History does not repeat itself because it is not two-dimensional. Even a simplified description of reality is too hard for most of us, but we have no choice but to try to face it.
The alternative is what people have been doing for the last forty years or so: claiming ignorance. That didn’t work, and things have gotten steadily worse.
Having lost the ability to educate ourselves by figuring out the complex problems we have created, the new approach claims it is all a lie. It is someone else’s fault because they are lying to us.
That has gotten more difficult because of a logical failure. If you are committed to believing lies, how do you fix anything? Whose lie is correct? Wait . . .
All of us on this planet have become entangled in prioritizing lies. Do we prioritize size, brutality, or absurdity? When we are finished, what do we have? Lies.
History does not repeat itself because it does not pass the same place twice.
Orbiting the Milky Way: The Sun, along with its retinue of planets, orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Our speed in this grand celestial waltz is approximately 220 kilometers per second (about 500,000 miles per hour) relative to the galactic center.
Chasing the Cosmic Microwave Background: As the Milky Way moves through space, it’s also chasing after the afterglow of the Big Bang—the cosmic microwave background radiation. Our velocity relative to this background radiation is around 370 kilometers per second (about 830,000 miles per hour) in the direction of the constellation Leo.
Galactic Motion: But wait, there’s more! Our galaxy isn’t stationary, either. It’s part of a larger cosmic structure called the Local Group, which includes Andromeda and other galaxies. The Local Group is drifting through space at a whopping 600 kilometers per second (about 1.3 million miles per hour) toward the Great Attractor—a mysterious gravitational anomaly.
This does not matter as we go to the neighborhood store for shredded cheese. But visualizing things is how we explain them to ourselves.
Throughout our history, it did not matter if we visualized things very simply as long as there were people who could do a better job and then tell the rest of us what to do. Due to population size and environmental manipulation, we have changed things, and simple isn’t good enough anymore.
Things are now complex enough that we cannot ignore all the ellipses and epicycles.
It is getting hotter, and storms are more potent while the waters are rising. We have deadly heat domes, polar vortexes, floods, and melting permafrost that redefine our lives. The gods are angry and never did help, but now that is a disastrous visualization.
What does melting permafrost look like, and what does it do to us?
Because of the prevalence of lies, things are tricky. Even the shredded cheese may not be what it appears. Tell me you don’t think about what’s in the shredded cheese. We live in a world of lies.
What we are facing is not an academic discussion. It is brutally real and a matter of life or death for billions of people.
Our ability to understand the reality around us has eroded to the point that we live in a world of lies and cannot tell what is real. As noted above, what is real changes according to increasingly complex rules.
But our way of organizing and managing our societies hands authority to people who are the most effective liars. Are there any other criteria?
We have enough information about conditions planet-wide now that it is impossible to remain oblivious to lies except through hard work. Most people deal with this by simply picking the best-looking liar or their favorite lies.
The neo-fascist groups tell both outrageous lies but also the most popular with many people. It is hard to go wrong when you tell only the most common and well-liked lies. As that has only a very superficial connection to our vast array of problems, it doesn’t help anything; in fact, it makes things worse. But the goal is familiarity, not solutions.
Don’t expect postgraduate solutions from an elementary school grasp of reality. Feeling better, even briefly, is the goal.
We have made many significant errors in the evolution of our civilization, and fixing them is probably beyond our abilities. Almost everyone, I think, understands that, but that is such a monstrously hard pill to swallow that we don’t know whether to shit or go blind.
Neither of those choices has anything to do with our problems.
We don’t have many options left, but realizing that is a significant step in the right direction. Many people desperately attempt to be positive, but being positive is inadequate. We must work with the reality we have created.
We are just about at the ‘Hail Mary!’ stage of our civilizational existence. What makes sense now is to seriously clear the deck to make our best shots, if possible.
The first thing we do is try to clear away the assholes and idiots from positions of authority. There are too many of them to do much quickly, but we need to remove greed, power, and wealth as the priorities for anything.
Existing political leaders are worthless unless focused on achieving planetary well-being, health, and survival in the next ten years. There is no future in criminalizing refugees, protecting the hordes held by billionaires or corporations, improving their well-being, or even ensuring their survival.
Traditional capitalists, racists, religionists, or opportunists have nothing to offer. Ignore them. That eliminates most of the existing politicians and oligarchs.
We don’t have time to remove them, but we can avoid making it worse by not voting for the most obvious idiots. In any political discussion, no discussion does not start with planetary survival and biosphere health. We must stop all activities that are blocking our survival.
What does this mean? Health is everyone’s right to live and thrive. Our population is already collapsing. We need to mitigate that as much as possible, but that means staying out of people’s way and NOT imposing on them as they try to survive.
Mass migration will overwhelm us. Mass dying will overwhelm us. We need to do what we can together to mitigate these. Shooting people or building walls will not work and will waste time. Where can we let people go to survive, and what resources can be made available?
We need to follow the groups of scientists desperately working to save us from what we have created. We need to start now.
Even people with little information are beginning to realize what is real in this planetary disaster. At some point, they will panic, and then chaos will grow. We must avoid that and cut out the useless politicians now.
The 2024 summer is already making 2023 look like the good old days. This is a lesson. If we have any future slowdown in climate-based disasters, it will be temporary at best.
Here are the straightforward statements of understanding that must be agreed to by anyone running for any office:
Pledge of Planetary Climate Responsibility
There is no short-term solution to our atmospheric heating.
We are not in an apocalypse but a destructive evolutionary environment we have created.
Mass migrations due to agricultural loss and the growth of uninhabitable regions will continue and must be managed until the climate is stabilized.
Mediating and managing the necessary changes must be planetary in scope.
The longer necessary changes are delayed, the worse everyone’s condition will become.
These statements should be the basis to determine if anyone is eligible for your vote.
Mike, you have written a very cogent essay about our current predicament as we are living in a rapidly changing world of heat explosion caused by continuous growth capitalism powered by dense fossil fuels that spew overwhelming amounts of CO2 into the earth's atmosphere. We are living the consequences of our choices that began about 200 years ago. As realization of our predicament increases across social barriers and economic differences a hard panic will overtake all thinking and actions. Fear will become the overwhelming Great Attractor causing humans to spiral into the Big Squeeze that is rapidly closing around us.
It's what we Greens want to work for! I recently wrote about international cooperation on these issues, and the environmental pledges I am signing. https://kdgreenparty.substack.com/
PS As a scifi author I appreciate your summary of the minuscule scale of us in the universe!