In the reality we do inhabit, the temperature of the Earth is catastrophically rising, Everests of ice are pouring into the oceans, Alaskan and Siberian permafrost, containing billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide, methane and mercury1, are rapidly melting2, half of all wildlife has been wiped out, ecosystems everywhere are collapsing and a third of all arable land was lost in just the last forty years.3 Data on the effect of the system on the world’s oceans and forests, and the consequences of our consumption of energy, fossil fuels, rare-earth metals, plastic and water, are all just as horrifying. Meanwhile 100 companies are responsible for 70 per cent of global warming,4 the fastest growing economy in the world produces nearly a third of global carbon emission and our colossal production of co2 continues to rise.
The next time you hear of ongoing man-made mass-extinction, or see piles of animal corpses after a mysterious mass death, or wastelands where there once were rainforests, or seas covered from shore to shore with rubbish, or sea-life riddled with plastic, or miles upon miles of bleached coral, the next time you hear that there will soon be more plastic than fish in the sea, or that 75% of our insects have died, or that antibiotics are becoming useless, or, that we will soon have no soil left, or that there’s just no more wild left, do remind yourself, because it’s sometimes easy to forget; the earth is actually dying, and the same system that makes cool cars, smart-phones, fibre-optic cables, Oreos, Mario-Kart, teflon, viagra and jet-skis is killing it; all of which are the reason it is easy to forget. The ongoing obliteration of the natural world, like all the other unspeakable horrors of the system, passes the distracted world by, making references to the appalling non-reality of system-life seem overblown, exaggerated, hyperbolic, childish. ‘What’s the beef? It’s not that bad — I can still buy Jaffa Cakes, the car’s running okay and anyway, the new Avengers films is coming out soon.’ The natural world is dying, human culture is dying, the light of consciousness is dying; everything good is dying. The real world, beyond the artificial ‘normality’ of the wind, security and video screen, is rapidly becoming a wasteland, but nobody really notices. Yet.
We are plummeting towards collapse5 (official term for this process; progress) and will soon be facing widespread droughts, flooding and famines, along with civil disorder on an unimaginable scale. Not only is it impossible that the market will learn to levitate, but it cannot even slow the speed of its fall (official term; growth or prosperity). Even faced with the prospect of imminent biological annihilation and the collapse of civilisation in our lifetimes, the idea that we need massive, immediate, negative growth, or that the system might be to blame, or even exists, or that we should face up to the coming horrors, remain officially unsayable and, in the wealthy West, widely unthinkable. In fact the closer we get to annihilation, the less visible the problem becomes in the news media. Only the effects are broadcast; not just silent woodlands and empty seas, but also mass-migration, wars over dwindling resources, rising prices and so on. People are left to invent their own causes for these things, which are very often quite fantastic.
As the evidence for the coming climate apocalypse piles up (see this excellent review) — along with the evidence for our responsibility for it — as towns sink into icy mud and once-in-a-million-year hurricanes file up to annihilate the tropics, and crops repeatedly fail, and ships pass unhindered through the Arctic, and countries run out of water, or food, or are submerged under rising rivers, or are scourged by wild-fires, and economies collapse, and murderous heat-waves become the norm and everyone, everywhere, constantly says to themselves, looking at the freakishly early (or late) blossom or the silent birds or the parched fields, ‘that’s weird,’ so official mentions of the euphemism ‘climate change’ diminish to zero, and the privileged classes of those countries most responsible collectively put their fingers in their ears and shout, ‘nah, nah, nah, can’t hear you.6’
They’ll be listening very soon, although whether they will see is another matter. The entire world is locked up in a planetary panic room comprised of, at best, domesticated (and therefore stupid) or symbolic (and therefore unreal) nature. The system — its states, corporations and artificially intelligent machines — is, and has always been, incapable of perceiving nature in anything but the most crudely utilitarian terms. The tree is so many tonnes of timber, or resin, or just in the way7. The multitude of relations that humans can have with it — much less the infinite subtlety, complexity and beauty of the mysterious thing itself — do not exist, just as they do not for the systemic-ego, which sees the tree, labels it, says ‘ooh nice!’ perhaps, and then moves on to something else it wants or doesn’t want.
