Beyond ethics and rationality: welcome to the assholocene

Author is Tadzio Müller

To be sure, this concept has come under convincing criticism, inter alia from the left – firstly, of course, it is not "man" who is in charge, but very specific people, mostly rich, mostly white, mostly male; and secondly, it is not man "as such", but “man on capitalist steroids” who exploits the earth – but it has prevailed against much weaker competition, such as "capitalocene" (my term will of course suffer the exact same fate, but there's no harm in trying ;)), because it articulates a widespread affect, with Freud, a "discontent within the culture", a kind of repressed collective awareness, something like: "Wow, ok, right, we're charge, and, holy crap, are we fucking up this 'world domination' thing." The Anthropocene is thus not only the age of "human" causal and ecological dominance, it is also the age of “repressed failure" of those who were in any relevant way “deciders”. We're in charge, we know that our fossil capitalist mode of production and our imperial mode of living is an ethical disaster, we know what the rational and ethical choice would be (I dunno, let's call it global degrowth communism) - and yet we are entirely incapable of making that choice, of taking that path, of changing our “normal-and-yet-insane”, deeply fucked-up collective behaviour.