Human Sustainability in the Anthropocene: Regaining our Bearings after the Big Con

Human Sustainability in the Anthropocene:Regaining our Bearings after the Big Con

By Earon S. Davis

I. Introduction

For the sake of understanding human sustainability, please join

me in exploring the human condition. To do this, I ask that you

step outside of our frantic popular culture, our academic

disciplines and their reductionism, our fundamentalist religions,

our irrational and polarized political systems and our out-of-

control economic systems. Step outside of our concerns about the

future. Step outside of our technological tethers. Please enter

into the present moment with me.

Here we are, just humans, without status, without wealth, without

prestige, just like two primates who could be baboons,

chimpanzees or gorillas, except that we have access to a dizzying

realm of human concepts and words and ideas. In our intense

information age, paradoxically perhaps, our physical truth, our

actual reality, is not easily accessed, but is hidden beneath and

between our words.

So, take a deep breath or two and open your simple, grounded-in-

nature, primate eyes. Yes, here we are. Just human animals in

Human Sustainability in the Anthropocene –Earon S. Davis, June 18, 2014

an immensely complex conceptual and societal matrix in which our

lives are shaped by economic resources, social class,

professional roles, age, gender, skin color, attractiveness and

sexual preference. We are intensely social beings, molded by

peer pressure and by our needs to be safe, fed, housed and loved,

very much like our primate cousins. So, just for now, forget

that we are brilliant humans.

What I am writing about, desiring to communicate to you, is that

perhaps our “civilization” has backfired, run its course, or hit

a brick wall. It often seems that we are too fixed in our

dysfunctional ways to change. If our culture has created a

feeding frenzy of greed, destroying its commons, perhaps we are

now in a race to the bottom. Is there another way? Can we

regain our bearings after the big con? I’ll suggest that we need

to pause, reflect and ask questions. Like the ancient Mayans,

perhaps some will abandon our greed-driven world and return to

the forest. We have survivalists, Amish, communalists and other

ways to live, after all. But there may also be other options.

One other way to look at the situation is that human society has

just been “taken” by the biggest, most daring con game in human

history. We’ve been fleeced, robbed of our life savings, our

natural heritage taken from under our noses, with us believing

that it was for our own good. To be sure, the confidence game

was massive. It depended upon hooking most of our leaders with

their own greed, using the manipulated values of our stock market

2


and unregulated finance sector to entice us into the fantasy of

unlimited growth. The set-up may not have been created by a

small group of conspirators, but by thousands upon thousands,

eventually hundreds of thousands and millions, who bought in, and

worked the con, even though many were fleeced in the process.

Many are still working it today. Our society even bought the

idiocy of trickle-down economics and anointed people like Milton

Friedman as masters of the “science” of economics, prophets of a

new world order in which greed made everything right.

Now, the deed is done. The con men and women are still

reassuring us that they did no wrong, that it was our own greed

that stung us, that government interfered with the proper

functioning of the “free market”. That’s called “cooling down

the mark,” of course. It is the way the con is allowed to play

out and disappear, with the ill-gotten gain being split up

amongst the insiders who took our economies for trillions, an

inside job that we will never completely understand. So, we sit

here with our mouths open, in shock. How could that happen? How

could humanity be so stupid?

But in the process of attempting to answer that question, we need

to get our act together and come back to some semblance of

normal. We need smelling salts, perhaps. We need to forgive our

own gullibility and move on. What do we need in order to come to

our senses, to see things more clearly? How can we return to

being intelligent humans rather than whatever confused social

3


creature has been created by the hubris and folly of our current

societies? One way to cope with the painful realizations we must

face is to peel away the con, including the stuff that we

rationalize as contemporary human “progress.” Yet, this is not

about learning the details of credit default swaps or other tools

by which people fleeced the financial system. When we do this,

we keep getting re-traumatized rather than restored. We keep

looking for ways to punish culprits rather than save humanity.

Perhaps we must first regain our composure, and restore our sense

of safety and responsibility for our own future.

Then, we need to embrace a more human, and successful, approach

to life, one that provides perspectives that nurture our

relationship to our environment and to each other. It may take

some time, many attempts, but is worth the effort. Try closing

your eyes, letting go of our “reality” and then re-opening our

eyes as humans five thousand years ago, or perhaps as a Native

American watching European settlers washing over their land 250

years ago. In this way may put things in perspective and fully

realize the insanity of human activity in this past century.

There are other ways to live, ways to live that our ancestors

experienced. For now, we don’t need to engage in rational

thought and explanations. Just sit there as a human, open to

better ways to live, ways to live that are consistent with our

long-term interests and the health of our planet.

4


If you can, open your primate eyes and take a look at our human

species. Draw upon our thousands of years of self-observation,

by artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, teachers and

dreamers. We know that we primates, including humans, have a

self-destructive side. Rage and violence, greed, alcohol and

drug abuse, obsession, risk-taking, hubris and distorted thinking

are part of being human, as well as kindness, compassion,

creativity and selflessness. Clearly, we primates are a complex

mix of behaviors, needs and perceptions. Stress can bring out

the best in us, or the worst. Sometimes, success is our worst

enemy. Look at the lives of lottery winners and celebrities! We

can thrive in the stimulation of a vibrant social life, but lose

our bearings when the pressure is too great and the odds seem

stacked against us. When we are feeling good about ourselves,

and secure in the future, we are still vulnerable to the big con.

So, recognizing that humans are animals, and that societies

reflect our best and worst, it would seem that maintaining human

societies on a sustainable path is an enormously complex

balancing act, perhaps more about luck than skill, but with some

time-proven guidelines. Technologically, there has been

incredible social evolution and technological advances, but with

many disasters, natural and self-imposed, along the way. Up to

this point, we have lived in a commons where everyone had the

political and economic incentive to add as many people as

possible to the population, to deplete our natural resources as

5


much as possible, and to pollute our bodies and world as much as

one could get away with. Today, our constraints may increasingly

dictate other approaches, but we persist in religious, cultural

and economic-driven patterns that threaten our future.

Generally, it seems that our collective history just seems to

happen, and it takes decades for historians to attempt to unravel

what actually transpired. Nobody is actually in control,

although there are those few at the top and the many at the

bottom. Currently, the natural experiment of human society has

run into some serious problems. Overpopulation and an

unimaginable (how could we let it happen?) exploitation of the

natural resources of this planet have created a new geological

epoch. We are now in the Anthropocene, the unexpected “Age of

Man,” where human activity is a major determinant of the

functioning of our climate and planetary ecosystems.

How can our primate minds deal with this? We are not in control

of human society to begin with! And we realize that we’ve been

conned. Really badly. So, how can we change the path we are on?

