WATCH: Banking Nature
How the Financial Elite are Commodifying “Conservation”
This film explores the truly insane & disturbing world of ‘nature commodification’ in all its warped dystopian horror.
Witness men in suits tell us how much a fly is worth or how much unpaid bee-labour adds to the economy. Listen to them talk about the amazing investment opportunities in species-scarcity and show their portfolios of rare owls, turtles, butterflies etc.
Did you know an entire banking system is evolving that deals with something even less real than fiat-money? That buys up land on which – allegedly – endangered creatures live and then sells the ‘credits’ it gives itself for ‘saving’ this land as offsets to other businesses – so they have what amounts to a licence to pollute and destroy?
You didn’t? Well it’s something of a well-kept open secret. Maybe because it’s not a business model that can survive close ethical or practical scrutiny.
However it is also a cornerstone of the ‘Green industrial Revolution’, and the drive to allow corporations free rein to ‘save’ bankable wild spaces. This indeed was one of the barely-alluded to agendas behind the recent media panic over the allegedly ‘unprecedented’ burning of the Amazon (remember that?)
The idea is that big business can somehow ‘invest’ in species and habitats on the verge of extinction and thereby save them.
There is so much wrong with this on so many levels that we can’t develop it here, but probably the major flaw is the obvious one that this business, like any other capitalist business, requires monopoly and scarcity.
If the fly featured in this documentary managed to recover and populate other regions not owned by the corporation that currently ‘protects’ it, then that corporation loses its monopoly, and its commodity (the fly) loses value.
The corporation has an incentive to keep this little creature frozen forever on the verge of extinction. A bankable little living fossil, already set apart from the truly living and integrated wild.
This ‘saving the planet’ model not only incentivises species and habitat scarcity, but equally incentivises the creation of new scarcities and even the promotion of fake ones.
If crisis is your raison d’etre, how hard are you going to try to end that crisis?
The subject of this movie feeds into the parallel issue of Green-washed climate-panic. Many of the same dangers and arguments apply. It’s a major crisis of our time, threatening both increased environmental degradation and massive loss of human freedom.
The fact so few in the alt-media are waking up to this is considerable cause for concern.
For more on this theme, read Cory Morningstar’s fantastic “The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg” series, and visit WinterOak.org.uk
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Yes.
Really? I came across it in specialist publications well over half a decade ago. The semi-MSM has been following that up for at least 3 years. Last year even Monbiot caught on. Thought I was carousing with the avant-garde round here. Turns out to be an antechamber to Tutankhamun’s tomb.
What the obscenely Rich don’t seem to understand is…….”Nobody owns anything,…..when we die, it all stays here”……George Carlin.
The Economist from Columbia says ‘we dont deify nature today’. Tell that to global indigenous cultures and communities. Where do you think ‘Mother Nature’ and/or Gaia comes from? The day we put Keynesian Economists in charge of nature, we are screwed.
I am so fecken angry and disgusted at what I’ve just seen. And I could only stomach the first 51 minutes. I’ll watch the rest tomorrow after I’ve calmed down.
This is the logical end result of fecken voodoo economics called Neoliberalism. This is the logical outcome of this cancer on our society.
Such grotesque logic. Some of the creatures that appeared in this film – I could literally see the evil in their eyes.
The financialisation of nature, the financialisation of Everything. All for $$$.
That’s what everything always comes down to. Money. Greed.
I highly recommend the detailed work of Cory Morningstar and only recently discovered the excellent blog Winter Oak.
This is why I come here. Where else would we see a such an important documentary?
Al Jazeera?
Or (as I noticed when I checcked to see the Al Jazeera air dates–without success, but about a couple of years ago) and perhaps more relevant to you, SBS?
Well either OG moves fast or this is a perfect serendipity.
https://off-guardian.org/2019/11/04/agrochemical-apocalypse/
Last night I prompted technocracy news to watch ‘Banking Nature’ for a broader appreciation of what is going on to the comment of:
https://www.technocracy.news/natures-rights-movement-will-destroy-concept-of-private-property/
The mission creep of regulatory corruption is partly because there is no will or recognition of the need to check it. Give corporations the rights of persons – what could possibly go wrong?
Extend them to lakes, mosquitos and any part of the Natural world deemed and authorised worthy of rights – what could possibly go wrong?
The idea of theft is recognisable to our experience and so there is a basis for rights of possession – but the theft being carried out globally is the power and the means to capture and remake law by which to dispossess us of our lives for the sustainability of their agenda – but notice – manipulative deceit sets it up in a way that the many sign up to it – just as to induce a peace loving people to initiate war they do not want.
