The UNWANTED plentitude of gas warfare

To many of us who see 'death as death', it has always been un-obvious why coughing to death from WWI gas clouds was so much different than being hit in the guts out in No Man's Land and coughing your life away for a half an hour while your comrades are helpless to intervene.

A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.

Plenticidal Revulsion (reductionism, reactionism) must always be simple - "terribly simple" - because Reality never is

The reaction thrown up by Plenticidal Revulsion (Lovecraftian Revulsion being the best known literary representation) must always and only seeks to see in its place a single, simple, pure vertical hierarchy and hegemony.

Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide

Plenticide (eugenics, genocide, pesticides) : human civilization of the Modern era seems determined to get rid of all of its nearest and dearest , leaving just a tiny 'saving seed' of the most perfect and the purest of humanity to exist all alone in this vast lifeless Universe.

It just didn't make sense : for the more evidence that emerged that the universe was old, vast and empty the harder humanity, circa 1930, tried to eliminate most of what little life was confirmed to exist in the universe : that of Earth itself.

LIFE is rarest thing in Universe, not some obscure precious metal

So why was Thirties humanity so eager to destroy 99.99% of it, in an act of collective plenticide that would have dwarfed the Nazi genocide of Jews and Romas ?

COMPLEXITY based science from SIMPLICITY based science : the post 1945 shift

Eugenics, the central science of Modernity, was a form of Reductionism and Plenticide.

Eugenics was all about reducing the existing 'impurities' it felt were present in the gene pool : like all of Modernity's sciences, it thought reality - in this case represented by the gene pool - would work much better if only it was much simpler.

Postmodern God's inordinate fondness for Beatles

Perhaps the old folks were right after all, and the deconstructionists wrong : perhaps popular postmodernity did not slowly and silently seep into our world like rising damp but instead arrived suddenly , on the Radio and the TV, with a noisy bang or a clang.

Putting the "pop" back into dating the rise of "popular" postmodernity : Beatlemania, November 1963

Because while the plenticidal modern world showed a decided un-fondness for beetles (and all other forms of exuberant natural fecundity), the postmoderns just as conversely show a decided fondness for the ever varying diversity of Nature.... and Beatles.

Would today's schooling even be around - if teachers acted as if Quantum physics really exists ?

The big three of Modernity (the Nazis, Communism and Imperial Capitalism) were all given a helping hand up ... when the pedagogy of Reductionism muddled into pedagogical reductionism.

So if I were a high school teacher, I would stop all that pedagogical reductionism and stop lying to my students.

We genuinely regret species loss - but we don't lose sleep over it

Morally, mass species extinction through plenticidal indifference is like the Nazi Hunger-Plan-in-slow-motion

If the Nazi Final Solution had been totally successful, ten million European Jews would have died violently by gas or bullet.

If the Nazi Hunger Plan had been totally successful, thirty million Eastern European Slavs and Jews would have slowly and quietly ebbed to death through hunger and cold.

If extent of intention rather than extent of execution marks the true magnitude of evil - and I believe it does, as do most people who have thought about it, then the Hunger Plan - though too little known - was the far greater Nazi evil.

All superweapons are plenticidal, even if they never kill anyone

1945's American-only atomic bomb was truly plenticidal (plentitude-reducing), but not because a full-out nuclear war would kill off thousands of the world's species in a few months.

It would have been just as plenticidal if it had never ever been used, but only threatened to be used.

Because its real target was not the Axis or even erstwhile allies like Russia - but rather Washington's favoured peace'n'wartime Allies !

Why deny something (extinction of others) you secretly HOPE is happening ?

It is generally agreed that no climate denier publicly denies the Sixth Extinction because they never ever regret other species disappearing - only if their own specie* is vanishing.

(*Specie = old fashioned term for money)

PLENTICIDE - not Ecocide or Mundicide

Plenticide is the deliberate 'pruning back' of 'excessive' anything (and everything) - simply because some/many/all people feel totally overwhelmed by abundance, either some of the time or all of the time.

Abundance of choice, abundance of complexity, abundance of competitors, abundance of debate and of decisions, the list goes on ---- plenticide happens because of primal fear from one or all of these reasons.

It needn't involve killing humans or even living beings - killing ideas and choices will do just as well in providing these plenticiders with their sought for relief.

Plenticidal Extinction

It is catchier, but less informative, to say we are living in the time of The Sixth Extinction than to use a ten cent word like The Anthropocene Extinction.

But I argue that even using a word like Anthropocene doesn't really begin to scratch the surface about what is truly unique about this latest - deliberately plenticidal - extinction.

Po, Po Pitiful Mo : too many Boomers praising plentitude & practising plenticide ...

Modernity's great sin was not its assumption that all our God-given diversity was actually, at its core, very simple, predictable and controllable.

Rather the sin lay in the fact that when Modernity's scientists discovered this not to be the case, they and it did not desist.

