The social capitalist era is coming to a calamitous end and all of humanity is on the cusp of a new dark age.
Despite the numerous continent-spanning religious and political wars and species threatening pandemics of the last 1000 years, it’s the third millennium of the so-called common era that will be remembered as humanity’s most destructive – if it will be remembered at all.
Few people alive today are aware of the severity of the climate and environment crisis. They’re too busy taking care of their immediate needs to be concerned about that. So, far from keeping global warming to 1.5C, we’re on a collision course with a catastrophic warming cycle.
Perhaps even fewer are aware of the severity of the crisis in capitalism. The failure of humanity to wake up to the failure of capitalism is resulting in the free-fall of public services, an unstoppable debt spiral and a global housing crisis.
Capitalism has drastically failed to secure global prosperity and well being, and, if anything, perpetuates and fosters widespread deprivation and ill health.
Far from being reversible, these crises are actually going to get worse. They’ll get worse because people cannot lift their gaze from the illusion of social capitalism – though they may flee from left to right and back like headless geese.
Even the morally good among us cannot see past it.
Why is this happening?
The ultimate answer is: the myopia of ordinary people. Simple human frailty.
Catastrophe is what happens when a species as prone to psychological and intellectual short-sightedness as humans somehow comes into possession of technologies of mass destruction.
Yes, religion, capitalism, socialism and communism are responsible for the coming dark age. Yes, industries, inventions and discoveries such as electricity, fossil fuels, deforestation, agriculture, chemical engineering, plastic and pollution are all at fault.
But really, it’s ordinary people who are responsible. People are fallible, gullible, conservative, and prone to addictions and false beliefs. People are inclined to violence, self-interest and celebrity worship.
Most people are not capable of acting for the well being of other people past their own children and even there they struggle. They are not capable of acting for the well being of others who live any distance from them on the planet – even their own townfolk.
Most people cannot think, feel or register as important any more than the immediate satisfaction of self-oriented action, and they cannot contemplate the possibility that their beliefs are false.
Even if you’re one of those good souls who values and thinks about future humans, who values and thinks about distant humans, you’re unlikely to know what to do about it, because all you have been taught, in your whole life, is to get a job and take care of your family and your money.
There are solutions to the polycrisis. But people aren’t interested.
Despite human frailty and indecency there is a seed of moral goodness struggling to find purchase in human life.
It would be impossible for that seed to find purchase in the degraded earth of socialism, capitalism and religious hatred.
It would be impossible for that seed to take root and grow in a species that embraces its own myopia.
But once all this dirt has been washed away, once these flies have been removed from our eyes, there may still be a semblance of a species left where morality can take root, thrive and bloom into a truly human society like nothing ever seen before.
Transformationism is about cultivating that seed.
Though hardly any who read this will give it any credence, I persist because I believe that the Universe pushes for truth, goodness and life.
It pushes despite ideologies of greed and technologies of destruction.
It pushes despite its own shortcomings, despite its own barriers.
I believe that despite the coming dark age, this moral seed put in us by the universe has a purpose, and whether humanity survives or not, I have a responsibility to serve that purpose – and so do you.
So sayeth Astro.