The Myth of Human Supremacy

by Derrick Jensen

  “No, not true. I run Doughnut Supreme, and Doughnut Supreme has overrun the planet, which means I can’t be an idiot. I must be supremely intelligent. Otherwise Doughnut Supreme wouldn’t control the world! In fact, I have just declared that the modern geological age should be called the Doughnutsupremocene, because Doughnut Supreme has become a world-shaking geological force!”

  “But,” you say, “You don’t pay your bills.”

  To which I reply, “Now wait a BakerDamn minute. We at Doughnut Supreme are responsible stewards and responsible businesspeople. We pay our bills. Of course we don’t pay rent, because we own. Actually a good part of the world by now. But we pay rent to ourselves. And we pay for the finest wheat, straight from what used to be the prairies, and the finest sugar, from what used to be the Everglades. And we pay for electricity and labor, too! How dare you accuse us of not paying our bills!”

  “Whom do you pay for electricity?”

  “It’s green energy from a hydroelectric company, which I also happen to own, through different corporations. But let’s leave that aside . . .”

  “Whom did the hydroelectric company pay for the electricity?”

  “They paid to build the dams (with cement, number thirty-seven on The Atlantic’s list of ‘greatest breakthroughs,’ which, it says, is ‘at the foundation of civilization as we know it—most of which would collapse without it’), and they paid to build the electrical grid (well, actually, the government paid for that, but leave that aside, too, and now that I think about it, the government also paid for the dams). They pay their workers, and so on. It’s all paid for, one way or another. And besides, why do I care who the electric company pays?”

  “Where did the energy come from?”

  “I just told you, the dams.”

  “No, the dams convert the energy into electricity. Where does the energy come from?”

  “The river, I guess.”

  “And who paid the river?”

  “Don’t be stupid. A river can’t use money.”

  “So give the river what it does want.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Ask the river.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Let’s try this again.”

  “What?”

  “Whom did you pay for wheat and sugar?”

  “Farmers. Well, actually huge agricorporations. But same diff, right? Oh, and I own them, too, but . . .”

  “But yes, we’ll leave that aside. . . . So, whom did the agricorporations pay?”

  “Chemical companies, and the bank—”

  “—Which you also . . .”

  “Yes, and . . . ?”

  “Who grew the wheat and sugar?”

  “I just told you, agricorporations, I mean small independent family farmers.”

  “No, who grew it?”

  “Aren’t you listening?”

  “Who paid the soil? Who paid the wheat and sugar cane plants? Who paid the prairies? Who paid the Everglades? Aren’t they the ones who actually grew it?”

  I say, “What the hell are you talking about, you crazy person?”

  You say, “Doughnut Supreme is overspreading the planet because you don’t pay your bills. You are, to use Richard Dawkins’s term, a Cheat.”

  What follows is an awkward silence while everyone in the room politely forgets you said anything at all.

  •••

  You could also argue that it’s not the human invention of plows (and other weapons of mass destruction) as such that implies human supremacy—after all, murdering the planet isn’t really that great of an idea—but instead it’s the human capacity to invent plows that implies this supremacy. I mean, neither squirrels nor blue whales nor redwood trees nor shrews (with their 10 percent brain-mass-to-body-weight ratio) nor fungi (with their essentially one-to-one brain-mass-to-body-weight ratio) have been able to build plows, or bicycles for that matter. No species other than humans have been able to invent plows, Pop-Tarts, two-stroke engines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, computers, or skyscrapers. And the truth is that we really are very good at creating gadgets. It is perhaps our most obvious gift as a species, this creation of gadgets. But there’s another problem. Does the capacity to invent gadgets really imply superiority, or even intelligence? By now we can see that the implication would be at best tautological. But here’s a far worse problem: if this gadget-making somehow becomes so compulsive that the gadgets threaten your own survival and the survival of the planet, such that even such a science booster as Richard Dawkins can acknowledge a 50 percent chance of these gadgets eradicating all humans within the next eighty-five years—and still not question the compulsive creation of ever more, and ever-more-dangerous, gadgets—how can even the most serious proponents of gadget-making still presume that the capacity to create gadgets is a sign of intelligence or superiority? The best we can say is that it sounds like a serious problem to be resolved. But honestly it sounds more like a terrible addiction.

  We also cannot forget the cultural component to this gadget-making. The Tolowa certainly invented some gadgets, such as baskets and hand-woven fishing nets, but they never allowed their gadget-making to become so compulsive as to cause them to destroy their landbase. As a consequence, they were able to live here for at least 12,500 years without destroying the place. The dominant culture has been here for 150 years, and the place is trashed.

  Why would we do something so stupid as to invent gadgets that threaten our existence and the existence of life on this planet? And why would we presume this means we’re superior? The answer: because our self-perceived superiority is based on our ability to enslave or destroy others.

