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Failed Species: The Rise and Fall of the Human Empire

From Steve Best
October 2022

Once a remarkably adaptive and highly successful species, Homo sapiens has become the victim of its own success, succumbing to its own “progress trap” that leads it to think the solution to its problems are more development and further growth. Humans – too many of them – have failed to learn from the mistakes of the past that brought down every moribund society and bloated empire.

“I’d like to share with you a revelation I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague.” “Agent Smith,” The Matrix (1999)

wildfires

Prologue

Throughout the last ten thousand years of history, human empires rose and fall, crumbling into pebbles and dust. Over the last two hundred thousand years, an even larger empire began its mighty and perilous ascent. From its home base in Africa, it established its presence everywhere throughout the globe, expanding endlessly in all directions, growing exponentially in numbers, colonizing land, other species, and entire peoples. Insatiable in its consumption of natural resources, addicted to growth, it left death, extinction, and destruction everywhere in its wake. This vast conglomerate was not the Persian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Ottoman, English, or American empires, but the consequence and aggregate of all particular empires and unsustainable hierarchical societies, namely, the human empire.

Today we call this planetary monolith “global capitalism,” but humans became global animals tens of thousands of years before the onset of capitalism. Humans created hierarchical and growth-addicted societies some ten thousand years ago and their ecocidal proclivities stretch back millennia more into prehistory. And just like every political empire of the past, the human empire has possibly reached its zenith and begun its downward spiral toward collapse. This empire’s peak and slide into catastrophe marks a new epoch not only in human history, but also the history of the earth. Debates over whether advanced societies have entered into a new “postmodernity” (see Best and Kellner 1991) pale in significance to the scientifically-based proposition that human activity has created a new epoch in geological history -- the age of the Anthropocene. This epoch characterized by the dominance of human influence over earth’s systems and has led to, among other colossal events, a sixth mass extinction crisis and runaway climate change.

Once a remarkably adaptive and highly successful species, Homo sapiens has become the victim of its own success, succumbing to its own “progress trap” that leads it to think the solution to its problems are more development and further growth. Humans – too many of them – have failed to learn from the mistakes of the past that brought down every moribund society and bloated empire. Just as today in the twenty-first century we are witnessing societies like Syria (and perhaps even the US) collapse into chaos and warfare, becoming “failed states,” so too, on a planetary scale, we behold the catastrophic wreckage of a failed species. We are living witnesses to the fact that every pathological lie and form of madness that humans have thrived on is now being refuted by an awakened earth system fighting back against the human onslaught, with devastating consequences to its parasitical social orders.

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