One can easily grow weary of intellect-driven, false-self poseurs chattering away and lose one’s cool. I apologize in advance but sometimes it feels good to indulge in a reaction even though I am not walking my talk when I do that. Good grief, will they ever get it! The intellect doesn’t know squat. There! Now I’m over it and we can get on with a calm analysis of the distinction between illusion and reality.
There is an almost silly philosophical worldview which nevertheless has been taken seriously by snoozing philosophers, namely determinism. Determinism is the philosophical doctrine that every human behavior and decision is the inevitable consequence of antecedents that are independent of the human will. Starts out OK; we cannot argue with the reality of cause and effect. We make choices and consequences are set in motion.
The second part, the antecedents also holds true for unconscious human beings. We don’t really have free will if we are not aware of why we do what we do or what the consequences of our choices will be. If we were to select the philosophy demonstrated by most of the people on our planet, determinism would be it. Granted it’s a choice made unconsciously but nature doesn’t take that into consideration, “she” is neutral and delivers the consequences of our choices. Bad choices! Bad outcomes!
Our false self, which does the choosing for most of us, is not really who we are; but it is providing the evidence for the determinists. When profoundly understood (and all philosophy should be profound) the truth about being human (and all philosophy should be true) is that, when awake, we not only have free will but will exercise that free will to determine our experience. Therefore, determinism is a self-deluded pseudo-philosophy, the smoke and mirrors of the sleepwalking human intellect; it has no basis in reality.
We will now proceed with a look at the “pre-determined” disaster unfolding in the global village caused by our lack of courage to face reality and to express our free will consciously. Yes, it will be sad and ugly. Were homo-sapiens ever awake? No! But we were more awake in the past than we are now. We are walking deeper and deeper into an ever-darkening dead-end tunnel. Follow me to the tropical rain forest of Northern Brazil and a protected preserve where the indigenous Kayapo Indians live.
Part One: The Pursuit of Sad Leaves
At this point we have to be open-minded about the meaning of such words as civilized, progress, evolution, primitive and advanced. For example, which culture has come closest to creating a sustainable human community, the Kayapo or the 21st century Americans? One advantage the Kayapo have is that they place a premium on “listening.”
“Kayapo pierce their infant’s earlobes as a way of symbolically expanding a baby’s capacity to understand language and the social dimension of existence; their phrase for ‘stupid’ is ama kre ket, or ‘no ear hole.’” Are you listening?
The area where the Kayapo live has been described as a kind of Eden. Fortunately for the Kayapo, they have been courageous realists not prone to sentimentality. Their goal for the last hundred years has been to survive and they have demonstrated the second trait that Americans lack—courage.
In 1900, the Kayapo population was about 4,000 as the miners, loggers, rubber tappers, ranchers and Brazilian government agencies and missionary organizations began their assault on Eden. Typical of all indigenous peoples with no natural immunity, the Kayapo succumbed to the diseases of those who showed up to cheat them with bribes of machetes, metal pots, axes, cloth and other trade goods. By 1980, following the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway their population had shrunk to 1,300.
What were the odds that such a culture could survive into the 21st century? It didn’t look good but anthropologists underestimated both the courage and the intelligence of the Kayapo. Barbara Zimmerman, the director of the Kayapo Project for the International Conservation Fund of Canada and the U.S.-Based Environmental Defense Fund observed, “They haven’t lost a sense of who they are.” In contrast, most Americans have failed to develop as profound a sense of who they are.
“The Kayapo population is now rapidly growing. From shotguns and motorized aluminum boats to Facebook pages, they have shown a canny ability to adopt technologies and practices of the cash-based society at their borders without compromising the essence of their culture.” The Kayapo also organized and armed their warriors to drive out the illegal ranchers, miners and loggers with their machetes and newly acquired shotguns. This optimistic-sounding observation fails to take into the long-term fate facing the Kayapo and the 240 other indigenous tribes in Brazil.
When the economy of the global village collapses because it is too complex to be sustainable and the 7 billion inhabitants are too unconscious to realize what is happening, will anyone survive? Indigenous peoples like the Kayapo, who have maintained more autonomy will have the best chance because they have yet to develop a dependency on the pursuit of plenty, pleasure and power. “It’s one thing to teach the skills and ceremonies of traditional culture; it’s another to inspire a sense of why knowledge of how to make arrow-tip poison (from herbs and snake venom with beeswax as an adhesive) or stack tortoises or stun fish using oxygen-depriving timbo vines might be valuable to a generation beguiled by iPhones and the convenience of store bought food.” These survival skills still have value and Americans might one day wish that we knew the power of their simplicity.
