The problem with civilisation is that it is simply self-destructive: driven by profit and efficiency alone, self-programmed to implode by following a predictable recipe of maximum death/maximum profit economics. This monstrous progeny of our greed now runs the planet. It operates not on dreams, laughter, feelings, creativity, love, compassion or any of our best human qualities. It operates on death.
Today’s definition of business success is to deplete all raw materials as quickly as possible. Once this realisation dawns, it becomes abundantly clear why Earth, and us, are already finished. This self-limiting process is increasingly taking on an algorithmic character, moving further out of the direct control of humans. Our economic system now has a mind of its own. It owns humans, Earth and all its resources, and it will deplete everything before it turns the gun to its head. This economy has been programmed to be a beast that never sleeps: it doesn’t know how to pace itself or conserve its energy. Its remit is to keep going until it collapses.
Even those who nurture hopes of solving civilisational overshoot admit that the only way to reform this system is to completely reimagine it from scratch. Can this be done without completely rewiring humans themselves? How do you re-imagine hundreds of thousands of years of unsustainable history? Our civilisation followed the same exact model of expansion after each collapse. Self-destructive narratives of growth, supremacy and technology convinced us every single time that “this time would be different”, yet each boom-and-bust cycle brought us deeper into the spiral of overshoot.
Given that we have operated a self-destructive model for more than 200 thousand years, suddenly moving to a sustainable and regenerative one would not be a “shift” or a “reform”. It would need to be a revolution of existential proportions. “Killing” this necrocapitalist system is difficult given that it is already suicidal and has on numerous occasions risked its own existence in order to keep consuming the planet. Most of all, The Thing is within us. It is the RELD asserting its dominance. How do we change our thinking patterns?
A reform of humanity can only happen through the demolition of growth and supremacy narratives, and this is an internal awareness process, not a new gadget or economic model. Yet all popular propositions for solving overshoot today fail to free themselves from the toxic narratives that form the Civilisational Lie. For every honest book out there on overshoot and self-destruction there are twenty more advocating a new civilisation through upgraded technology, not upgraded humans. They propose vague, unrealistic solutions which can only be implemented in another universe by a much more intelligent being possessing not only intelligence but wisdom too. It is this wisdom that should be our priority. Because whatever prospects of wisdom humans may have had were overwhelmingly sidelined long ago by the greed-related psychoses our necrocapitalist system selected for again and again over millennia of social and biological evolution. It is quite possible that our journey through evolution was a failed experiment, and that we are only capable of forming self-destructive civilisations. We may consider ourselves the pinnacle of evolution and intelligence on Earth, but however we see things, the hard cold truth is that this planet has no space for destructive species.
Whatever “plan” humans envision on paper to avoid self-destruction, they are still stuck with the same brain: one highly susceptible to corrupt systems that employ maximum destruction, competition, ecological fraud and exploitation as their prime “wealth creation” strategy.
George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.
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George Tsakraklides 
I
The true cause of capitalism, depletion of natural resources, the 6th Extinction, wars, civil unrest, stress diseases, and human misery in all its forms is this: TOO MANY HUMANS are using too many natural resources and producing to much pollution, including GHGs and the existential threat of rapidly increasing global heating. We are 3,000 times more numerous than were our ancestral Hunter-Gatherer/pastoralist clan/band members never numbering more than 150 per clan/band (the Dunbar number). Details? Go to “Greeley’s Newsletter”.substack.com and/or download the free PDF for the e-book “Stress R Us” at Stanford. Have a blessed evening/day.
I don’t think civilisation and capitalism are synonyms. Nor is the accumulation of stuff civilisation. Yes, we have been sold the idea that civilisation is impossible without the madness of over-consumption, but think that we need to see that a simplified and civil life is possible. There are so many people nowadays whose work has taken over every other aspect of their lives in favour of the acquisition of a bigger house and a newer car. We need to step back and see that adequate shelter, fresh food, a good book and friends are more important, and by living with a degree of co-operation, these are achievable.
And if enough people stepped back from the trap of an economy based on greed and waste, it would collapse.
YES ! The only way it could have been different is if we had a different relationship with death and perhaps a brain that was better at big picture thinking. If we were actually intelligent we would power down to life support only and 80 % of us would have to volunteer to be euthinized.
