The Twilight Begins
Unless you have been purposefully remaining ignorant of the status of the world, it has been a never ending parade of calamity and tragedy since 2019 circling the globe. Wildfires, heatwaves, floods, pandemics, epidemics, riots and civil unrest, and ever-growing issues with supply chains and labor should by this point paint a clear image for everyone: capitalism is dying. The world as we know it today is fading. Whether it’s because capitalism cannot withstand disruptions created by the various crises, or because simply that resource has been exhausted and depleated to the point it is hard and expensive to extract and process, or from the simple fact that the working class of humanity has been stretched beyond its limits, it is dying.
Collapse of our entire global system is frightening, but this has been a situation that not only was long in the making, but decision makers knew it was coming. We knew industrial society as it exists has been untenable for over 200 years at this point. Writers, thinkers, observers, sounded the alarms long, long ago that the trajectory of consumerism was a fools errand.
And yet, because there were profits to be had, we forged ahead. For the most part, this has shed significant benefits on a wide variety of people around the globe. Diseases that were once fatal have been eradicated or made survivable. Technologies such as plumbing, water treatment and sewage have made significant strides toward human longevity. We now know drinking dirty water from a shared ladle is a fast way to die. We have also shrunk the world to an incredibly small size. There is no place anywhere on earth that is not reachable within 48-hours by anyone who has the means and access. Voyages which once would take months now take hours. That is even assuming I need to be physically present somewhere. I can virtually explore and interact with people from far away lands almost instantaneously.
It is then a paradox that even with all of this amazing improvements, that life expectancy peaked in the United States, the wealthiest of all western nations, and continues to drop. Around the world, people complain that as technology and communication access grows, they are less connected to each other, to the people around them, to the world or to the very natural realm that supports us and makes our lives even possible.
In our haste and hubris, capitalist human society forged ahead into world that is in many ways worse than before, just shinier and flashier. Our addiction to the latest technologies has produced a pipeline of electronic waste that threatens the very existence of life.
The capitalistic, consumerist society has left mankind broken, empty, unfulfilled, poisoned and dying. Fast fashion and an addiction to convenience has filled landfills and roadside ditches with refuse and pollution. Capitalists, chasing profits, always seek new ways to skirt environmental protections and occupational health and safety standards, even going as far as specifically finding places where a few payments to local officials can ensure maximum profits.
People in countries the world over know first hand the damage caused by western consumerism. Their homes sit atop rubbish heaps, they wear the scraps and discards of western society. Waste runs through their streets. Shipping conglomerates run their ships ashore and leave them for locals to scavenge and rip apart for scrap metals, exposing people to toxic chemicals.
Western society is just beginning to see and feel the negative impacts of centuries of exploitation and hubris directly in their lives. As that system collapses, the absence of which will put more and more in peril as the days and weeks turn to years and decades.
In short, we have entrusted our very lives to a system that is uncaring to the human experience, and the result will be predictable.
However, there is an opportunity for improvement from the ashes of the old. We can learn from the mistakes of humankind’s addiction to industry and technology, and change our lives for the better. But it requires everyone to be willing to accept that the world we knew yesterday is never coming back. We are, to put it bluntly, in the twilight of capitalism and the industrial world. The night, the death of it all, is fast approaching. When the last light goes out, we will enter a darkness that the world has not experienced since the last major civilization collapse, and given how interconnected and widespread this civilization is, none will be spared. There will be death, there will be a rapid and long-term degradation of quality of life when compared to the peak of Capitalism (1990-2010).
However, how long night lasts depends entirely on who you are and where your mindset is. For some, it will be a decent into an authoritarian totalitarian nightmare. For others, it will be coping with the sudden vanishing of both the exploitative systems and the refuse and waste left in its wake.
How The West Was One
In western society, the only possibility we have of surviving is to accept that life is changing and that we must adapt and evolve with it, including our systems of life and means of living. For far too long we have been subjected to the alienation of a colonial mindset. Our lives, our systems, everything is engineered into a complex morass of interconnected, winding, redundant systems. Inside all of us resides a person, the same white male colonizer. This voice is the voice that attempts to keep all of life and living viewed through the narrow lens of consumer capitalism. This inner monologue doesn’t ask questions about the sustainability and future, but instead how to “keep what we have”.