Royalty, Feudal Lords, war lords, aristocrats, industrialists and

odd beings called corporations have an incredible influence on

our future, but in the last two centuries, governmental systems

have given us the ability to rein them in. It has been

understood that the purpose of government is to protect the

average person from the powerful. We have mechanisms we can use

to adapt and prevent man-made disasters, although we tend to be

6


reluctant to use them, and consensus is elusive. Of course, the

con men, thieves and sociopaths are always trying to get us to

dismantle our government and allow them free rein. The fox is

always seeking access to the chicken coop.

Through our primate eyes, humanity is a river that flows through

time, reflecting its own changing nature, changing environments,

changing course at times, and always with many diverse stories to

observe and tell. Today, we face environmental constraints that

threaten to drastically alter the course of human “progress”. We

have survived for tens of thousands of years, perhaps less fully

conscious of the constraints we faced, but far more aware of our

partnership with nature. We may know more, scientifically,

today, but we know less of our interdependence with the natural

world. Today, in our vastly more complex and “educated” world,

we are often paralyzed by fear even though the reality is that we

do have the resources to keep the river flowing.

Let’s explore human nature and the individual and social factors

that affect our ability to understand and alter the collective

impact we are having on our environment. We humans are in very

destructive patterns on our planet, and we know how this is being

done. However, while we think the problem is greed, gullibility,

habit and consumerism, perhaps there are more useful ways to look

at the situation. Perhaps we are too close to our current

cultures to truly understand why we are persisting in the

patterns that are having such destructive results.

7


Humanity’s self-destructiveness is palpable, but not inevitable.

Perhaps, if we look through primate eyes, we will find incorrect,

unchallenged assumptions about our human nature. These

assumptions are embedded in our cultures, our laws, our

literature, our sciences and our religions. As a result, we do

not truly see our options, but rather rationalize our excesses

away and excuse our distortions, seeing them as inevitable. We

should, instead, look more closely and be able to observe our

cultural and ecological systems operating with predictable

results and amenable to change.

A lack of objectivity, such as we experience with the influence

of politicians, advertisers, pundits and public relations agents

from special interests, would make it difficult to construct

effective interventions to maintain balance and perspective.

These short-sighted interests, like any con game, attempt to

flatter us and offer us a deal that is too good to be true. They

over-emphasize human genius and technological progress to the

point that we may avoid contemplating the very solutions that

could safeguard our future. We trust them for no good reason.

So, can we use our primate eyes to create a new self-awareness

that more truly reflects our nature and our options? If our

society’s collective misperception of human nature has empowered

the unleashing of delusional, irrational behaviors and encouraged

activities that undermine the survival of our species, there must

be a different path forward.

8


II. We Need to Rethink Human “Intelligence”

First, human intelligence must be redefined - not as our ability

to create shiny new technologies and media presentations, or to

amass great wealth - but as our ability to live sustainably,

grounded in our natural world. That is the cornerstone of this

exploration. Please take some time to ponder that. Can we be

“intelligent” if we can’t help but destroy ourselves and our

planet?

It is not enough to feel that we are intelligent, but insane.

What is the point of “intelligence” if not to meet our needs for

food, shelter, companionship and meaning? What happens if we re-

define ourselves as not behaving intelligently? Can we accept

the overt challenge implicit in this new awareness? Can we get

over the fact that we’ve been hosed, that we’ve been conned? Can

we rise to the occasion, let go of our rage and our shame and

move on, lesson learned?

Since humanity is clearly not collectively intelligent at this

time, it would seem necessary to identify and correct any deeply

held, irrational belief systems that contribute towards our

spiraling self-destruction. Perhaps the core of our difficulty is

that humans have such a complex and adaptable nature, as

individual animals and collective social creators. If that is

the case, we may tend to get carried away with our ideas and lose

9


sight of the realities in which we live and the consequences that

they produce. This is a story that we should be able to live

with. It takes the blame down a level and gives us some

direction.

We might begin to look differently at ideologies that involve

concepts like Ayn Rand’s “objectivism,” the idea that there is a

special kind of collective “intelligence in free markets” that

will protect our long-term needs or that there is a “supreme

being” who is watching over us. These ludicrous ideas may be

attractive catnip for humans, nice-sounding platitudes, which

have supported the biggest con in human history. However, they

have dangerous social consequences encouraging fuzzy thinking and

entitlement. These ideas encourage us to ignore obvious facts

and assert that our problems will take care of themselves. They

encourage us to hand over our natural heritage to “legitimate

businessmen” who promise to treat us fairly and deliver wealth

beyond our imaginations.

Unless we remain grounded in our natural world through objective

facts and aware of our non-rational animal nature, and guided by

ethics (such as the Golden Rule), we may be unable to prevent our

cultures from getting taken by social constructs such as

fundamentalist religion, trickle-down economics, exceptionalism,

racism, sexism, nationalism, ideology or worship of science and

technology that cause us to misperceive our nature as either

rational or divine. Ideologies tend to lure us away from our

10


connection to the natural world, liberating us from common sense,

creating short-term exuberance rather than giving us the real

freedom to control our destinies. Our beliefs, distorted by

arrogance and oversimplification, can cut us adrift from

otherwise obvious environmental realities and can disable our

sense of social responsibility. Today, we are seeing the

results.

One of the amazing conundrums that we face as primates is that

the potential for misperceiving “who we are” is present in our

social nature, especially as we become more highly specialized,

globalized and detached from the cultures that have grounded us

for tens of thousands of years. Modernism and post-modernism,

neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism offer self-congratulatory

concepts that redefined classical concepts of human history and

nature. To the primate mind, they may have thereby enabled the

unbounded arrogance, acquisitiveness and greed that characterize

the financial sector and economics in the dominant human

civilization today, making us ripe for the big con. After

congratulating ourselves (erroneously) on having conquered our

natural world, we have agreed to an economy that is literally

devouring our planet, oblivious to the greed and overpopulation

that threaten our future. We can do better than this! However,

we first need to open our eyes wider to the big questions.

11


III. Why?

Let’s go back to the rather unappealing fact that we humans are

destroying this planet. We have a good understanding of how this

is happening, through a massive con game promoting uncontrolled

carbon release, toxic pollution, overpopulation, mining, drilling

and fracking and deforestation. In reality, it is a completely

irrational exploitation of human and natural resources in what

can only be seen as utter contempt for our natural environment

and our common sense. Those who profit from these activities

tell us that we have no other choice. Uh huh. What else would

you expect them to say? But why do we go along with this?

Why are we, the mass of humans, causing,

allowing, or participating in, this

process of self-destruction?

As devastating as these realizations of having taken a wrong turn

appear, they do not inherently cause us to change what we are

doing. Often, the human response to unwelcome news is conscious

or unconscious denial. It is often not the denial of simple

ignorance, but the nuanced denial of being sold a bill of goods

and not wanting to believe that we have been taken for a fool.

12


We seem paralyzed, unable to fully grasp reality and agree on a

plan. So, the important question is why? Why are we, the mass

of humans, still causing, allowing, or participating in, this

process of self-destruction?

