Planet and PEOPLE

“For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.”

John Maynard Keynes

No, no, no,  John Maynard.   Fair is not foul, and foul is not fair.  Avarice and usury are false gods that create only suffering and death.

No wonder modern economics is called the dismal science!   The wonder is that anyone regards it as ‘science’ at all.   It is really just a product of nihilist ideology, an attempt to ‘justify’ the exploitation and destruction of planet and people in reckless pursuit of wealth and power, by some supposed benefit we won’t live to see.   

Keynes references the 18th c writer Bernard Mandeville, who promoted the philosophy over 200 years ago.     Well, the dream has revealed itself as a nightmare.   There is no ‘jam tomorrow’ to justify the lack of jam today.

We need to tear up modern economic theories.  Keynes is at least a man who clearly has qualms about the direction of travel.  When it comes to Milton Friedman and others, the gloves come right off.   And we find ourselves standing and watching while the planet burns.

The underlying idea is that the pursuit of profit and power justify any means necessary – ethics are to be mocked (following Mandeville) as ‘virtue signalling’.    Slavery, colonialism, fascism, war, whatever the horror, they are just unfortunate necessities.    

The so-called ‘Enlightenment’, the Age of Reason, was really an assertion that people and nature could be controlled and forced to do as the ‘experts’ demanded.   Christianity was replaced by Scientism.   Research followed the changing times in serving wealth and power,  inventing technologies to control and possess planet and people.    It was (and still is) asserted to be ‘progress’, and inevitable.   The appalling suffering brought by the industrial revolution was ‘justified’ by the rising wealth of the new industrialists and the specialists they relied on.   The mass of the population found itself driven off the land, and its traditional community support networks destroyed, forced into factories to serve the machines, and then herded into workhouses or just left to die when their labour was no longer profitable.

Eventually, living standards rose for some – apart from a few genuinely public spirited industrialists, it happened because the ‘haves’ found themselves forced to share some of their gains to buy off the growing anger of the poor.   And the sharing was as limited as possible.   Where possible workers were replaced by machines; and for those in the colonies,  communities and economies were ransacked and destroyed.   

The attitude that the world exists only to serve the needs of the powerful only grew as religious belief declined.   ‘God’ is surely a personification of an idea that the universe contains a force for good, and that aligning oneself with that is worthwhile.   Mocking an image of an old man sitting helplessly on a cloud while evil runs amok is simply asserting the ultimate meaningless of existence.   

If life is meaningless, and everything happened by ‘chance’,  science can only investigate ‘how’ things work and avoid the ‘why’.   Thus, the prevailing ideology of power and control was applied to everything.   Everything would be classified, labelled, catalogued, as a first step to controlling it.   What ‘services’ could each species, each mineral, each atom, provide to a human self-declared ‘elite’?

Just as the industrialists were in constant competition with each other, and saw their wealth as its own justification, so all ‘species’ (Darwin), or ‘classes of people’ (Marx), or ‘races’, were seen as in competition – producing a hierarchy that somehow placed wealthy, white, European males at the top, and black African women at the bottom of the human pyramid.  But even the ‘lowest’ human was above the greatest animal.  And so on, down to viruses, which of course have no redeeming qualities and must be destroyed at every opportunity.

Even the individual human is at war with their own nature.  Freud claimed that we all have to constantly struggle to control and manage our ‘id’, and that all civilisation is simply a sublimation of basic needs to fight each other for food and sex.

Anything that might not fit into such a nihilistic framework is still dismissed as ‘unscientific’, mad (or just foolish and ignorant), ludicrous nonsense.   If it cannot be understood, controlled and made to produce more wealth and power for those who already have more than enough, it doesn’t exist at all.  

All this is just rationalising and ‘justifying’ the new ‘gods’ proposed by Keynes.   These gods simply cannot deliver a future for the planet and its people – as many people have recognised over the last 300 years. However the ruthless, reckless nihilists see any alternative view to theirs as the biggest threat of all.  It is the one thing that unites them.   If you dare to question their gods you are to be feared as a dangerous heretic, a terrorist, a ‘conspiracy theorist’, a purveyor of ‘misinformation’.