Instead human Hubris set about trying to create an alternative artificial simplicity that was predictable and controllable by Man alone : the Triumph of the Will over the Wind.

moving the Human Heart from plenticidal to commensal --- before we burn up the planet

In a race against time,  humanity's heart must move from its current hard-hearted plenticide to displaying a willingness to dine at a common table with all other lifeforms here on Lifeboat Earth.

And it must do so before we self-immolate ourselves and all other life on Earth and bring on the Sixth Extinction.

So yes, I do blog with urgency.

But nothing half as urgent as when I just lay on my bed staring up at the ceiling.

Lying there trying and trying and trying to find some sort of explanation as to just why we humans find self-immolating plenticide so much more attractive than simply agreeing to share this earth with the other lifeforms, that after all, both sustain it and us ....

Synthetics & Plenticide : All Mod (ernity) Cons

First:
you synthesize an artificial, man-made, *Ur-topia of static reduction and perfection - the way it supposedly was before Nature's plentitude of chaos took over.

Then :
(Sixth time unlucky) you plenticide the life out of all the species that your Ur-topia's manifest says are no longer 'needed on voyage' ...

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*Ur-topias, (I say), unlike u-topias, look backwards to a supposed Golden Age rather than forward to a new Golden Age

Sixth Extinction not a mere 'bycatch' of Modernity

Plenticide, along with Synthetic Autarky, is Modernity's main product, how it measures success, what Modernity does for a living.

The Sixth Extinction, if not exactly planned by Modernity , is hardly lamented by Modernity.

The Plenticide of Closed Commensality

The Nazis were very concerned - even in the depths of their upcoming defeat - about maintaining the social welfare, health and well being of all their citizens - without fear or favour.

The catch ?

If plenticidal pruning is always better than plentitude's chaos , then bigger is always better

Medicalizing Modernity

The  real reason why so many humans  can confidently proclaim that 'bigger is always better' without knowing in advance how 'bigger' will actually turn out , is because bigger always means fewer --- in any given biological, social or economic niche.

For example , instead of thousands of small town bankers all competing against each other in unpredictable chaotic ways, they can all merge into a few big national banks : each with just one CEO, one Board of Directors, one set of unbending lending rules etc.

Neat, tidy, orderly : Canadian static simplicity and predictability instead of American plentitude's dynamic chaos.

(So now you know why Canada and the US so differ in their industrial competitiveness !)

Yes, a merger into a bigger entity might mean more profits but it might not - for as many mergers quickly and costly de-merge as prosper - but that is not the real point.

Similarly those pea-counters in the media obsessed with seeing fewer municipalities (and fewer council members) are not really concerned about cost savings despite their claims.

This is because the hard evidence suggests that total for the new higher salaries, pensions and benefits for the fewer council members (and for their new support staff) far exceeds the total costs when we had many town councils with many councillors --- all paid peanuts and with no support staff.

This mantra is never ever really about more profits or fewer costs but is actually about maintaining own's mental health.

For billions of humanity, 'bigger is always better' really means 'much better for their own mental stability' : they simply can't handle too much change or variety very well --- it 'hurts' their head.

As for why, no one really knows for sure. We can tentatively blame it on their individual genetic brain chemistry, in combination with how they were individually raised.

This is not a full on/full off condition but something we humans all have in common, each of us set along a sliding continuum from 'manageable' to 'all-consuming'.

So always think of the mantra 'bigger is better' as a quasi-prozac pill and you'd be on the right track...

AKA Modernity : the era of parsimonious plenticide , 1875-1965

The art of denial is not a new 21st century thing.

Denying human caused climate disaster, denying the Holocaust, Stalin's crimes, the existence of rape culture --- they are all but a few of the sub-sets of one way 'to deal' with 'overwhelming' dynamic complexity.

While to most of us , choice is good and more choice is better, many of us direct our entire existence around dealing with feelings of being overwhelmed by plentitude.

Why they feel so excessively this way (because we all feel overwhelmed by plentitude at times) is a mystery.

It may be due to a combination of unique body chemistry that handles stress badly and their parents (with similar body chemistry) being obsessed with dirt and order.

One of the most satisfying intellectual ways for them to deal with 'overwhelming' plentitude is to deny its very existence.

Its real - substantive - existence.

'Oh yes, the surface complexity is there all right - we shan't deny that.'

'But most of it is rubbish, useless, worthless, dirty, dangerous - and to claim that all of it is valuable is a form of false consciousness.'

'Once you properly separate out what is valuable, worthy , clean and stable and discard - eliminate/liquidate - the rest , life becomes much simpler and happier.'

Or so the plenticidial modernists claimed.

Modernity then was a great era for classification & then binning.

To its proponents, parsimonious plenticide was the best intellectual way to deal with the abundant scientific evidence that reality was much much more complex, older, wider, deeper than anyone had ever previously thought.

