So far so good...

Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good…so far so good…so far so good. How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!

These lines from ‘La Haine’ pretty accurately describe the scenario of environmental disaster where man in his denial keeps asserting—so far so good…so far so good. The fall is pleasurable but for how long? How far? Where will he land? These are not bothering his conscience right now. Every now and then he needs some anaesthetic –in every epoch he needs new anaesthetic—to keep him distracted and distanced from the senselessness of his existence. He invented religion to keep himself busy with some meaningfulness and now his religion is consumption; a consumer of his own life as if he had to earn his own life back from mortgagee. I can hardly find a difference between those blatant priests of ancient religions who determined patterns of human life and the “corporate priests” of our time. They both produce a tamed, predictable, harmless, bootless and believing individual; ready to believe anything for the greater good, for magnificent future, for phantasmagoria of unimaginable, in fact a subject of ludicrousness. A little unbiased view can tell you what horrendous individuals these corporations produce although there is no decline in the amount of collective bovine pride that is boasted off.

By the time we begin to comprehend our environment, our existence and our objective, we are already entangled in the chains of consumerism. We are neck-deep in its water and it becomes our governing instinct in every endeavour. Each solution to a subtle problem is a new product, new base of consumers and new set of producers. This is the reason we see passive solutions to environmental crisis. Consumerism as a solution to consumerism! New consumerism to old consumerism! Use efficient light bulbs, plant a few trees—especially to break some record, recycle your paper, switch off lights for one hour on Earth’s day, recycle some more paper and fix your tap if it is leaking as if those were the causes of the climatic catastrophe. By all these “potent” methods of conservation, we can actually defeat the monster. The rape of nature is compensated by arranging a marriage: marriage to the raper. These useless methods will lead us nowhere but in the labyrinth of “so far so good”. What we need is a radical change of thought of how we evaluate our position with respect to our surroundings.

Two main reasons, as I see it, of why environmental crisis has reached a stage as dangerous as of now are wage slavery and private property. I would caution not to misinterpret private property with personal property. Every man and woman has the right to enjoy whatever he/she earns of his labour, i.e. personal property. And it is no better than stealing to reap where someone else has sowed i.e. private property. Private property is a product of social labour which, due to the laws of ownership, assigns products of labour to the one who owns means of production. Personal property is something you produce by your own labour. Now back to our discussion. The reason why we are facing such difficulties in handling of Nature is the borrowing of concept of ownership while transiting from Feudal ages to Capitalism. You see, when we bring individual ownership of lands, machines or any other means of production by the pretext of inheritance or capital, we are actually making the sense of having more privileged than any other intellectual sense. Now the one who owns has greater power in terms of laws than the one who really produces. Having sense master over all other senses!  It is this sense which led to the slavery by feudal lords and it is the same sense, with a little modification and a human face, which leads to wage slavery. To make this game seem fair, even a wage slave can climb up the ladders of slavery and become the one who can have wage slaves himself. This seems as something providing equality. You can be a wage slave today and you can have yourself many some other day contrary to those times where once a slave, always a slave. It makes people to compete to be either one who serves or the one who make others serve. In the process, few names change—sometimes swapping occurs and it is life.

Now one may ask what has wage slavery has to do with environmental crisis? It has to do a lot although we cannot suspect it because our stomach depends on it. And why our stomach is slave to wage? Because ownership of resources is decided by inheritance or capital and not by those who work on it. In fact we have developed quite sophisticated means of credit-debt system so that even if one is not benefitted by the fortunes of his predecessors, he can use the system to step up another web of wage slavery to amass huge wealth and then continue the pattern which has been followed since, seemingly, eternity. Who will suspect it as we are doing such a noble deed of providing jobs? Jobs for what? Jobs to consume and continue the worthless cycle of mindless consumption! Jobs to outrage the modesty of nature every single time we discover useless luxury to entertain ourselves with. It is not that I oppose materialistic view of life. It is not that I support an ascetic lifestyle of some sage in India who would go hungry to please God. It is not that I practise self-denial, self-destruction, perishing for some imaginary cause: I am no priest, I am no sage but one should do labour for what he wants. If you feel that your desire cannot be satisfied with what you have and it is too hard for you to take tough morsels of life as they come to you then go and work with your own bare hands for the item of luxury which fascinates you. Why do billions of people need to work as wage slaves for your fantasy, for your luxury? Why do billions of people need to think the way corporations, advertisements want them to think? That’s where the problem lays—Bovine mentality of people, herd instinct, millions mind thinking alike just like religion wanted them to. I am sure that atheism too is heading towards same bovine instinct. It will be disastrous if that happens. Man loses his contemplating power in herd and acquires the mind and idea of crowd. You see, if I make an item of luxury by my own hands, I have the full right to enjoy it and it produces no problem. Problem starts when people are dragged into the arena of mass production through wage slavery. It is not hard to imagine what deep dent billions of similar demands controlled through mass media produce on the face of Earth. Why same demands? Due to conditioning of human mind to consume, because of wage slavery to meet that false induced desire, because wage slaves working unaware of the catastrophe their slavery will warrant, because a tag of I own it. Why I own it? My parents left it for me, because I have capital from my wage slavery to buy the work of another wage slave whose wage is discriminated as his labour is physical and inferior compared to my intellectual labour and because I can measure that his labour requires less tiring of muscles and nerves than my own. Perhaps laughable assumptions and conclusions of history!

All these can be dealt with recycle of paper and turning off lights! People trained to consume without reason would obviously say so. People who value ”sense of having” more than the “sense of labour” would obviously say so. Biological inheritance transformed into property inheritance. All these laws framed, no matter they may seem trivial, by religious texts. Without the tag of ownership, one cannot have wage slavery. Without wage slavery there cannot be such ruthless exploitation of nature. In the name of fighting climatic battle we are plunged into another cyclone of consumption and this time with no guilt. In the words of Slavoj Žižek:

“This readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.”