idk the author
Always lovely when we take extremely complicated problems and conclude “it’s simple, we kill my favorite pet peeve”
Doesn’t fascism require a strong man leader?
I’m all for calling out destructive ideologies but if we call everything fascism then it’s really going to dilute the power of the term.
Fascists typically believe in strongman leadership, but you don’t have to swear allegiance to a specific strongman to be a fascist.
Eco-fascists, in particular, want a Pol Pot-style dictator, someone who will ignore laws, human rights, and common decency, in order to drastically reduce the human population and force the survivors into low-tech subsistence farming. Last I checked, no one like that is anywhere near power anywhere in the world, but that doesn’t make eco-fascists any less fascist for it.
Humans are inherently adaptive to their environment. Our bodies obviously change, but so do our minds. Our habits, our emotional responses, our beliefs of what is possible and what is necessary, all change depending on how we grew up and the world we see around us. It takes a lifetime to unlearn all the harmful lessons of a fucked up youth, and almost everyone has had a youth fucked up to be burdened with plenty of traumas to pass on to the next generation. And that’s on top of all the pain that the natural world can bring.
Humans are the dumbest possible species capable of doing science well enough to reach escape velocity from the physical limits of the ecological niche they evolved to occupy, but we’re also the only species, seemingly in the nearest billion light years. We’re the best shot this part of the universe has at bringing peace and joy to the natural world, including ourselves. And we are getting better at it, slowly and with many setbacks. There have been countless plagues and extinction events in the history of our world that have caused tremendous damage to the ecosystem, and we’re the first to try to mitigate itself.
If we manage to change fast enough to mitigate most of the crisis we are creating, we will build a better world than could have ever have been without us. A world where mammals live unburdened by parasites and parasites live unburdened by mammal immune systems. A world where people grow strong and healthy and loving and open and connected and sharply intelligent because our environments help us grow into our best selves. Food forests, friendships, peace and prosperity and labors of love.
We already know it is possible. We already know we could belong there. We all dream of such a world no matter how strangely contorted our sense of how to get there has become. We just have to keep building our social structures to get ahead of our technological power.
Capitalism is largely responsible for climate change. Deforestation and aquifer depletion are more directly linked to population growth. Communism wouldn’t magically make industrial agriculture go away
No it wouldn’t but do you know the biggest contributor to CO2 emissions isn’t agriculture it’s just plain old energy usage.
Communism can most definitely help in curbing the use and extraction of fossil fuels while coordinating their replacement with renewables on a time scale that won’t doom humanity.
Yes I agree with you! Greed is at the heart of our predicament. I just think that the focus on CO2 emissions as the main problem is missing all of the other planetary boundaries we are crossing. There is an ecological problem in addition to the economic one. Without a doubt the economic problem has multiplied the harm of overpopulation manyfold, wealthy and exploitative countries are disproportionately to blame for the dangers we face, and we should seek new ways of living that are not inherently exploitative to minimize the loss of life as we adjust to drastic change.
True, however there are different ways to do it, I think its Denmark? that gets more than double the yield/acre than the world average utilizing a lot of greenhouses and what amounts to pretty much hydroponics lite. If half of agriculture land suddenly didn’t need to be used that way it would be huge.
Yep absolutely! Animal agriculture is really the main issue when it comes to this and the amount of food we would have to grow would be much less if we didn’t feed most of it to animals to eat. Our economic system could definitely incentivize there being more farmers who practice more labor intensive agriculture to improve yields and reduce soil degradation and water use.
And humans allowed capitalism to happen and have historically throughout history allowed a small handful of powerful people to take control and make everything shitty until things collapse soooooo. Capitalism is just a symptom of the disease
“Slavery is the slaves’ fault because they allowed themselves to be enslaved.”
Now you’re getting it
Yes but counterpoint, capitalism is a human invention so humans (at our current state) are still the root cause
Nah, other animals have performed transactions since before humans existed. The fact that we do it in marble halls and fancy suits doesn’t make us the originators.
And it’s not like it was all utopian paradise before capitalism was invented.
We can also be the solution.
There are more options than just capitalism (and especially the weird kind of klepto-capitalism that we’re falling into globally now).
I believe in humanity being the solution when I see it.
So far I don’t.
Humans will almost certainly bring a solution. Might not be a good one for most people though.
Humans also invented slavery, torture devices, nuclear weapons, and totalitarian regimes but we don’t argue these things are “natural” or inevitable.
Just because humans created capitalism doesn’t mean it’s an expression of some essential or universal human trait.
Such a western view: a capitalist society. We have the choice to participate in that or in a different system. Most just don’t want to give up the “I have” for “what can be”.
I think they did a study in the Amazon, and found that actually the Amazon is strongest when defended by indigenous populations. In fact basically all around the world, all nature is stronger when protected by humans.
I think you could make the case that before capitalism, this would also have been the case in the west. There are clear links between the growth of capitalism and witch burning.