The problem with a nihilistic philosophy, where the universe is apparently constantly at war with itself for possession and control is that there can be no ‘winners’.   The universe, the planet,  cannot be ‘reset’ to suit the narcissistic and the psychopathic.    Contrary to Judaeo-Christian tradition, ‘Man’ is not lord of the world.   Anthropocentrism offers no peace for anyone, only destruction for all.  

So once the nihilists think they have defeated the dissidents, they cannot help going back to fighting each other.  To the death.   Using any means necessary, regardless of the consequences.   

They fear anything that might affect the pursuit of unlimited wealth and power, because they cannot conceive of any other purpose in life.   They will pretend  to themselves  and others that what is good for them must be good for all – through philanthropic ‘virtue signalling’,  and trying to control the narrative to suit themselves.   Having an ‘opium of the masses’  of one kind or another, has always been a way to assert power and control.   Even concepts like mutual aid, community,  ethics, co-operation, democracy, are neutralised and co-opted using behavioural psychology to serve their needs.   You obey, you think as they want your to, because ‘everyone says so’, and not to do so is somehow antisocial.

Unfortunately for the devotees of the new gods, human nature, which is their nature too, is not as they imagine it.   They are therefore at war with themselves too.  Such a war is not winnable.

We have reached the point where we must now see that reckless war for power and wealth cannot deliver us a live-able present, let alone a future.  Nature doesn’t work like that, and we are part of nature.   As Peter Kropotkin pointed out over 100 years ago, both human and non-human ecosystems actually work through mutual aid.   The same is true of evolution itself.

The only possible future for humanity is to recognise the disastrous consequences of modern economic thinking and build a wellbeing economy, which works for both planet and people, where wealth and power are shared, based on cooperation instead of aggression, victimhood, and hostility.

Nature has millions of different forms and mechanisms, but all work towards maintaining a balance of powers.   Humans are destroying that – and the underlying reason is the anthropocentric ideology of  possession and control.  So let’s look at it a bit further.

When it was first proposed that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe, there was a furious reaction from the Catholic Church.  It asserted that at the centre of the universe was the Earth; the Earth existed to serve humanity, and humanity existed to serve ‘God’ whose sole representative was the Pope.   

The removal of that authoritarian power structure left a vacuum.   What basis could there be for any authority?    The Western Christian churches replaced the pope with king or those whose prosperity demonstrated they were predestined for ‘salvation’.   (The Quakers were the exception, refusing to accept any hierarchy)

Success in amassing wealth and power became its own justification.   The so-called ‘Enlightenment’  created a new ‘god’ of human ‘reason’, which placed us outside ‘nature’ and able to understand, control and possess it.   Earth’s place at the centre was now taken by humans:   somehow human ‘reason’  set our species apart from all others.   In an otherwise meaningless universe, humanity would have to assert control.   Technology and the amassing of wealth and power would be ‘evidence’ that humans were themselves gods.    And of course within humans there was a hierarchy too, with the most wealthy and powerful no longer ruling by ‘Divine Right’ but by the power of their self-affirming, material  ‘success’.  Materialism and its belief in struggling for power and dominance underpins both state communism and neo-fascism.   

Nihilist philosophy has run its course.  It cannot deliver a future for humanity and it can only destroy the life-support system we all depend on. 

We have to recognise that not only is the Earth not the centre of the universe, but neither are humans.   We are not lords of all we survey.   We could use a bit of humility.

The so-called ‘Great Reset’ is a vicious lie.  The ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ is neither inevitable nor desirable.   And ‘Saving the Planet’ too assumes that the technocrats have ultimate power over nature.  What are we ‘saving’ it from?   Are we not just trying to save a failed philosophy?

