2030: The Ends of Worlds
The Hindu Maha Puranas describe the present as the mere beginning of the worst of the four world ages: the age of conflict and sin, marked by strife, discord, quarrel or contention. The Kali Yuga lasts 432,000 years, and we’re 5,122 years in.
It’s entirely plausible that the world began to end 5,122 years ago.
The contemporary study of cultural evolution refers to terms often brought over from biological evolution, terms such as
niche selections (the point where a new behavioural or cultural trait emerges),
adaptive radiation (the growth of popularity of this trait), and
maximum complexity (new ways to exhibit this particular behaviour or culture become rarer and rarer).
I refer above to one particular niche selection which I see as one of the teardrops of cultural evolution leading to a concept we now know as modern civilisation… which in itself is a combination of two murky and wicked concepts:
Modernity
Consider that there is a point where modernity evolves into Modernity with a capital M, refering to institutionalised Western modernity, conventionally described as emerging and establishing itself during the European Renaissance:
Modernity is a paradigm shift in human thinking and human relations that ushered in the advent of modern science, technology, nation states, money economy, capitalism, and industrialism in Western societies. Fundamentally, modernity is our post-traditional way of being; it is the post-Medieval consciousness that has left no human institutions untouched in the Western societies. The philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650) — which created a dualism between mind and body, and had a purely mechanistic view of the universe — was a zygote of this new consciousness.
modernity however, with a little m, sits much deeper in our evolutionary psyche than a mere cultural outlook imposed by a dominant global hegemony.
It is coincidentally pointed to in one aspect of Modernity:
“a state of being whereby life is principally and disenchantingly lived in terms of standards, procedures, quantities, and bureaucracies — many of which are blindly unperceptive or intentionally disregardful to the ever-changing human [or environmental] conditions.”
These are the layers of separation that became normalised through the physical, mental and social structures of civilisation.
Civilisation
Wikipedia describes the concept of civilisation:
a complex society characterised by urban development, social stratification, a form of hierarchical government, and symbolic systems of communication (such as writing). Civilisations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics, such as centralisation, the domestication of both humans and other organisms, specialisation of labour, culturally-ingrained ideologies of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon farming and expansionism.
People moved away from traditional agroecology and began to cultivate food crops and livestock in farms. Social hierarchy appeared as an outcome of agricultural surplus and increasing local population: not everyone needs to be farmers. This is the invention of a class system that was made possible by the twin inventions of land ownership (on the pretense of protection) and landless peasants (capitalising upon immigrants).
The need to maintain this system of control gave rise to the concept of hegemony. Civilisation, unpleasant as it is, needs to market itself as visually impressive, materially comfortable, morally advanced, socially desirable— in order to continue to exist at all. Expansionist ideology takes root.
Historically, “a civilisation” has often been understood as a larger and “more advanced” culture, in implied contrast to smaller, supposedly “primitive” cultures. In this broad sense, a civilisation contrasts with non-centralized tribal societies, including the cultures of nomadic pastoralists, Neolithic societies or hunter-gatherers; however, sometimes it also contrasts with the cultures found within civilizations themselves.
Social revolutions driven by class warfare within civilisations come in waves, in cycles, even as civilisational hegemony swallows the world.
The particular cultural evolutionary teardrop of modern civilisation is the dominant teardrop on our planet. It’s quite possible that it nucleated from a niche selected 5,122 years ago.
The world ended in the 14th century.
The Age of Discovery arose from two major developments. The first was a burgeoning interest in the European ruling classes to control maritime trade through military might and intimidation, and to profit through taxes and market manipulation. The second was the Black Death (1346 to 1353), the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history with a death toll of 75–200 million in Eurasia and North Africa.
A cultural rationalisation amongst the European ruling classes for their own economic growth through colonisation came from the Catholic Pope, who issued a series of Papal Bulls that form the foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery. The church authorised the state “to conquer Saracens and pagans” and consign them to “perpetual servitude”.
How to do this at scale, and how to separate the deeds of business from the morality of man? The crucial innovation was the concept of the corporation:
an organisation — usually a group of people or a company — authorised by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law “born out of statute”; a legal person in legal context) and recognized as such in law for certain purposes.
This toxic combination of post-plague defense through offense, economic growth through cancerous profiteering, and divine validation of race supremacy led to European invasions all around the world, committing genocide and ethnocide upon most of the globe — destroying natural and human worlds again and again and again. European world domination through 600 years of war, rape and slavery cemented the cultural foundations of global institutions of the 20th and 21st centuries.
