Planet and PEOPLE

Let’s explore the idea of ‘power over’ other people and nature.   All power derives from fear – fear of violence from other people, and fear of ‘nature’, wild, unpredictable and uncontrollable:  wild beasts, disease, so-called  ‘Acts of God’.

We are told that violence and destruction are ‘human nature’.   That we are all separate, competing selves struggling for survival and dominance against all others.   But this is not correct.   Humans are simply a species like others.   Our DNA contains a record of our evolution from single-celled organisms.  And we didn’t evolve to the complex walking ecosystems were are now ( a large part of the DNA we contain isn’t ‘ours’ at all) by fighting and destroying everything in sight.

Peter Kropotkin (Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, 1902) demonstrated that the ‘fittest’ to survive in this complex interrelated system are those factors that co-operate rather than compete.  In fact, ecology shows that evolution is an aspect of the system as a whole that builds diversity and resilience:  the system is much greater than its various identified parts.  Gaia Theory suggests that the planet is alive.

We come back to the problem humans have of tying ourselves up in concepts.  Conceptualisation is necessary for cognition:  we need to identify ‘things’, ‘processes’, situations that might harm or help us.  We can then take these building blocks of experience to construct our perceptions. 

However we constantly have to beware of false logic, and the comforting, reassuring trust in concepts based on the pronouncements of others.  The scientific method is about setting up theories, hypotheses, and then testing them to destruction by experiment.  

Unfortunately, many people start to conclude that life is meaningless.  Humans are ‘meaning’-creating animals.  It’s just what we have evolved to do.  If we cannot ‘make sense’ of the universe, we might as well die out.    The Buddha understood this.   To him, the purpose of existence is to reduce suffering and increase harmony, in all living beings (and indeed non-living beings, since they cannot in fact be separated). 

 It makes sense that we were evolved, as did all other species, by the ecosystem for the  benefit of the whole.   Competition is simply a balancing mechanism to maintain and enhance biodiversity.   Bacteria combined to form more complex organisms.  Our bodies are only separate, isolated, struggling individuals if we ‘identify’ them as such.  Others are only ‘other’ is we perceive them as such.  Our bodies are not ‘particles’ but waves, processes, continually changing and interacting with everything that is not our body.   

So why do we tolerate or even encourage violence and destruction, even our own?   The root of all this is fear of loss.   Loss of our life, our freedom, our water, and air,  our life support system, our family  and communities.  We are social animals, we function through mutual aid. 

The drive to ‘Power over’ is driven by this fear.  The more we fear, the more we try to assert our individual or group ‘identity’ and dominance at the expense of planet and people.  And as more and more people and groups become impacted by the results of this, the more they will demand to assert themselves against the perpetrator.  So develops a vicious circle that can only end in mutually assured destruction.

Jean Paul Sartre said, ‘Hell is other People’.  But the Buddha said, 2500 years ago, that hell is a creation of your own mind.  If you project that hell onto others, and blame them for your suffering,  you drag them into hell with you.  How you react to the world is up to you.  If you suffer, examine that suffering, and see that your suffering and other peoples’ suffering are not separate.  If you want to reduce your own suffering you cannot do that at the expense of others, so we have to try to practice mutual aid.  As Gandhi said, ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind’.   

All world religions assert that there is a power in the universe greater than humans. This power has traditionally been personalised, anthropomorphised, simply as a way to try to conceive it. The ‘polytheistic’ religions identify aspects of reality as separate ‘gods’. The monotheistic ones emphasise the one-ness at the heart of the universe. But Islam, for example, is always clear that Allah, the embodiment of compassion and mercy, is beyond depiction in human form.

When spiritual leaders try to point out that there is a greater good that can benefit all, the modern nihilists attack and mock them because they insist that there is no meaning in life apart from endless violence.    ‘The image of ‘God’ is mocked as an old man sitting on a cloud, unable to prevent evil in the world. And what is ‘evil’ anyway? For Bernard Mandeville (The Fable of the Bees, 1714) it is something to be actually celebrated. And Mandeville has set the tone for the whole of modern economic theory.

Class war’, ‘racism’, asserting of an ‘ideology’ or an ‘individual’ right to be and do as we please, all these are simply attempts to demonstrate that I have some sort of power over you.  That in the endless competition for dominance, I am ahead.   It also asserts that you are powerless to stop me.  Because ‘I’ matter to me, and ‘you’ do not.  In fact, I overcome my fear my increasing yours. It underpins all those modern attempts to defeat the desperate fear of powerlessness: vandalism, victim culture, hooliganism, extreme political movements, gang culture, organised crime, corporate greed.

It is an utterly useless, destructive way of perceiving things and it can only lead to disaster for both of us.  The only future possible for all of us is to wake up from this nightmare and stop fearing each other.

Next time I’ll explore how this seems to have developed, and how mind and body are one.