Technology Is Destroying the Earth and Humanity
Why does it feel like everything's falling apart? Here's why.
The System’s Falling Apart.
Many of you reading this probably feel like the world is getting noticeably worse. Inflation is at 8.3% 1, gas prices are at record highs 2, we’ve got a housing crisis on our hands 3, an opioid epidemic 4, crime is on the rise 5, our infrastructure’s crumbling 6, and political polarization is rampant 7 — it feels like it’s never going to end! The truth about it all is harsh, but we need to face the music now before it’s too late.
For starters, the reason why it feels like everything is getting worse for us is due to how dependent we all are on a system for food, water, shelter, and even meaning. When we grow up, this dependence doesn’t go away; we quickly move from the mother’s breast to the bottle to the grocery store. As an adult, you are dependent on your job for survival. You are dependent on doctors for your health. And you are dependent on the state/police for protection and a stable economy.
From cradle onwards, we are thrown into school, then socially engineered to be compliant. With stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, kids are taught to surrender their will to authority in order to get what they want most — recognition. Through a system of rewards and punishments, we begin to associate pleasing others — a.k.a. doing what we are told — with good behavior.
As Ivan Illich noted, the pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to confuse process with substance, service with value.8 A diploma is confused with competance, good grades with intelligence, and repeating what you are told with common-sense. As we get older, this conformist mindset doesn’t change. After we exit the assembly that is the education system, young adults enter the wage cage, and become cogs in one giant economic machine. In this economic machine, adults learn how to accept their own powerlessness in the face of a system they don’t quite understand. Instead of trusting our own judgment, we place our faith in ‘experts’ and institutions.
“Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.”
From childhood and beyond, our lives are spent servicing others through work and school. Due to the division of labor, and our over-reliance on the industrial system, everything that happens to us is increasingly determined by the decisions of others.
“Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or politicians.” 9
Do you feel free in this world, relying on others for everything? Where will this all lead? To start, look at your own life and how this system is effecting your health and wellbeing.
Think about it: every day you wake up, eat your processed foods, down your cup of coffee, go to work, sit in a cubicle all day, and perform menial tasks from 9-5. Your boss tells you when to show up, when to leave, and what to do throughout your day. We are told to “go the extra mile”, feign enthusiamsm as we work, while knowing full well that we’re getting less for working more.
Companies now focus primarily on building brands and putting customers first, without investing in their workers futures. In the Fissured Workplace, David Weil demonstrates how the majority of large enterprises in the United States have subcontracted and franchised most of the labour functions outside of their core business unit, throwing workers under the bus.
“Jobs have shifted away to be done by separate employers who pay low wages, provide limited or often no health care, pension, or other benefits, and offer tenuous job security.” 10
Once your day at work is finished, you head home, now too dead to live and too alive to die. Like a zombie you scroll through your feed, watch Netflix or youtube, just to kill time, then you sleep. Rince-and-repeat. Rince-and-repeat. You gain nothing while you lose precious time, money, happiness, and eventually, yourself. Meanwhile, corrupt billionaires and power-hungry politicians take everything from you, while CLAIMING to be acting in your best interest. Every day, you fight harder and harder just to make ends meet, for yourself and for your loved ones. You know that if a heart attack or cancer doesn’t snuff you out by old age, then you’ll be encouraged to take a laundry list of meds, just to keep your body functioning 11. With little left to lose, you could end up like many other Americans who rely on substances like marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs just to take the edge off. This isn’t natural. You know it isn’t natural. Millions of years of evolution…for this?
So what is the cause of it all? There is a simple answer, really—technology is the problem.
What does the technological system look & feel like? It is you flipping through the channels, or typing on your computer, during a beautiful day. It is your shopping when you are depressed. It is the excess fat in your body or the thought that tells you to go on a diet. It is the birth defects in your children. It’s abortion. It is the drugs we take when we need an escape. It’s the small talk at the water cooler. The microwaved meals. It’s the police, the politicians, the billionaires, the economists, the self-help gurus, and the news networks. It is wealth inequality, the low wages. It is what makes you jealous. It’s every social media account — every click, every purchase, every share. It’s the white noise, the car wooshing by, the surveillance cameras tracking your every move. It is the urban sprawl. The traffic. The array of logos jutting out from the freeway exit. It’s the constant buzz about celebrities, the sleazy magazines on display in the grocery store. It’s the fluorescent lights. Your car, your phone, your tv. All the ads and billboards that you see everywhere you go. It is your lust for sex. It is the objectified woman, the aimless man. It’s the concrete beneath your feet. It is your hate. It is your love. It is our world.