But for now, the security-seeking politicians and corporations seek to undo the system currently protecting the Kayapo. The Brazilian government is trying to change the laws guaranteeing indigenous peoples a voice in whether their rivers can be damned for generating electricity or redrawing the boundaries of their preserves. Are we being too cynical? The content of the Simple Reality Project says no!
The Kayapo themselves seemed to sense the impending demise of their way of life. “The first Kayapo encounters with the grimy Brazilian banknotes led to the coining of their evocative word for money: pe-o caprin, or ‘sad leaves.’”
Part Two: But Not a Drop to Drink
Well, so much for the “bad choices” leading to the destruction of the Brazilian rain forest and the indigenous Indians, who are after all, only collateral damage occasioned by the inevitable consequences of progress on behalf of the civilized majority. But we would do well to remember that those trees “scrub” the air that we all breathe. We have never been much for long-range planning. Are we going to need clean air for the future? What! Me worry? Let’s continue to the next segment of “Losing Eden.”
From the indigenous people of Brazil we move to one of the so-called emerging BRIC nations. Brazil, Russia, India and China have not achieved the status of full-fledged free-market economies. We will focus on China which has caused a lot of anxiety in the paranoid West. If humanity lived in P-A, we would realize that all the peoples of the world have the exact same challenges and it would only make sense to express compassion and cooperate as the best chance to survive and reduce human suffering.
I don’t expect that to happen; do you? The Chinese Communist Party is on a treadmill. The Chinese people cannot be kept in the dark about what’s happening in the rest of the world and are demanding a higher standard of living comparable to what they are gradually beginning to see in the West. Party officials are running faster and faster but so are the people and the grim specter of the collective Chinese false self looms menacingly on the horizon.
“The Chinese government released a report on Thursday that said nearly one-fifth of its arable land was polluted, a finding certain to raise questions about the toxic results of China’s rapid industrialization, its lack of regulations over commercial interests and the consequences for the national food chain.”
In Brazil, the environmental disaster is centered on the air we all breathe. In China it is drinkable water and arable soil that is disappearing. The location of the following story is the village of Huai-hua Di on the Lanxi River in Hunan Province. Huai-hua Di is one of 200 (some researchers say 400) “cancer villages.”
Sheng Keyi remembers his village where as a child he drank from the crystal-clear waters of the Lanxi River while watching shrimp moving on the river bottom. People used to wash their clothes in it and cook with water from it. No more.
“The Lanxi is lined with factories, from mineral-processing plants to cement and chemical manufacturers. For years industrial and agricultural waste has been dumped into the water untreated.” Today most of China’s waterways are polluted. According to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, 280 million Chinese drink unsafe water and nearly half of the country’s lakes and rivers contain water that is unfit for even human contact.
China’s cancer mortality rate has climbed 80 percent in the last 30 years. Keyi is deeply saddened by the direction his nation has taken. “The entire country is sick. In our society, profit and gross domestic product count more than anything else. A glittering façade is the new face of China. Behind it, well-off people emigrate, people in power send their families to countries with clean water, while they themselves consume quality food and clean water through the networks that serve the privileged.”
Keyi recently returned to China to paint from memory the river and his once-beautiful village. Even though the Lanxi River is dead, he tries to remember and capture the paradise that once was. He cannot help asking, “But what about the people who lost their clean water? Where is their paradise?” Where indeed?
Part Three: Lightening Fast
The last “Eden” we are going to visit is the U. S., whose standard of living the people in both Brazil and China would like to enjoy. Specifically, our location will be Wall Street and the U. S. Stock Market. Here is the context. Michael Lewis wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine about his book, The Flash Boys and David Brooks wrote a column featuring the book in the The New York Times that same week. Lots of focus on a book supposedly exposing a system related to Wall Street that has been used to “game the system” giving certain “inside” traders a split second lead on trades. This information enables those traders to make money for themselves at the expense of the investor who placed the original purchase orders.
Michael Lewis describes why this “system” has gone on for so long. “The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became …” What was this system?
A comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a seemingly simple operation.
