Civilization as we know it must end

Civilization as we know it must end. This is not a statement of desire or intent, but simply one of inevitability. Just as surely as a cancer whose insatiable appetite achieves its own destruction, western civilization is approaching a dramatic and horrifying conclusion where the executioner and the executed are one and the same.

Part I: Isla Earth

Let’s imagine that there is a small island in a small lake. On opposite sides of this island live two groups of people, each numbering about 20. Each group benefits from the presence of a set amount of resources. They have, say, an acre of forest, which provides them with rudimentary shacks. They have an acre of tillable land, which is farmed and provides them with enough food to keep everyone alive (they also fish the lake for food). And there is a small stream that runs from one end of the island to the other, providing both groups with drinking water.

On this island, everything goes well for a time; no one is ever hungry or without shelter. To pass the time, the islanders sing songs or tell stories. After a while, however, the inhabitants of the west side of the island start to get a little bored. To remedy this, they throw an occasional party, with a bonfire on the beach and a veritable feast where everyone eats until they feel they’ll explode. The westerners realize that these parties are really fun, and over time they become more and more frequent. Soon, a large part of their one-acre farm is devoted to growing grapes to make wine (often, they must draw water from the stream to irrigate the grapes), and another part is devoted to growing marijuana.

After a few years of weekly parties, there comes a tipping point. In planning the next party, the westerners realize that their fun is in jeopardy—there isn’t enough wood for the bonfire and there isn’t enough food for the feast. “Well, I guess the party’s over,” says one. “We’ll have to go back to the boring old ways of before.”
“Maybe not,” intercedes another. “There’s still plenty of forest on the other side of the island. They’ve got food too!” The westerners erupt in celebration when they realize that their compatriot is right: there are more resources and the party doesn’t have to stop.

So the westerners head over to the east side of the island and ask their neighbors nicely if they can take wood for their bonfire and food for their feast. Several of the elder easterners object. “We have lived humbly on this side of the island for a long time,” they say, “and if we continue to live humbly, Mother Nature will reward us by continuing to provide for us. You have exhausted your resources. Will you not exhaust our resources as well and doom us all?” Of course, the westerners don’t like that answer, so they threaten to kill them all and take what they want anyway. “Wait,” shouts one of the younger easterners, “this party thing you’ve got going on sounds pretty fun.”

“Oh, dude. It’s fucking sweet tits,” says one of the westerners.
“Well then,” continues the young easterner, “we young ones will join you and your party. But instead of killing these old ones, let’s put them to work gathering the wood, growing the pot, and making the wine.”

And so everything is arranged. A new era of prosperity dawns on the island. The parties become daily, with weed, wine, and copious amounts of food for all the islanders, regardless of their cardinal direction. And they live happily ever after. Well, maybe not ever after. Eventually, the stream becomes nothing more than a trickle, its waters diverted to the grapes. The forest is long gone. Not only is there no wood for bonfires, but now repairs need to be made on the shacks, and there is no wood for that either. The islanders, sensing at last the irresponsibility of their ways, try to go back to planting the farms exclusively with edible food. But much of the soil, without a forest to protect it, has been ravaged by heavy rains. And even if they could plant more food, by now they’re all fat fucks who cruise the island on Hoverounds, and they’d never be able to produce enough calories to satisfy their needs. So they all die, and the island becomes a desert.

The End

This has been, of course, the exact story of our planet and the human civilizations on it. Our planet is indeed an island, for all intents and purposes, with a very finite amount of resources. And western civilization, by its very nature, is a cancer on the earth which will exploit those finite resources until there are no more to exploit, even if this results in the destruction of western civilization itself.

It’s happened before. The harsh, arid deserts of Iraq were once lush forests, but human activity—notably deforestation and overpopulation—resulted in the desertification of the ‘Garden of Eden’. Several Mayan sites (which we consider examples of ‘great’ civilization for their ability to construct big fuckin buildings that don’t decompose) were abandoned abruptly because, most scholars believe, overpopulation and conspicuous consumption of resources caused environmental catastrophe and rendered the areas uninhabitable.

But the stakes are higher now, because we no longer have distinct ‘civilizations’. Instead, globalization and the increasing interconnectedness and interdependence of societies worldwide mean that we’ve really got one humungous civilization. If it falls, as it must, and we’re all in this together, then we’re all going down together.

Part II: A 20pc Chicken McNuggets in every pot

It goes without saying that the white man fucked everything up. We can trace conspicuous consumption not only back to Jamestown, but to Rome, Athens, and even Babylon. But it’s interesting to look at some of the more recent manifestations of this rampant consumerism, and how it’s turned the United States into the most morbidly obese society in human history. In the defense of our predecessors, it seems it simply never crossed anyone’s mind before, say, the 60s, that the apparently vast resources of the planet could be exhausted. (So really, you can’t blame settlers for shooting buffalo from moving trains and leaving them to rot, because it was simply aimed at the extermination of a race of people, and they couldn’t have foreseen any dire environmental consequences.)

