Spotlight: A Sequence of Consumer Enslavement
The purpose of our current series in the Spotlight column is to expose the destructive nature of imperial culture and its colonial society. The destructive reality of colonial society only becomes readily apparent when contrasted with the life preserving traditional cultures originating from the Nile and Niger valley regions. Everything has a history. It is important to illuminate this fact because the history of something is the most important consideration when attempting to understand the nature of that thing. The current human condition, after two thousand years of colonial attack, is very unstable. The bulk of problems faced by humanity today all have a history and an origin traceable to the culture imposed by a colonial authority. Our success at solving these problems will equal our willingness and honesty in seeking out their root causes, recognize what had previously worked well for humanity and reestablishing ourselves as individuals responsible to every aspect of our world. To do this, the individual must cultivate the willingness to take on all the challenges that life presents to him or her.
Most people can relate to a situation where they misplace their keys. Some will put it off until they need to go out, while others will attempt to find them as soon as possible. In either case, the way in which one goes about finding the lost keys is generally the same. First, one checks the most obvious places. After not finding the keys, one proceeds to a guessing game. One will try to think of every possible place where those keys might be. Soon, one's imagination and the body become tired. Finally, sometimes at the point of desperation, one will stop guessing and start thinking hard about every step one has taken since the last time one saw the keys. And in most cases, one will walk straight to the obscure place where the keys have been all the while.
What causes the individual to not think about where their keys are initially is mental laziness, a habit. It is easier for the mind to guess that the keys may be here or there and have the body do the work, than it is for the mind to welcome the challenge of remembering exactly where the keys are located. If an individual is reluctant to think his or her way out of a simple problem, he or she will be more reluctant to address a complex problem. Something can be perceived as a complex problem only because of the inability of the individual to associate an effect (that problem) with its cause. Often a problem is called complex when, in actuality, the problem is our perception of cause and effect that is too rigid to allow insight into its solution. Facing complex problems, the individual usually exhausts one possibility after another with the hope that he or she will find a solution. Again, the imagination and the body become tired. Their hope is buoyed by the belief that they are working hard at solving the problem. However, not every direction gets you where you want to go.
In many cases, when a new direction or approach is taken in a renewed attempt to solve a problem, that creates a new problem. In South Africa, a trial vaccine for HIV was halted when they determined that the vaccine they had created made a human more susceptible to acquiring the disease. Modern pharmaceutical companies produce drugs that create health problems. For each symptom that a drug may relieve, a number of new health problems, i.e. "side effects", may arise. When humans built machines, they took a new direction. They have followed that direction until today, and we see that a new lifestyle has emerged--a consumer culture that promotes a lifestyle where machines produce the necessities for human life. Fuel for these machines has become the lifeline for the consumers' survival. Because these fuels are limited to oil, coal and timber, consumers who continue this lifestyle will be eating themselves out of existence. What food is eaten and how it is produced relate to a solution of one problem, but a greater understanding of the reason for our problems is what must come first.
The consumer society promotes a very unnatural lifestyle. The greatest problems facing individuals, societies and humanity stem from consumer culture. This is because the consumer culture or lifestyle creates an imbalance. To understand balance we must recognize two principles, construction and destruction. The construction principle is evident in the creation, growing and building of life. The destruction principle is evident in the deterioration of those things. A balance results from neither principle being too active nor not active enough. The natural world is the result of a balance of these two principles or forces, and every viable thing in the natural world displays this balance. Outside this balance, things now alive cannot exist. It is through observation and reasoning that humans are able to discern such things, and with these same faculties we must help return a balance to humanity's behavior. The traditional knowledge of Merita (currently colonial Africa) is being presented by the Earth Center for that purpose. Only with knowledge of what balance is will anyone be able to determine what needs to be done to achieve that balance.
First, the responsibility for working to restore a balance lies on those individuals who sense the imbalance. It is through the initial actions of these individuals that a positive direction for change is sensed and later followed by more people. In a consumer culture, business interests repackage and market their products as being associated with the new direction. Finally, those individuals of a society with the most spending power enjoy that new feeling with their same consumer products, but nothing changes because the change in values necessary to restore balance never takes place.
Organic food is a good example of how the colonial system of business interests controls the political agenda. The increasing desire for produce and animal products that are grown without using pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge, genetically modified organisms, ionizing radiation, antibiotics, growth hormones or cruel conditions explains why an organic standard has been enacted in various nations. With the demand for organic products rising, industries that dominate the agricultural market with non-organic products have been losing money and, in predictable reaction, are attempting to forcibly change the standards backwards. Whereas, if the organic standards are maintained or even strengthened, that will increase incentives for people to farm for a living, further eroding their profit.
