20 years too late, NASA steps up to the plate:
After running the numbers on a set of four equations representing human society, a team of NASA-funded mathematicians has come to the grim conclusion that the utter collapse of human civilization will be “difficult to avoid.”Tristin Hopper/Nat'l Post(Canada)
The exact scenario may vary, but in the coming decades humanity is essentially doomed to some variant of “Elites” consuming too much, “resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society.”
That is, unless civilization is ready for one of two “major policy changes”: inequality must be “greatly reduced” or population growth must be “strictly controlled.”
via @MargaretAtwood
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In other words either the "Elites" consume too much and everybody eats it, or the "Elites" get rid of all the "excess" "Commoners" and get back to consuming everything in sight after they're out of the way. God forbid something should happen to those precious ones.
With the hope to some day take their heartless appetites and ethical myopia outward to the stars and hey, why not just keep on going? The Satanic* triumph.
This is the vision, has been for some time, the glorious empire, the expanding kingdom. The Elect and the Preterite, the Chosen and the Left Behind. It's a miniaturization of what's really coming. The diabolical facsimile of divine truth. Relatively typical reaction of the wounded - duplicate the circumstance of the wound, with you in control this time.
The disdain from above of people whose only experience of those below is through scum-video surveillance, sycophantic reportage, and the little amount they've had of actual contact, mostly awful, with lives in the world of the under-class.
This is why the polarization everybody's buying into is so insidious. It's divide and conquer. It's working too well.
Contempt is the signifier. Always.
* Still gearing up to the rant on what "Satanic" means, used here. It is not from the patriarchal glossary of institutional religion.
For now: essentially it involves retro-temporality, the ability to move consciousness backward through time. And the wall up ahead where that didn't do any good, all that skullduggery and treachery to get there. All that selfish prophecy and magic, all that poison and proxy violence, all that deceit and betrayal of life.
So there's an astonished and bitterly outraged consciousness, that hasn't been born yet [but is here just the same], that gets its origin, its birth, in that moment of complete denial. The refusal at the Gate.
And it turns around and with folded wings heads back down the timeline. Because there's no other way to go. Outraged, bitter, vindictive, filled with thwarted pride and cauterized ambition.
Because it was so close, so close. The keys to cellular immortality, the technologies of life extension and dominating environmental control, and those worthless no longer useful peasants fucking everything up.
Imagine what people like Jamie Dimond think of the common man. Or really lots, most, of the more prominent voices today. And the ones who aren't saying anything, just waiting.
Isolated in bubbles of protective security, with no way to even get to the opening moments of shared reality with those below them.
All it takes to make that scenario vivid is some reptilian enabler, with a bag full of evidentiary half-truths. "See? They're stupid, non-productive, there's no reason for them to even exist, beyond the fact they already do. And they hate us, even as they hunger jealously for what we have."
Anyway, that's not the rap, it's here just in case the flow gets interrupted, or something.