War is targeted at the flagged ‘evil’ such as to induce a moral compulsion or a fear of exclusion as supporting or siding with ‘evil’.
Deceit works evil in the name of fighting it.
So what is needed is freedom from deceit, vigilance against deceit, and undoing of the baiting of deceit in our self and in our communications – else we become the mouthpiece of Sauron in the spreading of alarmism rather than a call to recognise and undo a falsely baited hook.
The ‘Banking Nature’ documentary fleshes out more about how the financiers of the world are marketising and weaponising even the toxic consequences of their own actions. Its a kind of necrotic cancer in that it feeds on destruction because it has cut off or denied the source of creative renewal. We may offer such ideas – but they are taken out of context (subverted) to serve a control agenda.
However, creative perspective is the living alternative to inventive deceits seeking sustainability of self-illusion under conditions of compression.
I have it that a certain kind of cricket is not very socially disposed and they thus spread out in an environment in which to eat and mate and thrive. But when a food source becomes scarce they are condensed to a smaller area so as to rub antenna at every meet – this action switches a gene that effects the next generation of young – who are born with wings.
While a locust is associated with famine as a result of crop loss – that isn’t my point here – but that when we are cornered by our own ‘eating or getting phase’ to a seeming paralysis and death, we may shift our consciousness to something like :
“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
― Malcolm X
This speaks to me of learning to listen and also look where we have been identified AGAINST and not just seeking the sustainability of a bubble reality that we have lived and grown the experience of – but is no longer coherent to an emergence’ that we haven’t a framework for in terms of fixed systemic identity.
(And where we have it is an aborted movement). This is in a sense to be skinless or exposed in a way that we may at first hate but from which real choices grow a sense of shared worth that isn’t framed in hierarchies of pre-judgement – but a sense of shared freedom to be our selves and learn and grow from a new basis.
In my sense of this – the space between and around us wakes, Not the personality we took to be a thing-in-itself. Focus on foreground filters out Infinity. Narcissus in self-imaged thought. Movements on the water break the world we took to be our self and world.
Laws seen and unseen operate rules and filters – ie algorithmically. The intent to control by overruling Life – or Natural Being – is like a background process or program running our mind while the heart is absent, broken, conflicted, chaotic, treacherous, undependable, weak or denied a voice by usurpation.
Decision is in the heart. Recognition is in the heart. Wholeness is a focus of the heart.
The only reality the mind can fake to pass off in, is that of the heart.
The only awakening is of the heart.
The word-term isn’t the point here – but I choose it to point with to a quality of awareness of which all else shares in or partakes of. 99% of the physical Universe is what we took (assigned) to be a vacuum of space.
The nature of plasma in physics that has self-organising properties at all scales – and A Universe in which Infinity is at all scales restores significance and connection of the field and wave to its particular expression. How can we lord it over and NOT meet conflict of force and density and isolation?
The denied seeks acceptance of release, while denial seeks outside itself from a sense of lack.
Insofar as the denied seeks vengeance, denial enacts it.
Behind the heart yes.
Isn’t this tied in with the slight “bad conscience” feeling the uber rich 1% sometimes get? They used to go for a spate of philanthropy but this would be a step up: get bragging rights and more money.
Heroine, coke or crack addicts destroy only themselves plus maximum a few close relatives, big money/power addicts destroy so many more.
You are naively generous I feel Antonym. If you look you closer, see this is intended to use the very destructive outputs as a new vector of persisting in destruction (sustainable plunder) under the guise of good intentions and ‘bargains struck’ by which to offset sins while confiscating the Natural world – using investors such as pension funds. Oh and driving the riff raff from the land into scare-cities and smart prisons for the dumb and dumped.
I write to a systemic addiction that runs beneath the logical outcomes of its thinking.
behind the guise of good intentions to offset sins that are so easy to see in others.
The drug business is much more systemic than your vignette – and is a key part of dark economy, war by stealth and social engineering.
I don’t know about the super rich and their conscience. People have to live with themselves and find ways that work to some extent – as they are to some extent living.
For some, greed is honesty and all the rest is a lie. There is something in that because owning a desire or fear or drive is more honest that trying to pretend it is for a selfless virtue.
What then is greed ?
I WANT – above all else.
Perhaps from a terrible and overwhelming sense of denial?
Where else such a drive?
If you are hungry enough everything else is made to serve one thing – and this is focus. But it is also driven and open to sacrifice of integrity such as to express a negative intent – such as vengeance of self vindication.