  And of course, all these questions are necessarily linked. Addicts often fail to recognize their own addictions, and perceive themselves instead as making choices. And it’s just some sort of strange coincidence that the addicts’ choices happen to consistently feed their addictions. They can quit any time they like. Maybe tomorrow. Or the day after.

  But there’s a huge and fatal difference between an alcoholic opening another bottle, and members of the dominant culture creating more effective means to “make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.” The difference has to do with the fact that those who are addicted to power and control receive tangible benefits for feeding their addictions. This is one reason perpetrators of domestic violence—and slavers, and capitalists, and exploiters in general—rarely change: their behavior is gaining them tangible benefits. Never mind that doing so harms their relationships; if they’re addicted to power and control, making others jump through hoops on command is by definition more important to them than having loving mutual relationships. The cliché is that addicts don’t usually change till they hit bottom. But those who are addicted to power and control are not the ones who hit bottom; it’s their victims who hit bottom. These particular addicts will not change so long as there is any other option, and quite often, not even then.

  * * *

  106 Bill Frezza, “In The Battle of Man Vs. Nature, Give Me Man,” Forbes, January 3, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2012/01/03/in-the-battle-of-man-vs-nature-give-me-man/ (accessed June 25, 2014).

  107 Julie Cart, “Sacrificing the Desert to Save the Earth,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2012, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-solar-desert-20120205,0,7889582.story (accessed July 2, 2014).

  108 Others also recognize the destructiveness of this culture, and that it will likely result in human extinction.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Dictatorship of the Machine

  Men have become the tools of their tools.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  All of which brings us back to Lewis Mumford. The fact that an authoritarian technics emerges from and leads to authoritarian social structures is
only part of why that technics is called authoritarian. Another, perhaps more important reason has to do with how the technics themselves gain authority over a culture. The logic behind the technologies can come to rule. The technics, and not the people, and not the landbase, are in control.

  We see this all the time. Or more precisely, because unquestioned assumptions are the real authorities of any culture, we don’t see this; it rules our lives, but we take it as normal.

  For example, let’s talk about fracking. Fracking is sold as a way to get more energy. More energy is sold as way to make people’s lives better. Among many other problems, fracking poisons groundwater. Communities are having to fight to protect the water they drink. As in drink. As in one of the things we have to do to survive. This means that those who benefit financially from fracking are poisoning the groundwater necessary for the survival of affected community members. A reasonable descriptor for those doing this is sociopath. Not only must sociopaths be stopped, we also need to ask what is wrong with a society that allows sociopaths to poison the drinking water of members of other communities. No, it doesn’t allow sociopaths to poison groundwater. It encourages them to do so, and rewards them for this behavior.

  The frackers can (and will) argue that they are doing what is best for the economy. And that will be making my point precisely: who is in charge? Who is actually making the decisions? Are they being made by human beings in community, or are they being made by those who are serving the technics that called fracking into being, and which is being influenced by that same technology? The technics is controlling society, causing it to poison even its own groundwater.

  Two days ago a judge overturned a ban on fracking voted in by the people of Fort Collins, Colorado, writing, “The City’s five-year ban effectively eliminates the possibility of oil and gas development within the City. This is so because hydraulic fracturing is used in ‘virtually all oil and gas wells’ in Colorado. To eliminate a technology that is used in virtually all oil and gas wells would substantially impede the state’s interest in oil and gas production.”109

  There you have it. Neither protecting your drinking water from being poisoned nor any notion of community self-determination shall be allowed to impede oil and gas production.

  Remind me again: who’s in charge?

  We can do the same exercise for oil. Same selling points. Same harm. And we can add its role in murdering—sorry, reorganizing—the planet. The planet is undergoing the most rapid heating in its history, contributing to the greatest mass extinction in its history, and a fair number of people believe global warming will drive humans extinct within the next generation or two. Yet this society keeps on exploring for, extracting, refining, and burning oil. Is it just me, or does this line of action seem to have a very strong downside? Once again, who is making these decisions? Either sociopaths who must be stopped, or the technics itself, which must be dismantled and destroyed.

