In a recent article titled ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’, I pointed out how existing conflict theory pays little attention to the extinction-causing conflict being generated by humans through over-consumption. I also mentioned that this conflict is sometimes inadequately identified as one caused by capitalism’s drive for unending economic growth in an environment with finite resources.
The psychological origin of biosphere-annihilating conflict has nurtured incredibly destructive aspects of capitalism (and socialism, for that matter) from the beginning. To understand why this is so important, just take a look at recent research related to climate catastrophe and you’ll see why the time to resolve this conflict is rapidly running out (assuming we can avert a nuclear war in the meantime).
In an article on a speech delivered by Professor James G. Anderson of Harvard University, whose research led to the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to mitigate CFC damage to the Ozone Layer, environmental journalist Robert Hunizker summarizes Anderson’s position as follows:
The chance of permanent ice remaining in the Arctic after 2022 is zero. Already, 80% is gone. The problem: Without an ice shield to protect frozen methane hydrates in place for millennia, the Arctic turns into a methane nightmare.”
If you think that sounds drastic, recent research suggests an alarming loss of insect life which will likely take down humanity before global warming hits maximum velocity.
The worldwide loss of insects is simply staggering with some reports of 75% up to 90%, happening much faster than the paleoclimate record rate of the past five major extinction events’. Without insects ‘burrowing, forming new soil, aerating the soil, pollinating food crops…’ and providing food for many bird species, the biosphere simply collapses.”
If we are indeed annihilating Earth’s biosphere, precipitating near-term human extinction, why aren’t we paying more attention to the origin of this fundamental conflict and developing a strategy to transcend it?
The answer is simple, the origin of this conflict is particularly uncomfortable to address, and from my observation, most people, including conflict theorists, aren’t particularly anxious to focus on it.
Conditioned to Consume
Shoppers form a line outside of Toys “R” Us before to take advantage of sales, Nov. 22, 2012 in Chico, Calif. Jason Halley | AP
What would allow humans to continue to over-consume, to the detriment of their own existence? The answer lies in our conditioning. Most of us were terrorized into unconsciously equating consumption with a meaningful life by parents and other adults who had already internalized this same ‘learning’.
From the moment of birth, a baby is genetically programmed to feel and express their feelings in response to stimuli, both internal and external. Soon after birth as a baby begins to feel hungry, it will signal that need, usually by crying, to an attentive parent who will respond to this need by feeding the baby. The baby will express their satisfaction with this outcome, perhaps through a facial expression, in a way that most parents will identify. If a baby is cold, in pain or experiencing other stimuli, the baby will express their need. Babies are incapable of immediately using a ‘cultural language’, so they rely on the language given to them by evolution: audibly expressed noises that adults quickly learn to interpret.
Throughout the next few months, a baby will experience an increasing range of stimuli – including internal stimuli such as the need for listening, understanding and love, as well as external stimuli ranging from a wet nappy to a diverse set of parental, social, climate and environmental stimuli – and will develop a diverse and expanding range of way to express responses, including satisfaction and enjoyment if appropriate, to these stimuli.
At some vital point within a child’s first eighteen months, adults will start to routinely and actively interfere with the child’s emotional expression, denying them the satisfaction of the unique need being expressed in each case. This interference is carried out in order to compel a child to be obedient – a socially compliant slave – rather than to follow their own Self-will.
This denial of emotional expression seems benign enough. Children who are crying, angry or frightened are scared into not expressing their feelings and offered material items – such as food or a toy – to distract them instead. These distracting items become addictive drugs. Unable to have their emotional needs met, a child learns to seek relief by acquiring the material substitutes offered by the parent. This emotional deprivation expands endlessly as the child, having been denied the listening, understanding, and love to develop the capacity to listen to, love and understand themselves, allow their ‘need’ for material acquisition expand endlessly.
As an aside, this explains why most violence is directed at gaining control of materialistic goods, rather than emotional satisfaction, as material resources become a dysfunctional and inadequate replacement for emotional satisfaction, leaving an individual likely to keep using direct and/or structural violence to gain control of more resources in an unconscious, futile attempt to meet their unidentified emotional needs. In essence, no amount of money and other assets can replace the love denied a child that would allow them to feel and act on their feelings.
Of course, the person consuming more than they need and using violence (or taking advantage of structural violence) are not aware of their deeply suppressed emotional needs, or functional ways of having those needs met. Although I admit, it is not easy to do given that listening, understanding, and love are not readily reciprocated by those who have themselves been denied those things. Consequently, with their emotional needs now unconsciously ‘hidden’ the consumer will now endlessly project that what they need, is in fact, material.
Materialism becomes Militarism
A U.S. soldier stands guard atop a humvee as workers attempt to extinguish oil well fires at Rumaila oil field in Southern Iraq, April 1, 2003. AP Photo
This is why members of the Rothschild family, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, Carlos Slim, the Walton family and the Koch brothers, as well as the world’s other billionaires and millionaires, seek material wealth and are willing to take it by taking advantage of the structures of exploitation held in place through US military might. They are certainly wealthy in the material sense; unfortunately, they are emotional voids who were never loved and do not know how to love themselves or others.
This fate is not exclusive to the world’s wealthy, even if they illustrate the point most graphically. Virtually all us who live in materialistic cultures have suffered this fate as is readily illustrated by our ongoing overconsumption – especially our meat-eating, fossil-fueled traveling acquisition of an endless stream of assets on a planet that has long been signaling ‘Enough!’
Governments that use military violence to gain control of material resources are simply composed of many individuals with this dysfunctionality, common in industrialized countries that promote materialism. Thus, cultures that allow and encourage this dysfunctional projection (that an emotional need is met by material acquisition) tend to be the most violent both domestically and internationally. Industrialized (material) countries use military violence to maintain political and economic structures that allow the ongoing exploitation of non-industrialized countries in Africa, Asia and Central/South America.
The individual who has all of their emotional needs met requires only the intellectual and a few material resources necessary to maintain a fulfilling life: anything beyond that is not only useless, it is a burden.
As the material simplicity of Mohandas K. Gandhi demonstrated: Consumption is not life.
If you are not able to emulate Gandhi (at least ‘in spirit’) by living modestly, it is your own emotional dysfunctionality – particularly unconscious fear – that is the problem that needs to be addressed.
Top Photo | Shoppers scramble to get deals at Walmart on the day before Black Friday, Nov. 23, 2017 in Bentonville, Ark. Gunnar Rathbun | AP
Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
Author’s Note | If you’re interested in working to end the issues addressed in this article, I would start with a profound change to our concept of sound parenting by emphasizing the importance of nisteling to children – see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’ – and making ‘My Promise to Children’.
For those adults who feel incapable of nisteling or living out such a promise, I encourage you to consider doing the emotional healing necessary by ‘Putting Feelings First’.
If you already feel capable of responding powerfully to this extinction-threatening conflict between human consumption and the Earth’s biosphere, you are welcome to consider joining those who are participating in the fifteen-year strategy to reduce consumption and achieve self-reliance explained in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ and/or to consider using sound nonviolent strategy to conduct your climate or environment campaign.
You are also welcome to consider signing the pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.
You can read a more detailed explanation of the information presented above in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.
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