Individualism, especially as the “rugged individualist” point of view, tends to get presented as some sort of triumph over limitations. As the story often goes, a person is dealing with circumstances beyond their control that range from difficult to traumatizing. Rather than back down, the person goes through some kind of experience of toughening up, if they are not already built of grit and steel, and they power through the trying circumstances, coming out stronger and more capable.
This romanticizing of struggle glosses over those who suffer and come out weaker. It glosses over those who suffer and are annihilated by it. And importantly, it ignores the push and pull of being a part of an ecosystem and a society of some kind; an experience that every human being shares.
Individualism, then, is not describing reality, but is denying it. Worse still, it is in some societies not a fringe view hardly known by anyone. Ironically, individualim is in some societies a view collectively shared by millions of people. So then you get the archetypes like the “independent thinker” in western society, who acts extremely similar to the next “independent thinker”, with both of them thinking they are uniquely different from one another.
This is why I call individualism a shared hallucination. Certain basic principles of reality and humanity are not being fundamentally changed by people believing in individualism. No matter how hard you believe in individual will, you still have a physical body that is limited by its existence in a particular ecosystem, which has basic needs like food, water, and oxygen. No matter how hard you believe in individual will, you still are influenced by other human beings from birth and influence the world around you, in a back and forth that both shapes you and shapes the world in small or big ways. And no matter how hard you believe in individual will, the whole of the rest of the environment and every other being and society in it, is having more or less the same basic relationship of push and pull. Individualism gets caught up in focusing on the push and neglects the pull. More specifically, it gets caught up in your push in isolation and ignores the push that everyone else and every system else is doing, whether consciously carried out or through sheer inertia.
Opposing individualism is not a denial of will, which would be in its own way a delusion, but is opposing the delusion of supremacy of individual will and opposing the denial of collective influences. The example of the “independent thinker” is important because it shows how fundamentally people are pulled toward similarities, no matter how much they cling to a belief of being unique or “elite”. Whether you have some things that are technically unique about you because of no one experiencing 100% the same things in all ways is sort of beside the point. The point is that you aren’t escaping the shared experience of the push and pull with the ecosystem, with other beings, with society. If you believe in life after this one, that’s another matter, but no amount of believing will escape the fundamental push and pull in this world.
The good news of this is that you are far more alike than you are different and that no matter who you are interacting with, if not a single other similarity, you will still share the same experience of existing as a being in that push and pull. Not as supremacy of individual, but as an inescapable part of some kind of collective sphere of similarities, whether it is concretely defined in language or more vague and transitory.
Author’s Note: Wanted to write up something on individualism. Not married to the exact specifics and presentation, but want to encourage more thought about how individualism impacts people.
If you take into account all the organic and inorganic systems on and inside of the earth theres really no reason it couldnt have some basic form of emergent cognition. Its like the idea of a interstellar gas cloud randomly forming into a mind for a second. At the very least we dont know enough to completely disregard the idea.
I do think any form of a mind on this scale would be very “slow” tho. Just like bacteria being so small have a rapidly accelerated lifespan compared to humans. If the earth was partially aware it probably would still be in the “why does my ass itch” stage of noticing humanity.
I would go more with a self maintaining system approach tho. The earths systems are self reinforcing. They have mechanisms to self correct. Which have evolved over billions of years. When humans come in and disrupt them it will cause chain reactions of self correction.
It might already be too late to stop this. Its like a stack of dominoes we hit one and started the chain reaction and itll be really hard to stop it until its done. Knowing what has happened in the past i think we will be looking at significant glaciation. Its getting hotter now yes, but that tends to cause lots of plant life to flourish which will spend a few millenia eating up all this C02 we put in the air and once the C02 plummets youll get ice sheets which reflect more sun until were in an ice age again.
That is assuming humans die out in the next 2-300 years. If we stick around we could cause even more issues which is hard to predict the outcome of.
I’m a very scientifically-minded person, and I agree or sympathize with most of what you are saying. But ultimately, I think that the most positive and profound claims, require the most extraordinary evidence, and we have no hard facts that point to Earth being conscious, so I can’t support that hypothesis.
But I also wouldn’t be surprised, if as you say, the Earth has a basic sort of emergent consciousness. Even most scientists agree that the Earth has numerous mechanisms, cycles and feedback loops, and most of the time they seem to keep Earth in a quasi-homeostasis as long as possible, that homeostasis seems to support the existence and thriving of life, which in turn positively reinforces Earth’s emergent consciousness and feedback loops.
Though this is getting more spiritual, and I typically loath spirituality, I think that Mother Earth has felt, noticed or “known” of humanity’s existence for many thousands of years.
Even prehistoric humans and proto-humans, for hundreds of thousands of years, have continuously shaped the environment in a myriad of ways that most people don’t think about.
I figure that around the Industrial Revolution, is when Mother Earth became incensed and saddened at the forward trajectory of humanity, and right now, Earth is very, very sick, from humanity’s poisoning of her, wiping out millions of species over just a few thousand years, and especially the past few centuries and decades.
While there are billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, I think global warming will first and foremost destroy more environments that support most or alot of these plant species in the first place, before they even have a chance to reappear in greater numbers to absorb the newly released CO2. I like your theory, though, and I admire your use of hypothesis using known facts and unknown variables.
I’m personally doubtful that another ice age could emerge again, but I don’t think it’s a zero percent chance. And there is a hypothesis/theory that Earth is still currently in an ice age, or at least a very comparatively long remissions period. The temperatures and climates on Earth that are needed for life to even survive, let alone thrive, are very specific.
