You and I are the problem

What's more important than destroying the earth?

“The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world’s problems.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

American novelist and social reformer Upton Sinclair wrote, “ It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Same with us and our consumption.

Ninety-nine percent of stuff we mine, harvest, process, and send through the system is disposed of within 6 months.¹ As FF alumni Sterling Roth puts it, we are destroying this earth to create garbage.

In order to create that garbage, we need fossil fuels. Fact: the West sends ten times more money to Russia for oil and natural gas than it sends to Ukraine for military aid.² This, so we can travel to more places and have more things.

The Consumptive Power of the Educated Liberal

Liberals are in denial.

You and I would like to believe it’s other people that are responsible for climate change and war. The “bad other:” Republicans, China, Putin. But the problem is you and me. The journalist George Monbiot reports that liberal, left-learning, peaceful people contribute more to climate change and environmental destruction (and war) than those on the right:

Why? Because, environmental awareness tends to be higher among wealthy people. It is not attitudes that govern our impacts on the planet, but income. The richer we are, the bigger our footprint, regardless of our good intentions. Those who see themselves as green consumers, the paper found, “mainly focus on behaviours that have relatively small benefits.”

I know people who recycle meticulously, save their plastic bags, carefully measure the water in their kettles, then take their holidays in the Caribbean, cancelling their environmental savings 100-fold. I’ve come to believe that the recycling licences their long-haul flights. It persuades people they’ve gone green, enabling them to overlook their greater impacts. . . .

Research by Oxfam suggests that the world’s richest 1% (if your household has an income of £70,000 or more, this means you) produce around 175 times as much carbon as the poorest 10%.³

Back in the 2010s, I worked in sustainability and saw plenty of this in Portland’s “green professionals” community. Diligent recycling/composting and vacationing to Bali. Buying clean energy and then “upgrading” to a bigger house and filling it with more “environmentally friendly” stuff. Americans consume (dictionary: “to destroy, to use up”) the equivalent of four planets worth of natural resources. If you make more than the median income of $36k a year, you’re likely responsible for more.

SIDE NOTE: Monbiot, along with everyone, equates high wealth and high incomes with high spending. There’s no necessary causation between the two, other than lack of awareness (unconsciousness) and the ability to do so. You can have wealth and low consumption. In fact that’s the only real path to financial independence.

To think it’s others but not us is deep denial. Sustainability without changing the logic of our desires will never happen. To think that we can “green purchase” our way out of personal transformation is a capitalist fantasy. Nonviolence is intimately related to non-consumption (non-destruction, non-using up). To get us out of our denial would entail deep shadow work.

The material world is only a manifestation of our inner spiritual world

A growth rate of 3% a year means the American economy doubles every 24 years.⁴ We have twice as many things as we did in 1998. We will have twice as many things in 2046. Since 1975, we have twice as much living space per person⁵:

I quoted Francis Weller in an earlier post:

One of the things we talk about in the work that I do is that we need to restore what I call primary satisfaction. The things that we evolved with over hundreds of thousands of years that satisfy the soul at the most basic level; adequate levels of touch, you know, comfort in times of sorrow and loss, celebration and gratitude, gathering food together, eating together under the stars, telling stories around the camp fire, you know, laughing and playfulness together, sensuous erotic connection to the wider world. These are what made us human. But for the most part these things have disappeared. Now, we are left with secondary satisfactions— material goods, seeking power, rank, prestige, addictions— and these things never satisfy the soul.

Here’s the thing with 3% growth: we could have taken it as time. We could have chosen to have just as many things as we had in 1998, but be working twenty hours a week. We could have had twenty hours more time for our primary satisfactions: touch, celebration, gratitude, laughing, play, and erotic connection. These are the things more important than destroying this earth. We can extend the logic of compound interest to realize that if we made this decision in 1974, we’d now be working ten hours a week. This is not idle conjecture: in 1930; the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would be working 15 hours a week. But we chose to use our economic productivity to buy secondary satisfactions: more things, bigger houses, more “experiences,” more status, more power.⁶

We’re making the same decision now, about the year 2046.

The problem is not money, the problem is you and me.

It’s easy to blame “money,” especially if you’re money avoidant. The problem is not money. Money is simply a store of value and a medium of exchange. The problem is you and me, our spiritual impoverishment. It is culture. But really it’s just you and me: the default, unconscious choices we make within our pathoadolesecent culture:

“We are surrounded by good, well-meaning folks who are swept along in a stream of shallow options. Not only is the good made increasingly difficult to do, it is even difficult to recognize.” - Richard Rohr

Until we stop choosing the shallow option, we’ll continue to create trash to fund militaries.⁷ Krishnamurti says: “From innumerable complexities we must grow to simplicity; we must become simple in our inward life and in our outward needs.”

The world is simply a manifestation of our inner lives. If we don’t realize what really satisfies us, we will burn this earth, with the people on it, to the ground.

1. The Story of Stuff.

2. The EU has sent $1.6 billion and the U.S. has sent $2 billion in military aid to Ukraine. President Biden recently proposed sending another $33 billion of arms over the next 4 months. In the meanwhile, the West sends $25 billion per month to Russia for fossil fuels. The EU is contemplating banning oil imports from Russia by the end of year, but not natural gas.

3. http://www.monbiot.com/2017/11/24/everything-must-go/

4. Compound interest, i.e. math.

5. And yet we still need more space for our stuff. We now rent out storage units for stuff, i.e. garbage, we can’t fit in our homes and garages.

6. To put it another way, we could have chosen to be in our bodies more. The cycle of working (life energy) for money, then spending the money we worked for (life energy) takes us out of our bodies.

7. Look at the wars the U.S. has entered into in the 40 years and you’ll see it’s in places where oil bubbles out of the ground. That’s the cost of our 3% growth.