Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
What can you say about people for whom the beauty of Nature does not inspire, and the fear of its destruction does not motivate?
People do not change unless they feel pain. Politics does not allow for social improvements unless first stung by social revolts. The idea of a spontaneous, peaceful and uneventful evolution of social improvement is delusional. Conflicts are necessary before social improvements can arise. The greater the need for those social improvements, the greater the conflicts necessary to open the possibilities for them to be realized.
Such conflicts always involve violence to one degree or another. Realistic proponents of non-violent social agitation know that the minimum violence necessary for them to achieve their goal requires that their people — the non-violent — suffer all the violence generated during their struggle, and which violence is perpetrated by the reactionary elements of society, those opposed to the social improvements sought. The status quo always reacts with violence to maintain itself. In the United States today that status quo is the domination of all aspects of economic, political and social life by White Supremacy and Capitalism. The magnitude of societal violence escalates in a vicious cycle as social reformers increase their own resorts to rebellious violence. Such vicious cycles are civil wars.
So it has been throughout history, and so it seems destined to remain for our species, as long as we are unable — by being unwilling — to renounce such behavior and evolve beyond it.
As of today, it seems that those who aim for the social improvements needed for all of humanity to live through the deterioration of climate brought on by affluent-human-caused global warming, and to eventually reverse it, will have to resort to social conflicts that admit to the inevitability of violence; minimally reactionary violence, and at worst civil wars.
If there is any threat of premature human extinction, it will only come from the escalation of violence in social conflicts with social reformers — revolutionaries — facing reactionary resistance during a time of rapid and severe deterioration of the environmental conditions necessary for human survival.
Since every creature and form-of-life has an instinct and will for survival, the possibility of such extinction will ultimately never deter revolutionaries motivated by global warming climate change, if they determine that the forces of reaction are implacable. Better then to die fighting than relinquish life, liberty and volition, to exploitation and annihilation by the global warming death-cult of intransigent reactionary domination.
As the conditions of life deteriorate for more and more people, an increasing number of them will be willing to make more desperate choices on the conduct of their lives, and on the conduct of their social advocacies.
The optimistic realization here — which is certainly utopian — is that we already have it in our power, as a collective, to make life whole for everybody. We only have to unite together in the choice to do so.
Premature human extinction is only as inevitable as the degree of our commitment to being intransigent in our fractious class-based and bigoted opposition to the species-wide social improvements necessary for our so-called civilization to be reformulated for the equitable benefit of all.
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September 30, 2020 at 06:03AM
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Conflict and Choice for Human Survival - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch
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