TUESDAY, MAR 9, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
The Wit & Wisdom of Cancer
Video transcript
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: GROWTH IS GOOD, FROM THE WIRES, MORE GROWTH IS BETTER
Abstract: That the modern techno-industrialized expansionist form of human is comparable to a metastatic cancer has been noted by some scientists since the 1970s at least. Are humans smarter than cancer cells?
COOS BAY (A-P) — This 4.5 minute video by Nina Paley is from 2006; I merely added readable subtitles to it. It should be better known, more topical. It features discussions between cancer cells. If the philosophy of the cancer cells seems reminiscent of our own civilization, well, Nina suggests that’s just coincidence, right? Or not. Over 99 percent of those who see the video may see no similarity, but what clothed apes think is not what determines our past, present, and near future.
As Edward Abbey noted, "Growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." We expansionist humans, going back 50k years, we of today are the modern techno-industrial form of civilization. We are metastatic-like dissipative structures, aka empire builders. We prosper greatly by destroying our host (Gaia), but in doing so we self-select out of the world system, just like some one we all have yet to know.
Our expansionist form of human is not evolvable and extinction of our expansionist form if not our species is foreseeable. When is not. A likely range is 50 to 50k years. As expansionists, it took 50k years for us to take the planet. The longer we as an expansionist form of human persist, the more degraded the life-support system all life depends on will become (hence the Anthropocene mass extinction event).
Human extinction in 50 to 500 years would not violate any laws of the universe, and odds of extinction may exceed 50:50 if we knew enough to guess. The downslope is typically shorter and steeper than the upslope, so 5k years is more likely than 50k years, but both are near term in geological/evolutionary time. Alternative would be to replace our non-viable form of overcomplex society with a viable form of civilization by listening to Nature (or making me World Dictator).
Scene 1: Woman in ICU on life-support.
CC = Cancer Cell, aka Anthropocene enthusiast and
ECC = Ecological Cancer Cell, as lesser Anthropocene enthusiast.
CC: This tumor is happening tonight!
ECC: It's crowded, there's too many of us.
CC: You can't have too many, no, this is good. In fact, unrestrained growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.
ECC: We're using up resources that other cells need.
CC: Other cells? Like spleen cells? You value spleen cells over cancer cells?
ECC: Uh, no.
CC: Other cells wouldn't have any value without cancer cells around to appreciate them.
ECC: But what about...?
CC: Cancer cells are the pinnacle of evolution. We're not like other cells. We can think. We're more successful because we're smarter.
ECC: You know, sometimes I...
CC: Hey, hey, the show's starting.
Scene 2: Comic cancer cell.
CCC = Comic Cancer Cell
ECC = Ecological Cancer Cell
CCC: Good evening ladies and James, especially James! I just metastasized in from the liver, and boy is my cytoplasm tired.
ECC: This guy is the pinnacle of evolution.
Scene 3: Two mother cancer cells.
MCC1 & MCC2 = Mother Cancer Cell 1 & 2
MCC1: Looks like you're expecting too.
MCC2: Oh, yes, I just love children.
MCC1: How many now?
MCC2: 537... look, make that 538.
MCC1: We're stopping at 2,000, for the environment.
MCC2: How ecological.
MCC1: Well, like ZPG says, consider having none, or one, and be sure to stop at 2,000.
MCC2: But you don't plan children, they just happen.
MCC1: They sure do that way.
Scene 4: Normal cancer cell and environmentalist cancer cell
NCC = Normal Cancer Cell
ECC = Environmentalist Cancer Cell
NCC: What do you mean not reproduce?
RCC: How many billion more cancer cells do you need?
NCC: If smart cancer cells like us don't reproduce, then we'll only have dumb cancer cells, things will just get worse.
ECC: But the body can't handle this many of us.
NCC: Of course it can. Cancer cells are just as natural as any other cells. We're part of the body. Why would the body make cells that were bad for us?
