Blind and/or psychopathic

Today, I want to write in response to a comment I received on my post The chink in the armor, a couple of days ago. Here is the comment.

"Kyle, as you may have gathered from the rest of the blog, Darshan wants to replace corporations with a pre-industrial anti-human "society," or, ideally, with the extinction of humanity. He doesn't want to live in a world with complex things like cars and computers--he wants to live in a world where rocks are afforded the same status, dignity, and moral weight as humans. Everything he ever writes expresses a deep hatred for humanity and freedom, and a love of totalitarian destruction of civilization."

Of course any thoughts contradictory to the status quo trample on the freedom of those who have benefited most. These are the "free" who have given themselves and their kin the "freedom" to destroy. Such sentiment comes from a deep psychopathy - of remorselessness, of insensitivity, of violence.

Freedom is a contradictory notion because we afford freedom to those most powerful, and then oppress other people to deal with the situations we've created for them. No better example than Delray in Detroit, where years of neglect and injustice by the powerful have put people in a situation they cannot escape from. In essence, the freedom of the powerful takes away from the freedom of the not-so-powerful. Many might say that people are free to do as they please. If someone doesn't like where they live, they can pack their bags and move away. Such thought comes out of either an ignorance of the world, or a knowledge that those being oppressed cannot be let free, because if they are, they might tell everyone else of the reality of their situation, making others want to take the powerful down. So instead, the powerful act innocent about the state of other people's lives and the environment, and live their lives as if nothing is wrong. Such an existence is devoid of even the basic moralities we would hope anyone to have.

In general, we are always told we have "freedom". We are free to vote and choose leaders to serve us. We are free to spend money in the way we choose to. But that’s where the train stops, because all the while, we have created behemoth structures and organisations, and even larger problems. When it comes to addressing these bigger issues, we are intimidated, beaten down and told that the problem is too big for each one of us to address. In a sense, we are told to make choices for ourselves, and just forget about the bigger picture. I've realised that we are given freedom when that freedom serves in the interest of behaviour that inevitably leads to ecological harm, but if we were to take a stand against this, we are labeled “tree-huggers” and “job-killers.” There is then an inherent contradiction between independence of choice, and the powerlessness to solve big social and environmental problems. We have the freedom to “consume” but not the freedom to change what it is that drives ecological degradation. 


Our right to freedom does not allow us to freely destroy. There is almost a libertarian sense that I get from hearing some people speak, how entitled they are to their possessions and belongings. What they fail to notice are the extreme injustices that lead to their entitlement. Those that support large corporatism are those that have benefited most from it; they aren't the ones living in Delray or Sumpter Township or Fox Township or the Niger Delta. When you disaggregate the costs and benefits, a feature of large corporatism, you disaggregate your ability to perceive wrongdoing. Or maybe it is the other way around. Actually, that's probably how it is.

People have today been enslaved because of circumstance. Many people actually believe that "working in sweatshops is better than what they would be doing anyway." How do we come to accept this? Why should sweatshops be the best people can be afforded? Because there is a hierarchy of power in this world. People at the top would not have it any other way. They want to keep you and me from speaking up against the injustices we are inflicting on the environment and people living in that environment. This is the corporatism that must fall.

And so my intention is a resolute take down of a system of society that on its face is one based on concepts of "justice" and "equality", but in the end is one of a subtle yet debilitating oppression, and the complex web of corporatism and government, the way we've structured them right now, does exactly that. The "humanity" we've created for ourselves blasts this Earth and its people to smithereens. This is not the humanity I subscribe to.  

One thing no one can argue with is the physical finiteness of this Earth. Conservation of mass, energy, and atoms dictate it. What this means is that if there is 100 of something, and I take one of them, there are only 99 left. Yet we act as if we can take all 100 with the blind faith that there are 100 left. Unfortunately, such people do not understand basic truths about nature. This is the physical world. Well, what about the emotional world, the spiritual world? There is luckily an infinity here, because we can always be kinder, we can always be more just, we can always show more love. What limits us is just the breath in our body.

The problems we face are of our own doing. Cutting down trees remorselessly for biofuel plantations and blasting through soil to get to tar sands are a rape of the Earth and its people. They are a result of mental and emotional constructs of society and economy influencing our physical presence in this world. And the only way they can be fixed is by fixing the source of the problems - this society, this culture. This is a culture that is founded on benefits for some, costs for other, and a privileged dishonesty about these costs. Thest costs move beyond just cost on human lives - this culture is oppressive and violent.

I like to ask myself the following. At what cost am I able to live the way that I do? Taking coal from underneath the ground inevitably degrades the ground, because we are incapable of doing anything benign. We are incapable of not leaving a trace behind. Instead, we pillage and plunder, and we'll blow the tops off of mountains. And the people that are doing the blowing up do not care, because they aren't the ones living in the valleys of West Virginia. They are probably living in their suburban homes, with their well-manicured lawns and big cars. They likely produce two trash cans full of toxic waste a week. No one would live in the place they degrade. Only psychopaths have the ability to somehow convince themselves that they are working in the best interests of other people, when they clearly are not.

