Hello Rambling Masses,
Long time no rant. Time to let off another salvo into the great abyss that is the Internet...
Gone are the days when the world saw free thinkers as mystics, seers, and the founts of wisdom. In the "modern" world, free thinking is discouraged. Half of the world is gripped by rampant capitalist consumerism, designed purely to keep that carrot well and truly on the stick in front of us, anaesthetising us, keeping us docile as we chase that ill-defined elusive happiness that the marketing moguls have sold us. The other half of the world is still struggling with oppressive government - the old-fashioned way of keeping free thinkers and libertines down.
But to my mind, the pervasiveness of capitalist materialism is a much greater evil, purely for the fact that it has slowly and subtly eroded our freedoms without so much as a whimper from all of us who have lost so much, and yet had the choice to say no to it all. Free choice and free will are still available to us, but the modern societal structures have developed to hide these self-evident facts. It is so obvious to anyone with the slightest shred of intelligence and free thought, and yet the vast majority of vapid humanity continues to give up some of the greatest gifts that man has got - free thought and a questing mind. And what do we get in return? A disposable destructive pseudo-society that isolates us, practically takes away our freedoms whilst espousing those very freedoms, and leaves us much the poorer as individuals and as a species. Truly not a great bargain. As they said in that great movie "The Usual Suspects" - "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
We are so much more than we currently seem to be. All we have to do is remove the veil from our eyes and realise the simple truths. Why do you think the so-called primitive cultures are always so happy, despite struggling for survival each and every day? Because they have a clear understanding that they have full control of their lives. They make of their lives what they will. "Modern" men have filled their lives with so much unimportant trash that they have lost sight of the very things that make us human and alive.
Rampant consumption and an overly obsessive compulsion to continue growth beyond all reasonable bounds sounds very much like a virus, not an advanced species. The gears of the capitalist machine are finely tuned to keep us locked on the path. Goods are deliberately made of lower quality, to ensure that they break down rapidly and often. Goods are so cheap that it does not pay to repair them. Instead, throw them out and buy shiny new ones. Capitalism provides us with shiny toys to hide the emptiness and lack of true values that our modern lives have become. This serves to further lock us in to the vicious cycle of consumption that keeps us busy working and accepting of the current system without applying our questing minds, and without seeing how unsustainable the system is in the medium to long term.
As a conservative estimate, I would say that 80-90 percent of everything that mankind strives for and believes in in the modern age is all bullshit, pure and simple. Esoteric detritus that hides the real truths from the vapid masses. That is why "The Matrix" is one of my favourite movies of all time - packaged in a glossy and modern way, this movie and the messages it espouses are the bible of our times. The message is simple - most of what we believe to be important and real is actually crap, designed to keep us docile.
You need only look at the barometers of our times, television and the Internet, to see where this has headed. Television, and as a natural progression the Internet, is all-pervasive in the developed world. Further to this, it is filled with meaningless crap that masquerades as "entertainment" and "information", when what it is really doing is obfuscating the truth. Why do the vapid masses keep tuning in to reality television in such mind-numbingly constant numbers? Why does the news not inform? Why do current affairs shows not tackle the real issues? Why, when we have the single most powerful tool of mass dissemination of knowledge, does the Internet continue to be used primarily for porn, email spam and the latest YouTube phenomenon of someone doing something stupid? Why do politicians continue to fiddle whilst Rome burns?
I guess it's because education has failed us. Instead of improving each generation, it seems that we have either gone backwards or stayed in an alarming and horrible holding pattern. How are we better, more intelligent, than the same apes 10,000 years ago that looked up at the heavens and shouted "Ugghhh"? Well, from where I am sitting, I can't see that we have advanced very much at all. As far as I am concerned, this is just a continual pattern of "same shit, different shovel". Hell, a lot of the time these days, even the shovel is the same.