EVERYTHING in this world is used to siphon your energy away on a daily basis. Get in the car, go into any public space, and all you hear is the same songs playing over and over again. Drive around, and all you see are dollar generals, fast food joints, and gas stations. Turn on the tv, everything is a copied idea, reboots, sequels, and reality tv shows interspersed with mind-numbing ads. To feel better, we fill our bellies full of inflammation/cancer-causing sludge. You are so desensitized to all this that you never stop to think about how unnatural it all is.
You see the consequences of this technological system every day. Driving alongside the road, you’ll often stumble upon a well-dressed grave — another reminder that over 40,000 people are lost to car accidents every year. 12 Or you’ll notice a depressed cashier in the grocery store, barely able to crack a smile — just another reminder that 13.2% of Americans over 18 are taking antidepressant medications, 13 while 66% of all adults in the United States are on some form of prescription drug.
Due to this technological system, our health is getting worse. Modern foods are killing us: pesticides, chemical fertilizers, growth hormones, genetically-modified crops, too much sugar, too much fat, too much seed, and vegetable oils, etc. The U.S. adult obesity rate stands at 41.9% percent now. 14
The natural world is slowly being taken from us too, from human activities such as building cities, farms, roads, houses, pipelines, and power plants. The U.S. has lost 24 million acres of natural land in 16 years — the equivalent of nine Grand Canyon national parks.15 We’re losing our animals too. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, “many biologically classified species have gone extinct: 83 species of mammals, 113 species of birds, 23 species of amphibians and reptiles, 23 species of fish, about 100 species of invertebrates, and over 350 species of plants.” 16 Over the next 50 years, climate change is expected to cause the extinction of 1 in 10 of all animals and plants — that’s more than 1 million species. 17
It’s important to remember that technology isn’t just your devices, it isn’t just machines or tools. It’s a mode of being, a way of looking at the world. 18 And the purpose of technology is to give you that sense of control we all desire deep down. Think of when you got your license and car for the first time, or when you got your first paycheck. New possibilities opened up — you felt in control, you felt free. You never thought about all the rules and regulations that you’d have to follow afterward. But we all ended up having to pay taxes, get our cars insured, pay our bills, etc. Technological freedom isn’t free.
If you want to see where everything is heading, you have to look back at the industrial revolution, when our relationship with nature changed forever. Economies that had been based on agriculture and handicrafts transformed into economies based on large-scale industry, mechanized manufacturing, and factory systems. This has been a blessing and a curse.
Since the industrial revolution, life expectancy has risen to the point where we no longer have to worry about things like predators, wars, or famine — what you might call “nature’s selection pressures.” 19 This is all good, but everything comes at a cost — and nature is full of trade-offs. As a result of technology, we now have the power to end our entire species. Nuclear weapons 20, artificial intelligence 21, climate change from the burning of fossil fuels and the cutting down of forests 22, bioweapons in the hands of terrorists & global powers 23 , and the list goes on. As the world becomes more interconnected and tightly coupled, the chances of one event having a ripple effect throughout the entire system has only gone up.
In 2020, with Covid-19, for example — based on the evidence we have at hand — the virus was probably created in a lab due to gain-of-function research, and biotechnological research 24. Thanks to how connected we all are with air travel, free trade, and the free movement of people, Covid spread like wildfire after it became transmissible to humans. 25 It is almost guaranteed now that if you haven’t already gotten the virus, somebody you know has. The virus originated from humans opening pandora’s box, attempting to play God with biotechnology. 26 It spread, also, due to our technological system — that relies on planes, ships, information networks, technocrats, and computers.
Going forward, our technological system will continue to effect our environment in profound ways. Climate change and rising sea levels are expected to make more countries and coastal cities uninhabitable, leading to refugee crises and water wars.27 We can’t anticipate the ripple effect this will have on the globe. But our leaders won’t be prepared, just as they weren’t in 2020 after the pandemic. If we look also at the response to the 2015 migration crisis 28 in Europe or the 2008 recession, our leaders were ill-prepared to tackle these huge systemic problems.
Why do we get sweeped up by these historical events that come out nowhere? It is hard for our brains to comprehend complex systems and the law of unintended consequences. We can’t anticipate what will happen in a system as complex as ours. Most of history has been a tale of innovations and discoveries leading us down unknown paths with destinations that we could have never foreseen.
“One hundred years ago, Henry Ford could not begin to anticipate the highway deaths, urban sprawl, wars over oil, and global warming that his automobiles would bring. The inventors of television could not anticipate that it would lead to obesity, ill health, lower academic performance, and attention deficit disorder. The inventors of aerosol propellants (chlorofluorocarbons) could not know that they would destroy the planetary ozone layer. Early coal miners could not know that their product would disrupt the climate of the entire planet.” 29
If you look at your own life, too, you can often point to a decision you’ve made, or a series of decisions, that forever altered the course of your life. But you never knew at the time that these changes would occur as a result of your decisions — you only recognized the impact they had after the fact.
