I just wish we didn't go down so stupidly. I could understand mere greed. I could even understand ordinary ignorance.
Instead, we chose stupidity. The answers were right there. It wasn't a secret and it wasn't all that difficult. Instead people pretended it was a vast conspiracy against them, denying both basic physics and the data.
We still debate why and how Rome fell, but they'll look back at us and say, "yeah, they were just a bunch of dumbfucks."
Part of me feels sad, part of me feels dread, and part of me says, "well, we're just reaping what we have been (and still are) sowing, and we collectively deserve all that is coming." All the suffering sucks though.
This is natural progression. The apex predator takes over and over-grazes the land, so to speak, to the point where it no longer supports the apex, so eventually the apex predator dies off, and the other species that are left can flourish.
The trick is to brake just early enough to hit the apex of the proverbial civilizational corner and come out accelerating until we straighten ourselves out.
Only some are more culpable than others. The climate crisis represents the single biggest failure of humanity. How stupid do our leaders need to be to know about an extinction level event (or at least one that threatens the breakdown of civilisation) with > 50 years notice and take no substantive action? They should be charged for crimes against humanity.
The blame doesn’t lie just with leaders though. It comes all the way from the bottom. Everyone wants their standard of life to improve, they want conveniences, luxuries, socioeconomic status… and they vote for policies that’ll give them those things. It’s a collective problem at a global scale.
Some people just want power and ego and status, some people just want things to be simple and not change from what they know, and a significantly smaller number of people just want to be chill and sensible.
Some conspiracy theorists warned people about the design of your political systems but no one seemed to think it's a legitimate concern. Time will tell I suppose.