This fact was materially thrust in their faces every day by the effects of co-current globalization cum modernization - seemingly the planet and all its beings were daily arriving at the customs and immigration gates of their country.

So : normal vs deviant , normal vs degenerated, normal vs deformed, normal vs unfit , normal vs dirty - on and on the classifying and destruction went.

No gene pool was ever shallow enough for them - any and every gene pool could always do with a little more draining.

The surface rubbish was complex but the solution wasn't : a little quick painless culling by some super heroes (and super nations) dressed up in capes and tights and it would all be resolved.

One might think evolution and progress as having been invented expressly to allow a moral mechanism for killing off one's new neighbours with a clear conscience.

Yes the world is a plentitude , but of mostly also rans and a few winners and the also rans will be quietly liquidated after the results of the marathon have been announced.

Reductionism as parsimonious plenticide

In the physical sciences , reductionism was the parsimonious plenticide equivalent : claiming all reality could be reduced to the reliable and predictable assembling and re-assembling of a handful of atoms of a handful of elements , all obeying a handful of  knowable, simple, eternal and universal laws.

For this was the great age of Erector and Meccano sets - vividly expressing how parents and grandparents thought their young should view the world.

But Modernity's big problem would not go away - because reality is really and truly complex and dynamic - and everything science has discovered since 1875 renders this more not less so.

In our new era of global commensality we (most of we , anyhow) see the interconnectedness of everything on Earth : many ,many things and events all interacting with each other is some direct, some distantly indirect ways.

But many of us don't, still in denial that the era of modernity was wrong or that it has ended.

And this attitude is fueling - petro fueling - the destruction of this planet.

For on all of the world's Wall Streets, the Alpha Male 'Masters of the Universe' lead the way in denying that we can't really master the universe ....

Two Tier Internet the Johnson-Reed Bill of its day : plenticiding "digital plentitude"

Modernity (1875-1965), the mean-spirited ideology that was a panicky response to all the plentitudes that global modernization and advances in science had thrown up , has a lot of faults to its credit.

One of the most infamous was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Bill, an Act that shut New York City's Golden Door for over 40 years.

Republican Albert Johnson ,along with fellow Republican David Reed, had foundationed that Bill's restrictions upon their racist cum social Darwinist cum eugenic cum anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-catholic philosophy.

Why did they fear the new plentitude so much ?

Perhaps because an expanded plentitude of choices and voices and decisions seems to overwhelm as many people (something about their brain chemicals ?) as it inspires many others.

As a result, they seek artificial ways to restrict Natural Plentitude.

Immigration restrictions and eugenic measures in general was one of them.

Rejecting ballot box and work place democracy because it gave everyone a voice to argue and debate the actions that past elites were used to have simply obeyed, was another.

Today, digital has many many things once so expensive and difficult , easy and cheap - even free.

Today the democracy of digital plentitude has made writing an e-book, blog ,web petition , even a science or academic article, much easier than ever.

More importantly, waving the results in front of people all over the entire world - thanks to the digital internet - is instant , easy, free  and effective.

Because already 40% plus of the entire world has some access to the internet.

That figure will soon rise to become near universal.

It will even be higher in the poorest most rural parts of the world than it is in the richest precincts of Manhattan .

If we can judge by the history of radio and TV , poorer rural people will crave mobile phone internet , even over cars or better homes, as the substitute for all the big city music concerts and first run movies they will never see.

The same sort of moral panic that led to 1924's Johnson-Reed Bill is already underway, fermented by the same sort of people : once-comfortably powerful white middle class professional males.

Who are they ?

Editors - like Johnson - this time fearful that anyone can write a better piece of journalism than their journal-degreed selves can , amateurs writing news reports from on the spot locations and with local on the spot insight.

Only by demanding that the only accurate news is that coming from the limited page output of our traditional print media can we Old Guard create a gatekeeper to hold the voice of journalistic democracy at bay.

Top line tenured professors ,used to having their names and university's status get their articles into the higher cited journals , now fearful that OPEN ACCESS will destroy all that.

They eagerly resist the OPEN ACCESS threat offered up by more junior, more productive, colleagues by demanding tenure still requires publishing hardcover books in the humanities and pre-publication peer view in prestige print journals for the physical sciences.

Why 300 very expensive copies (the usual print run today) of a scholarly book is better value to scholarship than an OPEN ACCESS e-book available in endless numbers world wide is left unsaid.

After all 300 copies does not go very far when the world has 300,000 libraries of higher learning !

But enough about the restrictive practises from cartels of old university professors and even older newspaper editors.

Business CEOs , old pros at cartels restricting trade to raises prices and profits, also fear new digital rivals destroying their comfortable lives.

They eagerly support the big telecoms who seek a two tiered internet - where money talks once again and the poor and foreign voices will once again be free to sleep under the digital highways's bridge ---- that is once again shut out.

Once again ,locking the digital Golden Door ....