Humans are indeed responsible for destroying habitats and ecosystems in the name of economic development and progress. Humans have certainly become geomorphic agents, radically transforming the landscape, moving gigantic amounts of soil and rock, altering the course of rivers, draining swamps, etc. That is all true but attributing the responsibility to human supremacy and declaring the modern times the Anthropocene Epoch is very limiting and misleading.
Human supremacy is not a default feature of the human condition. Being influenceable by manipulative narratives is a factual default feature of the human condition, and civilization, in many respects, has been built upon a web of lies, violence, and rewarding the wrong behaviors (the reason why the State centralizes the means of coercion) allowing dysfunctional systems to be controlled by a tiny minority.
Slaves and servants built temples, palaces, aqueducts, bridges, and routes. Imperialism, colonialism, and class-based societies are products of the Machiavellian minds of megalomaniacal, bloodthirsty psychopaths attracted by power and the desire for conquest, glory, and immortalization. Civilization developed on inequity, exploitation, and disregard for the lives of those who were categorized as inferior.
The crimes committed by imperialism and colonialism in the name of civilization are no less horrendous than the crimes attributed to barbaric peoples. The playbook is similar: when a community, tribe, people, or nation allows itself to be deceived by a political, religious "leader," savior, etc., once power is consolidated, the population can be drawn into all types of criminal adventures in the name of noble objectives. Opponents and dissenters are treated in a way to be an example for others, those who serve the leader are rewarded according to the relevance of the service provided, and the rest is history.
Centuries of subjugation culture made the idea of turning human beings into human beasts acceptable.
The duty of the dominated classes is to satisfy the whims, eccentricities and perversions of the dominant classes, to serve and venerate them. What's interesting is how easily we swallow the hope bait and dream about possibly climbing the social ladder to escape our servile condition rather than focusing on ending the vicious cycle.
Structural violence is often not seen as violence; it's just part of the reality we're used to. No matter how dysfunctional a society is, most citizens will adapt to the conditions imposed on them by the need to survive, and many do not even see anything wrong with how they are forced to live.
As far as historical memory allows us to return, the ruling classes squandered vast sums of money on ostentatious luxury, extravagance and sumptuousness. The feeling of absolute supremacy and unlimited impunity has allowed despots, emperors, kings, dictators and others to commit the most heinous crimes as an inherent right to the "responsibility" of ruling inferiors.
The history of supremacist ideology is indelibly linked to the process of legitimizing exclusive rights and privileges monopolized in an individual, family, organized group, government, etc., intending to control resources, land, people, animals, forests, rivers, in short, everything that could be a source of value and accumulation of wealth.
Techniques have evolved, but the modus operandi has remained. The supremacy of capital is increasingly prevalent in the political economy.
The financialization of the economy (financial capitalism, rentier economy), ecosystem services and even the genetic code of living beings is targeted at privatizing the rights to the code of life itself.
The supremacy of capital dictates the rules that regulate and condition human behavior as producers and consumers. As socioeconomic subjects, the need to survive forces people to accept jobs or resort to survival strategies regardless of their social utility and the unnecessary use of resources and environmental degradation caused.
Financial neocolonialism uses a set of financial and legal instruments to perpetuate control over the economies of developing countries.
Resources that could be used to develop social and ecological economies under the control of participatory democracy and international organizations with the mandate to equalize bilateral and multilateral relations and regulate trade flows as a means of avoiding waste of resources, pollution, and environmental degradation, are used in geostrategic machinations by governments that continue to operate in the neocolonialist imperialist mindset under the dictates of the supremacy of capital.
Megalomaniac psychopaths built temples and palaces, or any other kind of buildings in a vain attempt to immortalize themselves. We continue to idolize these characters as if they were the pinnacle of humanity, perpetuating the cult of narcissists with delusions of grandiosity.
Human supremacy does not emerge as an isolated phenomenon; it develops from feelings of superiority and entitlement supported ideologically and culturally and codified as property rights in the form of legal codes.
Human supremacy is not inherent to the human condition it arises as a response to cultural-ideological conditioning in societies that develop and institute proprietary rights imposed by the State's centralized means of coercion.
The problem predates Capitalism and stems from models of organizing society into classes and castes to frame each group's role in a vertical hierarchy.
The value added by economic activity is channeled upwards and accumulated by a minority protected by the coercive power of the State.