Marx would be cackling with glee to see that the government is now capitalism, not just it’s enabler.It will destroy itself, but first there will likely be war, the one evolutionary force we cannot escape from,only delay.Thanks for your work. GeneThere are 3 things important in life: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; the third is to be kind–William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Dear George Tsakraklides,
If I were asked the question “Would you rather live on Earth or elsewhere in the universe?”, I would choose the latter for two major reasons. The first reason is that we spent years accumulating knowledge and wisdom only to see our corporeal form disintegrating in mere decades. The second reason is that the human species is so flawed that there is no long-lasting peace and redemption. Given the escalating social problems and ongoing environmental crises on Earth, it would be easy for some of us to imagine that we could be citizens in the kind of morally and technologically advanced societies portrayed in Star Trek. Unfortunately, we were born several centuries too early. Sometimes one might indeed feel that it would be very nice to join Roy Neary in the movie “Close Encounter of the Third Kind” and to leave the Earth in that giant mothership for good so as to achieve or awaken interstellar or (inter)galactic Spiritual Revolutionaries!
The blame game is still very much rampant in Homo sapiens, which has firmly ushered in an apocalyptic age of deplorable politics, outright complicity, devious duplicity, shameless mendacity, excruciating inhumanity, extraordinary brutality and unrelenting cruelty! Considering the countless wretched situations and dire outcomes that humans have repeatedly created for themselves and nonhumans through war crimes, holocausts, slaveries, genocides, environmental destructions and ecological disasters plus a litany of gross injustices, unconscionable exploitations and staggering corruptions, any reasonable person may insist or conclude that there is emphatically no longer the need, excuse or justification to blame the old serpent, Devil or Satan, who can permanently retire from being the stigmatized scapegoat, catch-all villain and evil incarnate.
Even the most hopeful and virtuous amongst us still have little recourse for arriving at a far-reaching solution for all and sundry, whilst having to endure the sobering reality that “😱 We have Paleolithic Emotions; Medieval Institutions; and God-like Technology 🏰🚀”, the combination of which is increasingly plaguing and driving humanity towards even more hellish scenarios on Earth.
I for one am not very optimistic about human intelligence. Despite years of fleshing out the (conceptual, philosophical, ethical, practical and/or social) framework in examining the possibility or plausibility of environmentalism meeting the needs and expectations of all humanity to help us to survive as a species, fundamental progress is still far too slow. There may be no hope for humanity on Earth as we continue our wasteful and non-sustainable existence plus over-population. As for the future of humanity and migrating to other extra-terrestrial world(s), I have the following to share with you. Let me quote just a paragraph from one of my fellow bloggers by the name of Robert Elessar as follows:
Furthermore, I would like to add that the culture of expansion and exploitation as well as the ever-burgeoning population seem to be both the crux of, and the bottleneck to, our becoming significant on a cosmic scale.
Since the human species has not (always, adequately and/or consistently) been a good custodian of the environment and the Earth (not to mention countless wars, atrocities, resource depletions, species extinctions, environmental degradations and so on, plus an area of rainforest as big as 100,000 football fields is being cleared or destroyed everyday), there is no assurance that once the human species migrates to another planet, the same problems would not again surface and plague us, perhaps at an even quickening and/or devastating pace as a result of better and greater expansion, production and technology. We would indeed export our baggage and problems to other worlds!
Another blogger, Matthew Wright, commented to SoundEagle on 16 July 2013 at 11:39 pm as follows:
Perhaps we could also liken humans to cancer cells on the petri dish that is Earth.
Extinction is a euphemism for extermination, considering how many and the manner in which members of many endangered species have met their fate and untimely end.
More than 99% of all species that ever appeared on Earth since life began are already extinct.
The average lifespan of a species is one million years. The human species (counting the early hominids) has lasted six million years. Extinction is the rule; survival is the exception.
Even if humanity were to survive and later conquer other planets, there will be no guarantee that humanity will not repeat its mistakes and export its problems to other extra-terrestrial worlds.
One could indeed say that we live in interesting times, but often for the wrong reasons. It is all quite a big mess in danger of getting bigger still. One can reasonably conclude that certain “Good” ideas like communism or Marxism have a plethora of ideologues and superheroes (or rather supervillains, autocrats or dictators) but usually have horrendous consequences. Yet, capitalism has often fared very badly too, if not been twisted or exploited by populism and illiberalism. Furthermore, I am not very optimistic about (the outcome of) our superhuman ability (imagined or otherwise) in allowing humans to become a very dominant species on Earth, and also our modern technology, which has made us god-like, as well as the failings of both communism and capitalism. You can find all of these reasons, pitfalls and outstanding issues and a great deal more, being provided in detail in my highly analytical and multidisciplinary post entitled 😱 We have Paleolithic Emotions; Medieval Institutions; and God-like Technology 🏰🚀“, published at
I look forward to your submitting a comment to this post of mine, as I hope that the extensive post will impress you to such a favourable extent that you will kindly indulge me with a keen and informative response, for which I shall be both grateful and delighted.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅
humans are not inherently self destructive – for tens of thousands of years humans lived in balance with the natural world. various empires/states have come and gone because of various factors but it is only the capitalist economic system that is totally destroying the natural world and that will eventually transform life on earth