The Inevitable Business Case For Industrial Zombie Cannibalism - Resilience
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Now, I’ve gone over this and over this in my mind, and I’m convinced that we’ve reached a stage in the senescence of industrial society where if a business case can be made for a practice, even a heinous, criminal, and unthinkable one, whether it’s happening right now or not, sooner or later, it will. Mad cow disease, which spread due to the forced cannibalism of cattle fed the meat byproducts of their own species, can be seen as a template for how the current system operates. Zombie cannibalism is the new economy. Welcome to the global slaughterhouse.
For example, I’m trying to imagine the thinking that went into the decision to exempt or at least skirt the intent of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Clean Drinking Water Acts here in the United States in natural gas and petroleum fracking operations.(1) The reason this had to be done is that, like slaughtering people and marketing human flesh, the pollution that fracking generates would have been illegal if the changes had not been made. So, essentially, we’ve decided for convenience’ sake that an activity that we’d previously prohibited is now ok. Just like that. But why, then, was it ever made illegal in the first place? Forgive me, but wasn’t it because it was known that these chemicals, when they get into the air and water, cause people to get sick and die? So I guess that’s okay now, too. Yes, it’s a slow and geographically selective slaughter, but it’s a slaughter nonetheless. Most importantly, however, it generates a marketable product that can be sold at a profit -- or at least in this case a marketable business model that can drill investors.
I’ve read about how in West Africa’s cacao growing regions, children are forced into labor at picking the cacao pods. Frequently trafficked as slave labor across international boundaries (2) children may have to climb trees with machetes and walk around in shorts and barefooted, carrying blowers that fog insecticide and fungicide.(3) My basic question is, when I put that chocolate into my mouth, is that a sweetened form of cannibalism? And if I heat my home with fuel that has been purchased at the cost of fracking area residents drinking industrial waste from their home water wells, is that possibly also a kind of cannibalism, warmed up for sale? Do their tears and blood have to fall in my soup for me to consider myself a zombie cannibal, or is it enough to know that my body’s warmth this winter was paid for by their bodies’ suffering, disease, and premature death? Or to take another example, if I aspire to grisly zombie mayhem, do I have to go to India and hack a poor cotton farmer to death myself, or is it sufficient to go to the nearest mall and buy a pair of jeans made from the GMO cotton that bankrupted that farmer and led to his suicide? I have to ask because, after all, the mall is a heckuva lot more conveniently located, and these jeans look great on zombie cannibals like me.
However, there seems to be some controversy about that last example, so perhaps it’s best to focus on the hairless heads of childhood leukemia victims fixed atop pikes on the dandelion-free lawns of suburban homeowners and their sponsors at the local chemical company. You haven’t seen them? You should, because such deaths, while not made so public, are statistically inevitable given the widespread use of cosmetic lawn chemicals.(4) Or the cancers reported from petroleum contamination in Ecuador(5) and elsewhere. Or cancers and birth defects among electronics workers.(6) I mean, what zombie cannibal doesn’t like creating death and real-life monsters, especially if we can consume the results?
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http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-10-31/zombie-cannibalism-why-we-should-b-concerned-if-there-s-a-business-case-for-eating-people
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... and - despite what the usual defenders of Business As Usual will claim - really not
that far from today's practice ...
Thanks for posting that (and all of the other stuff you do Hatrack!)
