Lots of evidence from social science research makes it clear that we live much more by habit than by rational decisions about most things we do and say. We live in complex social, political, and economic systems that not only overlap but influence our lives in more ways than just about anyone could list. Our complex systems, including the various parts the global corporate industrial-consumer political economy, now dominate much of what we do and what we think.
Pundits and corporate propagandists promote the image of ‘globalization’ as a wonderful system that enriches all our lives. Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that ‘the system’ produces a plethora of ‘consumer products’ some of which can be creative and fun. No, because the bounty of products is not only available for fewer people as income and wealth disparities grow, but it is also both temporary and not so meaningful. Of course, to the extent that they capture our attention and engagement they seem to be meaningful for the moment. Yet, they leave us with that empty feeling of modern malaise.
What is Living Well?
If you watch much television, engage in social media, or play lots of video games, you may have a different sense of what it is to live well than does an indigenous member of a tribe that was driven off their abundant habitat a century or two ago. Members of ‘modern’ industrialized societies have shifted our attention from the natural world to the socio-economic and political institutions that exercise social control.
Most of us engage with these institutions indirectly, often via electronic media. That is, we engage with these domains via website, email, text message, telephone recorded machine-voice menu, and occasionally with a ‘customer representative’ or tech support person in another country. By engaging with these systems, usually at a distance, we seem to have various degrees of abstract power—the power of symbolic engagement—but the parameters are mostly set by the system. Our engagement with these media stimulate our minds, in ways that often generate frustration with our inability to talk with a person. Such interactions tend to go in specific directions, rarely in the direction that leads to direct experience in the ‘Real World.’
What is the ‘Real World’? Well, it is the ground you stand on, the sky you may occasionally look up to, the people you know and love, and the polluted water you probably drink from a plastic bottle. Society itself—the political-economic-social structures with which you must interact to survive in the modern corporate state—is in effect an overlay on top of the Real World. In contrast, the Real World is our habitat, the entire Earth System, including the atmosphere (air), lithosphere (land), hydrosphere (water), and biosphere (living systems). Simply put, that is where we live—no matter where we find ourselves in the political-economic or social superstructure that the dominator culture has imposed upon the planet.
Nevertheless, a growing research literature indicates that living well is increasingly hard to do in the context of ‘modern life.’ We are children of Nature and we can deny it all we want, whether consciously or not. We live in the natural world and we are part of it, whether we obsess over our latest smartphone update or not.
We cannot live well by engaging further with high-energy technology or social media, which are abstractions from the Real World. We will only live well to the extent that we engage with and acknowledge the Real World of which we are a part and with which we must harmonize to survive. Vandana Shiva calls it the ‘resurgence of the real.’ So far, most members of ‘modern’ societies have not achieved this new realism.
The Earth System and Us
The Earth System is the very core of the Real World. The quality of our engagement with it (or disengagement from it) determines how well we will live. At this point, the hierarchy of the industrial-consumer societies encourages us all to live in denial of our intimate relations with the Earth System. To do so would diminish the power of the predatory extractive ‘corporatocracy’ that dominates modern life. The integration of nation states and the international corporate complex rules by causing their subjects to lose themselves in the consumer culture.
That global hierarchy of integrated corporate and governmental institutions (the corporatocracy) directly contradicts the requirements for humanity to live well. Living well cannot be achieved by consuming more products but instead by resisting the domination of the corporatocracy in order to forge an ecological civilization. To reduce the detrimental effects of the global hierarchy will require that it be ‘decommissioned,’ abandoned, and put to rest.
The implications of the demise of the corporatocracy—that is, the global industrial-consumer corporate political economy—are many and complex. Since fossil fuels power virtually all institutions from global to local, their transformation into low-energy operations must be universal. Here, of course, we enter entirely new territory, or maybe not entirely.
Our ancestors lived without fossil fuels since humans what began to populate the Earth, until the industrial revolution. Some times were tough; some were plentiful. Today, we have vastly more scientific and technical knowledge and experience; we could certainly turn it to effectively living in a low energy-consumption regime.
That would not only slow the degradation of the Earth System; it would also allow us the opportunity to restore and regenerate the ecosystems we are still destroying at a rapidly increasing rate. That would be the foundation for building an ecological civilization. What other realistic choice do we have?
Inevitable Great Transformation
Here is the bottom line for the ‘modern’ human enterprise. You do not have to read much of the scientific findings about the emerging great transformation of the Earth System to realize that the current course of industrial modernism rushes directly and ever more rapidly toward a cliff of collapse. The various components of the Earth System are destabilizing now, and will only accelerate into the future without extreme human intervention to counter the effects of the extant extreme human intervention in Nature, that is, the fossil-fueled global industrial-consumer economy of endless growth.
The indicators abound. Devastation from super-high winds, drought, and consequent firestorms the likes of which Lahaina has never before seen, from the softball-size hailstones in recent U.S. storms, the record high temperatures around the world this summer, or from the spa-like ocean temperatures off the tip of Florida, were all predicted at less severity and further into the future by climate scientists not so long ago. Sea rise will likely occur far more rapidly than predicted too, since Arctic sea ice, Greenland’s glaciers, and the Antarctic ice sheets, among others, are all melting much faster than even recent predictions anticipated. None of these indicators was the first ‘canary in the coal mine.’ The earliest signs were simply ignored by those who should have known better. Growth is slow and steady; failure and collapse are rapid. Such is the nature of exponential change.
It is all about priorities—and giving up on what is no longer possible to find a better way. That is what makes the monumental adjustments that humans must make now and into the near future so difficult to conceptualize, no less initiate. Most people, and especially the world’s so-called ‘leaders,’ still hold to the priorities that no longer fit reality. Yet, here we are.
Most of the material things and achievements we have valued as we approach the end of the industrial era, must now fall far below the highest priorities for human survival today. In fact, most of them should probably be off the list entirely. We must abandon what we view as material progress in favor of low-energy products and services and far fewer of them. What do we really need? With a shift from hyper-consumption to social relations we will have time to engage in what it takes to live well.
Now, we might want to reflect on Abraham Maslow’s classic depiction of the ‘hierarchy of needs.’ At the base of that hierarchy are the requirements for survival; all the other levels rest on them. Questions of what we really need today cannot be answered in the context of the industrial-consumer culture, which of course is itself no longer of value if we consider our collective survival as the highest priority.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 