This is the nucleation and proliferation of the One World: the ontological parasite that seeks to exterminate other worlds.
The world ended in the 14th century. But not the One World — it had just been born.
The world ended in the early 20th century.
World War I brought European colonial hegemony to new levels, through accelerated technological development of weapons of mass destruction, through the accelerated institutional development of propaganda and nationalism, and through accelerated cultural development of the moral justification and vindication of the West’s One World.
World War II was the stage upon which new hardware and software could be practised — leading further to the birth of hybrid warfare that was born in colonial institutions as they operated in the Global South, and went through puberty during the Cold War.
The entire story of the world was suddenly re-written by two white men in 1941: a one-page document called the Atlantic Charter signed by Roosevelt and Churchill, both representing different incarnations of the West’s One World.
This is also when the perfected bastardisation of the original principles of the art-science of economics became a reflection of humanity’s narcissism instead of its altruism: the dawn of industrial capitalism fueled by Western colonisation and cultural supremacy.
This was the birth of The Great Acceleration: the dramatic, continuous and roughly simultaneous surge in growth rate across a large range of measures of human activity, often indicated as starting in the 1950s.
Though the death toll of both world wars is estimated at 67–97 million, the associated ecological destruction remains unstudied and unquantified.
The ultimate military technology, an explosive bomb fueled by nuclear fission, quite suddenly brings about, just six decades later, the possibility of a fifteen-minute world war that definitively puts the fullstop at the end of the anthropocene’s geological era of mass extinction.
Special mention: China 🇨🇳🐼
A list of wars by death toll further illuminates Chinese hegemony and imperialism, though there is the influence of the Opium Wars to consider as well. The Chinese ruling classes would eventually simply use Western colonial hegemony to their own benefit in later decades.
#howtheturntables
The world ended in the early 20th century. But not the One World — it was just a toddler.
The world ended in 1972.
Wartime industrialisation turned into a victory lap of industrialised consumerism that never actually ended — it was only accelerating by 1972. Multi-national corporations operated with impunity with disregard for environmental or social sustainability. It was a time of freedom and opportunity (a.k.a. lawlessness and recklessness).
The years leading up to 1972 saw plenty loud human concern for what human activity was doing to our environment on a planetary scale. The public, especially the American public, was shocked by what they saw in the news — oil spills, extreme smog and haze, etc. There were protests, conferences, articles in mainstream news, radio shows, documentaries, you name it.
In 1972, our ruling classes made us believe that they were also concerned about what human activity was doing to our environment on a planetary scale. They made us believe that they had received the message loud and clear, and to prove it, they set up institutions such as the UN Environment Programme to show that they intended to work together to satisfactorily resolve the issues people were protesting about.
The Club of Rome released the only publication they are really remembered for: The Limits to Growth, a report to the Club of Rome looking at the planetary effects of exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources, studied for the first time using a computer simulation — based upon and developed to align with Jay Forrester’s system dynamics representation of the world, World Dynamics. Its findings:
- If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
- It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on [E]arth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realise [their] individual human potential.
- If the world’s people[s] decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.
This was the first international postulation of global civilisational collapse. The report talked of transitioning “from growth to global equilibrium”.
By this point, our ruling classes were made up of privileged folk who controlled entire systems of governance at national and supranational levels. Through the influence of powerful corporate lobbies, they aligned with the ideology of progressive human development through economic growth and repeated the American colonial mantra of trickle-down economics: a rising tide lifts all boats.
Despite the political “independence” of much of the Global South, Western imperialism was stronger than ever, through systems of institutional and cultural control the Global North exerted through hard power (military and economic means) and soft power (diplomatic, cultural, and historical influence). This slowed processes of real decolonisation in the post-colonial period right down to nought, and kept the Global South at the extractive whims and fancies of Global North governments and corporations.
The Limits to Growth was in clear conflict with colonial hegemony’s propaganda of economic growth, progress, development and prosperity forever as a model, a roadmap, for the Global South to follow. The flawed hegemonic logic being that the Global South are too stupid to figure it out for themselves, and because their technology was too primitive to achieve the wealth the Global North had achieved through sheer hard work.
And so the report was denounced, lambasted, criticised in every public international forum.
