Thank you for this Nate, you've articulated much of what I've been thinking and feeling the past several months as we turn a blind eye to expanding genocide and war mongering, the continued unabated spread of Covid, and the ever worsening climate catastrophe as we move well past planetary boundaries. While plenty of human civilizations have collapsed in the past, there has never been biodiversity and planetary collapse along side. It's truly an unbelievable time; sometimes the grief is overwhelming.
We serfs, wretches, peons, proletariats, peasants, have always lived in the bad place. We sell our lives away to the “kings” for our basic livelihoods. I believe that “White people” have bought into the lie that with hard work you can leave serfdom and become a king.
Many of us Black people know that the ruling class doesn’t care about us or our children. No lives matter.
Sarscov2 damages us in so many ways. It destroys the gut biom. Which harms our lungs and our brains. Oh, and it makes it easier for bad bacteria to enter our bloodstream, causing sepsis.
There are many more cases of sepsis and sepsis deaths.
I now know why I had sepsis in July 2023.
And can get it again…
FUBAR - thank you WW2 soldiers for this “word”
SNAFU is a good one too
Those boys and young men were used as cannon fodder. Their lives did not matter, why would we think that ours do?
But it's always been like this throughout history. Always.
The wealthy and powerful run amok over the rest, forcing death and destruction to those who stand in the way of their getting more wealth. More power.
This particular aspect is a story as old as civilization.
The difference now is that the psychopaths calling the shots have terrifying weapons that they can, on a whim, use to wipe everything out.
It's the scale that makes this a planetary crisis.
We can be more aware. We can try to protect ourselves and our family from some of the dangers. We can consciously live our lives aligned with our values.
But individually, or even collectively now, we won't be able to stop the momentum.
I expect the propaganda to escalate. I expect there will be shocking/ dramatic/ entertaining/ violent / sparkly distractions invented or amplified to keep us busy reacting to events that have little relevance to our survival and wellbeing.
And people will happily take the bait.
Sometimes you have to come to terms with the reality.
It's too late.
The machinery is all in place and the elites are protecting each other and themselves. They're untouchable unless they anger their cronies. They won't survive either, ultimately, but I guess they win in their minds if they die richer than anyone else.
We're on our own to a very large degree. All we can really do is keep our situational awareness as honed as possible and make adjustments where we can to avoid the first and the worst of the collapse. We can try to do that for neighbors and friends... until we can't.
That's where I am with it. I'm going to keep driving until the wheels fall off. They're wobbling now.
There is a way out of this madness. But we have to get to the root of it- the capitalist-imperialist system. We need an actual revolution, not a metaphorical one. Much more on this here: revcom.us
It has always been like this, you are just now able to see it clearly. As an American I'm ashamed. "Oh, please don't kill any more civilians, be careful with these 2000 pound bombs we are sending every week"
"Don't worry we have two battle groups right there to help if any of those children shoot back" "They're terrorist children hiding in terrorist tunnels, holding their terrorist dolls and Teddy Bears to their little terrorist breasts. Do you need any more bombs to help kill them?" Freedom! Democracy! Lies!
Excellent article Nate, with which I agree on all points.
On the Covid front, I've just watched the first episode of Saving Lives in Cardiff, on iPlayer, centred around the University Hospital there. At the same time as saying that *vascular emergencies* had massively increased (I wonder why?!), to the point that the 37 yo vascular surgeon said he couldn't cope with this kind of workload for the rest of his working life (30 years), there was no-one, either patient or staff, wearing any kind of respirator. (And obviously no insight into *why* this situation was happening in the first place). The only masks to be seen were surgical masks worn during actual surgery.
One of the patients had compromised lungs, due to asbestos damage, which made him vulnerable to surviving his aneurysm operation - the surgeon was clearly worried that they needed to protect his lungs to make sure he could recover post-op, but not worried enough to mask around him to help prevent him catching a serious disease that would affect his lungs. The level of ignorance and denial over Covid is astounding and horrific. I don't know how long it can continue before things start to break down irretrievably (if they haven't started to do that already).
