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Title: Welcome to the Idiocene Author: Max Cafard Date: Fall / Winter 2014 Language: en Topics: poetry, time Source: Retrieved on December 11th, 2014 from http://www.fifthestate.org/archive/392-fallwinter-2014/welcome-idiocene/ Notes: Fifth Estate # 392, Fall/Winter 2014. Max Cafard, a lifelong inhabitant of the Island of New Orleans, is a surregionalist writer and pre-Ancientist philosopher. He is the author of The Surregionalist Manifesto and Other Writings, FLOOD BOOK, Surregional Explorations, and the forthcoming Lightning Storm Mind: PreAncientist Meditations. He edits the cyberjournal Psychic Swamp and is a member of Surrealists for Social Responsibility and the Deconstruction Workers Union of the IWW.
It has been proposed that the present era of life on earth should be
called the Anthropocene to reflect the human domination of our planet.
However, an elegant, scientific-sounding term like anthropocene seems
like a cop-out, a handy euphemism to hide exactly what kind of
domination this is and what it’s doing to the planet.
I propose that instead we call it the Idiocene, signifying the New Era
of Idiots. Idiot comes from the Greek word “idiutns” meaning both an
incompetent person and a private citizen. Idiocene is the one precisely
appropriate name for an era that is suicidally stupid and ecocidally
privatizing.
Would you like a simple definition of the Idiocene? You might remember
the old joke about a robber who comes up to somebody on the street,
pulls out a gun and says: “Your money or your life!” The victim pauses
and then says, “Can I have a moment to think it over?”
That moment is the Idiocene.