The ‘human heart’ – as distinct from my use of the term ‘heart’ for wholeness – is alloyed in fear and hate that many hide or recoil from and cast out, because it is hateful. This is lost heart to trauma that doesn’t have to be outwardly dramatic to crush a child’s trust in life.
If you cannot hide or escape – where do you go if you want to live?
You fight to live.
But my key is that ‘live’ has a different original and inherent meaning than ‘win’. And another’s losing isn’t really a basis for having. This speaks to me like a deep state operative that we are working to call home but the signal is blocked. All incoming is hostile – and blocked. The enemy must be pre-emptively destroyed to make way for life.
There has to be more to life than survival for its own sake.
If it’s any consolation, the parasites will die, just like the rest of us.
And then everything goes out of existence because the ‘perceiver’ is not there to perceive (all else is speculation).
Even speculation will die because there will be no-one there to speculate either.
No humans = no thoughts.
As for Awarenss, I’m not so sure.
That’s a strange kind of consolation from a strange kind of god.
Death in life, or living death – is a kind of substitution for life – usurping the true under false pretences.
If we realise we have been deceived – we also realise it never was true – even though we have lived the experience of it belief – perhaps through our whole life!
The idea that truth is inviolate is to say it is not IN the always changing. Our awareness of it is down to what we give acceptance to.
I see that attachment and identity of any attempt to grasp or control any form of truth sets a polarised struggle within itself. Self Image – or truth?
Illusions do not die – because they never were alive – but while we give them life they have all the life we give them. We can be gutted by a fictionalised depiction.
Existence can be directly known – because you are existence.
Much goes out of your awareness but does it go out of existence?
Or out of active focus?
There are levels of mind that move in ways and at speeds unimaginable to the virtual construct of a self made BY such an active focus.
Nothing is as it seems to be through the act of perceiving.
But what we give sets the measure of our receiving.
Doublethink runs self-contradiction like a very fast timeshare so as to establish ‘coherent domains’ of consciousness that are effectively partitioned or set in hierarchy of a need NOT to know.
Thinking can model, and the mind can run in emulation to seem autonomous.
But direct knowing is self transparency prior to any processing.
How do you know you exist?
Because thinking you exist can be questioned.
Perhaps the term you and existence are redundant.
How do you know? – and I mean this in any sense of any level of any awareness at all.
The constructs of consciousness can become a tunnel vision
Is death a clearing house for useless identities?
Old dogs find it impossible to learn new tricks.
Transformation IN life is extremely challenging to our sense of self.
Is our sense of self set against life – under the belief that that is how we save it?
Sounds familiar!
We have a knack for getting it backwards and then clinging to a bitter end – as a point of departure ie trying not to die – rather than embracing the living.
Questioning our experience is questioning the beliefs that are generating it.
Inherent self-contradictions operate systemic dysfunction.
In the setting forth we can carry them by separating – but as they generate an ever heavier and more depleting burden, we have to revisit and re-evaluate. Many would rather deny even more of their consciousness rather than revisit their own foundations – not least because they were set to escape and cover over fears and guilts or shames.
Materialism in its reductionist sense is no less wishful thinking than an afterlife. But I don’t like materialism as a term because I feel to embrace all of what we are as a whole – including our physical expression – but not exclusively so.
Parasites are attracted to dead matter. Predators seek out the weakness. We can uncover deadness in ourself as well as back doors by which we are hacked or hijacked by deceits. These are active responsibilities. You haven’t got time to die!
😉
Descartes, the silly old bugger, was too attached to thinking.
What he should have said was:
‘I think, but that’s not who I am’
Great film: though I think is is probably fair to say that there is not too much that will be new to those who have been paying attention?
The financialisation of nature is only part of the strategy though. Along with ‘net zero’: the other main pillar of the SDG/GND/4IR corporate green revolution is dematerialisation of aggregate economic flows or ‘decoupling’. Decoupling means the separation of the service economy from source to sink biophysical throughputs: dematerialising production by increasing knowledge intensity of value creation …which will be “innovation driven” (bullshit straight from the WEF). It is also called ‘tertiarisation’ of the economy as it turns to information and data processing; fintech; AI high-speed data connections (information superhighways); overfinancialisation; overcapitalisation; trade in services; blockchain technology; etc. It is this freedom from dirty and polluting manufacturing that will produce so much surplus value that we will all be rich; live lives of leisure economics in a techno-utopia; where we will mine the sky for free energy. This is ecomodernism at its maddest: straight from Klaus Schwab and the WEF. It is fucking insane.