  We can go through a whole raft of other technics, but it all boils down to the same: actions are taken to protect and further the technics, not living beings. We can do this for corporations. Corporations are ostensibly legal tools to facilitate commerce. But when corporations—legal fictions—control social decision-making processes, the tools are literally in charge. The tools—corporations—are authoritarian. We can do this for money. Money is ostensibly a legal tool to facilitate exchange. But when social decisions are made not primarily because they serve humans and nonhumans, that is, not because they serve life, but rather because they “make money,” then money is obviously controlling or guiding these decision-making processes. This is true on smaller scales, as individuals are forced to make decisions they would not otherwise make, because they’re forced to earn money to survive in a capitalist economy (which, as we’ve discussed, is not coincidental; the laws of apartheid, for example, were drafted specifically to drive people out of their subsistence economies and into mines). And this is true on larger scales, as the wealthy often have far more money than they will ever need to survive the rest of their lives, and still they continue to accumulate; money has become an end in itself. We can do this for power. When social decisions are made not primarily because they serve life, but because they increase the power of the decision-makers and others of their class, then power itself and not life is the real authority behind the decisions. We can do this for agriculture: once you have set yourself on the path of overshoot and drawdown—overshoot is when a population of any given species living in a particular manner exceeds the place’s carrying capacity (or the maximum population of that species who could live in that place in that way forever without harming that place); and drawdown is the harm done by these overpopulations who exceed carrying capacity, permanently drawing down carrying capacity—the technics itself and the physical conditions it creates lead to conquest and slavery. This can only stop with the (probably involuntary) abandonment of the technics. We can do this for “technological progress,” which is more accurately termed “technological escalation,” since the real point of the “progress,” as we’ve seen, is most often to escalate the control and reach of those in power. This is entirely to be expected in a culture based on authoritarian technics. It is also to be expected in a supremacist culture. And if you have a culture based on competition—and of course, it often comes as a complete surprise to members of this highly supremacist, highly competitive culture to learn that there have been cultures who are neither supremacist nor competitive; and to learn, further, that the erroneous belief that every culture, indeed all life, is and must be guided by competition is itself a central social part of an authoritarian technics—that competition will drive this “progress,” this “advancement,” this escalation.

  If, as in Dawkins’s story of Suckers and Cheats, you have two cultures who are not supremacist, not based on authoritarian technics—in other words, they are, to use Dawkins’s word, Suckers—they can coexist more or less forever. Now introduce a third culture, which believes in the Great Chain of Being, which perceives itself as superior to these others, which is based on authoritarian technics, which, through overshoot, has converted its landbase into human beings (and, most importantly to this particular example, soldiers) and into machines for war. What happens next? Well, that’s a story we’ve seen a few times over the past several thousand years. The authoritarian culture will do its worst to wipe out the non-authoritarian culture and steal their land. It will then proceed to steal from and destroy—I mean, manage; I mean, reorganize—this landbase to fuel its authoritarian structures and to fuel further conquest. Those survivors among the non-authoritarian cultures who aren’t wiped out will probably, if they are to continue to survive among the Cheats, need to adopt at least some of the attributes of the authoritarian, conquering culture. Now let’s introduce a fourth culture, which is also supremacist, authoritarian, and so on. Let’s say the machines of war of the two empires are on par. Next, one of them invents a new technology of killing (or otherwise extending the control of those in power). What happens then? The other empire has to somehow match it, or risk being conquered. Each time someone develops some new and more powerful technological means of control, the other culture must match or exceed it.

  This brings me to ask again: who’s in charge?

  This is one of the ways the technics themselves control the society.

  •••

  Let’s discuss electricity, and through that discussion, look at one of the ways authoritarian technics can destroy our ability to imagine.

  One of the (many) ways this culture is killing the planet is through a lack of imagination. I think about this all the time, but I especially thought about this in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, and especially in light of three pretty typical responses I read soon after, each showing less imagination than the one before.

  The first came from global warming activist George Monbiot (who normally writes much better stuff), who, just ten days after
the earthquake and tsunami, wrote in the Guardian, “As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.” His position was that the catastrophe—the mass release of highly toxic radiation—was caused not by the routine production and concentration of highly radioactive materials, but rather by a natural disaster combined with “a legacy of poor design and corner-cutting.” If the Technocrats can just design this monstrous process better, he seems to believe, they can continue to produce and concentrate highly radioactive materials without causing more accidents. Similar arguments were made after Oak Ridge, Windscale, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. And of course similar arguments are made every time any authoritarian technics leads to disaster, such as Bhopal, Valdez, and Deepwater Horizon. And of course each time we swallow it anew. You’d think by now we’d all know better. And you’d think it wouldn’t take a lot of imagination to see how routinely performing an action as stupendously dangerous as the intentional concentration of highly toxic and radioactive materials would render their eventual catastrophic release not so much an accident as an inevitability, with the question of if quickly giving way to the questions of when, how often, and how bad.

  I think the reference we’re looking for here is The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

  The second comment I read came from someone who did not have George Monbiot’s advantage of living half a world away from the radioactive mess. In late March of that year, an official with the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency told the Wall Street Journal that Japan is not reconsidering nuclear energy in the wake of Fukushima, because “Japan couldn’t go forward without nuclear power in order to meet its demand for energy today.” He said that a significant reduction in nuclear power would result in blackouts, then added, “I don’t think anyone could imagine life without electricity.” There’s nothing surprising about his response. Most exploiters cannot imagine life without the benefits of their exploitation, and, perhaps more importantly, cannot imagine that anyone else could imagine going through life being any less exploitative than they are. Many slave owners cannot imagine life without slave labor. Many pimps cannot imagine life without prostituting women. Many abusers cannot imagine life without those they routinely abuse. And many addicts cannot imagine life without their addictions, whether to heroin, crack, television, the internet, entitlement, power, economic growth, technological escalation, electricity, or industrial civilization.