We need to listen to the planet and base our human society on observation of nature.   We can see how nature, which is a living system, develops diversity and abundance.   Life is a miracle.  Suddenly, a seed becomes a plant, maybe a tree that will stand for thousands of years.  It is helped in that by the fungal networks in the soil.   Its flowers provide nectar for bees who in turn pollinate its seeds.  Its falling leaves enrich the living soil and return nutrients to the roots, while also supporting millions of micro-organisms.   The soil is also nourished by the droppings of the birds that perch in its branches.    The planet is a cause for wonder, not scorn.   It is astonishing and beautiful,  and it is absurd to assert that it is ‘meaningless’ simply because the Darwinists say so.   

There is clearly an organising principle at work in nature, and we are part of nature.   Like all species, nature has evolved us to benefit the system as a whole, not wreck it.  

So in practical terms, we surely have to keep the overall needs of the planet –  its people and other living species, and  even the water, minerals and gases that form our life support system – as our focus.   The planet is alive.  It has immense power to heal and recover, and so do we, if we help.

We just need the confidence to do it.  Goodbye 19th c nihilism,  there’s no place for you in the quantum  theory, 21st c. 

Finally here are some ideas about how all this surely translates into day-to-day practice.

1. Rejecting authoritarianism, corruption, the culture of bullying and coercion.    Incidentally I doubt if confrontation with the powerful and wealthy will be worthwhile.  Fighting and overcoming opposition is the very basis of their failed ideology.  They are very skilled at it so it is likely to be counterproductive.   I  expect that the UK government, and their Big Tech paymasters are looking forward to the ‘Big One’ demonstration.   They will test their facial recognition and digital ID technology and place everyone attending on a ‘watch list’, to be targetted by any means possible.   Propaganda will persuade people that your views are antisocial.   That climate change is a myth and just an excuse for acts of ‘terrorism’.   You’ll be ‘othered’ and subjected to ‘social credit’ techniques.  These might include, for example,  being  inexplicably subject to ‘welfare’ sanctions, being put under endless surveillance and constantly stopped by the police, being tagged to prevent you attending further demonstrations, being arrested and charged with all sorts of supposed offences , subjected to forced ‘vaccination’ , house arrest, administrative detention, your bank account frozen, your driving licence and passport revoked,  you get the idea.    I suggest a more effective way to do that is by adopting Gandhi’s principles of non-violent resistance.   Withdraw your consent.  Boycott, Divest, Sanction.  Refuse to be bullied.   Insist on only voting for politicians (any party) who publicly commit to (a) rejecting totalitarianism (b) acting on behalf of those who elect them  (c) placing the needs of planet and people before private profit and corporate power.
2. ‘Be the Change’ includes experimenting with alternative economic and political structures.   We need  to develop practical alternatives and we need no permission from anyone to do that.  We just do it.
3. We must insist on our right to question and debate ideas freely.   ‘Misinformation’ is just a euphemism for propaganda.  ‘Conspiracy theories’ are just scaremongering techniques designed to ‘other’ people.   We must challenge behavioural psychology and ‘cancel culture’ wherever it appears.   Who pays, and who benefits?   ‘Because everyone says so’ is not a valid excuse for hostility and oppression.
4. Technology is only as good as its purpose.   It is not a panacea.       We need to restore the precautionary principle,  and focus research and development on technologies that genuinely serve the needs of the human and planetary ecosystem rather than power and control of the many by a few.   These will I think mostly be decentralised, small-scale, delivering an empowering wellbeing economy – Schumacher’s ‘Intermediate’ Technology would be  more beneficial for us all than killer drones or the oppressive control and surveillance of the ‘Internet of Things’.   Who pays, and who benefits?   We need above all to reject the so-called ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ and its attempts to colonise and control our biology (and psychology) with technology.
5. Human and planetary ecosystems are inseparable and must be based on mutual aid, because it means all parties win.  Conflict, exploitation, hostility, exclusive power and control on the other hand can only mean all parties – especially those with the biggest ‘stake’ in the present system – lose.  

Well, it’s our choice.   Either we destroy ourselves or we do something about it.  The planet is going to survive longer than humans anyway.    Planet and people united cannot be defeated.