As our ruling classes promised us they would do everything in their power to stop environmental rape, they saw opportunities for co-optation and greenwashing, capitalising on profitable openings of the new #greeneconomy. We were, after all, well-embedded within the Great Acceleration where citizens were well on their way to becoming consumers born and bred. Just one more generation…
The wealth and power of our ruling classes were amassed on a foundation of colonial extractivism and cultural hegemony. The colonisers’ propaganda is music to the colonised mind. So the ruling classes formulated ways to rationalise #greengrowth — pretending colonial extractivism could be carried out without harm.
This obfuscation was successful.
The rest of humanity, even if we did have the means to overthrow the ruling classes in 1972, were constantly being told to be afraid that the Cold War would bring about the end of civilisation. We were happy to remain, for the moment, bribed with the material comforts of modern civilisation. It was simply easier to believe whatever we were told.
The world ended in 1972. But not the One World — it was just a kindergartner.
The world ended in 2012.
Humanity locked itself in, for perhaps the last time, into a downward spiral of hopium addiction, insisting on not learning from the complex civilisational crises of 2008/9, insisting on #moreofthesamefaster.
This lock-in led to the United Nations’ Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, both vehicles amassing and centring colonial hegemonic power in their ecofascist quest to “save the world” by 2030, and again by 2100. New innovations in Global North propaganda: protect the relevance of global institutions that maintain the soft power of the One World.
Let me describe this hopium lock-in from the perspective of a fictional, ambitious sustainability professional hailing from the Global South who believes they have managed to secure career paths of ever-increasing influence within our global institutions in the Global North. Our protagonist in this short story is Maria, a young woman in her late teens, who is born to indigenous and civilised heritages. The perfect bridge.
Having grown up in a middle-class family in a small city in a relatively privileged part of the Global South, Maria somehow — through one of the few diversity scholarship programmes available in her country — is able to study at a highly Westernised, elite academic institution in the biggest city in her country, a school so exclusive that the ratio of places to applicants is something like 1:10,000. Maria feels a tinge of guilt over this privilege, and resolves to turn the discomfort into motivation, to make the absolute best out of the opportunities afforded to her that the vast majority don’t receive.
She does well enough in her studies to be able to qualify for another scholarship for an advanced Masters programme at an elite university in the Global North — and not just anywhere in the Global North, but in the cities representing the very centres of colonial power — London, Paris and New York. Maria and her family are overjoyed. This is their ticket out of the debilitating systemic oppression they experience even in the middle classes of the Global South.
Maria moves to London, telling herself that she’s here to challenge the status quo. With the perception of meritocracy that she has experienced in her life in education, she is staunchly convinced that she will be able to change The System by joining it and tinkering with it from the inside.
But the challenges aren’t over of course. There’s racist and patriarchal cultural and institutional barriers to overcome. Visas, physical and mental health, finding friends she can actually relate to, etc. are constant risks as she finds herself isolated in her pursuits. At the conclusion of her studies, she secures a permanent position in the private sector, within the area of governance in a particular sector within London. She experiences organisational forces that are designed to hold her in suspended professional development due to conservative cultures rooted in coloniality. Every idea she comes up with is either stolen by higher-ups without credit, or criticised to damnation by competitive peers, who are pitted against each other for promotions, desirable new positions, etc. On top of that, she is surrounded by privilege and ignorance — by whiteness, by Londonness, by Englishness, by Europeanness.
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Diversity is what Maria longs for. Purpose. Community empowerment. Bettering our global society. Alleviating systemic injustice. Sustainable development. All her life, she has known a single dominant organisation that has been doing the work she longs to embed herself in: the United Nations. This is the very same organisation that had seeded such ideas in her as a child in the first place. She didn’t come to London to be held back in this company department. Of course she was grateful for the financial security that she was able to afford her family back home. She was happy her father finally was able to retire from physical labour to focus on his health and enjoy his marriage, his house, his life. But this firm just isn’t the place where she can really bloom.
She begins to write applications for jobs within the United Nations and its allied agencies and organisations. It’s a massive world. Many professionals are employed within the United Nations ecosystem. There must be a place for young Maria given her excellence in academia and profession. She wanted to surround herself with people who wanted to work together towards the same futures she envisioned ever since she was a child: a just, equitable future full of diversity, of peace, of beauty.
