This Century Asks Us to Transcend Exploitation — or Face Collapse

We live in strange and troubled times, you and I. A sense of daily discomfort, of unease is there, isn’t it? I’ve come to suspect that our souls know a truth that our minds won’t allow themselves to admit. The world cannot go on the way that it has, for a very long time. So what do we do now?

I want to put the problem before humanity as simply and starkly as I can. You can judge, as always, whether what I have to say is an empty, grandiose pronouncement — or if it contains a grain of truth.

We are running out of things to exploit. Let me give you three examples. The world’s insects are dying off. But they underpin all the food webs and chains. The globe is in the middle of a larger mass extinction. And, of course, climate change is here, wreaking havoc. But there is also the average American — broke, ruined, desperate, living paycheck to paycheck.Capitalism can only exploit him now in increasingly bizarre, gruesome ways — like making him beg strangers on the internet for money for medicine. In all these ways, exploitation is at its limit now.

But I’m not saying that we ourselves will be finished. The story that I want to tell is subtler, and perhaps more difficult.

Having run out of things to exploit, we are turning on each other — and on ourselves. What else would we do, if exploitation is all that we know? So we are turning on each other, in the rise of extremism and fascism and isolationism and so forth. And we are turning on ourselves, in the rise of depression and mistrust and hostility, all of which are internalized rage. Do you see how these phenomena are linked — running out of things to exploit, and turning on ourselves, and on each other? When there is nothing left to exploit but ourselves, but exploitation is all we know, want, appear capable of — bang! Implosion.

If you think about all this with me, I feel maybe you will come to a surprising place.

The central problem before humanity now is a very different one than it has ever been confronted with before. It is running out of things to exploit, and yet, having been born into systems and structures based for centuries on exploitation — feudalism, tribalism, slavery, capitalism — we seem to know how to imagine no other way. Hence, the world is in a state of stalemate. Deadlock. The future is not yet born — will it be? — and so a shudder runs down the spine of the world.

Every previous era of human prosperity has been based on exploitation. At least in the Western mindset — but that is a wrinkle that I will explore in further essays. In this one, allow me to just make the point.

First, we learned to expand prosperity for some by exploiting people — through slavery and servitude. This was the story of many societies, of whole eras, from tribalism through feudalism. Subjugation and subjection. You reap the harvest — and I will exact tribute.

Then we learned to expand prosperity by exploiting things — the natural world. That isn’t to say the exploitation of people stopped — though in some cases, I suppose you could argue, that it ameliorated. This was the story of the Renaissance through the industrial ages. Human beings imagined themselves masters of a material world which they understood, at last, through a kind of simplistic, linear, deterministic empiricism and rationality.

And then we learned to embed those forms of exploitation into minds, in ever more abstract “information” “Prices” and “stock market values” and so forth, for example, contain and simultaneously hide the assumptions that greed is good, that selfishness is right, that dominance is natural, that the weak should perish — right up until today, when we’re glued to our screens, a universe of info pulsing at our fingertips. How many likes did I get today? How many shares? This was the story of the information ages, which brings us to now.

In every previous age so far that we consider to be “history”, prosperity, growth, progress, has been based on exploitation. Mostly, the most violent, cruel, greedy, and selfish ruled. The obvious proof is that we made “nobility” the idea of foregoing violence that one was entitled to do, as in codes of chivalry. People became “lords” and “kings”, who were celebrated as kind and merciful when they did slightly less violence than they were privileged to do. LOL. That grim irony continues right down to today, where for example, in America, the ultimate example of a society ruled by and for exploitation, the most violent, cruel, greedy, and selfish have risen to the top — a point I’ll return to.

But now humanity is at a great turning point. A place of no return. There is nothing left to exploit. We have killed off the insects and bees and fish — by vast magnitudes. We have filled up the skies with ashes. We have taken the bounty of the earth until it is rebelling.

The only thing left to exploit, therefore, is ourselves.

That means that the world has two choices. One, either it transcends exploitation as the ordering principle of prosperity, of minds, of the project called civilization. Or two, it rewinds in history, and people exploit each other right back into servitude and slavery again. With nothing left to exploit but ourselves — what other choices are there?

You can see those dynamics already playing out in the strange, grotesque, weird story of America, which illustrates, in the way that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, perhaps, the story of the world, too. America was founded on the first kind of exploitation — slavery — and never really overcame it. It used it to perform the second kind — exploitation of nature — and then the third kind, exploitation of minds. But the result for America was not a sustainable, manageable society. The result was a society which imploded and collapsed. And that is because America never transcended exploitation. In the end, it was left with only one choice, when it began to run out of things to exploit — everyone had to exploit everyone else. Society began to regress at lightspeed. Today, America is a bizarre dystopia where everyone must exploit everyone else, or be abandoned to die, more or less. Nobody lives up to their potential in America — instead, they are made to waste it, exploiting and being exploited, living shorter, unhappier, more desperate, poorer lives, every year. It is a grim warning of precisely the future the world faces if it doesn’t outgrow exploitation as a mindset.

Exploitation as a mindset has been the linchpin, so far, of what we call history. It has been with us from the dawn of what is called civilization. The most foolish and cruel and brutal have always commanded the rest to use and abuse and subjugate others, nature, and themselves, until there is nothing left — mostly for their own benefit. And probably because it is easier to fire a gun or wield a club and crack open a skull than to read a book, for the most part, human beings listened to them. Instead of wiser minds, who suggested the harder work of true equality, freedom, dignity, and justice — not just their empty caricatures.