What is the combination of mistaken beliefs and unfortunate

choices that have put us in harm’s way? Was our thinking

corrupted by a few decades of uninterrupted economic growth and

growing participation in a massive, open-ended Ponzi scheme

called the stock market, for example? Part of the strategy of

U.S. “conservatives” for regaining control over American

government was to capture the will of the middle class and

working class by having everyone invested in the stock market in

one way or another. The idea was that as people have more stake

in the stock market, they have more stake in the status quo and

in seeing everything as okay, supporting “business as usual,”

rolling back regulations and promoting “unlimited growth,” which

means unlimited exploitation of human labor and our natural

resources.

With massive financial investment in the status quo, working

people would have two distinct interests; their personal

interests in long-term human sustainability and the short-term

economic interests of the human systems that are destroying our

planet. Cognitive dissonance, like this, is predictably resolved

by acquiescing to peer pressure and favoring our short-term

interests. It is our nature. We will put off (deny, ignore)

13


long-term consequences when we have socially supported short-term

gain. The elites are firmly in control of this process, and they

historically tend to focus on preserving things as they are – not

considering the long term, and certainly not considering the long

term interests of the larger population. And here we are.

Because of this group-think, human

sustainability literally becomes

unthinkable because it challenges the

sacred ideology of unregulated growth.

As a result, it seems that our leaders rationalize that they are

committed to a philosophy of economic growth and consumerism,

when our leaders are really just doing what avoids conflict with

their own self-interests. This allows the wealthy to destroy our

economy and endanger the even larger society and our very

planetary life support systems.

In sum, our “leaders” are unable to even envision living in ways

that engender sustainability, social justice and peace, because

their personal interests are tied to the interests of the

wealthy. They only see that which is already before them, in

their social circles. Because of this group-think, human

sustainability literally becomes unthinkable because it

challenges the sacred ideology of unfettered growth that brings

14


them privilege and ease. The short-term gain and orchestrated

denunciations of “socialism” and “global climate conspiracies”

are disastrously effective in shutting off debate, stopping

inquiry, using peer pressure and intimidation to undermine

critical thought and rational inquiry until the goal of survival

is completely obscured by the obsession with corporate growth.

The goal of human sustainability is thereby replaced by worries

about business sustainability. This is unabashedly represented

by the insane notion that there are three co-equal considerations

for human sustainability; economics, society and environment.

Really? Economy is as important as our Planet? No primate would

think this a sane conclusion. The Earth is the envelope in which

society exists. Society is the envelope in which the economy

exists. Let’s get our priorities straight!

For whatever reason, our society has bought into some very crazy

notions, which happen to be sending more and more wealth from the

earth and from the average person, into the bank accounts of the

wealthy, who understandably don’t want to change this pattern.

So, we all find ourselves in systems that provide short-term

benefits that immobilize our critical thinking by promoting

conflicted values that lead us to ignore long-term consequences.

We feel like we are trapped, because we don’t want to question

the sanity of those who are in power in our society. But we are

not trapped, not yet, although we are slowly being lulled into a

deep, deep sleep.

15


The unprecedented nature of our global challenges and the immense

peer pressure (group-think) built into our social systems further

increase our vulnerability to the paralysis of cognitive

dissonance. When faced by two or more conflicting values, our

nature leads us to choose one and to rationalize away the other.

Many of the “benefits” of the false choices we are asked to make

are illusory, like “safety” resulting from U.S. militarism and

our police/security state. Patriotism allows us to be played

like a piano. The benefits of unregulated growth create huge

disparity in income and power, which always lead to injustice,

inequality and a generally dysfunctional society. However, the

power of corrupted ideology is strong, especially when all

logical options have been marked as taboo. If government is

evil and socialism is evil, what can we do? We figure that we

just need to choose unregulated capitalism. These mind games are

effective in getting society to make counter-productive choices

and to set in motion self-destructive patterns. Simpleminded

answers that don’t consider the reality of the inter-related

social and physical environments create more problems than they

solve. But, when stressed, and when presented with inappropriate

“either or” choices, we often fail to see how we are being

manipulated.

IV. How Do Humans Recognize Crises?

In the big picture, our current scenario of human-created global

climate destabilization has never happened before. It is

16


unprecedented, and outside of our experience base as a society,

so we have never had to learn how to deal with its critical mass.

To be sure, we have had warnings, and we have had human-created

ecological disasters before, but nothing on this scale, nothing

in the memory of people under the age of 70 (when the Great

Depression and the war effort asked for, and received, great

sacrifice), nothing that requires coordinated action and

forbearance based upon long-term thinking on a global scale. We

gasp, immobilized, by the mess we are in, unaware that we have

access to the solutions.

Looking at the nature of humans and our societies, when something

new happens, we humans first need to build a consensus (a story

that is often over simplified) on what is happening, before

developing plans for addressing it. It has been observed that

our social nature seems to require the emergence of a solution

before we are able to fully recognize that a problem exists.

Therefore, the absence of a ready solution can, and has,

contributed to disputes about the nature of the problem, or

whether it is a problem at all. With doubt cast about whether a

problem even exists, the public is understandably unwilling to

make pre-emptive sacrifices. With climate change, we are often

told that there is no problem, or that it is natural and beyond

our capability to cause or solve it. Neither approach calls for

action. Solar energy may cost the same as fossil fuel, but we

17


don’t recognize it because vested interests keep pounding away at

their self-interested, out of date, “facts.”

Those who recognize the true nature of the problem seek

solutions, but without a consensus on the nature of the problem,

we can easily end up with solutions that are not solutions, but

just random, well-meaning (or exploitive), actions that either do

nothing or that may make the problem worse. This is where

“green-washing” comes in. It is very comforting to think that we

can just spend our way to sustainability. Perhaps we only need

to buy more environmentally responsible products and encourage

technological advances that will solve our problems. To me, this

represents the “bargaining phase” of grief, when we are working

past our denial and engage in magical thinking about how we can

change reality instead of understanding or accepting it.

The point, though, is that when there is no consensus about the

nature of a problem, or if the consensus is misguided, we may end

up doing “something,” “anything” and not solving the problem – or

just residing in confusion and indecision. That seems to be

where we are today.

V. Surely, Government Can Step In!

In processes like this, we need mechanisms of leadership through

which decisions can be made, and we lack those today. In the

United States, there is no government or council of elders

(certainly not our Congress) with the power and influence to make

18


massive positive social and cultural change happen. A simple tax

of $1 for a gallon of gasoline would provide the funds to support

a huge investment in solar energy that would change the base-line

need for fossil fuels. In Europe, gasoline costs around $10 per

gallon, and conservation and investment in cleaner energy is more

abundant. In the U.S. our government actually subsides

(promotes) the use of fossil fuels. This is not rational, but it

is seen as politically impossible to create a gasoline tax. This

is because, rather than invest in innovation and better products,

those who exploit our fossil fuel resources can get a greater

return on investment by lobbying for laws and regulations that

thwart the best interests of the public and our nation.

