Collection of musings about our world

On the destruction wraught by capitalism, a 'speciesist' mindset, ecological destruction and more

I have recently been really musing about the extent to which a speciesist mindset has been indoctrinated into the human psyche. Speciesism is a philosophy, or perhaps a state of mind (& mode of being), wherein one, many, or perhaps all other species of a planet are viewed simply as a commodity or resource to further personal advancement or aggrandizement*. Our indigenous relatives of North America and across the world are now all but extinct, but from what I have been able to gather and what my heart tells me, they implicitly knew what we all should ourselves be able to understand just by using our senses and logic - that no one species should have the right to permanently enslave the existence of all of the members of another species, for the purpose of harvesting them as a resource (on family farms or the ever increasingly brutal factories), as a pet, in truly outrageous 'entertainment' such as circuses, zoos or aquariums, or otherwise for any purpose.

Allow me to present a hypothetical scenario in an attempt to illustrate this point. An alien species comes to Earth and conquers the planet with military force. They subsequently decide that they are going to harvest humanity as a resource (for food in factory farms, in human circuses, as pets, experiments, and so on). So the humans, who are powerless because of being overwhelmed by force, are compelled to board the alien ships and return to their homeworld. Once there, they are separated from each other - some go to the slave labor pits, some go to the circuses, some to the human farms. There are open human slave markets everywhere. Every human is tagged and simply viewed as a resource to be harvested. Many humans have their throats brutally slit or are even boiled alive in the process of harvesfing human meat (as happens to countless millions of non-human animals yearly at present on Earth).

The humans obviously do not consent to this arrangement and would do anything to break their chains, but the reality of their circumstances, being separated from one another and held in confinement where they are dependent upon the slave masters for all of the basic necessities of life, renders any hope of a prison break effectively futile.

Surely, any human would balk at the idea of humans being permanently domesticated to the interests of, say, an alien spaces as presented in the above scenario. Moreover, the behavior of animals in our world confirms what should already be obvious(2) - there are a great many known and unknown examples of animal escapes from private homes, factory farms and other settings, and one can clearly witness with one's own eyes and ears the screams of pain and suffering from animals in factory farms, dogs chained to a post in a small backyard howling for help, and so on.

Why, provided all this context, are seemingly a great many humans unable to recognize the practice of the harvesting of all of non-human life (and other resources of Mother Earth such as oil and minerals), which is now so thoroughly embedded in the planetary reality, as an abominable practice that must be abolished as rapidly as possible?

I believe I have some possible explanations.

For one, humanity itself is being ushered into an ever increasingly domesticated experience. What do I mean by that? Well, one thing to look at is the rate at which ever increasingly large numbers of humans are being forced into increasingly smaller and smaller (but particularly urban) spaces. Estimates of urban expansion suggest an increase from the already massive 850 million humans living in urban areas in 1950, to a staggering 4.4 billion today, and expected to rise to 6 billion in 20 to 30 years. In concert with the seemingly endless expansion of urbanity (auto correct changed it to insanity, which is also appropriate) is a rapid increase of human population well beyond previous norms for us as a species, which then leads to a massive demand for food to be shipped into these urban areas where any ability to to grow or harvest food is rendered impossible, which in turn is leading us at very rapid pace to a world in which there will be no such thing as a 'wild animal' or environment of any kind.

Living in urban spaces is very toxic to a human being as it is to all living beings. The primary reason is that the natural ecological environment, which has served as the home to, and sustenence of, all of life on planet Earth since time immemorial, and itself creates a massive living energy field that activates, energies and nourishes all of life, has been completely annihilated in the urban environment. This makes the remaining living species in such a space suitable to be controlled and manipulated in all kinds of ways, due to the intense diminishment of the being caused by residing in such a ghastly, non living concrete jungle.

Another way to understand increased human domestication is to look at the increasing massification of human behavior. People increasingly shop at the same stores, watch the same shows, ascribe to the same 'approved' opinions, and otherwise live increasingly monotonous, uniform, miserable lives. This trend has become particularly heightened with the ushering in of the 'War on Terror' following 9/11/01 and the 'War on Covid' (launched in March 2020), where every effort is being made to inculcate a world where any dissent from a unified global state (governmental and corporate) orthodoxy is being increasingly severely censored, punished, or otherwise erased out of the collective mind. All pf this sigmificantly contributes to the creation of a world where increasingly many people surely do not feel safe, or otherwise have the time or inclination in their already busy and stressful lives, to allow themselves to think critically about the state of our world or their own existences.

Circling back to the urban expansion - aside from their central link in the chain of global ecological destruction, cities also serve as effective holding pens for a human labor force that you wish to exploit as ruthlessly as possible. The 'command' centers of these capitalist cities are heavily insulated from potential domestic disturbances through rapid response police agencies; meanwhile, the rise of cities (and living spaces in general) designed for cars rather than people means that what used to be natural human walking and organizing space (such as the colonial town center or, in the case of many indigenous groups, anywhere in their wilderness home) has become hostile to not only protests and other organizing, but increasingly any kind of human activity at all.

