Thursday, August 13, 2020

Our New End Game Scenario

 

There was a time when my feelings regarding Mutually Assured Destruction were truly ambiguous. I would blandly explain to people what a great honor it would be to serve as an eyewitness to the greatest event in human history: the world-ending total nuclear war. Certainly a couple of tens of thousands of megaton-strength warheads would be enough to do it. The suffering of the witnesses would be brief; most of them in the northern hemisphere would hardly have time to notice it at all. It would be an honor to be invited to that party.

With apologies to our neighbors in the south, who might cling briefly to life, I would feel no regret or resentment at all at being involved in such an event. I would be gone; we would all be gone rather quickly; and then there would be no one to care. It would be an end to the huge volume of daily suffering that afflicts mankind. We could all be at peace, in the most final way imaginable. Forgive me if I find that result almost charming.

The planet itself would almost certainly survive, in some form. Barren, more or less, and gray due to the nuclear shroud, but still with recognizable continents and oceans. Given the plethora of life-forms that now prosper on the earth, some of them would definitely survive. Consider the microorganisms that dwell around steam vents in the greatest depths of the oceans. Even if radioactive fallout reached down through the seven or so miles of ocean to reach them, they'd probably just eat it. Deep in the earth something driven by life would endure. And don't forget, everywhere that there is life, there is a food-chain. All life consumes life, and is in turn consumed to provide life to others. After a hundred-million years, the earth would have long since recovered nicely, again becoming a welcoming home to multivarious life, all killing things to survive and being killed in return so that others could survive. All striving through the process of evolution to reach the goal of all life: immunity from death at the hands of predators. Only humans have achieved that goal so far, but it would happen again, given enough time. And what are a few hundred-million years to the earth and the sun? That's just a walk in the park in galactic reckoning.

That particular end is no longer on the table, I fear. The big players are far to clever to bring on their own end that way, and the small players could only cause enough damage to be a nuisance. The end that threatens us now is much more likely to happen, and, to me, is much more disagreeable. It is the end of our brief period of industrialized capitalism. We are, I believe, now witnessing the final stage of that game. White has one bishop, one knight, and one pawn, and Black has one rook and three pawns. Neither side is particularly good at chess, so it's a real nail-biter. The game is dragging out, but the rough outlines of the end-game are clear. It will be a longish period of decline, after which industrialized capitalism will be replaced by an industrialized, fully mechanized authoritarian oligarchy. The world will become a large-scale imitation of Honduras, run for the benefit of a limited number of families, and manned by impoverished, debt-riddled workers. The odds are that you will be one of the workers.

I would have preferred the death by nuclear war, myself. That would have been much more democratic, don't you think? We would all have shared the same fate. That would have been an almost poetic ending to the human race. This way, the great majority of humankind will suffer under a great tyranny, perhaps for thousands of years. We in the developed world had the ability to avoid this result, but it seems that we were too busy enjoying our advantage and trying to increase our piece of the pie. We failed to notice our growing losses, and by now it is too late.

My sincerest apologies to those living in countries where all but a very few families have always been completely bereft. We could have helped you, but we were too busy making a living to give it much thought. Perhaps you can console yourselves with the knowledge that we will soon be joining you in the gutter.

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