Modern consumer industrial society is the world’s apex predator. It is a Death Machine that devours and tramples all Life wherever it sets foot.
The problem is not merely carbon pollution causing temperature increase and climate change, but also things like the destruction of forests, fisheries, poisoning of soils due to monoculture farming, the poisoning of fresh water, the exponential rise of plastics pollution, and the resultant massive loss of biodiversity as we suffer the Sixth Great Extinction.
All due to the aggressive exploitation and consumption habits of modern, i.e. western, “civilization.”
How ironic it is then that the sacred writings that form the foundation of our civilization also predict its downfall!
Yes I am speaking of the Judeo-Christian Bible and its apocalyptic predictions of the end of the age, an age that culminates in divine judgement against “those who destroy the earth.” (Rev. 11:18 NASB)
In the Old Testament the prophet Daniel saw a great Beast with iron teeth that “devoured the whole earth” and crushed and trampled everything in its path. Did you get that? Iron teeth. Like some kind of cyborg. A beastly machine that devours as it destroys. The ultimate CONSUMER.
Yes, there are allusions to ancient Rome here, as every Bible scholar will explain. Yet we would be remiss if we simply dismiss the vision as having no relation to our present situation.
In Revelation the very same vision is updated. Rather than presenting Daniel’s four beasts chronologically we find them combined into one all-consuming Beast that overcomes the saints and exercises authority over all the tribes and peoples of the earth.
The pinnacle of this Beast’s authority is it’s control over COMMERCE. Only those who wear the Beast’s mark are allowed to buy and sell. Many Bible experts seek some sort of allegorical interpretation here, yet it certainly must be noteworthy that today in the 21st Century is the closest that human society has come to being able to implement the Beast’s worldwide financial identity program literally.
There is a narrative of humanity that takes consumption and extraction and exploitation of the natural world for granted, even labelling it as “progress.” After all, the economy must continually grow because if it falters we have a recession, and if it shrinks we have a depression, and everyone knows that a depression is the worst thing that can happen to a society, right?
Such a sentiment was echoed by G. W. Bush after the Iraq invasion before the market crash of 2007 when he implored, “I encourage you all to go shopping more!”
Yet I would dare to assert that the wholehearted embrace of the Beast and it’s agenda to devour and destroy the earth through reckless consumerism and endless growth is the worst form of idolatry. It’s the result of knowing no other story of humanity than the one that the Beast tells to its admirers… to those who are also unwitting victims. It is the story of western civilization demanding that its way of being human is the only option:
Competitive consumerism.
Self-centered individualism.
Loving things and using people.
Land as privately-owned property.
Extraction and exploitation of the natural world.
The commodification and exploitation of human labor.
Love-of-money as the master-desire at the heart of the system.
Centralized control of the narrative, destroying our cultural imagination.
Seducing and enslaving the masses while steadily destroying the basis of all Life.
Forget supernatural explanations and theological interpretations for a moment and look instead at our present reality:
There is a System of domination that seeks power over all humanity and it is seductive just as much as it is repressive and destructive. We have created it and empowered it ourselves but now many of us are realizing that it now has a life of its own and a trajectory that threatens the liberty of humanity as well as the life of the planet.
Time to face reality and exit this predatory super-organism that we call “civilization.”
Time for a New Humanity.
Further Resources
Articles:
Deep Adaptation by Jem Bendell (2018)
The Lord’s Prayer and the New Exodus by Brant Pitre (2006)
UNCIVILIZATION: The Dark Mountain Manifesto by Paul Kingsnorth (2012)
Films:
Home (2012)
Living In the Future’s Past (2018)
Living In the Time of Dying (2022) “ … coming back into believing in ourselves as human beings. It is not human beings who have made things so colossally dire; it is a particular type of thinking – a predatory kind of thinking. That predatory psychology is justified as being the natural state of Man. But it is not true, and everyone knows in the deepest part of their heart that they are way better than that…”
Concerning Violence (2014)
Lectures:
Main Drivers of Collapse, Ecocide, and Near Term Human Extinction (2022)
Overstepping Our Ecological Footprint (2020)
Books:
Less Is More by Jason Hickel (2020)
Breaking Together by Jem Bendell (2023)
The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent (2017)
The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow (2021)
Building Tomorrow by Paddy Le Flufy (2023)
Local Is Our Future by Helena Norberg-Hodge(2019)
Online Communities:
New Horizons 