When I Say “Age of Extinction,” It Means History Starts Rewinding — Fast

Why Doesn’t the 1% Care About Extinction? Because the Road To Collapse Is Paved With Gold

Image Credit: Oxfam

Question: Why is it that the 1% don’t seem to care about the climate crisis when everything they enjoy doing will potentially be threatened or destroyed in the near future? They are educated and some are quite intelligent, and some say they care about social issues and conservation issues?

Good question. Deceptively simple — yet a deep, profound question. Let’s talk about it. Let me rephrase the question, in a way I’ll come back to. What is The Age of Extinction, sociopolitically? It’s a Great Rewind. Human civilization regresses, at light speed, through its past eras, its mistake, follies, and, yes, horrors.

Surely you see some hint of that already happening. But let’s flip back to the question the way it was to make the link.

Why don’t the 1% care about Extinction? There are two answers to that, the simple one, and the deep one. The simple one — and it’s a good enough answer, too — goes like this. Money and power.

What else has been happening as Extinction — aka the mega-scale impacts of “climate change” — has begun to bite? Here’s a cheery little factoid for you.

“The richest 1 percent have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014.” That’s from Oxfam, in 2015. Meanwhile, according to the bank formerly known as Credit Suisse, “in 2021 the world’s richest 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 47.8 percent of all the world’s wealth.” And today? “Since 2020, the richest 1% have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth.” That’s from Oxfam, again.

The trend’s pretty easy to see there, isn’t it?

Let me give you some more data, to really drive the point home. Corporate profits are at their highest point in history. Meanwhile, the top 1%, after seeing a steep drop in their fortunes in the post-war era, are now back to Victorian levels of opulence — we’re back at the early 1800s. And if anything, that’s probably an understatement, because nobody’s counting all the hidden wealth stashed offshore.

So. Let’s now put the question another way. To be in the 1%, you have to be a certain kind of person, really — and here, 1% means more or less billionaires, not just the average well-off. You have to care about money and power more than anything. Think about it. Most of us — and I mean sane, thoughtful people like you and me, dear readers — have no interest in…wasting our lives…stockpiling more money than…we or ten generations of our kids will ever be able to spend. We’d rather be do something…real. Creative. Constructive. Meaningful. True. Whether that’s art or science, literature or theorems, exploration or discovery — doesn’t matter. 

But to be in this social group, you have to be a certain kind of person already, which is to say, a selection effect occurs — you have to be obsessed, more or less psychotically, with money and power. Why would anyone spend their life chasing more money — over doing something, anything else — if they already have, LOL, a, uhh, billion dollars? Hey, dumbo, go spend some time with the kids, I don’t know, take up painting, read a book.

They’re not like us. So to grapple with this question means understanding that — they have a completely different set of priorities and values to you and me. Ones we’d consider, well, psychopathic, delusional, bizarre, and harmful. Because of course, right about now, we — as in not you and me, but human civilization, the future, and human progress — needs that money, those resources, to invest in itself. Or else.

Now. Say that you were this kind of person. Would you care about…Extinction? On the one side, there’d be immense suffering, grief, pain, on a cataclysmic level. But you only really care about money and power. And on the other side? There’s more and more of that.