A bunch of people thinking they outsmarted the meme by asking "who made capitalism".
A better question is "when you say humans are a virus, which humans exactly do you propose to exterminate in the name of saving the planet?" Because the bunker-state ethnonationalist, the trumpists, the Peter Thiels and the Mark Andreesens, the Dark Enlightenment and Network State and Tech Zionism neofascists, they know exactly what they mean.
The earth is big enough to support modest human life. It's not big enough to support billionaires' delusions of singularity. So they imagine to purge the parts of humanity that are not their particular version of white.
Don't fall for their fascist propaganda.
We live in a religious society that promotes a culture of bigotry. Does this mean we shouldn’t blame bigots?
We live in a patriarchal society that doesn’t take violence against women seriously. Does this mean that wife beaters aren’t to blame?
We live in a capitalist society that promotes selfishness and greed. Does this mean we shouldn’t blame selfish people? (Which is most of them.)
We live in a racist society… etc.
You are responsible for your actions and your beliefs. Step one to improving our society is accepting the reality that most humans have a poor (nearly non-existent) relationship with morality. They’re easily swayed by fallacious arguments because they are irrational and stupid. These are empirical facts about human beings that we ignore (with memes like this) at our own peril.
Redirecting blame attributable to human foibles to an abstract concept like “capitalism” is shortsighted and self-defeating. Analogously, the problem over the last 10,000 years hasn’t been slavery (the concept); the problem has been slavers (their ignorance, psychopathy, and greed).
There’s no period in human history when people weren’t unfathomably stupid, because people are literally just animals (and many would happily end the world in order to get access to cheeseburgers). They make bad choices because the average person is not capable of moral deliberation. All hyperbole aside, this is an actual empirical fact.
Plenty of bacteria and viruses are beneficial, and contribute to the overall health of their hosts.
If humans are diseases, then it is because through learned behaviors that we act in a deleterious manner towards the overall ecosystem. We are entirely capable of shifting those behaviors, of creating social structures that select for behaviors that promote co-existence and symbiosis with that ecosystem.
When I am ill with an infection, I care not that "Not All Bacteria" cause the illness, I still take antibiotics all the same. If I have cancer, I do not give a shit that Not All Cancer Cells will destroy my organs, I still seek chemotherapy.
Capitalism is entirely a human invention, and the most widely adopted ideology. I care not that "capitalism is the problem" because if humans can't get their shit together, then they are the root cause of the problem and Capitalism is just another symptom.
Put another way, in the words of Jesus Christ (paraphrased): "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they don't destroy their home and then pretend like they aren't the problem because 'Lily Capitalism is the actual problem'"
Oh, btw: Misanthropy != Fascism. Ecofascism is a belief that all people should stick to their racially segregated "homelands" and live in harmony with nature. Whatever people who say "'Humans are a virus' is literally ecofascist rhetoric" believe it to be may be the actual solution to the oncoming apocalypse we've gotten ourselves into. I'm a misanthrope who loves the biosphere more than humanity's right to do whatever it wants and get away with it because "it's the ideology, not the people who participate in the ideology." I'm not a fucking racist.
Destruction of nature & unwise use of resources, or even just multiplying to a point where even the most prudent resource management & minimal environmental impact per capita is the absolute goal could still destiny biodiversity.
This has to do with economical tendencies of living beings, not a particular socioeconomic system.
(Yes, capitalism is accelerating the process by taking away freedoms from the masses - but even a commune can decide to chop up the whole forest for wood. World is a fuck.)"Virus" might not be the best word for it tho (infestation maybe? Fits the capita growth statistics), but successful animals that oversaturate their environment (eg lots of food, no predators, longevity after procreation, tech) cause biodiversity loss (anything from local collapse to a global extinction event with cofactors like climate change or air structure change - what is novel with humans is how rapidly we are developing in our last 0.5% of existence, and how rapid the global impact we case is, it won't take us 10s of thousands of years, we can speedrun in less than a millennia).
Also kings, gods, holocaust, slavery asf. So, we have to remind ourselves that we can take back anything we thought up. If humans are the problem it’s those that say we can’t do that.
Sometimes I get frustrated with people and I think this. But then I quickly snap my mindset out of this because I know really what's the problem. Capitalism.
They are the same piece of generic rhetorical label you slap on or argue you can't slap on whenever it conveniences you. If your solution is just a sentence long, you are an over-simplifying things.
So what happened to the ancient civilizations that collapsed before capitalism existed? Ducks. It's the ducks that need to be shot.