How about globally? Well, the United Nations has a broad scope

but very limited powers and is no match for the multinational

corporations that dominate the global economy. Not

coincidentally, the interests promoting de-regulation in the U.S.

also promote disdain and mistrust for the United Nations.

Undermining our governments, while promoting free market myths,

disable the only forces powerful enough to rein in corporate

excesses, to expose and stop the con game. This selfish strategy

promotes increased profits for corporations, and long-term ruin

for humanity and planet Earth.

In the past, mechanisms of leadership existed in the United

States, serving us well during the Great Depression and WWII.

However, they have been disabled in our current time. The

19


corporations and individuals that profit from inappropriate

practices of warfare, agriculture, health, finance, security and

energy production are in control of how the public perceives the

existence of “problems”, and the political apparatus of decision

making. Government and the public’s interest have been

marginalized and silenced.

Today, in the U.S., there is no government strong enough to stand

up to our wealthy corporations and elites and demand that they

forbear from profit-making activities which are destroying our

planet. Political gridlock, polarization and mistrust of

government abound in our world today, and some believe they have

been promoted by wealthy elites specifically seeking to prevent

any societal force from limiting their freedom to exploit the

resources of this planet for their gain.

There are many wise people who have addressed the quirk in human

nature in which we tend to believe that whatever we are doing is

okay, no matter how destructive it may be. Upton Sinclair is

quoted as saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand

something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

How many nuclear engineers are opposed to nuclear power? How

many biotech engineers are opposed to GMO’s? So, we humans are

not logical and rational (or scientific) when it comes to

defining our reality. We tend to be open to surprises and

disasters because of the slowness with which we adjust our view

of reality and the ease with which others, especially those in

20


authority, can insert their own preferred view of reality into

our minds. Corporations and media thus have tremendous influence

not only over how their employees, consultants, suppliers and

customers behave, but over how they think – and over how everyone

thinks. Consider the massive use of public relations and

advertising in our society. Would companies be spending this

money if it didn’t produce results?

Additionally, we are accustomed to a worldview based on

unregulated growth and unplanned development and in which the

wealthy are able to profit from labor and resources at will, with

very limited protections for the public by governments. It is

all part and parcel of the big con. In the U.S., we have seen a

dramatic rise in discontent with government, encouraged by

politicians. President Ronald Reagan proclaimed in his first

Inaugural Address in 1981 that “Government is not the solution to

our problem; government is the problem.” Some see that as a

corporate declaration of war on the United States. Others see it

as an American counter-revolution in which the elites eliminate

democratic institutions and re-establish a new royalty – the

“haves” (including Corporate persons) ruling over the “have-nots”

(99% of the actual humans).

So, in the U.S., business (especially the financial sector, which

does not produce anything of value and siphons profits at an

unbelievable pace) has been valued and government vilified in our

post-Reagan/Thatcher world. With the crippling of government’s

21


ability to plan and regulate, even in our disaster preparedness

agencies, we have a perfect set up for surprise after surprise

after surprise, and none of them bode well for the average

person. Deregulation is a veritable “black swan” factory. With

blinders being the politically mandated eyewear, it is not

surprising how little one can see coming from even a short

distance. The disasters just keep coming, one after another,

each portrayed as a “perfect storm” or a freakish act of God.

And we are asked to adjust and adapt and remain resilient in the

face of disasters caused by intentionally sabotaged warning

systems.

This is part of the reason why we don’t deeply appreciate the

fact that the vast bulk of humanity is being exploited,

manipulated, coerced and utterly endangered by the insatiable

greed of a subset of our species that has taken control of our

societies. This is why we are all frustrated and depressed and

not doing anything much about it. The mechanisms we had for

preventing disasters have not been upgraded to handle the new

data trends and the new global realities. In fact, they have

been systematically dismantled and mocked.

As a result, there is nothing to protect us against risks, like

climate change, chemically induced cancers and neurotoxicity,

failed crop monoculture, pesticide resistance, resurgent racism

and sexism. Yet, we adapt. We lower our expectations and

eventually don’t even notice that we’ve yielded important ground

22


to special interests. We don’t even see the con game as it

unfolds and becomes normalized. Like frogs in hot water, we

don’t realize that we need to jump to safety. Even harms for

which we have already been relatively aware lose their visibility

to us, so we gradually normalize them. What we once referred to

as racism, sexism and homophobia are now given the more

respectable designation of “social conservatism.” We gradually

come to accept that which we would find utterly unacceptable if

our critical thinking had not been intentionally sabotaged.

VI. What Is “Political Will”, Anyway?

We are rightfully alarmed about our unsustainable societies,

whether we focus on the massively destructive use of fossil fuels

and other planetary resources, our out-of-control consumerism or

our growing rates of depression and obesity. Yet, some claim

that we simply lack the “political will” to identify the

necessary changes. That is hardly surprising when the most

powerful forces in our society want to continue with business as

usual.

It has become apparent to me that our culture’s inability to

change its direction, while easy to blame on the complacency and

lack of vision of the “many,” makes it necessary to address these

issues on another level. We should not vaguely wonder why our

society is not changing, but we should open our eyes to the

immense roadblocks that exist that prevent change. This is not

23


about a lack of “political will” but about the assertion of a

self-interested “political will” that has short-circuited our

democratic institutions. Our human ability to adapt can also be

our biggest weakness, as we become accustomed to all manner of

deprivation and exploitation.

I will not focus in this article on the basis for our concerns

about ecological destruction. If you believe that climate change

is a hoax or that the magic hand of free market economics (or a

supreme being) will keep us safe, this article is not for you.

However, feel free to read on if you are interested in

perceptions of the obstacles preventing people from being able to

grasp the self-destructive nature of their hidden beliefs. The

purpose of this article is to explore the reasons we have dug

ourselves into a hole and whether there are ways of thinking that

will help us stop digging, construct ladders and climb out.

VII. Is There A Better Way to View Our Situation?

Albert Einstein made an insightful observation about conundrums

like ours, years ago. He said that we can’t solve our problems

while thinking in the same ways that created them. So, I am

suggesting that we humans may be completely misperceiving our own

nature. Some quality in our thinking, in our assumptions, may be

quietly predisposing us towards self-destruction, to the big con.

Something isn’t allowing us to see that we are at the bottom of a

24


deep hole, feverishly digging deeper, with the materials for

building ladders easily at hand. What is it about humans? Why

are we so different from other species, and perhaps even from our

own ancestors?

In this inquiry, I start with an observation that our dual

nature, as humans, is not what most of us think it is. I am not

one who believes that our competing natures are good and evil.