Since the beginning of what we call civilization, elites have cultivated superfluous consumption, displaying conspicuous luxuries legitimized by class exceptionalism, such as rights granted by God, merit, inheritance, or others codified in Law as inalienable rights.
The concept of private property codified in Law in the form of proprietary rights draws an indelible dividing line between the owning class and the resources (including human resources) as an inferior category of beings and materials with the potential to be extracted, transformed, exploited, destroyed and discarded at the disposal of the property class.
The concept of supremacy is an ideological creation with a moral spin to justify it. The sense of supremacy does not arise spontaneously; it requires a favorable political-economic and sociocultural environment to disseminate political-ideological narratives capable of generating or taking advantage of social, racial, ethnocultural and religious cleavages favorable to the acceptance and growth of supremacist ideologies used as tools of conquest or reinforcement of power and social control.
The accumulation of wealth through the exploitation of human labor and the extraction of natural resources long predates Capitalism. The development of social systems based on vertically structured classes and castes could never have been consolidated without resorting to lies, manipulation, and social engineering to justify the socioeconomic and cultural division into lower and upper classes, lords and servants, masters and slaves.
Then, as now, despite the abysmal difference in access to information, the public is deceived by demagoguery and propaganda, and modern perception management techniques to manufacture consent have reached an almost unbreakable level of sophistication.
Propaganda campaigns are tough to deconstruct due to the massive asymmetry between the academic-technoscientific and ideological-cultural means accessible to the general public compared to the ones available to the PR industrial complex and mass media whose services are required by governments, oligarchs, plutocrats and the entire chain of power that depends on weapons of mass deception as one of the pillars to maintain power and control society.
Sooner or later, no matter how sophisticated it may be, propaganda ends up being unmasked, but the public at large repeatedly falls into similar traps, proving that propaganda works and that collective memory is short-lived.
In a culture of disconnection, consumption and discard, we cannot create the antigens against the systemic lies that are sold to us repeatedly, wrapped in a more convincing package.
When the propaganda of the past is finally unmasked, new campaigns are already underway, and many of those who realize that they have been deceived are already being deceived again because they continue to believe in the current system or are under the hypnotic influence of right-wing populism that promises to cleanse the State and restore a lost imaginary immaculate order.
The State is demonized as guilty of everything that goes wrong. But those who campaign against the State know that they need it to impose the freedom they claim to defend because the State is still the entity that monopolizes the means of coercion.
A complex society cannot exist without an organized State; The fundamental question to ask is who benefits from how the State is organized.
The State has the power to guarantee equality before the Law; if the Law is applied asymmetrically, it is our duty to ask why and demand change.
What forces, entities, organizations and institutions have the power to influence, interfere and modify the way State institutions are organized and function? Cui bono?
State Institutions are manipulated by interests that diverge from the public interest. The three pillars of power, administrative, legislative, and judicial, are supposed to function independently, as stipulated in the fundamental Law. Society has to bear the burden caused by conflicts of interest and corruption; why are we so powerless to undo the systemic dysfunctions besides placing our faith in far-right populist charlatans?
The separation of powers can be linked by bridges, tunnels, or optical fiber, through which circulates the many shades of capital. The power of capital governs the so-called democratic regimes through institutions that are supposed to defend the public interest and the collective good.
The concept of private property codified in Law as property rights erects a dividing fence between public and private space. The public sphere is being absorbed by the private sphere on the assumption of the efficiency of private management. Public spaces, institutions, and services are being predated by private capital.
A State managed in the name of national and transnational private interests is not a sovereign State; it is a State hijacked by private capital, and the public institutions become incapable of defending the public interest and the common good.
Private capital scans the world through the lens of profit, in which everything appears as resources to plunder and commodify.
The State has known different formats: city, principality, county, nation, republic and empire.
The State can be governed by kings, emperors, feudal lords, despots, dictators, or elected governments under the rule of Law with the division of powers to ensure that the Law is applied equitably. So, how can a shrunken State, due to the privatization of everything that has previously been collective property, defend the public interest?
Even if we accept at face value that the State is a lousy manager, most of the deficiencies are correctable, but there is no political will for improvements because the intention is to privatize everything that is profitable, or as happens with public-private partnerships, the losses are public and profits and rents are private.
Who benefits from the weakening of the State? The State needs to be democratized; it does not need to be liberalized, much less privatized. We have a deficient State because we have a State suffering from a democratic deficit.