Keep this in mind when you hear our leaders talking about the next industrial revolution that is on the horizon—the one that has the potential to transform everything about our lives. Remember: if something has the power to change the world, it has the power to end it.
Here’s some background on each industrial revolution(s): the first industrial revolution occurred at the end of the 18th century, in 1784 when steam was harnessed for mechanical production. The second one occurred around 1870 when mass production powered by electricity was first introduced (think of the first assembly lines). The third one occurred around 1969, when advances in computing led to machine programming, opening the door to progressive automation (computers).
The 4th Industrial Revolution will result in a fusion of advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), genetic engineering, quantum computing, and more. The new technologies of this age will include supercomputers, intelligent robots, self-driving cars, neuro-technological brain enhancements, & genetic editing software.
Artificial Intelligence and The Great Reset.
According to Klaus Shwab, “the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities.” 30 The World Economic Forum has told us that everybody will have their own ‘digital identity’ in this ‘new world order’. That digital identity will determine “what products, services, and information we can access.” 31
In other words, what you are allowed to see, what you are allowed to feel, what you are allowed to think—all of this will be filtered through a technological ecosystem full of sensors, devices, and algorithms that understand you better than you understand them.
That digital identity will be linked to every click, comment, and share you make on social media; every financial transaction you record; your location and where you travel; what you buy and sell; your personal health data and medical records; the websites that you visit; your participation in civic functions (i.e. voting, taxes, benefits, etc.); and how much energy you consume.
With a total of 5 billion people using the internet every year, and more and more of our time being spent on it every day, the economy will continue to transition to the web. In 2020 alone, the internet economy contributed $2.45 trillion to the United States' $21.18 trillion GDP. It feels like we are getting closer to the point where everything is done online. Think of where this could lead — think of the immersive virtual worlds in shows like Sword Art Online, or movies like Ready Player One & the Matrix.
The Metaverse, facebook’s virtual reality platform, has enormous monetization potential, even if it hasn’t lived up to the hype quite yet. According to industry estimates, revenues from virtual reality (VR) gaming worlds could reach $400 billion USD by 2025. 32 Our leaders are jumping at the opportunity to use these technologies for enormous profits. They are dancing to the tune of the dollar signs, throwing us headfirst into the fourth industrial revolution, without time to prepare.
In a virtual world, we will be provided with everything we lack in this one. Imagine having everything at your fingertips — sex, social connections, entertainment, you name it. With people having — on average — less-and less-sex, 33 fewer-and-fewer friendships, 34 with addictions rates going up simultaneously 35 — these digital markets would fall on fertile ground.
With the third generation of web technologies on the way — with what is known as Web 3.0 — our bodies will merge with our technologies, revolutionizing our internet experience. 36 A virtual world would be like a mirror image of ours — except that it will be tailor-made for us. Life-like graphics would give us realistic depictions of worlds beyond our imaginations (think of how realistic Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5 already is), and haptic skin would translate virtual signals into physical sensations, allowing us to feel things we’ve never felt before.
With the revolution in biotech on the horizon, soon you will give the corporations even more data about your behavior, with technologies that travel with you everywhere. Digital pills with embedded sensors, 37 and emotional sensors that analyze facial expressions, voice intonations, and other audio and visual signals.38 Clothing with temperature monitoring, 39 smart watches, 40 brain chips like Neuralink, artificial pancreases and organs, 41 internet-connected glasses, 42 electronic tattoos, 43 virtual reality headsets 44 — the list goes on. You will lose the right to be forgotten, the right to be alone in your own mind without a device by your side.
We hear constantly about how all this new tech will better our health care, make us happier, and how it’ll increase efficiency — but what of the dangers? The world’s scientists, politicians, economists, and intellectuals — all driven by the desire for status, money, and power — have become so preoccupied with whether or not they could change the world, that they never stopped to think if they should. China, for example, has already conducted “human testing” on members of the People’s Liberation Army, in hopes of developing soldiers with “biologically enhanced capabilities”. 45 China is competing with America over global hegemony, and they will stop at nothing to achieve it, ethics be damned.
It’s not hard to imagine a future where innovations in biotechnology end up leading to the mass adoption of genetic engineering on a global scale. Once one country adopts a new technology — say, nuclear bombs — the military & economic advantages that one country receives, incentivize others to jump on board the bandwagon. Before you know it, every country is using that technology, and it becomes so mainstream that it completely changes our lives.
