how to save the world

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being
can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know,
you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

– ee cummings

I confess I have not yet read Dawkins’ book The God Delusion (it sits, unopened, in favour of a collection of short stories by Amy Hempel, on my bedside table), though I think I have read more than a book’s worth of discussion about it. I may well write about it once I’ve read it, but in the meantime all the discussion of the book has caused me to think about something much more important, IMO, than the existence of superhumans: Our growing inability to think for ourselves.

The OED defines religion as “human recognition of superhuman controlling power and especially of a personal god entitled to worship and obedience”. Religions (plural) are in fact shared sets of beliefs about the nature of superhumanity and about which form to worship and obey. The word religion means “to bind” or constrain, to tie down.

In this sense a religion is merely a specific type of culture, culture being a shared pattern of beliefs or activities. We now live in a world with one overwhelmingly dominant Culture, within which a variety of religions and other subcultures exist which quibble among themselves (constantly, and often violently). This Culture and these subcultures can now hardly be escaped ñ there is no place to go to get away from Civilization Culture, its artifacts, its messages ñ to be, as Cummings says, “nobody-but-yourself”.

I find this terrifying. It is what I mean when I describe the modern world as a prison. There is no escaping it. The wardens are always watching you. Your fellow inmates are always correcting you, competing with you, pushing you around, compelling you to be “everybody else”. To stop trying to be nobody-but-yourself. To stop thinking for yourself. To be one with the BorgÖ er, I mean Culture.

I don’t believe in moral judgement, and I don’t view this reality as good or bad. It is just the way things are, and getting more so, as the last vestiges of cultures that differ significantly from Civilization Culture are extinguished, indoctrinated, and absorbed.

Why would this be? Because in the short run it is an evolutionary success. In a world with a natural human population level in balance with all life on Earth, there is room for diverse cultures to have their own space, and for individuals to have enough room and resources to be nobody-but-themselves. By contrast, in our horrifically overcrowded world, survival without constant war demands that we eliminate diversity, to have monoculture. Just as we have replaced permaculture (resilient, natural, self-managing, self-sufficient, abundant, sustainable) with monoculture agriculture (uniform, fragile, high-maintenance, unnatural, catastrophic, but efficient enough to keep many more humans alive, while it lasts), we have largely replaced astonishing indigenous human diversity (resilient, natural, self-managing, self-sufficient, abundant, sustainable) with human monoculture (uniform, fragile, high-maintenance, unnatural, catastrophic, but efficient enough to keep many more humans alive, while it lasts). Monoculture confers short-term evolutionary advantage and so it was probably inevitable. In the long run, it is unsustainable and hence will ultimately and inevitably collapse and be replaced with new diversity. Darwin’s rules.

We have, in addition to all the religions, political subcultures in the form of political parties, either owned by rich and powerful corporatists committed to Civilization Culture, or longing for a taste of power themselves, to perpetrate the variation of Civilization Culture that they believe in. And, in the pursuit of electoral popularity, they will compromise without limit, to the point that all that distinguishes the Tweedledum party from the Tweedledee party is the style and colour of their logos and their rhetoric.

And in addition to the religious and political subcultures we have the economic, social and technological ones. We have those who worship the ‘free market’. We have those who worship size and growth. We have those who pay homage to the latest edicts from the fashion world. Or the latest technology. Or the latest successful business tycoon. Or the latest sports/entertainment idol. We have those who follow their new age gurus and those who are obedient to their Twelve Steps. We have people who seek the promise of eternal life in nano-form, and those who believe technology will bring us salvation. And others who pursue the coming of a global ‘collective consciousness’.

These are all subcultures within the global Civilization Culture. The rich and powerful are delighted to have us endlessly distracted by these subcultures, to believe there are significant differences between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But you can’t jam the culture. Even the majority of the poor and disenfranchised eagerly support the culture, and aspire to ‘succeed’ in it. All the subcultures and the artificial choices and illusory differences between them keep us distracted from realizing that we have become everybody else. They keep us obedient to the larger Civilization Culture, keep us busy, keep us in line. Those in a monoculture must be kept in line. There is no room for anyone who is nobody-but-themselves.

Our Civilization Culture’s subcultures are remarkable not for their differences but for their crushing sameness: Like the ‘choice’ between McDonalds or Burger King, they offer an illusion of freedom to choose. They all tempt you to ‘join’, to sign up for their ‘brand’ of Civilization Culture. To stop thinking for yourself and be everybody else. (Ah, but sir, just look, our brand of everybody else suits you so well!) We have thousands of subcultures, many of them at war with each other (in order to keep the members ‘bound’ together through having a common ‘enemy’). The prosperity of the Tweedledum subculture depends on its unifying enmity for the Tweedledee subculture, and vice versa. The continuation of Civilization Culture depends on us being everybody else, through one subculture or another.

