Illuminating the Condition

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 2011-12-14 20:43

It has long struck me that some time in the last two hundred years society went essentially crazy.

Perhaps this chart explains it.

We did.

Mercury famously makes people crazy, and crazy people make crazy decisions:

to put profit above everything;

to rip the earth open in every larger gashes to suck out the blood and marrow of the earth;

to engage in multiple global wars with ever-more deadly weapons; to build weapons that can wipe out most life on the planet;

to build and explode globally a society founded on the insane notion of limitless growth on a finite planet

to keep growing that mad industrial society even while it became clear that it is destroying life on earth, directly, and through the side effect of GW...

Perhaps, then it all boils down to chemistry--we poisoned ourselves with Hg and that has caused us to further poison the planet.

IIRC, one result of exposure to such toxins is to not be able to see the larger picture, to become narrowly focused on linear goals (a similar result is seen in kids exposed to physical abuse.) This seems to be pretty much what we are doing as a society--focus narrowly on linear goals like GDP even while the larger picture--the living planet, is being destroyed by our actions.

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Very interesting. I happen to

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2011-12-15 20:50.

Very interesting. I happen to live in gold-mining central. Certainly, there is mercury in the air.

Thank you for this observation. It would be interesting to see a Pb chart - I seem to remember that leaded gas increased the amount of lead available to humans by X100 or X1000 or more. Really bad.

I keep thinking of Jung, and his descent into near madness as WWI drew close to beginning . He didn't know the war was coming, and maybe the timing was just coincedental , but I seem to sometimes get that same feel - that we as a species have gone collectively mad, and have fallen largely unaware of our madness. We declare our victory in Iraq - 4500 red whit e and blue body bags, 32000 wounded, 800 billion plus interest in $, and that's just the part we care to see as it highlights our own cost and ignores the huge suffering of the locals.

Collective madness? Looks like it to me. Other signs of collective madness abound, and much proof of such can be found in the willful ignorance of the great harm done by this huge disaster (and our typical arrogance) in Japan.

BC 12/15