Comparing people to viruses is trite, dehumanizing, unhelpful.
It's also a complete failure of a simile. Virus simply are. They have no agency. No life. Just a pattern of inert molecules, occasionally bumping into the right place to start overproducing duplicates. Viruses can only exist as the shadow of something living. To compare people to that... is so off the mark it's funny... especially when you've got a much better comparison right next to it.
You want a metaphor? People are constituent cells of a much larger organism. An organism made of multi-cellular organisms. “Meta-cellular”, if you’re that sort of dork. This isn’t without precedent. You can model an army of ants as a single organism, even check the health of the colony by taking the temperature of the anthill. The behavior and labor of all the ants combine up to an output far larger than anything an equal number of individual ants could do.
Of course, unlike cells or ants, people’s lives are nowhere near so prescribed. Each of us decides our own behavior. We learn, from our own experience and – most critically – from observing others. And as we all choose and develop our behavior, it adds to the behavior of others’, and something larger emerges. Call it community. Or nation. Country. State. Religion. Empire. Society. Economy. A bigger organism is born from the collective action of us all, whether we’re aware of it or not.
It’s not a smart organism. It has no awareness, no brain – that’s all concentrated in each ‘cell’. But it is powerful. Capable of altering landscapes, redirecting rivers – moving mountains, even… Its mere existence is a weight on the world. Ecologies bend towards it, fall into orbit. Smaller organisms are crushed without notice – sometimes completely. Often completely…
The behavior of this big organism is decided, partly by the thoughts, but primarily by the actions of its constituent components. Again, it’s not sentient. It doesn’t need to be. People already do that bit. You wouldn’t need to be sentient, either, if your cells could invent clever new ways of doing… whatever fiddly little things cells do (Something with oxygen, I think?)… and share it with one another.
The point is, right now that big organism is doing a great big capitalism. Or, perhaps, that organism is capitalism. For us, here in this moment of history, our job is to start organizing the next organism...
Rhetoric like "Humans are a virus" implies a collectivity of agency and responsibility between human beings that does not exist
There is no equivalence between a western billionaire and a starving child in the Sahel, what matters is their positioning and concrete relationship to capitalist production, which is the scientifically proven source of climate change
If you want to use the “global warming is like a fever” metaphor (which, don’t) capitalism is the virus and humans along with all the other life are the cells that die if a fever goes on without end
The amount of times I've heard this rhetoric coupled with "the animals are better than us! We should let them govern the planet instead! They're vastly superior to us murderous beings" is baffling
Yeah. Beyond the obvious ecofash aspect of it, plenty of animals are murdery or selfish as well. We have the reason and capacity to do better though, so we should.
Humans are the only beings capable of being destroying the world. But we’re also the only beings capable of taking care of it, making sure it’s healthy and safe.
Our power is our responsibility. We were born, a long chain of infinite lives over billions of years, to be the gardeners of Earth.
I think it is just Christianity making people hate humanity but also love and extoll all of its virtues so thqt they can simeltaeneously be a martyr and a misanthrope.
Humans have lived on this earth for ~300k years and most of that time we were basically in harmony with the natural world, whereas capitalism has only been a global system in the last century, which is when we started to see gigantic spikes in CO2.
One of the fundamental assumptions behind most eco-fascist rhetoric is that the amount of resources on Earth is insufficient for the current number of people or some arbitrary number of future people, and therefore that those resources could either be shared equally (and everybody will eventually starve) or a subset of humanity should get more of the resources and let the rest starve. I cannot stress enough that this is unequivocally false. The amount of resources and food that Earth is capable of supplying humanity far exceeds current and projected future populations.
It's a problem of distribution as the West takes far, far more resources than the rest of the planet's population. It's also a problem of exploitation, because developing economies are pressured into growing crops for making money - like opium poppies - rather than for food agriculture. Human development and technological advances in fertilizers and seeds and so on created the ability for humanity to not need to starve. Capitalism created the network in which those resources are funneled to a global minority via markets.
Recommended reading on this is Late Victorian Holocausts, in which the authors describe how famines which killed tens of millions of people in impoverished countries in the late 19th century - so, firmly in the capitalist era - were not caused by a lack of food in total (in most cases), but rather by imperialist countries like Britain taking away their grain for domestic consumption and merchants in markets in countries like India marking up prices so severely that the poor could not possibly afford it. The same railroads that were lauded for their ability to distribute grain from areas of bountiful harvest to areas with bad harvest ended up taking that grain from developing countries to Europe while the rest starved. Amartya Sen: “Famine is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.”
As @iridaniotter@hexbear.net said in the replies, the feudal mode of production was unable to change the climate to the same degree that the capitalist mode of production is able to, and was too inefficient compared to capitalism for the problem to necessarily be one of distribution and not total food production. Humans were generally victims of climate and environmental conditions, whereas now we can, to a significant degree, bend it to our will. The crime is that we do not use those powers to end starvation when it is now entirely within our means to do so, when that wasn't (as) true before capitalism.
Capitalists do not destroy the environment because of malice, no one wakes up one day and decides they really wanna fuck up some coral or drive a species of frog to extinction
Capitalists destroy the environment because of a specific profit imperative that dominates their thinking and behavior, profits go up when costs go down, and the maintenance of the environment is an external cost
So the snuggly or non-snuggly nature of humans prior to capitalism is completely irrelevant
Yes actually. We know full well what humans were like in hunter gatherer tribes, because we still have such tribes living today.
I suggest you meet the Hadza. A living demonstration of how different human beings are depending on the system you place them in. When humans have neither competition with one another nor a lack of material abundance they become something quite different.
Your interpretation of humans as assholes comes from never having known anything other than capitalism. If you lived in a burning building and never knew any different environment you would also believe that it is natural for humans to endlessly cough.
Do give that thread a full watch, and read the last couple posts. It will change your attitude.
There are two massive problems with that line of thinking: the first is the fact that capitalism is fundamentally a continuation and escalation of what it originally replaced, many of the core concepts of it originated under mercantilism, and the fundamental inequity and ownership-based-rule stretches back through feudalism all the way into antiquity, for all that it's had different flavors and social expectations along the way. The second is that capitalism is the hegemonic system now, so there's no reason to rail against feudal proto-capitalism or the primitive accumulation of the Roman empire, because they are all dead and gone.
Hell, a not insignificant chunk of the European bourgeoisie are literally the failchildren of landed aristocracy, and most non-aristocratic "old money" families at this point got their start under mercantilism. If the old Roman patrician families were still around instead of having diminished into obscurity in the middle ages they'd be bourgeoisie too, and probably weirdo hyper-fascists like most aristocratic failchildren are.