The Fire Is Raging, And We Refuse To Put It Out

On why Capitalism's belief in perpetual growth and our consumerist culture is destroying the planet...and why none of it matters, ultimately.

Good Sunday to you… This essay is about how we’re fucking up this planet and, in fact, more so ourselves by our tacit compliance with consumerism. Our appetite for useless bright shiny stuff seems insatiable. I’m still trying to figure out how to untangle myself from it, and when I do, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, if you think the stuff I write about is important and that others should read it, use the blue button just below to share on your social account or via email to a friend. Cheers, and have a good week. - Larry

Southern Europe, Chile, and Canada are on fire. Tropical storms are worsening in the Pacific, and many Asian towns and cities are underwater. So reports Global Citizen¹. So who is responsible? A paper in the Lancet Planetary Health shows that we must look to countries of the Global North². The United States is single-handedly responsible for 40 per cent of excess global CO2 emissions. The European Union and the United Kingdom are responsible for 29 per together cent. Adding the rest of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Japan, the analysis shows that the Global Nooup is collectively responsible for no less than 92 per cent of excess global CO2 emissions³.

Richard Buckminster Fuller suggested in his autobiography Critical Path⁴ that “the folly of the selfish and fearfully contrived wealth games humanity plays under a misinformed survival-of-the-fittest ideology” is ultimately responsible for all human problems. In other words, it’s every man for himself, or every Capitalist for himself, rather. It has been a get-rich-quick and let later generations sort out the problems, kind of game. Externalisation, I think they call it. In this game, we are all complicit, and for me, it breaks down to a very simple state of affairs. That is, human beings hardly know themselves or, indeed, what drives them and their behaviour. Others do, however, and so we are so easily duped by snake oil salesmen. Sold on the promise of a better tomorrow, we invest that future existence in instant gratification today. Alas, the gratification merely lasts like a sugar buzz on an empty stomach. Gustav Le Bon⁵, Edward Bernays⁶, and Claude Hopkins⁷ set the stage in the early twentieth century for this engineering of our tacit consent to the consumerist model. The rest, as they say, is history.

In reality, it is not the planet that is at risk from our psychotic behaviour and insatiable desire, it is we ourselves that are at risk. The planet will eventually recover from our raping and pillaging, and new species will evolve, perhaps with a more advanced consciousness sufficient to use technology with maturity and respect for their environment. Life will go on, in other words. But in our time, given our pursuit of perpetual growth, we will be responsible for destroying ourselves and everything around us. I see no way out of this because although we understand that human activity is creating dramatic and destructive change in the world, we seem incapable of modifying our behaviour sufficiently to reverse it. Governments still speak of growth as a primary and ongoing priority, and in a way that appears to represent the height of human prowess. Health, well-being, and human advancement are all measured in Dollars and Cents, and at the same time, they call for climate awareness and environmental policy change. We are schizophrenic—we know our demand for economic growth is destroying the planet, but we can’t help ourselves. We want to have our cake and eat it too.

Take jobs, for example. David Graeber, when he was alive (his legacy lives on), highlighted for me in his 2019 book Bullshit Jobs the utter insanity of human working lives⁸. He pointed out that whether you’re on the left or the right, few question the necessity of job creation. What those jobs are, whether they provide meaning, purpose, fulfilment, and value to the people who conduct them or to the world, seems to be largely irrelevant. Just give the people jobs—that’s all that matters. Little attention is given to the apparent fact that all this human activity; flying to meetings, driving to the city, building roads and other infrastructure, creation of industrial complexes, office blocks, the war machine, waste generation and every other ancillary aspect of industry and their associated jobs, is the primary contributor to the destruction of our world.

Speculative investment is at the core of the problem, according to Graeber. Things are made and built based on return on investment and not for the social good. Take the buildings that make up our cities, for example. For hundreds of years, the focus was on creating beautiful cities that lasted well beyond the lives of their designers. Now, they only need to last until the speculators get their money back plus three hundred or more per cent gain. Planned obsolescence is fundamental. Graeber says;

One of the main reasons we have such high levels of industrial production is that we design everything to break or to become outmoded and useless in a few years’ time. If you build an iPhone to break in three years, you can sell five times as many than if you make it to last 15, but you also use five times the resources and create five times the pollution. Manufacturers are perfectly capable of making phones (or stockings, or light bulbs) that wouldn’t break; in fact, they actually do – they’re called ‘military grade’. Force them to make military-grade products for everyone. We could cut down greenhouse gas production massively and improve our quality of life.

Consumerism creates jobs, but for what? For people to be miserable doing them? For the planet to be overrun by waste? (Our waste is transported to countries in the global south, did you know that? It’s then dumped on the land and in the rivers. When you see rivers of waste in India on TikTok, that’s what you’re looking at). How you feel about work is irrelevant, at least you have a job. You should be grateful. That’s the prevailing narrative. Grateful for what? To be beholden to some corporation? To subjugate yourself to a dictator? To be able to “qualify” for a 30-year death grip? To be caught in the rate wheel of consumerism? It is morally reprehensible to be unemployed, apparently. To have a job is to make a contribution to society (or is that the financial and corporate industrial complex? I can’t quite decide).

Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist and an advocate for degrowth. Here’s what he had to say recently on perpetual growth ideology;

Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatised and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there.

Perpetual growth is driven from the top down. The Capitalist system, of which we are currently an inseparable and complicit component, demands and requires it. Without it, Capitalism dies, and its captains just can’t be having that. It seems that from the elite of the elite, from the very pinnacle of the political, financial and corporate world right down to those of us below the bread line, there is an unwillingness to forego the standard of living to which we have come accustomed. After all, whatever comforts we have accumulated, we worked to obtain them, so why should we give them up? Of course, those living in tents on our city streets hardly have a standard of living to protect and make little or no contribution to the climate crisis. In fact, arguably, they are the ones who are suffering because of it.

