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über-greedy capitalist of the owning class struggles against the forces of renewable energy
Forget Yuval Noah Harari, Alvin Toffler, and that amoral lesion on humankind, Elmo Mush; you want to know the next phase of human evolution? I’ll tell you the next phase of human evolution: the tendency toward cession of power. The voluntary yet instinctive, reflexive ceding of advantage. Right now we call it “altruism,” and it resides in a quasi-mythical chamber of the human mind, or of the metaphorical “human heart” sung about by lovestruck poets.
Currently, the human being’s “natural” impulse, upon attaining power, privilege, or advantage is to retain it, grasp it, expand upon it, guard against its loss or diminishment by any means necessary, only giving up even a smidgen of territory for the purpose of grandstandingly demonstrating good will as a public relations ploy. It’s like a bite reflex. If someone dangles a morsel of protein by your mouth, your instinct is to bite. And, by “demonstrating good will,” I mean to include false virtue, virtue signaling, theatrical or spectacular philanthropy, and public charity.
The cession of power is “other” than the above mechanisms. It is not about goodness or seeming good or pretending to advocate the greater good. It is the impulse away from power disparity. It is the impulse toward power parity. It is the impulse away from grasping.
The anarchists, aka libertarian socialists, insist humans are already good. They would rely on human motivations such as shame and compassion to impel the cession of power. So how’s that been going for you, aka them, huh, guys, aka persons?
The anti-growth and small-is-beautiful movements invoke similar visions. We, they say, must understand when enough is enough, and when more than enough is too much. Some of them may even have diagrammatic proposals for the devolvement of power accumulation and resource hegemony. But a firmly situated capitalist ethos destroys such efforts casually, almost as if checking off tasks on a list of trivial daily errands.
The hunter-gatherer-low-impact-farming-seasonally-nomadic societies of the pre-Columbian Americas had ways of maintaining sensible societal structures and sustainable practices for exchanging resources with the non-human world.
But the tragic fact is, that era is long gone, lost in the fog of the past. The tragic fact is, clinging to power and exploiting advantage has become the default mode of humanness writ large. Whatever petitions to atavistic communalism we might make, since at least as long ago as the 16th Century we have sadly become a collective organism motivated by a bottomless desire for gain, employing all manner of exploitation, leading inevitably to toxic ruination of habitat, our own and that of others.
A self-actualized person today, even a non-billionaire, might interrogate the idea of egalitarianism thus: “What do you mean by equal? Because all individuals are different, and no matter what world they live in, some motivated people are going to do their best to make the most of themselves.”
Naturally no society of different individuals and family groups is ever going to be entirely equal, and any attempt to coerce equality will be a disaster. But the sickness of the current mindset is revealed in the question. What exactly does the questioner mean by “some motivated people?”
Does the questioner consider themselves to be one of those “motivated people making the most of themselves?” Are they thinking, “Oh, no, I can’t allow the egalitarianism of a proposed society to stifle my reaching my fullest potential.”
And what do they mean by “make the most of themselves?” Are they worried about continuing to exercise their prerogative to wrest from the economy the greatest possible acquisitions and privileges? Or perhaps it’s a less monetary concern. Is the questioner one of those kinds of people who defers to honors and prestige, even in a dishonorable and corrupt civilization? Do they believe the most celebrated doctor is the best doctor? The most celebrated poet is the best poet? Is that any less a deference toward acquisition? Is an acquisition of honors or certifications or degrees or good Yelp! reviews any less a product of a vision of the world as a finite pie from
which the stronger or better person extracts their due reward, the largest slice?
The good society is not a meritocracy in which merit is measured out by dubious, flawed, biased means. Because the one who arrogates to judge the merit is really the one “in power.”
A viable humanity is one in which honors are accepted with circumspection. Advantages would be immediately interrogated. That would be the emotional, social, and political default. Are my or my group’s gains and advantages justified? In what way, and how far can their justifications permit us to profit compared to others?
In such a humanity, the ones on top with most mostness, whether or not it was earned, would not immediately fear an erosion of their privileges. They would accept such an erosion as a fact of life, an abdication of advantage to moral, ethical, economic, military, proprietary, and public reality, to commodious equilibrium.
Our society today is problematic. It uses people and resources and grinds them down. Knowing this, one ought to understand that honors bestowed by such a society are to be questioned. Accumulation of wealth and advantage are to be questioned. The qualifications of such a society to make such a judgment must be examined honestly. And one’s own deserving of honor and advantage must also be examined with honesty.
Being tangentially associated with the film business, I’ll use the example of winning an Oscar for Best Actor.
When an actor receives an award, they should thank their team and all those who aided them and supported them on their journey toward accomplishing that for which the award is given. To be fair, we already do this to a large extent. Even a director, that lone soul who is assumed to have “done it themselves,” will attribute to others a portion if not all of the credit.
But of course, under our current moral atmosphere, no one believes them. We see things with the
eye of the cynic who perceives the motives of others as being of self-interest because they recognize the same quality in their own motives.
And, when push comes to shove, or when kingship comes to the king, the king is loath to allow any erosion of power. This is true of even the most enlightened capitalist, such as those former owners of the Esprit and Patagonia sportswear and equipment brands. And it was certainly true of Washington, Jefferson, Danton, Robespierre, Castro, Mao, Lenin, and Stalin, to varying degrees. Even the visionary creator of the Chicago Neofuturists couldn’t do it. Very rare is the individual so lacking in selfish fear of losing their purchase on power as to allow a structure that renders them equal to an “average” citizen, let alone a modestly poor one.
A major exception has been José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica Cordano, the former President of Uruguay. There are other exceptions. There’s Dan Price, the Gravity Payments corporation CEO, who raised the minimum wage at the corporation to $70,000 and brought his own compensation down to parity with it. But whatever the impulse driving such behavior, we currently view it as “unusual” if not “odd,” “eccentric,” “quirky.” Yet it will have to become simply common if we are to survive as a species without suffering a massive and sickeningly pathetic self-inflicted catastrophe. It could be argued we are already suffering thus.
I am not a utopian. I don’t know how such a condition of human nature as I describe can be achieved, if it’s even possible. I don’t know how a society evolving out of such a humanity would be organized. I don’t know what its schools, medical centers, marketplaces, or living spaces would look like.
In some ways we are on the right track here and there. Lawyers and conflict resolvers are advocating and bringing to existence practices of restorative justice to replace our carceral system of retribution. Persecuted minorities continue to demand equality in legal terms, workplaces, and casual social interactions. The major questions that remain about this movement are:
Is it making progress fast enough to save us from the oncoming catastrophe?
Is it going in the right direction or veering off incorrigibly into self-destructive infighting and narcissistic, abrasive liaisons with the less-than-progressive part of the world?
Who is part of the problem and who part of the solution? Without wearing jerseys or going shirts and skins or Crips and Bloods, how can we tell, and who has the right to decide?
Is it even a movement at all?
The Old Farmer’s Almanac insists we are transitioning from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. But the transition from hunter-gatherer-low-impact-farming-seasonally-nomadic societies to a civilization of urban spaces with centralized authority was, according to common wisdom, made possible by the advent of sedentary agriculture. So, whatever the Old Farmer’s Almanac might assert, if you think about how unfair wealth accumulation began, it was old farmers who got us into this mess in the first place. So it will have to be a new type of person to dig us out of it.
The New Nonfarmers Almanac will lead us.
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