At least Immortan Joe’s open about running a death cult; Good luck getting Charles Koch to admit it. — At least Immortan Joe’s *open* about running a death cult; Good luck getting Charles Koch to admit it.

As I sit here writing this, I have fans and air conditioning running (ineffectively, our new apartment has only a window unit in the bedroom, and so my new office is a bit muggy.) Out front of my building, I can here traffic going by, quieter now than it was an hour ago, but still very much present. Far distant, California is gearing up for wildfire season, the Amazon is burning, and the ice caps are melting.

Meanwhile, the US government is arguing that states can't set their own emission standards, and national emission standards have been relaxed because climate change is unstoppable anyway. Despite the fact that they argue it isn't necessarily happening and the jury is still out anyway. Because if we're all going to die then we might as well die in luxury SUVs with fuel economy measured in gallons per mile with the Pixar movie Cars playing in the back seat so the kids don't notice that they're breathing in poison.

I have said before that a thing is what it does.

Our dominant ideology is not liberal democracy; it is not neoliberalism; it is not free-market capitalism. Our dominant ideology is Exterminism. The implicit belief that much of extant life should be eradicated, presumably so that the survivors can inherit paradise. This term comes to me from the book Four Futures: Life after Capitalism by Peter Frase, a fixup of a Jacobin article. It is the last, and least desirable, of the four extreme options presented.

To understand the nature of Exterminism, imagine the scene in Blade Runner: 2049, where the film's heavy, Luv, pilots a lethal drone to kill a gang of scavengers outside the walls of Los Angeles while getting her nails done. While other aspects of the film edge into more fantastical territory, this is a chillingly plausible moment, where someone dwelling in the midst of luxury orders a machine to kill those who have never felt that luxury, and never would even without her intervention.

A thing is what it does, and we have built a system that is uniquely suited to killing a tremendous amount of life. Of course, this isn't the first time we've done this: the reason there are no more mammoths or mastodons or giant ground sloths is that we've eaten them all. Despite what this article from Truthout says, we don't live in the First Extermination Event, we live in the Second.

I'm also reminded of something that Bruce Sterling wrote in Tomorrow Now, a book he wrote on Futurism near the start of the century where he contends that we aren't just the cause of the Sixth Mass Extinction, we are the Sixth Mass Extinction, and it's important to realize that the face of that extinction (or extermination) isn't the big game hunter, it's the single-family home with a dog and a yard. A lot that once held dozens of different species is reduced to holding a mere handful, and subjected to a constant regimen of cutting and poisoning and digging and planting to keep it that way.

But what Sterling gets wrong is that it's not that human beings are responsible for this most recent period of dying, it's the whole culture that we have built up in “the west” that has done this. And specifically, the industrialized, consumption-driven culture that we have built up on top of the foundation laid by the Greek, Roman, and medieval peoples that preceded us.

What strikes me, though, is the acceleration of it. More than half of all industrial carbon dioxide emissions have been released in my lifetime. All of that has been since Exxon Mobil learned that climate change was happening.

I must assume that this is happening because someone with the power wants it to happen.

Indeed, there has been a concerted effort to obscure the fact that the world is getting hotter, that the oceans are turning more acidic, that forests are burning, nine-tenths of raindrops now contain plastic microbeads, and people are dying. Not only that, but bullets and tear gas canisters are being fired to support it. There is a vast machine of violence and misinformation that supports this project: extracting wealth so that a small minority of the population can dwell in comfort while the remainder of us are left arguing about things that don't matter.

This, I believe, is the origin of what I have termed the epistemic crisis. People are confronted daily with the knowledge that the human world is not just dying but being killed and that we can – potentially – do something about it if we could just work together. But we have been taught that people in a group are beasts in a herd, that a group is dumber the larger it gets (but we want the largest military on the planet, of course.)

I can think of no explanation other than that someone wants this to happen.

Meanwhile, the wealthy are retreating into bunkers. They're buying remote real-estate in New Zealand. They're building gated communities. I can't help but think: what does this resemble other than an inverted concentration camp? These seem to me to be not just for the purpose of privacy but to protect their accumulated wealth from the surplus humanity that they think will perish when the world gets too hot and unstable.

We already see this dynamic unfolding: the conflicts in Syria and Yemen are driven famines caused by climate change. And in the US this past year, planting was disrupted by flooding in the midwest – Nebraska was underwater, and the flooding rolled down the Missouri river, closing highways.

This is where your food is grown. We're not going to have famines this year, but what about in 2020? What about after that?

Emission standards rolled back; climate change is unavoidable anyway.

A thing is what it does, and we've built a machine that is perfectly designed to end the human world. Not in the cathartic, flaming deluge of nuclear holocaust, but in a slow wasting of our own waste.

Perhaps I am being unfair. Perhaps there isn't really a population that desires the death of the vast majority of human beings and the “less useful” portions of the natural world. Perhaps it's just a result of us deciding that the best system is one that plans in three-month increments and will die if it stops making useless things and capturing people's attention, that forces everyone to labor so that they can afford to live and leaves them so exhausted that they can't effectively work towards anything other than continued survival.

But a thing is what it does.

And far from being a system that works, industrial and supposedly post-industrial capitalism has a body count that far dwarfs anything done by actually-existing socialism; or feudalism; or Roman or Persian or Hellenic despotism.

So what's the upshot? What's the alternative? What's the ethic? What's the action plan?

I don't know.

I don't have a map, but I might have a compass.

This blog is principally focused on the arts, and it seems to me that the best reaction for artists to have to the current situation is not to make didactic, environmentalist art but to highlight the contradictions in our way of thinking, and point out the various ways in which our system is causing the crises that it is trying to confront or show the ways in which life might unfold if we don’t stop it..

Of course, Deleuze and Guattari point out that nothing ever died from contradiction. But Archimedes once said that, given the proper lever and a place to stand one could move the world.

Maybe these contradictions can give us the place to stand.

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Buried in the Tombs of their Luxury SUVs: Notes on Exterminism