For the ego and its system nature does not, actually, exist and so neither does its disappearance; at least the horrific magnitude of it. Isolated cases of pollution are presented and consumed, sad stories of dying polar bears8, filthy beaches and whatnot, but the immensity of the situation, of catastrophic climate meltdown, the heartbreaking ruin of all that is materially good and the extermination of life on earth itself — this is ignored or downplayed, offset with ‘good news’ and David Attenborough concluding a snapshot of the atrocity with, ‘but there is hope…’ For some reason newspapers and television channels whose primary purpose is to get us all to consume are not too interested in presenting the consequences of consumption. Official pronouncements referring to the terminal state of the natural world are limited to focusing on scapegoats and secondary matters, such as overpopulation, over-consumption of meat, volcanoes, cow farts, natural weather cycles; anything but the system, along with the usual bromides that we are destroying the world and that, therefore, we who live in an environment owned by other people are responsible for saving it. For some reason the landowners of the world are not too keen on the idea that to save the environment what we must do is, first of all, take it out of their hands, and so, as they set up a few nice little recycling earners, they relentlessly pump out the counter-notion that ‘we are all in this together.’
Because ‘we’ are despoiling the earth, ‘we’ need investment in green technologies, aid sent to ecological disaster areas, green governments, organic bananas and ethically-sourced coffee. And because ‘we’ are facing environmental collapse, ‘we’ need more education, more professionals, more aid, more security, more technology, more energy, more growth… ‘We’ might even end up needing martial law. But don’t worry, because ‘we’ are all in it together, ‘we’ will certainly benefit from what ‘we’ do.
The system tells us that we are all equally responsible for ‘the environment’. In the real world most people don’t have an environment — they can’t afford one9. The system tells us that nature is separate from the human world — a kind of painted backdrop in front of which we get on with the ‘real’ business of living in the world, pursuing, collecting, studying, avoiding and defending objective things (The Myth of Scientism). Or the system tells us that ‘everything is natural,’ which is to say, nothing is natural; the word is meaningless, a cultural construct, a subjective no-thing, formed from whatever interpretations you wish to make of it (The Myth of Postmodernism). That objectivity and subjectivity are effects of nature is incomprehensible madness to the mind of the world, which will do whatever it can to push the natural cause of our ordinary lives from experience. It will continually generate and pursue dreamworlds of future happiness, continually push unmediated contact with nature, or the present moment, from experience and continually obscure, mythologise, ignore or deny the deep reality of nature and the existential sacrifice which reveals it. The mind, in other words, builds the system until the system falls; and then mind goes out of its mind.
Along with God-knows-what bacteria and viruses.
And we’re only seeing now the effects of climate meltdown from decades past.
See (e.g.) Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines by Gerardo Ceballos et al (2017), D. Cameron, et.al A sustainable model for intensive agriculture, wwf. Living Planet Report; Risk and resilience in a new era, Steven J. Smith, et.al. Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change, T. Friedrich, et. al. Nonlinear climate sensitivity and its implications for future greenhouse warming, Chadlin M. Ostrander et.al, Constraining the rate of oceanic deoxygenation leading up to a Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic Event, and many, many, many others.
See the Carbon Majors Report, 2017.
Worst-case climate-meltdown scenarios are the most accurate. bp and Shell are preparing for a life-annihilating 5° rise by 2050. Lloyds of London, in partnership with The British government, recently estimated that civilisation will end by 2030; not that anyone in the British government takes such reports seriously, yet, but Lloyds are hardly a radical organisation. See also N. Ahmed, Scientific model supported by uk Government Taskforce flags risk of civilisation’s collapse by 2040.
At least they do publicly. In fact the mega-wealthy are prepping for the coming collapse, and researching how to deal with the reality of it.
