Why are us modern humans, with our amazing technology and hyper connected civilization, so fascinated by mutants in fiction? Because we are the mutants of Earth.
Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear
"May you live in interesting times."
-Ancient Chinese curse
Danger and Opportunity
Yes, we live in "interesting times." With so much craziness already happening in our world, what's coming in the future? There's an old axiom that the Chinese word "crisis" is made up of the characters "danger" and "opportunity." Actually that's not true, it's a linguistic mistake. But those two words probably best describe the decade I see us heading into. This coming period, from 2020 to 2030 is a decade of both great danger and great opportunity.
Several long term trends are converging and amplifying the speed and intensity of the transition period we're already in. The theme for this coming decade is collapse of the old, with all the pain and uncertainty that causes, and a rebuilding of something new. The Industrial Age many think is long over, is actually still lingering on, in many old businesses, and many old institutions, like our political and education system, among others. The remaining Industrial Age institutions will collapse in this decade, sparked by the worst economic collapse any of us living have ever seen. That's the danger.
The massive corruption and cronyism of today's world is grinding the world's economy to a halt. It's been propped up for years now, and we're teetering on the brink of a major collapse, an upside down pyramid heavy with levels of debt never seen in human history. That collapse, though it's been predicted by a few, and is now being anticipated, written about, and talked about by many, will take most people by surprise, and cause a ton of pain and hard times.
But in this collapse of the old comes levels of opportunity like we've never seen. The economic situation, which I personally think will visibly fall before the 2020 U.S. elections, will strip away much of the archaic, Industrial Age ideas and institutions that are now holding most regions of the United States back. While a handful of major cities and their metro areas have grown into high tech hubs, most of rural, small town, and small city America has been held back, not by lack of technology, but just by old ideas and old leaders struggling to hang on to their local power structures in the face of very uncertain times.
In every rural community, every small town or city, there are people now who know what that town or region needs to rebuild their economy, and their hope. But as rural and small town America lost factories, jobs, and talented people to the large tech hubs, those people trying to rebuild have often been held back by local power structures clinging to how things used to be.
Industrial Age urban jungle infrastructure, Shockhoe Bottom district, Richmond, Virginia, 2019. Photo by Steve Emig
First there was the Factory Apocalypse, hitting all those areas with the loss of millions of good paying manufacturing jobs. For the last several years there has been the Retail Apocalypse, hitting those regions hard with store and mall closures. With this next financial downturn, and the collapse of the student loan debt bubble, and other market bubbles, we will see the College Apocalypse, among other great societal upheavals. Many of our small towns and cities have become "Eds and Meds" towns, with most jobs tied to the local college and hospitals. The College Apocalypse has already started, dozens of small colleges have already been bought out, or have gone out of business. In this coming decade, we'll see this trend explode, and it will take a heavy toll on 150 or 200 small towns and cities across America. As we continue to head into the full scale Information Age, where most information is free and available to everyone, colleges will play a much different role in the future, a role that has to be figured out in the next decade.
While this collapse will be a hard and a dangerous blow to many small towns and cities, the chaos, and the desperate need to create jobs... any jobs... will finally allow all those creative, motivated, and hard working people in those towns to build something new. The waning power structures in all those areas will simply have to let new ideas take hold. It will be contentious, it will be turbulent, and a lot of people, who aren't paying attention to those talking and writing about the economic and societal shifts now, will lose a lot. But, like a forest fire that clears the old brush, this will allow for a lot of new growth, both in the major tech cities, but even more so across rural, small town, and small city America.
The word "recession" is basically meaningless in today's ultra-manipulated economic world. I'm calling this coming decade "The Phoenix Depression." Whatever the numbers and economists' statistics wind up being, this decade will feel like a full blown Great Depression to most people. Yes, no one wants to hear that, but that's where we're headed. But the tough initial blows economically are setting the stage for tremendous opportunity, like the mythical phoenix being reborn from the ashes.
