649
70.2 Biospheric Cul-de-Sacs
Out of this biospheric cul-de-sac, time itself can neither clarify nor rectify. Historians
can offer no proof. Our rapacious approach to systems does not spare us. Cohesive
thoughts have no claims upon our lives with anymore grace or attraction than generalized incoherence, which persists unabated, despite our most fervent efforts to
extinguish it. We philosophize systems, from the clothes we wear and food we consume to all that we desire, and all that is subjected to our miscellaneous microscopes.
The individual, however, is not entirely relegated to this devilish closet of presumptuous cohesions, with its obsolete wardrobe. At times, one can’t help but volunteer the admission that the individual rises above the species category, which is
woefully incommensurate with every prequel or subsequent asseveration stemming
from the mob. If, by species, its individual taxons are to be extrapolated, we must
once more own up to the repetitive fallacy of our self-assertion at the organized,
community level. Bands, factions, tribes, cultures, megacities. They harbor a fiction
that would link all individuals together. But those units of life cannot exist outside
of the quotation marks that represent our bid within the auction house of the biosphere: conquest. A species does not ascend Everest. Walking up to the summit is
something different than what collectives do. Groups come together and easily formulate and implement plans to build a Philadelphia or burn the Amazon.
Hence, a complex and potentially planet-shifting discrepancy. The individual
does not merely transcend its species, if it works at it, re-defining the rate of change
within the genus as genetics and behavior wildly vacillate down through the species
level into its differentiated taxa. The individual also bypasses analogies, becoming
the first potential candidate for whom it can be imagined there is no definitive outcome. Or, thought of differently, a future worth struggling for. As Kazantzakis once
wrote somewhere, “It is not human beings that interest me, but the flame that consumes human beings,” or words to that effect.
70.3 Misanthropy as Ecological Proxy
Misanthropy, obviously, is one obvious condition of such prospects. But not if this
theoretical individual is to gain our trust, to become the subject of our social compact.
9
Deep demographers might wish for the fatal collision of population thresholds depicted in their aftermaths by so many genetical crashes and ultimate
asymptotes. Followers of the Ehrlich-Holdren equations associated with I=PAT
by Valerie Ross, May 15, 2011, Discover Magazine, http://discovermagazine.com/2011/mar/10numbers-the-nervous-system, Accessed August 24, 2019.
9 See The Theoretical Individual: Imagination, Ethics and the Future of Humanity, by M.C. Tobias
and J.G. Morrison, Springer, New York, 2018.
70.3 Misanthropy as Ecological Proxy
70.2 Biospheric Cul-de-Sacs
Out of this biospheric cul-de-sac, time itself can neither clarify nor rectify. Historians
can offer no proof. Our rapacious approach to systems does not spare us. Cohesive
thoughts have no claims upon our lives with anymore grace or attraction than generalized incoherence, which persists unabated, despite our most fervent efforts to
extinguish it. We philosophize systems, from the clothes we wear and food we consume to all that we desire, and all that is subjected to our miscellaneous microscopes.
The individual, however, is not entirely relegated to this devilish closet of presumptuous cohesions, with its obsolete wardrobe. At times, one can’t help but volunteer the admission that the individual rises above the species category, which is
woefully incommensurate with every prequel or subsequent asseveration stemming
from the mob. If, by species, its individual taxons are to be extrapolated, we must
once more own up to the repetitive fallacy of our self-assertion at the organized,
community level. Bands, factions, tribes, cultures, megacities. They harbor a fiction
that would link all individuals together. But those units of life cannot exist outside
of the quotation marks that represent our bid within the auction house of the biosphere: conquest. A species does not ascend Everest. Walking up to the summit is
something different than what collectives do. Groups come together and easily formulate and implement plans to build a Philadelphia or burn the Amazon.
Hence, a complex and potentially planet-shifting discrepancy. The individual
does not merely transcend its species, if it works at it, re-defining the rate of change
within the genus as genetics and behavior wildly vacillate down through the species
level into its differentiated taxa. The individual also bypasses analogies, becoming
the first potential candidate for whom it can be imagined there is no definitive outcome. Or, thought of differently, a future worth struggling for. As Kazantzakis once
wrote somewhere, “It is not human beings that interest me, but the flame that consumes human beings,” or words to that effect.
70.3 Misanthropy as Ecological Proxy
Misanthropy, obviously, is one obvious condition of such prospects. But not if this
theoretical individual is to gain our trust, to become the subject of our social compact.
9
Deep demographers might wish for the fatal collision of population thresholds depicted in their aftermaths by so many genetical crashes and ultimate
asymptotes. Followers of the Ehrlich-Holdren equations associated with I=PAT
by Valerie Ross, May 15, 2011, Discover Magazine, http://discovermagazine.com/2011/mar/10numbers-the-nervous-system, Accessed August 24, 2019.
9 See The Theoretical Individual: Imagination, Ethics and the Future of Humanity, by M.C. Tobias
and J.G. Morrison, Springer, New York, 2018.
70.3 Misanthropy as Ecological Proxy