Bingo. Every couple of years, I teach a "fun" class on post apocalyptic literature. I've been doing it off and on for a decade or so, and every time I do it, I find Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower more and more plausible. It's not a standard "post apocalyptic" work in the sense that there's no big inciting event--no zombies, no big nuclear war, and no asteroid. Instead, it's a world in which everything has just gotten a little worse every year for a long time. It is, in other words, a projection of the current pattern we're seeing in the real world: every year, the weather is a little worse, the fire season a little longer, most people are a little poorer, and the world is a little more violent. It's not a huge difference, but it adds up. Can you remember thinking that 2012 was just peak hellworld? I can, and it looks pretty damn appealing now from here.
The journalist Robert Evans talks about how he prefers "the crumbles" to "the collapse," and I strongly agree. Of course it's possible that there might be some big black swan event that changes everything overnight, but I think it's a lot more likely that we're headed for Butler's Parable world--crumbling infrastructure, crumbling society, crumbling climate, and crumbling morale. In a way, I find this a lot scarier than the more traditional, dramatic collapse scenarios, if only because it makes it a lot harder to get people to act. That old myth about the slowly boiling frog is just that--a myth--but there's a grain of truth in there too, at least with respect to people (suggesting we're dumber than frogs). We're very, very bad at dealing with problems that are diffuse, slow, and causally complex. We're ok at solving big, immediate, catastrophes, but that's not really what we're facing. So we just keep letting things wind down.
Definitely agree, but I think these are different aspects of the same problem. Part of why capitalism has been as successful ("successful") as it has is precisely because humans as a species have a really hard time with long time-horizon planning and problem solving. Our hyper fixation on short term gains under capitalism strikes me as a symptom of that problem.
In addition to that, though, I think climate change is a uniquely challenging problem for us to solve, given our cognitive equipment. Philosophers of climate science like to describe the problem as a kind of "perfect moral storm," where lots of things that are problematic on their own intersect in just the right way to create a really nightmarish problem. On top of the "we suck at planning more than a year or two out" issue, climate change is also spatially distributed and causally attenuated. My emissions from (say) driving my car don't have a measurable negative impact on me (or even my neighbors) right here, but rather spread out across the globe and contribute to an ongoing escalation that is felt worldwide. Likewise, it's basically impossible to attribute any particular impact to any particular agent: something like that California wildfire season is clearly and uncontroversially a result of climate change, but the causal connections between particular actions--me driving to work, the US failing to meet its emissions targets, a particular logging company clear-cutting a range in the Amazon, &c.--are so attenuated as to be basically meaningless. That's not to say that nobody is responsible (or that some relatively small number of people aren't much more responsible than everyone else), but just that our common sense ideas of what "responsibility" or "causation" look like don't really work here, and that more sophisticated concepts are needed.
All that (plus some other things) make reasoning about--and thus combatting--climate change really difficult on a mass scale. It's a kind of problem that we've never really faced before as a species, and it's one that plays right into many of our biggest weaknesses, both individually and at the socio-political level. I used to think that once the impacts of climate change became concrete and started harming people in wealthy nations in direct, obvious ways some of these difficulties might be circumvented. Then COVID happened, though, and I...no longer think that.
Pretty much everything that's been happening for decades but every year it gets exponentially worse.
In a best case scenario, I assume it'd start with the nations of the global south being able to resist the US and EU enough to sustain and develop their countries without having to be hyperexploited by the core nations.
Maybe a domino effect of those global south countries implementing some hybridization of state capitalism/planned economies in those regions of the world; the rest just cascades from there. I assume this might be the case due to the ecocide of the planet prompting this response where the market will inevitably fail in the face of failed crop yields, water droughts, famine, energy and medicine shortages, etc.
The west will discard liberal democracy in its interior and in its place build a fortress empire and further empower repressive internal security apparatuses to maintain control. Altered Carbon & Elysium are likely futures rather than Star Trek or even the world of Interstellar.
The worst case is that capitalism's collapse will coincide with the ecological collapse, destroying capitalism altogether and slowly regressing into a canvass of failed/failing states. It is very possible that our ruling class will choose omnicide rather than having to live with less privileges and treats.
If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything. This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.
Look around you. Supposedly we live in a rich country but people can't afford to buy homes, get educated, or go to the doctor. People can't even pay rent. There's like 5 profitable companies that run everything and everything else is merely outrunning debts as long as interest rates continue to fall. Low wages, low interest rates, expensive ass homes, they're all the same thing: the rate of profit has fallen too much and the trickle of money invested in creation of new homes and new means of production cannot generate profits to justify itself. So the economy is now just about hoarding wealth and extracting rents from people that missed the boat.
Either some kind of rebellion or nuclear war over the dwindling resources. Capitalism has no plan to save the planet. Look at what the richest capitalists are doing: memeing about space and pretending to be astronauts. This is what the "meritocracy" of Capitalism has inevitably given us: The mediocrity of zooming around the upper atmosphere compared to landing on the moon half a century ago is astounding. Fail. Sons. Not only will they not save the planet, they cannot, because they aren't up to the task because they're a bunch of coddled princely failsons. When shit hits the fan the generals will take over and steer us toward mutually assured annihilation. The capitalist elite not already on board will be bullied into compliance or they'll get knocked off and nobody will bat an eye.
Basically what I'm saying is it'll descend into fascism.
Capitalism has no plan to save the planet. Look at what the richest capitalists are doing: memeing about space and pretending to be astronauts.
They're gonna do the Dr. Strangelove thing except with space instead of mine shafts.
Yea and it will fail, but aliens might find the remains of these idiots sometime down the line and wonder how the fuck humans could be this stupid.
Rapid descent into fascism, low intensity conflict creeping into the fringe of the imperial core, austerity, millions of deaths
Good times 🤡
I think it will be similar to the way that empires expand and contract. Capital’s grasp will expand and contract, but over time have less influence on average. Regional revolutions will occur and fail over and over until capitalist hegemony can’t remain in place