It is also called ‘globalisation 4.0’ – or ‘neoliberalism 4.0’ as I prefer – which is the switch from trade in goods to digitally enhanced trade in services. The broadening of the base by privatising natural capital; mitigation banks; and ecological and environmental services will allow the exponential increase in the hypothecation of OTC derivative trades (Over The Counter). This just basically means that the numbers of times you can leverage a trade will be unlimited. Where the trade is notionally a species or biodiversity offset: words fail to capture the evil masquerading as inclusive wealth creation and environmentalism. But you knew that.
What is not surprising is that capitalism/neoliberalism has to develop in such a fashion. That is: if you understand capitalism – this is a natural progression. What has become exposed in the last year is that there is literally no alternative. TINA: this is Capitalist Realism. Those in the developed high-consuming; high emitting countries – that is all of us – have their belief system co-constituted by the very belief system that produced the corporate green revolution. As violence breaks out around the world: how many people are willing to demonstrate or fight for less? It is the continuation of our lifestyles that demand more. Maybe this should be assessed before we cast the blame on the power elite? They are us extremised.
So we have a number of issues arising: if we want to make a radical reappraisal and turn to real sustainability. What so few are willing to admit is that we only get one shot at transition to a solar economy. We need oil and masses of material to transition. When they are gone: they are gone. We will not be renewing the renewable society. This is just a brute ecological fact [See Patzek; Friedemann; Hagens et al]. We need to get the transition to a future minimised solar society right the first time. If we get it wrong: there will be no future society. Maybe Mad Max?
There is the sheer scale of transition: even Forbes have crunched the numbers. To reach net zero: we would need three nuclear power stations deployed every two days; starting tomorrow and extending to 2050. In terms of renewables: “net-zero carbon dioxide by 2050 would require the deployment of ~1500 wind turbines (2.5 MW) over ~300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050”.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/09/30/net-zero-carbon-dACioxide-emissions-by-2050-requires-a-new-nuclear-power-plant-every-day/#24b9706035f7
That does not include the practicalities: such as intermittence and resource depletion. For battery back up: the US would need six weeks of backup to cover peak demand for a 100% renewable grid. Using current technology: a battery to store one days power of the US grid would weigh 74 million tons; cover 345 square miles; and cost $11.9 trillion [DOE/EPRI 2013].
Then there is the impossibility of absolute decoupling. As shown by Hickel et al and Parrique et al this year. Economies scale at 1:1 with energy and mass biophysical throughputs. Any relative decoupling is achieved by exporting pollution elsewhere in the turn to tertiarisation. Which is a zero-sum globally. But none of this will stop the corporate green revolution. Only a humanist alternative will.
https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
Which is not happening: because we are not willing to decouple from material flows either. Which is pushing the growth vectors into madness …our madness. No one will give up on their material flows so long as we have such gross inequality. Does that make wealth redistribution the nations priority political agenda? I’m not talking about pseudo-progressive taxation. I mean the reversal of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession. Redistributed not internally: but exported to low income; low consuming countries for clean running water and basic sanitation.
This is how radical a political agenda we need to adopt: along with reverse globalisation and local resilient infrastructures and food and energy justice – globally. We need the land to grow and sustain ourselves organically and agroecologically …with social permaculture systems and circular waste management. Anything else is just dreaming: as a few calculations can easily show.
Categorically: we are NOT transitioning to net zero by 2050. But what are we doing instead? Intransigence and indifference favour the corporate green revolution. WE ARE NOT GROWING ANYMORE. Not sustainably or unsustainably. We need to recognise our limitations and live within them. Rapid and full degrowth and redistribution is the only available option. If the corporate option of privatising nature is unconscionable – and it is – we have to agree our own ecological option. Soon.
For which I see very little political will. Or even any recognition of what sustainability really means.
I quit my career in 2011 from a Swedish power utilities company called Vattenfall. Their commitment to nuclear power after Fukushima was for me the final straw. I have been downsizing ever since, something I have somewhat forced on my immediate family, a process that comes with its own pain, but at least I could afford to manage the transition. What has become very apparent is how you cannot keep up with richer friends and family any more. You kind of ostracize yourself, and trigger whatever guilt they are capable of. We are a social animal. Normativity is something of a bad word in academia these days, but it is our instinct. The lockstep march towards environmental destruction is as sad as it is predictable. All that to say that the challenge of fighting for less is indeed very hard. But it must be done, or done to us. The facts and figures are clear.
So yes, well said, great post.
All respect to you,Toby.This is a hard moral decision to make,especially when it involves others such as family and dependents.Only those who genuinely take the step of living by example can institute change.”In the absence of light,darkness prevails”.Thank you for shining.
