The language and the conceptualization here is almost more interesting than the content itself, though the content is certainly of significance.
There is interesting language here that is reflecting a shift in consciousness: we move from a pinpointed awareness of self and of humankind as an agent of causation, which is unidirectional in its effects, versus a shifting awareness of the efficacy of external forces, of the earth and the universe in general, which wash back on to humanity and act on it, causing humanity to act in turn.
Of course, the extreme polar ends of these causal concepts never quite disappear, remaining dormant on the fringes until their expressions grow numerous enough so as to affect material, practical change, and so oscillate in strength of expression through time.
To clarify with an example, it is theorized that more ancient cultures saw a continuous, dialectic (or unidirectional?) exchange between the material and spiritual world, in which the agents of causal efficacy moved conceptually from external sources to the self and back, a view that eventually broke down under severe social, political, economic, and ecological stress, resulting in a division between the material, human world and the spiritual world. Soon enough these dividing fissures would produce the mythology of the efficacious self through further divisions, until the divisions reached the self.
It could be that the final breakdown of the self, as a causally efficacious agent within a productive body, produces these holistic visions of causation, a necessary conceptual progression that allows the individual to form a new political-economic body. Again, a theory, a narrative, yet...
This conceptual evolution and its dance with material reality serves as a reasonable explanation for the reality we are faced with today. How else to explain what is happening? We are faced with these corporate behemoths, which, embedded within a regime of competitive expansion and social disintegration, cause all individuals caught within their gravitational orbit to act against their own interests as human beings, even as members of an ecology.
We look on at these organs of production, which relentlessly seek out pockets of oil, and connected to the organs of energy production, extract and send out the oil to be burned or manipulated, which in turn further heats or degrades the ecology and environment that houses all possible productive activity, and we are at a loss to comprehend.
The corporate organs themselves are reproducing their own gradual destruction. Here the endless propaganda and rationalization proves useless in understanding the incomprehensible driving power of these organs. We are forced to temporarily discard our model of human causal efficacy, and understand this state of affairs as something which is animated by external forces. So the oil burns us. Or, the nature of its concentrated energy unlocks in an organism an endless expansion, so long as the organism possesses the means to exploit it.
Humanity itself, lacking effective limits to its own growth, could only violently expand with the concentrated energy it came into contact with. The violence and energy with which this process unfolds is owed in equal part to the internal state of the human organism itself, what with its rational-technological methods of universal exploitation and manipulation, which was noted as early as Heidegger in a wonderful essay, and certainly the thread goes back further.
It takes both the formation of a new spiritual ideology, and the political and economic ideologies which come with it, as well as the final burning out of the most accessible stores of petroleum energy (implying the collapse of the burning process), to put an end to this process. Paradoxically enough, as the formation of a new ideology - or the cyclical return to an ancient ideological conception, transformed in a different era, as a point in a spiral - seeks to mend divisions, a tense dividing wall is put up against the solipsistic worship of self which animates the end stages of the burning process.
Under this vision, individuals become the many licking fingers of the burning process. At the same time, the causal chain is perceived to extend conceptually into infinity, an ideological position that induces uncertainty and inaction, which of course is sometimes the best course of action.
However, under this enlarged aperture of perception, one can still act in accordance with the nature of the material world, as well as with the dictates of restoring life's ecological equilibria, however an impossible task it may seem to the individual. To locate a cause in a given historical thread, institution, political-economic system, or even an individual, is to perform a political act which has material consequences.
One may advocate switching out individuals like one switches out batteries - an attitude that is more prevalent in our individualistic, bourgeois thought, but not exclusive to it - or one may advocate rebuilding the entire mechanism within which the batteries act, such as an economic or political structure, or one may advocate departing entirely from a particular type of mechanism building altogether, which is to depart from a certain cultural or social form or mode of production. Each of these political acts has consequences both for the targets of their action, and the life structures connected to those targets, oftentimes with nonlinear and multiplying consequences.
Well, the process will wind down as it will, and generate its ideological reactions all along the spectrum in turn, which means a cascading and multitudinous array of human behavior, which all depends on what each individual is. There are many directions this incredibly complex system will take, though the one thing it won't do is continue on in the direction it has been going.
