We Are Being Driven To Our Doom By Mindless Machines Of Our Own Making

It’s not impossible to solve our world’s problems, it only looks that way because we’ve created systems which cause human behavior to be driven by mindless mechanisms of our own making rather than by human interest.

We allow the blind pursuit of profit to govern the way the human species behaves on our planet. Corporations which are legally compelled to do whatever maximizes shareholder value are exerting more and more control over the state and its people. And now we’ve got AI being prepped to do whatever it’s going to do.

These are unthinking beasts of our own creation. And we let them rule our world.

Our lives are dominated by gods without brains. And we made the gods.

We are being driven to extinction by the headless horsemen of the apocalypse. And we built those headless horsemen, bolt by bolt, with our own hands.

War. Militarism. Ecocide. Exploitation. Imperialist extraction. These things happen because they are profitable, and we are led by systems and institutions which consistently cause the most profitable thing to happen. They continually slant all movement toward the most profitable outcome, regardless of the negative impact it can have on human beings and the other organisms with whom we share this planet.

That’s why the military-industrial complex exists. That’s why the rainforests and ice caps are vanishing while sprawling data centers spring up all over the place. That’s why ordinary people are getting poorer and more miserable while those who own and operate giant corporations get richer and more powerful.

These things aren’t happening because it’s the way things need to be. They’re not happening because of human nature or because of some immutable characteristic of the way human civilization has to unfold. They’re happening because the mindless forces we put in charge of our society made things that way.

We can dismantle capitalism and set up systems which center human interests instead of profit. We do have the power to unseat the plutocratic institutions which rule our nations and put the people in the throne of power. All we need is the will to do so — which is why so much propaganda indoctrination has gone into undermining our will to do so.

You can tell how unthinking and indoctrinated someone is by how willing they are to go along with the rule of the headless gods. People who reflexively defend the status quo, who defend police brutality and government warmongering, who make excuses for capitalist abuses and inequality. They’re just small reflections of the mindless gods they serve. They are as unthinking and unconscious as the corporations that are devouring our world. Mindless NPCs marching to the drumbeat of mindless corporate power.

Humans do this because it’s easier to give over our power than to accept responsibility for the outcome. We’re scared of getting the blame, so we hand power upwards. We keep handing it up and handing it up until there’s no one to hand it to, so we make empty automatons to hold our power for us.

It is a grave sin for us to abdicate our authority in this way. Humanity does need to take responsibility for the self-destructive trajectory it has set itself on, and reverse course.

It is absolutely within our ability to transcend our propaganda indoctrination and force a dramatic change in the way human civilization occurs. It is absolutely within our ability to make peace, feed and clothe everyone, and move into a collaborative relationship with each other and with our biosphere.

We only think it’s not possible because we’ve never done it before. But we’ve done lots of things we’d never done before until we did them.

We’ve just got to stop letting ourselves be whipped around by unthinking, unfeeling, amoral mechanisms of our own creation. We made them, so we can unmake them.

Reading by Tim Foley:

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/we-are-being-driven-to-our-doom-by