Thank you, Heathen Tinker. I love that name, by the way.
Your comment reminded me of an Aranofsky film, Noah, in which a God-given command to build the Arc and save the animals leads Noah to confronting a terrible decision. It resonated deeply with me because of my own moral convictions, and the battle between them and how reality actually is from moment to moment in its unfathomable complexity.
I haven’t digested all you wrote but this bit caught my eye:
One of my work mates recently asked if we wanted to be one of the richest people on the planet. The answer, naturally, was yes and she asked if we had bank accounts. We said yes and she said then we were already amongst the richest. The point was well made: that those fortunate to be born into “The West” are, globally speaking, part of the affluent sector. Which goes a long way towards explaining why so many amongst us have as much economic sense as Marie Antoinette and her “Let them eat cake” philosophy.
Sharing in love and gratitude for being is not on the balance sheet. hence a rational psychopathy trades in guilt for the right to persist in hate given social reward.
I don’t cast blame for the blind assumption that the framework in which we think is self-existing reality. But it isn’t – and it paints us in a dead world in which scarcity elicits war by force and guile as the ‘way of life’ – but it is a way of death – sometimes apportioned more ‘fairly’ only to be unfairly robbed at system level. Such as those who capture the regulatory bodies, the financial system, the media, the key points of energy supply, the scientific and medical narrative – all of whom are following self-interest as they see it and in the frame that sets their seeing – that is held us the undercurrent gestalt of accepted reality in which we live and move and have our being.
Each have their own themes and challenges within a net of entanglement or support. You cannot compare or judge another’s life – excepting you teach that you are ‘better’.
Using such comparisons to get a sense of worth is indicative of lacking in awareness of shared worth. Using others ‘victimhood’ for personal and political agenda is also an invested ‘asset’ to attract sympathetic investment for guilts that are then offset by ticking some boxes of presented correctness so as to persist in the ways that keep the downtrodden in their role.
I don’t offer this to you personally but as a reflection for us all. The use of statistics is all in the framing. There are only a few thousand ‘richest’ in terms of financial flow and leverage, and actual assets – but even then the business is shady and so we can only talk of the ‘money’ that is publicly accounted and those who are publicly known or fronted as the money men.
A sense of self-lack – that a few here use the ‘hungry ghost’ metaphor for – is to my understanding – those who have not – from whom more shall be taken – even the little that they have. It doesn’t matter what you stuff a hole with – you can only truly have what you can love and be and share being in.
Finding what you love in terms of what resonates and aligns YOUR sense of true joy or fulfilment in life is to uncover an appreciation that appreciates by living it. Following false dreams to failed outcomes can eventually open to wisdom and compassion that cannot otherwise be found.
The ‘West’ is running on false dreams and evil outcomes. What riches are they that draw such a destructive yield?
Love and fear can reverse the mind to love a fearfully invested projection and protection and fear the love of its own truth as a loss of defence and control of its possession.
But a choice between conflict or peace, fear or love, acceptance or denial, is not in awareness as our choice while we set the terms and conditions. Opening the awareness that can question its own framing so as to feel for what truly aligns an integrity of at least a practical step now is opening a store of riches that money cannot buy – and yet grows the more we act from it. But I am not talking of ‘getting’ a stash – but growing value by sharing it.
No one else can judge your worth – but we can share in the truly worthy.
Downsizing is a term that can mean austerity and contraction or it can be a simplification to core qualities that are foundational – and from which all else share value.
We may feel ‘free’ in holding all sorts of options and sitting on all kinds of fences – but to hoard potentials that are not actually lived is to lack commitment – or ore honestly to be committed to conflicting ideas or goals – including freedom from commitment at all – which then seeks relations of convenience – that meet terms and conditions – but of course reinforce such a mindset to suffer them as fixed or hardwired into life.
If you want to counter with accounts of suffering and grievance – make it something you can own and stand in and give direct witness to. I am not for a moment suggesting we do not suffer hateful experience or that compassion is in error – but that a lot of what we stuff into the hole of a sense of self-lack is as a kind of insulation from our fears – which take different forms – such that everyone would have their own particular version of hell.
Perhaps likewise heaven or harmony is not in what anyone else wants or advocates but uncovered in our own heart’s recognition – as a dynamic and flowing balance point in whatever life is unfolding as our day, our fate or our opportunity to see with new eyes.
I wish I could get those in my circle who have bought (sorry!) into the green wash to watch this through a couple of times. The true climate ‘deniers’ are those that only adhere/listen to the Monbiot/Guardian narrative. Planting Eucalyptus in the Amazon to burn, how cynical, how DARE they? Can you imagine how these creatures must laugh when they’re plotting these grotesque machinations?