Scene 5: A cancer couple make plans.
MCC = Male Cancer Cell
FCC = Female Cancer Cell
MCC: Maybe we should metastasize out to the country.
FCC: I hear the lymph nodes are nice.
MCC: Not the suburbs, the country.
FCC: Like where we went camping last year?
MCC: Yeah,
Both: The left lung!
Scene 6: Normal cancer cell and complaining cancer cell.
NCC = Normal Cancer Cell
CCC = Complaining Cancer Cell
NCC: You need to get out more.
CCC: Get out where? It's like this everywhere.
NCC: Listen to him, he lives in a tumor and he thinks the whole body is overpopulated. It so happens that the body's entire cancer population can sit into just one nostril, leaving the whole of the other nostril free.
Scene 7: Sophisticated intellectual cancer cells.
SCC = Sophisticate Cancer Cells 1, 2, 3.
SCC1: Metastasis is our natural biological function, our manifest destiny if you will. It's survival of the fittest.
SCC2: It's a family tradition, for me. My great-great grandfather....
SCC3: When this goose is consumed, we'll find another one, or its economic equivalent.
Scene 8: Spiritual cancer cell and normal cancer cell talk.
SCC = Spiritual Cancer Cell
NCC = Normal Cancer Cell
SCC: You know, sometimes I think all the cells in the body form one big organism, and that organism has a soul, and it can feel what we're doing to it.
NCC: You and your crackpot new-age theories.
Scene 9: Back to woman in ICU.
In 1949, Aldo Leopold noted, "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." The world is now in the ICU facing multiple system failures, so the penalties of an ecolate education now is that one lives alone (effectively) in a world of pathologies, which are self-inflicted and inflicted on others (multiple species extinction, four percent of all mammals are now wild...). Yet 99.99+ percent of clever apes deny that they are pathogens, cells of a global tumor, spending their working lives to serve the growth SYSTEM when not sleeping, recreating, procreating, or consuming, which also serves the SYSTEM.
The woman's name is Gaia. Claiming to be a less enthusiastic form of cancer cell or blaming others is a distraction.
I also clipped from another video, Yu Koyo Peya (pt. 1), a bit of Jared Diamond on the Maya collapse. And, yes, there are other scholars who look at the Maya evidence and see no evidence of any collapse whatsoever, i.e., there was no collapse. But I recall taking in a lecture at Mesa Verde that ended with the question of where the population decided to move to? It was a mystery. No evidence of collapse there either.
The Maya had the most extensive writing in the new world. They had detailed knowledge of astronomy, great cities, wonderful monuments, and art.
And there were lots of them. There may have been as many as 50 million Maya, but by the time Cortez, the Spanish conquistador, marched through the Yucatan Peninsula, he passed within a few miles of these abandoned cities covered by jungle without even knowing that they were cities there, because there were no people.
And in the Maya crash, which happened between about 800 CE and 910 CE, maybe as many as ninety percent of the Maya died or scattered, and all of the Kings were overthrown, and the cities were abandoned.
They disappeared partly through inadvertent environmental damage of their own making, particularly chopping down forests on which they depended for plaster and fuel, and then as there were more and more people fighting over less and less land, naturally the fighting got more intense.
And finally this combination of overpopulation for too few resources came at a time of a severe drought, and so within a century or so Mayan Society collapsed and the Maya Heartland had been virtually emptied of people.
They could have avoided extinction by doing some of the obvious things: limiting their population growth, not cutting down all their trees, getting into a political union rather than fighting each other regularly.
It would have been obvious to them that the hillsides were getting deforested and that their buildings at the bottom of the hills were getting covered up with nine feet of sediment.
My UCLA students really bore home with that question, "why on earth did these past societies see what they were doing?"
But then I reflect that if there are still people around 70 years from now, they'll look back at the United States in 2005 and they too will say, "Weren't they thinking about their water problems and global warming and toxic waste? How could they have been so blind?"
