The Oligarchys Plans For Our Future Keep Getting Dumber by Caitlin Johnstone!
(2019-08-20 at 04:09:38 )

The Oligarchys Plans For Our Future Keep Getting Dumber by Caitlin Johnstone

It is rare to get a billionaire to share their grand plans for the future, which is weird because billionaires pretty much rule the world.

Whenever they do, though, it is always something incredibly sociopathic, like replacing all jobs with billionaire-owned automation-AI and giving people a Universal Basic Income set by the billionaire-owned government. Or loading all the humans onto rocket ships and sending them to live on Amazon Space Dildos.

Billionaire Elon Musk, who hates unions and wants to implant AI into human brains, has been continuing this trend of idiotic plutocratic futurology with a new campaign to detonate nuclear weapons on the planet Mars.

This is not because Musk hates Mars, but because he wants to colonize it; the idea is to vaporize the red planets polar ice caps and throw carbon dioxide into the air to ultimately make the planet more habitable.

Scientists are voicing skepticism that such a plan could even work, before even opening up the "Just because you can does not mean that you should" debate.

Sending nuclear weapons into space for any reason whatsoever should receive an outright rejection from all of humanity, since getting nukes into earths orbit has been the wet dream of war machine engineers for decades and pretending they went to Mars would serve as an ideal cover story to circumvent international space treaties until it is too late to prevent it.

Musk claims he wants to colonize Mars because a new dark age ensuing from a third world war appears "likely", and he wants to ensure that there will be humans living off of the planet to re-populate it after we wipe ourselves out here.

Rather than pouring wealth, brainpower and resources into pushing for a change in the status quo which has set the worlds nuclear-armed powers on a collision course for a world military confrontation that will destroy our biosphere, this billionaire has decided it is better to nuke Mars so that a back bench of reserve humans can live on a desert space rock.

This is the class of people who are calling the shots in our world. These are the minds who are choosing our fate for us. I would not trust them to run a f-cking gas station.

And Elon Musk is one of the saner billionaires.

I am going to take a lot of flak for saying this, but I honestly believe that the impulse to colonize space is one of the more pernicious cultural mind viruses in our society.

I mean, think about it: we have got a planet right here for which we are perfectly adapted, and we are burning it to the ground while looking up at a red dot in the sky going "You know I bet if I nuked that bitch I could build a hermetically sealed house on it someday."

How much more insane could you possibly get"

I am pushing against a cultural dogma that has been mainstream doctrine for generations, but I really find all this blather about adventure and the indomitable human spirit of exploration quite tedious and idiotic when it comes to space colonization.

We have got creatures swimming in our own oceans with brains many times larger than our own, and we are killing them all off before we have even developed any kind of real theory about what they are doing with all that extra gray matter.

There are parts of the moon that are better explored than vast expanses of our own seas. We do not even know what consciousness is, and science is largely uninterested in answering this question.

I do not believe the spirit of exploration and adventure is what is driving our longing to break for the stars. I think it is nothing but garden variety escapism.

We have all got that one friend or family member who is completely miserable and is always quitting jobs and relationships and moving house and changing their diet in a desperate attempt to find happiness.

They rearrange their lifestyle for the umpteenth time and they are barely settled in before their gaze lands on some other aspect of their life and they think, "That is the source of my unhappiness right there. If I can only escape from that, I will be happy."

Such people are exasperating to be around, because you can see what they are doing and you just want to sit them down and go "The problem is in you, babe. Moving will not help; your inner demons will follow you every time. You have got to stay put and deal with your issues."

Our species reminds me of that type of personality right now.

So many of us are looking forward to some escape route coming from outside of us to rescue us from ourselves; some are looking forward to the second coming of Jesus, some are looking forward to the aliens coming in to save the day, some are looking forward to the Democrats or the Republicans finally capturing the whole entire government and setting things right with the world, and some are looking forward to billionaires setting up a space colonization program so we can get off this accursed blue orb before we destroy it.

But there is no deus ex machina here.

No one is going to save us from ourselves.

Even if we do succeed in running away from home, we will inevitably bring the same inner demons with us that got us into this mess in the first place.

We have got to turn inward and evolve beyond our self-destructive impulses.

The only way out is through.

The mind virus of celestial escapism stops us from doing this, because it offers us yet another false promise of deus ex machina.

It lets us run away from doing the hard but necessary real inner work, just like doing drugs or binging on Netflix or any other kind of escapism.

Bezos Reveals His Ugly Vision For The World He’s Trying To Rule. "Bezos then went on to discuss his plan to ship humans off of the best planet in the solar system and send them to live in floating cylinders in space."-Caitlin Johnstone May 12, 2019

Can you try a little thought experiment for me?

