VI. Humans are just a highly invasive species that took over Earth.

I can make a guess that most of us here have had reckonings about our own generations’ chapters of the human plotline. Something along the lines of realizing that our entire lifetimes will be spent facing realities of climate change and other disasters of racist capitalism, overpopulation, and imminent decay of all stripes. My biggest question for the world lately has been, Is it every generations assumption that total collapse of society seems just around the corner…or are we just special?

It’s hard to rationalize the space humans consume on Earth—not just with our physical communities, but how we occupy the air, the water, how we manipulate the resources for our needs and at the expense of other survival. We occupy so much of it, especially in the Western developed world, even more in North America. It would be impossible to discuss the U.S. honestly without discussing that specific taking of space, that imperialism, those institutional heritages of racism and poverty and systemic oppression behind the development of this country.

Then you begin to do the mental gymnastics of what we could possibly do about any of it. It’s hard to want to find solutions, like alternative energy sources, just to find out they present a whole new set of issues. It is awfully conflicting to be typing on this laptop, checking this iPhone, putting week-old milk from my refrigerator in my coffee I made on an electric stove, and think…maybe the Industrial Revolution, like, shouldn’t have happened? Or, I’m sitting on occupied land of the Duwamish tribe, who were assaulted and persecuted by white imperialist capitalist settlers, and…maybe I never should have been here in the first place? These are things that, the more I learned about them in high school through classes or my own research, made the narrative of the human story appear to have no ultimate benevolent end, no inherent arc of justice that kept its shape no matter what human violence threatened to bend and pull it.

But let’s rewind it back—all back. In this TED talk (stay with me!), the historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that human rights aren’t inherent, but rather an invention of societies that act as a social contract. There is no guaranteed right of a human being. That sentence goes against every grain of my conscience, but I have to consent to the truth of it. There is nothing given but our own human organization that grants us the things the U.S. Constitution, for instance, considers inherent and unalienable. This how fragile human rights are.

We’re an accumulation of billions of years of biology, which is in no way tethered to a moral arc of the universe which, as it turns out, is a fiction (please refer to the chapter above for further explanation). I mean, this is why creationists are opposed to teaching evolution to students. It’s because of people like me, depressing people like you with this! For only one second, I don’t blame them, because I feel the pain of understanding, to my belief, that there is no creation story, there’s no plot of humanity on which we are chugging along. There’s no natural order, there’s no human story. Just data. It hurts because it suggests that there is no superiority or purpose to the human mission, that it is instead scientific strategy and happenstance, with no clear end or goal or inherent goodliness in the existence of people on the planet. Data dissolves fiction—facts disrupt stories. But what lies beyond that dissolution is a dose of actuality, and that’s the only honest point you can work, think, and act from.

So. About where we are now. I know that in the core of all of this—that rights are social contracts, that the arc of justice is entirely in our control—we realize what parts of survival are our domain. We know power is accumulated not through any specific natural order or inherent privilege, but through force and accumulation. I don’t really know what to do with this one—if I did, i’d know how to save the world! I hope to just to leave you with the sense that knowing darkness can make you feel a bit lighter. Thoughts are good containers for suspicions that could haunt you forever if they don’t become organized. When I bring up something serious in conversations and friends are like, “Whoa, that’s heavy,” I get that—but putting those weights somewhere besides my shoulders lets them live independently. Although I’m a clump of regenerating cells, stuck in a damaging system, on a planet in dissolve, there’s a lightness in knowing that there’s a bit more freedom to be found in moments of personal destruction. I would hope that getting to know that freedom would be able to stop some of the other kinds. ♦