Reality has always been a troubled concept. In my seven decades of life, what my government says and does are two separate entities. In my compulsory study of U.S. history in elementary and secondary school, there was no mention of the atrocities committed by our forces in either the Philippines or Hawaii. Much less any question of the wiping out of our indigenous population.
Are the school children of today, acquainted with the assiduous work of our intelligence agencies to bring thousands of committed Nazi scientists to work in our defense industries after the German surrender? The Nazi war effort relied upon slave labor to manufacture the weapons that our victorious generals then wished to deploy against Japan first, and ultimately, the Soviet Union, our ruling capitalists' true enemy.
But what endures is bad behavior and abdication of responsible leadership by our elites who are cowed by craven capitalists. What is differs now is the environment in which this neglect of facts on the ground takes place. The global north has a lifestyle that overshoots our planet's resources. There is an ongoing population wide experiment with the long term effects of exposure to a virulent virus. In a few decades will people even contemplate life in their seventies?
Are there even a few decades to watch the ravages of climate change and wholesale habitat destruction with the specter of a nuclear war hovering ominously?
As I am going to take one of my frequent mountain bike rides, let me close with stating how precious an opportunity for joy my life has afforded. Should we not endeavor to preserve that opportunity to all? Unfortunately, as Nate Bear meticulously documents, that answer is No!
Everything one plugs into instinctively seems disingenuous and feels like control. News feeds are voyeurism disguised as information and everyone is on the make with an agenda. Reality is fractured and society feels more like a William Gibson novel with every passing day. The world feels like it's in a death spiral and yet the show goes on as if nothing sinister is happening. Good vs Evil is a ridiculous dichotomy, since it is a simplistic construct invented by the narrator. I fear for the children, my children, and for the innocents everywhere, who may never know history. Angry chimps should never have been allowed to do so much damage. Pax Vobiscum...
Excellent analysis, Mr. Bear. Macrofutilism, I’ve called it - but this has been going on for decades, and the dominant myth of progress, reinforced at every institutional level from politics to religion to academia to punditry, marginalizes this understanding. We live at the base of Bullshit Mountain, an artificial and growing mountain.
Nate, Thank you for this article. I agree with you completely. I can’t really see a way out, unless there is radical change and this must come from goverment with strong leadership. This existed: kissinger’s book on leadership tells the story of several. But where are the leaders now? They must exist, but what are they doing. Maybe things need to get even worse before they somehow emerge.
You are not alone in thinking these thoughts which are surrounded by social silence.
The novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which I happen to be reading now, is eerily prescient. A flu pandemic wipes out the world as we knew it, and what happens in the years that follow to those who survived is what is unfolding. And I agree with you Nate that nothing that at one time felt impossible or certainly highly unlikely still does. I was struck down in 2020 by long COVID at the height of my career and physically active life (mid-40s). Witnessing and experiencing what at first felt like love and community and humanity do a complete 180 while the hundreds of millions of us languish at home (and yes - almost 6 million children in the U.S. alone have long COVID) has been a real mindfuck. Even the “good” people in our lives aren’t listening anymore about the risks of COVID reinfections.
Tying in the absolute historical memory-wipe of Israel’s laying the groundwork for this total annihilation was brilliant. Thank you for linking all of this.
Reading up on The Samson Doctrine, it strikes me that this is simply the codification of an implicit threat posed by every nuclear state. I would certainly not put it past the US to act similarly "in extremis" against a non-nuclear threat, any more than I would Russia, N. Korea, India, or the rest. The fact that "tactical nukes" has developed in the menu of military options and made its way into our common vernacular makes me want to run screaming for the hills.
What is important about talking about the Samson Doctrine is that not many people know Israel is nuclear armed. It's this weird secret that isn't well kept, but suppressed enough that the average person would struggle to readily find information about it. So this helps folks understand that this is the card Israeli is playing behind the scenes with the Western Powers that is leading to complete and enthusiastic support for the current Isreali aggression, despite it being deeply unpopular at home and also amoral. You better believe Netanyahu is pushing this line when asking for more weapons from Allies to appease the Alt-Right politicians who are keeping him power. They are who want this expansion with zero care of Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, or any other innocent civilian lives who gets in the way.
re: lockdowns in the UK, its important to remember that less than 50% of people ever 'had' to work from home during the lockdowns, the rest of the population were deemed essential in some capacity.
