October 2022
How can it be?
How is it that some people seem so driven by greed and hunger for power, while others seem happy to live simply and enjoyably with what they have? How is it that many people apparently believe themselves to be separate, always in competition with others, always having to grasp for more—more money, more fame, more power, ever more proof of their worth— while others feel pretty good about their lives most of the time, enjoying friendships, family, and simple everyday achievements of creativity and service to their community.
The Greedy and Powerful
The former would seem to be the unfortunate ones, unhappy, lonely, disconnected. Yet, at least in today’s world, some of them have considerable political and economic power (politicians, corporate leaders, captains of finance, etc.). In those positions they manage to spread their unhappiness far and wide, wreaking havoc on people and planet alike. In their relentless pursuit of wealth and power for themselves and their immediate families, they lie, cheat, and steal. Nothing is sacred—no law or value or principle—if it gets in their way. They are consummate Takers, accustomed to claiming credit for others’ achievements and blaming those same others for the damage they themselves perpetrate. They make up and spread horrendous stories about their opponents—often projections of their own misdeeds. And they continue to destroy the life support systems of Earth and communities of people without a shred of conscience.
Everyone else
The rest of us in the Western world are somewhere on a continuum between destitution and contentment. There are grievously oppressed, impoverished, and imprisoned people at one extreme. Somewhere in the middle are those caught up in lives of “quiet desperation.” They are indebted to credit card companies for purchases they’ve been convinced are necessary for their happiness; they work at often barely tolerable jobs to pay for food, clothing, rent or mortgage payments, health care, cars, and other goods and services deemed necessary for survival in this culture. Then at the other extreme are people somehow fortunate enough to have escaped the madness and living more or less happily on modest incomes.
No one on this continuum is completely safe from the predations of the greedy and powerful.
The Insanity of Capitalism Today
We truly live in an insane economic system that is destroying the living systems upon which all life—including all human life—depends. Case in point: the plastics industry continues to build plants to manufacture plastic micro pellets, also called microbeads or nurdles—even though it is widely known that these pellets are poisoning the waterways and oceans vital to life on Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_pellet_pollution). Local governments often encourage these plants, which promise jobs and financial return in the form of taxes, with no consideration for the pollution that they vent on neighboring residents, usually Black, Brown, and impoverished communities. (https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2022-3-fall/feature/these-are-new-titans-plastic-shell-pennsylvania-fracking.)
Profit counts more than life in a capitalist economy.
Another case in point in the desert near Phoenix, Arizona:
Fondomonte, a Saudi Arabian agricultural firm, has rented a 3,500-acre plot of state-owned land at a steeply discounted rate to grow feed for cattle in Saudi Arabia. To grow its crop, Fondomonte is slurping up as much as 18,000 acre-feet per year—enough water to supply 54,000 homes.
(Miller,Jeremy, “Inherit the Dust,” Sierra, Fall 2022)
Feedback from Earth
If this isn’t the essence of insanity, I don’t know what is. Yet when most of our society is caught up in it, constantly convincing itself that this is only possible way to function, it is very hard for its members to perceive its insanity. The living system of Earth is increasingly giving us feedback in the form of devastating hurricanes, wildfires, floods, mega-droughts, atmospheric rivers, heat waves, wide-spread hard freezes, and other catastrophes. But the mindset of capitalism keeps us from comprehending this trajectory as feedback, continuing instead to interpret it as just a series of misfortunes from which we can rapidly recover (or even profit), or as tragedies visited on a few unfortunate people Over There (or, worse yet, well-deserved punishments from God for the imagined sins of those Others). Anything to keep the profits rolling in to the powerful and greedy–no matter what.
I recently read a very impactful memoir by Tara Westover, titled Educated (Random House, 2018) She tells of growing up in the delusional and abusive reality created by an authoritarian father, and how she awakened to a wider reality through education. She portrays the tenacity of the family delusion to which she had to subscribe in order to remain a member of the family, and her struggle to free herself from this constricting, sexist, racist, denigrating worldview. Perhaps this is a struggle we must all undertake, to save not only ourselves, but also our children, grandchildren, and siblings of other species from the catastrophic effects of our collective insanity. True, we take the risk of ostracism, but we may, as Tara did, find new family/community among others who have awakened to the insanity and are working to create a healthier economy and society for the benefit of all life.
Toward an Ecological Economy
One of the stories that capitalism tells is that the only alternative to capitalism is communism, and we’ve seen how badly that worked out in Russia. What if that is a myth? I believe that we can create an economic system based on the principles that support all the other living systems of Earth—perhaps something entirely new, or something patterned on the many indigenous societies that thrived for thousands of years before “civilization” took hold.