I do not advocate that the State cease to be controlled by private interests to become controlled by unaccountable bureaucrats and technocrats, as is the case with the current EU; with the aggravating factor that institutions such as the European Commission and the ECB (it is ridiculous to believe in its independence) were designed to serve the private interests of the Western plutoligarchy.
The State, then as today, is controlled directly or indirectly by those who have enough wealth to buy favors, and the ultimate favor is to use the State's power to defend and reinforce the interests of the private elites.
A system based on capital accumulation is irreformable. All efforts to humanize Capitalism are fruitless because Capitalism is a dehumanization machine completely uninterested in rewarding collective well-being. Capitalism flourishes with division and social isolation, generating artificial scarcity and imposing austerity, privatizing public services, etc. Property rights do not create community; they raise barriers based on social status, privileges and entitlements.
In theory, all citizens can be property owners. A large part of the population ends up owning some sort of hard assets, such as houses, cars and land. However, assuming that a 30-year mortgage contract is equivalent to owning an asset is incorrect; what the citizen, family, or company owns is a liability in the form of debt.
Nowadays, most people believe that private property is an inalienable right that no one should be deprived of.
In November 2016, the WEF predicted that by 2030, "You will own nothing and you will be happy." This statement raised eyebrows among many people. Critics of the WEF claim that the idea of imposing CBDCs, digital identity cards and the introduction of social points aims to justify the confiscation of goods and properties such as cars, houses and land, or at the very least, difficult their acquisition. This is what they call the "sharing" economy. These critics also claim that the UBI will be used as justification to facilitate the abolition of cash.
Richard Werner (economist) often mentions that we have been using digital money (BDC) for a long time; the difference is that CBDCs will be controlled by Central Banks. The risks of centralized control already exist, with or without CBDCs, which will ultimately be implemented without resistance from the public at large.
Civil society should focus, including the most radical critics of organizations and institutions such as the CBs or the WEF, on creating democratic movements and organizations with the aim of laying the foundations for a new paradigm of social and ecological political economy.
For efficiency reasons, we can elect rulers to represent us, but the basis of the political system has to be participatory democracy; politics, economy and society need to be democratized. Participatory democracy is a right and a duty, political apathy is the ideal stance for us to be governed by mediocre people and subject ourselves to austerity policies and the worsening of social inequality.
Political agency can never be exercised adequately under the paradigm of representative democracy. The so-called liberal democracies are responsible for creating the chronic democratic deficit that Western societies suffer from. Neoliberalism (liberalism on steroids) accelerated the process of degradation of the social fabric to the point of making the situation intolerable, paving the way to fascism.
The public at large has two choices, either gets organized to create alternatives, or it is condemned to live under the shackles of a techno-fascist regime because the current system has no other solution on the table to remain functional.
Society should be open to discussing whether private property is essential for a functioning society. I am not convinced that private property should be abolished, but I am deeply convinced that a maximum ceiling should be imposed on the acquisition and control of tangible assets such as agricultural land and real estate. When the gap between the haves and have-nots grows to the point of nullifying the democratic functioning of society, private property, in addition to being used to encourage parasitic rent-seeking, creates a permanent class of indigents.
Just a few decades ago, despite all the contradictions of the capitalist system, social mobility, which is currently a mirage, was a realistic possibility for many (mostly white) citizens of Western societies.
Meanwhile, the capitalist class discovered new ways to extract and generate value by creating innovative financial instruments. The liberalization and deregulation of financial markets and the free movement of capital, entering and leaving countries without any sovereign control, have enriched individuals, families and well-connected companies nationally and globally.
Politics has become the (enabler) local agent (national) of globalized capital. The privatization of public assets, public-private partnership agreements, land concessions for prospection and extraction of oil, minerals and other purposes, forests to be used as carbon sinks, etc.
All of these investments require a legal framework that provides guarantees to investors. This is where political and judicial powers come in, functioning as agents of the global capital, at least when the benefits of these investments are never reflected in the improvement of the collective good or the defense of the public interest but rather cause environmental degradation, pollution of waterways, destruction of ecosystems, and the forced relocation of people and animals to advance the agendas of transnational investors, the capital speaks above the dignity of life and environmental integrity.
All this happens because the market demands the raw materials to produce the goods, products, and devices that everyone wants. If there is too much demand, it is supposedly because of overpopulation. This is a misled reasoning because if it were not for the search for profit and the asymmetrical power between the globalized capital and the developing countries with economic and financial problems caused by the same actors that give with one hand and take with the other, we would have a much different situation.