Current estimates show that the U.S. has 285,000,000 people but fewer than 1,000,000 farmers. People outnumber farmers 300 tol. This illustrates the imbalance that is the result of a consumer culture. Because people depend on the natural world for their survival, the colonial system has developed a society that separates people from their natural world, resulting in dependency on the colonial system. A person dependent on a system responsible for financial profit but not for the well being of fellow citizens is a person in a desperate situation. The desperate consumer will often place more value on how he or she feels (emotion) than on how he or she thinks (logic) about a situation. The business industry seeks to get people like this on the organic standards board, which decides what the standards are. These individuals can be persuaded to vote in favor of changing the standards when presented with an argument such as: lowering organic standards enables the business industry to make organic more affordable, and to not lowering organic standards threatens the economic health of the agricultural industry and the economic health of the nation. Unfortunately, this conclusion is not entirely untrue.
The weakening of organic standards can be compared to a headache one feels when one has a brain tumor. Maintaining organic standards within a consumer culture is akin to relieving the headache of one with a brain tumor. In fact it makes the situation worse. Buying organic provides a difference that is largely illusory. This is not because there are no health benefits to organic. These benefits are well documented, just as the hazards of conventionally produced food are well documented. The illusion that organic provides is that as an alternative, it is a solution to destructive agricultural practices. Buying organic produce relieves consumers' guilt over being part of the problem. While practices like pesticide, chemical fertilizers, sewage sludge and g.m.o use are bad, they are irrelevant when compared to the physical practices of commercial agriculture. How to farm has been left out of the organic debate. Only what to use in farming remains on the table. Commercial agriculture has set the terms of the debate, and the consumer public has agreed. People who knew better could not have succeeded because they were outnumbered ... 300 to 1.
It is obvious that only with the advent of machines could one person farm for three hundred people a million times over. With machines, one can have a meal where each ingredient comes from a different continent. Balance is necessary for life, and no one should be so shortsighted to think that things are fine just because one is still alive now. Nor should anyone think that they are not responsible or not at fault without first examining the major factors contributing to our problems. Examining our own actions and how they relate to the industries whose actions result in environmental destruction will help us to understand the role that we each play. Following the path or sequence of events that lead to an "effect", or another event in the sequence, allows us a greater understanding of the "cause" of something. A greater insight into the next event will also be gained, because the problems humanity is experiencing now are only predecessors to another series of events. Prediction and prevention of these future events will be determined by our understanding of the sequence of events that led us to the situation we are in, our honesty about what we must do, and our willingness to do it.
To be honest about the situation that we are in means to examine our relationship with the destruction that surrounds us. The urbanization of humanity gives most of us the impression of construction and progress. With a positive impression of its own culture and a negative impression of traditional culture, the colonial authority convinces a majority of the population that their dependency on colonial culture is a good thing. The main reason that the impression of colonial culture is a good thing remains, despite two thousand years of laying nature to waste, is that people want to believe it. Their livelihood and easy lifestyle depend on it.
Traditionally, humans have always struggled to maintain a balance with the natural environment because humans understood that to upset the balance was precedes drastic consequences. In these traditional societies, the goal has always been to preserve life. When the predecessors to the modern colonial authority usurped power from traditional cultures through warfare and religion, the resulting colonial society became one where the goal of preserving life would no longer be honored. If we are not preserving life, then we are destroying it. This is dictated by the two opposing principles of construction and destruction. Seeing that there are destructive forces already working against humans naturally, it seems crazy that we would be helping these forces to destroy us, for so long and to so great an extent. However, because humans desire to do good, it is only by believing that one is doing good while one is actually doing evil that one will keep up this behavior until everything has been destroyed.
Only belief will allow anyone to accept the history of a colonial "progress" that has placed our planet in peril. Every action of a modern colonial society exploits humans and the natural environment. Even when more powerful colonial nations reduce exploitation of natural resources within their own borders, greater exploitation occurs elsewhere. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest increased sixty percent over the last five months of 2007. When the forest is cleared, trees are used to produce charcoal and the land is used to graze or grow feed for animals. The charcoal is used to make steel; corn and soybeans are grown to feed livestock or fuel vehicles; livestock is grazed to feed consumers. As for the consumer, his transport depends on the forest; his fuel depends on the forest; his food depends on the forest; his shelter, rainy days, warm days and especially the air he breathes all depend on the forest.
For our collective survival and for food security, people must become increasingly less dependent on supplies from the distant regions of global markets. Local production of life's necessities has been a tried and proved cornerstone for human survival. At this time, higher cost of food is affecting food donations. We know, however, that this current shortage is only one event in an ongoing sequence of similar events. Droughts in the Southeastern U.S., floods in the Midwest, wheat and corn production drops in the U.S., France, Germany and Australia are more events. At first, higher prices affect donations, then continued higher prices affect the cost of staples, from the poor to the rich, as we see happening daily. All are events in a sequence.
Reducing what we consume to only that which is available locally will take adjustment, but it is necessary to make the adjustment now. The consumer must take their survival seriously. A strong connection to the land is like roots that supply as with everything we need to survive. From strong roots grows the cultural tree of humanity. Many of the branches of this tree have become parasitic, or infected by parasites. To eliminate this parasite, we must cleanse ourselves of consumer culture and begin a new leaf.
