Most people are good at defining the symptoms of the problems that face us today. The decision-makers in our society are the investor class and their cadre of politicians, who wield power for the well-being of the Wall Street economy. This situation leads to the institutionalization of joblessness and homelessness, the destruction of the environment and war. But let's stop looking at the corporate power structure and their politicians as good or bad or greedy for a moment. Study them without making a moral judgment. Ask why they act the way they do.
Ask this question the same way you would try to understand Aztec human sacrifice. Did the Aztecs sacrifice people because they were irrational and savage and not as morally developed and evolved as you? In fact they sacrificed humans because they were within a mythology that allowed sacrifice to seem a legitimate, even a pious and virtuous act. Our free-market economy, which sacrifices two-thirds of the world to poverty, and the planetary environment for the well-being of you-know-who, is also integrated around an analogous mythology.
The problem we are facing is not about good progressives versus evil, greedy people who destroy the environment. It is enticing to see it that way, but that analysis misses the mark. It leaves untouched the body of knowledge that legitimizes the behavior of people who are screwing things up. The behavior of these "bad" people is actually produced and validated by what our society produces as knowledge. To change the behavior you have to change the knowledge. We must have the willingness to study, as a scientist might, ourselves as we study others. Certainly anthropologists do not say the Aztec priests practiced human sacrifice because they were evil people. They sacrificed because they thought their gods, (invented by the Aztecs themselves), had ordained that behavior.
Incidentally, the story that integrated the Aztec social order was an origin narrative about how the gods sacrificed themselves so that the sun might rise. Origin narratives are the foundational stories a society tells itself about what the human is and how it is supposed to act. In this vein, the basic myth that integrates our social order is the origin narrative of evolution. Remember, evolution is a scientific fact of our earth's history but it is absolutely mythic when used as an explanatory model for human history as it now is.
The body of knowledge that integrates our social order is based on the mythology that the way we now interact in society is "natural." As an origin narrative, evolution functions to verify the idea that our present behavior in this society is the expression of how we have been biologically programmed to interact. Most essentially it means we are biologically programmed to compete with each other (like the animals) for our material well-being.
At our schools the discipline of history, for instance, is constructed through this evolutionary lens. Our kids are basically taught that the apes came down from the trees and we just kept evolving into our present masterful state. Then our schools test our children about how well they have mastered this knowledge. Those who test well go on to live well, meaning high standards of consumption. Those who test poorly are the low I.Q. category reserved for poverty, joblessness, etc. Further, these tests do not only correlate with income, they also correlate with racial categories. If we are teaching our kids that human history is explained by evolution, is anyone surprised that some non-white kids would internalize these expectations and score, on average, lower? The knowledge we presently organize ourselves around is not meant for "non-whites," that is a fact.
Evolution applied to humans, and with it the idea that the way we interact in society is natural, is a myth. Humans are not biologically pre-programmed to know the world any particular way. We are biologically pre-programmed to be able to program ourselves with language Ñmyth and narrative. We are now within a mythology, a matrix, that has incorrectly attributed our social behavior to our biological make-up. The problems we are facing are not the result of people being inherently greedy or bad, smart or stupid. Our knowledge instills a fear in people that they need to consume and compete and redeem themselves with higher standards of living, and if they don't it is a sign that they are worthless.
This type of fear is not only characteristic of this society. Before the West secularized, all human societies used to be organized around a religious explanation for reality. Religions as social systems have historically been organized around redemption from some significant ill or fear. For instance, medieval Christianity, as a social system, was based on the idea that mankind was born in sin and needed to achieve redemption from original sin through the behaviors prescribed by the clergy. Or, for instance, the Aztec order was organized around the threat that the sun might not rise if certain rituals weren't followed. These threats are metaphysical.
Presently, our society is organized around the economy. As a discipline economics is based on the idea that resources are "naturally scarce." Natural scarcity is as much a metaphysic as original sin or the instability of the sun. Resources are not naturally scarce or abundant, they just are. To ascribe such a value to resources is a metaphysical determination (value judgment), not a scientific one. Yet people are as enthralled with material redemption as the medieval Christian would have been with spiritual redemption. And we pursue money with the same zealousness of an Aztec expanding the empire and making the ritual sacrifices.
Human beings are and always have been the authors of the social order. Evolution did not make the world this way any more than the Aztec gods did. We are living in a mental prison that has been created for us and continues to be reproduced by us. I understand it is difficult to face this system without being a reactionary (talking about those "bad" people) because all of us have been raised in it and infected by it to varying degreesÑwe don't like it so we lash out at it. But I think we are ready to challenge it again.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2003
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited