Narcissism&Climate blame: Capitalism&Consumer ties vs Choices + the Monty Python ‘bunny’.
Capitalism can be seen as an extreme form of human narcissism.
Like narcissism, it is parasitic and has subversively infiltrated its nutrient-robbing tentacles throughout the economic ‘body’ and well beyond, perverting our social structures and undermining the potential value of positive human interactions. Because we perceive it as beneficial, we’ve become willing hosts, even as it drains our world of sustainability. Although it has its roots in ancient trade practices and mercantilism, the system currently consuming our planet dates back to the 17th century and the progenitor corporations of the Dutch and English..
While corporations provide some benefits to the collective, it is in the nature of the ‘Beast’ to otherwise undermine societal health. Since its inception, the primary function of capitalism has been to generate wealth and funnel it into the pockets of the ‘chosen’ few. When not reined in, this can reach the level of auto-destruction, as we are witnessing now with the stripping of world resources and the potential annihilation of our world — corporations and their consumer base included.
The ‘ends justify the means’, and from the beginning with the Dutch East India Company, the ‘means’ have included theft, exploitation, ruthless control and irresponsible power.
The harsh reality of wealth would turn the wealthy to salt without the blinders of narcissism and the shield of sociopathic predisposition. Lacking checks and balances, wealth becomes the jet fuel of these hyper-anti-societal ‘gods in their own image’.
‘Every man for himself’ has evolved to become the pervasive modus operandi ever since we stopped working together to bring down mastodons and agriculture facilitated our disastrous conglomeration into cities. While it was originally best evinced by those who exercised power, with the advent of the merchant class and then their uber-avatar, capitalism, it began to fracture and the shards spread throughout society, until, like a viral pandemic, it left no one untouched. At first there was enough social pressure to counter the effects of ‘me first’, but over time ‘the permeation of narcissism’ gained predominance. It now rules the roost.
As if all the suffering this mindset has generated throughout millennia has not been enough to get humanity to change course (and it hasn’t been), the fact that it has led us up to the precipice of annihilation, would, you might think, give us pause (but it hasn’t yet). And so, with few exceptions, the supremacy of our personal desires, continues unabated, overriding the common good.
For, the non-rich dream of riches and those dreams continue to lead us blindly on. Despite the fact that in our better moments some of us can recognize the merit in sacrificing for the collective good, our all-pervasive narcissism tells us to fuck the ‘collective good’ and grab what we can before (or even after) someone else does, while quickly reassuring us that we are undeniably deserving. (That is, if we even need reassurance.)
For as we all know, material gratification is the coinage of the realm and provides such reassurance in spades. But only briefly, as ingrained dissatisfaction quickly snuffs out our pleasure. The chronic discontent we collectively suffer from makes short work of fulfillment and this insatiable predatory desire has become life threatening.
Our collective narcissism has played a heavy hand in creating the destructive maelstrom of consumption called capitalism, and we have struck a Faustian bargain in our willingness to become domesticated consumer livestock sacrificed on the alter of convenience. Even those profiting from it are being consumed by it. The puppet masters are themselves puppets, their strings pulled by entrenched conventionalism and systems beyond their control.
We all live in the same box and only the truly perceptive see outside it.
In a mature, healthy society — by which I mean balanced; materially, mentally and spiritually — our objective in life would be to give back more than we receive in the course of it. This amounts to leaving things better than we found them and contributing to the health of the planet on as many levels as possible.
But most of us are material and emotional vortexes driven by ego, fear, and greed.
Our rapidly vanishing illusion of ‘normality’ is the structural foundation supporting this house of cards.
In a comment on DK recently I read this paraphrased statement attributed to. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres:
“He also explicitly says that the enemy is the fossil fuel industry. It is not consumers making the wrong choices.” Now whether he actually said something to this effect, or whether it was a wishful muddling on the part of the quoter based in a subconscious need for absolution, is a coin toss.
Most likely it is a combination both, for despite Mr. Guterres’ climate clarity, it can still remain in the realm of possibility.
Because denial knows no boundaries and flows up hill as well as down.
It fuels paupers while subjugating kings, and no amount of ‘brains’ or wealth or power can protect you from it.
Twenty-some-odd years ago, the then U.N Secretary General, Kofi Annan issued a similar denial ridden statement, to the effect that the environment was “a soft issue”. Even then, it was not.
