Of missing days, sabre-toothed tigers and addictions – End of Days #29 and #30

2023 07 11 End of Days #30

Another double-header because I didn’t get myself together yesterday. 

Various things are running through my head (as ever), few of them for public (if you can call it that) consumption.  The usual rubbish.

Various groups going through the motions

Is it so wrong that they do? Here’s one.

It will presumably be “send an email to your MP” or a few people dressed up in costumes (are polar bears still a thing) and doing a photo op, sending out a press release that ends up in the deleted/unread folders of overworked journalists who only top and tail press releases from “respectable” (won’t get them in trouble with their editors) things. And the stunts are so tired. But it keeps everyone plodding along, treading water, feeling like they are contributing to making a difference.  You need to do something to show you still exist, even if you’re only sending a signal to yourselves, I guess.  And I sympathise with those who say “well, what’s your bright idea Marc” because I thought I had some but I don’t. They may have been the ‘right’ ideas but they were at the wrong time, in the wrong way and I am not the person to champion them. Too much baggage, not enough of the right skills and aptitudes.  We live our lives forward and understand them (if at all, in the rear-vision mirror).  

And even when “they” do do ‘movement-building’ or ‘skills-share’ days, it’s done so badly, tokenistically, so ineptly, that you just want to cry. But people actually want to gain those skills, because it means that once you’ve got them, other people expect you to use them, so you become endlessly on tap as the person who does x, y or z – press releases, websites, whatever.  And so people resist acquiring those skills, because all it is doing is making a rod for their own backs – don’t volunteer, “giving a fuck when it wasn’t your turn to give a fuck” as McNulty put it so succinctly in the very first episode of The Wire.

Uggh.  How is a social movement organisation or an NGO supposed to help over come that? It’s all too difficult. Easier to just name an appointed day on which people will come to the lek, display to each other their virtue and then go away again. And because it’s easier, it’s what gets done. And there are short-term benefits, so it detracts from the longer-term work. Story of my life, anyway.  

Story of the species too, I guess. We were always very good at doing things and not worrying too much about the future. Because it was hard to think about the future when there were the most immediate short-term threats (sabre-toothed tigers, starvation, marauding gangs of assholes with better weapons than you), because even when you could ‘see’ them, it was an inter-generational collaboration issue. Then God came along and He had a plan, so everything was going to be okay. And then when we started killing off God (a very unfinished project) and replaced it with, well, Growth and Mammon, we were so drunk on “our” new powers that we convinced ourselves that there was no problem our technology couldn’t create (as a by-product) that our technology couldn’t fix.  It’s such a self-sustaining and with the grain narrative, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to believe that humans are capable of anything? And any doubters can be (and are) derided as superstitious, luddites, enemies of progress.  And the doubters have often been wrong – astonishing things HAVE been accomplished (public health measures in the west, heart surgery, vaccines, ‘etc’).  But sometimes – and on the BIG question (looking at you, carbon dioxide) – those saying ‘watch out’ have, it turns out, been right.  But prophets in their own land and all that – people have not wanted to hear, for understandable reasons. It’s the way things are, and it’s too late now for the old dog called ‘civillisation’ to learn any new tricks, even if it wanted to (I see no real signs that it does).  Apparently addicts have to really hit rock bottom before they admit they need help. Until then, all you’re doing is wasting your breath and winding yourself up. 

This is quite the ramble, eh? Well, if you want polished, you’ve come to the wrong place.  And polished and coherent is sometimes part of the problem (I don’t want to go full brain vomit here – there have to be some rules, some grammars, if we’re to communicate at all).  But the glib people, with easy answers, that trip of the tongue and trip us all up – that send us on a sweet holiday (a trip) are the people who you have to watch out for. Whether they’re selling an actual physical “salvation” technology (CCS) or a social movement technology (encuentros, ‘spokescouncils, occupy, rebellions, whatever the fashionable forms of idiocy are these days), then we switch off our critical faculties because, well, we want to believe. Why wouldn’t we?  Who wants to look into the freaking abyss all the time? It’s a total buzz kill, it doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t help anything, you won’t get invited to parties.  So most people, most of the time, learn to dial down that.  People with poor social skills (for whatever reason – genetic, because of childhood trauma/abuse/whatever) can go on for years (decades) not getting that nobody wants to hear this stuff, and that there are very well-established channels for not hearing it, for discouraging it and if people continue to insist on it, for taking it to the next level – exit, voice and loyalty and all that.

They should teach this stuff in the visible curriculum.  But the people who need to hear it the most, are, for various reasons, the least likely to benefit from it.  So it goes.

And what community/society etc could long endure that foregrounded its mechanisms of discipline and control? A magician who shows how his or her tricks are done soon is powerless, loses their, well, magic.

So all this is a very very convoluted and wandering way of saying that if we ever expected humans to ‘wake up’ and understand long-term damage and do something about it, then surely, over the last 35 years we are cured of such a delusion.  Sure, we will “wake up” in a blind panic, and jump into bargaining phase activities around solar radiation management. We will throw money at direct air capture.. We will dial up on the religious stuff. Of course we we will.  But there isn’t, at a global scale, a Priory Clinic we can check ourselves into for a rest cure. So it will end differently, with, well, the proverbial body not found for weeks, in an advanced state of decay (a ‘soupy’ if I recall correctly from a 1990 documentary about death I saw, where they interviewed people all the way from the paramedics to the grave diggers…

I don’t know many words that is, but I need to crack on with other stuff, so that’s that for today (and yesterday). Tomorrow is the end of this project – lots of things I didn’t do, but it was worth doing, because, well, I learned some stuff.

I may do a different project, I don’t know. Something that will keep me trying to kick start my writing day, but in a useful way… I’ll think on it.  Suggestions welcome.