life forms, were aggressively taken over and replaced by monocultures of humans who offered nothing to the local landscape other than mechanically reproducing more and more copies of themselves. 

But however ugly, inhospitable, and sterile the city was, it would easily manage to charm humans right from the beginning with its imposing grandeur and illuminated evening vistas.  The city dwellers would admire the city and feel proud as humans for having created this monstrous, bizarre new world.  The city would become a symbol of their independence, a living reminder that they had “made it”: they had escaped nature, safe inside their industrial concrete fortresses.

Sitting on this narrative of accomplishment and power, and comparing themselves to the Creator, the teenage humans were able to continue to feed their delusion of independence: that they didn’t need the village anymore, even though it continued to be the source of all their food, oxygen and water. They had created their own little single-species ecosystem, unaware that it was merely parasitizing the ecosystem they had come from.

Psychonomic Civilisations

For the teenagers, everything outside of the city was nothing but a cheap resource to be exploited, and their arrogance grew by the day as they descended into a spiral of addiction and mental illness exacerbated by the city itself.  Instead of abandoning their concrete fortress and returning to the village, they would choose to stay there, in this concrete hell hole, and somehow build their life upon, and around, their mounting addictions, obsessions, and psychoses.  In order to work around their mental turmoil, they would in fact end up creating a civilization where all of these psychoses were not only considered normal, but would eventually become useful skills.  They would become the bedrock of social and political organisation. This would be a civilization where the most psychotic and unstable personalities were welcomed and, would in fact thrive and attain leadership positions.  They would be the most successful individuals, leading the way for humanity and enabling people to live not necessarily a happy, but at least a functional existence within these brutal, soul-destroying cities. These highly psychotic, yet highly successful individuals, would keep the city going and ensure the growth and establishment of humanity’s economic system: the psychonomy.

But the problem with highly urbanized societies is that personal happiness was defined largely in relation to the closest neighbor’s possessions and achievements. There is absolutely nothing personal or “real” about this type of happiness. There was always another neighbor who had more wealth, and who became yet another reason to feel unhappy. The city’s residents would consequently sink into further unhappiness, which made them pursue more addictions and psychotic behaviours. This of course made the psychonomy stronger, more diverse, more resilient. It began to grow together with humanity’s escalating psychoses, forming an intricate and increasingly specialised economic web of mutual exploitation.

Today, humans have become resigned and adapted to the anxiety, depression, greed, schizophrenia and loneliness that they have largely brought upon themselves. They have successfully erected a civilization, economy and society which are almost exclusively powered by a wide assortment of mental illnesses, masterfully disguised and rebranded as skills, talents and inclinations.  This is why, although many people are successful, they still feel that something is missing: their long-gone sanity. Our civilization has been built on the successful exploitation not only of our talents, but our psychoses too. All of us to an extent have made a career out of the multiple psychoses that undoubtedly come with having such a huge brain.
If at any point a citizen of the city wakes up and realizes that they are in fact mentally unstable, there are many painkillers which can help them go back to their “happy” sleep: drugs, alcohol, Netflix, and an endless, almost infinite assortment of consumer products which will distract them, and reward them for being such a good sport for taking all of this mentally-burdening urban abuse on the chin.

Generations of Estrangement

Back in the village, the cherry trees that bloom every spring, the goldfish in the pond, have no idea that they’ve been turned into villains.  They live in fear that their grown-up teenager may one day come back to the village and burn it all down, turn the trees into furniture, the fish into sushi for corporate egomaniacs’ business lunch breaks.  The junkie teenager intends to sell the village all off, in order to buy more drugs. 

As the psychonomy expanded, the planet suffered the tragic consequences of humans having effectively domesticated themselves within their own asylum, then outsourced this domestication to The Thing: an economic management entity hungry for data, which is now breeding estranged generations of increasingly brainwashed, unhealthy human cattle: all of them unaware of what they have done to themselves, to the planet, and of what is yet to come.

Most of humanity today still thinks like a teenager.  It continues to hold the belief that turning our back on nature was not only the right decision, but a natural and unavoidable progression for our species.  The teenager may have grown up, but they are more stubborn and selfish than ever, and ever more hateful towards the family they abandoned long ago.  They’ve had their own kids by now, who have grown up entirely in the city, and who harbour an even more naïve and estranged relationship with nature, unaware of its importance in keeping the city alive. 

