Consumption as Cancer to Living Beings

by Rose Sybil

Rose Sybil argues that humanity’s overreliance on technique, driven by the illusions of humanism and consumption, is destabilizing ecosystems, disrupting cultural bonds, and accelerating societal and environmental entropy, necessitating a fundamental shift in human organization to restore balance and preserve life.

It is not misanthropic to recognize the harmful aspects of human nature, or our shadow, and to seek to address them, especially since technique often exploits the temptations of excess that harm human bonds. There is no greater love for mankind than striving to understand what might prevent our own downfall. Pointing out the harms of our technique does not suggest that Faustian man is evil, but rather that he is unaware of what ensnares him. By distinguishing technique from both machine and man, we can better understand what is undermining the foundations of life.

Humanism posits that elevating all of mankind is an inherent good, but it is this very belief that leads to misanthropy, much like the pursuit of unbounded pleasure ultimately spirals into the abyss of suffering or isolation. The humanist perspective fails to grasp the fundamental concept of entropy — by attempting to save all of mankind through the application of the competitive impetus (see The Lost Heroic Age, Part Six), i.e, using machines in a consumptive manner to unnaturally shape our living systems, we end up undermining the creative force necessary to sustain life. The consuming void is never satisfied with nature’s means, thereby creating an uninhabitable environment. Our advancements in electrotechnology have exponentially increased the rate at which we generate refuse, pushing things toward their most entropic form.

“The only way is through” is rooted in the same lack of discernment, assuming that our inventions can somehow outpace and out-invent the harm they cause when applied to life in a consumptive manner. The level of entropy generated by each leap in technique — requiring entirely new infrastructure and the extraction of resources — will always surpass the benefits to the environment. Additionally, it harms our natural ability to bond, which is supported by the natural cycles of hormone layering and stress, as opposed to the chronic stresses created by increasingly complex systems we are forced to uphold. This false solution is embraced by elites who believe that smart cities will save us, yet these are burdens to sustain. Unnatural, long supply chains will always create more refuse than they save and result in more distorted expressions of human nature, disconnected from the garden we are meant to inhabit.

Advancing machines is not the same as advancing science, a distinction that the French philosopher Jaques Ellul fully grasped. By allowing machine consumption to shape not only human organization but also the way we approach inquiry, we hinder true scientific and philosophical exploration. The reason those who claim to value both science and machines fail to recognize a need for their exclusion from shaping our way of life is because their own attachment to the current system is either rationalized or driven by the illusion of power it provides them.

The reason most socialism is as harmful as the capitalism it claims to oppose is that both systems mechanize people; they simply disagree on how to distribute the superfluous, without fundamentally altering the system itself. A temporary release valve for the average person’s comfort, while enabling more rapid consolidation into an international oligopoly, still operates within the same zeitgeist and moves in the same ultimate direction. The core issue lies in the failure to understand that the human condition cannot be bypassed by a utopian desire to consume the fruits of the competitive impetus and apply them to the creative realms of life. This misunderstanding is at the heart of our ills today and opens society up to a shadow form of organization through technique, which, in turn, fuels a destructive illusion of power held by elites who mirror this same archetypal madness. Replacing the elites without fundamentally changing the system will not bring real transformation — it will only create another fold in the metazeitgeist.

The mirror of what we could be is seen in the ocean, in the reflection of our own tribal apex nature as orcas. Their lack of emphasis on use extraction shows that love can foster extreme forms of self-sacrificing culture that pushes their spiritual and physical evolution and place in the food chain. The destruction of keystone species parallels the harm caused by humanism — the expansion of an apex within consumptive civilization has ultimately destroyed man as apex. The absence of competition between subspecies, except in largely economic terms, has led to a profound imbalance in the foundational pyramids of life and those who stand atop them. Hominid numbers are inflated, harming the entire ecosystem, and just as the absence of apex predators harms the environment — whether it is wolves in Yellowstone or lions in Africa controlling primate populations — it creates a ripple effect.

Consumptive society is easily seen as an anticulture because no true culture can be transmitted or absorbed by such vastly different species or subspecies. All species and subspecies can fall victim to behavioral sink when their energy flow rapidly increases without expanding their habitat. All aspects of liberalism that primitive groups quickly adopt or absorb are simply manifestations of behavioral sink, which is why consumptive society is inherently opposed to real traditions. Even if it can wear the trappings of tradition like a hollow shell, true culture can only be transmitted through blood, teaching, and love between those compatible enough to carry it forward.

