It should be impossible to ignore or deny certain truths - like the laws of physics, for example. Yet the never-ending gamboling with irrefutable foundational facts is distracting us from dealing with one inevitable dilemma - delineated in such stark contours by events enveloping Ukraine, Russia, and NATO.
The industrial code, ontological framing, and entropic narratives that were the genesis of our prevailing civilizational worldview and its moral ethos are proving to be dysfunctional. No longer fit for purpose, they are causing a state of collapse within and across the world-system.
The decline into disorder and volatility pervading the Global North, likely to infect the whole of humanity in due course, has turned feral. On so many levels it is reaching a point of no return - acquiring a momentum that could prove to be unstoppable unless prudent action is taken soon. The implications are well known and discussed in forums of all kinds. We must radically alter how we relate to each other, and to the Earth on which we rely for our sustenance, if our species is to survive the increasingly hostile conditions we ourselves have generated within the cycle of desire and consumption.
One example will suffice to illustrate the urgency. Last week I inadvertently stumbled across an international law so inherently delusional that I had never even considered anything like it could possibly exist. Indeed, if anyone had told me about it I might have imagined they were describing the most absurd Monty Python sketch.
I am referring to the rules of war or 'international humanitarian law' as it is formally known. This is a set of international rules, based on the Geneva Conventions that are endorsed by 198 states. They establish what can and cannot be done during armed conflicts. Evidently the main purpose of these rules is to maintain some semblance of humanity during wars. They are meant to save lives and reduce suffering. And yet, instead of preventing or outlawing war in the first place, and establishing steps that would police such law, they attempt to regulate how wars are fought. I have never heard anything so farcically futile in all my life.
The truth is these laws are ignored by everyone. Once war starts all propriety is abandoned. Rare individuals might occasionally offer lip service to humanitarian protocols. By and large though, any sanity ensconced in 'law' is entirely absent. How could it not be when only greed and furious rage shroud evil? To propose 'maintaining a semblance of humanity' during war is preposterous and at best a cruel joke. War is merciless and relentless. It turns the mildest of souls into savage beasts at the command of licensed thugs in uniform. It is blind to brutality, rape, pillage, and the killing of innocents. War is pure barbarism, a scar on humanity, stationed far outside and beyond the bounds of morality.
War can never be justified. We should stop pretending that it can. Nor is there anything remotely virtuous or honourable about warfare. We should stop pretending there are situations when war becomes acceptable. Nothing about war is tolerable. No religious dogma, moral principle, or self- righteous ambition can justify the horror. There are no heroes in war, only troops of misinformed and compliant youth sacrificing their lives for no good reason. Nothing exonerates those in power from sending young people to their death. No cause imaginable can justify the atrocity of war.
And if Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, which I do not doubt, then the likes of Tony Blair, George Bush and his son George W. Bush, John Howard, Barack Obama, lead a column of narcissistic men in power: psychopaths who, over centuries, have resorted to aggression, bullying, and bloodshed to achieve their self-centered and prejudiced goals.
But the real tragedy is that none of these men - who are invariably etched into the chronicles of the human project as great warriors and conquerors - add anything of value to what it means to be human. Each tyrant, each war leader, each petty martinet, each deranged victor, merely set back civilization by decades. Consider this...
Around 65 million years ago, an asteroid killed 75 per cent of all life on this planet. Today we are challenged by another mass extinction - the sixth in Earth's history. This event has already begun. But this time Homo sapiens are that asteroid. Through toxic industrial practices that now cater for 7.937 billion of us through an addiction to extraction, we have managed to destroy two-thirds of the world's rainforests, half the coral reefs, and 87 per cent of all wetlands. Increasingly sick seas, stricken by the effluent of modernity are losing oxygen, while humans remain hooked on making more and more stuff that isn't actually needed and, in many cases, is actually bad for us.
Almost one million species are on the brink of extinction - including iconic species such as the Australian koala, China's giant panda, asian elephants, gorillas, blue whales, snow leopards, and tigers. And all we can do is to buy more weapons that fuel hate, annihilating each other in a mass paranoia that defies reason.
The only sane path forward is a profound 2nd-order metamorphosis, accompanied by a new set of empathic and cooperative principles for humanity operating pluriversally and at scale, along with the reinvention of our most life-critical systems, in a manner that respects and celebrates the sacredness of all life on Earth.
These activities will require a giant leap of consciousness if we are to collectively liberate rational ways of understanding each other while eliminating anti-human conduct. One such priority must comprise banning wars, prosecuting war crimes, along with the dismantling and outlawing of all mechanisms, technologies, armaments, and practices suckled on the swollen breasts of industrial military establishments - including the proliferation of weapons, both criminal and those so shamefully condoned by nation-states.
This must be deemed a final warning to humanity. It is aimed not just at averting catastrophe but pivoting from an insane ethos and trajectory to pathways of reason. It is the last opportunity to swing the future destiny of homo sapiens from the path of extinction to one of endurance.