by Lee Camp

The age of post-materialist superabundance is here! …Well, it could be, if we behave like adults rather than demonstrating the foresight and systemic planning of Teletubbies. I know getting us all to act like grown-ups is a bigger ask than gently requesting Mitch McConnell climb Mount Everest. (Or a staircase.) Unfortunately if we continue down the path we’re on—I’ll call it “the psycho path” for now—Then all planetary boundaries for life systems will be breached and we will have successfully ruined the only cool place to hang out for roughly 4,000 light years.

But like I said, there’s another path. One with superabundancy, security, and a future that’s like, “Ahhhhh” instead of “AAAAAAA! IT BURNS!” Journalist and showoff smarty-pants Nahfeez Ahmed put the ideas together well in his recent writings at AgeOfTransformation.org. 

He says, “The empirical data shows unequivocally that, if we took the ‘pure’ forecasts of material trends and imagined that we deployed them rationally, without weird hang-ups (like nationalism), incumbent barriers (like nationalism), self-flagellating narcissism (like Trump) or regressive self-defeating culture wars (Trans Story Time will be the death of us all), we have the ability to rapidly transition to a new ecological civilization that could provide abundant energy, materials, food, transportation, Cinnabons and knowledge to all without hurting the earth.” (I added Cinnabons because why not?)  

He goes on, “This looks like a new Human-Earth System in which humans stop seeing themselves as separate from each other and from the planet, but finally recognise ourselves as integrally interconnected with each other as part of the earth herself.”
In all honesty, humanity is at a fork in the road and luckily one of the prongs or tines or paths or legs—If a fork had legs but that sounds disgusting. Anyway, one of the sides of the forky road thing is really fucking awesome! Ahmed writes, “...the looming obsolescence of the industrial order is part and parcel of a civilisational-scale metamorphosis in which a whole new Human System is emerging.”

You see, the current industrial order is collapsing or fading away quickly. And bloodthirsty clowns like Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Howie Mandel are accelerating it, but they aren’t the cause of it.

This all-encompassing phase shift could look like horrific societal collapse where we all hoard guns and tuna—Or maybe guns that shoot tuna?!— No, what would be the point of that? Damn it, I’ve always been a terrible inventor. My best invention was the “carcycle” — a bicycle attached to the roof of a car so the bike rider could go a lot faster.

 

But then I realized most people would probably choose to ride in the car part of the “carcycle.” And anybody riding on the bike would be slammed into a low bridge at 70 miles per hour. Then it becomes a “car-sickle”.

Anyway, humans very well could take the awful path of the fork in the road - societal collapse. Continuing to breach the last three planetary boundaries (having already breached the first six) until there’s no hope of survival. And millions of years from now maybe a new intelligent species that looks like an octopus wearing glasses will marvel at how quickly and effectively capitalism killed us all.

Alternatively, we could take the path of a breakthrough, a reinvention, a rebirth of the way humans relate to the planet and to our future. (I’m rooting for that one - even if we’re covered in a gooey afterbirth.)

Supporter only beyond here

Ahmed writes, “...industrial civilisation appears to be moving through the last two stages of its current life cycle: breakdown and renewal…” (Similar to Peter Thiel before he sheds his exoskeleton and thousands of Peter Thiel larva hatch out of his brain pupa.)

Ahmed continues, “...every fundamental technological system that defines civilization – energy, transport, food, materials and information – is experiencing a phase transition in which incumbent industrial age technologies …are on track to being outcompeted and replaced by a new set of technologies across all these sectors.”
Green energy, bullet trains, autonomous EVs, hydroponic farming, cheaper desalination processes, quantum computing, and of course A.I. girlfriends or boyfriends who won’t freaking talk over you so much and at least pretend to enjoy watching sci-fi things with dragons in them! Is that too much to ask, Catherine X57-9,000?! (When I’m really mad at her, I call her by her full name.)

And the old-school fossil-fuel based societal operating system (or OS) is antiquated and struggling to hang on to power. The petro-world is dying and the petro-dollar along with it. But can we create a new operating system before the old one destroys our planet’s ability to support us? That’s the question.

Our current OS is aimed at maximizing human consumption, AKA materialism — It’s all about how we can achieve the most materialism for the most people for the greatest number of hours per day? In layman’s terms “people gotta buy, use, and shit-out loads of stuff all the time, never pause or waver.” That’s the driving motivation in our society. Each corporation wants to figure out how to get more people using their products more often. The companies that are always growing, like a cancer, win the game. The ones that aren’t always growing, lose. (And please don’t forget… cancer is bad.)Nahfeez Ahmed says, “...this OS is simply incapable of managing a new system that is inherently networked, distributed and participatory – and that must respect planetary boundaries.”

