People always want an answer. “OK, now what do we do?” Sometimes nothing. Sometimes you get done unto you. Sometimes you just take it on the chin. This is one of those times, civilizationally. What do we do about it? Nothing much.

We’re riding to the top of a centuries-tall tower of Babel, interconnected instantaneously, linguistically, translating between thousands of languages. We worship a literal golden calf. The ‘bull market’ is the only thing rich people give a fuck about, and they sacrifice countless lives to its name. By every sign in every book, this civilization is fucked. It deserves to be fucked. This is its comeuppance.

What does this mean for you and your precious feelings? Nothing much. ‘You’ are actually 27 people today and 2 billion microrganisms living inside you and countless rebirths as different animals before that. We’re all just space dust riding the edge of an explosion and sometimes it just blows you away. There’s bigger things going on than how one feels about coronavirus, climate, and capitalist collapse. This is some biblical shit. You’ve got to start thinking in terms of thousands of years, well beyond the lens of one modern lifespan.

When I raise questions like ‘How Do We Live Under Such A Fucking Evil White Empire’ and ‘Capitalism Fucking Sucks’ people ask me what I would do. I answer global communist revolution and they laugh but I’m being serious. It’s amazing to me how people can look at the big problems we face and think of such small solutions. Facing climate destruction you need an actual revolution. Everything else is just masturbatory and simply not enough.

Given that people with enough money to get a MacBook and a motorcar will never give it up, collapse is the only way out. Collapse is healthy in a long-term way, and honestly we’re getting the best of it. We’re living through a mass extinction of other species, the sixth since the start. Amma periodically kills 99% of her children and starts over. It’s hard for the trilobites and dinosaurs, but life goes on.

Climate collapse is often framed as a political question (and a decision for the demos) but it’s of course much deeper than that. These discrete categories (politics, economics, biology) do not really exist in the ‘real’ world. It’s all connected and in this case what is happening is a balancing of the ancient cybernetic systems that are the climate. Some new lifeform (Capital, not us) started producing a lot of waste, and now the chemistry set of the Earth is having some new reactions. And a new climate will form. It’s happened many times before, sometimes even caused by lifeforms like us.

What do you do about this? Good god, nothing, just get right with god. By nothing I really mean do your dharma, do your duty without thinking about the whole thing. Because it’s fundamentally out of your hands. People that believe in democracy are somewhat offended by this, they’re all citizen rulers, if they just have the right opinions.

Citizens work on their citizenly opinions all the time, despite said opinions being suspiciously the same as their rulers (war! money!) and otherwise having no effect at all. Democracy is a delusion, the fentanyl of the masses. In lieu of actual power for the masses of poor, they get a reality TV show that they can call in and vote on. It’s all a video game where every choice is constrained. It’s a casino where the house always wins. They just spin the wheel and you pick red or blue. That’s it.

People in such a civilization cannot imagine a world outside of that frame. It’s like asking a fish ‘how’s the water?’ ‘What the fuck is water?’ they’d reply. Many of these people don’t want to be opiated, but they don’t want to wake up either. They want to acknowledge that something is bad and be told ‘everything is OK, it’s not your fault.’ But everything’s not OK and it doesn’t matter who’s fault it is. It’s just happening. It’s been happening for three years. It’ll keep going.

All of these articles offering solutions to this are all good as motivation pieces. Everyone has to do their own dharma, to find their own path, their own thread within the whole. But the idea that the liberal masses of the White Empire and its colonies are going to rise up and change this wicked rule through polite nudging is farcical. There simply isn’t time. It’s like trying to change course on the Titanic by farting. It’s what we in Sinhala call a pada show. A fart show.

It is, as the kids say, Copium. I don’t begrudge it. Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. But I don’t indulge in it myself. I’m trying to get right with God. That requires perceiving things clearly, and sometimes things are just bad. Life is suffering. It’s been said time and time again. What do you do with this information? I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. And, fundamentally, it’s in God’s hands. All we can do is our is dharma. Nobody’s going to tell you the grand plan. There isn’t one. It’s all just a still exploding big bang.