Real wealth in the form of natural resources and virtual wealth (interest and debt payments, currency devaluation, etc.) leave the global South at a much greater rate than the money coming in the form of "aid." If the global financial and banking system and development agencies had been designed to promote the real development of the economies of sovereign countries in the Global South, the international economy would long ago be more balanced and fair without having to depend on economic growth to feed the poor.
Productivism, capitalist or socialist, is a formula for disaster. Development does not have to mean consuming more but rather consuming better. What we need is a paradigm shift to end the problem of ecological overshoot.
It is ethically reprehensible to assume that we have the right to consume what we want, when we want, without considering the consequences of our actions. This is the commodification of the concept of freedom that gradually dehumanizes us because we learn to see everything as objects, products and things at our disposal 24/7.
It is overexploitation that causes social underdevelopment and inequality.
What is needed is to produce goods with quality and durability that satisfy people's needs. A system that measures the quality of life based on the quantity of goods and services consumed should not be taken seriously, at least because everything we consume has to come from somewhere; it does not magically appear on supermarket shelves.
The poor, that is, those who are deprived of the means to live; let me remind you that the majority of the poor work, and yet they are still unable to satisfy some basic needs such as access to housing or health services; we all know that in most cases this does not happen due to a lack of housing or health services. Besides, why do we need luxury houses, to show what and impress whom?
A society that measures well-being through quantitative methods expects people to buy what they do not need with money they do not have; that is, economic growth = debt. No new debt, no economic growth; if you dig deep and wide enough, you will find where the problem comes from and who's to blame. Not the poor I assure you.
It was the capital in the web of life that generated what is called the Anthropocene epoch. The age of gold and silver (and everything else that is part of our daily lives today) of European imperialism, the age of discovery as I was taught at school. This corresponded to the most tragic disruption caused by the pursuit of profit and accumulation of capital on all continents and marked the beginning of the Capitalocene Age, the time of the supremacy of capital, which some call the first wave of globalization.
I am not going to defend the theory of the noble savage corrupted by civilization, but rather to remember the history of cultural and ethnic genocide due to the triumph of dehumanization caused by the search for profit and the consequent commodification of everything that can be transformed into capital.
This new world order has brought us to the reality we know today, which some want to paint as the era of human supremacy, which, at the very least, I find to be of poor taste. Once again, I remind you that it is the supremacy of capital that commands life, and although population growth takes place in poorer continents, this does not mean that we can remove the capital variable from the equation.
We can and should have an adult conversation about the problem of overpopulation; there is no reason for it to be taboo. But it only makes sense to have this discussion in the context of the Capitalocene; either we are being cynical, deluded, or both, or worse still, we are campaigning on behalf of neo-Malthusians and eugenicists who will try to implement measures to reduce the population on the assumption of the need to save civilization. To save what's left of the planet so that the supremacist class, which I have no doubt will correspond to the elites and their acolytes, can continue the human or post-human adventure on the planet and perhaps beyond.
The world of politics and the world of business are the two faces of neoliberal Capitalism. The accumulation of capital and tangible goods and properties at the top of the social pyramid corresponds proportionally to the destruction of the social fabric; some people call this phenomenon trickle-down economics.
The legislative, executive, and judicial powers were literally hijacked by capital. The supposed separation of powers is pure fiction because it is the power of capital that dictates the rules of the game. I highly recommend reading the book The Capital Code: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691178974/the-code-of-capital. While society is torn apart and social and labor rights are rolled back, wealth continues accumulating at the top of the social pyramid.
The capitalist class only opens its purse when it feels the danger getting too close, but as soon as the fear dissipates, it begins the effort to reverse it back again. The capitalist class does not tolerate anything beyond its control. Public spaces and services and the collective good represent the antithesis of freedom, unbridled greed and the privatization of everything that can generate value for a private owner, with a sign saying no trespassing is the highest form of freedom.
In theory, all citizens are equal before the Law, but in practice, the legal system is framed to defend the interests of capital and property rights. Pretending that the judicial system of liberal capitalist regimes, because the people have free and democratic elections, is independent is hilarious. The rights and privileges of the dominant classes will always be ahead of the rights of those who make up the base of the social pyramid for a simple reason, capital has access to circles of power, and whoever controls capital has the power to influence not only how the Law is applied but how it is shaped.
