Two Planets
How do I keep missing the ball and writing so belatedly on big news? I’ve actually known about this for a while and have told others, and used it as an example of the capitalist system failing on discussions, but for some reason it never occurred to me turn it into a post here.
Well, what is the news? The widely respected biennial report from the World Wide Fund for Nature has come out and it has grim news indeed: if humanity continues to live as it does, we will require two planets by 2030 to sustain our lifestyle.
Scared? You should be. That’s just twenty years away.
It’s not hard to see how they came to this conclusion: the world is rapidly turning into a desert thanks to profit-fueled agricultural techniques which focus on production while depleting the soil. Our acids–I mean, our oceans–are totally mixing with our bases and rising slowly. Deforestation is causing droughts and floods, because trees in the mountains soak up the rain and slowly release it over a year. Our air is slowly killing us, hell, even our milk is slowly killing us, thanks to the antibiotics we’re all consuming when we aren’t sick which makes them useless when we really need them. And on top of all this, you still have families having too many children.
The question is not whether we can change our way of life by then. We can’t. We live in a capitalist society where intelligence is crushed underfoot the wheels of profit and consumerism.
We’ve become a global society indoctrinated in the religion of Capitalism. We read ‘Beauty Mags’ or shopping catalogues as our Bibles. We watch only Capitalist television and only hang out with Capitalists. We go to shopping mall churches and worship with our dollars, and hope someday to see the shopping mall of shopping malls, the NY Stock Exchange. We are shunned if we dare to question Capitalism. We are taught from birth that Capitalism is the only way, because here in civilized America and Europe we worship currency. Currency is the only thing that can bring you happiness, and when our love for the dollar bites us in the ass, it will be a mysterious Capitalist miracle to save us all.
Sound familiar?
Long story short, I doubt reality will ever triumph over profit unless the Capitalist system itself is destroyed. This is the only chance of changing our lifestyle.
The real question is, can we get off our asses, get our space programs going, and colonize another planet by 2030? What do you think?
Quite scary indeed, not to mention discouraging to those of us who still think conservation is a good idea. It’s like voting, any individual person can become apathetic and stick with the old consumptive habits, thinking that their own personal effect doesn’t matter when those of the other six and a half billion are taken into account, and yet that mentality is also part of the reason why the six and a half billion are so problematic.
Yes, it is discouraging. The problem is however, it isn’t like voting at all, or at least not equal voting–living in a country like America, and being rich, greatly increase your vote and let you ruin it for everyone else.
I have serious doubts that capitalism is to blame for everything wrong with the world. No matter the economic system, human selfishness and greed is going to rear its ugly head.
Let me rephrase my comment: Most humans have serious difficulties thinking in the long-term, and it’s only become worse in modern times.
Well, of course it isn’t to blame for everything wrong with the world. That’s impossible!
But without profit motive there would be no reason for things such as overproduction and overconsumption, which are the main causes of these problems.
It seems to me that most people are easily led. In a capitalist system, people are led to consume lots of goods. That’s how capitalism works.
I agree that selfish and greedy people will always exist in any exconomic system, as Yoo said, but capitalism rewards selfishness and greed. Capitalism thrives on greed. It’s like a game of hungry-hungry hippo, where everyone tries to get the most marbles (money). I agree with Yvette that capitalism causes overproduction and overconsumption.
Capitalism requires a consumer base. It creates an environment where we are bombarded with commercials telling us we need to buy all this crap that we don’t need. Within capitalism, corporations do not just fill a need that already exists. In order to maximize profits and be competitive, corporations invent the need (demand for their products) through clever advertising. The result of this is obviously that we consume far more than we need to. If there were no capitalist profit system, then what would be the motivation to get everyone to consume as much as they possibly can?
You hit the nail on the head there Joe.