No matter our concern for the planet and for others around us, very few of us are willing to give up our seat on the bus for someone who needs it, let alone admit that being on the bus in the first place is what’s causing the problem. And the more we have, the less likely it seems we are willing to give some of that up. The result is that everyone waits for everyone else to take action, and in the meantime, the earth is burning, or drowning. It reminds me in many ways of the Bystander Apathy phenomenon.

Hey, The Sunday Letters Journal is written by me, Larry Maguire. I’m a psychologist and lecturer with a keen interest in a social-oriented agenda and way of life for humanity. If you think the same, if this article resonates with you, become a paid supporter of this publication. Here’s 20% off forever.

Would you act if your life depended on it? Apparently not…

Imagine you were sitting alone in a waiting room. Smoke begins to enter the room from under the door, and seconds later, the fire alarm activates. You’d probably get out of there and look for someone to notify or confirm the problem. But what if there were ten other people with you, and none of them reacted or were hesitant - would you still take action? Studies on these kinds of situations have consistently shown that most people wait for others to show the way, they become confused and often fail to take action that would otherwise save their lives. We are more likely to try to avoid looking foolish than stay alive.

Darley and Latané (1968)⁹ suggested that the number of individuals present in an emergency impacts how quickly if at all, any single individual responds to that situation. They predicted that the more people present in an emergency, the less likely that any single person will take action and the longer it will take them to do so. We can see this play out in a variety of social situations, such as the scene of a road accident, an injured person on the street, a person being attacked, and so on.

The Smoke-Filled Room Study

To test their theory, Darley and Latané simulated a fire emergency where participants waited in a room that gradually filled with smoke. There were three conditions involving the naive participant;

1. The person waited alone.

2. They waited with two other naive participants

3. They waited with two confederates who ignored the smoke, pretended there was nothing much to worry about and stayed in the room.

The study results showed that for condition 1, 75% of the solo participants sought help. For condition 2, 38% of participants accompanied by others sought help. And for condition 3, only 10% of participants who were accompanied by confederates sought help. The results showed that the passive behaviour of “bystanders” can impose a negative social influence on the behaviour of all involved.

Latané and Darley argued that people who are not alone in an emergency sense a “diffusion of responsibility”, and because of this, they are less likely or slower to act. For example, we see climate disasters on the evening news and lament the behaviour of humans, but unless it literally comes to our door, we do nothing. And in this writer’s opinion, the more we have to give up, the longer we wait. It’s similar to the behaviour of traders in equity markets; maybe if we wait it out, we won’t have to sell. Then, like the effects of a bad vindaloo, the arse falls out of it, and we lose it all.

Latané & Darley identified two other psychological processes at work. The second is “evaluation apprehension” which refers to the fear of overreacting or being judged negatively by others when acting in public. In other words, we fear making mistakes and looking foolish in the eyes of our peers. We’d rather risk it all than jump too soon. This is the insanity of the ego.

The third psychological process at work in the bystander phenomenon is “pluralistic ignorance”. This results from our tendency to rely on the clear reactions of others before we, in turn, decide to act. We ask ourselves, just how serious is this situation? According to bystander apathy, a maximum bystander effect occurs when no one acts or intervenes because everyone believes no one else believes there is an emergency (Latane & Nida, 1981)¹⁰. The difficult thing to reconcile to our current global emergency is that many people are shouting FIRE!, but not too many people are exiting the room. Or maybe the fire was spotted too late. Or maybe Bystander Apathy is quite consistent with our current situation—the fire was raging for some time, and too many of us accepted that there was a risk we could perish.

Ah well…

At the end of the day…

At the end of the day, as the fella says, none of it matters because, in one, five, or ten thousand years’ time, we and all that we have created and destroyed will not matter one iota. Life will have gone on in spite of us, and new species will occupy this place. If anything remains of our time here, it will surely speak to the juxtaposition of both the creative intelligence and insanity that raged together within us.

So much potential these human beings must have had, they’ll say, yet so naive, self-centred, fearful and violent. They had no vision beyond next week or next year or, indeed, beyond their own individual existence. They had no sense of legacy to future generations, of their connection to the ground that they tore apart or the creatures that shared their space. They lived only for the hedonic pleasures of today. Stupid humans…

In this, maybe future generations of human beings will have learned from the folly of our existence.

Hey, The Sunday Letters Journal is written by me, Larry Maguire. I’m a psychologist and lecturer with a keen interest in a social-oriented agenda and way of life for humanity. If you think the same, if this article resonates with you, become a paid supporter of this publication. Here’s 20% off forever.

References

1. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/photos-extreme-weather-events-2023-climate-change/

2. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/4/4/who-is-responsible-for-climate

3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(20)30196-0/fulltext

4. Fuller, R. B., & Kuromiya, K. (1981). Critical path. Macmillan.

5. Le Bon, G. (1897). The crowd: A study of the popular mind. TF Unwin.

6. Bernays, E. L. (2005). Propaganda. Ig publishing.

7. Hopkins, C. C. (1968). Scientific advertising. New Line Publishing.

8. https://davidgraeber.org/books/bullshit-jobs/

9. Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: diffusion of responsibility. Journal of personality and social psychology, 8(4p1), 377.

10. Latané, B., & Nida, S. (1981). Ten years of research on group size and helping. Psychological bulletin, 89(2), 308.