by Ziya Tong
We are crushing our own spirits in the quest to own better things, to own more things, things that ironically we soon won’t want and will throw away. The worst part is, this dependence on acquiring objects tends to worsen when times are tough, because when we feel insecure, having something solid to cling to becomes a coping mechanism. Our possessions give us some semblance of control over the world. They give us power. We, the weak species of naked ape, did not rely on brute strength but rather on our brains to dominate. And we did it with our stuff. We became the masters of things. Things that made us stronger, faster, more powerful, better defended, more efficient, and more dangerous.
In the modern world, this power translates into action. We have the power to communicate with each other at the speed of light, to fly at the speed of sound. Individually, our things give us the freedom to shuttle ourselves independently across vast distances. Our things save us time. Machines wash our clothes and do our dishes. With the press of a button on a food processor you can chop food in an instant, where doing it by hand might take half an hour. Our things also save us from the grind of manual labour; instead, fleets of robots work overtime to assemble our mass-produced goods.
It would seem we have almost everything at our disposal in the modern world, yet even in wealthy countries—where, in theory at least, people have access to all kinds of consumer goods—many still have a sense of emptiness; people feel like they’ve been robbed. That may be because there’s a real price to pay for worshipping things. According to a study by JWT, a New York marketing firm, “Fame and fortune have replaced faith and family as the core of the American Dream.” But this dream is a dangerous illusion. Ultimately, money and ownership are status symbols, and symbols are only the mark of happiness, not the essence of it.
You’ll often hear it argued that greed is at the bottom of the problems in the world. That is not completely true. It is our belief that we must own things—a nice car, a beautiful home, fashionable clothes—to be respected and deemed successful. This “good life,” so the story goes, can be attained if we work hard and keep acquiring. That’s the rule of the game. And so people regularly go into debt to buy more things. That debt becomes money, which in turn siphons up to the rich. The rich have the ability to find loopholes (from offshore accounts to tax breaks), making them better at the game. And as a consequence, the divide between the rich and poor grows ever more extreme.
We may think that ownership is the solution, but in many ways it’s the problem. And while ownership seems natural, that doesn’t mean it’s good. Evolution has crafted all kinds of other “natural” traits and behaviours that are now maladaptive, or even criminal. In fact, one way to define civilization is as the shared effort to mitigate the danger of evolved responses.
But there is another issue at the root of ownership. And that is, even if our species blindly believes it owns the world, that doesn’t mean it’s truly ours.
11
REVOLUTION
A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
IN THE SPRING OF 2014, I packed my bags and travelled to the remote Lamu Archipelago off the coast of Kenya to begin research for this book. I chose the location specifically because Lamu is a living relic; it is a place out of time. Donkeys are still the primary mode of transport on the island, and dhows, with their beige triangular sails, drift across the glimmering waters as they have for two thousand years. By immersing myself in another reality, I hoped I could begin to question my own.
One morning toward the end of my stay, the owner of my hotel told me she was making a trip across the water to a nearby island. She did this occasionally, she said, bringing seed pods with her that had fallen from her baobab trees. As we chatted by my hammock, I looked up at the two massive baobabs above us with their hulking silvery trunks. They looked like giant guards protecting us with their shade against the African sun. These trees were still babies, however, perhaps only one or two hundred years old. I asked the owner why she made the effort to plant trees that she would never see mature in her lifetime. She replied that the trees were a gift to people of the future so that they too might sit under giant baobabs one day and simply admire them.
After she left, I returned to my hammock and did just that. Looking up, I thought how few people today would question the right to own something like a tree. If it’s on your land, it’s yours; it belongs to you. You can let it grow or you can chop it down. Because you own it, you can do what you choose. But that morning, sitting beneath those African giants, I was struck by how strange it was to think one could own something like a baobab tree. How could I own a life that will outlive me by two thousand years? Compared to the baobab, I felt like a mayfly. At that moment, the thought that this tree could be mine seemed utterly absurd.
