Update

Hello again! It’s been a while.

Excuses for the absence of new posts:

• I’ve been taking a lot of credit hours in university.
• I’ve been shy about writing again due to an unforeseen result of sharing my writing in person.
• I’ve been lazy and feeling like the world is too big to change.

Today’s focus:

It’s been a while since I really thought much was missing from my urban life… That is to say, I’ve become quite comfortable with spending my evenings watching TV and participating in consumer culture, instead of doing something more. The temperature outside in the region I now live in is unbearably hot, and only in mid-October could I stand to take a ten-minute walk somewhere outside. I also had a fun little skin cancer scare, where a mole on my ear apparently doubled in size and then shrunk a little bit, so now I’ve been even warier of the sun.

Suffice to say…. Even more of the world I see now is only through the media, fictional or not.

That brings me to today’s focus, and the focus of my mind in all the recent months: The natural environment, and climate change.

A Childhood Theory

When I was younger, in my mid-to-late teens, I started to have conversations about the real world with some of my peers. After a good amount of heated debate, myself being stubborn and logical as always, I decided on the best way to see the human vs. natural environment. A theory, philosophy, or framework is what I’d call it now. It’s a prototype but I like it, I think it’s good.

In contemporary culture, there are two spheres: That of the human, and then that of the “animal”. This notion is in some ways an artifact of a time in an older Europe turned Christian, and in some ways a very modern idea, happily reinvented and re-spun. Some sizeable number of people today believe, rightfully as I see it, that there are no two spheres, there is only one within the other. But time has made this very complicated, because as humans have grown in influence over aspects of this Earth, the “two spheres” idea has been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Self-fulfilling prophecies are powerful things, only attainable truly if you are powerful, and they have always, always fascinated me.

It’s the real-world proof of some event, some process, going on for so long that time is completely unimportant as a factor at all.

What do I mean, specifically? Let’s look at these notions one at a time, then review the self-fulfilling prophecy phenomenon.

The Two Spheres

A Quick Note:

This is obviously not a new idea. I’m just giving it an arbitrary name for fun.

We’ve been living in this notion for a long time, and I believe it has always been untrue, but it is still the belief of the prevailing culture. A world where our human actions have no consequences on our environment’s actions. A world where a human is not an animal but something greater, something else. Where the natural world is just a backdrop on human affairs, like a painting in a room.

Those interested in preserving the environment do the good work of reminding everyone that everything is connected. That one’s human actions do have real consequences. That, in fact, being a coward at worst or a sellout at best and gaining financially in your own life from the destruction of the natural environment is a bad thing. You can only believe it’s not a bad thing if you live in your own world, a made up world of only human affairs.

I am a civil engineering undergrad, and it’s unfortunate but true that most of my classmates will make this world a much worse place. I can’t really deny it anymore, and honestly if I denied it before it was just to be able to maintain a level of friendliness with them for studying purposes. (Now, I just maintain it by being pre-disappointed before they can disappoint me). Paving over natural habitat for automotive travel efficiency, with extra lanes and stupid super-highways lobbied for by money-hungry corporations and their allied interests, is actually a bad thing. I see so many dead animals every day. Everyone does. We kill animals to get to work and back. And those are just the active killings: the extinctions and habitat/food source/water source destruction are what we don’t see, and those kill so many more. And now that I’m in Texas, this hellhole of a state, many more of my classmates will go into oil and gas and knock off the other half of the “kill everything but humans and also a good amount of humans” plan.

These classmates of mine live with the notion that human affairs are all basically O.K.. All options available to them to make a living are basically O.K.. They live exclusively in this false reality of the human sphere. Their lives are dictated by media, by family, by social norms and human culture overall. As Americans, this becomes highly consumerist and as Texans, this makes them into fans of whatever industry will make them rich. Morals don’t matter in the Texan economy, trust me.

A Sphere Within A Sphere

This one is my philosophy. It’s true, which is why I stick with it. Humans are animals that have some weird shit going on, and our brains are all fancy and our children take forever to grow and we make a lot of weird sounds at each other and have pretty great motor control. In the human sphere, when we’re only interacting with members of our own species, we are social animals. Beyond this is the real world, where everyone that’s not just us lives. You can’t fix the result of a natural encounter using our own social rules (like a mountain lion encounter or a hurricane at your door), and regardless of the humans who believe in the “Two Spheres” theory and want to live in their boxes and never look out, nothing drastic about the nature of our world has ever changed.

