Thread by @leashless

I've been thinking really hard about people's inability to stare at the darkness of the world and the fate of the poor, without blinking.

It all seems pretty obvious to me: the central fact of human existence is that 5 or 10 million people starve to death each year. The core.

Everything that we do is set against the background.

Everything that we do is set against the constant drum beat of other humans starving to death. Maybe one every ten seconds. I hear that clock. That clock is with me. I wake up with it, I fall asleep with it. Brain won't block.

My brain won't block it because I trained my brain not to: I am "enlightened" - a human that has punched through its own programming. Freedom, certainly, but also awareness - and in that awareness one has a few choices.

Most people who are enlightened or approaching it become increasingly detached from the world and its woes. They may feed people with a bucket and spoon as far as money permits, but they do not act systemically and rationally on absolute causes.

They act, but they act locally.

(a more common escape is a retreat into "the inner planes" - shared dreamworlds where beings of pure mind live free from the general shitshow which is trying to inhabit spiritual consciousness while inhabiting decaying bodies made of meat.

You can't blame them. Not much anyway.)

Did I do what I could?

I feel these beings as if they were in front of me. I mean, I have to bend myself in fucking knots not to wind up running a homeless shelter in my spare bedroom.

I've been homeless now and again. I know these people are *actually people*. It's A Problem.

But nearly everybody else is enslaved to a blinding mechanism: their own biological script around reproduction *simply won't run* if you feed it realistic data about the state of the world. "No, I'm not going to risk having a kid that might starve and die in this horror show."

And so we get "toxic positivity". People *hallucinate* a world fit to bring children into, where the problems of the world are being worked on and it'll all work out fine in the end. This hallucination protects their ability to reproduce and biology selects for that hallucination

It's just a hallucination. It's a veil drawn over The Uninsured or the Opiate Addicted or The Factory Workers in Shit Countries Who Make Our Shoes, and all the rest. Without that veil, deciding to have children becomes nearly impossible.

It's just too awful out there. My god.

Nuclear weapons and climate change (and biower, and all the rest) are *so fucking scary* that anybody who has kids will - if they can - block out all awareness AND THEREFORE ALL ACTION on these core issues.

We've been insane since Hiroshima or maybe Mutually Assured Destruction.

So we are literally sleepwalking into hell because the The Sleep of Reason Produces Children. You just can't have kids if you think your biome is collapsing. You're going to watch them die, or worse, and that's a very rational fear not some crazy fantasy.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleep…

Oh that fear might not be rational *for middle class white folks* but you ask roughly 50% of the human race whether there's any possibility their kid will starve to death before the kid becomes adult?

Big fear. People have more kids to make up for the ones who will die. To cope.

Leaders who cannot think clearly about nuclear weapons and mass starvation do not deserve to be leaders.

They're just shitty little entertainers telling you stories to sooth your rational fear enough for you to buy their product or have kids who will buy it instead. Nothing else

You are not going to get nuclear disarmament from people that cannot look at movies from post-Hiroshima

You are not going to get action on famine from people who believe it does not exist because its only happening to brown people in hot countries and they can pretend away death

The rate of starvation is not very controversial. The data isn't perfect but it's pretty easy to see the cause of death, you know, at least in the more extreme cases.

If the skin hangs loose, it probably wasn't a heart attack

I want to know why we ignore this. It's foundational

Take a look at the recent skirmish between Elon Musk and the United Nations World Food Programme.

mashable.com/article/elon-m…

Just stop and read it. Ignore the spin, look at the dynamics. "Money will fix it." "Here is an offer of money, if you can fix it."

"Actually we can't. Ow."

How do people starve to death?

The answer is so simple it will disturb you.

"People value their lives as worth less than the food which would keep them from dying."

Read. That. Sentence. Again.

That's all that is going on here. That is 100% of the problem. Lives are worthless

My capacity to help is limited. I'm mostly working on climate refugees, and to get any leverage there means making a *tremendous* amount of money and spending it to fund research. I tried UN, Red Cross, DoD, Ikea and more. Nobody has any leverage.

I can't do much about food yet.

But what I can say with absolute clarity is this: we are not going to solve this problem until we get people with kids to pull their heads out of their asses in large numbers.

We can't fix the world without the support of the parents, and their narrow focus on their own? Deadly.

What would it take to get parents to look a little wider than their immediate survival concerns, en masse, and act on starvation, on climate change, on nuclear weapons, and all the rest?

Concern for their children, and a realistic understanding of how random bad luck can be.

Parents are not working together to solve the world's fundamental problems so their kids will be safe.

No, parents are putting their faith in The State or The Economy or Pension Funds or whatever else. And they're turning a blind eye to the monstrous shit at the edges of the map

Unfortunately *the fucking map is on fire* and the monstrous shit at the edge of the map is on the march.

It's pretty much last ditch for the current equilibrium, and it gets a *lot* worse before it gets better.

A good example is America: if it *breaks* into civil war? Oh fuck.

So we're hanging on by our fingernails to the last shreds of Normality, this post-war bubble in which generally speaking life got linearly better. If we stopped working on our shitty little priorities and talked clearly about the real situation, we could stabilise this for a bit.

In that period of stability the solar panels will get much cheaper. Maybe AI will arrive and help us out solving economic and logistical problems

But if we lose that stability it tears badly. Yugoslavia, Iraq that sort of thing. Stable-but-nasty turns into hell on earth. Texas

You pretty much have to peel the veil back to see where the risks are for yourself.

Then maybe enough of us can work together to deal with the worse of this.

But it only begins when you stop prioritising irrelevant emotional bullshit over the brutal fact of mass starvation.