All this insistence on littleness offends out global unifiers to whom everything bigger is greater. But since the road of bigness has no end, and since the unifiers can never find a greatest element beyond which mass ceases to accumulate, they cannot arrive anywhere except in the asylum of the infinite.

— breakdown-of-nationsp. 170

Unable to enjoy a moment’s peace, they are for ever driven to project their present trouble into the future and then to anticipate the future miseries to make their present doubly sour, conjuring dangers as yet unborn, but suffering from their vision already now. They try to solve the problems of all future generations while dying from their inability to solve their own.

— breakdown-of-nationsp. 170

"Infinite growth on a finite planet"

Cancer¶

Homo sapiens as a cancer upon the Earth (loss of contact inhibition, etc.)

See also "Development and the People’s Immune System: The Story of Another Variety of AIDS" in post-dev-reader

Hungry Ghosts¶

hungry-ghosts - addiction and the "modern condition"

Since corporations are “immortal,” and since they are created solely to amass wealth, they become the institutionalization of dissatisfaction, the economic manifestation of the Buddhist notion of “hungry ghosts,” spirits who roam the earth, always eating, never sated.

— culture-make-believech. Corporations, Cops, and Hungry Ghosts

Wendigo¶

braiding-sweetgrass Wendigo stories as warning to those who lose their humanity and transform into monsters when they transgress all bounds of morality in order to slake their insatiable appetites

Black holes¶

Turtles all the way down

Non-profits and progressivism¶

Non-profits are founded with the best intentions: they want to solve world hunger, eliminate disease, mitigate climate change. But with the SOP of the modern non-profit, applying for grants continuously in a bid to keep themselves in existence year after year, how many of them can truly say that they have interests aligned with those they claim to serve? Taking money from wealthy donors will always come with strings attached—whether contractual or structural. And with the never-ending fund-raising, can staffers truly say that they are working to solve whatever problem it is they set out to solve, or is this just an exercise in ensuring their own job security? When a tech startup claims that they were set up to solve a certain problem, and then pivots to a subscription model, are they not then taking up one evil and hoping to replace that with a new addiction—an addiction to their own service?

When an organisation tells you they are mission-driven, it had better be a suicide mission they're on. Anything less, and it means that they are dedicated more strongly to their own gain than to the eradication of the problem they've identified. Let their metric of success, the metric of their sincerity, be to put themselves out of business.

cf: CIDOC and the joyful celebration they held when they shut it down.