We don’t have to know what it looks like to imagine that it is possible. We can move into the unknown with wide-open eyes and hearts and minds, discovering and trying out new ways of functioning as we go along, guided by the living systems of the natural world. That’s how everything alive today has come into being: no master plan, just ongoing emergent trial and error—adaptive evolution—inspired by creativity, relationship, and (I believe) the essence of love.
CODA
The day after I finished writing this essay, I attended a webinar with David Korten and Della Duncan sponsored by the Work That Reconnects Network, and heard them speak to similar themes. (Clickherefor a recording of the webinar.) Of course I know that my perspective is hardly unique or original, but it was still encouraging to hear two thinkers whom I highly respect speaking about our insane capitalist system. David Korten’s recent white paper, “Ecological Civilization: From Emergency to Emergence” covers a lot of the same territory in greater depth. He introduces the coined word (pun not intended but apt!) “ego-nomics” referring to an economic system that benefits a few egotistical humans at the cost of everyone and everything else. I recommend his essay to continue this exploration.
I attach an article by Dan Axelrod that was recently published in our local weekly newspaper. He describes a successful community effort in our small town of Mount Shasta, California to prevent the opening of a water-bottling plant on the outskirts of our town. With Dan’s permission, I share it here as a case study of the insanity of corporate capitalism, and how together we can sometimes disentangle the powerful tendrils that ensnare our government and society.
Communities Opposing Divide-and-Conquer:
Lessons Learned from the Crystal Geyser Campaign
Published as a Guest Editorial by Daniel Axelrod in the September 7, 2022
Mount Shasta Herald
This past May, something good happened. The California Court of Appeals found that Siskiyou County, CA, and Crystal Geyser Water Company (CGWC, a subsidiary of a multibillion- dollar Japanese Pharmaceutical corporation) used dubious procedures to push through approvals of a beverage-bottling plant on Ski Village Drive in Mt. Shasta, CA, approvals which violated established environmental law. This correct decision came well after CGWC itself decided to withdraw from the project, in the face of what it termed “challenges”, likely the strong organized opposition of many hundreds of community members over the past ten years. As focused by We Advocate Thorough Environmental Review, W.A.T.E.R., the community pointed out the numerous ways the project would deplete water supplies and produce noise, and air and water pollution. W.A.T.E.R. would like to thank the whole community for its support and activism for this significant victory in preserving Mount Shasta’s environment and groundwater supplies.
It is important, however, to draw broader lessons, because the nature of the “system” says that corporate attacks against local communities necessarily will continue. The system has no choice. It naturally pits large private corporations, whose only real goal is to make money and expand their power for their global investors, against working people and families, whose goal is to make decent money doing useful work in healthful and safe surroundings. These divergent goals sometimes can be made to seem compatible by slick corporate advertising. For example, the “other” Crystal Geyser (CG Roxane in Weed, CA) publicly claims on its website that it is “family-owned and operated with no corporate hierarchy” when in fact it is owned by “Alma S.A.”, which is 49 % owned by the same giant Japanese pharmaceutical company as CGWC and 51% by a billionaire French family Papillaud.
Corporate lying sometimes works. Historical examples: “Tobacco is not harmful”. “Scientists are divided about climate change”. “The U.S. has the world’s best medical care system.” “Military weapon spending defends democracy around the world”. All lies, but they do deceive people.
If false advertising and PR and outright lying doesn’t quite work to mislead people, then “divide and conquer” techniques are employed. In the local case, Siskiyou County and CGWC sought to pit environmental protection against “job creation”, although the goal of a corporation always is to operate with as few (and as low-paid) workers as possible, and then sell the product for as high a price as possible. This money machine operates until the “market” evaporates, or the corporation is bought by some international financial equity firm with different priorities, or the local resource they were mining for free in unlimited quantities runs out. Then the company departs, as did CGWC’s predecessors, Danone and Coca-Cola. These regular corporate departures leave the workers and communities with nothing but devastated towns, health problems, and in our case, depleted wells.
Working people bear a well-justified resentment against the private corporate system that determines what and where and for whom investments are made, and that determines how the wealth produced by working people gets distributed. To misdirect that resentment, corporations (and their political representatives) use the “divide and conquer” strategy to tell working people that other working people, not the system, are their enemy. This is what underlies the corporate-funded political campaigns that pit long-term immigrants against short-term immigrants (and we are all immigrants if you go back far enough). “Divide and conquer” pits nationalities, ethnic groups, religions, races, genders, lifestyles, age, and education levels against each other, all to divert blame from the global economic powers at the top.
People all need a clean environment, jobs over which they have some control, good health care, good education, and decent pay. None of that is guaranteed by a system based on private mega-corporations. When we realize that working people of all types and backgrounds and nations can be much more powerful when we are united to oppose such a system, then there is hope for the future.