That notion has existed for millennia, at least since the

emergence of monotheism, and it just doesn’t seem to work in an

age of nuance and logic. Instead, I agree that we have two

natures, but neither is “good” or “evil.”

Instead, our two natures might be better described as animal and

intellectual. Our animal nature has been mapped by psychologists

and primatologists. We are apes, and have the same needs and

emotions as other apes. We are capable of love and hate, empathy

and cruelty. If you look at your life, virtually all of it

involves social activity, empathic caring, competing, seeking a

place in hierarchies, seeking a partner, seeking stable housing,

food and community. Freud and Jung both taught that the primary

source of our emotions and motivation is our unconscious, or

animal, mind.

Perhaps the way in which we are different from other animals is

that we have a particularly rich social existence due to our

ability to develop, use and share abstract concepts and symbols.

25


By no means are we the only species to have highly developed

social lives, but our abilities to develop and communicate

abstract concepts, ideologies, religions, legal systems and our

otherwise enormously complex intellectual lives, is rather

different from a troop of baboons, dolphins or monkeys. Most

other species have empathy, family and tribal connections and

communications, and even a contemplative life. Many can develop

and/or use tools. However, it appears that humans have the most

highly developed and abstract socially integrated intellectual

life.

VIII. Humans Create Our Own Realities

I suggest that our social nature, coupled with our ability to

manipulate abstract intellectual symbols, facilitates the

creative and complex communications that build incredibly

complicated societies in our globalizing world. This ability to

create our own realities allows us to adapt to a tremendous range

of environments and conditions. Yet, this intellectual

adaptability may be both our greatest strength and our greatest

weakness. We don’t know how to turn it off, nor when we need to.

That which allows us to survive drought and predators may well

make us more vulnerable to sociopaths, psychopaths and despots

who intimidate and manipulate us to our detriment. Many of the

realities we come to accept are not actually the physical

26


realities we face, but the constructed realities invented by

ambitious opportunists seeking to get us to meet their needs.

And, on a massive scale, reinforced by mass media, we are often

not able to tell the difference.

This ability to live in the reality (e.g., matrix) created by

other humans is profoundly liberating and incarcerating, at the

same time. No example is more compelling than humans living

among our constructed legal fictions, called corporations. These

constructs often cause us to work against our very clear

interests. We may even be asked to vote against our interests

for freedom and individual rights if that will further the

profitability of a corporation. How crazy is that? After all,

if our paycheck, in our society, is our freedom, why not serve an

imaginary life form with our time and talents in exchange for

money? In the short term, it seems to work.

IX. And We Are So Gullible!

Processes such as monetization and corporatization turn nature

into a commodity and humans into replaceable mechanical parts.

These are reminiscent of feudal times, but in those times people

did not have democratic processes through which change could

occur. Instead, the enforced sense of subservience to a

corporation or a feudal lord disempowers us. We often know what

is going on, but without our connection with the natural world,

with our actual animal reality, we cannot fully embrace our role

27


as guardians of the natural world. When we are under the spell

of reality-spinning opportunistic storytellers, we lose our

ability to see what is in plain view. Instead of seeing sick,

greedy cowards, we see intimidating economic warriors or saviors.

We get sucked into the con game. Our intelligence, rather than

being used to inform us, is thus used to distract, confuse and

control us. And our governments are transformed into corporate

relations agents, divorced from the somewhat representative forms

of government of the recent past.

In normal times, starting millennia ago, human creativity tends

to distract us from the mundane life of a human primate.

Seeking group protection, stimulation and companionship, we have

increasingly been living in the complex social realities of human

settlements containing hundreds of thousands, or millions, of

individuals in rather close proximity. In exchange for this

solidarity, we relinquish our individual authority to entirely

create our own reality. Instead, we accept part of the reality

of the host group and the leaders who define and control life for

their followers, subjects, employees. One can argue that this

trade-off has empowered humans to extend our geographic range and

increase our numbers, and to develop more and more advanced

technology. However, we cannot say that we are better off. We

may have simply traded our freedom for a self-incarcerated

reality that is not in our interests, and today is not

sustainable.

28


X. What Conflict, Stress, Shame and Fear Do to Us.

In this dystopic, constructed human existence, our abundant

experiences of stress, shame and fear, instead of being used to

ensure our survival from predators, are converted, through

intellectualization, to metaphoric survival struggles and

stories. Instead of being chased by a tiger, our threat may be

being badgered for a date, not being given a living wage for our

work or being denied a promotion. As a result, we have chronic

stresses that are a threat to our individual health and group

resilience. Our shame at falling for the massive con and giving

away our natural world, immobilizes us! While fear may not

threaten our survival directly through violence, in combination

with shame, it threatens our survival through stress-related

illnesses, rage, compulsion, anxiety and depression, as well as

unpredictably predictable outbursts of violence, often directed

against ourselves.

Even more importantly, the fear and stress force us to compromise

on our happiness and well-being. We accept austerity, conditions

of employment that are far from optimal, gradually giving up our

dreams in favor of a stable job, or one that appears to be

stable. We may be forced to accept far less than a “living

wage.” So, we work for organizations that we don’t trust and

which we often come to despise. Dissonance. We live in an

explosion of cognitive dissonance, where we are doing things that

we don’t necessarily value, working for organizations we don’t

29


trust, and helping move the world in directions with which we

don’t agree. We elect politicians we know will be mentally or

financially corrupt. We accept corporate and governmental

intrusions into our autonomy and privacy as “necessary.” As a

result, we disconnect with ourselves, with our dreams, with our

feelings about how we want to live and how we want to be treated.

We disconnect from our ethics and stop “rocking the boat.” It

just isn’t worth it to be idealistic, to expect people and

organizations to do what they say they are doing, to be who they

claim to be.

On one level, our ecological challenges and the global and local

threats to our sustainability are real tigers that are still

stalking us. But they are not yet in striking distance, and,

like the real tiger, they will not be visible until it is pretty

much too late. I don’t know the extent that our personal dramas

and frustrations distract us from the knowledge of the dangers

our planet faces. But our corporate media are adept at using

looming threats to distract and desensitize us, rather than to

generate thoughtful debate. When hazards are omnipresent, we get

used to them. When, as with deregulation, we have allowed so

many serious risks to constantly wander around in our lives, our

senses are overwhelmed and shut down. After a while, like the

village of the boy who “cried wolf” too often, we are

desensitized to the still-present risks and actively ignore them,

although at a grave risk.

30


Perhaps these real dangers are also overshadowed by distractions

by our omnipresent technologies, media and personal dramas.

After all, we experience ample dramas in our aspirations, our

dreams, our fears and nightmares, traumas, history, the

expectations of those around us. We have dramas caused by the

often-impossible standards we attempt to follow from ethical,

religious and philosophical systems, the boundaries of the

ideological systems to which we are devoted, and from concepts

like citizenship, nationhood, family obligations, ethnicity,

global citizenship and community.

