☠️ Why We're Going Extinct - 5000 Fucks, 30 Million Views, 8 Billion Dead
My tweet on collapsing carbon sinks has gone viral, racking up 30 million views. But what does 5,000 'Fucks' mean for our path to extinction?
This article was recorded down a prison phoneline. You can listen to the original with subtitles here.
We are not going extinct because of the climate crisis.
We’re going extinct because we can’t think straight.
Let me give you a simple example.
What, dear human being reading this, is worse: a child trips over a railway line and cuts her knee, or a child is tied to the railway line and a train is coming down the track?
Okay, yeah, it’s the second situation. Because although the harm has not yet been caused, it is going to happen, and the kid will die.
So far, sound good? Very clever of you. So try this one: what is worse—Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, or a thousand Auschwitzes, the thousand concentration camps coming down the line due to endless global chaos caused by elites allowing the continued emission of carbon?
Yep, you got it right—it’s obviously the Nazi horror, right? Because that happened, and 1,000 camps coming down the line have not happened yet, we don’t need to worry about that, right?
Burn, baby, burn.
We are going extinct because of your “right answer.”
Maybe a few of you feel (obviously, this is subjective) that 1,000 is greater than 1, so you don’t want us to go extinct. In which case, for the small percentage of you who have the attention span to get this far down this tweet/article, you might want to know what we need to do.
Well, as one of the world’s top campaigners, sitting in a cell after being given a five-year sentence for suggesting we do something effective about going extinct, I have a few ideas I will humbly share with you.
First, humility will get you nowhere. The only thing that gets attention is drama, and without attention, you don’t even get past the starting line.
Don’t write “scientists are concerned.” Don’t say you’re really upset. Don’t put in a one-off “fuck.” No—put “fuck” 4,568 times. Then you might get 30 million views rather than 1,000.
This is what I call the Larry Kramer Law. If you’re not up to speed on the guy who should be considered the greatest campaigner of the last century, you should know that he did not hold back. He turned around the disgusting neglect of gay people dying of AIDS in hospital corridors during the 1980s in just six months.
He didn’t ask nicely for people to protest; he said, “Get out on the streets, or you’re gonna fucking die.”
When TV interviewers asked him shitty questions, he said, “When you say that, I hate you.”
It’s what social movement academics call the emotional turn. Emotion trumps all those sensible things like “being right.”
So, you could say that the reason we are going extinct is not because of all the bad guys—there are always bad guys—it’s because the good guys are so crap at doing their job.
But the “climate movement” is like a family friend going to visit the Nazi household in the film The Zone of Interest. I’m politely suggesting it is wrong to have people die to further your problematic views.
At this point, most of you are going to turn away. It’s like the bit in the Bible when the rich man comes to Jesus and says, “Hey, so how do I get into the kingdom of heaven?” And Jesus, speaking truth to power, says, “You have to give away all your money.” The man walks off.
If you want to stop us from going extinct, it’s very simple: you must be prepared to sacrifice. You have to disrupt to the extent the government puts you in prison for five years—just for starters. When 1,000 people do that, we will be on the foothills of not going extinct.
But just about all of you will not do that, right? Because the hell has not happened yet, right? The train has not yet actually sliced up the child’s body on the track.
The biggest mistake, though, is not to decide not to act to the point of effectiveness. The most appallingly tragic mistake is to think you have chosen the easier option by walking away, like the rich man. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Because what will destroy you is not the fires, the storms, the floods—like the world has never seen. Nor will it be the social effects—the economic depression, the mass migration, the social collapse, the terror of the fascists. No, what will kill you is knowing you read this article and turned away. You saw, you understood, and you did nothing. Nothing real. Nothing that actually would make the difference. Not the emotion. Not the disruption.
You disagree, right? Because you’re a person of the world. You’ll handle it like the man who goes to war—he can handle it too, right? And then the guy next to him gets his head blown off, and for the next 30 years, he cannot forgive himself that it was the other guy who got killed and not him.
What kills you, you see, is not the world itself but your guilt about the world. Because you are designed to care and love, and if you betray that essence of your being, you rot from the inside. And that inside, one day you realise, is all you’ve got.
Jesus was just trying to give the rich man a bit of good advice.
So, as Larry says, “Get out on the streets, otherwise you’re gonna fucking die.”
There are plenty of pathways to action for the few of you who are heroic enough to get this far. Look at the links.
And yes, the carbon sinks are collapsing, and the carbon budgets are fucked. And unless there is a massive turnaround, we are going extinct. But as I hope I have explained, that’s not the real story.
As always, you can sign up for nonviolent civil resistance with Just Stop Oil in the UK or via the A22 Network internationally. If you want to get involved in the democratic revolution, join an upcoming Welcome to Assemble talk.