Rube Goldberg
Was the system a Rube Goldberg contrivance? I’ll let you be the judge of that.
For a veteran columnist, David Brooks has over a long period of time remained more than a little naïve. “One lesson of this tale is that capitalism doesn’t really work when it relies on the profit motive alone. If everybody is just chasing material self-interest, the invisible hand won’t lead to well-functioning markets. It will just lead to arrangements in which market insiders take advantage of everybody else. Capitalism requires the full range of motivation, including the intrinsic drive for knowledge and fairness.”
Mr. Brooks has obviously not heard of the human false self which dominates human behavior on our planet and which by definition has NO “intrinsic drive for fairness.” The True self on the other hand can be trusted to express compassion and fairness but the True self would find the environment on Wall Street inhospitable if not abhorrent. In any case, the dominant behavior among traders buying and selling stocks and bonds will be explained by the security center of the false-self survival strategy. That’s a reality all journalists should be aware of if they are to perform their function of keeping American capitalism and politics honest; admittedly a tall order.
Marina Keegan as a college senior protested on the The New York Times website “about the rush of students into well-paying jobs on Wall Street—not because of innate interest but because that route was lucrative and practical. One-quarter of Yale graduates entering the job market were going into finance or consulting …”
Paul Krugman draws a broader indictment of the institution of finance as a whole. “So never mind the debate about exactly how much damage high-frequency trading does. It’s the whole financial industry, not just that piece, that’s undermining our economy and our society.”
In the Garden of Eden, humanity (Adam and Eve) “fell” into unconsciousness and the false self has dominated human behavior ever since. Perhaps most of us are not capable of waking up as only a few people have experienced heaven on earth in the present moment. Are we teachable and does our compassion manifest itself in momentary spurts? We have known about threatening and dysfunctional financial institutions for some time now and have chosen to leave them with no meaningful regulation. Columnist John Williams cites a 1923 book review of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre which appeared in The New York Times. “According to our review, those interested in the stock market would ‘learn much about its methods and peculiarities.’” Michael Lewis wrote a Wall Street expose previous to The Flash Boys called Liar’s Poker about his time working in the investment firm Salomon Brothers.
On a global scale we are choosing such self-destructive behaviors as allowing loggers, miners and farmers to destroy the Amazon rain forest, a resource that our survival depends on. In that process we are also choosing to destroy an indigenous people who are demonstrating for us the wisdom necessary to survive in a relationship with nature that we must learn to re-create.
In their zeal to create a higher standard of living for their people and to stay in power, the “privileged” leaders of China are trapped in catastrophic environmental destruction that will impact the entire global village.
In the U. S. the oligarchs and their minions, like unfeeling zombies, create and hoard wealth while creating an unsustainable and unfair “income-gap” between themselves and their fellow citizens. In the 1930’s in London, George Orwell wrote Down and Out in Paris and London describing life among restaurant workers and the homeless. “As Herbert Gorman wrote in his 1933 review, the book was ‘an indictment of a world that permits such destitution as is pictured in these chapters to exist.’ Barbara Ehrenreich followed a similar path in Nickel and Dimed (2001), praised by Dorothy Gallagher ‘for bringing us the news of America’s working poor so clearly and directly, and conveying with it a deep moral outrage and a finely textured sense of lives as lived.’” How are we going to translate moral outrage into compassionate action?
We have described only three of the infinite number of ways that the human false self will find to distract itself from suffering and as a consequence cause devastating destruction to both the human and natural inhabitants of paradise. This is how Eden (heaven on earth) is being lost even though we could choose otherwise. Do we believe that this nightmare is pre-determined? Have we given up and accepted an identity that is unworthy of our true nature?
We can behave as if determinism explains our fate but that would be a cop out. The Kayapo displayed the courage to fight back against corporate greed and the greed of individuals but post-modern humanity seems to be lacking the courage and commitment to even learn about our true identity.
Just as we must learn to transcend our reliance on science if we are to survive, we must also transcend philosophy-influenced narratives and enter the perfection of the moment. That experience would begin with a fundamental choice. Either we have the power to write our own story or we are just mindless, heartless automatons; the victims of an unfriendly universe.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in the Simple Reality Trilogy
by Roy Charles Henry:
Where Am I? Story – The First Great Question
Who Am I? Identity – The Second Great Question
Why Am I Here? Behavior – The Third Great Question
