Apocalypse of Ignorance
Its too late to fix anything. Or is it? Maybe we are not being imaginative enough...
There are many doomsday scenarios, most are dramatic, involve some kind of heroism, and inevitably, rescue and redemption. I am sorry to tell you while we are facing doomsday, there are no heroes, there is no rescue, and there is no redemption.
This morning I read an article about something I was already knew, the pervasive presence of microplastics accumulating in our bodies, raining down from the sky, filling our water, and permeating the very air we breath.
Some people in the past have noted that due to the layer of plastic that is forming on the planet, this era should be called the Plasticene.
This all poses a serious risk to all life on the planet in its present form, or should I say, we form a risk to ourselves and all life on this planet in its present form. All who have not been blinded by the rightwing climate-denialism understand these facts laid out above to be true.
The cause of all suffering is karma, action. And the cause of all karma that bears negative results is ignorance. This ignorance is not lack of knowledge of math, etc. Its far more basic, its ignorance of causes and effects. We have been in an apocalypse of ignorance for decades now. We have warned and been warned of the pernicious effects of hydrocarbons for over a century. The multitude of negative outcomes of the industrial and post-industrial age can’t be measured nor can they be anticipated; well, they were and they can be, but no one can clearly see anyway out of the capitalist mode of production which does not involve violent revolution and the death of billions of people.
The capitalist mode of production is now the only mode of production in the world. Because it is decentralized and everyone in the world is now dependent on wages, it has stunted our imagination. This change has only come about in the past 100 years and in parts of the world, only in the last 50 through the undermining of cultures of subsistence economies. It has been accelerated by the rise of computers and the internet. NAFTA, which was negotiated during the early rise of the internet:
According to Laura Carlsen of the Center for International Policy, as cheap American foodstuffs flooded Mexico's markets and as U.S. agribusiness moved in, 1.1 million small farmers--and 1.4 million other Mexicans dependent upon the farm sector--were driven out of work between 1993 and 2005. Wages dropped so precipitously that today the income of a farm laborer is one-third that of what it was before NAFTA1
For most of human history, until the rise of capitalism, most human beings lived at a subsistence level. In one lecture, my teacher, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu (1938-2018), noted that it was possible for people to live in Tibet without money. Tibetans did not pay bills, though they paid taxes. People were more or less self-sufficient, living in a subsistence economy. That era of human history is now over. There are no more places in the world where people live primarily in subsistence economies. We all, one way or another, legally exchange our free labor in the market for money—barring of course people who in live in prisons or who are exploited in human trafficking.
We can do nothing to mitigate the harms of the profligate use of hydrocarbons. We can only cease using them. But we cannot. The whole infrastructure of the world economy absolutely depends upon them and there is no way to radically change this without causing the death of billions. There is no technological solution to the harm the capitalist mode of production has done to the world. Jerry Mander writes:
Techno-optimism has been greatly encouraged by the fact that in capitalist societies, most descriptions of new technology come from the corporations and other institutions that are developing the technologies. Their descriptions—especially in advertising—are invariably optimistic, even utopian. Negative potentials are left out of the description. This has been the practice since the Industrial Revolution.2
He continues by pointing out that:
It is clear that technology is deeply implicated in what is becoming the most important question of our time: Will we finally recognize that the natural world has been so negatively impacted that it may no longer be able to sustain us?3
Dougald Lamont, a Substack writer based in Manitoba has a withering dissection of Marc Andreesen’s neo-fascist screed which you may read here:
In October, 2023, he published his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” an incoherent mess of ideas and quotes scraped off the internet that combines the worst elements of a bloated and pompous sermon with a corporate motivational speech, and the research and fact-checking skills of a 14-year-old, all with shout-outs to actual fascists.
The techno-optimists are blinded by pride, utter lack of imagination, and a complete absence of vision—though they fancy themselves to be the most visionary and imaginative of all people.
Most of the problem these days is lack of imagination. Graeber and Wengrow ask an important question:
What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they’re actually more imaginative than we are? We find it difficult to picture what a truly free society would be like; perhaps they have no similar trouble picturing what arbitrary power and domination would be like. Perhaps they can not only imagine it, but consciously arrange their society in such a way as to avoid it.4
I have been mulling over for quite some time how to approach writing about the intersection between Buddhism and Anarchism. As my readers will recall, I have already lightly touched on the intersection between Buddhist studies in Western Academia, settler colonialism, and Buddhadharma as indigenous culture. I think the capitalist apocalypse is a good place to start. We need to imagine our way out of it.
Glenn Wallis, in his Anarchist Manifesto, defines anarchism very clearly:
Anarchism: A value system for organizing relations between people. It emphasizes order, cooperation, equality, and mutual support. It rejects authoritarianism, oppression, exploitation, coercion, and hierarchy.5
Having considered all forms of government over the years, Anarchism is the only form of government and economic relations, the only secular value system that can make any sense at all from a Buddhist point of view.