Months go by. Maria’s made dozens of applications, been shortlisted within several long-drawn interview processes, and had repeatedly been turned down in favour of someone with just a hair’s width more academic, professional or societal validation. It’s always a young leaders’ award, or having led an immersion programme in Southeast Asia or Central Africa to help refugees build houses, or having invented a gadget for safe drinking water that made it to national news for about fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, her relationship with her manager was becoming increasingly tedious and strenuous.
One day, she wakes up, and sitting right there in her email inbox is the offer letter she’s coveted for decades. Maria didn’t quite care about the salary offer — it was always going to be much more than enough — she cared instead about the opportunity to finally be able to do the work she wanted to do.
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Fifteen years later, Maria has climbed the ladder within the UN system. She’s lost her idyllic perspective of what the world of sustainable development and impact investment is. She now sees it as it really is: a farce. Everywhere she turns, she’s looking dead in the eyes at someone else with a fat paycheck whose only purpose in the system is to be able to humblebrag about what a great person they are, working for the betterment of human society through advancing international financing mechanisms for nature-based solutions in the Global South… or something or other.
Meanwhile, in the real world, nothing has changed. Corporate power has increased exponentially, systemic oppression is more blatant than ever, and the climate crisis is rearing its ugly head. The monster that is the United Nations is dominated by privileged white folk deliberating what they must do next to save humankind, the academic research and next-gen technologies that must be invested in, the development funds that must filter to scalable methodologies, blah blah blah, even as they miss the throngs of indigenous rights protestors riding atop herds of elephants stomping through their debate chambers.
Maria breaks down over a glass of New Zealand pinot noir on a lonely Saturday afternoon in her comfortably lush Victorian flat in central London, overlooking a quiet park where squirrels anxiously check for predators before dashing madly between trees. She and her boyfriend, a progressive white man eight years her senior within Zurich’s impact investment ecosystem (someone she had met through her professional travels in sustainable finance and governance), were taking a break. He wanted to talk about starting a family, while she was trying to figure out the tensions tearing her career path apart. The voice of her indigenous-heritage mother rings in her ears: This civilisation is one of separation. Remember, child, their ways are immature and incorrect.
It’s hopeless, Maria writes in her daily meditation journal. Was I so foolish to think I could change their systems? They’re built against change.
She decides to take an extended sabbatical to spend time back home, in the Global South. She rents out her London flat to an artsy Japanese-Brazilian couple running an independent queer theatre on South Bank, and takes a one-way flight home.
What was meant to be a trip lasting three weeks became a several-month grassroots tour through the continent she grew up on. This is it, she realised, the resolving of those existential tensions. It was systemic work that was causing dissonance with her. She simply needed to get back to the ground where the real work is being done with real people.
She unlocks her phone, takes a straight-faced selfie to remember the moment, writes a well-rehearsed resignation email to her line manager, and sends a text to her still-waiting boyfriend in Zurich: “We need to talk.”
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Two years later, the grassroots NGO Maria founded in her hometown has secured major funding through her connections in London — to empower young indigenous women by helping them hone their voices, their impact, and their global networks. The Japanese-Brazilian couple she rented her apartment to were instrumental in making those connections. She’s pregnant with her first child, after a whirlwind romance with a high-profile Bolivian-American human rights NGO founder that just felt right. Her team’s work is blowing up on social media: they go viral every other week. Murmurs begin to spread amongst her ex-colleagues within the UN system: Maria’s doing the thing. We should invite her to speak at one of our events on inspirational leadership — in fact don’t we have that women’s empowerment festival coming up?
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This is the lock-in. Straight shot to the famed hyped-up town of #nowhere.
We are looking at a highly efficient mechanism here that is the system of paralysis the United Nations’ agencies and organisations represent — the staged nature of it is precisely the clue. Well-honed and highly refined over the eighty years during which humanity has destroyed the planet it exists upon.
The purpose of this behemoth is to trap the folk who would otherwise spend their time upending the global system arising from colonial hegemony. These are the people who would otherwise look for other ways to think differently in many different spheres.
This is by design.
Let me say again.
The ruling classes within the UN and the entire sector of “sustainable development” have created this system to ensure existential, cultural and economic security of colonial hegemony — by trapping the very folk who want to spend their energy alleviating systemic injustices — into a well-funded paralysis driven by generational propaganda, and genuine hope for exiting systemic oppression.
There is a massive pipeline of young people queueing up to join this rah-rah kumbaya scam. At the end of the pipeline, people are being spat out, using their privilege to join an NGO, do more poverty porn, and accelerate #thecrisis.
