8 Billion Junkies: The Addiction That Is Killing Civilisation

Like any substance abuse victim that has reached rock bottom, human civilisation has become utterly ignorant of the pain it is inflicting upon itself. With every addictive personality there comes a point where the addiction takes over, replacing the actual person it infected: the subject is demoted into a host object as the drug becomes an internal parasite using its victim as its zombie vessel.

The ultimate parasite humans succumbed to was never heroin or dopamine, but something much more potent: capitalism and all the addictive mythologies, hallucinations and corrosive sedatives that it daily injected straight into the central watering hole we all drink from. Capitalism is a pain-numbing cocktail of Class A drugs: euphoric consumer products numb the pain of unhappiness, dopaminogenic social media turn loneliness from an epidemic to a “current mood”, sedative salary packages mask the trauma of burnout, all the while as mind-altering sponsored morning news apply a rosy veneer to just about everything: from war and genocide to the climate crisis. Just drink the cool aid and don’t look up.

Meanwhile, all the organic, natural alternatives to capitalism’s hallucinogens have long ago been forgotten: they were intentionally flushed down the toilet like a bag of coke while profit banged its fist on our door, to check whether we had what it took to become nature’s hitman. We held on to the drugs, and flushed our brain down the drain instead.

Humanity’s distractions serve as potent myth amplifiers: products create an illusion of abundance, technologies masquerade as off-the-shelf saviours in lieu of a conscious society, and television provides us with millions of happy endings just as humanity is about to end itself by crashing into the wall of reality. We are high on the strongest drug that has ever existed: self-deception.

This is why the fact that an estimated 4 billion of us will die has not even scratched the news headlines. No, I don’t think it was dismissed as a “boy cried wolf” story. It was deliberately ignored, even though deep down everyone knows half of us will die. I think we are looking at something much worse here: a complacency to our own self-destruction that is no different from the complacency an addict adopts towards their own death. We are 8 billion junkies waiting to die.

Another hit will surely fix this: a more potent intravenous injection of products, new episodes on Netflix, and the mind-numbing myths we’ve been regurgitating, embellishing and enhancing for thousands of years. Humanity’s myths are the most addictive Class A drugs. Once you smoke them, there’s no going back. Those who escape the addiction aren’t lucky either: they get to stay sober through the carnage as they witness their loved ones unalive themselves: first in spirit, and then in the flesh.

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My new book, The Biology of Collapse is OUT NOW:

Watch my interview on myth creation and hallucinogenic capitalism from the sidelines of the World Adaptation Forum: