The Loneliness of a Dying Parasite

While humans achieved impressive technological accomplishments inside their busy cities, they had failed to equally develop all parts of themselves.  If anything, over centuries they devolved into a species with a lost identity, meaning or purpose, core elements of the psyche that were neglected and sidelined by the whiplash of technological “progress”.  These huge widening psychological gaps were hastily filled by religions, addictions, and physical belongings as our species looked for a sense of wholeness in strange and unfamiliar places each time.  But the biggest loss by far, which was the result of relentless technological change and concurrent spiritual famine, was the loss of the ability to feel genuine, true contentment without having to plan it, manufacture it, commoditise, rationalise and analyse it within the narrow and oppressive framework of frivolous stereotypes and norms.  Humans would soon discover the hard way that while real happiness is meant to be raw, unplanned, dirty and imperfect, productised happiness is stale and quickly perishable.

By rejecting their imperfect nature, humans had mutilated their psyche.  Attempting to assert their independence by rejecting the natural environment itself in its entirety, what they discovered instead was a new type of vast, infinite loneliness: the devastating silence which comes with living in an empty, desolate new world that barely resembles the original creation they had long ago made extinct.  

Humans today are not only lonely but increasingly alone, as they drive the entirety of the planet’s biology to extinction.  Even parasites need friends, yet humans are exterminating the very host they have parasitised for thousands of years.  Man is becoming a lonely, dislocated parasite, while society turns to cannibalism to sustain itself as a measure of last resort.  Necroeconomics is a process of diminishing returns whereby our economic system exploits and permanently destroys the most productive natural resources first, only to quickly move on to the next set of profitable resources down the opportunity pecking order.  This process only ceases when there is nothing left to burn or sell: the furnace of this automated necrosystem will only cool once it has burned through just about everything.

The human parasite is in the process of rendering itself devoid of a host.  This is the tale of a species that thought it could rule over all others but failed to understand the basics of the ecosystem organogram: Earth only works as a federation of 8 million species, not a dictatorship of one. As this globalised civilization approaches its natural conclusion, humans will attempt to do what they’ve always done each time they collapsed:  move to a new home.  This time though, there is nowhere to go.

Reducing our view of nature to a peripheral part of existence was not only naïve and arrogant.  It was a death wish. The more estranged from nature we become, the more diabetes, Alzheimer’s, sterility and a myriad of new and emerging mental and physical illnesses afflict us.  These are the symptoms of a parasite dying along with its host. As the host becomes weak, so does the parasite.

Well over a third of Earth’s habitable land area has been modified by human civilisation to create cities or arable land.  Much of it is becoming uninhabitable, submerged, or desertified. As the planet succumbs to human overpopulation, our main error is staring us in the face: we rewarded the most imperialistic, narcissistic and egotistical tendencies within our cultures.   It is these psychoses which kept human supremacy and arrogance in charge all this time, leading to a self-annihilating civilisation. Necrocapitalism can only guarantee that the door to our future remains firmly shut. 

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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