Humanity is Approaching its Greek Tragedy Phase

Ancient Greeks, and many other civilisations, had an obsession with the concept of “sacrifice for the greater good”. They believed that if they let go of something precious that they love, they can get something else in return. A quite naive and selfish concept really, which was made to one’s measure, as you get to pick both what you want in return, as well as what you are prepared to relinquish to get it. Yet people fell for it: from the Ancient Greeks to the Aztec empire thousands of miles away, the same exact concept was replicated in exactly the same way: if I kill some random strangers that I picked off the street and dedicate their corpses to you, will you please make it rain, Dear God of “so and so”?

The fact that the same sacrificial customs came into existence within civilisations who had no contact with each other, reveals a lot about the human mind’s struggle with resolving its crises: it would rather “trade” them, than actually work to mitigate and resolve them. This is really quite lazy, yet it is happening all over again today with carbon trading: we are more willing to create a fictional carbon trading market which has been proven to be completely corrupt, than actively work to lower our carbon emissions. At least the ancient civilisations had an awareness of the concept of sacrifice, of the fact that something has to give. Today, countless “sustainability” fraudsters on Linkedin advertise their magical consultancy skills which will help humanity to simply “calculate away” the climate crisis. This is the most lazy and irresponsible bullshit job that has ever existed. Nothing is being sacrificed, or learned.

While the ideological narrative of those ancient sacrifices involved the deities of rain, drought and so on, the deity we are all worshipping today is capitalism. We have surrendered to it completely to the point where, rather than trying to demolish or reform it, we have resorted to appeasing it through carbon trading.

Perhaps the most well known sacrificial tale is that of Troy, where Agamemnon has to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, so that the god Artemis allows his fleet to safely sail to Troy. (Yes, Artemis sounds like a real piece of work). Aside from creating drama, something the Greeks invented and excelled in, these types of stories aimed to explore the concept of compromise, and the struggle of balancing personal benefit on one hand, and the benefit of the greater society on the other. If Agamemnon thinks only of himself, he can save his daughter’s life but lose the war and possibly condemn a whole nation to subjugation. If however he decides to think of his country and his fleet first, he will make the difficult decision to sacrifice Iphigenia. He will be safeguarding the greater good, possibly the future of generations. It really is an impossible decision, because this is actually a lose-lose situation: either one of the two choices are extremely painful and detrimental. Yet he chooses to sacrifice his child. He chooses society instead of himself.

And this brings us to real life. Because in 399 BC Athens, the philosopher Socrates was waiting alone in a prison cell, faced with a difficult choice between two options, which in his mind were also equally detrimental:

A) He could denounce his critical views of Athenian Democracy, stop being an enemy of the state, and apologise for what he believed in. If he did this, he would walk away from his cell a free man.

OR

B) He could insist on his views, but would have to die by drinking the hemlock poison in his cell. He would maintain his pride and dignity, but he would have to pay the ultimate price: his own life.

To Socrates, this was an easy choice: it was a choice on one hand between dying as himself, a truly free man, holding on to his beliefs, and on the other continuing to live, but as a fake version of himself, having denounced the very things he had been fighting for. In a sombre atmosphere, as his students visited his cell to plead with him not to accept the death sentence, he explained to them that one is only alive when they are themselves. If they denounce themselves and their beliefs, they are effectively dead. He took the poison. Socrates was basically a version of Roger Hallam, a few thousand years ago.

The fallout from Socrates’ death gave birth to a renaissance in philosophy, and the impact of his choice, his sacrifice, would reverberate through the ages by nucleating new thought which evolved into Athens’ own brand of philosophy: one that championed the human spirit, individualism, and questioned where our ethical responsibilities lie as individuals and societies. Many of Socrates’ students became philosophers, leaving behind a legacy that has left its mark on today’s activism. It is alive with us, today.

Fast forward to the present, and enter the climate crisis. Where do our responsibilities lie? And what are our choices? Is it all lose-lose or can there be a win? Can politicians actually put society first, and themselves second? And which are the values that we need to uphold, no matter what? The answer is that the more we delay making a choice in our impossible dilemma, the more it becomes apparent that we have taken the third, most detrimental choice of all: to not make one. We lose both society, and our daughter, because we don’t like being blackmailed by nature. And while those ancient civilisations were genuinely blackmailed by nature’s droughts, today we have blackmailed ourselves: we caused all of this climate mayhem. Stupid doesn’t quite summarise it.

Our dithering civilisation has entered its Greek Tragedy phase, and you are all part of the audience, chained down to those ancient, burning, marble seats to watch the show of your own demise. Because a few decades ago, the level of sacrifices we would have had to make in terms of emission cuts, in terms of our lifestyle, pale in comparison to the ones we need to make today, after having wasted so much time emitting, destroying, burning. We have wasted precious time, and have already reached a lose-lose situation: we could take draconian measures to cut emissions that would destabilise our societies and still manage to lose our only planet, as there is ample evidence that Earth has entered an accelerating, runaway amplification of climate change that cannot be stopped at this point.

In other words, even if we sacrifice Iphigenia we still lose our war fleet. This is our predicament. And it is not only a lose-lose situation, but a combination of the worst of both decisions. The more we delay a decision between our two options, the more the third option is being selected for us: Hell.

Many politicians today are in the place of Socrates or Agamemnon, only a very, very corrupt version of them. They know that climate change is happening, and that action was due yesterday. Yet they don’t take any action because they will most certainly lose their job, a few voters, and the carbon-trading mobster lobbyists and solar capitalists. They are selling themselves out, and selling their Iphigenia’s who will suffer for them, so that they don’t have to drink the hemlock poison themselves. Meanwhile, the fleet is already burning.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter?@99blackbaloons

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