Imagine, for a second, if we were given the power to genetically design our babies, choosing traits that we found desirable like height or intelligence — imagine how profitable that would be. This is already feasible. In 2018, He Jiankui, a Chinese biophysics researcher, implanted embryos in a pair of twins, where he used CRISPR — a gene-editing technology — to edit a gene known as CCR5 with the goal of making the twins resistant to the HIV virus. 46 CRISPR gene-editing technology is still in the process of being developed, but scientists are saying that CRISPR could allow us to one day make reliably precise changes to human embryos. 47
With physical attractiveness becoming a significant predictor of life success in our attention economy, why would you not want to give your kid to have a leg up in the competition? With dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, we see how hyper-stratified the dating market is; practically 90% of women are looking for 6% of men. So wouldn’t you want your boy to be part of that 6%, so he doesn’t end up lonely and aimless? Or wouldn’t you want your daughter to be one of the girls that secure the high-status, financially well-off man, so she can live a safe, happy, and secure life? Unfortunately, we might have to start asking these questions soon.
We Are the Counted People Now.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is currently underway as we speak, and already we are the counted people. As Marc Barnes writes,
“Our locations, words, memories, shopping habits, entertainment preferences, and political beliefs are translated into numbers, then stored, sold, and traded by governments and the data giants of Silicon Valley who make our technological age tick.” 48
With technologies like Neura-link being developed and powerful Quantum Computers in the making too, picture a future where corporations and governments possess enough information to know everything about you. It seems like every world event over the past 20 years has been used to get the public and private sectors closer to that point of absolute knowledge. Think of 9/11 with the Patriot Act — how the U.S. Government used it as an excuse to increase the power of government agencies like the NSA and FBI/CIA. Think of the recent pandemic response, with tracking & tracing & microchip technology.
Right now, as you are reading this, corporations like Google are collecting your behavioral data from number logs, geolocation, search terms, dwell times, and click patterns. All of this data is used for targeted ads, like the ones you see everywhere online. But with the development of smart cities, smartphones, biometric technologies, and all of the devices that make up the internet of things — corporations and governments are developing algorithms so intelligent, so predictive, and so ubiquitous, that they won’t just be using your clicks to develop better ads — eventually, they will know everything about you, no matter where you go.
In the words of Shoshanna Zuboff, corporations and governments,
“Want your home and what you say and do within its walls. They want your car, your medical conditions, and the shows you stream; your location as well as all the streets and buildings in your path and all the behavior of all the people in your city. They want your voice and what you eat and what you buy; your children’s play time and their schooling; your brain waves and your bloodstream.” Your reality, your home, your life, and your body — they want it all.” 49
After the industrial revolution, we started relying on ‘experts’ for everything, but now we are on the verge of giving machines the ability to rule over us. The problems we face as a species, like climate change and pandemics, are becoming more complex. With computers simultaneously becoming more intelligent, these global problems are approach us, as humanity is slowly drifts into a situation where we must, almost out of necessity, rely on the internet and machines for everything. 50 This heavy reliance will only make our situation worse if a disastrous event were to occur, with the power to disrupt everything, such as a solar flare.
Astrophysicists estimate the likelihood of a solar storm of sufficient strength to cause catastrophic disruption occurring within the next decade to be 1.6 - 12%.51 We’ve already experienced a solar flare like this before. The Carrington event, for example, was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, occurring in September of 1859. It created strong auroral displays that were reported globally, and it caused sparking and even fires in multiple telegraph stations. Now imagine the fallout of an event like that today, and how catastrophic those outages would be.
The power grid and the internet are a byproduct of one giant ecosystem of technologies— the world’s largest computer networks, data centers, populations of servers, undersea transmission cables, and advanced microchips. The more we rely on this vast and expansive technological system, the more vulnerable we become. Already, there is a shortage of semiconductors & computer chips. 52 Manufacturing a chip typically takes more than three months and involves giant factories, dust-free rooms, & multi-million-dollar machines. What else could go wrong? Undersea transatlantic cables, for example, — those “information super-highways” — are indispensable to the world economy, carrying over 95% of international data.53 Damage to any of them would be catastrophic. In the financial sector alone, undersea cables carry some $10 trillion of financial transfers daily. Imagine if a group of terrorists targeted this critical infrastructure, or a state adversary like Russia — imagine the impact that alone would have on the world economy.