Imagine, just for a moment, if we took space colonization off the table. Completely. Forever.

We just decided that it is never going to happen and we all moved to accept that. Really imagine it. Really put yourself there for a minute.

What does that change in you?

What does that change about your attitude toward our future?

If we are honest with ourselves, I think it would change quite a bit.

For me, when I take space conquest off the table, it takes me in a direction that just so happens to look extremely healthy.

It makes me say, "Oh, okay, so we will obviously have to get rid of the status quo of endless war and ecocide, since those will ruin this place, and that will mean radically changing our relationship with each other and with our ecosystem.

It will mean getting women around the world full reproductive sovereignty and education since that has proven to reverse population growth.

It will mean ceasing to think like a cancer, believing that endless growth is a virtue.

It will mean ceasing to believe that the existence of trillions of humans is the best thing we can hope for for our species when we have yet to even scratch the surface of our own potential on a large scale.

And I suppose it will mean getting together and figuring out how to detect and neutralize the threat of apocalyptic meteor strikes, too."

Imagine that.

Imagine if instead of trying to figure out how to fill the sky with trillions of mediocre humans we turned inward, healed our inner demons, and realized our full potential.

Such a world would be a paradise.

I know from my own experience that humans are capable of so very, very much more than what we have attained so far; we really have not scratched the surface at all.

If we are going to explore, the direction of that exploration ought to be inward.

I really think the mainstream idea that we can always make a mad dash for the black emptiness in the sky if things go to shit here keeps us from truly confronting our urgent need to preserve the ecosystemic context in which we evolved, and which there is no evidence that we can live without.

I mean, we do not even know that space colonization is possible.

As of yet we have no evidence at all that humans are sufficiently separate and separable from Earths biosphere for survival apart from our ecosystem to be a real thing.

Humans are not really separate "things"; they are a symbiotic collaboration of organisms with ecosystems of their own, all of which as far as we know are entirely dependent on the greater ecosystem from which we blossomed.

So far all our attempts at creating independent biospheres have failed miserably, and the closest we have come to living in space has consisted of nothing but glorified scuba excursions: visits to space stations fully dependent on a lifeline of terrestrial supplies.

That is the difference between flying and jumping.

It might be as delusional as our brains thinking they can hop out of our skulls and live independently of our bodies.

Elon Musks Neuralink is developing a brain implant to connect peoples minds directly to a computer. These mind-reading systems could affect our privacy, security, identity, equality, and personal safety.-Rappler August 17, 2019

And even if it is possible, why would you want it?

Do people not know what space is? Are they aware that it is nothing but boring desert wasteland that is really really hard to get to and survive on?

Have you ever been trapped for a long time surrounded by nothing but man-made things, like on an airplane or a cruise ship?

Picture that, but way worse and for much longer.

It would be a sterile, artificial existence; even if you managed to bring in plants and animals it would be ordered in a man-made way that is no more natural than the saplings grown on traffic islands.

At best it would be like being in a mall your entire life.

You would be cut off from the primordial thrum of your home world. There would be no real life there. No real soul.

Imagine never feeling the starry spatter of a shower of rain on your face. Imagine never ever again hearing the roar of wind on a wintry night or experiencing the thunder of the ocean on a big surf day.

Imagine never again being blown away by the brightness of a rainbow or the thrilling crack of lightning or the astonishing beauty of a sunset or the first rays of springtime sunshine fondly warming the back of your neck.

Imagine never again coming across a friendly squirrel or a shy possum or a little feast of wild blackberries.

Imagine never again lying in the dappled light filtered through a magnificent tree.

I do not know about you but I would just miss the breeze playing in my hair too terribly to ever leave.

I love it here and it loves me like a mother loves her child.

This is not just my home, I grew from the earth as surely as a mushroom or a seahorse. I am a part of the earth and the earth is a part of me. We belong together.

It is easy to feel helpless.

The wise ones do not have any money and therefore any power.

We are being run by a handful of coddled man-children and it seems like they might have the last word.

But I have been thinking about Rupert Sheldrakes ideas on morphic resonance a lot lately and I am increasingly convinced that even just one of us bringing consciousness to an aspect of our collective darkness is enough to wordlessly and instantly inform the herd.

So, do me a favor if you are willing.

Go and run one more experiment for me.

Go outside now and place your hand on the ground and say to the earth these words - "I am sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you."

Say it as many times as you feel like.

Say it, and mean it.

And then let us see what happens next.

Thanks for reading!!
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