Denial is self-deception, and intelligence has no natural immunity to it. In fact a high I.Q. can actually be a liability, as it is often devoted to ‘rationalization’ rather than ‘rationality’. Our conflicting subconscious ‘traffic cops’ can often misdirect us, and intelligence itself, while it can be skilled in ‘husbandry’, rarely contains the seeds of self-awareness. These are usually planted by outside influences.
Autograph or not, at the core of Mr. Guterres’ remark is a beautifully gift-wrapped “get out of jail free” pass. And it couldn’t be more patently absurd. The illusory claim to logic it serves up is based in such a desperate need for devolving guilt, that any possible self-reflective clarity becomes opaque instantly.
Its pseudo-legitimacy rests upon its being a universally shared subconscious avoidance ‘necessity’, as the reality of consumer culpability poses an abhorrent threat to the psyche.
As with all addictive behavior, lucidity is a double-edge blade, threatening the ‘cut’ of guilt on one side and the ‘severing’ of self-indulgent gluttony on the other.
The last time I checked the accepted definition of ‘adulthood’, there was nothing about its being a super-sized stage of childhood, or for that matter, that ‘adults’ are innocent ‘babes in the wood’ when it comes to felonious scams like the ‘bait’ offered up by corporate malfeasance.
Even children tend to be far from innocent, and responsible adults are anything but — unless they’ve been framed, which is not the same thing and decidedly not the case here.
Yes, we have been lied to, but those lies haven’t been delivered in an information vacuum and most of us have made scant attempts to recognize them by going to the trouble of countering them with fact checking. Most of this information has always been accessible and not that hard to suss out. Frequently it is available in the ‘library’ of common sense.
But we’ve been loath to read the weather forecast, which might dampen our ‘parade’.
During the past seven decades of burgeoning hyper-consumption, there have been plenty of Cassandras, warning us of the various dangers strewn along the consumer highway and advising us to change coarse.
But most of us have only changed lanes…to the left.
When I was a child, no one ever took me aside and explained to me the dangers of mindless consumption. I didn’t have access to scientific circles, courses on the environment or climate ‘think tanks’. The information I learned from was scarce, but out there. Much was circulated by word of mouth and not yet suppressed as psychically ‘repellent’. Although some people voiced concern, this was quickly crowded out by immediate issues and just as quickly forgotten. My subconscious information filter has always acted more like a funnel, and disturbing new ideas that can often be blocked from contemplation always find my front door left wide open. Because of this ‘’abnormality’, I’m more apt to recognized the value of the subconsciously unpalatable and adjust my life accordingly.
I’ve been environmentally empathetic since my very early youth, in the ‘childlike’ way of ‘primitive cultures’ with their deep bonds to nature. I didn’t need anyone to explain to me at the end of the 1950’s, when I was 9 or so, that there was something inherently wrong with disposables and planned obsolescence. As such, I am not predisposed to give everyone else a pass.
Our collective limitations as a species are not an excuse, especially in the light of our species, claims to ‘superiority’. (This overarching ‘mega’ ego is so inherently instilled in us that many who harbor disparaging attitudes toward mankind will still auto-set to declaring our primacy as the central ‘purpose’ of global survival.)
‘Preeminence’ can’t be ‘cut’ with inadequacy of this magnitude and still retain its structural integrity.
There are simply no valid excuses, other than stupidity, willful blindness and greed, for the horrendous choices we’ve made as consumers. We’ve chosen candy over carrots and ease over effort.
Our energy has been misdirected toward justifications rather than sound judgment. For responsibility has been viewed as a deterrent to ‘convenience’ and convenience is Emperor Denial’s ‘evil Queen’.
The ‘inconvenient truth’ here is that the bad consumer choices we’ve chosen to make throughout our lives far outnumber the good ones — probably by a factor of ten. The vast majority of us have willingly embraced disposables, trend buying and ‘comfort’ consumption. When Madison Avenue tells us this will make our lives fuller and easier, we elbow others in our rush to get on board.
We think nothing of having gas guzzlers for every member of the family capable of driving (many of them pickup trucks loaded with ego and testosterone, but little else).
