On Becoming The First Species To Go Extinct From Politeness
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
We’re on track to become the first species to go extinct due to politeness. Gonna follow the dinosaurs out the door because it was too uncomfortable and confrontational to tell a few billionaires and empire managers to fuck off.
As Howard Zinn put it:
“As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem…. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
Or as Utah Phillips put it, “The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.”
They have names and addresses, but we don’t stop them. We let them wave armageddon weapons around for global power agendas and let them destroy our biosphere for profit, and who knows where they’re headed with all this AI stuff with zero regulations or accountability. They just get to play games with the lives of every organism on this planet, completely unimpeded.
We don’t allow this for any good reason. We just don’t want to be rude. Stopping them would feel like a bit much, you know? A bit too much shrill woke-policing. Nobody likes a humorless scold.
What a ridiculous reason for the world to end.
I like to think about the Fermi paradox sometimes. You know, the apparent contradiction between the fact that we can’t detect any signs of extraterrestrial life in our galaxy and the fact that the Drake equation suggests we should be seeing some due to the sheer number of stars in the Milky Way.
People have come up with all kinds of theories to resolve this paradox. Maybe the ETs are keeping signs of their existence hidden from us for some reason. Maybe there has been life on other planets many times throughout our galaxy’s history, but whenever life advances up to a certain level of intelligence it always self-destructs by cannibalizing its own biosphere or annihilating itself with nuclear weapons.
One theory I like to contemplate is the possibility that there is life on other planets and that those life forms will one day evolve high levels of intelligence, but we’re not seeing any signs of extraterrestrial technology because humans are the first life forms to arrive at this stage.
Isn’t that trippy to imagine? If WE’RE the grown-ups here? If we are the eldest sibling in our galactic family? The aliens never came to rescue us with technologies from a civilization millions of years more advanced than ours because there ARE no civilizations more advanced than ours. We got here first.
Imagine how silly it would be if we went extinct due to politeness, and then other civilizations came here millions of years later and found out that’s what happened to their galaxy’s firstborn intelligent life. If they showed up and found a bunch of ruins on a poisoned planet, with a sign that says “Sorry, we tried to stay alive but we didn’t feel entitled enough to make Sam Altman stop being a dick.”
What an embarrassment that would be. We’d be the laughing stock of the Milky Way. Whole insults would be made out of us.
“Someone needs to put a stop to this nonsense, but I don’t want to make a scene.”
“Ah, quit being such a little homo sapien!”
What a dopey legacy for a species to leave behind.
Let’s turn things around before it comes to that, shall we?
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What a great post. I never knew Utah Phillips but I had several friends who did.
It’s been too long since I’ve heard his name. Just before they made him, they broke the mould.
Here’s one of his best: Phillips is at a bar with a friend, and says: “I’m supposed to plow up the back garden so we can plant, but it’s a lot of work.”
Then he gets up, calls his house and says to his wife: “Honey, did you remember to bury those rifles out back?”
Sitting back down his friend asks if he needs help with the plowing, and Phillips says, “No, I got the FBI to do it for me.”
Everyday I self destruct on the inside a little, breaking away at the thought of how we are upon the beginning stages of the 6th mass extinction and we just… go on business as casual. I’m losing my mind and I’m struggling to come up for air when I try to convey my feelings of the urgency and people just want to talk about new season of that, new products, pretty people in Hollywood, who they want to fuck, and so forth… Please, we desperately, as you say, need to “turn things around before it comes to that.”