A weird wind strikes our world. The guides point to impoverishment and desolation. The heat increases and life support systems lose their stability. Guidelines are broken and the logbooks record speaks of missed targets. The rudder lacks its helmsman. Animals and plants are driven away from the earth and man becomes increasingly lonely.
The trap is so infernally constructed that a person caught only wants further in. Who in our modern society is satisfied with a cold water tap, a wood stove and an outdoor shed, even though it would be a luxury in many parts of the world? Once you've got hot water, central heating and a toilet, it is hard to reverse. A wall-mounted phone with a finger dials for those who carry the entire internet in a pocket? A bike when it is possible to bring both family and luggage long distances just by pedalling lightly with your right foot and turning a steering wheel! Who willingly trades away a radius of existence of hundreds of miles for a neighbourhood no more than a day's march by foot? Used to this, who wants to scale back?
The transformation required will be so pervasive that it cannot be planned or implemented with institutions that have been created to stabilize and preserve society as it is. A transition that creates justice for the earth, people and animals cannot be accommodated within the framework of Western concepts and values. Many mental grafts must be removed.
In 1976, Milton Friedman received the Swedish Riksbank's prize in economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel (sometimes erroneously called ‘Nobel Prize in Economics”). He actively worked to bring the world to the state of today. He referred to Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile as ’Miracle of Chile’.
Milton Friedman could not see justice in nature, only greed: “Tell me, is there a society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed?” 2
Justice? “Life is unfair. There is nothing fair about one man being born of a wealthy parent and one of an impecunious parent. There is nothing fair by Muhammad Ali having been born with a skill that enables him making millions of dollars one night. There's noting fair about Marlene Dietrich having great legs we all want to watch?” 3
These are thoughts from an influential economist. The nature he refers to is not the living nature, but nurture of industrialized man, entangled in the technological system.4
The living nature does not work this way, but large parts of humanity still live under the notion that the living nature is wild and cruel and must be defeated. Yes, it can be wild and cruel, but that is not the core and will be very misleading when it leads to the conclusion that nature must be defeated and that the law of nature is the survival of the strongest, most cunning and most enterprising. That is a view that has distilled much that is unpleasant in our world.
You cannot blame Milton Friedman. He would never have gained such influence without people willing to adopt his ideas. He was a product of the social development that entailed imperialism, the slave trade and genocide – the prerequisites of industrialism.
Seemingly not him, nor his followers made the conclusion that if the world were truly unjust, justice, empathy and solidarity would be needed more than ever.
Cooperation, not competition, is the most important driving force in nature. The sense of justice is not a rare quality.
Of course, competition occurs in nature, but far from to the extent of the dominant relationship of cooperation.
Butterflies, moths, flower flies, ants, fungi, bacteria, viruses, frogs, flies, deer, herbivores, predators – everyone participates in the interplay that keeps the earth in balance.
Cooperation, care, empathy are basic principles in nature. Anything else would be weird in a world that has existed for millions of years. In the long run, no one can manage in solitude.
Modern industrial society presupposes many mental grafts, things that you take in unconsciously and unresistingly and rarely reflect on. We get them through upbringing and social conventions, not least through the flow from the mass media. The school makes many demands on what we should think, say and do in order to be accepted and pass as approved. Our culture and nurture fills us with beliefs that we don't notice and seldom question.
For example, do you react to gambling companies' advertisements where a winner is supposed to buy status cars, boats, luxury villas with swimming pools or to dream trips? Never anyone who starts a scholarship foundation, use their financial power for environmental protection or support of any non-profit activity.
You don't react because selfish consumption is fundamental to the civilization we live in. Every such advertisement reinforces the cultural indoctrination: You live one life and do the best you can to enrich yourself.
Deforestation, overfishing, soil degradation, climate, coral bleaching, nuclear power and other concerns hovering over modern society are debated back and forth, but the driving force behind it never surfaces.
There is much that works in the hidden and makes us representatives of something that, if we were fully conscious, would not stand for. Much of what we do, think and consider, we do without further thought. There are forces that use us for their purposes.
There are everyday actions that seem innocent but, if done with full awareness of the consequences, would be considered as pure evil. But insights about the consequences rarely emerge, and if they do, they quickly fade away under the pressure of the social conventions around them.
An evening at the sausage shack. What does a hamburger have in common with a cow who had to give up her life to benefit the dairy farmer's accounting, was artificially inseminated, gave birth to children and had to give them up, forced to leave the milk to the dairy farmer and, when her strength ran out, was taken to the slaughterhouse and grounded down for the hamburger that you just wanted extra everything for?—Rubbish! Can't I even have a simple hamburger without feeling guilty?
Industrial animal husbandry—cows, pigs, chickens, chickens, fish—viewed with an awakened consciousness, that really dared to see, the only difference to the extermination camps of the Nazis would be that the animal industries are constantly replenishing with new victims.
If you look at it that way, Nazism is just a variant of an underlying ideology, an ideology that stands as a foundation of Western civilization. Perhaps it is a prerequisite for all high cultures: There must be a centre, a core, and this must be administrated. Filled with an ideology like survival of the strongest, it will lkead to misuse of power and eventuaslly to war—a war even against nature.
The ideology that promotes the idea of the survival of the strong despises weakness, sees an ideal in the winner, believes that might is right and turns a blind eye when the suffering of others favours its own interests. The weapon, the tool that we hold up against nature, is the same thing that holds us as in a vice: technological development, the Technological System.
If we are to survive, we must show ourselves worthy of the responsibility that comes with the power to change earth. Giving up control, and see with open mind, is not to surrender, it is to take in reality without the burden of other similar situations. It is to connect to nature, because in nature no situation is like another.
Far too many are stuck in the delusion that the solution to our problems comes via science and technology. Same tools and thinking that created the problems!
I believe that part of a new approach lies in exchanging the objective view of nature for the search for relationships. Then the truth about the world is not primarily about intellectual knowledge but about the ability to listen and in the encounter humbly ask Who are you?
Where man settles, the lands should flourish, the waters flow clear and clean, the air be easy to breathe.