I am lucky I wasn't one of them but I wonder when their story will be told in the mainstream media in any detail (never, if the people in charge of the publications can help it).
Secondly it makes me wonder what is so wrong with the lives of people like Rosa Silverman, who (in the telegraph article you linked) describes the lockdowns as traumatic - how can social distancing and a moderation of one's ability to hang out with others (it was never true isolation or close to it, and we have a range of technologies to stay in contact with friends and families) truly be experienced as more traumatic than an unmitigated pandemic?
Its clear that people like Silverman have one eye on the spectre of the bird flu and are certain they will take precautionary measures not to allow precautions in the event of another pandemic. You said it already but its important that we all keep stating the obvious - this is eugenics, eugenics, eugenics, in the service of capitalism.
It helps me deal with the reality you describe so well to know someone sees what we are experiencing.
I particularly resonate with "This hasn’t happened before. Everything really might not be fine."
We have never lived with eight thousand million humans on the planet. World population has tripled in my lifetime. This affects the climate, it affects pandemics (each human is an incubator for new viral variants - that's a lot of petri dishes), it affects the impact on what is left of our mammal cousins.
We don't know what will happen, and we clearly don't care.
Thank you, Nate. It helps to read your essay and all the comments and know I am not the only one ---looking around and wondering how people cannot see that the empire has no clothes. But I also see people engaging in increasingly risky behavior, and I see despair which is overwhelming mental health clincs, and I think maybe people do know. The average person can feel the great wrongness in our way of life and everyone is lashing out/ reacting in different ways. Most of those ways are self-destructive/ counter-productive. Like you said, I flip flop between the relief of giving up and the knowledge that I can't. I have three young grandchildren! I don't know what I can do, but I must do something.
Thank you for this Nate, you've articulated much of what I've been thinking and feeling the past several months as we turn a blind eye to expanding genocide and war mongering, the continued unabated spread of Covid, and the ever worsening climate catastrophe as we move well past planetary boundaries. While plenty of human civilizations have collapsed in the past, there has never been biodiversity and planetary collapse along side. It's truly an unbelievable time; sometimes the grief is overwhelming.
Thanks for saying that. Yes, the only thing that helps for me is to write down and hope it resonates with someone so I'm glad it did
We serfs, wretches, peons, proletariats, peasants, have always lived in the bad place. We sell our lives away to the “kings” for our basic livelihoods. I believe that “White people” have bought into the lie that with hard work you can leave serfdom and become a king.
Many of us Black people know that the ruling class doesn’t care about us or our children. No lives matter.
Sarscov2 damages us in so many ways. It destroys the gut biom. Which harms our lungs and our brains. Oh, and it makes it easier for bad bacteria to enter our bloodstream, causing sepsis.
There are many more cases of sepsis and sepsis deaths.
I now know why I had sepsis in July 2023.
And can get it again…
FUBAR - thank you WW2 soldiers for this “word”
SNAFU is a good one too
Those boys and young men were used as cannon fodder. Their lives did not matter, why would we think that ours do?
It's never been "exactly" like this.
But it's always been like this throughout history. Always.
The wealthy and powerful run amok over the rest, forcing death and destruction to those who stand in the way of their getting more wealth. More power.
This particular aspect is a story as old as civilization.
The difference now is that the psychopaths calling the shots have terrifying weapons that they can, on a whim, use to wipe everything out.
It's the scale that makes this a planetary crisis.
We can be more aware. We can try to protect ourselves and our family from some of the dangers. We can consciously live our lives aligned with our values.
But individually, or even collectively now, we won't be able to stop the momentum.
I expect the propaganda to escalate. I expect there will be shocking/ dramatic/ entertaining/ violent / sparkly distractions invented or amplified to keep us busy reacting to events that have little relevance to our survival and wellbeing.
And people will happily take the bait.
Sometimes you have to come to terms with the reality.
It's too late.