Of burger-cows, suburbia, strip-mines, etc.
Not so long ago a gruesome photograph of a malnourished polar bear made the rounds of the green media. Nobody seemed too interested in the idea that millions and millions of plants and animals are dying in the same way every day, stumbling around the wasteland we have created.
Not that using a ruinously wasteful it system to order an amusing t-shirt from Amazon that was manufactured in Bangladesh and then carted half-way around the world in an oil-guzzling containership; or swanning around the planet on 747s to take selfies on Foxconn phones with the last few dolphin left alive; or munching on burgers raised on cleared Brazilian rainforests while watching a World Cup made possible by exterminating local paupers (etc, etc, etc) aren’t also a significant — foundational — part of the problem, one that the technophilic masses are, curiously, unwilling to address.
11. The Trickle Down Myth
The ‘trickle down’ theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.
William Blum
The advanced system relies on the idea that the more money rich people have, the better off poor people are · · · The fact that a few miserable peasants can now afford Dunkin’ Donuts masks the fact that nature is not better off · · · It also masks the fact that by any meaningful measure of wealth, everyone is dirt poor.
It is the rich that create wealth. Without their ability to spot investment opportunities and courageously invest in the future, everyone else would be sitting around twiddling their thumbs and slowly getting poorer as the economy shrinks.
In order to accept this fantastic picture of the world we have to not only ignore the stupendous growth of the first world during the 1950s, 60s and 70s when the rich were taxed up to their eyeballs and adequate state welfare handed out to the poor; not only put aside the facts on how fast and how much wealth has increased since the 1970s for the owning 0.01%1 and for the managing 1% compared to everyone else; not only ignore the fact that money and work do not lift the poor out of misery; not only pass over the fact that as overall wealth has increased investment has slowed; and not only pretend that the rich don’t do everything in their power to ensure that more and more have less and less; but we also have to assume that a system which gives $470,000,000,000 to five hundred psychopaths2 in the hope that a few of their servants might benefit must be the fairest and most intelligent way of organising society.
The marvellous ‘trickle-down’ theory came to prominence during the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan handed the world over to the super-wealthy, by privatising public services, funding foreign dictators, giving tax breaks to the hyper-rich, dismantling the welfare state and passing a ‘financialised’ virtual economy over to banks. The idea was that, in order to be persuaded to work, rich people need to be given money, while poor people need to have their money taken away.
Oddly enough, it no work. Funnelling unimaginable sums of money into the pockets of a microscopically small group of useless mega-wealthy rentiers3 via massive tax-breaks and credits, bailouts, enormous subsidies4, soft regulation and various other special privileges doesn’t improve the lot of the multitude that the system was built to dominate. Rather it inflates their living costs, depresses their wages, suffocates their production, sucks the life-blood from their communities, destroys their nature and pushes them into debt.5 According to, of all people, the imf, it doesn’t even promote growth!6
The Trickle-Down Myth is represented nowadays as the idea that ‘a rising tide raises all boats,’ which is to say that yes, a rentier earning $200,000 a year from a wide portfolio of property and investments now earns 10% more, but so does a Nigerian farmer earning $2 a day. It’s fair, you see, because an extra $20,000 earned from doing nothing productive is the same as an extra 20 cents from slogging your guts out all day to grow food. Thus, poor countries are richer and rich countries are richer, and they both get rich through free-trade and free-markets. The complete ruin of the third-world (forcing poor countries to adopt free-market policies), the annihilation of the natural world — and, incidentally the ‘growth’ of states which practice intense state-directed protectionism and discrimination against foreign investors (such as the usa in the 1880s and China today)7 — are, predictably, swept under the ideological carpet.