The value of scarcity, what genius. In the next financial crash we can’t allow the banks to fail but this time because we must to save the orangutan. Of course, we only worry about indigenous species when they are not homo sapiens.
For thirty years I’ve supported environmental causes. Every magazine/blog I read links somewhere to the carbon emergency. I went to a talk on Swallowtail butterflies in the spring, much was made of the imminent climate catastrophe. I felt like I was living in a parallel universe since I was the only one there bracing for the Grand Solar Minimum…
I shall share this film widely. Thank you for link.
Just the first few minutes of this film are enough to send a cold shiver down my spine. It’s like watching a discussion in some asylum for the criminally insane, and the look on some of those faces gives one the impression of looking into a black hole.
I haven’t watched the movie yet, but wanted to comment on the important observation in the article about the systemic need for as much scarcity as possible when we measure value almost exclusively in terms of price/money. For price to be above zero, supply must be less than demand. Anything readily available/accessible in abundance – supply exceeding demand – must have a price of zero. Of course in practice there are several ways of creating artificial scarcity, but the basic logic is sound enough. This means that abundance is a fundamental anathema to market-/price-based economics. The ramifications of this logic seep out in many directions, one of which is the (hopefully) obvious insanity of attaching dollar values and the profit motive to absolutely everything there is, and attempting to understand reality wholly through the lens of price and money profits. What a wasteland of poverty that perspective creates. The beginning of a viable alternative will include new (and old) definitions of and structural relationships with the wealth-health synonymy we have somehow forgotten.
So I find the film’s presence and article describing it encouraging. In its insatiable search for more commodities, more growth, more profit, capitalism must self destruct; perhaps this is becoming clearer and clearer as the terrible costs mount. As a wannabe optimist, I choose to believe it’s not too late, that the destruction caused by this cancerous rapacity won’t prove irreversible. This film feeds that optimism.
“the systemic need for as much scarcity as possible”
Capitalism is predicated on want, dissatisfaction, neediness, goods that go bad or become unfashionable and which therefore need to be constantly replaced etc., indoctrinating everyone into feeling inadequate, unattractive, frustrated, sick etc. The point is that everyone must constantly be looking for the next big thing that will solve all problems but, when it arrives, proves to be yet another arrow pointing somewhere else.
As good a description of dukkha as I have ever read George
Odd you should mention that. I was thinking about the Buddhist concept of the six realms of being and the realm of the hungry ghosts came to mind.
From Wiki:
Animals don’t suffer the illusory cravings that supposedly smarter humans do.
True. And for that to work, commodities, and pretty much everything else, must be scarce, or felt to be so. If there’s we really believe there’s not enough to go around, we tend to want as much of the pie as we can get our hands on, for all the reasons you lay out, and more.
Toby et al:
Are there really so few of us globally that realise holism in and as ourselves: that we have to pander to the majoritarian natural attitude that the value/price object is separate from experience? As soon as we admit – even if in convention – that the value object is separated from us: we have to invent the price mechanism. It is a natural concomitant entailment of separation. The cost of separation is exponential extermination.
As soon as we have a price mechanism: the rest of capitalism falls into place. The price is the biosphere as no surplus value can be created without energy/exergy transformation; labour; capital; mass biophysical source to sink throughputs; waste and pollution. As previously discussed at some length. Price is a subjective evaluation of unseen environmental degradation as a function of separation.
I hope that is not too dense: as we have discussed the principles before. The cost to the biosphere is the price of separation. As soon as we admit that natural objects are separate: we have to put a monetary value on them. This is wholly the wrong approach: as Vandana Shiva and Pablo Solon make clear in the film.
The right approach is to INCLUDE the value object in experience. This totally shortcuts the symbolic exhange; fetishisation; and desire addictions we suffer from collectively. As Vandana says: when value is subordinate to price …this is a cancer in the brain (I’m interpolating: I can’t remember exactly how she put it).
This is basic spiritual education and revaluing the indigenous way of life over the so-called civilised. So long as we draw breath: live experience is quasi-infinite and priceless. To put a value on anything but live experience is counter-productive. If the value and price are invested in live experience: no external valuation is required. Speculation is ended. Financialisation, derivatives, and debt monetisation are meaningless concepts. False consciousness wants needs and desire addictions are short circuited by holism. The mythical state of harmonisation with nature is apparent and lived. Artificial scarcity has no meaning.
