You must log in or register to comment.
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.
I for one welcome a world ruled by the Orangutan-Bonobo-Cetacean alliance.
If i could kill all gorillas to save 1000 humans i would, even though i think gorillas matter.
The people who make this claim just point to sophisticated ant/termite colonies and go “Look at that, why can’t society be like that?” It’s just projection of their own desires to control others without reason.
Double points if they compare humans to ants.
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.
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
deleted by creator
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 ‘humans are the real virus’ rhetoric is disgusting, and just keep in mind that people’s views on humanity generally reflect themselves.
deleted by creator
There are plenty of edgy misanthropic antinatalists of which you speak, but I think most of them are more on the reducing the suffering of living things side.
deleted by creator
Im not so sure. I love humanity but im unpredictable and unstable.
Or it’s just a normal response to global neoliberal capitalism. The whole notion of “cost of living” is pretty mind breaking.
I’ve thought before that the only obstacle to me writing a novel is all the 12 hour work days. I am more than capable of writing 1000+ words a day when I’m off, but progress is painfully slow all the time because of how much work I have to do.
I thought it would get better if I quit my job and found an easier one so I could write more. Now I’m so stressed out finding a new industrial job that my productivity is down. It was a mistake to quit my job, because now it will be back to the oilfield.
I think probably a lot of people who parrot the virus stuff have not given it much thought, just think it sounded cool in the Matrix.
just think it sounded cool in the Matrix
The whole line was spoken by the arch-cop during an interrogation. Sometimes I wonder if that scene is an unintentional political Rorschach Test.
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.
Christianity has been around for thousands of years, climate change has only become an issue recently. Capitalism is the problem.
Modern mainstream Christianity (in the USA at least) is very pro-capitalist. There are some other parallels I’ve noticed, such as the rise of mega churches.
Right, but that’s because of capitalism, not Christianity, because one has existed for thousands of years, while the other began in England in the 16th century.
“Listen! Hear the cries of the wages of your field hands. These are the wages you stole from those who harvested your fields. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of heavenly forces. You have lived a self-satisfying life on this earth, a life of luxury.”
Well it’s not like we can blame the whales
Just the corporate ones
the whales aren’t doing enough
I think the whales blame us.
Nuke the whales
well we have to nuke something
Lol yeah
People don’t mean themselves or their families - when they say this they’re saying foreigners are the virus whether they know it or not
Nah I explicitly mean my family lol
Lmao yeah your racist uncle do be virulent
viruses are a vital part of the dialectics of evolution, without them animals might never have existed. Typical fascist exterminationism ideology!
👆 this officer, right here. BMF is posting again.
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.
But have you concidered this snowball I brought to the Legislative Floor in the middle of summer?
It’s also much more apt to compare capital to a kind of social virus imo. It infiltrates into human agency in order to multiply itself
Hey do you know the artist? I’d love to repost this on the prolewiki twitter
I think I found the artist: https://www.reddit.com/r/learntodraw/comments/q4lbgc/i_havent_been_motivated_to_draw_recently_but_then/
not sure who made the edit tho
goddamnit
i spent 10 minutes trying to track down the artist by myself on break time without realizing someone already did it lmao
We appreciate your effort though, it’s very caring and helpful to try
awww, thank you so much! 💖
Unknown, sadly, its been floating around since 2021.
it seems not everything gets drudged up from the posting trenches after all…
I tried digging for it for no success
Life is a virus, like reproduction is literally a defining characteristic of life
deleted by creator
Lmao.
Smartest misanthropes “logic” above already debunked by your reply.
Yeah but who made capitalism?
The bourgeoisie, who are a virus. Or more accurately, a parasite.
Hunter-gatherer societies started settling down with the invention of agriculture, and force began being used to grant ownership of the land to the strongest.
These societies began coalescing and creating the first cities, and these landowners expaned their power to take over as Kings and less powerful ones as the nobility.
With the use of that might, people belonging to other realms were forced to work as slaves.
Slavery became widespread (in western countries) and needed constant war to get more slaves as the economy grew, because less slaves = more labor needed to expand.
Expanding in that way is unsustainable and leads to stagnation or overextension, such as what happened to the Roman Empire. It was in a deep crisis when it collapsed in the 5th century and its slave based economy was becoming obsolete.
This system was replaced by armed nobles dividing the land and its subjects between themselves, giving them a small piece of land and protection in exchange of forced loyalty, taxes and the ability to be forced to fight for the lord of the land. An attractive proposition in times of societal collapse like Europe had.
Eventually, this rule of noble families started losing its power as improvements in technology and colonization gave inner city artisans a growing amount of influence and wealth from the ability to produce things increasingly fast and easier.
Peasants started moving into cities and leaving the lord’s lands. This process accelerated drastically with the invention of the steam engine and the nobility began being seen as obsolete and parasitic. The revolutions of the late 18th century made this decline permanent. The remaining nobles were forced to either join the bourgeois and become businessmen with fancy titles, fade away into obscurity or fight back and have their country become a Target of capitalism.
Capitalism, the new system, is based on producing more and more, faster and faster. Because you need to outdo the competition to not go bankrupt, and the competition needs to do the same. You need to lower costs and increase profits. You have to produce cheaper so you fight to keep wages low and working conditions poor, extract resources in ways that are cheap (even if damaging the environment), find more places to sell your goods to (even if they don’t want you to), drive your competition out of business, etc. Especially as new businesses are founded and join the same race to the bottom against you, making it faster.
It’s not even that they necessary want to do this stuff. It’s just the ones that “blink” and chicken out of doing one of these things is more likely to fail at doing business, go bankrupt, stagnate, exist as a niche only, etc.
It’s the issue of “You have 10€ in your wallet. The product from the place workers are treated well and does everything by the book costs 15€ and the one where they dump trash in a ditch out back and don’t clean the floors is 7€, which one do you buy?”
