Spooks and the Murder Machine
“A man obsessed is a man possessed by a demon”
- Hubert Selby Jr, The Demon
We all know the story so I’ll not go into detail too much here. One of the most famous is Mary Shelly's Frankestein.
For the last 200 years Shellys infamous gothic horror novel has freighted many children and adults alike and has left a lasting effect in the mind of many generations influencing horror stories and film making.
Similarly to Albert Camus' usage of the plague as a metaphor for the rise of fascism in his novel of the same name, Shellys creation can be used in the same manner for the dangers of technological society.
So when viewing the story from a different angle than just a monster running amok murdering people, but looked at as a critique of technology a different meaning to it unfolds showing the arrogance of the technoscientific quest to control and assert dominance and superiority over the natural world, while trying to do so creates a murderous monster and loses all control over turning on its creator.
The main character, the young scientist Victor Frankenstein's only motivation is to leave his mark among his predecessors to be up there with all the other great scientists.
"...more, far more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation."
It doesn't take long for his motivation to turn into total possession; he is compelled by the idea of gaining knowledge to further science but becomes completely imprisoned to it, it owns him.
"My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emancipated with confinement. Sometimes, on the brink of certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realise. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself;....Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unalloyed damp of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with remembrance; but the resistless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit."
Frankestein's possession can be looked at similarly to civilisation's pursuit of industrial and technological progress at whatever the cost, whether to personal health or to the health of other beings. Society is owned by its pursuit of artificial betterment and overindulgence. While Frankestein's figures out he created a monster and so attempts to put an end to his creation, unlike him, society hasn't figured out its demise is on the horizon and instead propels the continuance of the human made murder machine that is techno-industrial civilization, even spores on its murderous evolution.
Through the anti-civ lense the novel is more than a horror story, it is a warning to the narcissism of industrial and technological progress and the want of putting the world to right through scientific experiment.
This progress is a dogmatic idol, held above everyone's heads, promising to bring salvation to humanity; instead creates prisoners and followers, as opposed to inspiring willful self-creators. Similarly to how Catholics believe if they are good their whole life they will be accepted into heaven when they die, but that time will never come, it's a fantasy. The reality of this idol is tragically unfolding all around us and across the globe. The body counts are stacking up and the destruction of the natural world is increasing.
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Fanciful constructs of cruelty
"In the innermost recesses of humanism, at its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison."
- Theodor W. Adorno
The myth of progress is closely linked to anthropocentrism; which has its roots in the old testament - which states humans were made in the image of God, who gave humans the moral right to subdue and establish dominion over nature, to use and exploit the entire earth because it's only value is to serve the needs of humans.
Which brings use to yet another construct, that of humanity; which separates the human species from other animals and the natural world in the belief that humans are the most important and valuable element of existence, therefore human interests come first over any nonhuman animal and the natural environment as if we are something different. Humanity is a cultural construct of self-alienation.
This construct of human supremacy is explicitly a speciesist morality which is used not only to exploit and control animals but to even characterize human animals hierarchically based on social constructs of domination such as classism, racism, sexism, queerphobia.
At the time Shelly was writing her novel England and Europe was going through a massive social and economical transformation, largely due to the scientific advances that birthed industrialism. With the changes came conflict between those at the bottom of society and those enforcing industrialization.
With the so-called progress of the industrial revolution came mass poverty on a scale not seen before. As the old cottage trade and crafters became defunct as new technologies developed creating monopolies in industries driving small rural based individual and family traders out of business. Floods of unemployed people diverged into the cities creating overcrowding and driving down already poor wages.
The miserable condition of the poor created much conflict, often spilling out into outright rebellion. One such rebellion was that of the infamous Luddites.
"Frankenstein's monster" was used repeatedly by the media of the time to describe the revolting poor throughout the 19th century, the poor were the scientists' creation turning on their master.