Also to their credit, the relentless onward march of technology and industry (though it’s always been used as a tool by the wealthy and powerful to increase their wealth and power) initially held much promise as a remedy to poverty. When Herbert Hoover optimistically promised Americans “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” it was because most American families were too poor to own a car or even eat chicken regularly. Today, that seems a fairly reasonable expectation. The problem is that, inevitably, Americans would never be satisfied with just one car, just one pot, and just one chicken.

One of the reasons there appears to have been so little progress in the eradication of world poverty is that the scale is constantly sliding—what was considered developed in the 1950s is considered developing today. By the time a family in another part of the world finally got a car, the American family had two cars. By the time they got radio, Americans had TV. By the time they’d managed to deal with Malaria, Americans had Viagra. Oh wait, they still haven’t managed to deal with Malaria.

In 1950, the average American consumed 21 lbs of chicken each year; by 2007, it had risen to 87lbs per year. (Total meat consumption in the same period went from 144lbs/year to 222lbs/year.) The average American household now has 2.28 cars, meaning roughly two thirds of households have two, three, or more cars. Since 1972, there have been more cars in the U.S. than drivers. In that year, there were one million more cars than drivers. In 2003, there were 35 million more cars than drivers. The average home size in 1970 was 1,400ft². In 2004, it was 2,330ft².

This perpetual advancement carries with it a price tag. The U.S. consumes three times more energy today than it did in 1950. 70% of that comes from burning fossil fuels. The average American is responsible for 22 tons of carbon emissions each year, compared to a global average of 6 tons per capita. And the imperial death march is unlikely to stop. Could you imagine Americans saying, “you know what, the first iPad is good enough. Let’s stop developing computer technology.” ? Or “I think an average lifespan of 78 is pretty respectable. Let’s cool it with all the medical advancements.”? The march can never stop, because the system of capitalist consumerism behaves in a way that is strikingly similar to a heroin addict, forever in search of a new fix, forever needing just a little bit more than last time to get high, until the final fix is a fatal overdose.

More, more, more. It’s always about more. The system requires constant consumption to keep going, so the parts of the system do their part to encourage everyone to take more. For example, there is a light bulb in a fire station in Livermore, California, that has been burning continuously for 110 years. In fact, in the 1920s and 30s, there were a number of innovators who developed light bulbs which lasted much longer than the 2000 hours of the standard incandescent bulb. But if a customer only needed to purchase one light bulb in her entire life, you wouldn’t have a very successful light bulb business, would you? So the major light bulb producers got together and agreed not to produce or advertise light bulbs that lasted longer than 2000 hours.

Planned obsolescence may have been a novel idea in the 20s, but today it is commonplace. Computer printers regularly have a chip installed in them that renders them useless and irreparable after a given number of pages printed. Apple was sued in a class action law suit for deliberately installing batteries with short life spans in its iPods, and further, for making iPods so that consumers could not open them to replace or repair the batteries. But consumers have, for the most part, been complicit, because they are also employees. iPods that break and can’t be repaired need to be replaced, and that means more jobs at Apple, so more people have more money, with which they can buy more goods that break quickly and have to be replaced. All in the interest of more, more, more.

I once talked to a man who worked for Proctor & Gamble in the U.K. about the company’s market strategy in that country. P&G makes, among other things, toilet paper and paper towels. When the company wanted to enter the U.K. market, they couldn’t do much with toilet paper. Why? Because people only shit so much, so selling more toilet paper would have to mean encroaching on the market share of existing TP producers, which for whatever reason was undesirable. With paper towels, on the other hand, people could be driven to consume more all around, so P&G would move units, but so would their competitors—everybody wins. So P&G embarked on an ad campaign to convince Brits of new uses for paper towels that they hadn’t considered before. Instead of cleaning up that coffee spill with a reusable dish cloth, use a paper towel and throw it away! It’s so much easier. As a result, people in the U.K. now consume a lot more paper towels (and create a lot more trash).

Even if we wanted to stop, we couldn’t. One of the defining characteristics of civilizations is the presence of institutions, and unlike a person who can be reasoned with, cajoled, or killed, institutions are very difficult to stop. Governments, corporations, churches, they all have mechanisms built into them to ensure their continual progress regardless of the actions of the countless humans who help run them. I remember during training for the Peace Corps, the trainees in my group met with an official from a U.S. Embassy. It was 2009, and one trainee asked about changes at the embassy due to the change of presidents, from a Republican administration to a Democratic one. “Nothing changes,” the official said frankly. “It’s a machine, a giant bureaucratic machine, and it marches on and the same paperwork gets filed regardless of who’s in the White House.” Corporations and churches work the same.

So what can be done? I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I can take my family and eke out a subsistence lifestyle on a couple acres in the rural Philippines, and perhaps that’s the most responsible course of action, but it would do little to slow the suicidal march of civilization, and at some point, they’ll be knocking on my door asking to cut down my trees. The tragedy of civilization in the age of globalization is that you can’t be spared from its calamity, even if you don’t participate.

I guess there’s nothing left to do but pop a bottle (champagne, petrol, or whatever you’re into) and party til the lights go off.