In 2002 I got some weird-ass bug, probably from having been in Cambodia. I ended up in a lot of pain (probably as much as in my life) and on a hospital gurney. And then they gave me some morphine.
Holy mother of God that stuff is the shit. You just… the pain just… you float away on this soft warm cloud of bliss.
I TOTALLY see how people get addicted to that. You’d be mad not to, if you had serious pain (and I did not – it was acute, but not chronic, not omfg ‘shoot me now’ pain).
Anyone with a brain who looks at what our species (1) has done to this planet – the genocides, the ecocides, the wanton destruction driven by fear, greed, will to power etc – is in a lot of pain. That would be the case even if we were not quite clearly a long way down a suicidal path that will turn this planet into a largely uninhabitable overcooked slag-and-plastic heap.
Pain is not fun.
So, we want to suck on the hopium pipe.
“New group X will save us” (for x, insert Climate Camp, Occupy, Corbymentum or some extremely new and depoliticised rendition).
And if anyone has the rudeness to question why the same tactics and rhetoric should be expected to come to a different result, oh my.
“Look has anything else got this big this quickly? We must be winning. If you’re not with us you’re against us! Don’t be so demoralising. You must be unwell/jealous” etc
I will say it again, (though I am staggered and appalled that I have to). We. Have. A. Moral. Obligation. Not. Just. To. Act. But. To. Learn. From. Past. Mistakes.
Everything is just riding an emotacycle off a cliff. Again. Why should people who ought to know better be applauded for that?
Footnotes
(1) Yep, there is common but differentiated responsibility. Most of that responsibility lies with people who look like me – white, male, middle-class, who either actively did stuff or were unwilling to speak up against it, out of fear-greed-complicity-etc. Anyhows, parsing the anthropocene versus the racialised capitolocene etc is a blog post for another day, ‘kay?
marchudson.net 
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