Delusion Is The Ultimate Renewable Energy Source

When a species eliminates all its predators, it automatically becomes a planetary-level threat. With no ceiling to its population, humanity quickly became an unstoppable infestation that covered the planet. Nothing was spared: biome, landscape, weather, oceans. Today as we witness the aftermath of a millennia-long relentless ecological, environmental and climate holocaust, some still choose to call this disaster a “civilisation”. As a biologist, I prefer to refer to it by its scientific term: a quickly escalating pest infestation.

Surpassing its permissible population level long ago, humanity would go on to become a force of unimaginable devastation. Anthropocentric narratives driven by business, religion and government systematically concealed the parasitic nature of human expansionism. Challenging the parasitic nature of humanity became a blasphemy of the highest level in all cultures, religions and societies throughout history. Today anyone that dares to cross the picket line and describe humans as pests or parasites is viciously attacked by the pests themselves: businesses, politicians, grassroots citizen movements and faux environmentalists in equal measure, regardless of political affiliation.

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Discussing the parasitic nature of humanity remains an impossible conversation despite its existential urgency, even though the math involved is more straightforward than pre-school algebra. The cognitive blockage is so immense that the average human today perceives anti-growth arguments as a personal threat on their life. In this context, it was only natural that degrowth would be classed as extremist ideology: humans today are unable to imagine themselves or civilisation for that matter, without the expansionist structures of a society that has been built to exhaust, not sustain.

Among the enlightened few who do recognize growth as a problem, most will fall for the selective bias generously served by various eco-socialist lies: economic growth is a problem, yes, but population growth or overshoot aren’t. This civilisation can continue to expand, even though each of us already has a quantity of microplastics in our brain equivalent to a plastic spoon. Maybe they have a bit more? Selecting which types of growth to eliminate is an exercise in absurdity, when growth is synergistic: growth in one sector leads to growth in other sectors, ultimately resulting in civilisational overshoot. You have to be seriously stupid to fail to recognise this.

The most “cognitively interesting” fantasists though are perhaps those who are too human-centric to acknowledge that they are parasites. They have managed to have it both ways: on one hand they accept that growth is a problem, but on the other they claim that growth is not perpetrated by “real humans” but by a society of “other humans” who emerged recently and were corrupted by capitalism. According to their guilt-washing fantasy, humans are deep down sustainable, even though anthropological evidence now proves we have driven life forms to extinction and over-used resources since the beginning of our existence.

I consider these delusional individuals the most dangerous of all, and I place their level of denial on par with outright deniers. They are the ones who carry the baton of capitalism-driven sustainability as they seek to deal with their unprocessed parasite guilt by becoming extravagant hipster-preppers, solar punks, greenfluencers and energy transition “warriors” for green-flavoured necrocapitalist expansionism. It is a tragedy of idiocy that humanity went through decades of measuring, understanding and projecting the cataclysmically game-ending result of economic and population expansion only to conclude that the solution to all this was more growth, more energy installation, more bullshit jobs, more humans and more capitalism.

Like a true pest unaware of its impact to its host, this civilisation keeps hoping that perhaps the planet can sustain one lethal hit after another. Natural resources may be permanently vanishing, but delusion is the one resource this civilisation never runs out of. Delusion is more than a necessity for humans: it is the oxygen that sustains the self-destructive economic engine of this civilisation, and what ultimately kills it. In our version of history we are innocent, fragile, God-like creatures. Over the course of millennia our civilisation crafted myths of human supremacy over nature, which it vilified as a wild, hostile beast to be tamed and eliminated by trophy hunters. Humanity saw itself as defenceless when it was in fact the perpetrator: 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 tree to build US’s massive railway network was a “marvel of human progress”.

A web of delusion indoctrinated 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 enables the multiplication of the Human Supreme Being. If humans had spent as much time in searching for objective truth as they did in crafting religions and fairy tales to convince themselves of the convenient lies they wanted to hear, this civilisation would look entirely different today.

At the end of the day, a pest is a pest: everyone knows it is a pest, except for the pest itself: it has no way of knowing what a parasite is or isn’t, given that it has only ever known one type of existence. Humans vehemently reject their comparison to parasites. It is a cognitive leap for which they are unprepared, and for good reason: the last thing any parasite wants to hear is that it depends on a host. Human parasitism is a taboo subject because it challenges the human supremacy fairy tale. The parasite’s biggest strength, the efficient exploitation of its host, is in fact its greatest weakness: it will die once its host becomes sick. For a civilisation sustained by ecocide, awakening to the realisation of parasitism is an existential threat it must protect itself against, through layer upon layer of supremacy narratives.

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 parasitic and predatory consumatronic dystopia. In this consumaverse, the happiest humans are the ones who have surrendered the most of themselves to the parasite of capitalism: becoming debt slaves before even finishing their education, only to enter a path of lifelong subjugation to mortgages and bills as they enter the workforce. They are preyed upon by a system which is the ultimate parasite on the planet. Becoming prey to something that is already a parasite is arguably quite a drop down the pecking order for a so-called “Supreme Being”.

But enough of the parasite-shaming. 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 has set us on a collision course with the physics of the universe. We have created our own parallel economic reality made out of thin air: a planet within a planet where we think we can continue to lie to ourselves.

Whether they are pests, parasites or invasive entities, the bottom line is that humans are unwanted, undesirable, and worthless to this planet. As we await our turn to go extinct, our only chance of remaining in existence is if we end our war with the planet and make ourselves useful to the ecosystem again.

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