The animal within us is stressed, to be sure. But rather than

ensuring that we are safe, our intellect is throwing emotional

noise in all directions, overwhelming our biological sensors

until they shut down. You may be familiar with the military

aircraft tactic to defend against a heat-seeking missile. The

pilot, aware of being tracked by a missile, explodes a pod of

scrap metal that distracts the missile from its intended target.

In the case of the aircraft, it escapes the attack. In the case

of us humans, our out-of-control stress levels further cause us

to distort reality, misperceive threats, to lose sight of very

real dangers.

XI. A Very “Special” Animal.

One of the many puzzles about us humans is that we are definitely

animals, but animals that feel special and different from

31


animals. Perhaps these thoughts have been necessary for us to

justify being predators. Other species may not need to have the

same kind of internal conversation before taking action to

satisfy an animal need. When a tiger is hungry, I suspect that

there is thought, contemplation and awareness, but perhaps not

the same kind of internal conversation between two natures that

we have in humans. In non-human animals, there may be much less

social negotiation at a conceptual level.

Still, as both Freud and Jung made clear, we humans are governed

by our unconscious (animal) mind. To be sure, our intellectual

mind claims to be in charge, making our decisions appear

rational. We can imagine that the bulk of our intellectual

thoughts center on the rationalization of our animal mind’s

inclinations. So, rather than the dichotomy of stupid animal vs.

brilliant human, I am posing a very different nature for us.

Perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps our animal mind

possesses our survival instincts while our intellectual mind

possesses our ability to rationalize, essentially being the con

man, the schmoozer, the socially constructed “us” that lacks an

individual identity and common sense. Perhaps the intellectual

mind is the part of us that can make astounding discoveries while

being completely oblivious to the tiger quietly stalking us.

If there is a wild human left within us, which is my firm belief,

it is a primate that is as untamable as a chimpanzee. It is a

truly non-rational being, one that has often fallen in love with

32


firearms and motor vehicles, drawn to any and all shiny things

despite the dangers they create. Perhaps, we can dampen the

intellectualization that separates us from our animal nature,

which suppresses our relationship to nature rather than informing

it. Perhaps, we can clarify our intellectual musings that keep

us doing things that long ago became counterproductive. Perhaps

we can bring ourselves more into synch with the reality in which

we live. Could we create clearer visions of needed changes?

Perhaps this two-natured creature will yet receive the agency

needed to lead us through the maze of our decadent, greed-based

intellectualizing culture to open our ancient eyes and do what is

necessary for our survival.

I do not idealize the primitive in us, and I respect the

potential for horrendous episodes of unpredictable violence as

well as unpredictable grace. But perhaps we need to call upon

its power and resolve in this time of crisis. One must have a

deeply human culture to safely harness these energies, and so we

need to transform our culture with examples from those from

various human heritages and traditions. But we need to lessen

our high-tech distractions, perhaps especially for those of us

who are not digital natives, and focus more on the present and on

opening our minds and hearts, toning down the chattering of our

intellectualizing, rationalizing minds.

To start with, humans are animals, like the members of other

species. Over the hundreds of thousands of years in which we

33


separated from other primate species, humans have slowly

developed different patterns that have enabled us to adapt to

hostile climates and to develop agricultural practices that

allowed the creation of large settlements that eventually became

cities. Yet, our urban corporate cultures have been increasingly

stressing and stretching our two separate realities.

That may be the reason we have so much difficulty navigating

between the various values and systems we inhabit. Early humans

were attuned primarily to the biological/physical realities of

their lives. However, current humans have used technology,

including visual and conceptual imagery, to rationalize our

biological needs into a diverse and ever-complex range of social

realities and cultural systems. Our situation is unprecedented.

The globalized, urban corporate cultures of our world have

virtually self-incarcerated billions of humans in worlds of

mental images and constructs.

No wonder humanity is not of one mind even when it comes to our

survival! We do not have a common reality as our starting point.

Our cultures are floating between two very different, but

interactive, realities, our two different natures - physical

(animal) and social (intellectual). Our perception of these two

realities is immensely complicated by our diverse political,

cultural, religious, scientific and economic tools, ideologies

and disciplines. No wonder we haplessly seek technological

solutions and “green” consumerism to solve our problems – the

34


very ways of thinking that have gotten us into this mess to begin

with.

XII. The Two Realities and What Has Changed

If we are willing to think in new ways, to question our

assumptions, we can see that our social and cultural constructs

have increasingly been out of synch with our physical

environment, our real world. We are, indeed, living in two very

different realities.

Physical Reality/Animal Nature is the biological/ecological

reality of our natural systems on this planet, the predictable

cycles and unpredictable events of nature and our biological

needs for shelter, food, water, waste management and

companionship.

Social Reality/Intellectual Nature is our human-constructed ideas

and cultures related to our nature and our role in society and

the cosmos. It is what our young people learn growing up, how to

think in ways that gain them acceptance, friends and success in a

society that is increasingly disembodied from the natural world.

In ancient times, our societies were structured around the

physical realities, the constraints of nature. We observed the

changes of the seasons, the life cycles of domesticated animals,

the rise and fall of the tides, cyclic flooding of rivers, the

35


seasonal paths of nomads, the planting and harvest cycles, the

movement of celestial bodies. We celebrated our holidays in

conjunction with nature, from which we derived explanations and

stories of who we were and where we came from.

However, our social and cultural realities have become

increasingly complex over the past few thousand years, and

dramatically more so over the past 200 years. Today, instead of

90% of our people living in rural areas, mostly engaged with

farming, 90% of our people will soon live in cities and many

believe that food comes from supermarkets. We are less aware of

the constraints of nature, having “conquered” nature in countless

ways, or at least thinking we have done so. Natural events

change the price of our food, or the place it comes from, not

whether we have the food at all, at least in the developed world.

Global commoditization has changed our relationship with our

world and has broken our inter-dependence with our local

environment.

Our social world is often unconcerned with the actual sources of

our food and water. All is assumed. We live in big, urban

factories, akin to space satellites rather than organically

sustainable natural systems. Instead of nature, our economy (our

social reality) has become the source of everything we need or

want. Everything is defined by the marketplace, which is a

quirky, rationalized social construct, not a physical one.

36


XIII. Where Reality Becomes Delusion.

At the core of the distinction between our physical and social

realities is a cultural value that seems embedded or programmed

in our consciousness. That value, possibly associated with our

continuum of self-esteem and arrogance is that humans are better

than, and separate from, nature. We know that we are animals,

but somewhere along the paths of religion and science, humanity

became convinced that it is special. We identify other species

as “animals” and humans as, well, humans! Many believe the

preposterous stories about humans being created by an omniscient,

omnipotent extra-terrestrial being. Many believe that our

capability to produce replicable, scientific research simply puts

us into another biological category from all other animals. It

is almost as if we were some kind of exceptional, computer-ape

hybrid. Without this specialness, and the ability of humans to

construct social systems to support and expand our subjective

experience of specialness, humans might remain more closely

attuned to nature, as we did before the industrial age, as we did

before we built huge cities.