Ireland but much of the brunt of this progress there is many records of food riots consistently every year for decades from the 18th century right across the 19th. The Frankestien metaphor was also used as a racist slur against Irish rioters and rebels depicting them as ape-like monsters in imagery in the colonial propaganda of the British. At the time the Irish were considered apes not only by the British colonizers but across Europe and the Americas. Seen as being no better than animals, backed up and justified by the racist evolutionary theory of Social Darwinism and Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest''. The very same theory used by European colonizers to justify colonizing Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia and for their genocides, slavery and civilizing the "savages"; or as Joseph Conrad put it in his novel The Heart of Darkness (which was based on the horrors inflicted by Belgian colonizers in the Congo), "exterminate all the brutes". Since then, the Irish have been accepted and assimilated into whiteness.
The social and economic reconstruction of the West has never stopped since, techno-industrial society has been continuously evolving, spilling over into the rest of the world. Its evolution is built on piles of corpses and the plundering and destruction of the earth.
Supposedly now in the 21st century we have meant to have gotten by all these techno-industrial hiccups. On the surface industrial society has brought some improvements, the typical life expectancy has risen, access to other innovative technologies, in theory we have fair democracies, employment opportunities (wage slavery, as if this is a good thing), access to healthcare (if you can afford it), transport infrastructure, colleges (not accessible for all), economic and social rights (again in theory).
Do people really have a better quality of life and what is the coast? Some gain but many don't. All these gains have all been built off misery. From swet shops in India and China to the toxic mining of rare earth minerals in Africa, child labour and low wages across the board; to the torture of animals through vivisection laboratories used for all sorts of consumer products such as makeup, cigarettes and testing household chemicals; massive ecological destruction and habitat lose from both animal and plant agriculture.
There is a long list, I will outline a small fraction of the horrific effects of the damage caused by industrial society to the natural world, nonhuman and human animal populations. I'll keep it short for the sake of the reader, but for anyone interested alls you have to do is Google and a whole flood of info will appear:
Roughly 160 million children were subjected to child labour at the beginning of 2020. 822 million suffer from undernourishment. Outdoor air pollution kills between 6 to 8 million people from cancer and other related diseases each year. Studies have shown an estimate of 1.35 million people die from car crashes or road related accidents yearly, that's 3,700 killed each day worldwide. Throughout the world millions are addicted to drugs and millions regularly drug binge. There are as many as 300 million people suffering from alcohol use-disorder worldwide. 1.2 billion people in 111 developing countries live in multidimensional poverty, accounting for 19% of the world’s population. Each day, 25,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, die from hunger and related causes globally.
A study in the University of Pennsylvania found that high usage of social media including Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram increases rather than decreases feelings of loneliness. Also, the study found that reducing social media usage can actually make you feel less lonely and isolated and improve your overall wellbeing.
Another recent study found that as much as 33 percent of the world's population feels lonely. Younger people between the ages of 12 to 24 feel more lonelier than people older. So while individuals are becoming increasingly prisoners to their phone and social media it's not actually beneficial to people's mental wellbeing. Feelings of isolation are increasing instead of the opposite.
And then there's the suffering of nonhuman animals….
According to stats, in 2021, almost 83 Billion animals (this doesn't include fish) were killed annually for consumption or sports.
Agriculture is responsible for a large chunk of these deaths. The following are deaths mainly caused by farming each year globally: 73 billion chickens, 1.3 billion pigs, 4.3 billion ducks, 800 million geese and guinea fowl, 572 rabbits, 617 million turkeys, 602 million sheep and 500 million goats. 1.5 billion cows,in 2019 the average amount of cows killed daily in the US was 95,000. In the US more than 20 million animals die each year getting transported to slaughterhouses.In fish farms between 50 Billion to 167 Billion fish were Killed in 2017.
Not only is agriculture the cause of unfathomable horrors against nonhuman animals, it's also the leading cause of global warming. Livestock creates more Greenhouse gas emissions than exhaust fumes from cars. 83% of land used for farming is used for animal agriculture which provides 18% of global calories and 37% of protein.
