People are interesting. I suppose we live in a culture where we are all free in terms of our hyperindividualistic traits, and consumer mindset, to want whatever we want. Of course, it is another matter altogether, owning up to those things, and those activities in public. And this is how deception begins, and deceitfulness, I would argue, is absolutely part and parcel of the ubiquitous human con game. It is harmful and less harmful, but it is always harmful, and it always boils down to one simple thing - lying to oneself can never be healthy either to ourselves, or, in the scheme of things, to those we care about or ought to care about. And one way we do this is through religion.
In South Africa there is so much of this hyperindividualism going on at the corporate level it isn't funny. The biggest companies, like Vodacom, Telkom, SABC and others present themselves to their consumers as heroic and respectable, when they really ought to advertise themselves as the most obese, bloated and disgusting capitalist pigs out there. Because that is what they are. Just because they advertise themselves with cool blue designs and call themselves 'the leading ' this, doesn't make the disgrace in the manner that they do business any less disgraceful.
The problem also lies with the passive consumer. If these companies are pigs, the consumers that use them, are witless sheep.
The financial crisis of 2009 was caused by a collective 'living beyond our means', a collective lack of honesty about what we really own, what we need and what it's all for. But the financial crisis portends something far graver, far worse, and that is the climate crisis. It may be a dull murmur in the background, but we are approaching some grand tipping point events in Nature. Right now, one of these is the softening, the melting, of the entire Greenland Icecap. Make no mistake, once that is gone, and the feedback mechanism is in place, it's gone. Then you have systems marching in a specific direction until there is a rebalancing. That means a lot of systems, speaking in terms of Earth systems now, will be bankrupted. That is, destroyed. There aren't any bailouts for them.
When I say the financial crisis portends something worse, I am actually being exceedingly generous. In fact, it is the greed of all of us, of our species, that is behind the incredible changes that had slowly breathed their way into our climate. There is something like a 30 year time lag for inputs in the environment to be manfiested in the climate. This also means once you curb those effects, you have to wait 30 years - let's say a generation - for those effects to filter through. So right now we are feeling the levels of pollution and consumption we farted into the world in the early 80's. I don't think any person will argue that the amounts of poisonous farting has gone up to noxious amounts in the nineties, and the last decade has been the most nauseating of all in terms of consumption. If you have children in the world today, I wonder whether you can really expect the next 30 years for them to be better than the last 30?
In a world where paedophiles are coming out of the woodwork, it is no coincidence that the world we leave our children is one that is in far worse shape, and has far worse prospects than the one we inherited. The world we inherited, was a world not entirely handed over by the Baby Boomers. It's probably fair to say that that narcissistic and naive generation are still at the helm, and will be wrestled away from the controls of a crashing Spaceship earth by force - imminently. Think of Rumsfeld, Blair and Bush as your typical Boomer folk. Obama needs to step clearly away and make a new generation, and some indications are that he might.
But companies like Goldman Sachs are like giant octopi, with their tentacles in every cookie jar.
Yet who are the people who make these octopi work? Regular people.
I am one of those people who is capable of honesty and sincerity, and who believes, honesty - in the workplace, in our habits, in family and community life - is a form of altruism. I'm often caught out by other people who are less than honest. Let's be straight: there are some lying scoundrels out there, who justify their actions based on their perceptions of their own popularity, but have a dark and devious side when they experience something contrary to their agenda. Then, they resort to treachery and lies to win their points, anything to maintain their place in the pigsty.
I have a friend who works fairly high up in banking. He believes, for example, that markets are efficient, that markets will automatically solve the financial crisis, energy issues etc. Of course, his salary - which isn't modest - is based on him believing that banking is a 'normal, natural, perfectly 'fair' allocation' mechanism. This guy I'm referring to isn't stupid, and his heart is in the right place. But if he is mistaken about our prospects, if he believes the financial crisis simply happened because of a few innocent mistakes, a few exceptionally greedy ponzi schemers and a few overly avaricious derivatives traders, well then we are clearly in trouble. If the participants in these systems don't recognise their own complicity, if the gatekeepers to the bailouts can't see their own dirty hands and dirty hearts behind more and more dirty money, then the only way for these activities to change fundamentally - which they must - is for the system to crash.
One of the words that ought to stand out in the above paragraph is that word 'believes'. This friend of mine is a Christian, and if you believe in God, that means, by definition, that you think everything is ultimately, okay, that there is order in the universe, that everthing is ultimately God's plan. It also means, God will sort out global warming, punish those who must be punished and the weird psychology culminates, of course, in laying the blame for our mistakes at God's door. In short, God is responsible. If you want to fuck up the prospects for everyone, blame God. Make it God's job to sort out the mess you leave behind.
It would be good to imagine we are smarter than that. I think when it comes to how smart you are, and how greedy you are, for the vast majority, greed wins by a couple of miles. But reality is a great leveller. What to me is tragic, is that our delusions and appetites are ruining things on a planet wide scale. Why must other creatures suffer? The elephants in Botswana, whales migrating on 4000 mile journeys [feeding offspring 600 litres of milk per day] and Polar Bears - all depend on arriving at their destinations and finding water, or krill, or solid ice on which to hunt - as the case may be. Can you imagine arriving at the huge physical cost these efforts involve, only to find those habitats and havens, those resources, have begun to shift away or deteriorate or disappear entirely?
In the same way, we expect those around us to be honest, we expect systems around us to work, to have integrity. We think, implicitly, that people, that a community has the interests of others at heart. But as the numbers rollover, we start to come into increasing competition with each other for less and less. Not so much because there is not enough, but because some pigs - just a few - are sitting on resources that belong to everyone. Did I say 'sitting' or 'shitting' on resources? It's far from cool by the pool. But you already knew that, didn't you?
Postscript: The research I conducted for this post included the discovery of this blog: World Climate Report. The entire contents of this blog is dedicated to confusing and muddying the issue, and attempting to say climate change is overblown. I wonder who is bankrolling the 4-5 staff members of this blog?
This blog provides a more accurate view of issues faced by the Polar Bear today.
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