Seen from Mars, it’s as if human beings as a whole don’t care if they themselves survive (or if other species are allowed to live).

Is this mass suicide?

An indifference to our own collective fate is spreading, even among people who are still devoted to their families. The indifference is justified as a form of realism. If we’re heading towards destruction then realism, they say, is accepting our fate (knowing all living things eventually die anyways).

Indifference to life and death itself is being conflated with realism.

And death as a natural completion of a life-cycle is being conflated with a premature murder/suicide of one another and millions of other species.

This isn’t a realistic or mature regard for life and death, but the very attitude of a person who has resigned themselves to giving up on a complete life and committing suicide before maturation. This “realism” is the suicidal impulse itself.

After all, what are the direct means by which we are prematurely killing ourselves? We’re denying the effects of climate change, indulging in fascism and allowing AI to gain total possession of our minds, and suck the marrow out of life itself, to name just three.

These are the self-destructive behaviors of an immature species, an adolescent species, who has set fire to the house, locked itself in its virtual room, and then climbed into bed to watch a movie with the dog. And when a brother bursts into the room, shouting “fire!”, the adolescent mocks him for his overzealous concern, saying, “calm down and be realistic: we’re all going to die eventually anyways.”

Denial, indulgence and apathy are the justifications for what’s happening, not the mature acceptance of life and death. There is a reason why we make a distinction between murder and natural causes.

I believe it is realistic to say that we are killing ourselves and murdering one another.

But it’s not realistic to accept this situation as inevitable.

Therefore, I’d like to suggest that it’s this lack of self-knowledge, this refusal to self-reflect, learn, change and die naturally to who we are, which is the problem. Suicide and murder are not the acceptance of death, but its denial. We would rather be consumed in a fire we started than give up the illusions of ourselves and allow who we thought we were to die naturally.

Therefore, I’d like to make the pithy statement that education at its best teaches us self-knowledge, while education at its worst tells us who we are. And not only does education implant a false identity, but it also teaches us to maintain and defend that identity (as republicans, as democrats, you name it) to the point of utter annihilation of everyone we claim to love.

And when we don’t allow ourselves to die a proper, peaceful death, this is where we end up.

Probably, this overzealous attachment to identity would not occur if we lived in a culture that loved its children. (Yes, many parents love their children, but the culture doesn’t). So, the unique, incipient shapes of creativity that are noticeable in any healthy toddler are ground down by an industrialized system of competitive training,

Training (as a substitute for real education) doesn’t attempt to unfold the unique qualities of each child (there aren’t enough teachers; it’s not cost-effective; nor effective in producing willing slaves, etc.). So, the system doesn’t love and serve the child, but is merely efficient at drilling and ranking children with respect to particular skills that only serve the economic system.

Again, too many people accept this species-destroying battle for a few musical chairs as a given fact of life, or defensively attach themselves to this way of life because they managed to find a comfortable chair. It served them. So, it’s easy to justify this battle for a few chairs at the top of the heap as a motivating force in the culture’s development.

“We wouldn’t have all these technological advances if there wasn’t competition!” is the old saw.

But it’s these very advancements (so-called) that are also killing us. And why were we in such a rush to develop tools that end up controlling us? Does this hyper urgency to develop technologies seem calmly realistic?

And couldn’t we have been creative in another direction? Instead of focusing solely on building technologies to save us from disease, couldn’t we have primarily focused on altering our way of living so that disease was less common?

We haven’t even come close to unfolding our human potential beyond tool-making.

If we grew mature enough to regain some trust in our native human creativity and didn’t try to press our one-of-a-kind shapes into a few habitual old forms, we’d raise children capable of seeing the world very differently and developing more loving systems that served humanity or life itself, rather than serving the inorganic system itself.

But an essential part of the training we endure convinces us that human beings are not to be trusted to grow intelligent all on their own, by following their own inspiration, surrounded by equally inspired guides, without drilling them with propaganda. And this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can’t change if we don’t trust ourselves to try. And that’s not a realistic acceptance of ourselves.

And I feel sorry for teachers, who love children and want them to blossom. They’re also constrained to adhere to these increasingly AI-dictated marching orders, which doesn’t allow much time for adding nuance to the cold-hearted judgements of a strictly hierarchical sorting machine.

So, despite many teachers’ best intentions, our training essentially sands away the creative nuances of the developing child (and this translates into a constant battle to subdue and bend the child’s distrusted will), which slows and weakens the creative flow of shape-shifting identities, and replaces all that with two simplified, machine-readable ones: Somebodies and Nobodies.

Almost nobody gets through this system of education without being ground down. Even the ones whose natural inclinations happen to coincide with the interests of the inorganic system, or those who otherwise manage to preserve some portion of their creativity and vision, they too end up deeply scarred. And because they may have ended up in a musical chair that was comfortable and provided the love-substitute of status, their own memories of the process often become rose-tinted enough for them to recommend the same crushing process to their own kids as a necessary trial by fire, forgetting how damn lucky they really were.

My long-winded point is this: Fascism, runaway technological development for its own sake (not ours), climate catastrophe and doom-ensuring overshoot are different forms of overdose.

The only thing that can break this suicidal tendency is honest self-knowledge. Hence, I feel a certain urgency to understand this issue before the house is entirely burned to the ground.