Domestication and civilization

Does anyone else here believe that civilization will collapse in the coming years/decades. I'm banking on it. Pretty much everything I do, I have this in mind. I even really changed the way I eat because I was fed up eating domesticated crops all the time. I want to undomesticate myself!

Anyone else feel the same? I think domestication is something that is really worth talking about.........

Comments

  • Oh I completely believe civilization will collapse very soon. I have this in mind all the time too. I'm planning on learning about organic farming this summer so that I will know how to grow my own food and be healthy about it. This kind of goes against the whole undomestication thing, but I think growing our own food is really the only way to survive the collapse of civilization with the earth as destroyed as we have made it.

  • I was just thinking about that yesterday, and researching more about growing organic food to be able to survive after a collapse or attack.

  • That whole line of thought appeals to me upon looking at the chaos of the present world... until I study history.

    For the past several hundred years, people have been afraid about civilization collapsing (whatever that means to each person or group), often with rather coherent and sometimes plausible scenarios in mind of how it would happen. Especially since the 19th century, we've been terrified of technology, wars, environmental degradation... but time and again we pull ourselves through as a species. And our frightened rhetoric from ages past turns out to have underestimated our ability to make advances and see our wrongdoing.

    Some people truly believed Thomas Malthus had it right with his view (population expands geometrically, food production grows linearly) but then we found ways of growing exponentially more food.

    It looked like epidemics would wipe us out, but we expanded public sanitation and discovered medicines (and will keep finding ways around "superbugs" -- the backlash against counterproductive antibiotic use is slowly building, too).

    It looked like we'd savagely kill each other off entirely in the Dark and Middle Ages (when people tortured cats or had public hangings for "entertainment", and human life meant nothing in the eyes of rulers) but we actually got less sadistic and unconsciously violent as a species. Consider: People used to care only about ourselves and our genetic relatives, perhaps the tribe or village, never a nation or other nations or an ecosystem! This expanded sort of consciousness is still rare, yes, but it was previously unheard-of. (From what I've read, our collective sense of morality and responsibility, as paltry as it seems sometimes, is likely higher than it's ever been before. Whether that's depressing or uplifting to you is a personal viewpoint.)

    I don't know what civilization will look like in 50 years, nor do I know what solutions of those we see (new biotechnology, nanotech, clean energy, more eco-supportive methods of high-yield farming, expansion of democracy, and much more) will be used to make our governments and civilization possible (nor do I know which ones might backfire!).

    Still, I would bet any amount of money (or a non-currency valuable) that "civilization" as we presently know it will still be around. We humans are a relentlessly resilient species, and the governments we make reflect that reality.

    (I do acknowledge the instability of government and life in many parts of the world still. Read Robert Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy" for a still-depressing look at that. But when you say "civilization will collapse" I assume you mean the daily life and government around us in the developed world.)

    Civilization may not always be pretty, never ideal, but in my view, there's neither a past Golden Age nor a future Apocalypse.

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