Dawkins takes issue with those who seek a reconciliation between the religious subcultures and the science & technology subcultures. He doesn’t think we should be tolerant of subcultures which preach hate for other subcultures or which question the truths of the science & technology subcultures. Like a preacher or an advertiser or a car salesman, he wants to convert us from one subculture to another. We debate, we fight wars and elections, but its all about which ‘everybody else’ everybody should be.

Let me put it in simpler terms. Religions and other subcultures are all forms of groupthink. Groupthink is easy, it is comforting. It enables more people to live in crowded, unpleasant and unnatural conditions, because we have the group, ‘our’ beliefs to fall back on. They explain away everything. They promise a better future in return for suffering, obedience and worship today. They keep us in line and in thrall.

Groupthink, as Cummings was I think trying to tell us, is essentially a form of self-loathing. For some this takes the form of self-prostration or confession or admitting we’re addicted or other forms of self-abasement. But there are newer forms: Screaming hysterically at the mere sight of a celebrity. Doing what you’re told, 9-5 every day, without question. Living in a squalid, over-crowded, unnatural urban or suburban world among neighbours you don’t know or don’t like, without question or complaint. Longing for, and working to ‘earn’, the latest cult artifact that shows you belong to the brand of your ‘choice’. 

I don’t disrespect religions and other subcultures. I empathize with their members, as I empathize with inmates of jails and hospitals and institutions and personal hells, confined as they are in a hollow figment of a real life, never free just to be themselves. We are all in the same boat.

What is now called ‘low self-esteem’ is absolutely essential to the continuation of Civilization Culture. You must believe that others have the inherent right to tell you what to do and how to think. You must believe that the choice between Tweedledum or Tweedledee is your most important decision. You must know your place in the line and the hierarchy. And you must be kept busy enough doing meaningless work, and scared enough about the scarcity lurking just around the corner if you stop, that you never dare think for yourself.

Our planet’s remaining indigenous cultures are based more substantially on respect for and trust in the individual to know what to do, and the freedom to make one’s own decisions. Their cultures respect all life on Earth, and respect their elders and ancestors, but they do not worship them or necessarily even obey them. They have evolved in a way that is antithetic to groupthink because, unlike us, they have had space to accommodate diversity and are not dependent on the constraints of monoculture agriculture. Where there is room for diversity, it’s an evolutionary advantage, since it makes the culture more resilient.

We have learned enough about our world to know, intellectually, emotionally, instinctively, that there are no superhumans, that No One is In Control, and that Civilization Culture, in its headlong race to self-perpetuate and grow without limit, has launched our planet’s sixth Great Extinction. Still, we take turns reassuring ourselves everything will be alright. We have met the enemy and he is us.

There are readers who have claimed that I am religious and that my ‘god’ is nature or Gaia. But while I am in awe of nature’s ability to evolve self-organization for the collective well-being of all life on Earth over millions of years (you have to admit, unless you’re a creationist, that that’s a remarkable achievement), I do not ‘worship’ nature. Nature is merely a remarkable adaptation, though not without its cruelties. It has its rules, and they have evolved to work. Nature just is. It is not a god, or superhuman, or all-powerful, or divine.

I am and probably always will be in thrall to Civilization Culture. I have been fortunate to have had the time and opportunity to step back and study and learn about our world and our history and different cultures. And I’ve acquired a capacity to imagine possibilities very different from the reality in which we live today. As a result, I am very slowly extracting myself from the hold of this culture, by spending time thinking for myself. I am still far from being nobody-but-myself, but I am getting closer. As I get further from the Centre and closer to the Edge of Civilization Culture, its hold on me is weakening.

What freed me most of all was John Gray’s book Straw Dogs, because that book made me realize that we aren’t going to save the world, it’s just not in our nature, and that you cannot change culture (even counter-cultures are really just subcultures that either self-extinguish or become part of the larger Civilization Culture). Ultimately we cannot be what we are not. So despite the title of this blog (which has once again become ironic), I have no desire to sway people to think like me. I’m merely keeping a public journal of my experiment in learning to think for myself, and of my journey to our Civilization’s Edge.

If my writing provokes you to acknowledge that you’re in thrall to Civilization Culture but are making the arduous, life-long journey in the hope that you might just briefly understand what it means not to be everybody else, well then I wish you fare well (or as Eliot said, fare forward), wherever that journey may take you.