I would be remiss if I did not also note the extent to which the mindset of human dominion over all life comes into what may be considered its purest expression in urban cities, where the only signs of undomesticated life might be some pigeons or insects. However, suburbia and rural living spaces are little better. Some suburban neighborhoods or rural areas may reluctantly grant a few trees the right to grow, often only for their own (human) enjoyment or amusement, and only on the condition that their existence can be ended at any time on the whims of the human property owner. (Imagine how absurd it must feel to be a non human living being on this planet...) Aside from having an inherent right to their own existence, trees provide homes for squirrels, birds, and insects and other creatures, and the impact of the destruction of the global forests at the scale we have and continue to experience cannot be overstated.

Rural land is mostly dominated by plant factory farms, where the once diverse natural landscape has been reduced nearly if not exclusively to 'cropland'; the remaining monocrop plants are removed their connection to incredibly diverse natural wilderness environments and forcibly cultivated in the interests of another species.

Places where this has not already happened (ie the remaining wilderness areas on this planet) are vanishing at a rapid pace. Thus, it is in the best interests for those of us with any ability to object against global ecological destruction, along with increasing human confinement, to do whatever is in our power to preserve life on planet Earth.

Footnotes

(1)Of course, one of the driving motivators for the speciesist mindset is capitalism. As excellently demonstrated and discussed in Sylvia Federici's book 'Caliban and the Witch', the past 500 years of human history have borne witness to a horrific (and ongoing) holocaust of life on planet Earth, and the driving force behind that expansion has been the capitalist stock markets of London and Western Europe, with their insatiable demand for more 'wealth' in the form of money and private property (living slaves of all species included in the latter category).

Included in this capitalist zealotry for rapid expansion has been what appears to me to have been a successful attempt to fashion humanity into the master slave species used to enslave or otherwise destroy the rest of life on the planet. After all, I do not believe that any healthy functioning human would wish to willingly take part in the destruction of planet Earth. Rather, it is the system of capitalism, in which access to the basic necessities of survival is increasingly privatized in the hands of a tiny few, that incentives humans to turn a blind eye to harms they are causing or contributing to. This is because everyone is constantly searching for a feeling of security and safety in an ever increasingly disturbing and dangerous world, and everyone and everything is considered expendable in the pursuit of that goal, which is ultimately unachievable while living so disconnected from the natural world and our own basic instincts as we do now.

Capitalism is best understood as an empire, because that's exactly what it is. Ever more increasingly powerful armies, sent off at the comission of powerful governments or increasingly, private mercenary corporations, have (and continue to) plow down the natural wilderness spaces of the world, genociding or otherwise enslaving the indigenous species including humans, and replacing said environment with either a concretized urban or suburban hellscape, or an increasingly large animal or plant factory farm that can more accurately be described as the pits of hell; or, perhaps a dead zone entirely due to insectides, nuclear and other weapon detonation, or abusive and unsustainable agricultural practices.

Once the land is conquered, all of the land and her creatures are turned into 'private property', to be sold (and increasingly consolidated) on the stock market. This has resulted in the present horrific conditions of non-human life on the planet, and what is in many ways an equally horrific present existence for humans. The options, mobility and vitality of life on planet Earth is becoming ever increasingly squeezed and strangled, as both humans and what remains of the non-human planetary life forms find themselves in ever more confined, disconnected and alienating living spaces, with ever less access to a currency which we have been made to depend upon and acquire should we wish to avoid horrific fates like starving to death or homelessness.

(2) If you look at how animals are domesticated, the same techniques used on them can be used on humans. If you apply enough force (largely through creating mountains of trauma, or in the more specific sense using negative reinforcement to indoctrinate) then you can make any kind of being do pretty much anything.

For example, with the right 'parenting tools' for evangelicals, you can successfully indoctrinate (domesticate) a human into evangelism, with a low likelihood that they will ever 'stray from the farm'. Similarly, if you consult the right 'public authorities' on the youth experience, you can learn how to raise a youngster up fully indoctrinated into the tenants of good secularism. The state assists you in this process by passing laws that mandate young people to be remanded to state prison solely on account of their age.

The statist or secularist religion has been growing massively in recent history, due to ever increasing government incursions into all areas of human and planetary life. Under the guise of vaious crises, including both World Wars, the Civil War and more recent events, governments have been amassing ever greater power and control. World War II saw the establishment of the massive & ever increasingly powerful U.S. intelligence apparatus (CIA and at least ~15 other publically known intelligence agencies) which have been used to enforce empire both domestically and abroad. Some other examples of extreme statist incursion include the 13 year youth incarceration & indoctrination program; the creation of 'Stepford wives'/'Truman show' style suburban ghost-towns increasingly devoid of any signs of life, and built for cars rather than people; hardcore indoctrination through the many mediums of the television (shows, movies, games, music - facilitated through fascist public-private partnerships between massively powerful public and private institutions); shipping off the elderly to elder prisons where they waste away in isolation until the release of death (often heavily medicated on pharmaceuticals); and compelling all of humanity by virtue of 'market forces' to spend most of their waking time in hellish, drab 'workplaces' like factories, offices, and retail.

Put all of this together and I do not believe it hyperbole for me to describe our present planetary condition as one of intense enslavement, imprisonment, and misery.

P.S. The website 'anarchist library' has great articles on topics like youth liberation, envisioning a non capitalist world, critiques (or call for the abolition of) money and private property, and more.

I also highly recommend a viewing of 'My Dinner with Andre" for a wonderful deconstruction of many of the aspects of our modern world that are in fact indicative of pur condition of extreme servitude. Both men also display a wonderful heart, spirit, and connection to their humanity. The film can be freely viewed on YouTube.