Source Feed: StoryMoss Magazine
Published: 2026-04-12T14:09:57+00:00
Content Type ID: 1
George Tsakraklides is a scientist, researcher, activist and writer, a passionate biologist turning an ecological lens on our species, exposing pervasive, destructive human supremacy through numerous books, including “Frankenpolitics”, “Beyond the Petri Dish: Human Consciousness in the Time of Collapse, Apathy and Algorithms”, and “The Unhappiness Machine: In the Grip of Necrocapitalism.” As humanity drives its own destruction, George has said: “Food, life and sanity are all disappearing together.”
George joined StoryMoss from his home town of Kavala, in northern Greece, ahead of the World Adaptation Forum meeting taking place in beautiful Budapest (and online) 23-24 April. Anticipating the upcoming heart, mind and world-opening conversations, George said, “The World Adaptation Forum is really one of a kind. It’s not a place where the participants try to network in a professional sense. It’s about the cold hard truths. In fact I was invited last year and I declined, because it seemed too good to be true!”
Our short, lively conversation touched on some of the themes George will pack into his 25-minute presentation, drawn from the last 7 years of research. George describes the modern human as a “consumatron” — a supermarket missile being fired from one shop to the next. Our dopamine economy drives our collective compulsions of shopping, consuming, rushing, competition, and algorithm driven behaviors.
George describes capitalism as a horror story: “We often don’t think of frightening stories when we think of capitalism. Yet capitalism is extremely frightening. It is the reason we are now in the polycrisis.” It is our long co-evolution with capitalism and even before it, George argues, that shaped our powerful cognitive biases towards supremacy, violence, worship of technology and domination over life. And instilled the behaviors that now accelerate us towards peak destruction through necrocapitalism, the monetization of death, and disaster cannibalism (with apologies to Naomi Klein) seen in our wars against nature and fellow humanity alike (not that these are separate).
George said: “Essentially we evolved to maximize our exploitation of nature and our fellow humans, and this is a survival trait. This is what is so interesting. These lethal behaviors originally developed as survival traits, but they don’t work anymore because the world has changed. They remain as the mental baggage that we carry with us.”
What we need now is to slow down and step off the treadmills of destruction. Reconnect with nature, grow food, rediscover our generosity and our paths of healing together with kindness and simplicity. Our conversation touched on pathways of kinship, Buddhism, degrowth, minimalism and our potential to take inspiration from the natural world to experience beauty and stillness, to diffuse the destructive patterns we so often struggle to escape, so that new qualities of being may find the possibility to emerge.