Getting back to capitalism as one of the main thrusts of my current rant - economic theorists have often espoused the great advantages of capitalism as an efficient machine, always improving itself in a "competitive" environment, always advancing. Those capitalist entities that are inefficient simply die or are swallowed by larger, more efficient entities. However, what has been forgotten are the simple ethical and philosophical elements of this. The question that should be asked is not "how efficient is capitalism" but rather "what kind of efficiency is it?" The answer to this is an alarming one. Capitalism is efficient at one thing and one thing only - making money for the holders of capital. This one true goal of capitalism is to be attained at any cost. Human life, sustainability, the environment, real efficiency, thought, ethics, progress, advancement of ideals and ideas, beauty and soul are all up for grabs, to be trampled on in the great rush to achieve ever higher profits.
Don't get me wrong - I see money as a necessary evil, and would not wish to see it abolished, as it would not serve the interests of the world. Money is a useful, albeit grossly oversimplified, measure of relative value and worth. Without it, we would be living in a confusing world where bartering of goods and services struggles with the eternal question of trying to come to terms with how much "X" will be needed to barter for "Y", assuming that the owner of "Y" actually wants "X". Much effort would be wasted in this difficult and complex process of agreeing on the relative value of disparate goods and services.
As much as I rail against money and capitalism, these are not my main enemy. The great evil is the rampant consumerism and materialism that we have been slowly led to accept as the norm ever since the 1950s, despite the obvious fact that it is totally unsustainable in the medium to long term. Our excesses have been growing ever grander as each generation strives for more of everything.
One way for everyone to mitigate the rampant consumerism that is destroying our world and enslaving us all is to make a very simple shift in our thought patterns. The problem is that money is such an abstract term, and easily allows us to make assumptions and value judgements without truly understanding the consequences. I don't measure value in terms of money - I never have. Instead, I measure it against the one true human currency - time. The one thing of value on the face of this earth that each of us has is time - time to live, time to choose our path throughout our lives, and time to die. So this is the measure of value that I use.
If I look at something to buy, I ask myself whether I actually need it or not. If I don't need it, I ask myself whether I actually want it. If I need it or want it, I then ask myself how much time I would be giving up in order to purchase it. This takes into account what I am currently earning, what my disposable income is, and how long it has taken to amass that disposable income. If it takes me two weeks to earn the money to buy something, it better be worth two weeks of my life that I will never get back, otherwise the purchase is not being made.
In this way, serious judgements can be made on whether I choose to contribute to the capitalist machine or not. More often than not, I end up on the frugal side, choosing not to purchase something. One of my life's goals is not to amass a whole bunch of stuff to fill my supposedly empty life with. Instead, I work when I have to in order to gain the relative financial freedom to choose not to work as a slave to the capitalist machine.
At this point you may be saying to yourself "Who does this guy think he is, ranting about capitalism and yet at the same time enjoying the plethora of great things that have come from it? The mechanisms of capitalism have lifted his life from one of pure subsistence and survival to one of incredible luxury, undreamed of by previous generations." That may well be true, but I strongly feel that what we and the planet have lost and are currently losing is much greater than any gains that have been made.
Now we get to the crux of what I want to try to communicate in this particular posting to the two people who actually bother to read my blog. Capitalism/consumerism was the introduction, the shoehorn that got the foot into the shoe. Now, let's use those shoes to walk just a little further.
The current environmental crisis facing the world, brought on by our rampant consumption, is the real modern battlefield for free thought. Mankind has always seen itself as natural inheritors and owners of all that they survey, ever since that good old opposable thumb lifted us to the top of the food chain. The moment that the first of our distant ancestors picked up a stick and used it as a tool, our fate was sealed. We were destined to become the dominant species on the planet, outcompeting all others. The old adage of "might makes right" holds sway here. We have the power to control all around us, and we therefore assume that we have a right to wield that power indiscriminately, much to the detriment of all life on this planet.
Many wise people have said that there are no rights without responsibility. As the dominant species on the planet, we have a right to all that this entails. However, we also have a responsibility to make sure that we do not destroy it all in short-sighted pursuit of selfish ends.
Environmentalism isn't just about saving a few trees or stopping the giant panda from dying. It isn't just about making sure the paper goes in the recycling bin. It is so much broader than that. But like everything that the mass media gets a hold of, it has to be dumbed down and packaged into neat little bundles, so the "common" people can understand it. What a crock. Environmentalism should be, pure and simple, the struggle of mankind to find their true balance in this world. We have to get over the obsessive view that we own everything from here to the horizon, that the land and sea and everything on it and in it is ours to do with as we please. We have to move past the mistaken belief that nothing has value unless it can be dug up from the ground, cut down, mashed, pulped, killed, processed and packaged to serve our every whim.
