Fatalism -- An Unnatural Behavior

There are only one two situations where you will see an air of fatalism affecting the behavior of animals. One is when they sense they are terminally ill and they stoically wander off from their social group to die in a private hidden place. The other situation is an artificial one: when animals are held in prolonged captivity or are chained up for a long time; in these circumstances you are seeing a broken spirit. Yet various degrees of fatalism have been present as a cultural phenomenon among human beings ever since we ceased being nomads and opted for a settled existence. There are religions that have appeared at different times and been described more or less accurately as "fatalistic". Such religions are psychologically symptomatic of the more limited survival options and the imposed constraints of social stratification, all of which resulted with the rise of agrarian and urban civilizations. Yet there seems to be a new sort of fatalism crowding out a reasonably hopeful consciousness in humankind today. This fatalism is not wholly religiously sourced -- though we do have the 2012 and Revelations millenarians feeding the miasma of pessimism. This more secular fatalism is, however, artificially induced. We have been led to believe that our business infrastructure simply cannot effectively switch in a timely way to sources of energy that do not create terminal climate change. This is the bluff of the madmen that run our energy industries. It is not that they cannot readily mobilize a shift; it is that they are unwilling. They are riding the high tide of greed, and they will not let go of coal and oil until it runs out -- even though the extractive procedures are destroying our marine ecosystems and the life-supporting qualities of our mountain landscapes and freshwater systems. The real revelations of fuel-oil derived from algae is one blatant example that indicate the lie we have been fed. Algae-oil does not harm our climate balance, does not pollute our biosphere, is cheaply produced in massive quantities, and has been proven to drive energy efficient motors and with a propensity comparable to fossil fuels. Ditto for wind machines for power-plants, and their energy can serve power-grids encompassing areas where there is not plentiful wind. How is it that we as a species so imbecilically demand that energy must be commodified as a "high-profit" venture. When the remnants of the biosphere are dying off a few decades from now in the withering final stages of global-warming's firestorms, where will these fossil-fuel industrialists take all their piles of money -- to the moon? The moon is as good a grave as the one they will have made of the Earth.