We’re drowning in an endless cascade of ever more specialized, barely used, effort-sparing devices, as well as attention ‘getting’ (but not ‘keeping’) nonsense novelties, many of them masquerading as ‘necessities’.
Ravenously, we devour individual tonnages of grossly over-consumed meat and compound the horror by remaining blissfully ‘unaware’ of the irresponsible, profit-driven waste of approximately 45% of our overall food production.
Simply because, no matter how fat we get, somehow our eyes still manage to be larger than our stomachs. And so the ‘consumer orgy’ continues on and on and on, ad infinitum’…literally.
(Did I forgot to mention our self-fumigation by air travel? — and our cellular reconstruction through plastic particulates?)
Plastic has become such an integral part of life that it should be No. 1 on the Periodic Table of Elements — as it rapidly becomes more omnipresent than carbon and oxygen. Even though there are many safer substitutes; like an infatuated lover, we choose it to all else and summarily dismiss even ‘more attractive’ alternatives.
All of this gluttonous binging has led to the creation of literal mountains of waste and a saturation of the biosphere with a pot pourri of trash and toxins vying for destructive primacy, because, aside from the sheer volume we generate, our chosen ‘convenient’ methods of disposal ‘cataclysmatize’ our inexcusable slovenliness. (Our blind ‘trust’ in recycling has also been a ‘choice’ expedited by the convenience of expediency.)
How are hundreds of millions of homes stuffed to the rafters, as well as, millions of ‘out of sight’ storage units, filled with things we can’t let go of, but no longer want and don’t even remember we own, a reflection of good consumer choices?
Gluttony, like any other of the ‘deadly’ sins, involves choice: “To consume or not to consume — that should be the question’. (But it’s not — yet.)
Though people can be prey to cons of all kinds, many have enough sense not to bite.
A skilled con artist picks his ‘mark’ by recognizing emotions that make ‘suckers’ vulnerable. He knows how to manipulate these feelings and by doing so, them.
But the success rate is unpredictable.
The difference here is that the vast majority of humans have been completely on board with this con, not just willing, but actively shaping and enabling it. Like a ‘do-it-yourself’ kit for transforming to ‘consumer vacuums’ (disposable bags included).
While it is true that the developing countries have not greatly participated in global ‘immolation’ (besides getting burned by it), this has been largely due to economics and cultural isolation, rather than inclination. Resistance to generating unnecessary material waste due to cultural conventions has factored in, but these ‘taboos’ have been quickly corroding in our increasingly globalized world and in their weakened state aren’t strong enough to repel the temptations of capitalism.
Meanwhile, in the more ‘fortunate’ portion of the globe, after, more or less, 70 years of obsessive compulsive consumption, the economically privileged are lost in the throws of a vast ‘cult of consumption’. We’ve become ‘consumer zombies’ and the con relies on symbiotic mutual interdependence with our corporate progenitors.
For what is the true nature of our relationship with wealth, power and capitalism, if not as co-partners in a dance of death? They control us only because we do not exercise our power to control them. As long as the ‘well’ keeps ‘gushing’ we feel no need to. Until quite recently, the effects of this social malfeasance have been comfortably partitioned off by a lack of immediacy.
This disconnect has powered denial just like warm waters feed hurricanes.
As things ‘warm up’, shifting blame is a form of cognitive dissonance, which seeks to preserve our denial of wanton participation. As such, denial becomes the blueprint of our self-destruction.
One of the imminent dangers in projecting culpability is that it promotes the idea that, since we the consumers are ‘innocent’, it’s the responsibility of the ‘bad actors’ to take action.
But this they will not do unless forced to.
By us.
We have to own our part in this and act first, because, while we’ve been self-centered and self-serving, they’ve been monstrous, and Beasts of this satanic level need to be brought to submission first and then, if possible, destroyed.
What’s more, if we are able to get our shit together, but remain unwilling to accept our part in creating this mess, we’ll ‘doom ourselves to repeat it’. Destructive patterns need to be recognized as such and broken. Irrevocably.
I recently wrote about El Niño and the effect it is having on climate awareness. In that diary, I stated that “cognitive dissonance is putting up a brave front, like a bunny facing down a tiger”.
What I forgot to mention is that this is the Monte Python, “Holy Grail” killer ‘bunny’
…and it is capable of dismembering our efforts to survive.