A Rant Of A Different Colour

There’s a philosophical state of being called fatalism that I have more or less come to embrace these days.

The Stanford Encyclopedia has this to say about it:

"Though the word “fatalism” is commonly used to refer to an attitude of resignation in the face of some future event or events which are thought to be inevitable, philosophers usually use the word to refer to the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do."

That sounds like a bit of bullshit on the surface. But when you think about it and how it applies to the world as we know it now, you start to see that there are many things that are beyond our control.

If you look to the left you see a whole lot of people who believe that anything can be fixed, either through collective effort or the power of god or whatever.

And if you look to the right you see a whole lot of people who have the attitude that they will take as much as they can for as long as they can, because everything is fucked anyway.

I know this is a broad sweeping generalization. But that’s what philosophy has kind of always been: An attempt to figure out the world, despite all the insanity created by greed, avarice, lust, tribalism, hate and superstition.

I majored in philosophy in university. Not because I was particularly interested in becoming a professor of philosophy, because that’s really all a study of philosophy equips you do in the real world. But because I was trying to figure out how the world worked so I could get a clearer picture of what my place in it could be.

I believe that each of us, in our own way, is looking for the same thing. And the different ways we go about it and the different places where we end up is what makes this world such an interesting place.

And it worked because I found my place. And for the past 50 years, I have been sitting at it. In a chair. At a desk. With a machine to take what’s in my head and transfer it to a page of some kind.

I have written about a lot of different things, because I am interested in a lot of different things. The rich tapestry of the world. The ideas that people have. The way things that happen in the world actually come about. And this place where we live.

I used to think a lot about this place where we live and how it came to be. But what I discovered, very quickly I might add, is that it really didn’t matter. Mainly because it’s not something that can ever be figured out or completely understood.

So instead of pondering the universe and our place in it, I stuck with the world. And what I have learned about the world is that the main miracle of this planet, and to some extent, the universe, is its ability to create and destroy life.

Humans such as us, are a relatively new species, when you consider how long this planet has been around. And in the philosophical sense, the one thing we have proven ourselves to be really good at is our ingenuity.

The rest of the stuff is not good at all.

We have been fighting and killing each other since we could first create and wield a weapon. We have been taking from the earth since we could first dig a hole. We have been formed into tribes, for the express purpose of conquering other tribes, since we could communicate and organize ourselves into communities. And we have hated other communities for no other reason than that they were different from ours.

We are a narrow-minded, pathetic species. We have, over the ages, squandered the beauty of the gift of humanity through ego and pride and avarice and jealousy and fear and unfounded hatred.

We are a sad lot. And now, over the last decade or so, the chickens have come home to roost, so to speak.

We have been dumbed down by the powers that be to the point of near apathy. We have taken so much from the planet, that the planet is now starting to regenerate, because that’s what it does.

Everything has a natural state of being. The earth is no exception. And if you upset that natural state, it will correct itself. These corrections can take hundreds of thousands of years or longer.

And my belief is that a correction has started. Call it climate change. Call it global warming. Call it whatever you like. It’s upon us. And it will eventually eliminate us. How long it takes is really academic.

And that is fatalism in a nutshell. We are an odd species in that we take way more than we need to take from the earth to survive.

And in so doing, we have upset the natural state of the earth, and brought about the need for the earth to correct itself.

And it’s all based on one simple human failing. Greed. Pure and simple. Because greed breeds inequality that creates slaves or a powerless underclass. Greed shows no regard for balance because the greedy are not fair-minded. All they care about is wealth and power. And they have no compunction about doing whatever it takes to get those things.

Over the years there have been many revolutions over greed. But the time for revolutions, I’m afraid, has passed.

I will be turned to ashes by the time this imbalance starts to take place on a massive scale. And at the end of the day, I pray for one thing, and that is that I am wrong about this.

I pray that our ingenuity can figure out ways to turn this all around, or at least buy us more time to develop more effective solutions.

But it really is like playing a baseball game and being several runs behind. The effort that will be required is a total team effort. And in order for  that to happen, the whole concept of greed needs to be eliminated,and the human race needs to start seeing itself as one collective entity, which, sadly, is something it has not been able to do for thousands of years.

jim out

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