Individualism: The Story of Our Demise
Echo and Narcissus, John William Waterhouse, 1903.
“IT IS WORSE, MUCH WORSE, THAN YOU THINK. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all...”
This is the opening sentence of The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. Your extinction is imminent. And no, it won’t be an asteroid or the dying of the sun that ends your sojourn around the sun.
It will be mine, yours – every human’s doing. It will be in the near future, within 60-100 years. But especially man’s doing, the richest 10% in the global north actually. Read 10% richest as white males. It will be entirely our doing and yet these same rich white men are doing little or nothing to change course. Our extinction is coming, and it isn’t going to be a merry-go-round. The climate crisis will punish us with all the ferocity with which we have fed it. And we have fed it a hell of lot. In the last three decades we have emitted more carbon into the biosphere than in all of human history before that.
The consequences? Well, they are well known and have been for a while already, since the 1970’s, believe it or not? I could bore you with the details but you would switch off because “you’ve heard it all before.” You are numb to the glum news of climate change. You feel that you cannot change the world because you are only one person.
It’s true that you are one person, an individual. And here is where I think part of the problem is. We have been made to believe in the Global North the lie that our lives are outside of nature, removed by double glazed windows and the screens of our phones from the whole. The world is out there and I am in here. I am all that matters. We have been made to believe that we are somehow outside of the laws of nature and that our individual needs matter most, above the health of the earth itself. Did I just write that? Yes, I did. Like gods? Yes, like gods, we feel we are beyond the reach of the climate change we have orchestrated and authored into future time. We believe our choices are beyond scrutiny because we feel access to our individual freedoms is an inalienable right.
It feels like the story of Narcissus, doesn’t it? He loved himself so much he drowned in his own reflection. I feel that we have entered the end game and we will all happily drown in our own reflections.
I don’t like what I see in the reflection.
It will be very inconvenient, our extinction. Leading on from last week’s post, on the one hand, I think we have to embrace inconvenience to protect the planet and our very existence from ourselves, and on the other, it’s about a collective, collaborative, and non-individualistic response to the crisis. Something which the Global North is ill equipped to do. Why is this so? Well, it is ill-equipped to think of itself as a whole because, through Capitalism, it has come to understand that the needs of the individual are more important than the needs of the whole - read planet. This is a very dangerous point of view given our current circumstance. In a sense it is not a natural view and has never been natural but has been evoked and provoked by the history of capitalism.
How did we get here, to this place of radical individualism and climate breakdown? Individualism is a symptom of the disease. The disease being capitalism and its need for constant growth. This vehicle is elitist, never forget that. It was created by Lords who couldn’t share any part of the vast pie of natural resources with peasants. The Lords wanted it all for themselves, very much like we see today happening. Remember 40% of the world’s wealth is in the hands of 1% of the population. Let that sink in.
To be honest, we got here, and this is not to try and make you feel any better, not by your or my doing. But we are perpetuating the breakdown of the earth. We are responsible for what is happening now.
It started with something called enclosure in the twelfth century in England. Enclosure was the cruel appropriation of common land and unfair practice of depriving commoners of their rights of access and privilege to those said common grounds. It unlawfully took away access to common land. Rent was charged on the enclosed land and peasants were now pitted against each other to produce the best yields from the land allotted to them or lose the right to work the land. Lords found that this doubled and tripled production yield. In addition, the large amounts of food produced on the appropriated land was kept from the peasants, creating what we today call artificial scarcity. There was enough to go around, by near poverty produced the best results.
Once there was no land left to appropriate in England, the British Empire cast its net and system wider – colonialism and the slave trade being perfect vehicles to extract maximum value with minimum cost to British life locally. By the way, The British Empire has never internalized the costs of its colonialist extraction and slavery. It has not paid one cent out in retribution to those countries and peoples affected. A pathetic “sorry” from the Crown is not enough, never ever.
When Both of those horrors of injustice were outlawed, capitalism had to find new “markets”.
Luckily, it found it in the Industrial revolution and the two wars to really kick start things. Christmas and war have always been good for business. Peasants then, and workers now, are pitted against each other to produce more for less in the interest of capital growth. The old adage of conquer and divide comes to mind. Capitalism and its brokers have done a great job in doing both.
Let me be clear. Injustice is the engine purring underneath the hood of capitalism. It has tried to look beautiful with its bright, dynamic and colourful paint. But that is just an image, a coverup sold by Lords and Ladies and marketing firms. The world, climate and people have suffered to get us to where we are today.
Becoming wage slaves has separated us from the land, the planet and each other. It has divested us from responsibility through proxy. We have no idea how things are made or what damage that making has on the earth because, by proxy, we hand over that responsibility with the money we pay for it. The pain and torture of the Turkey on the Christmas table is absent when we hand over the money for it in the shops. It does not interest us how it got to the shop shelf. The taste is all that counts. By proxy we let the global corporations “administer” the world and its resources for us. Isn’t it ironic that Capitalism has finally got its cake and eaten it. Capitalism has wage slaves who are enslaved to buying its mostly useless products. That’s what we call win-win. Individualism is a symptom of the disease.
Collaboration, breaking open the enclosed commons and non-individualism or anti-individualism is the way forward. A way to heal the world from our current predicament. Thinking of others before ourself should be the mantra. Actually, thinking of the planet before ourselves is more specific.
The planet belongs to everybody, not to an elite few who see it as property and worthy only of extraction and exploitation.
If individual freedom is the high watermark of our modern civilization, it will also be our downfall. The thing that will damn us to the climate hell we are shortly going to face. Believing that your choices are sacred, not to be challenged and that you are free to do and buy what you want is the rust that is eroding our planet. Individual freedom is the reflection in which we, like Narcissus, will drown. The selfishness with which the richest people in the world walk around with is disgusting and exhausting, not only for them but for the planet. We are exhausting the planet at a rate that will leave nothing untouched.
Choose NOT to satisfy your needs and realise that you are free because the air you breathe is still breathable.