How to I know this? That's what the rest of this "book," that I'm publishing for free as a blog, is all about. This has been my life's work, what I've really been learning about through a string of odd jobs and crazy adventures. These online chapters will explain how I came to discover all this is coming. Future books in this "Welcome to Dystopia" series will go into much greater depth in specific parts of this overall idea.
Mutant figure in a giant sneaker, street art on the back of a building in Hollywood, California, December 2019. Photo by Steve Emig
Why are we fascinated by mutants?
To a cancer cell, the tumor seems normal. An abnormal cell, sick, mutated, and deformed, a cell that sucks life and energy from its host, that cell sees the putrid, smelly, puss-filled, fungus-riddled tumor as its natural environment. That cell, and all those like it, reproduce and multiply, bent on self-destruction, slowly sucking the life from, and ultimately killing, its host. To that cell, its disease-riddled environment is "just the way things are."
To a healthy cell, the tumor is an aberration that must be destroyed, to keep the larger body from dying. The healthy cells of the immune system attack and destroy the mutated cells of the tumor, and work to remove the toxic mess from the body. The body feels really sick while this is happening, yet knows it is ultimately for its higher good. Instinctively, healthy cells know that they are part of an environment, the body, and if they pollute and destroy that body, they ultimately destroy themselves. The mutant cells just don't give a fuck.
A huge, deep, underlying problem of human civilization here on Earth is that we are born and raised as "cancer cells." We are born into modern civilization, a society where it's simply normal to pollute, attack, destroy, and trash the environment that surrounds us, and ultimately makes our lives possible. We are born and raised in a social system that pollutes the air, water, and earth that supports our very lives.
Our towns and cities, where the majority of us are now born, live, and grow up, are human created environments of steel, concrete, asphalt, brick, and dead wood from trees that were cut down. Our immediate environment, the places we live, work, play, and sleep, are filled with toxic substances. Our cities are designed for large numbers of humans to live close together, which is made possible by taking huge amounts of resources from areas far away from those cities, to support the comfortable lives of the city dwellers. We are all raised in an environment that is simply not sustainable over the long term.
Other humans, miles away, grow our food, cut down trees to build our houses, mine minerals to build and fuel our vehicles and make our cell phones, and bury our incredible amounts of waste products. Our everyday lives depend on this huge system of taking resources from a distance, from a few miles to thousands of miles away, to support our urban populations.
We are born into this thing called "human civilization," a way of living that is ultimately going to collapse. That's our normal. We are so intertwined in this system, that it is rarely, if ever, questioned. It's simply believed to be the way things are supposed to be. The simple, underlying root belief of human civilization is that we can live our urban or suburban lives, that our society can take more than it gives back, and that we can do this, forever. Our human civilization is based upon this lie. We go through our daily lives, all of us, without ever questioning it.
Because our entire social structure is based upon this lie that we are not bound by the limits of our environment, we have created a whole nest of other lies to justify our everyday lives. We built this nest of lies so we never have to take the uncomfortable step of even glancing at the the root lie underneath.
We are born and raised as "cancer cells," we live in towns and cities that, from space, appear to be tumors on the green and yellow skin Earth's land masses. Why are we so fascinated by the mutants in comic books and video games and movies?
Because we are the mutants.
This underlying lie of human civilization, has bothered me since I was in junior high, about 40 years ago. "The Great Lie," as I dubbed it four decades ago, doesn't mean we have to give up living in towns and cities. While cities create pollution, toxins, and most of the worst aspects of human society, cities also fuel our innovation, music, art, entrepreneurship, creativity, and great humanitarian acts of kindness and good as well. It just means that human civilization will always have some serious problems to contend with, and that our "high civilization" will... someday... collapse.
This Great Lie is the foundation of everything our day to day lives are built upon. And we wonder why our world seems so crazy.
A tarped homeless person's encampment, in the skid row area of downtown Los Angeles, with new skyscrapers being built in the background. December 2019. Photo by Steve Emig
Welcome to Dystopia.