Let me translate. Our current societal operating system… BLOWS! (I also would’ve accepted “sucks balls” or “eats dirty dung piles.”)

I’ll give an example. With hydroponic farming, food - let’s say tomatoes - could be grown locally and organically using 90% less water and one hundred percent less soil than old methods. Right now there is drought in many areas around the world. And U.S. farmlands are struggling. They look like Clint Eastwood’s upper thighs! (I just assume he doesn’t moisturize, but I could be wrong.) 

 

Plus with hydroponics tomatoes would not need to be flown around the world and trucked across the country, using loads of resources specifically fossil fuels. These local tomatoes could then be given to people as their need requires. Instead right now, the guy with millions of dollars might buy 10 tomatoes a week (flown in from China), eat only two of them, then throw the others away because who cares? Buying more than he needs and throwing them out is no problem to him. All the problems with it are externalized—dumped onto others and the environment.

Meanwhile the portion of the population who are poor might be able to buy one or zero tomatoes. And instead they either eat cheap junk food or go hungry. In our incredibly inefficient system, “...the United States discards more food than any other country: nearly 60 million tons — 120 billion pounds — every year. That’s estimated to be almost 40 percent of the entire U.S. food supply…”

Our system is insane! It’s ludicrously wasteful. It’s ridiculously exploitative and abusive. It rewards cancerous corporations and promotes unhinged sociopaths to the top. This is an antiquated, outdated, and offensive O.S.! This operating system is like trying to run NASA mission control on an Atari game console. (Sorry. I feel bad for hitting Atari while they’re down.)

But, we have the answer. It’s staring us in the face. We know the solution—A new operating system. Not materialism. Not capitalism. Not consumerism. Ahmed states, “We are on the cusp of a ‘giant leap’ in our material capabilities as a species; but we are in danger of aborting that leap, falling into a new dark age – if not into total collapse – if we attempt to take the leap from within the outmoded framework of the old industrial OS.”

 

Yes, we’re trying to make this tremendous leap from an outmoded OS. It’s like trying to play in the NBA while wearing your shoes from elementary school. All of a sudden one of the best basketball players in the world can barely walk. Humanity is trying to take an unprecedented jump in our capabilities while wearing shoes from when we were seven years old. We need new shoes—which at this point, I’m 80% sure is a metaphor for systemic change.

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By Lee Camp (Also check out the video version of this column.)

By the end of this column you’ll know who controls the world… whether you like it or not.

Where the money flows in this world decides the direction of humanity (at least for now). So the people with the most money truly control much of the world. And I don’t just mean billionaires. There are entities with way more money than Donald Trump or Elon Musk, and they truly have the steering wheel… or the rudder, depending on what form of locomotion you’re most familiar with. Or if you’re “doing the Locomotion” then I guess it would be your hips. So these parasites have the hips. (That’s an uncomfortable image on Jamie Dimon.)

The answer as to who controls most of the world is the top asset management firms—AKA “shadow banks.” And they have unimaginable wealth.

The top 5 asset management firms are:

BlackRock: $11.6 Trillion! (!!!)

Vanguard: $9.3 Trillion

UBS: $5.7 Trillion

Fidelity: $4.9 Trillion

State Street: $4.7 Trillion

And my cousin Nathan: $250

(He’s just getting started. Probably shouldn’t be on the list but I owed him ‘cause he scored me some molly so I could get through my kid’s parent-teacher conference.)

Try to imagine how much money a trillion dollars is. If you spent $100,000 a year, in order to spend $1 trillion, you’d have to keep doing that for 10 million years! If you spent $100,000 a day—So you’re either Kim Kardashian or a lunatic—in order to spend $1 trillion, it would take you over 27,000 years! (Which is older than Larry Ellison’s original head before he got the prosthetic one.)

The people who run these funds are the true dominant rulers of much of the world, and they’re talked about in the media less than a Native American protesting the petrodollar. So while these shadow banks sit on trillions, what about everyone else? One in three people on our planet suffer malnutrition. As the Guardian reported, “Each year, poor nutrition kills 3.1 million children under the age of five.”