The system is set up to ensure its control by the ruling class. There is some flexibility regarding the admission of new members; in the same way, members who become a burden or a public embarrassment end up being eliminated because what matters is maintaining the cohesion of the supremacy of capital and private property by the plutoligarchy.
The State, in the form of a principality, city-state, or nation-state, governed by a lord with absolute power, powerful bankers, or elected governments, always ends up controlled by the plutoligarchy.
The power of capital requires to be backed by military power. Military forces should be seen as the pinnacle of power, but due to its immaterial nature, the supremacy of capital always ends up coming to the top.
For some, capital is the indispensable tool for acquiring influence and power; for others, it is not power that motivates them but wealth. In any case, capital is the indispensable fuel.
The power and influence of the FIRE sector and asset management companies grows as the power of the State decreases.
However, the power of the State only recedes in areas essential to the proper functioning of society, such as universal public services, the protection of labor rights, and the maintenance and construction of essential infrastructures such as roads, ports, airports, energy, water, sewers, etc. Concerning police forces and, more specifically, the so-called special forces, increasingly militarized and equipped with sophisticated weapons to control crowds. The repressive power of the State is being reinforced by supposedly democratic governments to intimidate and render the public at large powerless.
Laws are written by law firms with interests in the world of financial markets and corporate conglomerates. The supremacy of capital has never been more evident, and yet many of us continue to look at individual behavior as the source of problems as if each of us lived in a political, social, and ideological-cultural vacuum.
The State, then as today, is controlled directly or indirectly by those who have enough wealth to buy favors. The favor is the power to use State institutions to defend and reinforce private interests. Whose private interests? Not mine.
The capitalist system is unreformable, neither by gradualism nor incrementalism, but rather by system change.
After the Second World War, the European capitalist class realized it had to adopt a mixed economic system, with a strong public sector and generous labor and social rights. This strategy was based on the real threat that left-wing parties (communists and socialists) with strong popular support posed to the status quo.
Thus, implementing social policies, universal public services, and government control of vital infrastructure and industries allowed social democratic parties to restrain left-wing parties from taking power. Europeans owe the Soviet Union the model of mixed economy (social democracy) that has guaranteed them a good standard of living and universal public services for quite a few decades.
But Capitalism is like rust; it never sleeps. Neoliberal ideology declared a fierce war on the public sector and managed to impose itself as the dominant economic theology. Ideas have consequences, and the TINA dogma has been a disastrous idea for the real economy and society, and there is still no light at the end of the tunnel.
As for the end of history proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama, most of us have realized that history is not dead, yet humanity is engaged in collective participatory annihilation.
The capitalist class always thinks of ways to reverse the policies hindering their movements. Free market theology does not aim to free the world from the shackles of misery but to give unlimited freedom to savage Capitalism. Capitalism dehumanizes people, not necessarily in the sense that all rich people are sociopaths, but because no one likes to lose what they have "earned." Subconscious worries about not being able to maintain the assets, properties, homes, and social status we have taken for granted force us to continue accumulating as the only way to build the material security we all aspire to in a system based on artificial scarcity and uncertainty.
Billion-dollar philanthropy could bring positive change to millions of people and communities worldwide, but most of these projects have ulterior motives. Humanitarian support does not automatically build autonomous communities, but it can effectively promote camouflaged agendas that have little to do with philanthropy.
Bringing people into the world of commodification does not make them freer but rather more dependent. Commodification and monetization pave the way for dehumanization because it destroys the bridges that connect people to the origins of what they consume.
Introducing new products, goods and services generates new habits that will cause behavioral changes in how people interact. Some groups may be empowered, but the benefits are distributed asymmetrically and in the absence of democratic and legal mechanisms to function as social equalizers, the community does not become more cohesive, but somewhat more dysfunctional and unfair.
Disconnecting people from the destruction wreaked on human communities, ecosystems and habitats vital for the survival of thousands of species is what Capitalism in the web of life does; the focus on profit and the accumulation of wealth ends up making everything else inconveniences to be ignored.
Capitalism does not aspire to generate collective well-being but rather to divide, exploit and create artificial scarcity, inequality and injustice that only benefits a minority. Capitalism depends on state support to survive. It is the State that saves Capitalism from its excesses with legal, political, military, and financial protection.
Globalized financial Capitalism is supported by legal rights that place the rights of capital above national sovereignty and the dignity of life. Everyone who benefits from the financial markets or is associated with the activities of financial Capitalism is complicit in what, in my opinion, is the materialization of evil on Earth.
