A Brain from Another Time

Our naturally dismissive attitude towards impending disasters is woven into the geological history of this planet.  Our brain did not evolve in the midst of catastrophes, but during one of the most climatically stable and abundant times in Earth’s history.  Resources were infinitely plentiful in relation to our consumption, and the climate remained stable enough over centuries to allow the formation of organised civilisations.  Humans were designed for an era of stability and abundance, not for today.  Our natural inclination is to assume by default that everything is abundant and that it will stay that way.  Negative thoughts are incapable of penetrating this delusion of abundance. 

A few thousand years and 8 billion humans later, we come to a rude awakening: we live on a highly impoverished planet where any remaining ecosystems are in rapid decline, including the climate that sustains them.  Society is about to endure physical and emotional stresses beyond anything humans are biologically designed for, let alone prepared to acknowledge and address.  The history of previous civilisational collapses is repeating down to the letter: 8 billion of us are fighting over land, water and diminishing food resources while the biome is driven to complete annihilation. 

Our brains are out of touch with reality because they were never designed to face this.  Those rare humans gifted with “apocalypse brain” are at best ridiculed and marginalised as alarmists and “doomers” by mainstream culture.  Cvilizational collapse fails to even register within the top 10 list of humanity’s preoccupations, even though it is well underway.  We are beyond help.

The Aspergers, visionaries and spiritual leaders were the only ones capable to foresee disasters and envisage solutions.  From Socrates to Nelson Mandela to Dr. Martin Luther King and Greta Thunberg, we labelled truth tellers as Cassandras and witches, hunted them down and threw them in jail.  The unsustainability of civilisation is its best kept secret.  Any inconvenient truths challenging the necrosystem’s foundational lies are the highest form of treason. Messengers daring to break the virtual reality are instantly removed from circulation.   

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

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