Shucking Oysters: Don’t Get Me Started
By Alex Allen
Experts are always reminding us that perspective is everything. Take what you are afraid of and break it apart. Look at it from a new angle, and it loses its power over you. Call me cynical, but really? Mark
Twain said it best that we don’t know “whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” There are so many disparities. Us and them. Ecar drivers and gas car drivers. Homeowners and the homeless. Half full and half empty.
We all know who the wealthiest are and it does not bode well. For one, the tech companies are destroying something precious which is the possibility of contemplation. They have created a world where we are constantly watched and always distracted. Their most precious asset is our most precious asset, our attention and they are abusing it.
Franklin Foer wrote that the lineage of tech companies, like Facebook and Google goes back to the era of communes. In his words, “that experiment ended in shambles – the communities dissolved into cults of personality, small villages riven by rivalries.” All the hippy visions of democracy and oneness culminated in authoritarianism and crushing disappointment.
We homo sapiens have definitely lost our way. The obscene wealth of some individuals is not just inhumane, it is inhuman. As someone said, a watch tells the time, a $250,000 Rolex tells people you’ve got issues. Most of us know, that many traits characteristic of psychopaths are celebrated in business: ruthlessness, a convenient absence of social conscience, and laser-focused on success. It’s not that people without a soul become rich, it’s that being rich tends to corrode whatever soul you have got left.
And speaking of us and them. We seem to be still trapped in this distorted view of human nature and
the natural world, two faces of an enemy to be feared and conquered, rather than an ally to be honoured
and nourished. This is the deepest species-level psychopathology imaginable. How did we go from
flowing with the natural world to living in a zoo of our own making?
We contaminate streams, rivers, lakes, aquifers with industrial waste, pesticide runoff, and fracking
chemicals, and then we are sold “pure spring water” (often just tap water) in plastic bottles that breakdown into micro-plastics that find their way to oceans, whales’ stomachs, and our own bloodstreams.
Paul Huebener bluntly wrote in Nature’s Broken Clocks, “from the sudden acceleration of the warming
of the seas, to shocking storms and unprecedented fires, to the distress cries of birds that no longer know when to migrate, the environment can no longer be seen as a stable backdrop to human affairs.”And ironically, the few events that still seem to happen with predictable regularity is that every few years a group of scientists warns us that we have only a few years left to take action.
Many say that we are living in the anthropocene era; that human nature is the cause of climate crisis.
Far from it. We are living in the “capitalocene.” The real issue is the “voracious ecological appetite and
willful irresponsibility of capitalism.” Capitalism not only alienates and commodifies nature into products, it transforms humans into consumers, and also alienates and commodifies us. The economy does not create value for the real world: it destroys the real world. Is industrial civilization the thing that has to be saved? Or is it the destruction that has to be stopped? Think long and hard on that.
I used to think naively that personal change equalled social change. Eat less. Drive less. Take shorter showers. Live more simply. Sadly, it in no way stops this culture from killing the planet. Writer and ecophilosopher Derrick Jensen wrote that simple living as a political act is fundamentally as narcissistic as “orgasms for peace, in that it substitutes private, personal actions that accomplish very little in the real world and a whole lot of wishing.”
We individuals are not the problem. The industrial economy is what needs to stop. Global warming and global poisoning will continue, no matter how many Ecars or Ebikes there are on the road. Jensen added that “unless you are ideologically blinkered, irredeemably selfish, or just plain stupid, it’s pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive.”
What are the solutions, short of taking down every pipeline, dam, fish farm, tanker, port authority, forestry company, mining company, LNG plant, oil rig, factory farm, monoculture farm, shipping company, myopic government and all the other entities that exist by putting greed and profit over anything or anyone that gets in their way? I don’t know.
And here we are spending billions on artificial life and artificial intelligence while we destroy real natural life. If we define insanity as being out of touch with reality, our capitalistic world is by definition, insane. Where are we going? In his book An Optimist’s Tour of the Future, Mark Stevenson warned us that asking what’s next is “like asking a fly to consider the aesthetic quality of a windshield.”