Capitalism, as well as colonialism, begins with the notion of property. But who creates property? Like money, property is created by fiat. It is wished into existence, and because there is no place in the world not inhabited by something, it is created by imagining that some land is void and unoccupied, terra nullis, that there is no prior right of a human, or an animal, or a plant to exist in a given place or that the humans inhabiting a region have not put it to good productive use, i.e. used it to generate capital.
Who truly owns anything, especially a sovereign power such as a state or a king? This idea of state sovereignty is skewered by our very own Āryadeva. In his 400 Verses he writes:
The arrogant one thinks “I am the sovereign, this is mine,” but who in the world is better [than others]? Why is this? Everything appears equally to all beings. [Chapter 4, verse 1]
Through out this chapter Āryadeva interrogates hierarchy, power, and entitlement, pointing out to third century Indian Buddhists that all sovereign power is derived from the consent of the populace. Importantly, he also calls into question the notion of property and the rights of kings or the state. He observes that as everything appears to everyone there is no one who has more rights to anything than anyone else. No one is better than anyone else. It is only arrogance to claim one is an inherent sovereign with rights over property. Who can rightly claim they have more right to this and that appearance than any other being? Who can rightly claim ownership of sunlight, starlight, moonlight, the earth, water, and the air we breathe?
This fiat notion of property is so ethically corrosive that even the lauded jurist, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, commits a profound miscarriage of justice when she wrote an opinion upholding the doctrine of discovery in the City of Sherrill, New York v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York 544 U.S. 197 (2005), quoting earlier precedents based ultimately upon Johnson v. McIntosh, 8 Wheat. 543, 573-574, 5 L.Ed. 681 (1823):
"[D]iscovery gave title to the government by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.
"The exclusion of all other Europeans, necessarily gave to the nation making the discovery the sole right of acquiring the soil from the natives, and establishing settlements upon it. . . .
"The rights thus acquired being exclusive, no other power could interpose between [the discoverer and the natives].
"In the establishment of these relations, the rights of the original inhabitants were, in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired. They were admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal as well as just claim to retain possession of it, and to use it according to their own discretion; but their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it."
This legal theory depends wholly on Pope Alexander VI’s Papal Bull “Inter Caetera,” issued May 4th, 1493, the legal theory that dispossessed all human beings living in the Americas of their rights. Pope Alexander VI set the stage for the wholesale slaughter and exploitation of the people of two entire continents divided up between “Christian” nations. With the onset of the European incursions into the Americas, then, we can see the whole notion of “property” for being the legal fiction that it is and always has been.
So, if property is a fiction, and money is likewise a fiction, fictions created out of nothing, how is it that the chimera of capitalism is so destructive? It begins with “I” and “mine.” In the end, the apocalypse of ignorance we face begins and ends with our false notion of “I and mine.” If there is an “I and mine,” there is a “you and yours.” This dualism is toxic and divisive. It not only is the source of all problems in the world, in the Buddhist analysis this dualism is the very cause of and perpetuator of compounded existence, impermanence, and suffering. The Buddhist solution is that in the recognition that the false notion of self is the cause of all problems, we can begin the slow process of turning away from the toxic politics of dualism and division. To do that we have to evolve.
And to do that, we have to first imagine that we can.
https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2008/04/trade-secrets-the-real-problem-with-nafta?lang=en
Mander, Jerry. The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System (p. 187). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Mander, Jerry. The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System (p. 189). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 73). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Wallis, Glenn. An Anarchist's Manifesto (p. 11). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Hi Thomas
I never said anything about abolishing property, just as I never said anything about abolishing money, even though both entities are just fictions with no basis in reality. But we do need to know that these things are fictions otherwise, we are captured by our own realism.
What you are basically asking is "How there be an economy without a market?"
The incentive for people to work, to engage in labor is the same as it has always been: the need to eat food and the pleasure of making things others will enjoy. Humans have, for thousands of years in all parts of the world been providing goods and services to one another without the kind of notion of property we have inherited from Roman Law:
"But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan’s descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published—and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women’s councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. Economists simply ignored this information."
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Function). Kindle Edition.
So, Graeber offers one culture's solution to the quandry you pose.
Sorry, me again… what you say about subsistence economies not using money was known by my wife in her childhood in 80s rural east Thailand. They could go for ages without using money, and had minimal amounts of it and no concern for it whatsoever. I won’t bother blathering on about their sense of contentment, lack of stress etc. beyond saying that pushing nations and peoples into the money system is *the* royal road to stress, corruption and misery.