The capital channeled into speculation, securitization, collateralization and other Machiavellian financial instruments has the sole purpose of serving the class of rentier parasites. This parasitic subsystem of the real economy, society and nature must be banished if we want to recover or build a humanized, social and ecological society.
In class-based societies, feelings of superiority and entitlement are a constant. The snobbery disdain that many middle-class people have for their "lower" class fellow citizens should make us wonder how easy it is to normalize feelings of class superiority to justify stigma, ostracism, and social inequality.
The feeling of superiority is not congenital; it is acquired, developed, or planted in people by society through structural cultural-ideological narratives. Thus, citizens who speak the same language and share the same culture and ethnic origin are subjugated, exploited and seen as inferior by a system that attributes value to citizens based on the place they occupy or the role they play, without the need for a direct relationship between the social importance of the role and the relevance given to it.
Humans have become experts in the art of denialism and cognitive dissonance and rationalize with relative ease that they treat their fellow humans fairly.
For someone to feel superior, it is necessary for someone to be placed in an inferior position, and for society to be complacent with this fact.
Human beings have the absurd (utterly senseless) ability to rationalize and justify everything, but only social validation, family, group, organization, corporation, institution, and government can legitimize wrong and harmful behaviors. Feelings of shame and guilt, if used as a means to serve the common good, are useful tools to correct harmful attitudes, habits and behaviors.
Classist and racist supremacy or any other manifestation of feelings or sense of superiority needs social validation, legal framework, and moral justification to grow to the point of becoming a social problem in the form of inferiorization, dehumanization and demonization of minorities or target groups.
We perceive the world around us as something to be conquered, appropriated and exploited to exhaustion, motivated by whim, greed, or necessity. It is the feeling of entitlement that justifies the division of reality into two distinct sides: property rights on one side and resources on the other. Humans, animals, rivers, forests, genetic material and everything else magically acquire the category of (implicit inferiority) things to be extracted, plundered, transformed into products and/or converted into capital.
Those who develop feelings of equality and a sense of justice and cultivate them consciously do not see the world through lenses that legitimize manipulation, domination, destruction, punishment, massacre and ownership as part of healthy behavior.
Obviously, we have to use raw materials, and eating meat is not a crime. We don't need to convert to vegetarianism to become good people. But we have the obligation to treat all living beings with respect, consume in moderation and use the raw materials strictly necessary to have a modest level of comfort and well-being. Luxury and excess always require sacrifice and destruction (unnecessary suffering); it's not a zero-sum game.
There is a problem: we live in a dissociative mode caused by the desensitization generated by the commodification of life. We consume meat without associating the act with a living being that had to be sacrificed, nor with the way it was treated while alive. This attitude extends to most of the goods, products, and services that are bought and consumed. This is an acquired mentality caused by a system of political economy that rewards desensitization and dissociation, framed ideologically and culturally.
Submission to the capitalist system forces people to adopt harmful behaviors motivated by the mere need to survive, based on dog-eat-dog politics.
The supremacy of capital and private property is the engine of the wealth reproduction system controlled by a minority and the primary fuel of feelings of class superiority and entitlement.
Economic growth differs from economic development and is far from equating to human development. The economic activities essential to satisfy the needs of the population, that is, economic development must be measured by the quality of the goods and services provided and not by the wealth created because it is not capital that feeds, clothes, shelters, teaches and cares for people, it is people and raw materials that do it.
Capital, as a source of value protected by proprietary rights that can be accumulated and reinvested to generate more capital and acquire assets, properties, or whatever, is a system that distorts the objective of the economy and erodes the sense of interdependence, which is what the real economy is, a system of interdependent activities to meet the needs of society and ensure collective well-being.
The feeling of ownership sets precedents for the development of feelings of supremacy and absolute power over everything that has the potential to be exploited or financialized. This is only possible with centralized coercion of the State to impose order and enforce the Law.
Those whose favorite hobby is demonizing the State, anarcho-capitalists, market fundamentalists and libertarians, pretend not to realize that complex societies cannot survive without the State; the alternative would be militias and private armies to defend the interests of oligarchs and plutocrats. What is needed is to democratize the State instead of pushing it towards fascism.
The Anthropocene Epoch is described as the age of human supremacy. Some see the 8 billion humans who inhabit planet Earth as an overpopulation problem because they consider that we have already far exceeded the planet's capacity to regenerate.
