(no subject)

[lahermite]

knowledge is like a double-edged sword. the more one knows, the more one realises how very little one knows, and how much of what one knows is applicably useless.

there's a lot about how humans in recent millenia have organized themselves that bothers me. a whole hell of a lot. if i started listing all the things the defy reason, logic, intuition, sense, and basic survival, i'd be here for the next few millenia doing it. what i want to address right now, however, is superiority. a signature i use is, "human evolution is its willing rejection of superiority". one of the reasons i struggled so much to plow through the ancient text known as the bible is its whole basis in humans being somehow superior to every other form of life on the planet. it's a given that "we" are "top of the food chain". that we are somehow guardians of the planet (the one we're actually wiping clean of most life), that it's our role to moniter, control, guide, whatever, everything else here. this is anthropocentric ego. we aren't actually any different to anything else here, not in a planetary sense of the word "different" anyway. we are born, we eat, shit, reproduce, and die. as does everything else, including the planet, the solar system, the universe, and whatever is beyond it. but humans, with the help in the last couple of thousand years of the bible, have proclaimed themselves top of the pile, rulers, with the god-given right to oppress, use, abuse, and take ourselves out of any moral obligation for reciprocity. this misunderstanding of hierarchy gives us governments, police forces, nuclear power and bombs, guns, tanks, roads, clear-cutting, man-made desserts (anyone remember that the wastelands of the "fertile crescent" were once, prior to gilgamesh or whatever, forested), the current travesty that is climate change, and hillary clintons wonderful ideas that all children should be educated by the government in schools and not by their incapable parents in the home.

this misunderstanding gives us technology that is designed to help only rich people at the expense of, well, everyone and everything else. it gives us scientists that pour bleach in non-human eyes to learn that it shouldn't be poured in human eyes. it gives us the armed forces, a group of people who go and kill and maim and torture because someone "above them" told them to, no questions asked. it gives us electricity that, for millions of years wasn't necessary, and now is so necessary that we're killing the planet for it. it gives us - what - three oil spills in the last month with no mention that we shouldn't be drilling for oil let alone transporting it on oceans across thousands of miles in ships that split apart when hit or driven wrong. it gives us cops who shoot young black men for walking towards them with a hairbrush in their hands. it gives us the justification for destroying what's left of the fertile crescent, which isn't much. it gives us the right to clear-cut a whole island so that we can grow palm oil on it. more perpetuation of the great myth that humans are somehow above and better than everything else, including the only planet we have to live on. it gives us the space program that is attempting to find other planets to extract resources from, other planets that we humans can potentially move to when we've finished destroying this one.

superiority, people, is a human construct and does not exist outside of humans misperceptions, ego, and bullshit.

evolve.
willingly give up your notion of superiority.

before its too late.

Comments

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

that we are somehow guardians of the planet (the one we're actually wiping clean of most life)

They call it "stewardship", I think. Its horrific.

three oil spills in the last month

I'm more angry about one of them than I'm saying right now.

evolve. willingly give up your notion of superiority.

You are so right on Tracy.

[lahermite.livejournal.com]

i was thinking i should have said "devolve" because we certainly didn't used to have this fucked up notion of superiority. and we didn't used to destroy the planet, either. i think it was derrick jensen who said (paraphrased) that we couldn't possibly oppress something we felt equal to, therefore we had to put (some of) ourselves "above" others in order to create oppression, the class and slave system, and civilisation.

[orangebeaver.livejournal.com]

Discovery Channel is doing another series on Evolution of the Future. They did it a few years ago, starting about 5,000 years from now and ending with a million. The newest one is five million years in the future.

We are lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng gone. The cover story last time was that we "colonized the stars" but the basic truth is that we will be extinct. Evolution will continue on the planet without us. It's just the way it is. It's humbling...

[lahermite.livejournal.com]

i think we're guaranteeing our extinction right now with the way we're polluting and depleting resources. we may be a "weedy species" capable of surviving through an awful lot, but when we literally change the face of the planet, we guarantee we can't evolve quick enough to survive. yes, it's humbling. and quite a stick up the arse to those who picture us as pinnacles of creation! pinnacles of creation would probably be the cockroaches haha. they'll survive til the earth explodes!

i'll have to keep my eye out for the show on netflix.

[asharak.livejournal.com]

I suppose one good thing about possibly moving to habitable planets in the distant future is that it gives humanity (if we still exist by then) the chance to start over and learn from its past mistakes. But I'm not too optimistic about that, and at best, it would only be a small group of human colonists doing it.

[lahermite.livejournal.com]

simpy put, if we cannot exist on this planet without destroying it, why would we learn to on another one. if we cannot cohabit this planet with all the other species here, why would we learn to on another one(with presumably different species on it).

the notion that we can "save" ourselves by moving to another planet is simply more smoke and mirrors by the powers that be into getting us to continue believing that we can continue this destruction parasitic way of life.

we can't. and no matter how many potentially habitable planets there are out there cannot save us if we cannot save ourselves. which we can't.

this planet will save us by killing most of us off. thus will we learn. the hard way.

and doesn't that suck.

technology cannot save us from the damage technology has caused.

[hippiedork.livejournal.com]

You know what really brought this point home to me? It was when I watched the documentary March of the Penguins, and saw how some of them died trying to keep their off-spring alive. And all I could think was how we believe we are so superior and yet so many humans don't even attempt to care for their children, or abuse them, or worse. I'm always complaining about how the human race sucks, but that movie really made me sit up and take notice of our so-called "superiority."

[lahermite.livejournal.com]

animal testing, to me, is one of the more obvious displays of our notion of superiority. thousands, millions, of animals are, quite literally, tortured to test things that humans use. someone once said, "if just one more rabbit had to die to cure aids, would it then be okay with you" - the reply to that was, "if just one more human had to die to cure miximotosis, would that be okay with you" of course, it's not. humans are the only ones who can justify torture and death, especially of non-humans and poor/brown humans.

i think it was pythagoras that said something along the lines of "as long as humans torture animals, humans will also torture humans" - which makes sense. we can't separate ourselves, no matter how hard we try, from the fact that a) we are animals and b) everything is intricately connected. poison the earth, we poison ourselves.