I’ve read that even if humanity were to altogether completely stop polluting the Earth tomorrow (which would be extremely fast and require an unheard of level of global cooperation and likely the overthrowing of capitalism) the gasses and damage to Earth, and their potential and likely aftereffects, would last a minimum of thousands-to tens of thousands years, or even longer than that, as Earth recovers. It’s not going to be a pretty or easy recovery.
I’m confident (relatively) that humanity will likely continue indefinitely into the future, or at the very least, the next several centuries, hopefully milennia.
My main concern though, is what’s known as the Methane Clathrate Gun.
Even though it’s constantly being dismissed, rejected or viewed as unlikely, scientists, and especially climate-related scientists, are notorious for being extremely conservative, downplaying or underestimating their findings and the reality of the current mass extinction event and the worsening severity and totality of climate change. This isn’t to knock on scientists. They are only human, and they are often directly or indirectly muzzled, censored or forced to downplay their findings and opinions by capitalist political elites, politicians, the undue influence of money in politics, especially by fossil fuel corporations.
The USSR first proved the existence of human-caused or human-majority-caused climate change in the 1960’s, after surveying conditions in the Arctic/Siberia, but the world and especially the U.S./West dismissed it as communist propaganda. The USSR’s’ researchers noticed that billions of tons of permafrost were melting every year, releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gases. The USSR tried their best to sound the alarm, but were continually ignored until their twilight years, and the West and the world began to take climate change very seriously as the USSR entered it’s final years.
Methane clathrates are extremely, extremely deep in the ocean, and even though it takes the heated water long periods of time to begin affecting and then later melting the ice, and releasing greenhouse gasses that trap more heat in, on the order of potentially thousands of years to reach the deepest depths, this is still increasing faster and faster, leading to increased albedo, increased intensity feedback loops, releasing more gasses and more warming, and especially over the past several decades.
If/when all of these cascading effects reach to deep enough depths, and as the world gets hotter and hotter, the reaction could trigger a grand reaction, causing the simultaneous release of GIGATONS of greenhouse gasses from permafrost. A chain reaction that superheats the Earth, to become alot like Venus, all on the order of centuries, but way more likely mere decades, or even YEARS, cooking the planet and likely destroying ALL life on Earth, and Earth becomes a second Venus. And we wouldn’t have the technology to delay or avert this disaster, or move to entire other planets. And the amount of money, resources, and overall return of value that we would get from moving to space, would still be utterly dogshit compared to saving Earth, for now at least.
Not to mention that the Earth is currently on track for an estimated 2.7-2.9 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. It’s strongly theorized that if warming exceeds well beyond the mid-high 3 degrees C of warming, that the Earth will experience a global Deoxygenation event, turning the very air into a poisonous, acidic soup, leaving very few relative safe spots, if any. And that’s likely way before a Methane Clathrate Gun type of event.
According to recent scientific research, humanity as a whole has likely kickstarted enough of an effort to mitigate global warming, to prevent all of this. Last year, scientific/technological research has accumulated and advanced enough, that if things keep going the way they are (which is likely) that from now on, every year will be a net negative reduction in fossil fuel usage/pollutants, and every year will be a net gain in renewable energy/green technology usage, globally. So if we as a species don’t get too cocky, and don’t let capitalism subjugate us all, we may have JUST BARELY avoided the worst of the worst of the fucking worst of possible climate change and hopefully mass extinction scenarios.
And all these efforts started right after China began heavily investing in renewable energy/green technology/combatting pollution and habitat destruction, or kickstarted and catalyzed and boosted all of these efforts, in the late aught’s/early 2010’s.
Sorry i don’t think i am very good at talking about time scales. I tend to downplay or not be clear. When i was saying earth would just be noticing humans making its ass itch i was talking about a thousands of years long itch. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and 400k years is the blink of an eye in comparison. And its only been a few centuries since the industrial revolution. Thats nothing.
As for the climate change you mentioned yes i wasnt saying we wont have heating like that. More like we will see a over-correction afterwards. You get lots of hot, humid jungles for a few millenia that eat up all the C02 and then get flung back into an ice age once the green house gases are all gone.
Its funny you mention the clathrate gun because times where its thought to maybe have had an effect on the climate, periods of rapid warming, were followed eventually by large glaciation events. This is part of why i think we will see glaciation due to warming. The earths pull towards equilibrium causes an over correction and sends us into another ice age. The ice ages tend to be more stable, they are self reinforcing since the ice itself reflects heat, so IMO its more likely when the climate stabilizes again it will be colder rather than hotter. But that isn’t to say we wont see quite a long time of warming.
Cold climates also can be reinforced by the Milancovich cycles. When the earth has long colder winters and longer hotter summers, more extreme seasons, and Ice forms during the winter that ice then takes time to melt. Reflecting heat into the summer months, and making the net solar energy lower the more extreme the difference in seasons becomes.
I don’t think a Venusian scenario is likely at all. The earth has too much water for that, and is too far from the sun. Water vapor can be a green house gas when diffused, but when its dense in cloud cover it reflects light having the opposite effect. Plus when water evaporates it cools so as it gets hot more water evaporates, and removes heat from the surface carrying it up. Even without increased plantlife the oceans would stop warming from getting too out of control through that mechanism. It would create the perfect scenario for tons of rainforests to pop up though with all the rain we would see from it. Which would just pull more c02 from the air.