Of course, the increase in population has negative impacts on the environment, but the heart of the problem is that human societies have technological means and engineering knowledge at their disposal, with the power to change the Earth's morphology at an unprecedented speed. It is not faith that moves mountains but the pursuit of profit with the help of technology. Everything revolves around the search for profit and dependence on wages to survive in a capitalist-dominated system.
Human ingenuity has long been hijacked by capital and power. Creativity is a natural component of the human condition, but as social beings, the sociocultural environment shapes our innate abilities. Education is a form of indoctrination within an ideological-cultural framework to model the perception of reality within parameters determined by the dominant narratives.
The ease with which we are influenced, seduced, or tricked into accepting the unacceptable is mind-blowing. A single sociopath, psychopath, or opportunist suffering from grandiose delusions may develop a solitary strategy or infiltrate a group, organization, corporation, institution, or government and form alliances to bring together the material means and political power and resort to the propaganda to hypnotize a community, nation or block of countries to support operations that should never happen, as is the case of most imperialist murderous conquests.
Demagoguery hypnotizes crowds. Demagogue leaders often act as if they were heavenly messengers entrusted with the mission of saving civilization from decay and recovering the lost pride of a particular race, group, culture, or social class.
The ability to impress others through fictional narratives full of ideas of liberation, happiness, immortality, or others justifies the need to make sacrifices in the present to enjoy a better future reward, eventually in the post-mortem. For example, convincing fellow citizens of the need to wage war against a manufactured evil and duly wrapping the operation in a moral duty banner aggrandizing the aggressor in his role as redeemer.
Ideas have consequences, and when turned into systems of power, they can have disastrous consequences. Idolizing, following, and obeying those who present themselves as saviors, restorers of order and lost morality or introduce themselves as having been entrusted with a noble mission of redeeming humanity by an immaterial entity, independently of the origin, style, or methods used, the result is always disastrous for the collective good.
What is a State?
A State is an independent and sovereign political-legal body that exercises control over a specific territory delimited by borders and internationally recognized by other States.
The state bureaucracy guarantees the functioning of state institutions. The State controls (or should) the sovereign currency (issues the currency and collects taxes). In short, the State includes the country, the nation, and the institutions of power: legislative, executive, and judicial.
The State model is determined by the political system in power (authoritarian, totalitarian, democratic). The State can also be captured by special interests, as in cases where it is controlled by an oligarchy, plutocracy, or transnational megacorporations and global financiers in the form of economic-financial neocolonialism.
The Nation-State and the Federal State are the most common forms of State, with an official language (there are exceptions) and the fundamental Law known as the Constitution, the supreme Law to which the country's legal codes must refer. The State centralizes and controls the coercive means of enforcing the Law and maintaining order.
Why doesn't the State promote the common good?
In class-based societies, the structural institutions of the State are designed to protect class privileges and property rights. The State is the cumulative result of dominant groups' ability to influence how it is organized.
In the past, I also believed that the State was the problem. No, I never bought into the Thatcher/Reagen (government is not the solution; government is the problem). I was genuinely convinced of the feasibility of anarchism, but after a few decades, it seems to me extremely difficult to maintain a functional society in the absence of some form of State structure.
A complex society cannot be managed based on the assumption of goodwill and voluntary cooperation of all its members. In simple societies, it works, but in complex societies, it doesn't. It is not sensible to expect the majority of citizens to be able to reach an agreement on everything that is important for the proper functioning of society. However, state institutions under democratic control have the capacity to defend the public interest and promote the collective good, which would be impossible to achieve under a libertarian regime.
Individual freedom is a non-negotiable value, but free market advocates demand unrestricted freedom to get rich while believing they have no duty of reciprocity to society. Free market advocates detest the State but expect the state apparatus to defend private property and private accumulated wealth. Those who defend the abolition of the State need to realize that they are supporting an unviable model of society. The motto that needs to be demanded: the State does not need to be eliminated, it needs to be democratized.
Humans' social "failure" is to listen to those who will have no qualms about using them as cannon fodder.
A complex society hierarchically stratified into multiple layers of structural submission under the control of private capital and the mantra of the pursuit of profit is responsible for a worldview that idolizes enrichment as the most logical existential purpose.
It is evident that class society is a human creation, but what leads human communities to accept this form of sociopathic organization?
