For a small planet, Earth harbors an incredible diversity of terrains and microclimates, even if the biosphere was excluded. It is nothing short of a miracle how a single celestial object can be host to so many landscapes, life forms and ecosystems. We live in a “world of worlds”, all of which coexist within this barely noticeable, lonely rock revolving around itself in an otherwise dark, cold, silent infinity of emptiness. The level of wealth on Earth, compared to the black desert that surrounds it, becomes even more apparent at the molecular level: while there may only be 8 million species on the planet, the molecular diversity of carbon compounds they represent approaches infinity. This is the magnitude of what is at stake on Earth. As more of the biome goes extinct, we are losing it before we can even appreciate how incredibly diverse it is.
Our story, the story of Earth, couldn’t possibly be more surreal and miraculous at the same time. Even the smartest team of human designers would almost certainly have failed to imagine, not least create our world from scratch, even if they had access to all the tools and elements in the periodic table. How could they succeed, after all, since they themselves are a mere tiny piece of this creation? They would miss the mark by a long shot.
The planet’s “designers” would probably think that trees are thermodynamically impossible: how can these huge complex structures support their weight in the wind, towering over the land, sometimes hundreds of feet tall? How could they “grow and expand from the inside”, and produce millions of bright green leaves that feed on just thin air (CO2) and water? How would they cope in winter? The very thought of a tree sounds impossible, too good to be true. It sounds like someone’s acid trip. Yet this miracle of life exists. The same designers would not even know where to start when assembling the planet’s climate machine and its renewable, cyclical processes: a collection of interdependent systems that recirculate temperature, water, nutrients, magma, air, electrical charge, radiation and oxygen throughout the planet in ways that are too ingenious for us to fully understand.
Yet all these seemingly chaotic processes are in balance with each other. All these terrains and microclimates, all these very different worlds, these dynamic and often aggressive and antagonizing processes, are in full communication with each other. The level of complexity of the Earth’s machine is so vast, so deep that it will never be fully understood by humans and possibly even a deep mind AI. Earth is a Swiss watch with an infinite number of gears, springs and feedback loops, and even living beings are an active part of its central mechanism.
The Swiss watch is normally able to self-tune. But humans are the one “rogue gear” in this watch which does not want to be regulated by the other gears. It wants to spin on its own, however it likes to, whenever it likes to. Humans still know very little about the climate of this planet, because they are treating it as a collection of independent objects. They still fail to see that it is all connected, and that everything you do on Earth will come back to you. Climate is a mere reflection of ourselves, a reaction to the actions we are putting into the Swiss watch. Climate is a mirror into our society, and right now it is mirroring the chaos of our unsustainable, self-destructive industrial civilization.
Despite all our efforts and scientific endeavors, it is becoming clear that we are too small to understand the big picture – and to see the forest, not the trees. The forest may be burning, but all we see is mirages of ourselves in the flames. We lack both the consciousness and the humility to recognize our predicament, and both of these are fundamental cognitive handicaps. Our arrogance has been central to this: humans have made the tragic error of mistaking their narcissism for self-awareness. While awareness imparts infinite vision, vanity is a lethal form of myopia, at best. Without true awareness, there is no true intelligence.
How did we turn out to be so terminally blind? It would seem that our cognitive function has followed a direction opposite to that of our technological progress. There are a number of ways in which this paradox is unfolding:
For starters, we have been nurturing an economic system whose very survival depends on keeping us unhappy, and hungry for products. The more unhappy, unsatisfied and greedy we become, the more we turn inwardly and lose sight of this world. Not only do we become too narcissistic to appreciate and value this planet, but we also literally become blind: we cannot see it. Present, past, future, all merge into one, as we lose sense of time and space and become obsessed with our personal image and our “stuff”. This has become the planet of the narcissists. Necrocapitalism is taking us on a journey towards full unconsciousness, with tragic consequences.
The first casualty of unconsciousness is the loss of a moral compass. We have created a society where if something is not sellable, or doesn’t get any monetizable “air time”, then it is absolutely useless. Values such as dignity, compassion, equality, healthcare, environmentalism, are often red alerts for our system: they are loss-makers, extremely risky areas for our capitalist society to “invest” in. They only become profitable when hijacked and weaponized as temporary facades for political campaigns, green new deals or clever product marketing, so that they can appeal to whatever humanity is left in us. Governments, brands, sometimes even charities, have learned to play the “equality” card very well whenever they need the votes. There has never been a time when humans have been so out of touch with their humanity.