Postscript: Thinking about and writing this article has made me realize why I am so impatient with, and tardy in responding to, comments and e-mails about my articles.  I’ve come to realize that I don’t much care what others think of my writing or my ideas. I write to think out loud, to clarify my own thinking and feeling and sensing and instincts. Whenever I’ve written an article espousing the starting of some movement or collective action (and boy is it tempting to do so!) an alarm bell goes off in my head, saying don’t do that. So I’m going to stop worrying about and apologizing for not replying to e-mails and comments. I read them all, I appreciate them all, but giventhe choice between a dialogue on what I’ve written and writing something new, there is no contest. 

Jo’s Laser Products was a typical entrepreneurial business in 2034: It offshored material purchases and labour in order to be ‘competitive’ with global corporations in its industry. It used non-reusable materials and non-renewable energy when it was cheaper. It sold about a million lasers per year at a price of $200 each, and had after-tax income of $27M. Its ten-person management team earned a total of $23M after tax, and the company reinvested $7M in new capital equipment.

But the Global Tax Charter of 2035 replaced personal and corporate income, commodity and payroll taxes with two new taxes designed to reduce the impact of global warming and to redistribute some of the massive inequities of wealth that had led to the international Class Riots of 2034. The first new tax was a 100% tax on the cost of ‘imported’ (transported over a certain number of km from source to consumer) and non-reusable materials, a 200% tax on the cost of ‘imported’ materials that were also non-reusable, a 100% tax on offshored labour, and a 100% tax on non-renewable energy and other polluting production costs. The second new tax was a graduated tax on appraised personal wealth in excess of $2M.

Jo’s management team was delighted at the elimination of income, commodity and payroll taxes, but they began to realize that they weren’t as ‘green’, or as socially responsible, as they thought, when they totalled up the new taxes they would have to pay in 2035. In fact, they calculated that, to be profitable under the new scheme, they would have to increase their prices by 40%. The combination of these price increases and comparable increases of other corporations reduced consumer spending power to the point that Jo’s 2035 sales fell by half, to 500,000 units. Profits were eliminated, and the new Excess Wealth Tax exceeded management’s take-home pay. Even worse, Jo’s total investment in the domestic economy, money that would be spent on other goods and services and keep the economy healthy, fell from nearly $120M to barely half that amount:

Something had to change. Early in 2036, Jo’s management scrambled to ‘inshore’ labour and materials, even though this increased costs somewhat. And they switched to more expensive reusable materials and renewable energy sources.

The strategy worked: The tax saving more than offset the increased cost of more socially and environmentally responsible purchasing and production. Jo’s was able to roll back almost half of the previous year’s price increases, and by getting the jump on competitors, they increased their market share back to 800,000 units. Management was able to reinvest $10M in capital spending in the company and still take home $15M in total after-tax income. They were now doing almost as well as before the new tax regime, and were paying twice as much tax, which was being invested by the government in major renewable energy, anti-pollution and reusable materials projects and research. And their total investment in the domestic economy more than doubled to over $140M.

Over the next two years, Jo’s completed the transition of its purchasing and production processes, getting their facilities upgraded to the new Cradle to Cradle certified standard. Their purchasing and production taxes were eliminated entirely, so that by 2038 they were reinvesting more in the company than ever, taking home more than ever, and investing twice as much as before in the domestic and ‘green’ economy. The tax shift had produced dramatic, fast behaviour change and a win-win for the company, the shareholders, the economy and the environment.

– – – – –

In real life we probably would need to phase this in over several years to allow companies to make the change more gradually. And having a single global tax scheme is nice to dream about, but without it this tax system would be harder to implement — opportunistic corporations would simply move operations to countries with more lax tax regimes.

But it’s still a good idea, and one whose time has come. It makes no sense to tax income rather than wealth, and even less sense to tax payrolls and essential purchases, while leaving socially and environmentallyirresponsible activities untaxed.

Since I got sick last summer, I have studied the workings of the human body enough to appreciate that it is, in many ways, an equally awesome, self-regulating and complex organism, designed to advance and sustain its constituent organisms in a state of evolving and resilient well-being.

And I’m becoming convinced that what ails our planet and what ails our bodies is the same thing: poisoning by massive amounts of toxins produced by irresponsible people and corporations. But because our planet and our bodies are so complex, we will never be able to prove it to the satisfaction of our shoddy legal and political systems, which are designed to protect the perpetrators of this poisoning.