The scary thing is that the more we are forced to confront these environmental and social threats, the more we double-down on using technology to solve our problems, which only centralizes power. To combat Covid, for instance, many countries utilized digital authoritarian measures that took away our freedoms. China, for example, required its citizens to to use software on their smartphones that dictated whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces. 54 China also utilized its social credit system on the national and provincial level as a way to “nudge” business behaviors, firstly to encourage containment and then to punish COVID-19-related crimes. 55
These draconian measures are not exclusive to the east either. Canadians were charged a special tax due to their vaccination status and were banned from places like restaurants and liquor stores. The Canadian government even went so far as to freeze the bank accounts of hundreds of individuals involved in the Freedom Convoy protests. 56 In addition, Australia built Covid internment camps for non-compliant citizens to be placed in, where they would be held against their will. Here is a list of all the rights that were infringed upon during the pandemic, from The Truth About Covid-19.
As you can probably tell by now — NGOs, national governments, international governing bodies like the WHO, corporations, financial institutions, and philanthropists — are all working hard to make this “Great Reset” a reality. The enemy is neither the state nor the market — it is both. They all want us to be totally dependent on the technological system.
You may be reading this article on a smartphone right now. That device you rely on for everything spies on you — it knows where you go, what you buy, what you read, how much you exercise, it knows your vital signs, and even your sleeping habits. With all this data in the hands of corporations and governments, our freedoms will slowly can, and will, slowly go away. With crime on the rise, and shootings becoming a big issue — especially in America — our data has the potential to be used to identify who has psychiatric problems even before individuals become aware of them. Where could this lead?
In an effort to prevent mass shootings, the White House — back in 2019 — already considered a controversial proposal from the Suzanne Wright Foundation to try and predict gun violence by monitoring the mentally ill online. 57 The SAFEHOME program, proposed by Bob Wright, would employ tracking software, using everything from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo’s, Google Homes, as well as fMRIs, tractography and image analysis — to detect signs of mental instability that could foreshadow mass shootings. 58 The government already utilizes predictive policing — the utilization of computer systems to analyze large sets of data, including historical crime data, to help decide where to deploy police or to identify individuals who are likely to commit a crime.
Who's to say the government won’t use these spying powers for its own gain, as it has, and continues to do? Who's to say it won’t be used to target political dissidents, as Pedro Gonzalez has written about already? ‘Domestic terrorists’ are the new ‘enemy combatants’ — the new group of people whose eyes no longer address us with the unavoidable question of “why?” When we all put on masks during the pandemic, it symbolized a transition to a new world order — a new social environmental where individuals could no longer express and reveal themselves. The face is the foundation of politics. It is by looking at each other’s faces “that individuals recognise themselves and develop a passion for one another.” 59 But now we are indifferent towards each other—everybody is a threat, a potential carrier of a virus. We have internalized the machinic indifference of our technologies. When biometric-tech analyzes a face, it doesn’t recognize a person with thoughts and feelings. Increasingly, when we look at each other, we don’t see people either.
Our devices, all of these sensors and technologies, observe us with radical indifference. They don’t care who we are, where we come from, or what we are passionate about — the goal of technology is to reduce unique individuals to the lowest common denominator; corporations and governments — and the tech they use — want to turn your sorrows, your loves, your beliefs, your insecurities, into lines of code. They want to transform you into an endless series of 0’s and 1’s.
Say we had the opportunity to live most of our days in the digital realm—in a metaverse-like reality. Why would we be needed in the real world after that? Decades from now, many jobs will have been automated away. The McKinsey Global Institute has already predicted that 45 million Americans—one-quarter of the workforce—could lose their jobs to automation by 2030. 60 Each day that goes by, the masses only become more-and-more superfluous under this technological system—a useless burden to our corrupt elite. If history is any indication, elites — when given the opportunity and the power — will oppress their people. Think of the African slaves in the New World (especially in Brazil), serfs under the British aristocracy, peasants under the Russian Tsars, or slaves under the Chinese dynasties. Why would our technocratic elite be any different? What if instead of ruling us with pain, they rule us with pleasure — with mind-numbing technologies?
In the World Economic Forum’s video 8 Predictions For The World In 2030, the very first prediction is:
“You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”
Every day we own less, matter less, feel less, and care less about our futures. They want this. They don’t want to let any disaster to go to waste. Going forward, climate change, pandemics, and terrorist attacks will be used to increase the size of corporations and the government.
Geoengineering.
Climate change will only get worse in the future, 61 providing oppurtunities for Bill Gates and others others to enforce ‘climate lockdowns’, 62 and other state interventions in the economy. As sea levels and temperatures rise, creating discontent on a worldwide scale, populations will accept bad solutions from their governments. Seeing as how climate change is a global issue — a global government, like the half-baked one we have in place currently, will be given even more discretionary power to combat our transcontinental, environmental threat. In that case, international organizations will be given the chance to possibly enforce massive environmental projects, like geoengineering techniques.