Unconsciousness also means being unable to appreciate just about anything and everything. Most modern humans are blind to the natural miracle that surrounds them on this planet in every waking moment of their existence. In our futile search to constantly make meaningless improvements to our lifestyles, we easily forget what is already here, free of charge: a planet where the sun will rise every morning, the grass will be green, the ecosystem and the climate system will be there to continue to nurture us. We have it all, already. But by taking all this creation for granted we forget that it too, needs attention and maintenance. To truly appreciate this planet is to realize that all these “pretty” life forms we like to watch in our documentaries are extremely fragile living organisms, just like us: they need light, water, oxygen, nutrients, love and protection during every minute of their existence.
Humanity is always focused on the next step, the future, never thinking for a minute that things do not always necessarily improve. They can also deteriorate very quickly, if we take them for granted.
Yet another way in which we are becoming unconscious is by being turned into products. Necrocapitalism is pushing every life form and every renewable resource towards its death sentence: the productization route. Even consumers themselves are becoming products with an expiration date. The new digital economy has accelerated our transformation into data entities. Google and Facebook have turned us into products whose data can be bought, sold, influenced and exploited, but this is also how we are beginning to treat other humans, becoming exploiters ourselves: our digital society is habituating us to treat other human beings as pages that we scroll through. We increasingly see other humans and other life forms on the planet on a purely transactional basis: as items on our “want” list, as opposed to independent entities with their own rights, wants and feelings. Our police forces are being trained to treat protesters as if they are objects in a video game obstacle course. Soon It will become easier to program compassion into a robot, than to “re-program” compassion into our human police force, and into the rest of us. The Robocop age will become reality, as we rely on algorithms to maintain social cohesion. Yearly surveys conducted by city authorities in the future will reassure citizens: “new survey finds that robot police forces continue to be more effective, more compassionate, and less racist than real humans”.
People in the wealthier areas of the world are the most unconscious of us all. As capitalism automates more and more of our lives with amenities and luxuries that we take for granted, we become even more blind and ungrateful. Like a tenant who has just moved into a new flat, there are certain things like air, food, water, the right temperature, which we falsely assume were included as standard in our contract. We falsely think that all these amenities “came with the planet”, as if our planet is a minutes and data package from a phone company. We’ve had the package and the rented flat for so many millions of years now, and we’ve forgotten that in order to maintain it and not be evicted from the flat, we have to also stick to our end of the bargain: don’t trash the place.
Almost everything on the planet, whether living or not, is becoming a product and an object. We do marvel at the most exotic aspects of our planet, often sitting mesmerised for hours in front of our TVs watching David Attenborough documentaries. But this takes on more of an hedonistic entertainment value, as we become voyers looking for momentary satisfaction. We don’t really care about these life forms. Like a theme park, you pay your ticket and get your day’s worth of fun, as your eyes move from one display to another, one fun ride to the next, without ever contemplating the significance of the things that you are seeing or experiencing. Whether they are fish, trees or colorful birds, we have stopped seeing them as life forms and have begun to treat them as objects, or at best, as actors playing in their own sad, autobiographical movie. We have confused real life, and the real significance of the Creation, with meaningless entertainment. Every life form becomes an object that looks just like the original, but without a soul, and without any rights of its own. It has been productized, objectified for your entertainment, and ended up in a supermarket shelf. In our ignorant eyes, it has effectively become lifeless.
It is no wonder then that our instinctive reaction to any stimulus, life form or object, is whether we can own it or not. Our economic system has made greed the central inner compass which directs all our interactions. We are much more interested in owning things than learning about them, empathizing with them, understanding them and simply respecting their right to exist, as themselves, in their natural setting. However many documentaries we make, or museums we build, they will never capture the soul and the essence of these life forms, because in our eyes they have become lifeless digital actors and actresses. Our obsession with “cataloguing” the natural world, although seemingly harmless, is an indication of an obsessive ownership mental disorder. We count species in numbers, like bottles of detergent sitting on a supermarket shelf, completely forgetting that these are fragile beings.
We treat other human beings as products as well: whether it is an employee we are about to hire, a friend that we turn to only in a time of need, a potential partner that we swipe left or right on Tinder, in much the same way that we hastily look through a clothes rack in a shop. We never ever afford other life forms, whether human or not, our full attention. Once the nature documentary finishes and the popcorn runs out, our attention needs to switch to the next excitement that our capitalist theme park has in store for us, from an endless database of personalized auto-suggestions. Everything that we’ve just seen, all the actors and actresses of the plant and animal kingdom, only existed for our entertainment, not for themselves. They were not part of our reality. Any meaningful attachment or appreciation vanishes immediately as the next program begins.
What is at stake, and what is in fact being eroded, is our very humanity. The more automated and asleep we become, the less compassion we can feel for others, for the planet, and for ourselves.
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