Today, the (arch-conservative) Canadian federal government took the extraordinary step of publicly censuring an Alberta doctor who dared connect the horrible level of environmental diseases suffered by the indigenous peoples in his community, to Canada’s eco-holocaust, the Alberta tar sands dirty oil sludge project, directly upstream from the community. Why? Because it clearly connects irresponsible pollution with human suffering. Can’t have that, or what will happen to our economy? If the corporatists can be held accountable for poisoning the citizens, the lawyers paid to defend them and protect their profits will not be able to do their jobs. These mega-polluters will go out of business and their wealth will be transferred back to the people they stole it from. And the leading sources of greenhouse gases, other pollutants, and water depletion in the country will be shut down. Unthinkable!

These corporatist polluters are not just destroying Gaia, the billion-year-old balance of life on our planet, they are destroying our personal health with the toxins they put in our air, our water, our soils and our foods, which end up in our bodies. There is growing evidence that most of the epidemic diseases of the modern world are consequences of damaged immune systems, either immune deficiency diseases or, increasingly, immune system hyperactivity diseases. Now there is evidence that the virulence of the horrific 1918 Spanish Flu and of H5N1 influenza, the one predicted to cause the next pandemic, can be attributed to immune system hyperactivity in a form called a ‘cytokine storm’. That’s why the devastating 1918 flu hit the healthiest citizens hardest and spared many children and seniors: Healthy people are most prone to immune system hyperactivity.

The fluwiki link above likens a cytokine storm to a rogue SWAT team. Faced with a riot, a SWAT team is supposed to go in and quell the illegal behaviour, by separating or diverting the combatants if possible, and by arrests if not. But sometimes, either because they get instructions indicating the riot is out of control when it isn’t, or because the SWAT team members themselves lack self-control, the SWAT team overreacts, exerting excess violence at the site of the disturbance or attacking innocent bystanders indiscriminately. (If you’ve ever been in a demonstration, you know this happens easily and often.)

If your immune system is damaged, cytokines, the system’s messenger proteins, send inappropriate messages that cause the body’s T- and B-cells to overreact to quell the disease, just like an overly aggressive SWAT captain’s inflammatory rhetoric. Or, the cells can misinterpret the context-sensitive messages and attack the wrong targets, just like overzealous SWAT police. The result is severe inflammation and irreparable damage to critical healthy cells and tissue, which can be crippling, agonizing, or fatal, as in arthritis or diabetes or lupus or endometriosis or MS or chronic fatigue syndrome or asthma or allergies or inflammatory bowel disease or any of the dozens of other chronic immune system hyperactivity diseases. Cytokines not only summon immune cells to attack, they activate the ability of those immune cells to produce yet more cytokines, producing a positive feedback loop that, in the absence of other types of cytokines that normally put the brakes on the loop when the target has been defeated, produce a cytokine storm, like a huge army of rogue SWAT cops killing everyone in sight. There is now some evidence that the 1918 flu strain had, and the H5N1 influenza strain has, evolved an ability to provoke cytokine storms.

Anti-inflammatory drugs merely treat the symptoms, like nurses treating the bystanders injured by the rogue cops. There is no cure for autoimmune diseases, because the immune system is so staggeringly complex we are only beginning to understand its behaviour, let alone what causes that behaviour to go awry. Steroids are even worse: they cripple the immune system, which stops the rogue cops and the good cops, but leaves the body utterly defenseless against all kinds of lethal diseases. Chemotherapy can have the same effect, as, of course, can AIDS. Immunodeficiency diseases are the flip-side of autoimmune diseases: Instead of a hyperactive immune system, their sufferers struggle with a suppressed or completely disabled one.

As I mentioned, the operation of our immune system is so utterly complex that we will never be able to prove beyond doubt what causes it to malfunction. But there is now overwhelming evidence that the damage to the Earth’s regulatory system is caused by human pollutants and toxins in such massive quantities that the system can no longer cope with them (read The Weather Makers for a full explanation of this). So isn’t it logical to assume that human pollutants and toxins are also the cause of the epidemic of equally complex regulatory system failures (autoimmune diseases) in our bodies?

Of course, the powers that be don’t want you to think that. It’s genetic, they’ll tell you, blame your parents. Or it’s caused by some kind of unknown virus or other microbe. We’ll find it (or invent it if we have to). The fact that your food and water and air are full of artificial chemicals and toxins, and now bereft of the micronutrients essential to replenish our body’s natural defences is just a coincidence. Andthey’ll dare you to prove otherwise.

Image: Cytokine storm by Gary Carlson