In most of the world its participate in capitalism or go to jail, not like you can just go live in a tent in the woods without being dragged out. (Unless you live somewhere like the US which still has really big woods.)
Right but then it’s a matter of reference. Anything can be a virus. The specific issue with unlimited capitalism is that it is a virus to ourselves as well as pretty much everything else on Earth except a handful of people that benefit from it. As if they were immune.
Capitalism no doubt sucks, but our other inventions suck even more unfortunately.
Capitalism is genetically baked in, to a certain degree. But so is egalitarianism, war, schadenfreude, empathy, looking at people but if they look back at you then you turn away because you’re really not trying to give them vibes but they’re still looking at you for an uncomfortably long time so you have to turn back to them to understand why they’re doing this but your perception was wrong and they had long since looked away.
hasn’t the earth already gone through several mass extinctions even before capitalism was invented?
Communist countries did some pretty heinous stuff to the environment, too. Industrialization lets us fuck things up efficiently regardless of the economic system.
Aye, but free market capitalism is against two important tools: Rationing and regulations.
Since most people want more stuff than they need and will not vote for less consumption, the most effective form of government would be an enlightened dictatorship.A dictatorship of any sort wont get you much different than capitalism does: capitalism has the effect that it does because it creates a situation where power concentrates (because wealth is generally a proxy for power, and having a lot of capital under capitalism allows you to more easily obtain more of the finite pool of it), so that decisions are made that benefit the few with power while the many without much of it suffer the negative externalizes of those decisions, that the wealth of the powerful insulates them from. A dictator represents simply skipping to the end-state of that, where power is highly concentrated among one person and those that directly enable them. They still will make decisions that benefit themselves at the cost of the well being of everyone else, because people are selfish that way. Even if you somehow get a person that somehow cares more about everyone else than themself, that person wont be dictator forever, and since that mentality isnt the norm for dictators, odds are soon enough you’ll end up with an “unenlightened” dictatorship again.
That or people who want that money/power will kill you and abuse the system that was created.
Fuck capitalism and fuck dictatorships.
It would still be industrialized and still be far too numerous not to affect the ecosystem.
You can’t have eight billion people on the planet and a healthy environment. They’re mutually exclusive. The more people there are the more resources we need, and the less are available for other species.
The duck knows what’s up
Is ecofascism a real ideology? I’ve never run into a single adherent.
Few fascists call themselves fascists. But ecofascism is mostly used as a descriptor for policies and policy priorities that are genocidal in the name of ecology, even though the proponents may be non-fascist in other areas.
For example, a neoliberal legislator may cut foreign aid because it’s going to industries that emit carbon, while simultaneously cutting public transit funding to promote driving. Or a neoconservative may increase the funding for border police by a massive amount because climate change will lead to an increasing number of climate refugees.
It’s a cool-sounding buzzword to use against people concerned about the environment so you can sound like a leftist while protecting overconsumption.
I don’t think they advertise much irl, but you can certainly find them in the darker corners of the web. If I recall correctly, it started as an academic term to describe the emerging ideology. Some of them view the term negatively, others have embraced it.
have you ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? because it was coined by an ecofascist and has inserted itself deep into economic theory. ecofascists are few, just like all fascists, but their ability to ply power allows them to influence world decisions by seeming reasonable while they murder, kill, and disrupt
Humans are stupid creatures that wage wars on their own species, they are smart enough not to but they don’t choose to. They are smart enough to know right or wrong but no. Their smartness is also the cause of this human nature because every human can have their own thoughts or opinion for something which causes conflict between them so my solution is “one body one mind” which is shown in so many media. But in reality it’s also not perfect because individuality will be gone. Just FUCKING SUFFER ALREADY STRUGGLER
Idk I’m leaning towards the idea that it’s mathematically inevitable.
No matter what societal structure you have, if your ultimate goal is to become type 3 civilization, you want to grow efficiently with scale. The only way to do this is by using templates/cookie cutters/removing individuality/ authoritarian. This inevitably leads to ignoring natural habitats and laying out your mass-produced factory lines.
Also because of entropy, this kind of system will inevitably be destroyed. And power vacuum, new faction swarm in, the cycle repeats.
Life is just an entropy machine created by entropy after all…
Who invented capitalism again?
Captain Capital.
Humans can’t do anything but capitalism due to our need to differentiate from our peers and having massive egos that prevent us from truly sharing wealth. Mine is bigger than yours has been a thing for as long as we have history records.
We are the virus, because we uphold capitalism as the longest lasting form of “peace”time economy. Yes there are alternatives, but all of them would result in more peace on the one hand and gang-wars and multiple mass genocides on the other.
Earth is also a virus incubator. Eventually nature does its thing. Like right now, and then we have an extinction level event.
If we’re not the virus, then why is Gaia acting like it has a fever of at least +1.5ºC likely +3ºC in less than 20 years?
And that ego is also the reason why accepting responsibility is very hard.
Best we can do is using capitalism to create better alternatives like the way the cost of solar panels has made solar the cheapest energy faster than any other energy revolution.
