(image swiped from Crash Course Geography #14)

We don’t have done it because if we had we would have by now. The train is rushing over the cliff and still the ruling elitist and the average man are working together, shoveling coal into the firebox, frantic as lemmings. The world we’ve built does not deserve to live forever.

Even if we quit praying to fossil satan here and now today, cold turkey, there would be thirty years of hell in the not-wilderness of the Anthropocene age.

That’s not happening, and it won’t tomorrow either.

Listen to this man.

Shed A Light: Rupert Read – This civilisation is finished: so what is to be done?

Please. Listen to the first five minutes, and then stop if you want and can.

This lecture is given to a respectfully somber group of students.

A year later, having answered his own question about what to do by becoming an activist with the group Extinction Rebellion, the same man is on a BBC Panel, taking questions from the people.

BBC Question Time | Dr. Rupert Read | Extinction Rebellion

This is the truly horrifying part.

The evil politicians on the panel with him are one thing, to be expected, bad faith incrementalists looking out for their own short term.

But the people! The ordinary everyday thinking feeling British people …

There are 10 or 15 percent of them who get it really.

But that fraction won’t be enough to stand against the mobs in the theater seats, the majority wagging their finger at the prophet because some theoretical workers may have been inconvenienced in their commute by the Ex-Rebellion direct actions.

This majority has internalized capitalist insanity, swallowing it whole and serving as nominally human hosts for the parasite’s eggs. Watching this is to watch the hatching.

Jeremiad; Lamentations. This is why our grandchildren can’t have nice things. Like the chance to grow old.

If you want, you can continue to follow the evolution of one man’s thinking to the brink of the COVID era:

Chatter #120 – Rupert Read on Parents For A Future and Extinction Rebellion

And beyond even if you like. It’s out there.

The death spiral will not be mitigated.

After all this, the prophet still believes, not in stopping the train, but in ‘transformatively adapting’ to the process of the train cars flying independently through the air, decoupled and rolling head over caboose. Even this marginal adaption, he argues, is unlikely to happen. But “we should still give it our best shot”.

I’m frankly slack-jawed that he hasn’t simply given into despair.

The one eventual point where his vision and mine align is that large scale government is and will continue to be useless on any larger question of destiny.

Consider, my nephews and all the young people, not which film to download next, not where to get the best hot wings, not what will look good on your resumes, but where and how you will grow your own food, find your own water, defend the lives and virtue of your own loved ones when you are as old as I am today.

I won’t be here then. I only have to worry about the next couple dozen orbits around the sun, at the very most. It makes no difference where I set my thermostat between now and then, no difference except how I feel about it on some abstract level of morality.

How do I want to feel?

I want to feel like I would if I was living in that other world we might have built, of mountain road and oracles in the park. I want to live the dream.