Civilization Not Busy Being Born is Busy Dying

The art of ice

One has to wonder how so many people saw civilization as a danger to the planet Earth.

How they saw that it was a danger to all life forms.

How they saw that the danger applied to the human species too.

It is not as difficult for "the many" who see that today even though the other "the many" do not see it.

Do you get miffed if people do not want to die the way you have heard is the proper way to die even though "nothing is certain except death and taxes" according to those possessed of the impulse to determine which is which?

Is death a tax or is a tax a death in the world of what you call life?

That debate is the basic McTell News rap of the past Ad Nauseum section of the current Anthropocene.

As regular readers know, I am fascinated with the prescience of those who see long into the future:

“One would say that [man] is destined to exterminate himself after having rendered the globe uninhabitable.” - Lamarck (1817)

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now — and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive ..." - Jesus Christ (Matt. 24)

"Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it's very unlikely that we'll find any [extraterrestrial intelligence]. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let's take a look at Earth. And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation ... you're just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won't find it here for very long either because it's just a lethal mutation" - Dr. Noam Chomsky paraphrasing Dr. Ernst Mayr

“Experience has shown that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” – Thomas Jefferson

(On The Origin of the Crusader Pathogen - 2). Some do the same thing as an art form which includes more abstraction:

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
...
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin',
... the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin',
Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin',
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin',
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,
...
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
...
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

(Office of the Prescient of the U.S.). That even though there are those who argue that no one can see into the future.

Wrong ("he not busy being born is busy dying").

Civilization, in the form of society, habitually dies time and time again because of the myth that the future is unreachable by visionaries:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown." - A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee

(The Deceit Business - 3). The historians are loved as long as they flatter civilization, but fall into the darkness of civilization's ire when they do not.

Soon enough, thereafter, the society follows themselves into the darkness they were warned of.

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A Hard Rain ..., by Dylan (lyrics here)

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