So long as we try and describe this future in terms of capitalisation we are doomed: a conversation from long ago. Not because of the price/money equivalence – but because we have to admit to the reality of the split personality. The one that takes the putative value object as separate and ascribes a socially agreed price on it. That is how we got into this mess. It is going to take a radical rethink to get us out. It is a matter of perception and cognition. The value object is not separate from experience. The only real value is in the holism of experience. The real external needs – warmth; shelter; sustenance; love; etc – can much more easily be provided without capitalism. Degrowth; a minimised steady state sutainable economy; and lasting prosperity become meaningful and enervated by life.
With no separation and no price we need no eternal economic growth. We can live within our means sustainably. Everything we then experience has a quasi-infinite value of uniqueness, creativity, empathy, and love. Which is the basis of a life coherent onto-axiological value system – priceless and in abundance!
Yup, value cannot be measured; it is a quality of experience. I think Vandana said “Price is a disease of the mind.” And she said it with beautiful passion.
The scarcity issue is the essence of the “last chance knock down bargain” manoeuvre too. Thus are you encouraged to furiously desire items which, with a little thought, you realise you couldn’t care less about.
This manufactured scarcity reminds me of Thorstein Veblen’s notion of industrial sabotage, such that no industrial line ever worked to maximum capacity but was deliberately “hobbled” to ensure that less was produced than was needed – all for the sake, of course, of maximising profits. Veblen said this wasn’t an anomaly but referred to normal business practice. Marx would probably say that such “hobbling” wasn’t necessary since the entire system was already set up to maximise profits and, having this exclusive goal, already entailed a “deformation” of a working practice that could have benefitted all.
I haven’t read any Veblen, but everything I hear from him makes very good sense. Perhaps I should make the time to take the plunge!
My own perspective on the roots of the capitalism sickness as being composed of scarcity, fear, a poor understanding of competition and property, and how those components tightly interrelate and sustain each other, is derived from a number of books and sources, but perhaps the most influential was “The Ascent of Humanity” by Charles Eisenstein. As I now see it, there are any number of techniques developed to ‘profit’ from perceived scarcity, and endless names we might give them, but for me the challenge is first a change of consciousness, such that humanity shifts how it sees itself, from being the separated and special centre of a universe of distinct objects, over to being an embedded part of organic nature. Nature is not ‘out there’ as a separate and mechanical pool of ‘resources’ for our consumerist addictions. We humans and all our activities, however healthy or sick, are as of and in nature as grass, soil, sun, weather, etc. Once that shift starts in earnest, our sense of scarcity, abundance and value will shift with it. Until then, we’re frantically and fractiously rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Of course all that unpacks into huge amounts of devillish detail, but as a crude sketch I guess it’s enough.
Interesting points. My wife has always been an animal lover and, since meeting her, I have always had pets. We currently have two dogs and when I look at them I don’t see creatures that are absolutely separate from myself. They obviously have awareness and intelligence. In many respects they have keener senses then I do. And so this notion of some kind of forbidding barrier between humans and the rest of the natural world doesn’t make sense to me. But it seems to me this notion is central to many religions – certainly the Western monotheist ones. I know that it is unwise to “essentialise” about institutions and beliefs i.e. to ascribe a monolithic quality to them so that e.g. Christianity is always assumed to be the same thing. And yet I’m afraid I have noticed what I can only describe as a regressive function throughout much religious thought.
I’m not sure if it’s central to religion or if the central message becomes distorted as psychologically immature humans twist it over the decades and centuries. I suspect the latter is more likely, though perhaps not in every single case. And this latter possibility could be the “regressive function” you reference, though for me it attaches to humanity rather religion per se. We ‘civilised’ ones have a strong, fear-based tendency to want our ‘control’ over ‘nature out there’ to become ever more precise, but as unintended consequences have their uncontrollable way, the quality of our consciousness in responding to that unwanted inevitability tends to regress towards the infantile and narcissistic: hence, e.g., dogmatic Scientism.
As for non-human animals, my eyes were opened far wider by an online film call Speciesism. Perhaps you would find it interesting…
George Mc:
Andre Gorz updated Veblen in his ‘Critique of Economic Reason’. As an addendum: he wrote that AI-robotisation of production was being retarded because that would create a leisure society. In a leisure society: the relations of production (class relations) would be equalised …that is the relations of hierarchical rule would break down. Which is unacceptable to the capitalist notions of authoritarian rule.
So we got McBullshit Uberisation instead. Sold as the democratisation of labour (freedom from rule by being ones own boss: whilst being a wage slave to three different jobs). Gorz’s theory was that we embrace technology and share the remaining work equally – in a 2-3 day working week. Can you imagine a vast leisure class of auto-didactic politically educated subjects? No, neither can the advocates of authoritarian rule (which is in the neo-universal distribution of the majoritarian natural attitude BTW: not just the ruling class).