Some of these geoengineering techniques might include iron fertilization, already a controversial proposal 63 ; they could also try spraying seawater thousands of meters into the air to seed the formation of stratocumulus clouds to will deflect sunlight 64; they might also install sun-shields or mirrors in space to reflect the sun-light 65 ; or they might attempt Stratospheric Aerosol Injection. Who knows. But each one of these techniques has the potential to have long-term consequences for the environment; attempts to meddle with the ecosystem almost always have unforeseen, undesirable consequences. If something catastrophic occurred as a result of climate management, further meddling would be required in order to fix the problem — creating a feedback loop of environmental degradation mixed in with temporary band-aids.
When the Earth has a managed climate that is declining due to human intervention, after it reaches the point of no return, we would have no choice but to continue meddling with it. Since the breakdown of the technological system would mean a destroyed climate. All the world’s leaders would be delighted by this, since the system that gives them their power and their status would have become indispensable, and therefore immune, to any serious challenge. With the earth going to hell in a handbasket, the billionaires and politicians would be safe in their luxury bunkers, sheltered from all the chaos.
The Baby Drought.
Apart from climate change, artificial intelligence, and nuclear warfare — one of the most important technology-related problems we face — as figures like Elon Musk have pointed out — is a global population collapse. This might sound absurd at face value. There are more humans on the earth than ever before, right? But that isn’t the issue at hand — the problem is the ratio between the young and the old. There are far less young people being born today than ever before. In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 66 — and their study, published in the Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100. 67
What does this mean? Well, compared to the elderly, young people both produce more things and buy more things. Because of this, they drive the majority of the economy, growing GDP and generating tax revenue. As Ryan McEntush writes in his Substack,
“Throughout your adult life, you’re building stuff, buying goods, and investing in the capital markets, but the moment you retire this stops. You’re no longer producing anything, you reduce spending, and your investments are exchanged into cash or Treasury bills.The lack of young people is becoming a problem in Japan, but just imagine if the entire world experienced the same crisis, which projections show that it will. If birth rates continue to decline, consumption will begin to drop altogether, and the net flows into capital markets will reverse. Less consumption means less aggregate demand, which could trigger a global recession, crippling the still-developing world reliant on these markets.”
To make matters worse, the shrinking fraction of young people — people like you and me — will have to shoulder the financial burden of a growing elderly population. Less tax revenue means less expenditures, as the elderly demand their retirement and health-care benefits. We’ve already printed $5 TRILLION in pandemic stimulus money 68, only making inflation worse. All of this borrowed money is just taxation without representation for the unborn. You, your children, and your children’s children will face this burden of our country’s burgeoning debt, and it’ll only become more of a burden with a smaller tax-paying population. Already, about 23% of Gen Z and 26% of millennials believe there’s little chance they’ll be able to rely on Social Security to fund their retirement. 69 Data shows that if no changes are made to Social Security funding, the program’s reserves could be exhausted by 2035 or 2036.
With all of this discontent piling up in countries around the world, all the frustrated populations will force politicians — out of necessity— to become more authoritarian and militarist if they want to stay in power. We are already seeing this happen with countries like Russia and China, who must accomplish their global ambitions now before it’s too late. Russia’s population demographic data shows us that soon they’ll have a fraction of their current young fighting force. Long-term plans must be accomplished soon, which is undoubtedly part of the reason why Ukraine is being invaded as we speak. 70
In China, between 2023 and 2032, the elderly population aged 60–69 will increase from 158.1 million to 220 million, while the younger population aged 30–39 will decrease from 233 million to 170.3 million during the same period. 71 Despite it’s growing economy, China WILL NOT have accrued the national wealth by this point to cope with the growing elderly population. And due to China’s one-child policy, too, there is also a surplus of males with no stake in society — alienated men without wives or children. This is going to create a pincer effect, forcing China into behaving more aggressively.
China must rely on its economic growth to satisfy all of these groups, and it if doesn’t then it may — out of necessity — have to channel all that violent energy into a war, likely over Taiwan. President Joe Biden has already said he would commit to defending Taiwan if it was invaded by China. A confrontation between two superpowers like America and China could lead to an all-out nuclear war. BCA Research’s Global Investment Strategy service has already put the chance of a nuclear war occurring within the next 12 months at 10%.
So why is this happening? Over the course of evolutionary history, organisms have developed means of exploiting every piece of land, utilizing every resource, and invading every corner of the globe. Even microscopic aquatic animals like Tardigrades, for example, can survive in volcanic vents and the ocean floor by deactivating their metabolism, allowing them to enter what scientists call a cryptobiotic state. No matter the time or place — life finds a way and adapts no matter the challenges. It is truly beautiful to see, and though it may be a blessing, it is also a curse, especially for a species like ours.
