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.
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.