It’s no surprise then that humanity today is struggling to lift its head above the toxic residue of centuries of structures of exploitation — from capitalism to colonialism to segregation to supremacism to tribalism to fascism. Only in a few places did we see the merest glimmers of non-exploitative systems ever really even begin to arise, even in small ways — European social democracy, Canadian multiculturalism, Scandinavian egalitarianism, perhaps.

So the task before us is an historic, beautiful, and strange one, if we really understand it well. The 21st century needs a mindset that, for the first time in human history, is not based on exploitation. On dominance and acquisition, on taking all that can be taken, on reducing and abstracting, on externalizing costs, on snatching and seizing and plundering, on “maximizing” and “profiting.” This century needs human consciousness itself to expand, grow, mature, and ripen. Or else humanity probably will not really survive it, except in the form of scattered, shattered kingdoms, regressed by millennia.

But developing a genuinely new mindset — one not based on exploitation, which abjures and rejects it — will not be an easy one. Because the truth is that we barely know how to think that way, how to feel that way, how to be that way. It will be a difficult, painful birth. It will need mourning and grief, remembrance and truth, reconciliation with all the mistakes of the ages of the past. That, I’ve come to think, is the central challenge of now. Letting this mindset emerge is a shift that has yet to really happen. Let me describe that shift using levels — in a slightly different way.

Level I consciousness is the mindset of the slave age and the feudal age — it is marked by naked violence, the need for absolute dominance, the belief that only some are “people”, and others are more like gods. That is where, for example, America was for most of its history. Level II consciousness is the mindset of the industrial age — it is marked by rigidly organized hierarchies of exploitation, which ration status and dominance. Level III consciousness is the mindset of predatory capitalism — it is marked by a kind of absurd, grotesque appetite for endless acquisition, a kind of impossibly needy narcissism, that even a trillion dollars to a single person isn’t enough, even if costs the whole world, democracy, and the future.

All these things must now be outgrown if humanity is to endure.

Level Zero consciousness is very different. It is the idea that one should take just what one needs, and give back multiplefold. That if one chops down a tree, one should plant ten. If one hunts a deer, one should feed ten. It is the belief that all things have intrinsic and inherent worth, that nothing is for free. It is the belief that because all things have intrinsic worth, every thing should be allowed to reach its natural potential — and what isn’t should therefore be counted as a loss — from a sapling that never became a tree, to an elephant that never grew old. It is the belief that all things are linked in balance and harmony, and we are not the masters of this balance and harmony. We are the servants, the guardians, and the children of time, of dust, of being.

Do you glimpse, maybe, the ideas that I am trying to express? They are different, many, and interwoven. They are as subtle and complex as subtlety and complexity. I wouldn’t reduce them to the way we talk about ideas today — charts, statistics, soundbites. They need room to breathe, to move, to really be understood. It is the difference between walking in the woods without saying a word, and talking about the woods.

I don’t mean that people should live in tents and wear burlap sacks. But I do mean that human beings are going to have to build Level Zero systems now — beginning with minds. Let me sum them up this way. Those that prize the values of cultivation, of nurturance, of possibility, of investment, of coexistence, of balance, of depth, of expansiveness — and reject their absences and negations, the failed values of dominance, exploitation, greed, acquisition, control, superficiality, and egotism. I think that we can do all that and have better lives, in fact — simply because so much of what we consume and produce today does little for our emotional, mental, and spiritual, well-being anyways.

I call it “Level Zero” because it is not so much an “evolution” in human consciousness as a return to its roots. It is what many ancient systems of belief consist of, which were derided as “primitive.” It is akin to what Jesus and Buddha said. It is not something modern, so much as something very, very old. Level Zero says that time, progress, growth, takes us in spirals, and sometimes, to go upward, we must circle back to the beginning. You could also just call it a “constructive” or a “generative” or a “nurturing” mindset, perspective, attitude, disposition, if you like.

This essay is already too long, and I’ve struggled to express just one simple idea. Humanity has grown by relying on exploitation. But now there is nothing left to exploit. Nothing except ourselves — and that way lies regress, servitude, slavery, war, violence.

We must develop different minds now. I mean “mind” in an expansive, not a limiting, way. New dispositions, attitudes, ways of seeing, relating, acting, and thinking — and especially feeling . We need to allow ourselves to grieve for the folly and stupidity of a way of life that put profit above the world, to mourn all the souls that exploitation abused — and to feel a righteous sense of anger, too, as we face those bitter truths. Is that who we wish to be?

All that is needed in order to chart a way forward. To develop minds that aren’t mere calculators of exploitation any longer. But see themselves as guardians, as friends, as students, partners and equals. Of what, from what? Of all that is. What are you made of? Your tears are oceans, and your laughter is stardust. Who is exploiting whom? Exploitation must always be understood as a form of self-destruction, of folly, of ruin, the most unnatural action that any being can take.

New minds. Not for the first time in human history. But perhaps for the second, which we have forgotten too long. We must come full circle, if we are to grow. And the strange thing is that, from the rivers that flow to the sea, to the caterpillar that, hanging upon the tree, becomes the butterfly, that is how all maturity works.

Umair
December 2018