The Convenient Lies We Hide Behind

I tuned in to follow a debate between the sole UK Green MP and a here unnamed government minister on the unquestionably most pressing concern of our present times, The Climate emergency.

As she stood up to deliver her points, I watched in utter astonishment as the house immediately emptied — school boys scarpering en masse with special permission before the bell's ringing. Supposedly, these learned and time-pressed men and women had something much more important to do than listen to the dire consequences of their business as usual god acquired antics — the tolling of the doomsday bell was a fringe interest way below their vaunted positions.

Left virtually alone in an emptied parliamentary chamber did not put the Green MP off her stride. She clearly and precisely delivered the salient points line by line, word by word. She painted a picture backed up by 99 per cent of the world’s scientists that did not leave any ambiguities to the trajected path the world was on and what the UK government should be doing to avert the worse of these predictions.

Again I watched in amazement as the government spokesman, in dignified, some might say superior and smarmy tones, dismissed the concerns she had raised and lectured her on being impractical and innocent to the needs of modern society and the contemporary world. We cannot possibly tamper with the system, especially with a war blazing in the middle of Europe. Now is not the moment for such folly.

This blatant display of blindness dressed up as sober assessment exposed the absurd mentality under which our so-called leaders are running.

Two constructs are vying for ascendancy, one manufactured and the other created by nature which birthed us, nourished us and provided the conditions for us to flourish.

The man-made construct is an all-controlling system invented by economists. It has invaded every part of the world, from autocratic capitalist China to dictatorial capitalist Russia to the Capitalist democracies of the West, developing countries and rich countries alike. It is the system that runs every aspect of daily business and life, from World Trade, Governance, and household concerns. We see it as a reality which we cannot escape or deny. In general, it advocates growth above all else. We use what we have, our capital, to get more. If we don’t possess or have lost everything, we do not count. We merely join the growing ranks of the undeserved and the despised. Our World leaders can see nothing else but GDP. Conveniently for them, there exists an economic model that demonstrates that the rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere lie indelibly linked to GDP growth. If one increases, so does the other. Since most of our erudite, clever tongued, elite leaders are acolytes trained to worship at the feet of the god of economic growth, many things become clear. They lack the vision or bravery to peer over the walls of this false construct that has enriched and elevated them from beyond living memory — a golden goal to achieve at any means, a culmination of a life’s work and ambition, and a portrait of power for eternity. The hallowed halls of governance from parliaments, houses of congress, senates and penthouse corporate offices and banks have always stood gilded with this construct's rewards. Why change now? If it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.

Nature does not care about humanity’s obsession with economics. Everything in the natural world is intricately and delicately connected. What happens in the oceans at every level, from the smallest planktons to the largest organisms such as whales, affects not only the health of this profound watery universe but also what manifests in our atmosphere and vice versa — our weather, to give an example. So too, in this interrelated bio-feedback mix are the ebb and flows of our landmasses, fertility, biodiversity, deserts, savannahs, forests, wetlands, and mountain ranges. The clouds roll in from the seas and water the land. The rivers take the excess back to the oceans. All touch each other with intimacy in ways that our scientists are just beginning to understand and the majority of us submerged in our concrete and technological world barely comprehend and appreciate. Through millions of years of disharmony, it is a construct that has created a system of harmony, breathing in and out like a living entity. It is the mother of all life, including us, one of the latest of her children to be born. She carries her myriad of offspring, many weird and wonderful species, in unpredictable cycles. They spin on until her relationship with the cosmos causes them to spin off, but from their death or extinction, another takes their place. Nothing is forever, but she ensures life continues until her power to do so bows before an even greater construct. She provides what is needed for her children to survive but leaves them free will according to their evolved natures and abilities to gather in the harvest. Sometimes it is bountiful. Sometimes it is lean. Most have what they need in their habitats based on the local conditions to survive. Then along came humanity.

Humans are different. There is no doubt about that. We have all the impulses and behaviour as the rest of the animal kingdom, except we exhibit more than them on every scale. We have evolved a forebrain that allows us to analyse, reason and invent our gods, mostly in our own image. Combining this unique brain with exceptionally developed hands, we can record our endeavours and extract whatever we need from our mother despite the habitat variance—taking something because we want it has become our mantra. The planet is ours to conquer. Nature can no longer subject us to her rule. In reality, our gods, who we created, have given it to us to do with as we desire.

We build technological marvels around us that allow us to isolate ourselves from the cycles of nature, or so we convinced ourselves, for we have acquired dangerous hubris. We coral the selective animals useful for our purposes, transformed into pet slaves or bred in highly virulent conditions for food and profit — the two have become inseparable. We’ve covered the soils with four or five mono-crops on which we feed — depleting nature’s variety basket. One can safely say that everything we do is toxic to our environment, our lonely planet. We know this but cannot see over the wall of human constructs taught to us as the norm — our reality.

Humanity has hitched itself to a runaway train. All our artificially designated nations are merely carriages in which we carry on as if the world rushing by outside the windows does not matter, only us and the other carriages, fore and aft. We know that the track ahead will end at the broken bridge, a bottomless cavern to fall into. Still, we are evolutionarily programmed to see only our immediate self-interest, which stops just beyond our noses. This near-sighted, primitive survival kit has allowed economists, notably Freedman’s shareholder theory followers, to hijack our common sense and find safety and comfort in the absurd and downright unethical.