We act far from "civilised" in the true meaning of the word. We act in ways that are indicative of moral and spiritual voids, ones that we feel we must fill with materialistic junk and physicality. The culture we live in depends on the Earth more so than any other culture in history. We use almost every element on the periodic table, we extract more and more petrochemicals and cull virgin forests and use more water than ever before. Exposed here is a deep contradiction that the privileged seem to not want to appreciate. In their efforts for "conservation," they use. In their use, they degrade. Technology as we conceive it is founded fundamentally on use of material, not on personal development and education. And yet it is a culture that degrades this Earth exponentially and categorically.

Things don't have to be this way. If we were to take a deep look around us, to observe, and really observe, and think about the complicated systems at play, we can boil much of this ecological injustice to very simple things, but things that would take diligent effort, thought, and consciousness to address. Or we can buy into what those that are privileged want us to think - that just because you are afforded the luxury of a car or computer or home, that things are good everywhere else. Of course, people have a tendency to surround themselves with people that are similar to us - similar in socioeconomic status, people of similar skin colour, people of the same political leanings. Perfect. This is what the oppressors want us to be like. They do not want us to think about what is wrong, they do not want us to look to the other side. Delray is cut off by I-75. Landfills are placed many miles from where we live. Africa is several thousand miles away. Sweet. Out of sight, screw what is happening there. This is a reality we are forced to believe. A reality of mirrors. We see ourselves, and then others like us. We do not see the other side.

And by the way, if you are going to bash my writing and thoughts, at least have the courtesy and courage to tell me who you are.

When we use, we don't conserve

On my way to Professor Hardin's Conservation Justice class today, I was reading the National Geographic. This month, there is a story, 'The Pierced Heart,' about illegal logging in Madagascar, especially for the beet-coloured rosewood tree, seen below.

 

The writer, Robert Draper, speaks eloquently about the growing ecological and biodiversity crisis being caused because of thoughtless logging. There have been waxing and waning international pressures on the Madagascan government for years now, waning when a President says such logging is illegal, and waxing when new Presidents think the government is cash-strapped enough to resume such logging. Yet, Draper rightly states that, "The outside world is in no position to lecture, given its own voracious appetite - sometimes benign, sometimes less so - for Madagascar's wondrous resources." The above tree earned this man $6, and the wood was eventually sold for about $5000 in China.

If there was no demand, there would be no supply. Until we keep thinking that we will find ourselves in what we use and what we consume, we will continue to fell trees that took 500 years to grow in five minutes. As long as we think we need the latest techno-gadget, mining companies will gladly blast through valleys and trees for mine rare earth metals. When we use, we don't conserve.

What we have already

Here is an email that Monica sent to me yesterday:

I never buy plastic bags for sending sandwiches in lunches, but the Wrap-N-Mats I've used for Greg and Maddi finally wore out. I bought them maybe five or six years ago, when Maddi was in grade school. They're fabric on the outside and thin plastic sheeting on the inside, sewn together, and they closed with a small piece of Velcro. After a few years of use, the plastic started getting tacky and sticking to itself, and I was worried about chemicals in the plastic that might leech out into the food. Since the time I bought those, a lot of new products have come out (see the lunch section at www.reusablebags.com), and I was shopping that site yesterday to see which ones looked best, or to see if I could make something myself. Then, last night after having looked at that site, I found this in a magazine I get . . .

http://familyfun.go.com/crafts/crafts-by-material/recyclable-projects/coffee-bag-sandwich-wrap-895357/

I had one foil coffee bag, so I just tried it, and it works pretty well! I don't have good luck with pre-sticky Velcro staying put on anything (the hook and loops hold together better than most glues to non-porous surfaces, so you end up pulling one side or the other off with the hook and loops still attached), so I think I'll just close the coffee-bag sandwich wraps with a rubber band. So now I'm thinking I'll buy maybe two of the ones from the web site, just to have a couple that are super-sturdy, but then make a new one every time we finish off a bag of coffee! :)

This email made me re-realise how important my base set of packaging has been to me to undertake this project. As I mentioned a while ago, although I have not acquired any new packaging materials since this started, I decided to make full use of all of the packaging that already existed around me. This point, however, speaks to much larger issues of what we have already. We have already committed ourselves to a certain amount of natural resources, e.g, plastic bags from oil, cardboard boxes from trees, wires from copper, pots and pans from iron. We have also used natural resources to make gadgets and gizmos like computers, which today do much more than most people could have ever imagined, and much more than what we "need." However, we have the tendency to forget what we have already. We are always on to the next thing, in its new shiny waxed box, with thin plastic packaging around it, styrofoam peanuts preserving such a new marvel. As Wendell Berry has written about, we don't want to be here; we want to be somewhere else; the future is better than the present; it always will be better. But what we necessarily commit ourselves to then is not using what we have already, but extracting more, consuming more, removing more mountain tops, clearing out more rainforests, leaking more oil into waters, breathing more pollutants from air. Indeed, we commit ourselves to more trash. A simple question is this - given all that we've done so far, all that we've extracted and used and created, all the computers we have already, is this enough for our needs today? Is there enough that we have today to be satisfied with our lives from here on out?