Three Million kids killed by this greed…

By Lee Camp

An orange butterfly taking flight for the first time, unaware of the tempestuous unforgiving yet dazzling world it brightens. The dusty bodies of executed children. These are the two defining images of my weekend. And most painful is their lack of exceptionality. 

Ten days ago my toddler found and pointed out what looked to be a trinket hanging from a brown, fragile plant—A bright green pod hardly bigger than an adult’s thumbnail, crowned by brilliant gold dots reflecting the afternoon sun. How stunning and out-of-place it appeared. It took me a moment to figure out what it was—I had never seen a monarch butterfly cocoon before.

It feels like it doesn’t belong, an ill fitting accessory for the brown shriveling leaves of autumn. It looks more like something an Egyptian pharaoh would be entombed with, right at home alongside ornate ivory hair brushes and flashy golden necklaces. 

Later that day, in between reading about the latest unfathomable atrocities Israel committed, I read up on monarch butterflies and the best temperatures for them to survive the no doubt difficult transformation from caterpillar to majestic kaleidoscopic aerial dream bug. Sure enough I found the odds of her surviving the metamorphosis in 45° F nights on a withering splintering milkweed leaf in the direct path of rambunctious dogs and feral neighborhood children were slim. (The nearly microscopic monarch eggs have a 3% chance of enduring all the way to adult butterflies in the outside elements while they have a 90% chance when brought indoors and given the proper treatment.) 

So I took a brief pause from ingesting yet another article about a small child targeted for death by a Zik (Hermes 450) armed attack drone, nearly silent as it rains death from above. I went outside armed with a pair of scissors and some dental floss—The scissors to cut the leaf and the dental floss to tie around the top of the chrysalis (the cocoon) in order to suspend it from the inside of a small plastic container. 

Over the next week the cherry tomato-sized bauble turned a gripping rich blue like a raging sea of torment and fury. In that time several hundred innocent people were murdered by Israel—In Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank. 

Occasionally my child, desperately curious about everything both natural and not, would take a look at the dangling chrysalis. Of course since it wasn’t moving, it held his attention 1/100th of the time a matchbox car might. Meanwhile I would peer at it and lose myself in the seething subaquatic abyss, a richness of color that called to mind a collapsing galaxy pulsating with the hopes and desires, anguish and love, pain and passion of legions. Or maybe an expanding galaxy, blossoming into such abundance. …It gripped me.

Israel holds roughly 10,000 Palestinian hostages in its prisons.

On Saturday, after one week in our home, a vibrant orange and black butterfly materialized. I imagine no matter how many times one might see this, it probably always seems magical, otherworldly. How a butterfly fit, metamorphosed, and retailored itself inside that pod I will never understand. 

As Israeli officials brainstormed new and interesting ways to stop food from reaching starving children, my small family of three walked outside to release a new butterfly into the world. I trepidatiously lowered my index finger into the container in front of the tiny flier (lepidoptera) as I saw on a YouTube video, and she crawled slowly onto it as if she knew the plan exactly. 

I then delicately, ever so carefully, held her next to a small violet flower and she snuck onto it, minding the gap. I had read that monarchs will sit still for several hours after greeting the world in order to dry out their wings (and probably take things in, recalibrating to their new reality). She did exactly that before eventually fluttering away, going about her effervescent orange journey. 

Israel fired white phosphorus at UN workers in Lebanon.

The IDF set another hospital in Gaza ablaze.

In hindsight I know why I invested so much time and thought into the growth and maturation toward freedom of a single minuscule creature. It’s tempting to say it was a metaphor for human evolution in a breathtakingly sick, ugly world. To say there’s something better coming. To say humanity sits moments away from breaking out of these stained, sullied dystopian circumstances and into a brand new gleaming reality of possibility and peace. 

But that’s not it. 

I sunk so much emotion into a bug (albeit an attractive one) as a distraction and a projection. As genocide drips down all our screens, a US-backed genocide at that, I desperately needed to help something live, to facilitate freedom and survival. I ached to show my child something beautiful while he’s still at the age before one comprehends the horrors of the evening news.

Projection won’t save the world. Momentary distraction won’t stop one Israeli bomb from falling or secure one sandwich for a single Gazan child.

But perhaps, just maybe, I’m raising a child with empathy and love for all living things. Maybe he’ll be one more person who accepts no justification for ethnic cleansing and war crimes. 

I don’t yet know how to process the moral injury of the true unfettered massacre we’re all absorbing. I don’t know if anyone does. …But there’s one more butterfly in the world. 

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