Everything’s Ablaze, Always & Forever

“I’ll cut to the chase. The gist of Becker’s short essay is contained within the latter half of a single paragraph: ‘All human systems are enormous trash fires. Every single one, no matter how pretty it looked from the outside, or how enchanting those first gossamer months were, will eventually prove to be a goddamn disasterpants clusterfuck. Your company, your organization, your church, your campaign, your band, your political movement, your city, your dinner party, your revolution: At some point, you’ll look up, notice everything around you has been torched, and say to yourself, Holy shit, this place is an enormous fucking trash fire.’”—Dr. Guy McPherson

Planetary Hospice

By Dr. Guy McPherson

“Once you recognize that all human systems are enormous trash fires, you stop trying to figure out how to switch to a system that isn’t an enormous trash fire, since they don’t exist. Instead, you ask better questions about your current trash fire. Like, ‘Am I doing everything I can to contain this enormous trash fire, even though I know it will never go out?’ ‘Do the people in charge recognize that this whole place is an enormous trash fire?’ And, most importantly, ‘Am I surrounded by a team of firefighters or a team of arsonists?’”―Lane Becker

“Few scholars are comfortable suggesting that people ought to believe an outright lie. Advocating the perpetuation of untruths would breach their integrity and violate a principle that philosophers have long held dear: the Platonic hope that the true and the good go hand in hand. Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: ‘We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth about free will.’”—Dr. Stephen Cave

Editor’s Note: Since December 2016, Guy and I have had one another’s backs . . . against all virtual comers. I knew the moment I first encountered him on the internet that he had hit the sad motherload of truth that is The (long-in-progress) Sixth Extinction, and I wanted, immediately, to share his message with my readership at “Hubris.” So, though he and I know full well that no hopium can now save our species, of all Earth’s species, we also know that . . . love is the answer. This essay first appeared here in July of 2022.

BELLOWS FALLS Vermont—(Hubris)—1 April 2023—I have never met Lane Becker. Indeed, there are probably many people with that name. I haven’t met any of them. I know about one, and I know one piece of work by him. I read a single, short essay by Lane Becker shortly after it was posted at hackernoon.com on 19 June 2016. I quote from the essay frequently, and I recently engaged in lengthy conversation about the essay with friends on the patio. It’s titled, “All Human Systems are Enormous Trash Fires.”

Trigger alert: The following essay quotes directly from Becker’s essay. In so doing, this essay includes a few words many people would consider inappropriate for polite conversation. On the other hand, anybody who purposely reads my work in this space is probably unimpressed with polite conversation.

I’ll cut to the chase. The gist of Becker’s short essay is contained within the latter half of a single paragraph: “All human systems are enormous trash fires. Every single one, no matter how pretty it looked from the outside, or how enchanting those first gossamer months were, will eventually prove to be a goddamn disasterpants clusterfuck. Your company, your organization, your church, your campaign, your band, your political movement, your city, your dinner party, your revolution: At some point, you’ll look up, notice everything around you has been torched, and say to yourself, ‘Holy shit, this place is an enormous fucking trash fire.’”

If you find these three sentences offensive, then the remainder of this essay is not for you.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not intentionally provocative. It comes naturally to me.

More than 62 years on this beautiful planet, including nearly all of my adult life spent within the privileged service of academia, tells me this: We’re screwed. We hover on the brink of extinction, and we’re taking the entire living planet down the proverbial drain with us. Not only that, but relatively few people acting in a relatively short period of time are responsible. It’s not you, Dear Reader. It’s not me, either. I’m merely the messenger. Like me, you’re collateral damage as the wealthy pursue more wealth.

It’s all of us, and it’s none of us. It’s CEOs and political “leaders.” It’s the corporate media working on behalf of the 0.1 percent. It’s fossil-fuel companies lying to us, with support from politicians and the corporate media. In my cognizant moments, I cannot hold soccer moms responsible for taking their kids to practice in minivans. On the other hand, it’s easy and appropriate to blame the fossil-fuel companies that knew about runaway climate change and chose to lie to us about it. Generations have come and gone as the liars have benefitted at the expense of habitat for humans on Earth.

Can we rightfully, righteously blame them? Would we have acted differently in their privileged shoes? I’d love to think so, although evidentiary support is difficult to find. It’s difficult to argue with Becker’s logic: “[I]f you’re wondering why the particular system you’re in is always such an enormous trash fire, the answer is because there’s no other way for it to be. No other place is going to be any less of an enormous trash fire. Everything is ablaze, always and forever.”

After all, as with other organisms, human animals almost certainly lack any significant amount of free will. Our ability to choose—to choose freely, in light of the circumstances—is restricted to the equivalent of a moon shot or, more likely, a Pluto shot. Yes, we believe we are choosing, every day, all the time. Instead, we are responding with a decision that is made long before we are cognitively capable of deciding. I’ve provided a tiny sample of the evidentiary support for the virtual absence of free will by humans in this space for the past five years. There is much more, of course, with a decent overview provided by Dr. Stephen Cave in The Atlantic. As Cave points out, free will is an illusion and, contrary to this tidbit, ethicists believe we should act as if the illusion is real. I agree, although doing so makes my truth-telling head spin.

Circling back to Becker’s short essay, “Everything is ablaze, always and forever” is a crucial point: “Once you recognize that all human systems are enormous trash fires, you stop trying to figure out how to switch to a system that isn’t an enormous trash fire, since they don’t exist. Instead, you ask better questions about your current trash fire. Like, ‘Am I doing everything I can to contain this enormous trash fire, even though I know it will never go out?’ ‘Do the people in charge recognize that this whole place is an enormous trash fire?’ And, most importantly, ‘Am I surrounded by a team of firefighters or a team of arsonists?’”

Of course, asking and especially answering these questions assumes we have control over how to act in light of the ongoing trash fire that comprises our lives. Alas, I suspect we can only pursue Becker’s final paragraph, and that pursuit is limited by our virtual absence of free will: “Eventually you even start to appreciate the beauty of it. How impressive it is that we manage to get anything done at all, given how completely trash everything is, and how on fire it is all the time. How good it feels when you manage to put out even a tiny piece of it. How lucky we are that we get to try, even as the world burns all around us.”

To the limited extent our free will allows it, we can appreciate that we are here, against virtually impossible odds. We can appreciate the beauty of this pale blue dot. We can appreciate that as individuals, communities, societies, and even as a species, we get to try to put out the fire. We get to improve the trash-fire-filled day of someone we love by telling them we love them. Maybe, just maybe, in the face of the never-ending trash fire and the impossible odds against putting it out, we can bring a smile to a single face for a single moment. If we can do better than that, I cannot imagine how.

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