Hallucinating Parasites and the War on Physics

When a species eliminates all predators, it is a threat to everything.  And when its population reaches astronomical numbers, this threat becomes existential.  Everything is attacked, including the inanimate world: atmosphere, weather, energy, temperature.  The planetary infrastructure is taken down bit by bit, much like a Hollywood set hurriedly dismantled to make space for the next movie: one with a very minimal set this time, and few to no actors in the cast.  Having exceeded its permissible population level long ago, humanity has become a force of unimaginable devastation.  Yet it keeps hoping and believing that perhaps this planet is made to withstand and tolerate hit after hit to its infrastructure.  Delusion is the one resource this civilisation never runs out of.

In our version of history, we are innocent, fragile yet God-like creatures.  Over the course of millennia our civilisation would go on to masterfully craft countless myths of human supremacy over nature, which it vilified as a wild, hostile beast to be subordinated and eliminated by trophy hunters.  Humanity saw itself as helpless and defenceless when it was in fact the most dangerous beast this world had ever known. The near extinction of the American bison was hailed as a victory over “wild beasts”.  The decimation of the giant chestnut to build the country’s massive railway network was a “marvel of human progress”.  A web of delusion crafted over the millennia would indoctrinate our societies into the human supremacy dogma:  we are a superior god-like entity which must be protected and multiplied.  Any crime is allowed, as long as it serves the Human Supreme Being.

Nothing has changed today.  As soon as we are born, we are inundated by the millennia-old human supremacy PR machine.  Colourful myths, religions and fairy tales justify why humans had to do the things they did to this planet and to each other: for freedom, for Jesus, for any reason other than self-interest.  These are the lullabies of a hallucinating parasite.  They are endorsed by our leaders, christened by the church, and rubberstamped by laws securing our “human right” to own everything and everyone on Earth.  They are the bedrock of our civilisation so much so that, we never think twice to challenge them.  “Grow and prosper” is a synonym for “search and destroy”, never to be questioned by “crazies” and anti-human eco-fascists.

Most humans reject their comparison to parasites.  It is a cognitive leap for which they are both unwilling and psychologically unprepared, and for good reasons: the last thing any parasite wants to hear is that it is a parasite, because this immediately implies dependency on a host, and therefore a drop down the pecking order.  The human supremacy myth suddenly comes crashing down, as the parasite realises that its biggest strength, the efficient exploitation of its host, was in fact its greatest weakness: it will die once its host becomes sick. 

For a civilisation sustained by ecocide and myths of human supremacy, awakening to the realisation of parasitism is an existential threat it must protect itself against, through layer upon layer of narratives of supremacy.  Failing to do so would threaten all of the institutions, power structures and economic activities which sustain the parasite. Delusion is not simply a necessity. It is the oxygen which sustains this civilisation.  Either way, a parasite is incapable of conceptualising the nature of its own existence: it has no way of knowing what a parasite is or isn’t, given that it has only known one way of existing i.e. as a parasite.

Yet despite its parasitic nature, necrocapitalism hypocritically looks down upon parasitism and financial dependency by encouraging all of us to become “independent”, to “get a job” so that we have the illusion of freedom within an otherwise highly parasitic, predatory, oppressive and individualistic consumatronic dystopia.  In this consumaverse, the happiest humans are the ones who have sold the most of themselves and their time to the dystopia: becoming debt slaves already before finishing their education, only to enter a path of lifelong subjugation to mortgages and other subscriptions as they enter the workforce.  They are preyed upon by a system which in turn parasitizes the planet.  Being the prey of something that is already a parasite arguably is quite a drop down the pecking order, for a so-called supreme being.

Yet although humans may display parasitic behaviour, they are not exactly parasites.  True parasitic lifeforms have every right to exist, having evolved as rightful members of a balanced ecosystem where they remain subject to limitations and checks, much like predators and their prey. Humanity is neither a parasite, predator, prey or virus.  It is an entity attempting to exclude itself from the ecosystem “game” altogether, by changing the rules:  let’s get rid of the ecosystem.  By doing just that, humans have declared war not only on 10 million species, but on physics.  No one has ever won this type of war.  Our chosen apartheid from the ecosystem and our war on nature have set us on a collision course with the physics of the universe.  We have created our own parallel reality, a planet within a planet, where we think we can continue to lie to ourselves.  Like all bubbles, this is a thermodynamically unstable situation.

Humanity has become an anti-ecosystem, anti-life foreign entity most closely resembling some type of alien, planetary-scale weapon of mass destruction.  Unlike all other species, modern humans are of zero use to Earth anymore.  Any benefits to our presence have long ago been extinguished by eons of successive toxic civilisations.  Hundreds of thousands of species on this planet right at this moment are homeless, malnourished, and silently going extinct because of humans.  It appears that this process will only cease when there is nothing left to exterminate.

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

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