If we attempted to transmit or learn the cultures of chimpanzees, we would fail, just as primitive groups cannot fully learn our specific true cultures. These cultures are unique to us at a physical level because they not only exert selective pressure but were also shaped by the spiritual and physical capabilities of the blood that birthed them. There is an interplay between the two, but also a ceiling effect that cannot be surpassed simply by trying to impose our cultures on another subspecies or species. The anti-culture that consumes and spreads cultures is not as simple as a form of cultural supremacy. To view it as such is to misunderstand the true nature of the beast, reducing it to something much simpler and easier to oppose. The moral framework of the opposition is always still rooted in humanism, in various forms, and it fails to grasp the fundamental problem with humanism: that its fruits are anti-human, no matter how appealing it may seem. By extension, it is anti-all foundations of life and the creative impetus, undermining our own dominion.

It is entirely natural that witnessing the harm we are inflicting on our reflections in the water feels so devastating, compared to the guilt-driven attempts to help primitive hominids somewhere who are starving, as if doing so could fix things. In the latter case, the folly of trying to "fix" them will only create greater heights from which the fall will eventually come to equilibrium. This is not true empathy — offering aid to expand their dysfunction only perpetuates the cycle. The former, however, offers a glimpse into our own disruption of the food chain and our failure in dominion. The dichotomy of globalist, false environmentalism masks the real issues at hand: the toxic environment we are creating through the subsumption of our own will to consumption, which blinds us to how technique shapes human organization. The “cage” or Leviathan is this invisible hand that shapes and rapidly alters our human environment, perfectly blinding us with our own temptations to accept it.

We are swiftly turning a paradise into an inescapable hell through our willful blindness to technique. The pain of the orca’s potential extinction is not something external to us — it is the canary in the coal mine. The caves we inhabit are about to collapse, and we will be reborn into the horrors of the abominations we allow to unfold here. The recent loss of the orca calf is profoundly significant; her showing us the death is not accidental or random grief but intentional, a message to us. They know we are poisoning them far more than most people realize. This marks the third calf lost by this mother in a dying/aging pod since 2017, and specifically, the second one she has brought to the surface. The losses are not just due to a lack of fish, as people were dropping live salmon to try to save the calf in 2020.

The orca mother showing her dead calf.

Manmade chemical exposure is killing these beautiful creatures, and PCBs accumulate up the food chain. The levels of these chemicals continue to rise in the Puget Sound, even though they have been banned for about a century. Small-scale production of these chemicals remains unregulated, and they are still produced offshore and imported for unnecessary production, made in places with divergent economic systems, revealing how they are all different expressions of the same fundamental metazeitgeist and paradigm that fold into one another. China, like other nations, is just as much a producer and contributor to the production of “forever chemicals” as any.

These chemicals are present in our waters — both natural bodies and the drinking/showering water we rely on. Not only are we failing to address the threat of plastic, but we are also overwhelmed by “forever chemicals,” and we will leave this horror that the orcas are enduring for our children and grandchildren to face. Moreover, the collapse of various ecosystems will have a ripple effect throughout the entire biosphere. The oceans are incredibly complex and vital to sustaining life on Earth; their suffering is our collective suffering, and the loss we face is greater than individual death because it represents the death of life itself. The pain of this mother orca is not merely the pain of death, but the agony of knowing there will be no new life, and the inevitable collapse of her entire clan — taking with them the oceans, and in turn, the planet. What we need is not just more regulations, but a fundamental shift in human organization and the way we live.

We would destroy our home base long before we make it to the stars, and any species that would do so does not deserve to reach them. Escape is a shortcut, a rationalization for those trapped in the throes of addiction to their illusions. The type of cultures, rooted in inclusive fitness, needed to adapt to new conditions can be seen in our own reflection in the water. These beautiful creatures have the right balance of competitive impetus and creative impetus — something our machines cannot replace in space, nor facilitate. Furthermore, we are too shortsighted to consciously recognize and rapidly fix our problems. We see the issues, but they are so systematic that we cannot accept the fundamental shift required. We are more prone to illusions than these magnificent beings, who carefully calculate risk (link: Intentional Stranding of Killer Whales). Throwing ourselves into hardship will not yield adaptation; that simplistic view of “evolution” is material reductionism, lacking a driving essence.

Knowing our own shortcomings is not misanthropy, because beings with culture and higher consciousness require awareness of a problem in order to circumvent or overcome it. We cannot exert our will outwardly when we allow short-sighted temptations to subsume ours, shaping mankind’s organization. We will not innovate our way out of a systemic problem where consumption hijacks the competitive impetus that is meant to protect the creative impetus. Knowledge should never be used to keep life in stasis, as a goal or comfort, because it disrupts everything — from our own bonds and foundations to the foundations of life between species. To take a god’s eye view and detach the self from the biases and vantage of the person is to harm all life. It is not a form of love. Love is relational and discerning; we cannot love the salmon more than the orca. We do not love the deer by killing the wolf. We should not love far-off races or the consuming void that expands them more than the health of our ecosystems. Humanism is an illusion that harms every level of life from the individual outward.