You must accept that human civilization is over.
This is what a small movement gaining adherents wants you to get.
It’s a good idea. Your death may come shortly after reading this. It could come tomorrow.
We know this intellectually. Yet it rarely informs our daily acts. You doubt? How many items have you crossed off your bucket list. Do you even have one?
Harder to accept: humanity itself may be over.
Some I know will accept this intellectually. Others will not. As the environment responds to our collective actions, the shit is really going to start hitting the fan, as survivalists like to say. Then, even non-believers will be weeping and gnashing.
We’ve already seen examples: Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Copiosis may be unable to prevent such outcomes. Indeed, we may have to move through such a disaster to reach a better way of running civilization.
Societal collapses are normal. They have happened since the beginning of time. Modern civilization can’t even claim distinction for causing it’s own collapse. Previous civilizations already claimed that title.
Societies, such as ours today, with woefully imbalanced resource ownership, vast wealth disparity between “commoners” and “elites” and continued resource extraction stripping nature’s ability to recover, make collapse more than possible. The only question is, will it be a Type I or Type II collapse. In the first, nature recovers and eventually humanity. In the second, no such luck for either.
Why are we covering this?
Philosophically, we pursue our mission in the spirit of 18th-century Samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo. He wrote a manual for samurai called “Hagakure.” It was must reading for samurai who daily faced death. A snippet:
“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way.”
We are not against anything. We do not fight against climate change, government, oppression, the one percent the left or the right. Instead, we take action we feel compelled to take and see where that leads, understanding death is a foregone conclusion. That conclusion, however, provokes no resignation, apathy or capitulation. Rather, for us it gives birth to pure determination. Death will come. When it does it will be embraced. Until our hearts stop beating and we’ve breathed our last breath, however, we will continue the work.
Making peace with humanity’s end may be a good idea. That doesn’t mean we stop what we’re called to do. Nor does it mean humanity’s end is inevitable.