The machinery is all in place and the elites are protecting each other and themselves. They're untouchable unless they anger their cronies. They won't survive either, ultimately, but I guess they win in their minds if they die richer than anyone else.
We're on our own to a very large degree. All we can really do is keep our situational awareness as honed as possible and make adjustments where we can to avoid the first and the worst of the collapse. We can try to do that for neighbors and friends... until we can't.
That's where I am with it. I'm going to keep driving until the wheels fall off. They're wobbling now.
There is a way out of this madness. But we have to get to the root of it- the capitalist-imperialist system. We need an actual revolution, not a metaphorical one. Much more on this here: revcom.us
I'm feeling every word of this this week.
It has always been like this, you are just now able to see it clearly. As an American I'm ashamed. "Oh, please don't kill any more civilians, be careful with these 2000 pound bombs we are sending every week"
"Don't worry we have two battle groups right there to help if any of those children shoot back" "They're terrorist children hiding in terrorist tunnels, holding their terrorist dolls and Teddy Bears to their little terrorist breasts. Do you need any more bombs to help kill them?" Freedom! Democracy! Lies!
Excellent article Nate, with which I agree on all points.
On the Covid front, I've just watched the first episode of Saving Lives in Cardiff, on iPlayer, centred around the University Hospital there. At the same time as saying that *vascular emergencies* had massively increased (I wonder why?!), to the point that the 37 yo vascular surgeon said he couldn't cope with this kind of workload for the rest of his working life (30 years), there was no-one, either patient or staff, wearing any kind of respirator. (And obviously no insight into *why* this situation was happening in the first place). The only masks to be seen were surgical masks worn during actual surgery.
One of the patients had compromised lungs, due to asbestos damage, which made him vulnerable to surviving his aneurysm operation - the surgeon was clearly worried that they needed to protect his lungs to make sure he could recover post-op, but not worried enough to mask around him to help prevent him catching a serious disease that would affect his lungs. The level of ignorance and denial over Covid is astounding and horrific. I don't know how long it can continue before things start to break down irretrievably (if they haven't started to do that already).
Thank you for this tip. I'll try and check it out
Reality has always been a troubled concept. In my seven decades of life, what my government says and does are two separate entities. In my compulsory study of U.S. history in elementary and secondary school, there was no mention of the atrocities committed by our forces in either the Philippines or Hawaii. Much less any question of the wiping out of our indigenous population.
Are the school children of today, acquainted with the assiduous work of our intelligence agencies to bring thousands of committed Nazi scientists to work in our defense industries after the German surrender? The Nazi war effort relied upon slave labor to manufacture the weapons that our victorious generals then wished to deploy against Japan first, and ultimately, the Soviet Union, our ruling capitalists' true enemy.
But what endures is bad behavior and abdication of responsible leadership by our elites who are cowed by craven capitalists. What is differs now is the environment in which this neglect of facts on the ground takes place. The global north has a lifestyle that overshoots our planet's resources. There is an ongoing population wide experiment with the long term effects of exposure to a virulent virus. In a few decades will people even contemplate life in their seventies?
Are there even a few decades to watch the ravages of climate change and wholesale habitat destruction with the specter of a nuclear war hovering ominously?
As I am going to take one of my frequent mountain bike rides, let me close with stating how precious an opportunity for joy my life has afforded. Should we not endeavor to preserve that opportunity to all? Unfortunately, as Nate Bear meticulously documents, that answer is No!
Thanks for this
I hear you brother...
Everything one plugs into instinctively seems disingenuous and feels like control. News feeds are voyeurism disguised as information and everyone is on the make with an agenda. Reality is fractured and society feels more like a William Gibson novel with every passing day. The world feels like it's in a death spiral and yet the show goes on as if nothing sinister is happening. Good vs Evil is a ridiculous dichotomy, since it is a simplistic construct invented by the narrator. I fear for the children, my children, and for the innocents everywhere, who may never know history. Angry chimps should never have been allowed to do so much damage. Pax Vobiscum...
Excellent analysis, Mr. Bear. Macrofutilism, I’ve called it - but this has been going on for decades, and the dominant myth of progress, reinforced at every institutional level from politics to religion to academia to punditry, marginalizes this understanding. We live at the base of Bullshit Mountain, an artificial and growing mountain.