Our 2019 world is a place where thousands of homeless people struggle for day to day survival on the streets, often mere blocks away from high rise luxury apartments and condos which are empty, on purpose. Those high end living spaces, occupying many key places in the most prestigious cities of our world, are empty because they are investments. The handful of insects that may wander those empty apartments, could crawl up on a window sill and look down on human cockroaches, the homeless, living in a world where average humans would never let a stray dog or cat live for long. Yet we'll let feral humans suffer indefinitely. The buildings full of empty condos, and the growing homeless population several floors below, is just one of the many paradoxes of today's chaotic world.
Is there some underlying order, or disorder, that can shed light on why our world today seems so different, so crazy, so chaotic? Yes, I think there is. This big picture of our world is what I've spent my life being fascinated by, and learning about. There are major themes underlying today's chaos, and there are long term cycles playing out, that give it context. This little book, originally intended to be a self-published book, both ebook and in print, is my work to explain the context I see for today's crazy world. But I'm self-publishing this as a blog, because in today's crazy world, I'm a homeless man as I start publishing it, who hasn't been able to escape the streets. I don't drink anymore, I stopped drinking while working as a taxi driver years ago. I'm not an alcoholic, I just got tired of being around drunks, since I drove them home every night for years, and stopped drinking. I don't do any drugs, legal, illegal, or otherwise. The only exception is a Tylenol for a toothache maybe once every few months. I'm not the stereotypical homeless person, yet I'm living in that crazy world, for now. Then again, no person is really any stereotype, homeless or otherwise.
So I deal with some of the worst of us "cancer cells," a lot, on a day to day, minute to minute basis. This afternoon changing trains under downtown L.A., I stood 15 feet from a heated fight where one guy grabbed his girlfriend's taser to go after the other guy, as the train doors were closing. Just another day on the streets, working through the urban world millions of us inhabit.
You may ask, if all of us urban dwellers are the human "cancer cells," who are the "healthy cells?" The healthy cells are the small numbers of tribal people, the ones we usually call hunter/gatherers, left in our world. While we call them primitive, they are born into the actual, natural, environment, and grow up wandering it in bare feet or with thin shoes of some sort, and less clothing that we use. As kids they are taught which things in the natural environment are good to eat, which are not, which are used for tools and weapons, which can be used as medicine. They are taught what's safe and what's not. Without a book or a smartphone to Google stuff, these "primitive" people learn, and remember, thousands of things, in and about their local environment that us "civilized" people will never know. For these tribal people, living within the parameters and actual capacity of their local, natural environment, is "normal," and so they don't pollute the water, air, or earth in a dramatic way. When our civilization eventually collapses, theirs can most likely go on, more or less indefinitely.
So do we all need to learn to hunt rabbits and deer and eat local edible plants? Only if that's a personal draw we have. If learning primitive survival skills is fascinating to you, then, by all means, go learn all you can. But in today's world, in another paradox, the local environments that those small groups of remaining tribal people live in, are dependent on our civilization. Our 7 billion plus people, over half living in cities right now, have such an effect on the global environment, that we could take out those remaining tribal people in our greed, as we have millions of others, simply with pollution or continued habitat destruction that affects their regions. Their sustainable lives are often dependent on our civilization in our crazy world today.
Again... welcome to Dystopia. This is not the global authoritarian government world George Orwell and similar writers envisioned. This is not the post-nuclear apocalypse world that other sci-fi writers imagined. It's not the end times waiting for the rapture, that some Christians invented from a misunderstanding of the crazy book of Revelation. Our Dystopia, this time we're now living through, this time where change and chaos is rapidly escalating, is a period of great transition. It's a long, drawn out, turbulent time of transition from one kind of human society to another. Our Dystopia is the greatest period of rapid change in known human history, and a greater change than most of the human history that's long been lost to us, as well.
Written by Steve Emig (aka The White Bear)
All opinions are mine, and are not officially endorsed by anyone in the videos shared, or in the works and theories of other people I mention.
Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed anything since writing these posts in 2019-2020, except these notes at the bottom, I've even left the typos in. My thoughts on the 2020's are making more sense now, as a lot of chaos has already played out. You can read more my thoughts on my Substack:
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