No matter how insane human affairs get, we still breathe the same air from the same sources (phytoplankton, trees and plants) as a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years ago. If we are to survive, we have to realize there is no end to this. There are no real end times, Christians are just delusional. This brings me, finally, to the self-fulfilling prophecy piece.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, or a Positive Feedback Loop

“A rose by any other name…”

I find that the best way to talk about the notion of a human self-fulfilling prophecy is to look at what happens in a society due to Christianity. I’ll use an example from my own life here: A pattern that many should be familiar with, or understand. This is about Christian missionaries, from a mostly-outside perspective.

A member of my extended family is a Christian missionary. She had, raised, and homeschooled a few more Christian missionary kids. Her home is filled with multicultural decorations and a depiction of a multicultural Last Supper. She speaks about Uganda and their water, and speaks about a store where they import Ugandan artisan goods to sell at American prices and support that nation’s economy from a distance.

When a rich person who wants for nothing goes to a place of poverty, what happens then? Humans are social animals and the smartest ones (I’d hope) would do what they needed to get material resources, including converting to a religion or going along with other silliness.

And this member of my family is not well-educated, does not seem to know this. She speaks about how everything works out for good for the Ugandans she sees become Christians, who keep in contact, who have been through hard times but now their lives appear to be looking up. On one hand of course it’s what these Christians want to hear, and they must be giving more financial or material resources when they’re happy, right? On the other hand, literally, the money makes things better right off the bat. She speaks about the goodness of a God that is in reality her American wallet, and takes this to mean that God is good. No, dear, maybe you are being philanthropic, but that does not mean that a God that sponsored the economic destruction of these very countries is good. You’re truly, truly, just uneducated and blind.

Her and her daughter also didn’t know what my degree was in when I told them. I don’t think they even knew what engineering was. As a child, I remember the children’s schooling being something about counting colored jelly beans in glass kitchen jars. The black ones represented the devil, or something like that, and had to be removed.

Implications of a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy on Humanity

I spoke earlier in this post about how time becomes unimportant in a philosophy bent on fulfilling itself. In the “Two Spheres” theory (again, an informal name for an idea that already exists and has been studied), if one thinks that their human actions will never affect their safety as a person on this planet, they can easily hold onto that idea until the very end. They will stay in their boxes, live out their lives, pretend it is as it always has been and nothing can be done to stop what only humans started, as if that makes even a speck of sense.

In reality: the destruction, actually, would stop if people stopped causing it, but they are following a self-fulfilling prophecy that they don’t understand is self-fulfilling. It’s not some damn aliens doing it. It’s us. No animal has this power, no plant nor fungi nor microorganism clusters. It’s the shipping routes and the consumerism and a million more things that we’re doing.

We’re doing it to hurt ourselves. Maybe because we hate ourselves? A world of humans that loved itself, and was proud of itself, wouldn’t be trying to kill itself and bring everything else down with it. These are the actions of a world of humans embarrassed: Embarrassed at the damage they have inflicted on themselves, and embarrassed at the death and disease and destruction they have inflicted on everyone else. Maybe it’s men embarrassed inside from the pain they have inflicted on us women. Maybe it’s adults embarrassed from their failures to the following generations. Maybe it’s just pure lack of education, which is probably the most likely and sounds like something an older person would say once they grow out of whatever kindness-oriented phase in life I’m in right now. But we’ll see. I’m still young and this optimism has a place, and at least I’m not blindly optimistic, I am well educated.

Conclusion

I believe every living human has a real heart. Unfortunately, shame is just more powerful than love. Enough of us are aware of the stories of an abusive adult man looking into the eyes of an innocent victim of his and then, and only then, going crazy and trying to take the whole situation down with him. I have my own stories of this, as do so many others as children.

There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of abusive men in power today. They are shameful and ashamed, and they keep going on and causing harm to us all because we have not been powerful enough yet to stop them. Many climate activists are young. Many can only look into their eyes as they go crazier and crazier and dig themselves into what has become the biggest pit a group of humans could have ever dug.

I hope to not waste too much time in my life. I had a brief job as a climate/public health activist going door to door, but everything good in my life has been personal and not about work since then. I hope I am not wasting time, and that I have made the right decisions in my life going forward.

Halting the effects of climate change is of the upmost importance to me. As a civil engineer, I know now from looking closer at my classmates that I’m gonna be one of the only ones doing more good than not in the world. Something something male dominated profession, I don’t know. Something something corporate sellouts. Something something unnecessary industry. Selfishness. I’m choosing to not collaborate with current classmates, however, even to inspire them, because I’m both too quiet and too sensitive to get very far, and I don’t want to stay in this particular place to make it better, because politically, this state (TX) inside this country (USA) is just too fucked.

I can really only handle so much.