Nate, Thank you for this article. I agree with you completely. I can’t really see a way out, unless there is radical change and this must come from goverment with strong leadership. This existed: kissinger’s book on leadership tells the story of several. But where are the leaders now? They must exist, but what are they doing. Maybe things need to get even worse before they somehow emerge.
You are not alone in thinking these thoughts which are surrounded by social silence.
Lawrence
The novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which I happen to be reading now, is eerily prescient. A flu pandemic wipes out the world as we knew it, and what happens in the years that follow to those who survived is what is unfolding. And I agree with you Nate that nothing that at one time felt impossible or certainly highly unlikely still does. I was struck down in 2020 by long COVID at the height of my career and physically active life (mid-40s). Witnessing and experiencing what at first felt like love and community and humanity do a complete 180 while the hundreds of millions of us languish at home (and yes - almost 6 million children in the U.S. alone have long COVID) has been a real mindfuck. Even the “good” people in our lives aren’t listening anymore about the risks of COVID reinfections.
Tying in the absolute historical memory-wipe of Israel’s laying the groundwork for this total annihilation was brilliant. Thank you for linking all of this.
Reading up on The Samson Doctrine, it strikes me that this is simply the codification of an implicit threat posed by every nuclear state. I would certainly not put it past the US to act similarly "in extremis" against a non-nuclear threat, any more than I would Russia, N. Korea, India, or the rest. The fact that "tactical nukes" has developed in the menu of military options and made its way into our common vernacular makes me want to run screaming for the hills.
What is important about talking about the Samson Doctrine is that not many people know Israel is nuclear armed. It's this weird secret that isn't well kept, but suppressed enough that the average person would struggle to readily find information about it. So this helps folks understand that this is the card Israeli is playing behind the scenes with the Western Powers that is leading to complete and enthusiastic support for the current Isreali aggression, despite it being deeply unpopular at home and also amoral. You better believe Netanyahu is pushing this line when asking for more weapons from Allies to appease the Alt-Right politicians who are keeping him power. They are who want this expansion with zero care of Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, or any other innocent civilian lives who gets in the way.
re: lockdowns in the UK, its important to remember that less than 50% of people ever 'had' to work from home during the lockdowns, the rest of the population were deemed essential in some capacity.
I am lucky I wasn't one of them but I wonder when their story will be told in the mainstream media in any detail (never, if the people in charge of the publications can help it).
Secondly it makes me wonder what is so wrong with the lives of people like Rosa Silverman, who (in the telegraph article you linked) describes the lockdowns as traumatic - how can social distancing and a moderation of one's ability to hang out with others (it was never true isolation or close to it, and we have a range of technologies to stay in contact with friends and families) truly be experienced as more traumatic than an unmitigated pandemic?
Its clear that people like Silverman have one eye on the spectre of the bird flu and are certain they will take precautionary measures not to allow precautions in the event of another pandemic. You said it already but its important that we all keep stating the obvious - this is eugenics, eugenics, eugenics, in the service of capitalism.
It helps me deal with the reality you describe so well to know someone sees what we are experiencing.
I particularly resonate with "This hasn’t happened before. Everything really might not be fine."
We have never lived with eight thousand million humans on the planet. World population has tripled in my lifetime. This affects the climate, it affects pandemics (each human is an incubator for new viral variants - that's a lot of petri dishes), it affects the impact on what is left of our mammal cousins.
We don't know what will happen, and we clearly don't care.
Thanks for writing.
Thank you, Nate. It helps to read your essay and all the comments and know I am not the only one ---looking around and wondering how people cannot see that the empire has no clothes. But I also see people engaging in increasingly risky behavior, and I see despair which is overwhelming mental health clincs, and I think maybe people do know. The average person can feel the great wrongness in our way of life and everyone is lashing out/ reacting in different ways. Most of those ways are self-destructive/ counter-productive. Like you said, I flip flop between the relief of giving up and the knowledge that I can't. I have three young grandchildren! I don't know what I can do, but I must do something.