This is the global culture that the UN and the industry of neoliberal optimism is perpetuating in order to secure colonial hegemony.
This is yet another mechanism of ethnocide.
My fictional character Maria never realises that the oppressors, this whole time, are, and always have been, the creators of the narratives that have dictated her life. She never wakes up to find out that her rapist is her father. She will likely never be able to see that even with her grassroots NGO, she remains co-opted, part of the system of colonial hegemony that perpetuates ecocide and ethnocide — not least her own.
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2012 was when humanity locked itself into industrialised, globalised, Westernised civilisation soothed by neoliberal optimism. 2012 was when humanity locked itself into the One World that seeks to exterminate other worlds — through a widespread addiction to hopium.
The world ended in 2012. But not the One World — it was just starting at school.
The world ended in 2021.
In 2021, our nostalgia for the “civilised” past is the big failure of the outgoing generations who hold on to a lot of the systemic power in global human society. And it looks, by all accounts, like we Millennials and Gen Z’s have inherited this culture, even as we are paralysed by it, over-intellectualising and learning badly.
This was the year that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released, to great fanfare amongst mainstream media, sustainability professionals, left-leaning politicians and environmental activists, one of three working group reports that is meant to make up their Sixth Assessment Report on the state of Earth’s climate systems as they were about three years ago. This very successfully distracted everyone from everything except CO2 emissions, while making obvious three separate camps: Blind Determination, Pensive Anxiety, and Gleeful Validation.
This was the year that the United Nations Food Systems Summit was held as a highly-anticipated World Economic Forum-led pagent of white supremacy and corporate saviourship through various narratives pointing to commercialised regenerative agriculture as the only silver bullet worth investing in if we are to feed the world, address our climate emergency, and congratulate ourselves for saving our planet. A Global People’s Summit on Food Systems was held by land rights and food sovereignty activists alongside the global peasant movement — in a boycott of the UNFSS that was missed entirely by virtually everyone who was at UNFSS.
This was the year that the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress created yet another high-profile trade show and photo op for big-name NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund to advance their sector-leading colonial agendas in the world of international conservation. Survival International’s largely-ignored counter congress to decolonise conservation, “Our Land, Our Nature!”, brought together the true grassroots perspectives that were conveniently not invited to the IUCN’s event.
This was the year that the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held its twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties #COP26 (the whitest and most privileged ever), no closer to real climate action from state governments. Our colonisers came together to deliberate inaction, protectionism and economic growth on a finite planet, within the context of accelerating global environmental collapse — something they have known about for decades and is only now arriving in the houses of the Global North.
The singular obsession with CO2 emissions intensified when a white Swedish teenager, who quickly became the co-opted youth climate activist at every international event on climate, walked out of talks at COP26, denouncing it as a failure.
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This was the year that geopolitical security threats began to seriously heat up, particularly in the South China Sea and the Middle East — with yet more US colonial and imperial perspectives for the need for and development of more advanced hybrid warfare, to protect with honour what they see as “democracy” or “human rights”. Military might fuels colonial hegemony.
Our acceleration of societal collapse into an ironically never-ending World War III is sorely missed by Global North and privileged sustainability professionals everywhere as they encourage Global South folk who are experiencing life-threatening systemic oppression to kindly join them in sitting leisurely around a crackling campfire, holding hands and singing major-key songs about reducing carbon emissions through regenerative agriculture as ecocide and ethnocide rages on around us. Remember, self-care is of utmost importance!
The world ended in 2021. But not the One World — it was just about past puberty and going to university.
It goes faster now.
How will the world end in 2030?
Sustainable development via ecofascism?
#nice
Humans have been made this way through our biological, social and cultural evolution. The cultural evolution of this single species, that has within 100 years driven the Earth to its sixth mass extinction, is not slowing down its efforts to turn Earth into a dead planet.
This species sees what it is doing, it is partially aware of its actions and their consequences, and some individuals within the species actually appear to be somewhat horrified by it. However the forces dictating this cultural evolution appear only to be gaining momentum, not slowing down.
While the species may be seen to be seeking to learn, it hasn’t had much practice at admitting wrongs, taking on other perspectives and embodying learnings within its civilisational perspective, despite cycle after cycle of civilisational collapse in its most recent ten-thousand year history. It remains proud of recent and current mistakes — hence locking itself into repeating them.
Next stop: Mars.
