The Fallout, 2

At some point in our human development it seems we became more like chimpanzees and less like bonobos. Bonobos, as many of us already know, are the small, peaceful and relentlessly horny siblings to the chimps. They would be the primate hippies, make love and not war. Chimpanzees, like humans, are notoriously warlike and murderous to their own species. My guess that hunter-gatherer societies tend to be more bonobo and agricultural and post-agricultural societies are more chimp. I don't think that it's as simple as just saying that this is the way we are and we are never going to change. One of the interesting features of our humanity is how mutable, or how changeable we really are. When it suits our convenience. Intense competition seems to exist at all levels: in families, friendships, marriage and romance, work, business, entertainment. It is vicious, it is intense, dizzying and ruthless. It also suggests the Darwinist view of nature, which really is a derivative of the Industrial Revolution: that nature is one seething cauldron of different life forms all in perpetual conflict and competition for survival and to thrive. Everything is at war. What an ugly, sad and depressing concept. I also don't believe in it. As I wrote elsewhere on these pages, in my last time in Monteverde, Costa Rica, I saw the opposite: life forms supporting and sustaining one another, as in the way that trees supported vines and epiphytes and other life forms. Much like the intense cooperation that is essential to human survival in hunter-gatherer societies. This is an idea we need badly to re-embrace. Otherwise, our lives under capitalism are simply going to further degenerate as more and more people fall through the cracks, unable to do well in the cruel and pitiless game that substitutes for life. There is something about being competitive that makes people ugly. There is no kindness in being competitive. No mercy. No compassion. Absolutely no love. In fact, all the qualities and features that make us beautiful and lovely are absolutely absent from this momentum of competing. In order to win, to get ahead, we are expected to make ourselves less than human. This eventually hardens us, puts to death our conscience and we all by default turn into monsters. This is the fallout of inequality. I remember how, sixteen years ago, the newly-minted Liberal government of my province completely gutted our social services system, and how many more fell through the cracks and ended up homeless, in some cases dead. Very little was done by staff or unions to correct things. No one wanted to risk their employment. Because of selfish fear they simply closed their eyes and looked away as they became rubber stamps authorizing what could easily be considered one of the most egregious assaults on human rights here since the Japanese Internment during the Second World War. This selfish fear is deadly, dangerous and toxic and if we are really going to heal as a society, then more of us are going to have to start taking some very major risks. Standing up for what is right is not easy and it can be a hazard to one's career and even to one's life. But someone has to do it, and it needs to happen fast, before we all get flushed down this toilet.