110 million animals are killed through vivisection in the US alone each year. 100 million marine animals die each year from plastic waste alone. In the last 100 years nearly 500 species of animals have gone extinct. But the winner of the most kills globally is the fishing industry which accounts for between 0.97 trillion to 2.74 trillion individual wild fish killed.
Humans write fiction scared of the unknowns or monsters created metaphors. But it is us who are the real monsters. As the famous Jewish writer and holocaust survivor Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote "In relation to animals, all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka", the same can be extended to the wild and even the human animals who are exterminate daily at the hands of the techno-industrial civilized monstrosity.
All the killing and torture is a byproduct of civilization. It's needed to prop up the system and to feed the ever growing population of wage slaves. The only way to truly stop the killing and death is by dismantling the murder machine.
And finally the ecological damage done….
The world loses almost ten million hectares of forest each year to deforestation. That’s like losing an area the size of Portugal every two years. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. 8.3 million tons of plastic is discarded in the sea yearly. 70% of our debris sinks into the ocean's ecosystem, 15% floats, and 15% lands on beaches. 80% of global marine pollution comes from agriculture runoff, untreated sewage, discharge of nutrients and pesticides. 90% of the worldwide ocean debris comes from 10 rivers alone. 500 marine locations are now recorded as dead zones globally
The practices of agriculture cause water pollution from pesticides and herbicides that seep into rivers and lakes and then make their way into the sea poisoning the water ways which then has a knock on damaging effect for the environment. Agriculture is also responsible for at least one quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. Another big factor directly connected to agriculture is deforestation. Half of the earth's habitable land is used for agriculture. Which is also the main cause of the loss of earth's biodiversity. 94% of non-human mammal biomass is livestock, so wild mammals account for only 6%.
Many diseases and pandemics have come from practices directly related to animal exploitation, slaughter and consumption. Farms, slaughterhouses and wet markets (open air markets that sell farmed and hunted animal corpses) are a recipe for disaster creating the conditions for the evolution of diseases. More than 70% of all human infectious diseases came from animals, including Ebola, HIV/AIDS, Monkeypox, and even Covid 19 is believed to have originated from a wet market.
Usage of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil is responsible for 75% of greenhouse gas emissions - the main cause of climate change.
And then there's the damage caused by so-called renewable energy. For the US alone to transition from fossil fuels to electric vehicles would need three times as much lithium as is currently used globally. So this means more colonization of indigenous peoples lands, more poisoning waterways and ecosystems, more shortages of water, because this is the process for mining lithium and the other rare metals needed such as nickel, cobalt and graphite. If this is compared to all states transitioning to electric vehicles will create massive ecological and social damage globally. The wars in the future will be over these rare earth metals and minerals instead of oil.
Is the future of the planet to be covered in fields, slaughter houses, car parks and shopping centers? Human life is more likely to end before that happens. Reality is often more horrifying than fiction.
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"When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?"
- Mary Shelly
All children are born wild free thinking individuals, open minded and never afraid to question. In the context of industrial civilization, as soon as a baby is born they're conditioned through a traumatic socialization process, psychologically breaking down the wild ego/self conforming the individual to civilized society's expectations creating a domesticated ego/self. In school and by her parents, she is thought to question less and less. Then when old enough, the grips of bondage tighten through the negation of freedom that is wage slavery. Urging her to chase the false promises of the glamorous life we are told is achievable if we work hard enough. Some may reach it, many won't. It is as much a fiction as Shellys creation.
Haunted by our own cultural creations that have taken on a life of their own. The sacred idols of consumerism, progress, authority, wage slavery, wealth accumulation, hierarchy, the state are used to justify speciesism, ecocide, exploitation and a whole host of scumbaggery. It's these very constructs that perpetuate the murder machine that's destroying the planet and we enslave ourselves willingly helping to keep it all going.
The only way to be truly free and stop the ecological catastrophe that is unfolding before us is to strip away these social and cultural constructs that possess us that are so deeply embedded in our minds, and live as one with the natural world because we are a part of it and it's our home.
Kill the murder machine in your head.