The Anthropocene is a myopic concept, focused on "blaming" the human condition instead of highlighting how human behavior is conditioned by a multiplicity of factors that have nothing to do with the essence of the human condition but instead with the type of society and system of political economy hijacked by vested interests.
Throughout history, a small percentage of humans with opportunistic and unscrupulous sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies have manufactured misleading narratives to convince the public at large to support them. The general public is led to confuse the interests of a minority at the top of the social pyramid with the public interest and the common good and generally only realizes this too late.
A democratic culture should focus on developing a set of intellectual tools capable of dismantling the propaganda that induces millions of humans to vote, trust, idolize, and follow individuals, groups, organizations, parties, celebrities, etc., whose main objective is to use them as disposable pawns.
A minority develops and institutes ways of preying on the society they belong to by creating legal mechanisms to shield private property and wealth accumulation. Economic entrepreneurship under the capitalist banner transforms everything into commodities. At the same time, the survival of the majority demands submission to an economic system in which the search for profit legitimizes all types of abuses.
Human ingenuity is placed mainly at the service of development and the creation of superfluous products and services because the dominant economic system demands it. The capitalist system grows based on public and private debt. The general public needs to be made aware that most money is created through debt. Banks are the magical creators of money. When citizens, families, and businesses ask for a "loan," the customer's account is credited with the agreed sum, and the newly created money is available to become part of the economy.
The bank uses double accounting entries; the second is where the monthly installments are recorded, and the gradual reduction of the debt is how the money is destroyed. When public and private debt decreases, economic activity contracts.
The general public believes in the fallacious theory that banks work as intermediaries; that is, they lend depositors money, but that is not how the system works.
Governments take on debt by issuing treasury bonds to which primary dealers (companies that buy treasury bonds directly from governments to resell them to third parties, thus acting as market makers for public bonds) have privileged access.
Where do the billions and trillions used in bailouts and to finance imperialist wars come from? Analyzing the numbers makes it easy to verify that the money did not exist and was created out of thin air.
Central Banks create liquidity for the banking system by accepting junk assets to clean up the system. Central banks create reserves, a type of money that does not circulate in the economy but functions as bank reserves for the banking system.
Commercial banks are primarily responsible for creating new money that enters the economy, playing the crucial role of allocating financial resources to the real economy.
Access to credit can be influenced by political measures prioritizing the sectors to be supported, but private banking focuses on the most profitable sectors, even by taking avoidable risks. It is no coincidence that the real estate sector has been at the top of preferences, encouraging speculation and creating the so-called housing bubbles.
The decline of the real economy in favor of the financialized economy is not the result of chance, it was a conscious choice to enrich the FIRE sector, a form of feudal-type rentier capitalism.
Humans do not make choices in a social vacuum. Our choices are not as free as many think; a varying degree of submission to a multiplicity of sociocultural conventions is implicit in the subconscious decision-making process.
The consumer society does not aim to satisfy basic needs but rather to create artificial consumption habits, exploring fictitious needs and generating constant dissatisfaction to encourage new forms of dependence and addiction to novelty.
Consumer society resulted from the development of industrial Capitalism. Financial Capitalism is gradually making the consumer society obsolete. The financialization of the economy and ecosystem services, as part of the development of parasitic (technofeudalist) capitalism controlled by the FIRE sector, is increasingly dissociated from the performance of the real economy.
The core of the ecological overshoot problem is not population but rather the political economy model; those who are destroying the planet are from rich countries, and green Capitalism is more of the same capitalist snake oil propaganda.
Dominant Western culture continues to distort the role of the economy, promoting financial Capitalism, a useless perversity paving the way to fascism or even total annihilation.
The elites intend to continue to enjoy the privileges they are accustomed to – mansions, yachts, private jets, luxury resorts and everything else to which they consider themselves entitled. The capitalist cult feeds the feeling of supremacy that nourishes the contempt that elites have for the rest of us.
We must frame the analysis of the problem of overpopulation by accepting that we actually live in the Capitalocene Age rather than assuming the problem is exclusively anthropogenic. What is needed is a platform where the problem can be discussed democratically. If we want to preserve the current civilizational model, then transhumanist and technofascist eugenic programs will be imposed on society.
The plutocrats and oligarchs of this world are not genuinely committed to saving the Earth but to maintaining power and controlling wealth.
Why not consider replacing a civilizational paradigm in which private property rights and capital accumulation are not above the dignity of life?
