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    Re: In the current instance, it will mean a halt to growthforever, a population cull, and the chance for Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on June 1, 2019, 10:03 am, in reply to "In the current instance, it will mean a halt to growthforever, a population cull, and the chance for"

    Agreed Rhis, that's the main reason I see collapse as the least-bad alternative at this point. But 'pretty hairy' is probably an understatement! I don't think we have any idea, here in the pampered semi-affluent west, about just how bad it's going to get. Most of us haven't experienced war, epidemic disease or famine where we live for over half a century (because those evils have been basically exported to the global south). When all those things come rushing back... ooh boy...

    I remember Jason Godesky (author of those 30 theses I posted before - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-godesky-thirty-theses ) putting it in these memorable terms:

    '[C]onsider a sickly child. Consider my brother. It is my earliest memory. The doctors insisted it was not meningitis, even though it matched all the symptoms — after all, how could it be? He had just a few days before had a large number of meningitis pathogens injected into his body, and, having been vaccinated, it couldn’t possibly be. That would mean that science and medcine had failed.

    My mother told me not to watch, but I peeked, and the image was seared into my brain forever. My tiny brother’s body, screaming in agony, pinned down by my father and a doctor, as another took a needle nearly as long as my little brother’s entire body, and slipped it into his spine.

    I cannot imagine my brother’s pain — or my father’s holding him down for such a thing. But he did the right thing — the hard thing. My brother very nearly died that night, but because my father could see that avoiding that passing agony would mean death, he survived. There was great pain, but once that pain passed, there was life.

    That is very much the situation the human race is in now. Had our civilization collapsed in the Bronze Age, it would have killed millions and caused ecological devastation throughout the Mediterranean. It was avoided, and instead we had wars, empires, the decimation of the New World, and we have ushered in the single greatest mass extinction in the planet’s history. Now, we stand on the same precipice. Collapse now would involve the deaths of billions, and we can look back and see that it would have been better if our civilization had not survived the Bronze Age. But it did, for all the same pressures that push us forward now. If by some miracle we do find another deus ex machina, then we will only make it still worse — the deaths of trillions, and the very real poossibility of the extinction of our species, and all multicellular life on earth,

    The cost of collapse is terrible. It should have been paid by our ancestors, and damn them for not paying it! The cost would have been so much less. Instead, the debt has fallen on us, and it is almost more than we can bear. Yet bear it — and pay it — we must. If we do, then humanity will be free once again. If we don’t, then our children will pay it, and then the cost will be too much to bear — they will damn us as we damn our ancestors’ weakness, for because of our weakness, there will be no bright, shining hope once the debt is paid. For them, the debt will be so great that it must be paid with the extinction of our entire species.' - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-godesky-5-common-objections-to-primitivism-and-why-they-re-wrong

    cheers,
    I

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