I am not advocating that we idolize nature, turn our backs on

technology and culture and retreat to living in caves. Yet, this

is a talking point of those opposed to dealing with reality.

37


They assert that we have no choice but to continue destroying

ourselves, hoping that technology will somehow save us. My goal,

instead, is a balance that brings relief to the dissonance

between our two realities, our two natures, bringing them closer

together. In this way, we might use our social abilities to

adapt, to create cultures that approach our ecosystems and

physical reality with the seriousness that they demand for our

survival.

I do not think that humans have actually left nature. We can’t.

Wherever we go, there we are. However, we have degraded and

diminished our connections with the natural world, to the extent

that our social systems tell us that it is okay to pollute and

destroy our planet – or at least that we should allow the

greediest sociopaths among us to do so.

XIV. National and Multi-National Corporations as Symbiotic

Entities

With Legal Rights, Powers and Ultimate Legitimacy

38


What is a corporation? Is it a person? Is it anything more than

a legal construct, a fiction to make doing business easier? I

think that one of the reasons we follow a social “reality” that

ignores human sustainability because we have surrendered our

stewardship of the natural world to corporations and governments.

Unlike humans, corporations have no inherent connection with, or

value for, the natural world. They are collective systems with a

consciousness that is not based upon moral or ethical principles,

not on the survival of our species, but on the social constructs

of constant competition, efficiency and maximized profit.

Nature, beauty, love and kindness are not translatable into

dollars, so they just don’t influence the “balance sheets” of

these nonhuman entities. There is talk about the “triple bottom

line,” which is a very positive development. Yet, humans seem

more drawn to numbers than principles. It is easier to measure

profits than good citizenship, so that’s what we tend to focus

on.

To a corporation, a legal/cultural construct, a curious legal

fiction, ecological and planetary systems are simply there to be

converted into wealth. To a corporation, people are of no

special value, except in that they can serve the corporation’s

interests. Keeping the population levels sustainable for the

planet is not a consideration because the more people there are,

the greater potential markets for goods and services and the

larger the pool of people to serve the corporation.

39


Corporations, as legal constructs, are not citizens and their

interests must not control our discourse as citizens or our

governments. However, they currently have a much larger voice in

public affairs than actual people do. Talk about our ability to

think abstractly gone horribly wrong!

The creation and massive spread of corporate-think appears to

have helped sever our connection with our natural world. As we

adopt the social reality of our rationalizing, socially

constructed systems, we have let go of the reality or our animal

world, our natural world. We attempt to “humanize” corporations

by thinking of them as “global citizens” as honoring their

“corporate responsibility.” We expect them to embody our human

values, which is entirely irrational because they are not human.

In these ways, the rise of corporations and money worship, with

the resulting growth of disparities in power and wealth, have

exacerbated the split between our social constructs and our

common sense relationship with our physical world. Our

intellectual nature has created the selfish, amoral, bizarre,

imaginary world in which we now live. It is quite separate from

our natural world, the planet Earth. Our two natures have split

apart, with too many of us thinking that we exist outside of

nature. Our two realities have become dangerously,

unsustainably, distant and unstable.

40


XV. Can We Still Choose a More Functional Reality?

Which reality is real? Our cultures, including our corporations,

scientists and most religions, have been telling us for decades

that we make our own reality, that we can do better than nature.

Indeed, we do create our own reality, but only our social

reality. The physical realities remain the same. Science and

technology do not control our planet, although our social reality

encourages us to believe that they do. When we are proven wrong,

time after time, as with a massive storm or earthquake, rather

than re-think our dependence on technology, we get angry at

nature, further distancing ourselves from that unpredictable and

violent realm from which we emerged.

There are two realities. Our thoughts can only control one. We

can make up our social reality, which can appear to dominate our

physical reality and determine our success and lifestyle. We can

become even more special than anyone could ever have imagined

(That’s how many of our top elites feel!). However, on a

collective level, for the long term, our social reality is not

sustainable. We need to maintain acute awareness of our

physical, natural reality, which we cannot actually control

through our thoughts and cultural constructs.

41


XVI. Transcending the Duality

When we recognize that there are two (or more), sometimes

competing, realities, in our human nature and consciousness, we

gain greater potential for insight. We gain the potential to

think in ways other than those that caused our problems. Freud

and Jung showed us that the unconscious mind is more powerful

than our conscious minds, but our social realities tend to over-

ride that knowledge, making enormous assumptions about how great

and exceptional we humans are. Those feelings of omnipotence and

omniscience that we get from religion, ideology, science and

technology are hubris. We need to watch for exuberance that

feeds the ego rather than the soul. These thoughts and feelings

cause us to forget the basic lessons of what it means to be

human. They have led us to break away from the physical reality

in which we exist, the planet Earth, our overpopulation, our

callousness towards our world, and to live in a reality that

endangers our future.

Our cultures, especially our current corporate cultures, with

their CEO’s, and the robber barons, war lords, nobility and

feudal systems that preceded them, have been splitting humans

from our natural physical world for millennia. Today, we have

come up against constraints and limits. They require us to bring

our cultures into alignment with our physical reality on this

planet. Understanding the complexity of human consciousness, and

our vulnerability to losing touch with reality, is essential

42


today. We must accept that we humans are generally not objective

or rational, regardless of how successful and “intelligent” we

may regard ourselves.

Two useful metaphors may be found in considering sound and light.

Five thousand years ago, light was substantially a property of

the sun, moon, stars and fires. Today, it emanates everywhere,

indoors and out, obscuring the moon and stars that guided our

ancestors and which reinforced a reverence for our physical

world. We allow security to drive the illumination of our cities

and towns so that night doesn’t fall on most of our population

anymore. This disconnects us from nature, and deprives us of an

essential experience of solitude, down-time.

The same is true for sound. Our hyperactive, omnipresent media

and electronic devices are like chattering monkeys in the trees.

They drown out the subtle interior world that people have used to

search for deeper meaning and truth. When we find a “quiet spot”

it is too often disturbed by our electronic tethers, some person

or programmed digital message or notification or alarm that

piques our interest and/or adrenaline, banning the quiet from

even our quiet places. Many people are seeing this reality and

taking action to develop contemplative practices to re-assert our

human-ness. We need to find tranquility, to quiet the buzz of

our intellects, in order to slow down and remember what it is to

be human.

43


XVII. Conclusion

We humans are a chronically over-stimulated and over-stressed

species on the run, exhausted, and not making reasonable

decisions. To use ancient metaphors, perhaps we are literally

evicting ourselves from the Garden of Eden by worshiping money

and exalting the egos of our business and political celebrities.

