End Times

While Tom Cruise builds his bunker in Telluride to protect himself and his family from the Alien Armageddon, we are busy here at home manifesting an End Times destiny of our own. That old saying about saying something enough times and it finally coming true gives me the shivers. Western social consciousness, rooted in the Biblical idea that God is coming, one of these days, has been a convenient basis for our misbehavior. If things are going to end when good old God comes down to judge us, who really cares if we fill the atmosphere with pollution, who cares if we heat the damn planet up to uncomfortable temperatures and make it look like a hell of concrete strip-mall, fast-food wastelands, unsuitable for life. Who cares? We have heaven up there somewhere to look forward to, don’t we? If we turn our earth into a burning inferno of hell, we can at least say to ourselves, “well, see, we told you so, the end times are here.” It is just that it will have been us playing God, ending life as we know it, not God.

We are busy turning it into reality, and is it any wonder that free-market ideology, which is all about growth and expanding consumers, imitates religion in the way it trains humans to serve its purposes? A few hundred years ago we were traveling around the world, trying to spread our faith to the heathens (while conveniently taking their resources, land, and destroying their way of life, and enslaving them), and now we are doing the same thing around the world with our “free-market.” We are trying to spread “freedom” (the freedom to be a good consumer) all over the world. We call this thriving. It is no longer OK to survive, sustaining a way of life while living in harmony with nature. Freedom is defined as an open market, where we are free to consume, and consume, and consume. No matter the bigger picture that it is not sustainable. Big business does not care, just like religion never cared.

If big business and organized religion had a vision for our future, their dream would be for us consumers to cover the earth. These institutions care nothing for our species, they care nothing for our happiness, they are dependent on our continued over-population to expand their consumer base, so that they grow. Corporations have to grow just like religions have to grow, or they whither. So some day down the road, when there is nothing but corporate farmland, housing, stores, or restaurants covering the earth, when all the wild species are extinct, and the sky is red with pollution, when there is no walk in nature option to distract us from our consumption, we will have ourselves to thank for making the lies we’ve told ourselves for thousands of years finally come true.