In fact, to them nature is an alien world somewhere far out in the distance.  They have no ecological conscience, because all they know is the tiny concrete bubble of the city.  They don’t know that this bubble is nested within a much bigger, more important one, Earth’s global ecology.  Ecology is bigger than capitalism, bigger than human civilization itself. Yet for most humans today, ecology takes place somewhere in the sidelines of our existence, or in a classroom, or a nature documentary. We fail to grasp the gravity of our ignorance of basically almost everything that exists, having eyes and ears only for what happens inside our tiny artificial bubble which we arrogantly call “civilisation”.

The Deluded Predator

Desperate to prop-up its delusions about its estrangement, as it matured over the course of millennia our teenage civilization would go on to masterfully craft countless false narratives about human supremacy over nature, which it vilified as a wild, hostile beast to be tamed, subordinated and eliminated by trophy hunters.  The grown-up teenager today still uses these narratives to convince themselves that they had made the right decision to leave the village.  These narratives are the lullabies they sing to their unsuspecting children, every time it becomes momentarily clear that humans in fact may have failed not only their original family, but also themselves and their children, and that these cities are in fact killing them. The self-confirming narratives of the teenager only manage to further inflate the ego. A predator who has no natural enemies eventually becomes so arrogant and narcissistic that they build a prison around them, thinking it’s a palace. 

The city has now grown so much that its inhabitants are completely ignorant of what lies beyond it.  The edges of the city are expanding as they blindly consume the countryside, like an unstoppable fungus on its way to completing its lifecycle.  Arrogantly obsessed with growth, human civilization has no idea that it is already finished. It is spending imaginary money it doesn’t have on resources which are permanently disappearing, to raise a generation of humans who will soon be fighting for food.  Amongst all of our achievements, the planet’s destruction risks becoming our ultimate legacy, casting its shadow over anything and everything we have ever accomplished. Any trip to the moon, brilliant invention or work of art ever created by humans will pale in comparison to the colossal damage we inflicted on an infinitely complex network of diverse, interconnected ecosystems which used to span the entirety of this planet – much of it already gone. All of this, so that we can be independent.

Our New, Infinite Loneliness

While humans continued to achieve impressive accomplishments within their busy cities, they had failed to evolve all parts of themselves. If anything, they had been devolving into a psychotic mess. What they had lost most of all, was the ability to feel joy without having to manufacture it, rationalise it, or analyse it. By rejecting nature, the teenagers wanted to assert their independence.  What they discovered instead was a new kind of infinite loneliness, living in a world which they had largely made extinct. 

Humans today are not only lonely, but increasingly alone on the planet as more and more of our family is driven to extinction.  Even parasites need friends: they are part of the ecosystem which they need for their survival. Their existence depends wholly upon the hosts they have infected, who become part of the jury in their final reckoning.  Humanity is becoming a lonely, dislocated parasite, while at the same time learning the macabre task of parasitizing itself. It will eventually run out of fuel to throw into its demented inferno, but by the time this happens the damage will have been almost complete. The fire of our automated, necrocapitalist psychonomic system will only stop once it has burned just about everything.
Whether we are a parasite or not, as more of our family members across the seven biological kingdoms disappear, we are left without our life support.  Earth only works as a federation of 8 million species, not a dictatorship of one. As this civilization approaches its natural disintegration, the teenager will soon lose their job, go bankrupt, and will need a home to return to, but this home won’t be there.  They will be going back to a burned down village with no resources. Only then might they realize that there was never a reason to leave. They had all they could ever wish for from the beginning, back at the village. Instead of building their life as part of the ecosystem, they had given up their connections, their relationship with nature, to pursue a selfish fantasy which only a blind heart can create. The fantasy became reality, in the cruelest of ways: the teenagers wanted to go it alone, and this is what they got in the end: ending up surrounded by desolate urban wastelands where humans lived close to one another, but barely interacted.

Reducing our view of nature to a mere peripheral part of our existence has not only been naïve and arrogant, but a death wish which is beginning to materialize. The more estranged from their roots new generations of humans become, the more diabetes, Alzheimer’s, sterility and a myriad of new and emerging mental and physical illnesses of our necrocapitalist world will afflict them, guaranteeing that the door to the future among those who survive remains firmly shut.

Well over a third of Earth’s current habitable land area has been modified by human civilisation to create either cities or arable land. Much of it is becoming either too hot to support life, or turning into ocean or desert. The entire planet is being transformed by human overpopulation and the resulting climate catastrophe. This is what happens to a civilisation when it rests its foundations upon the most imperialistic, narcissistic and egotistical tendencies.

It is these psychoses which have kept feeding our delusion of independence, and which are still, to this day, the most vital “skill sets” in our greed-obsessed psychonomy. The remaining essays in this book explore different facets of these psychoses, many of which have been with us since the beginning of our journey.

George is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons or enjoy his books