Perhaps we have created towers of babel that satisfy their egos,

and ours, but deny reality, over reach our capabilities and

divide our communities.

In the big picture, our divorce from nature has not gone well for

either party. In order to reconcile, on whatever terms we can

find, we may need to tone down the background noise and sit in

calm. As we drift back from surround sound to stereo, to hi fi,

and finally acoustic natural sounds, we may be more able to

experience our physical and social realities. The shouting of

sound and light has masked the beauty of our world, the beauty of

being human. It has helped consumerism to steal the meaning from

our lives.

We humans are tremendously resilient, partly because of our

ability to create social realities. However, we have reached a

point where our mainstream culture is endangering our survival.

We need to bring our social and ecological realities (using both

our intellectual and animal natures) back into alignment so that

44


we may make better decisions to safeguard our future on this

planet.

Indeed, we have never left nature. We’ve left our senses. It is

time to return to our senses. We are gradually doing just that.

XVIII. The Things We Can Do

So, what do we do next? My suggestion is for each of us to spend

some time in nature, to get reacquainted, or re-invested in our

relationship with, the natural world. Some of us already have

these connections, but many don’t. Think about what is important

and what you would be willing to change in order to be able to

pass this planet along to future generations, rather than risk

ending the great ride that humans, and other species, have had.

Think about how we need to step up and change our own lives, out

of joy and hope rather than suffering and deprivation, while we

build communities of understanding and resilience that transform

our consciousness and open our eyes.

“To Do” List:

Spend more time in nature

Take more “down time”

Build positive, forward-looking communities

Turn off the TV

Enjoy being human

45


Be grateful

Work to improve government and business

Grow, gather and/or hunt some of your own

food

Be of service to your community

Don’t Ever Give Up!

We each need to have some “down time” in which we just sit and

think, or walk and think. This time may be called “meditation”

or not, but it is vital that we spend at least 20 or 30 minutes

each day in reflection and contemplation. That time must be

spent in the present, sorting out our thoughts and feelings,

clarifying our understanding of who we are and how we can be more

calm and less stressed. A person who cannot sit still for 20

minutes is not comfortable in their body and their mind. It

takes practice, but anyone can (and should) make that investment

in themselves. If individuals are not self-aware, then we cannot

expect our collective societies to reflect anything other than

the chaos and self-centeredness of humanity’s hugely diverse

interests, needs and wants.

Talk with your friends and colleagues. This isn’t about doom and

gloom, but about mobilizing our insight and compassion in order

to build a better world. It takes community to maintain a human.

Write your thoughts down. Share your thoughts and feelings with

46


others, in person, on discussion boards, social media or your

local newspaper. Sharing can help us build support networks that

will help us overcome the inertia of others, who may be resisting

the recognition of our common interests in protecting our future.

In the process of sharing, and increasing our networks, we can

change our communities, and the world.

In the larger world of community, civic groups and politics,

point out where incorrect assumptions, ideologies and prejudices

are creating obstacles to human sustainability. Help to show

that there ARE positive, reasonable roles for government and for

businesses. Challenge any assertions that there is nothing that

we can do, that we have no good options. We always have choices,

and we need to make them consciously and rationally.

We are slowly changing our awareness and our societies, but we

can do better. Turn off the TV. Take breaks from your

electronic devices. Re-discover the natural world around you.

Develop your own interests and hobbies, developing yourself as an

artist, musician, writer, gardener, and/or leader. Volunteer to

help other people. Grow some of your own food. In the end, one

of our greatest abilities, as humans, is to find our own ways to

be productive in our communities and helpful to others.

Above all, don’t give up. Humanity, and this unbelievable

planet, are worth it. Humans are incredibly resilient and

creative. Let’s use those qualities to improve our prospects for

47


the future, to take meaningful and measured action, rather than

simply kicking the can down the road, waiting for a new

technology to save us. The answers are already here, but we need

to be quiet and present to see them. We need to be self-aware

and mindful in order to ask the right questions – and to discern

the best answers.

XIX. Why This Paper Has No References1

1You may be searching for footnotes or references at the end of

this paper. Let me explain why there are none, despite the

convention. There are no references in this essay because I

believe that our concepts and realities need to be untied from

their social histories, morphed in ways that serve us, and stand

on their own. This can be uncomfortable in that most of us,

especially academics, are used to receiving hidden cues from

familiar references, which give us a sense of connection to

specialized knowledge and history. However, we cannot afford to

hold philosophy, linguistics, psychology, history and science as

limited to “experts” in a given field or discipline. My goal is

to help facilitate the larger society in transforming our

thinking from the reductionist and specialized realms in which we

are currently stuck. Eliminating the lineages and disciplines

from the role of filtering and sorting our reality, perhaps we

can arrive at human solutions that are more flexible and

48


accessible, understandable and reasonable to all of us as a human

family.

I am concerned that the complexity of our world, of our

societies, in and of itself, is helping drive our dysfunctional

practices and preventing the re-aggregation of our knowledge and

values in sustainable ways. Instead, they are locking us into

fragmentation and enabling special interests and ideologies to

dominate (or thwart) the dialog. We need to build a common

language, a transdisciplinary awareness, holistic in the

inclusion of all of the factors and perspectives involved with

our human and planetary systems. In this way, we can all

function as global citizens rather than competing as experts or

representatives of various disciplines, industries, economic

classes or ideologies.

My paper attempts to model a human dialog on the topic of our

collective future, telling a story that is accurate and

accessible. One other response to our stifling mess of

complexity is to simply “chuck it all.” This “know nothing”

reaction is increasingly common in the U.S. and Europe, a neo-

conservatism that attempts to roll back civilization to a mythic

time when things were simpler and better. Instead, my vision is

to step back and examine our situation in creative and honest

ways capable of bringing clarity to our present, enabling

positive solutions, rather than regression to the past. However,49


I share the frustration of those seeking simplicity. I believe

that our societies desperately need to clarify, simplify and

humanize, focusing on our core values and rapidly move off of the

exceptionalist, individualism-worshiping, greed-based path that

is leading humanity to oblivion.

Earon Davis is a transdisciplinary writer with degrees in

sociology, law and public health and experience in environmental

health and policy and non-profits. He is an adjunct lecturer at

Indiana University, teaching stress reduction techniques. A

former Assistant to the Chairman of the Illinois Pollution

Control Board, consultant and newsletter publisher, Earon

currently teaches college and writes on human sustainability. He

is originally from Chicago and has three sons there. Earon lives

in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife, Martha Foster, and is on

the Board of Directors of her inter-cultural documentary non-

profit, Living Earth Television. Earon is active in his

community and has a profile on LinkedIn,

http://linkedin.com/in/earon

50

http://linkedin.com/in/earon

Human Sustainability in the Anthropocene: Regaining our Bearings after the Big Con

Documents