The warnings are out there in the public domain, and the science is mostly rock solid, and still the governments of the world continue to drag their feet. Why is this? Because the existing monied powers hold the cards. They decide what policy gets passed, and even what policy gets debated. They dilute the facts and derail the discussions about what should be done by casting aspersions on the validity of the science, and by arguing against what the self-evident facts are telling us. They control the mass media, and the resulting information that should be presented to all of us as a matter of course is only available to the free thinkers who actually bother to open their eyes and ask some questions.
What does it matter that there are disputed claims regarding what one group of (in my view legitimate) scientists are saying about carbon emissions versus what another group (funded by big business) are saying? This is yet another attempt at a smoke screen to hide the fact that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and we as a species and individually are responsible. On the one hand we have the vast majority of the scientific community and free thinkers of the world, saying that we are destroying the planet with our actions. On the other hand we have a tiny minority of nay-sayers who are in the pockets of the main polluters and exploiters of resources on the planet, arguing and stalling for all they are worth. The scary thing is that the mass media, by paying equal attention to both camps, is presenting a vastly distorted picture of what the truth really is.
Who in their right mind can sit there with their hand on their heart and say that pollution, deforestation, mass species extinctions, loss of biodiversity, etc, etc, are in our best interests? The monied powers can, of course. They have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because it's an oh so wonderful and comfortable existence for them. They remain unchallenged in their power only so long as the system keeps everyone repressed. And we stay repressed only so long as we continue to swallow the crap that is getting spoon fed to us each and every day.
The bastards who call the shots are doing so because it makes them rich, and continues to keep them in power. They have no regard for the future, certainly not past their comfortable lifespan. What they care about is wringing every last bit of profit out of the resources at their disposal, and never mind the consequence. This stems from the aforementioned human belief that we have the right to use and abuse everything, just because we can.
A fundamental shift in thinking needs to happen for us to save the planet and ourselves. This isn't bombastic hyperbole - it is the simple truth. To think that we are above and beyond the natural cycles that hold sway on this planet is the ultimate in arrogance and ignorance. If we keep going too much longer on our destructive path, there will be no second chances, no get out of jail free card, no pleading ignorance. We will die, and take a significant portion of the biodiversity of this planet with us.
The fundamental shift in thinking that I mention is not one that will come easily, but it has to come nonetheless. It does not just affect the rich and the mighty. For it to truly work, it has to be accepted by everyone - yes, that's right - every single human being on the planet. Every person that contributes to the capitalist consumerist machine without regard for the planet and our place in it is responsible. We have to make this radical shift to survive, and hopefully save as many species of the overstretched and over-utilised planet as we possibly can.
I for one will be watching with keen interest just how much actual progress we have made in our thinking as a species. This progress will be measured in earnest at the global climate conference in Copenhagen coming up towards the end of this year (6 - 18 December 2009). I really hope I am wrong, but I don't hold out much hope for any actual decisions being made. I would even be surprised if any vague, watered-down aspirational targets were limply aimed at. The political will is just not there, big business holds most if not all of the cards, and we, the masses of humanity, continue to fill our lives with insignificance instead of striving to fulfil our destiny on this planet.
If God or Gaia or whatever ultimate entity you believe in walked up to me today and gave me the power to say yay or nay to the human race, I swear that I would need more than 10 seconds of think music to decide whether it was worth it. Would I decide to end it all and say "fuck it, give some other species on the planet a chance - they surely can't fuck it up any more than we did", or would I decide that we have a genuine chance to change things for the better and assume our natural role as caretakers of this planet? That question remains unanswered...
Given the regenerative power of the planet, I feel confident in the fact that it would recover from our influence in 100-200 years. Everything that we strived for; everything that we believed in; everything that we killed, sacrificed and died for would be washed away in a sea of green and blue, and most likely the planet would be much better off. And what would be lost? Just another species that got too big for its boots.
Ohh, gotta go. Big Brother, Pop Idol and Survivor are on. Wouldn't want to miss them...
