We Must Fix Civilisation To Survive
By Lionel Anet
15 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Crime and punishment
Humanity is about to commit the greatest possible crime on all living things including ourselves. Civilisation has killed hundreds of people with continual fighting and oppression for thousands of years with only minor local collapses. Building on that, Capitalism in only two centuries waged wars that killed millions of people, changed the planet’ climate, raped its forest and oceans, and overburden nature with more than double the number of people the ecosystem can properly manage. The reason for that increasing out of balanced is to be found in the faulty social system of civilisation and particularly capitalism. It’s that system that controls us, we have been at its mercy because civilisation has separate people into different categories. Those categories are of power and therefore of different interest, a tiny minority have the power and control societies. As well as violence, capitalist societies have fiat money, as their main and most effective control weapon. The interest of that powerful small group is to safeguard and increase their assets of power, and to do that society has to increase the pillage of everything on the planet.
Life can’t sustain such despoiling for much longer and to maintain the present economic system we must continue to increase that damage until our planet is unliveable. That appears farfetched today, because we have seen little change and it still feels secure.
What’s keeping the atmosphere relatively cooler than the quantity of carbon in it should make it is the ocean. It absorbs enormous amount of energy before its temperature rises and the more resent melting of polar ice requires even more energy. However, the insulation from most of the carbon will still be there next century and with a warmer ocean and less ice the planet’s temperature could skyrocket for our decedents. As well they have to deal with a probable 2 metre sea level rise per one degree temperature increase.
This is obviously the most severs crime we can commit; it will impinge on everyone and everything. This crime will also be magnified by nature’s many positive feedbacks that could take this sixth extinction to be the last.
Domination is the original crime for any very social mammals. Dominance is also the primary source of unfairness and that’s what motivates the crimes of civilisation and to control those crimes the dominant people use punishment, a comparable crime. The less fair a society is the more crime there will be and accordingly an increase severity in the punishment will be needed to maintain enough order for society to function. The severity of the punishment for crimes committed, to maintain order, is proportional to society’s unfairness (a comparable crime). Those crimes are judged according to the law of the land, but there’s no law against domination, if that domination is what’s dominates the masses by a tiny minority. Domination is an anathema, for a very social being, because it creates divisions, which is a dishonest form of association and control for us, as we are the most social of all life. Unfortunately for us civilised one, we perceive that civilisation to be the pillar of good social behaviour but that’s based on domination and a gradation of authority, power, and possessions. They are what I maintain is our original crimes.
Therefore civilisation is a criminal way of living and it’s a crime against people and all living things. It’s the lies that give us the awe for civilisation, which has obscured our view of civilisation’s social destructiveness. Regardless of the method used, it’s a small minority who control the majority to aggrandise who ever are really calling the shots. That set up has and is creating much suffering for every one and is increasingly destroying nature - our life supports. The legacy of years of civilisation is now maintained by an educational system and a mass media that has largely replaced direct and open violence within nations.
Education: the tool of capitalist civilisation
Education plays multiple roles; it must produce the ablest workers, and depict the grandeurs of civilisation with its material and cultural achievements. Within that depiction, education gives us a mistaken impression that it’s civilisation that controls our savage brutal nature, to be law abiding, knowledgeable, and honest citizens. Civilisation as always been falsely depicted as the best possible way to live, but at times spoiled by human frailty.
Capitalism had to go from renewables to fossil fuel technologies to meet its energy needs of perpetual growth. That technology required many new skills that were met with universal education geared to maximise profits for the elite. Education has forced the need of elections, but only to give a feeling of involvement. But democracies are intense competitive activities, which favours deceitful pursuits to acquire political power. This dishonesty is enabled by the educated psychologist by editing information to suit their employers, the multinationals corporations.
Nevertheless, the crunch time is upon us. That use of high-tech to replaces workers with fossil fuel energy needs very high growth or the level of unemployment is unacceptable. As the banks created the money for the economic growth, which increase their wealth so, they gave rosy prediction of the future, until oil price rose to unbearable heights for the economy to grow. Sadly, the education has trained us for the impossible continual growth economy, which was based on an acceptance of a perpetually available fossil fuels, minerals, and a continuous green revolution and they’re now failing us. Unfortunately, our thinking from the education is stuck on perpetual growth belief regardless of the need of a reduction in economic activities from the observed situation.
As I maintain, civilisation is a criminal organisation and for any activities to be supported, it must promote the unfairness and profits for the few. Whether it’s through business of manufacturing, supply of energy, banking, sport or the military, their purpose is to produce the greatest profits, and maintain dominance. We can only minimise our involvement in civilisation’s crimes. To maintain ourselves, we must contribute to the wasteful system by depleting resources, pollute the biosphere, and heat up the planet - it’s the final crime. The extremes in civilisation is the oppression, the deceit and the violence to rob other nation - it’s the military’s raison d'être. The ultimate punishment will be metre out by nature’s inability to support us in any style.
We can’t honestly blame our nature; as it’s the result of an evolutionary process that has tuned us to have incredible cooperative ability and to have that ability we need passionate compassion, and skills. But under capitalism we use part of that great capacity to dominate nature and degrade it, if it brings greater dominance. Nevertheless, we also have the intellectual and emotional capacity to live as a part of nature. That should be easy with all the accumulated knowledge we have, if it wasn’t for our civilised culture of domination and capitalist education, which grew out of racist-slavery. The problem is our civilisation; we got to fix it for our children’s survival.
Lionel Anet is a member of Sydney U3A University of the Third Age, of 20 years standing and now a life member
Comments are moderated