Life Has Become A Combined Self-Sustaining Economic System Energised By Sunlight
By Lionel Anet
01 August, 2015
Countercurrents.org
We humans are a tiny part of that natural system, but unlike other animals, we are outside the energy constraints that limit other life. That’s, we have incredible advantages over other living things, which means we are free from the control all living things have over one and other. This is because we have taken advantage over other life forms by tapping into millions of years of sunlight energy. Life retained the sunlight energy, which was then turned into fossil fuels over millions of years. It’s that energy that has enabled us to put in practice the ideology that humans are separate and above the rest of nature, which also has only ever been there for our use. It also confirms the belief of our delusionary uniqueness in the universe, of using nature rather than being control by it, as pre civilised were, and now with capitalism we are globally exhausting nature in a chaotic mindless way.
Such outrages attitudes that comes out of civilisation can only be maintain due to the separation of discipline into multitudes of independent but at times conflicting and competing identities in capitalist societies. That separation suits capitalist economies but it gives an illusion of a controlled managed grandeur, with power, and safety, which can be precarious, and therefore may lead to our demise. Nevertheless, it suit that system, as it gives the economy the advantage of an overload of information without giving us an overhaul understanding of what we are doing to ourselves and nature.
We must realise what’s keeping us alive. It’s our and natures interconnection, not the stock exchange or the financial market. It’s the multitude of other life form that allows us to live, but, that’s what we’re gradually and directly destroying. Nevertheless, it’s the indirect degradation of the planet’s condition, caused by a population explosion energised by burning fossil fuels that may finish us off.
There are two major obstacles in understand our predicament; one is our education, which was institute to maximise economic growth, so that the economy can accelerate its growth. The second is competition; it compels and directs one’s individual thinking to the task of maximising output and input. Competition reduce people options, it’s our major control, but worst the conflicts keeps us doing more, even as now we need to do less, that is to reduce economic activities especially the ones that are directly destructive to people and the ecology.
How can we get back to a sustainable lifestyle? The sun’s energy can suffice life for millions of years so it’s not the lack of energy that we need to solve, as we also have wind, which also involves the power from the earth rotation. That energy can provide a life of comfort and even of magnificence simplicity for everyone, but it’s inadequate to energise perpetual growth. Today’s society is dependent on more production and consumption, that’s more waste and a less efficient way of living. We must think of doing less to have a better life, a life with less regrets, a life proudly fulfilled that’s leaving our offspring feeling fortunate to have had such honest and fair ancestors.
To assess how well-functioning a community is, it only requires gauging the happiness of its individuals. Today the planet is overburden with people. We have a few who are wastefully extravagant, and then they’re many that are made to feel a need to compulsively consume products and food, and unluckily, a very large section that are near starvation level. It doesn’t take a PhD degree to see that it’s not fair, but it takes one to justify it, and to show it’s the poor’s lack of drive that inhibits them from enrich themselves.
What we need with our huge increasing population on a degraded planet is to be very efficient with the way we share and consume, so as to enable all people to live genially. If we do that successfully it will gives us the greatest satisfaction and pleasure. Happiness is precious and costless, so everyone worldwide can have it and must for humanity to survive this century. Fairness is a simple social standard of social sharing it doesn’t take years of university study to know what is, or not fair. Most social animals know when things aren’t fare.
We need a non-competitive educational system to suit a cooperative economic system for a fruitful life, to live as a part of nature. We can do it, because we have to, to survive.
Lionel Anet is a member of Sydney U3A University of the Third Age, of 20 years standing and now a life member
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