006 Is the selfish gene to blame?

In the face of a possible infection of the biosphere, not only serious but also wildly unpredictable and disorienting, Neolib Gov's creed remained unchanged and, as usual, was based on the old myth of technoscience being able to cope with it.

To the cry of "technoscientists of the whole world unite!" they launched a contest that was supposed to find the causes behind the biosphere's condition.   It was also to test as to how large a proportion of humans had become, or perhaps had always been, the pathogen of biospheric septicemia. The goal was to find the solution in a click of a button, avoiding , however, ever questioning the role of Neolib Governance.

Research began to see whether the driving force behind such behavior among humans was a virus-generated disease or some bacterium that turned them into destroyers of the ecosystem. Some compared the pandemic with plagues: malaria, which had been mowing down humans for millennia, or Xylella fastidiosa, a producer of major plant epidemics, or the countless diseases in which there was an intermediary host. In this case, the intermediary host initiating septicemia would have been the human species itself in the grip of a mysterious disease. And this disease would drive us to disrupt the balance of the biosphere without any material vehicle of transmission appearing among humans.

It must be said that, at that time, the changes in living conditions were such that everyone had already realized the gravity of the situation, including the techbros who, not surprisingly, were preparing to sneak away first. However, after much opposition and resistance from the upper echelons of Governance, no one denied the responsibility of the human species in generating what now turned out to be an infection in the ecosphere any longer. At the expense of all common sense, an attempt was made to give an ideological interpretation that would allow the very foundations of established power not to be called into question despite everything. So, they still argued that it wasn't a disease, but only a slight impasse the abnormal development of so-called "civilization" had led to. Some suspected a (genetic?) incompatibility with the balance of the biosphere. So human nature and the evolution of our species on Earth were directly implicated. According to mainstream technoscientists, human behavior had not changed since early days of civilization. Terrotorial deterioration was triggered and worsened with sudden jumps due to a combination of factors, including population density, economic development and the intensive use of technologies. Implicitly, this was a genetic hypothesis, referring to the selfish gene theory. This theory said genes act to increase their own reproduction and spread without consideration for the consequences on individuals or the species. According to this theory, the genes of any living organism would be considered a veritable autopilot that drives life. They're described as "selfish" in that they act in self preservation rather than for the good of the individual or species in natural selection. So, individuals would be regarded as mere carriers of a genetic heritage that they must maximize to ensure their own survival and spread.

The genetic mechanics of the species, blindly capable of anything to ensure maximum reproduction, became perfectly compatible with the transformation of the environment as an endless, free resource and dumping ground. It was the human gene that decided everything: a perfectly agreeable thesis for all those who sought to escape all responsibility.

In the Autonomous Sphere, the gimmick of the selfish gene, which supposedly would blindly force humans to destroy the environment in order to reproduce and multiply ad infinitum, was generally not accepted.

It was argued that the attribution of a moral quality, such as selfishness, to a sequence of organic molecules capable of reproduction, namely genes, was a ploy of science linked to the power of capital, represented by Ecofin. This attempt sought to show that selfishness did not belong to the moral sphere of good and evil, but was intrinsic to life itself. Meanwhile, Neolib Gov helped make matters worse with an explicit selfishness that made the gene's implicit selfishness pale in comparison. Nevertheless, how can we not rule out the possibility that some humans might have inflicted the first localized insults on their surroundings ever since the birth of techné?

Also in the Autonomous Sphere, some time after the genetic hypothesis, another, lesser known theory was advanced, albeit in complete disagreement with the first, but which also ruled out any pathology. At issue were the ways in which humans had organized themselves over the last few centuries, leading to a succession of ever new variants of Capitalist Governance. As it happens, the beginning of this era of humanity coincided macroscopically with that of the pathology of the biosphere, at least as far as recent material evidence from space and recorded through the time machine was concerned.

As shown by the space videos going back in time, there had been no evidence of deterioration in the state of the biosphere for a period of about two million years since the emergence of humankind.

The earliest evidence of terrestrial pathology seemed to have manifested itself around the period of the colonization of America, a significant historical moment that had marked the establishment of the logic of capital accumulation and early globalization. Although it might have seemed a simple synchronism, the proponents of this thesis did not believe that the simultaneous emergence of a social, political and ecological regime based on the global exploitation of the planet and the infection of the biosphere was a mere coincidence.

Just like it was no coincidence the state of so many territories and ecosystems worsened with the successive revolutions of the industrial age, even though, at that time, large portions of the earth's surface, including some still-pristine areas, had not yet been reached.

The destructive peaks at the culmination of civilization during the so-called World Wars somehow foreshadowed the future. The explosions of the first atomic bombs were the precursor and preparatory technological signs of a generalized septicemia of the biosphere.

The proponents of this theory saw capitalism, in all its forms and mutations of governance, as the engine of the earth's infection. This thesis, which they called Capitalocene, seemed, if nothing else, to point to a way out. By closing the five centuries or more of capital, according to them, the nightmare of destruction could be ended. But the situation was so critical that they feared a condition of complete irreversibility, that not even a hypothetical global revolution seemed sufficient to solve the problem.

But there was something tantalizing about the Capitalocene thesis that didn't seem too far-fetched, especially because of the circumstantial evidence: maybe everything had really begun from the genocide celebrated as the "discovery of America" and the "conquest of the West," the latter term ominously evoking the High Frontier project launched by the Ecofin AltaSphere. It appeared the two expressions could not be disjointed.

The Capitalocene theory had limitations: it did not take into account the fact that the phases of globalization were insignificant in length when considered in the history of the planet and human presence on Earth. What would a few centuries mean compared to a geological time scale? Despite the spatial evidence, it seemed almost impossible that all these changes had occurred suddenly in five centuries, without humans noticing any premonitory signs or finding effective remedies. From an orbital distance, the time machine video report – its granularity was still approximate and imprecise – the first truly remarkable signs of terrestrial infection appeared with the industrial steam revolution based on coal mining.

Human presence had also previously left traces on the geosphere, but they did not appear to be signs of pathology. Although the sequence obtained with the time machine confirmed the Orbis Spike, the regeneration of American forests after the native population, massacred by European colonizers, had been reduced from sixty to six million individuals in little more than a century.

During the capitalism, there had been non-capitalist (or anti-capitalist) twists and turns and revolutions that had paid any attention to the state of the earth's infection. Quite the opposite, they adopted the same industrial models. Plus, the paroxysmal crisis caused by the Erbanera nuclear power plant explosions could not be forgotten. This showed that merely opposing capitalism would not be enough to stop the progression of the biospheric infection.

Not to mention China, the country where bioshock septicemia was most advanced, ever since the time when it was a mere "factory of the world," when its GDP still indicated unhappy growth.

So there was still no historical evidence that humans were able to organize under different conditions and circumstances outside of capitalist logic in order to reverse the movement and roll back the septicemia of the biosphere.