Humans have built an industrial system that exploits everything, that utilizes every resource on the planet — now to the detriment of ourselves and our earth. We have also populated every habitable corner of the globe, every continent, and climate. Now that this technological system has spread so far, so wide, it has taken on a life of its own, and it has become almost like a parasite—a parasite that is starting to eat away at its host.
The fertility crisis is an example of this parasitical growth. The baby drought can be blamed on factors unique to modern civilization, and the techno-industrial system that supports it. It likely stems from chemicals in our environment and unhealthy lifestyle practices in our modern world, which affect our bodies in numerous ways, making us infertile and unhealthy.
In 1992, a study found a global 50% decline in sperm counts in men over the previous 60 years, likely due to obesity, poor diet, and environmental toxins. 72 A 2007 study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, revealed a “substantial” drop in U.S. men's testosterone levels since the 1980s, with average levels declining by about 1% per year. 73 This decline can likely be attributed to the prevalence of seed oils, microplastics, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, & sedentary lifestyles. Trying to avoid all of these environmental toxins is increasingly difficult, as many of you who i’m sure already know by now.
Fewer men are becoming marriageable as well, so that means fewer families. In the US, almost one-third of all working-age men in America aren’t working—that’s around 30 million men. 74 Men don’t feel needed anymore. Women used to rely on men for everything, and we use to be able to provide for our families with just one source of income, but with more-and-more jobs getting outsourced abroad, or automated away by machines— real wages have barely budged in decades. And with college becoming increasingly expensive, with degrees losing value—fewer men are deciding to do anything with their lives. Men have become disposable.
Women, too, no longer need to have kids. With contraception pills and other birth control methods — plus increased employment opportunities for women — they can wait until their 30s to have children if they even decide to at all. And, as it turns out, fewer women and men WANT to have kids now. A new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that more adults report they do not want to have children — ever. About 44% of people ages 18 to 49 report it’s unlikely or “not too likely” that they’ll have children. This doesn’t bode well for the future.
Conclusion.
So what are the deeper implications of all this? The baby drought, climate change, the great reset — everything. What does it mean for us, for our happiness?
If we look at the four domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfaction in life, that is, REAL happiness, it’s through:
1: Family,
2: Vocation,
3: Community,
4: Faith.
Many of us, either because of financial struggles or personal choices, have decided not to become parents. More of us, too, are growing up in divided families, with parents and relatives that are divorced or abusive/neglectful. Children are increasingly estranged from their families; families are increasingly estranged from their children.
With regard to vocation, if you’re lucky enough to complete all 4 years of college, and get a degree, then like most university graduates you’ll probably end up sifting through job listings for “entry-level” positions that demand years of experience. You’ll find a massive web of regulations and credentials—both of which are increasingly expensive to comply with or to obtain—end up blocking you from entering a profession that might fulfill your need for a genuine calling. So, as a result of the job market, many of us end up working in retail, at some soulless dead-end job, or in the gig economy, unable to realize our potential or have kids.
With regard to community, so many of us — especially after the pandemic — don’t spend as much time with friends & communities anymore. That dense network of friends — what is known as ‘civil society’ — made up of organizations, companies, churches, schools, and clubs, is disappearing. With the Great Resignation & many Americans exiting the job market, in pursuit of at-home work, fewer of us are leaving the house now. We can just uber-eats our meals, get all of our entertainment online, and talk with our friends or co-workers over zoom or discord.
And lastly, let’s talk about faith. Regardless of what your thoughts are on religion, it is undeniable that attending Church, and having a deeper purpose in life, is good for the soul. If you believe in God, suffering takes on a new meaning — life’s struggles become bearable. But fewer Americans are attending church now than ever before, with attendence dropping below 50% for the first time in 2020.
So how can we reverse the decline? This system isn’t delivering on its promises. It isn’t giving us what we want deep down—healthy families, good jobs, tight-knit communities, and spiritual satisfaction.
Is there any way to fix it all? Well, first we must admit this to ourselves—there is no ‘reforming’ this system. There is no way we can manually steer society in the direction we want. Any aspiration to shephard a people into a collective course of action, only becomes less feasible everyday, as our world becomes more complex. Any ideology, whether its liberalism, socialism, fascism — won’t work. None of them, in fact, have succeeded in accomplishing what they set out to accomplish. Communism never gave us a worker’s paradise, instead leading to Gulag’s and the death of around 65 million people. Liberalism gave us the Iran War, with casaualities estimated to be around 1-2 million. Not to mention slavery, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (140,000 deaths in Hiroshima, 74,000 dead in Nagasaki), and color revolutions in former Soviet States, and much more. Nazism lead to genocides, the murder of hostages, reprisal raids, forced labor, "euthanasia," starvation, exposure, medical experiments, and terror bombing, concentration and death camps, likely resulting in the deaths of around 15,003,000 to 31,595,000 people. No political-system will ever give us what we want deep down. The best political system is NO political system.
