post 16: negging the anthropocene

At some point, human beings will have to come to terms with the reality that we have serious cognitive limitations on a species-level. Ain’t that what the philosopher Sylvia Wynter was talking about? 

It seems more obvious than ever that humans are just as capable of brilliance and myopia as any other animal on Earth; when we are successful at living, we have the potential to live harmoniously with other lifeforms. When we are selfish and overconfident, we threaten our own destruction and theirs. Great ability comes with the potential for both unbelievable magnificence and unbelievable stupidity. 

It’s pretty cool that humans can use their thumbs to implement technological innovations like pottery, baskets, plumbing, and transportation vehicles, but I think it might be way cooler that birds and woodland creatures manage to build nests and gather all that they need without summoning the destruction of planets.

And honestly, ‘summoning’ puts things too passively. Over the past few centuries, humans have made it clear that they are capable of swan-diving into cesspools of misery in exchange for meeting the basic need of social belonging, which we had already achieved on a more pervasive scale before we capitulated our social structures to antisocial warlords who are willing to devastate swaths of species in order to tickle the serotonin in their brains. These warlords believe they are more capable of bettering the world than the rest of us, because they have succumbed to the most flattering hallucination they have of themselves and their capabilities. They have terrible foresight, but they have convinced themselves they can see the future, and engineer their vision into reality. 

A lot of humans believe things about their species that are fundamentally untrue. One such untruth is the notion that they can ever be uniform. Humans will never be uniform, no matter what they do to control each other. The key to our survival and happiness is to embrace our idiosyncracy, not to try in vain to stamp out what cannot be stamped out. There will always be variance in the way we look, the way we behave, the way we live. There will always be queerness. There cannot be a uniworld, united totally under a single vision of life. We will always break out of the cage. Any worldview that suggests otherwise should be interrogated and ridiculed. 

And any systems we use should account for the fact that we’re all kinda fucking dumb, and there is not in fact a class of people who are not kinda fucking dumb, so we kind of fucking need each other to not be like, mad with power. No fucking presidents, no fucking unimpeachable social classes, no rules that cannot be fucking questioned.

— Many Eyes