‘But we’re richer now!’ cry the Marvellous Ones, living in the Land of Plenty, ‘look at my bank balance! look at the price of my house! look at…’ actually nobody celebrates their own wealth. Focused on the level above, restrained by fear of resentment masquerading as modesty (see myth 15) and hyper-sensitive to microscopic inconveniences, even six-figure technocrats complain they haven’t got enough. The [propertied] rich are richer though, and the idea persists that their rising wealth is a Good Thing, or that access to middle-class ‘financial security’ is a Noble Goal. Everyone with eyes in their head knows that wealthy people are overwhelmingly insensitive, that the children and grand-children of self-made men are notorious morons, that famous people are extraordinarily unhappy, or far less creative than they were before they made it ‘big,’ and that the wealthy classes are, as a group, cruel, lonely, miserable, afraid of independent responsibility, terrified of freedom, haunted by their mediocrity, tight-fisted beyond satire and sedated by their affluence; compliant, domesticated and, in the worst sense of the word, ordinary. But none of this will happen to me! I can handle money-power! Not likely8.
‘But everyone’s earning more!9’ cry systemacrats, ‘they’ve got degrees now! and mobile phones! and look at China! and the GDP!’ Thereby ignoring the catastrophic madness of measuring quality of life by the transformation of nature and culture into money (an oil spill increases gdp, as does felling a rainforest, as does a new Amazon warehouse10), along with a billion people who live in slums and do not have clean water or enough to eat11 — the money poor — and billions more who are either excluded from the Great Party because they are too old, too young, too female, too sensitive, or too weird; or who are unable to feed, clothe, heal, house, transport or entertain themselves, or live without work, high-tech access to the market (cars, internet, supermarkets, electricity etc.) or the correct paperwork; a world of people who need to get things (and scores) in order to ‘enjoy’ five seconds of relief from continual, restless, boredom, who have no access to nature or genuine culture (or knowledge that such things actually exist) and who have only crap games to play. By any meaningful measure of wealth we are all dirt poor and getting poorer by the day.
The real elites represent something like 0.001%.
Or in which eight people have the same wealth as half of humanity; see Oxfam, An Economy for the 99%, although bear in mind that this study, and many others like them, refers only to financial wealth. Social, cultural and natural wealth — access to free time, comfort, peace, the arts, good housing, healthy environment, the wild and, most importantly (as far as wealth is concerned) the commons — do not figure.
Not just of land and property, but also of intellectual property.
‘An extraordinary feature of globalisation is that governments everywhere have splurged on an increasing array of subsidies to asset holders of all kinds, giving out public money to selected private interests. Subsidies that go to owners of land, property, mineral rights, intellectual property and financial assets are rental income; they are not gained from ‘hard work’ or production. And they are worsening inequality while giving rental income to some very undeserving individuals and corporations’. Guy Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism.
Some of the so-called ‘global poor’ occasionally get slightly financially richer from entering the capitalist dream; a possibility much trumpeted by the Lords of the Universe, who are unwilling to investigate what it means in practise to swap the misery of the paddies for the misery of Foxconn.
‘…if the income share of the top 20 percent (the rich) increases, then GDP growth actually declines over the medium term, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down. In contrast, an increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with higher gdp growth. The poor and the middle-class matter the most for growth via a number of interrelated economic, social, and political channels.’ The imf: Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality. Of course this doesn’t mean that higher inequality leads to lower growth, or that ‘egalitarian societies’ can’t grow slowly (they can). The point is that on its own terms, according to it’s own institutions, the trickle-down theory, as everyone waiting at the bottom of the Valley of Doom well knows, is bullshit.
Ha Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.
If you’ve spent your whole life poor, if you are genuinely sensitive and courageous, there is a far-distant chance you can handle money. The litmus test is how quickly, intelligently and splendidly you get rid of it.
The share of the world living in extreme poverty has halved over the last fifteen years.
The human misery of such places is soon to be at an end of course, as machines replace warehouse monkeys, who will be deposited into a shoddy welfare system which forces them into criminal activities which lead them to incarceration in GDP-enhancing prisons; owned by Jeff Bezos.
According to WaterAid and the Global Hunger Index, 2010.
12. The Myth of Progress
