Listening to The Beatles remind me to “let it be,” and that got me thinking about #stoicism and my own mental response to the horrors of our age.

Listening to The Beatles remind me to “let it be,” and that got me thinking about #stoicism and my own mental response to the horrors of our age. Yes, things are horrific and we shouldn’t try pretending they aren’t. I will venture a couple of self-replies to explain why, but most you seeing this know most of this all too well, except perhaps about #Covid

P.S. Not the Twitter attention seeker I used to be, but it’s still gratifying to see boosts of these threads and know that a few people are reading what I occasionally take the time to write. Thanks.

Now, this 🧵 on #collapse and dealing with it.

2/ (One thing I enjoy about this medium of expression, after having written two books and a whole bunch of essays on a blob nobody reads anymore: It’s in real time. I’m tapping this out on my iPad right now. Beats writer’s block.)

3/ So, what do we have to be stoic about? What is all around that is difficult to accept and just let be with equanimity?

The early stages of civilizational collapse, that’s what. It is an arduous process nobody really wants to live through, but it’s now underway. None of us will live to see the long-tail end stage of it, and none of us should remotely wish to.

4/ It took the Romans a couple hundred years to go from the peak of empire to the day when the last Caesar was invited to pack up his stuff and go home, his official power having finally subsided to the point where the barbarians’ invitation for him to leave was not really to be argued with. And the height of that power itself marked a form of collapse, of what passed for Democracy in the ancient Republic.

5/ It won’t take nearly so long this time around. Nor will there be the promise of some alternative civilization taking over and doing things if not better then at least in a way that supports about the same number of humans living in pretty much the same way, overall.

This is humanity’s end game.

6/ The hot smelly elephant in the room is, of course, #ClimateChange. We are turning the planet into a place that will no longer support human habitation in a hellish circumference of death around its equator. The early effects of that are showing up in European far-right politics like the Alternativ für Deutschland and Italy’s leaning back toward fascism. And in a US President deploying his gestapo against people most of our fellow citizens would quietly rather not have any more of.

7/ When people can no longer survive a couple of days per summer without air conditioning because the wet bulb temperature has reached the point where sitting quietly in the shade will still kill you, they will flee north. Don’t count on them to just lie down and die, or engage in pointless warfare to kill each other off.

They can’t air condition everybody. The masses who are left out will have nothing left to fight for except the still-habitable land to the north. And El Norte isn’t going to just give it to them.

8/ No matter how righteously you protest or (more likely) just complain about the ICE thugs terrorizing the populace, the fact is that your kids and most certainly their kids will greatly prefer having these lands to themselves. Even here it will be hot and burning and storm-ravaged and crops will be failing, and they will not be feeling charitable.

9/ That in itself would be quite enough for one #collapse essay, but there’s more. Sadly, quite a lot more. Like petroleum depletion, which is why our own fairly-elected (this time) despot has captured a sovereign head of state. Because Venezuela’s reserves of shitty sour heavy crude are looking increasingly attractive now that Texas has largely dried up.

The fracked wells have another decade or so to keep their deplete-and-drill-more game going. Saudi’s supergiants have been pumping for longer than most of us have been alive, and they are getting tired.

10/ I’m going to skip over a lot more stuff like fractional reserve banking and the illusory nature of our money. I don’t want to sound like some old crank ranting about the gold standard. Suffice it to say there are a whole lot more dollars in virtual circulation than you’d really like to know about, after looking at what those numbers in your bank account will buy vs what they used to.

11/ There is so much to skip. The displacement of human creative and independent thought by machines that were trained on their output and now can imitate it to an unsettling degree. The peak of our representative democracy a little over a decade ago. The uselessness of most liberals for doing anything to save it more than give speeches and send out signals of their virtue—certainly not to give real opposition in elected office.

12/ But there is one thing that I cannot skip, or long forget. It confronts me every time I unlock my driveway gate and venture off my wooded acreage to get groceries, or sit in a courtroom full of coughing people to satisfy a jury summons.

It’s the ongoing repeated mass infection of the populace by a virus that causes brain damage.

13/ When I step into a store, I am wearing an #N95 respirator designed to block invisible airborne particles on which this malevolent little chunk of RNA otherwise floats from a sick person’s nose to the nose of another host. At this point, after six fucking years of this, my various respirators have undoubtedly intercepted hundreds of #SARS_CoV2 virions. None have infected me.

14/ I do this because I know better. I’ve read the academic papers on what this virus is doing, and have responded in a logical manner, unlike most of the authors of those papers taking unmasked selfies at their conferences and speeches.

But, almost without exception, people either don’t know better or simply cannot act like they do. And it’s accelerating collapse.

15/ You cannot reduce the collective intelligence, empathy, and executive functioning of an entire species without that species being adversely impacted.

That really should be enough. There is so much more, about the immune system damage that AJ Leonardi predicted years ago to much scorn, about the kids with cancer. But mass brain damage really ought to have been enough.

It is, at least, for this thread. //