So we are stuck in this materialist dialectic driven by ruler/ruled and Goodwin’s predator/prey relations. Which is the main driver of growth in advanced industrial societies. It is not just the growth addiction of ‘them’ – the possessing/ruling class – it is the subconscious growth addiction of ‘us’ – the majoritarian attitude of the ruled. It is this dialectical tension that is driving exponential growth of the industrial consumer society.
But is is also driving our appetite for destruction as credit and consumerism reach natural – but unseen – limits. The same dialectical tension is driving the polarisation of inequality into a no-analogue zenith of social anomie. What no one has done yet is analyse this rationally: that the materialist dialectical tension of predator/prey social relations will literally tear society apart …which is a form of anomic suicide at both the societal and individual level of perception.
http://sociologyindex.com/anomic_suicide.htm
What the film does not address – beyond the moral repugnance of the privatisation of nature – is that our economy is already doomed to catastrophic cascading failure …due to dynamics identified by *inter alia* Fisher/Minsky/Keen/Rasmus/Hudson et al. The collapse is inevitable: it is the restart that will be catastrophic. This will require the rematerialisation of teriary service economies – involved in such as China’s unprecedented public works projects from circa 2009 – for what? A bigger crash and greater rematerialisation? That is: if there is enough biophysical and bioenergetic resources to restart the global economy even one more time. Which, personally I doubt is possible.
So: artificially extending the capital base – using nature as collateral – creates the very material dialectic amplifying growth drivers that will destroy nature. Which everyone – except the corporate philosophical zombies in the film – already knows intuitively. Only, the situation is now more pronounced than when Gorz was writing (1988). The radical solutions require rapid degrowth and post-work, post-production leisure solutions …the embrace of the Great Simplification. Which entails no entitlement or artificial privilege in a classless society. Which erects its own perceived brick walls due to its resemblance to historic communism. And so we proceed to grow: only not eternally. It is quite temporally, entropically, biophysically, bioenergetically, and debt deflationary constrained and limited. Which no one will accept. Well, not many. Just turn on the TV or radio to listen to manifestos which are in fact anomic societal suicide pacts.
Perhaps this film – widely distributed – will shock some more from the moral repugnance of eternal expansion within a finite Earth System? But there are no sticking plaster solutions. The radical solutions require the entire inversion of all political values: particularly the political economy. Less is more. Small is beautiful. The Great Simplification and degrowth to an eventual solar economy is the only option we have.
Before the Great Simplification must come the Great Humiliation: which is nothing less than the total re-calibration of our entire value system …from life-blind to life-coherent. We are caught between a rock and a hard place. Both entail mass psychological trauma and social anomie/anomic suicide. So it is so much easier to extend and pretend and continue in denial. Which entails the privatisation of nature. Which entails social anomie and anomic ecocide. How we break out of the amplifying feed-forward trauma cycle is unclear. And remains unclear until we can collectively admit we are in an self-amplifying trauma cycle.
I’m off to listen to the election news to see how we can get out of our self-manufactured predicament …by more speculative growth? Oh, dear.
Your lengthy post has got so much in it that it will take me a long time to digest. But on an initial look, I found myself with the following (possibly utopian) thoughts:
The very concepts “work” and “leisure” are defined with reference to capitalism which needs to have a population regulated, on the one hand, by wage slavery and, on the other, by a submissive acquisition of commodities. Thus “work” is that which we must do in order to be paid in order to live and, for that very reason, has an irksome odious flavour. And this is true even for those fortunate to find employment in something they enjoy doing i.e. the very fact they MUST do it for a livelihood is an emotional disincentive. The measure of that is the well known sentiment that we need money itself as an incentive. That monetary incentive stands as an indication that the work is of a sort that we don’t want.
“Leisure” by contrast is what we are supposed to want. But the word implies passivity. And that makes sense within capitalism since, in our spare time, we are called on to be consumers. Thus – perhaps ironically – the word “leisure” too has an odious quality. It signals laziness, irrelevance.
Somewhere in the Marxist literature I recall a comment about the difference between working to live and living to work. The latter may strike us as appalling – such is the well-ingrained revulsion for work. But I think it contains the seed of a notion of what a free society would look like. Of course there is work that needs to be done in any community. A free society ought to be able to plan that work out and share it. And this brings us to another duality imposed by capitalism i.e. the unnatural division between “the individual” and “the community”.
“Those whom the Immortal Gods mean to destroy…”