With regard to the challenges of the future
I solemnly acknowledge I haven't given this topic full coverage, as I have given no topic in the latest years, or any time before, and for that reason there is, I hope, particular venom to appreciate this particular angle. Not only is humanity facing multiple crises broadly interlinked and related to overconsumption, overpopulation and over-technologisation (for this particular, nasty, truth, see
Jevons paradox, no apostrophe, and then compare to the ever-pliant and ever-reproducing Amish, who will inherit the American earth if scary demographic trends is anything to go by) but also biting itself in the foot in the brave attempt at eluding these crises, tightening the proverbial noose by outsourcing , further stoking a paradoxical dependence on primitive fossil fuels in the process of abandoning them and jumping ship.
Undoubtedly, these crises interlinked will herald a new era of unassailable and incalculable proportions, altering the equilibrium for human survival on earth (admittedly, a very precautious and precise one at first, and it sure has been worse, even in the absence of thermonuclear device which, then, would mostly have been thought as an obliquely clever machination to preserve heat) and, in all likelihood and with some inherited optimism, providence or god or our unmade nature will not be completely erased, although conditions as well as the purported loss of death - or rather premature death - will mean incalculable psychological harm for those lucky to carry the torch through the new era. As the Klown once mused at the prospects of a television-free future, egotistically recognising his jugular for what it is, the survivors may well envy the dead.
Carrying the weight of the future... or its obstacle, rooted in an economic order not nestled in the consideration of further hundreds, or millions, of generations but the development of humanity beyond the capacity of its (current) habitation, with consequences blooming those beyond the capacity of readily available remedies. Malthus or techno-hubris, the adaption of the future within the confines of the present does, no doubt, pose the greatest question above the horizon since the advent of nuclear weapons, and since well before and beyond it.
The development of this conundrum, posed by a combination of a post-industrial order without which we would sooner not endure (would not, most of us, now even in Third World countries, foreclosing any vague fantasy of returning to the past by those deeming themselves most progressive) and the population explosion permitted, if not demanded, by this greatest revolution, having now advanced into the stage of micro-chips, the ever-present "smartphone" and the purposed Artificial Intelligence now born like a prodigal son, a digital Zeus - or, as Nietzsche would have it, the sons of Adam - developed into a stage to slay its parent.
And then, perhaps - which is often, and perhaps too often professed - maybe a great remedy is beyond our grasp? Beyond the question of human nature, determinism and representative democracy, which all put certain definite, if not immalleable constraints, on our collective decision-making, akin to the surgeon with a scalpel determined to dig out a cancerous but young tumour from his own belly, or collectively expected to do so to a third party by and before an audience, an example realised by group psychology, mental training and sectarianism, but often to great condemnation and resistance, there is perhaps variables not exactly determined, but which we have avoided in our attempt to rationalise our existence as well as the importance of human agency. To this, I can only offer a sigh of unresigned acceptance, of "well, at least I tried".
McMurphy failed, or so we think at least, but the goal - undesirable or dangerous illusion - of breaking the window was reached. We would better put up resistance, and at the worst, we will have completely readjusted our economy . This has been done, gloriously or in vain, as it were, in response to the German, and Japanese (Italians need not bother) military threat to dominate the globe - meaning, as it still frequently does, the Eurasian landmass, or quite a lot thereof - and the result, for the survivors that is, was not necessarily bad, Stalinist and post-colonial (now inevitable, due to German-Japanese efforts) resettlements and re-drawings of maps without rulers notwithstanding. On the contrary, both for the colonial liberator (and post-colonial technocrat, at best) and European rising from the ashes, the following decades are frequently thought of as the best, the epitome of human existence, barring that question of nuclear warfare between he new, undisputed victors. Would this, a prospect of an "unnecessary" restoration, be something undesirable? Either we die, or many of us will die much sooner than they would have preferred, not because of but regardless of efforts to escape the same, or we survive knowing the neuroses of a great collective of scientists was just that... a collective response to certain trends, pointing fatefully, but ultimately misguidingly (is that a word?) towards a great need to sudden and dramatic adaption, no box office.
The core question, leading me back to the topics I like to discuss, is that of external consequences and ulterior motives. The latter, usually not a concern of mine, is that of using the adaptive measures to
The contradiction of new tech, its demands and the prospects for further consumption (the advent of independent currencies being one major demon to slay, although its demarcation by paying for its ecolocial effects would be more desirable)
What then - as the now forgotten Russian author immemorialised by his reader V. I. Ulyanov, also more famous under a name of his own hand - is to be done?
