The Collapse Hierarchy of Needs

Whenever there is a collapse, society has two choices: in the first scenario, powerful individuals grab as big a slice as they can from a rapidly diminishing pie and make a run for it in their golden parachutes. In the second scenario, societies come together and try to distribute the pie as calmly, fairly, and democratically as possible.

But in both scenarios the planet is a loser. There is never a scenario where the actual integrity of the pie is preserved, so that it can be handed over to the next generation. While scenario B sounds like a lefty’s acid dream, in both scenarios A and B the extractive machine of necrocapitalism goes on overdrive as it inhales whatever is left of Earth’s resources in one, last, gasp. None of the likely scenarios include the preservation of the climate and ecosystem infrastructure of the planet, because they never have: these were always very low-ticket items in the Collapse Hierarchy of Needs. In fact, they don’t feature anywhere in it.

Human supremacy, present bias, optimism bias, technophilia and many other hardwired cognitive biases have always prevented civilisations from pressing on the brake as they accelerated full speed into the cliff of stupidity, for yet one more time. The narratives that fostered these biases and their corresponding self-destructive behaviours are as strong as ever: we are easily indoctrinated into believing that genocide is a legitimate form of war, war is a legitimate form of business, and business can only exist in the form of extraction, destruction, subjugation and exploitation. The amount of crack each of us is forced to smoke on a daily basis so that we hallucinate into accepting the dystopia we live in, perfectly explains why 99% of us believe that capitalism is inevitable, nature is irrelevant, and oligarchs should be allowed to become trillionaires because “they worked their ass off” to steal from everyone else.

Our hierarchy of needs has always been nothing but a hierarchy of urges: civilisations have learned to exist only through exhausting as opposed to sustaining, and this makes the reform of any civilisation an obstinate, if not impossible, endeavour. The pie has been shrinking for thousands of years, just as the number of customers formed a queue around the block. We are flies trapped in a jar, surviving on a fish head that has all but rotted away. Nature is looking at us behind the glass, from the outside, bored out of its mind, enjoying its popcorn as it waits for this species to finally off itself.

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