The amount of times I've heard this rhetoric coupled with "the animals are better than us! We should let them govern the planet instead! They're vastly superior to us murderous beings" is baffling

Comparing people to viruses is trite, dehumanizing, unhelpful.

It's also a complete failure of a simile. Virus simply are. They have no agency. No life. Just a pattern of inert molecules, occasionally bumping into the right place to start overproducing duplicates. Viruses can only exist as the shadow of something living. To compare people to that... is so off the mark it's funny... especially when you've got a much better comparison right next to it.

You want a metaphor? People are constituent cells of a much larger organism. An organism made of multi-cellular organisms. “Meta-cellular”, if you’re that sort of dork. This isn’t without precedent. You can model an army of ants as a single organism, even check the health of the colony by taking the temperature of the anthill. The behavior and labor of all the ants combine up to an output far larger than anything an equal number of individual ants could do.

Of course, unlike cells or ants, people’s lives are nowhere near so prescribed. Each of us decides our own behavior. We learn, from our own experience and – most critically – from observing others. And as we all choose and develop our behavior, it adds to the behavior of others’, and something larger emerges. Call it community. Or nation. Country. State. Religion. Empire. Society. Economy. A bigger organism is born from the collective action of us all, whether we’re aware of it or not.

It’s not a smart organism. It has no awareness, no brain – that’s all concentrated in each ‘cell’. But it is powerful. Capable of altering landscapes, redirecting rivers – moving mountains, even… Its mere existence is a weight on the world. Ecologies bend towards it, fall into orbit. Smaller organisms are crushed without notice – sometimes completely. Often completely…

The behavior of this big organism is decided, partly by the thoughts, but primarily by the actions of its constituent components. Again, it’s not sentient. It doesn’t need to be. People already do that bit. You wouldn’t need to be sentient, either, if your cells could invent clever new ways of doing… whatever fiddly little things cells do (Something with oxygen, I think?)… and share it with one another.

The point is, right now that big organism is doing a great big capitalism. Or, perhaps, that organism is capitalism. For us, here in this moment of history, our job is to start organizing the next organism...

Rhetoric like "Humans are a virus" implies a collectivity of agency and responsibility between human beings that does not exist

There is no equivalence between a western billionaire and a starving child in the Sahel, what matters is their positioning and concrete relationship to capitalist production, which is the scientifically proven source of climate change

If you want to use the “global warming is like a fever” metaphor (which, don’t) capitalism is the virus and humans along with all the other life are the cells that die if a fever goes on without end

The 'humans are the real virus' rhetoric is disgusting, and just keep in mind that people's views on humanity generally reflect themselves.

I think probably a lot of people who parrot the virus stuff have not given it much thought, just think it sounded cool in the Matrix.

Well it's not like we can blame the whales

Lol yeah

People don't mean themselves or their families - when they say this they're saying foreigners are the virus whether they know it or not

viruses are a vital part of the dialectics of evolution, without them animals might never have existed. Typical fascist exterminationism ideology!

Humans have lived on this earth for ~300k years and most of that time we were basically in harmony with the natural world, whereas capitalism has only been a global system in the last century, which is when we started to see gigantic spikes in CO2.

It's also much more apt to compare capital to a kind of social virus imo. It infiltrates into human agency in order to multiply itself

Hey do you know the artist? I'd love to repost this on the prolewiki twitter