There is no regulating the data-retrieving practices of big corporations, especially when the government is in bed with big data. There is no managing the earth’s climate when we can’t even tackle a pandemic, or fix our crumbling infrastructure. There is no reversing a baby drought when all these corporations and lobbyists have a vested interest in producing more processed foods, plastics, & other environmental toxins.
There are no band-aids, policies, government programs, dictators, or technologies that’ll reverse climate change, the baby drought, or any of these bigger historical trends. All the failed political experiments of the 20th century, all the failed ideologies and foiled plans, tell us one thing — humanity cannot, and will not, be in charge of its own fate with a system this large, and this complex.
History shows that, in general, we have very little control over our own fates. Does that mean all hope is lost? No, not quite.
As Friedrich Engels wrote in 1890:
“History is made in such a way that the final result always arises from the conflicts among many individual wills, each of which is made into what it is by a multitude of special conditions of life; thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite collection of parallelograms of forces, and from them emerges a historical event which from another point of view can be regarded as the product of one power that, as a whole, operates unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wants runs up against the opposition of every other, and what comes out of it all is something that no one wanted.”
Nobody wants to admit that they have very little control over their future. Nobody wants to admit that the world is indifferent to their wants and needs. Regardless of whether life has some inherent purpose, we act as though it does. We wouldn’t get up in the morning unless we felt like our lives had a purpose, and that we could have a positive impact on the world.
Our elites, like us, derive their value, their sense of importance—from changing the world, from having an impact. It is extremely psychologically difficult for them to admit, as it is for us, that spending an entire lifetime within this system — with all that time, money, and effort — only makes things worse. Our elites would rather cling to any scheme, no matter how idealistic, before admitting to themselves that the only way to get off the road to disaster is a total collapse of the technological system—the system they helped create. A threat to their worldview is more important to them than a threat to their lives because that threat, to them, is far-off into the future.
It’s like the Emperor Has No Clothes story; we all are partaking in this lie that this system is sustainable, even when we know it isn’t, because the truth hurts. In the end, each lie we tell ourselves incurs a debt to the truth, and sooner or later that debt has to be paid. It’s time we pay it.
Even if we were to create a system that benefitted leaders and citizens alike, even if we were to see eye-to-eye on everything, many individuals doing what is best for themselves could end up creating a society that is worse for us all. This is the “tragedy of the commons” dilemma—an example of which might include overfishing.
It is in the short-term interest of each fisherman, for example, to collect as many fish as possible for maximum profit, but overfishing can lead to critical dispensation, where the fish population is no longer able to sustain itself. When the fish can no longer replenish their populations naturally through reproduction, we can offer potential solutions like ending harmful fishery subsidies, but that won’t solve the problem. With such a high demand for fish in such an overpopulated world, a reduction in fishing would be harmful not just the consumption-side of the economy, but also to the production-side (60 million people are employed in fishing worldwide, 20.5 in developing countries).
There will always be a scarcity of resources, so if we go on exploiting the natural world forever, eventually things will reach a breaking point when nature starts to rebel. We can build a sophisticated civilization, create the most complex machines, but this fact will never change. At the end of the day, it’s important to recognize that this world does not revolve around us.
“Tsunamis don't suddenly stop when they reach poor neighborhoods, alligators don't distinguish between the innocent and the guilty in their nocturnal hunts, and hurricanes don't attack people according to race.” 75
The tragic thing is that each of us are instinctually selfish, with minds wired to respond to threats that ‘intend’ to hurt us. And while there certainly are leaders with bad intentions, they aren’t the enemy—the industrial system is. Our leaders are part of the system, but they themselves do not constitute it.
The problem now is that we aren't built to respond to dangers from systems as complex as ours; the brain is attuned to threats from agents—evildoers, people, or creatures that are out to hurt us. Something as abstract as technology does not come across as evil or malicious. But what makes technology so pernicious is that it is totally indifferent to us—it is inhuman. We don’t recognize this because we have become like machine’s ourselves—automatons that feel less, love less, and care less.
I don’t have any political solutions to the industrial system. I think it’s best to wait until it starts to collapse, as it inevitably will. As this starts to happen, we must remember: the only solution to everything we are going through right now is to fundamentally reject the techno-industrial system. We must overthrow it, and build something new out of the ashes of it all.
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