To illustrate what I mean, let’s look at the United States. Even it’s progressive populace views the United States through the lens of that white male colonizer. Statements regarding the “promise of America”, and how it’s a functioning democracy, all stem from the same propaganda and lies fed to us from the white male colonizer mindset. When we silence that voice, we begin to understand that we live in a fiction: a rather upsetting, dystopian fiction.
The past of the United States is a house of cards: lies upon lies. How often do you hear something about America being a “democracy”? Fairly regularly if you live here. The fact of the matter is, America has never been a democracy. Ever. No, that’s not just a nihilistic view. The United States of America was founded by white male colonists for white male colonists. The United States was made for landowners and businessmen. This isn’t any sort of assumption or secret, it’s well documented American History. The franchise, that is the power to vote, only slowly devolved overtime, first to all white males regardless of whether or not they owned land. Then eventually additional groups like black males, women, and immigrants were granted the franchise. Today, we take this notion of “all men are created equal” as being an egalitarian one. However, that was never the intent. Progress happened, and as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. remarked, long and toward justice, but that was never the intent of this grand experiment.
If one silences the white colonizer voice inside of their mind attempting to wedge an artificial lens of which to view American history through, and actually consider it from the view of Indigenous peoples, Blacks and People of Color, you begin to fully understand the truth: America was founded as a shit nation, by shit people, for shit reasons, and has always been dominated and controlled by the biggest turds in the cesspool. This isn’t an exaggeration. The idealistic America paraded out at every opportunity never existed. The faster we all come to accept that this is the truth, the faster we can actually move toward righting the wrongs of human civilization and bracing ourselves for the darkness coming through the death throes of that capitalistic colonizer experience.
The Way Forward
The way forward for humanity around the world is one of purposeful, intentional, and active rebellion. This does not necessarily mean this must be a violent rebellion, but it involves first and foremost killing the white colonizer voice in our minds.
The way forward cannot be prescribed, it will be unique to each person and community, but many commonalities will be shared regardless of where we are. Our mindset must change to that of one that wide, vast, grand, and most importantly, able to let go of what we have today. Consumerism as we know it, cannot continue any longer.
What will survive though is intentional communities that operate themselves with a mindset of “what problem does this solve”. Let’s take a very simple, very common western idea: the purchase of a piece of technology.
- Why do I need it?
- What does it do for me?
- Is it sustainable?
- Is it needed for human life?
- What problems does it solve? What problems does it create?
- What impact does this purchase have on people around the world?
Simplifying our lives greatly and reducing our dependence on technological solutions to problems will produce less waste and reduce our dependence on the global capitalistic society.
The faster households can pivot their thinking, the better. The most important thing that must be considered by anyone though is that the world that we know, or knew, can not ever happen again. It is not sustainable. We cannot consume endlessly without consequence. Every action has a consequence and a cost, costs that have been largely ignored for the majority of western civilization.
Before purchasing that new computer or tablet, we must ask ourselves can I do without? Can I use something different? Instead of a digital notebook, can a paper one do?
The hardest part though is completely ditching the mindset of the mindless consumer that we have been forced into by capitalist society: consuming endlessly products and services because they exist. Single use plastics and single use containers. Exploited restaurant workers making our meals. Foodstuffs that are not nourishing and ultimately a processed toxic mass.
The fall of capitalism has the potential to become a renaissance for humanity, a chance to finally learn from the hubris and mistakes of mankind’s past. It is up to us to decide whether we want to go into the darkness of the coming night pretending it is not happening, and ultimately allow ourselves to perish, or shall we accept that by looking back at human existence, what we have created is a terrible monster that must be put to sleep… and we cannot go back.
That does not mean we have to live a rough life without technology and back to old ways. It does mean we have to decide everything, from how we live to how we get around, if it’s worth the costs. It means we have to learn to not be slaves to technology but to use it as a tool, as a finite resource.
In future updates, I will describe more about what I and my family are doing to unhitch ourselves from this existence and prepare ourselves for the coming of a new age. It will be difficult, but it must be done.
The first step will be to fully kill the capitalist, consumerist, white colonizer in our heads. Only once we are freed from that slavery, can we begin the conversation about what comes next.