Back in Toronto, I found myself thinking in a similar way about ownership. All around me, people were said to be living in a “housing bubble.” But owning a house is different from owning a tree. Yes, some homes are investments, but our primary homes are our shelters; they are not optional, they are a necessity. As I thought more about it, I realized we have relationships to our homes, and whether we own them or rent them (and most people don’t even own their home, the bank does) makes no difference to our feeling of ownership. People love their homes. We tend to them, whether it’s painting the walls, mowing the grass, or remodelling the kitchen. Some homes, like our childhood homes, have a significant place in our hearts. But does that really require ownership? Do we need to own something for it to be a part of us?
As I look around my home now, the same could be said of the things that I feel are most precious to me, like photographs or heirlooms. These objects are cherished because they serve as an unbroken chain of time, they are intergenerational, and priceless. My grandmother’s watch, for instance, can’t do any of the things a modern watch can. It can’t track my fitness, make phone calls, or receive emails. It’s a treasured object not because of what it does, and would be even if it stopped ticking. It keeps time for me in a different sense. It is the physical carrier of a memory. After all, what would it mean if I lost it? Would it be my grandmother’s loss or mine? Or the next generation’s?
Once we begin to see how we look at the world through a lens of ownership, we can see how it shapes everything about our reality. It is so deeply intertwined into daily life that it feels like the most natural thing in the world, and we don’t question it. After all, all of us, myself included, are owners to some degree. But what does it really mean to own something? Is ownership a fundamental, intrinsic reality, like an atom? Or is it just a way of looking at things?
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WE HAVE EYES, but that doesn’t mean we see clearly. In 1951, Solomon Asch conducted a famous experiment to illustrate this point. The study involved a vision test with fifty college students in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. As the subjects entered a room, they sat amongst what they thought were seven other students, who were really actors.
In this setting, the “students” were all given a task: to match the length of a line on the left side of the board with a line from a series of different-sized lines, marked A, B, and C, on the right. The test subject was unaware that the others taking the test had been instructed in advance to all choose the same line, which was either too long or too short. It was a trick. So, for example, looking at the illustration below, the group would say that the line on the left matched the line marked A. An answer that was obviously not correct.
The study found that, faced with wrong answers by their peers, 75 percent of the test subjects conformed to the group’s choice at least once; that is, they claimed to see what the others saw, even though the answer was incorrect. For participants in the control group, where no actors were present, fewer than 1 percent gave the wrong answer.
In an effort to find out what was happening in the brain when subjects took this test, researchers at Emory University mod
ified the Asch experiment by placing them inside an fMRI scanner to see which parts of their brains were activated during the task. They were asked to take a similar vision test, but instead of lines they were shown 3-D objects. The researchers expected that if conformity was the result of conscious decision-making, then the prefrontal cortex would be activated, as this is the area of the brain related to planning, decision-making, and moderating social behaviour. What they found was a surprise: conformists showed activity in the parietal and occipital areas of the brain. This is where sensory information and sight are processed, indicating to the team that the conformity was not just a decision, it was having a perceptual influence on sight. Said in another way, conformity may have altered their perception. For these subjects, it wasn’t a case of seeing is believing, but rather the reverse.
The Asch experiment on conformity has been much publicized over the years, but one aspect of the study is rarely emphasized: how often people refused to conform. While it is true that 75 percent of subjects in the original study went along with the majority at least once, it is also true that 95 percent of the subjects “rebelled” at least once and stood by what they saw. Further, 25 percent of participants refused to be swayed at any time.
Two hundred years earlier, David Hume roughly predicted those results. In fact, our eagerness to conform was one of his key insights into human behaviour. And this conformity is not benign; it has enormous political implications. Writing in his 1741 treatise Of the First Principles of Government, Hume observed,
Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.
That being the case, tyrants depend on public endorsement just as much as elected prime ministers and presidents do. But even where there is a majority there will always be objectors. Indeed, the 25 percent that refuse to conform, that refuse to be blindly ruled, are why we are subject to ever-growing surveillance.
So what of the majority? What causes their conformity? Brain research has shown that there’s a price to be paid for independent thinking. In the Asch fMRI study, subjects who refused to conform showed activation in an area of the brain where other subjects did not: the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with “fight or flight” responses. Standing up for your beliefs, then, has a cognitive cost, as standing against a consensus can mean a conflict. For social animals like us, that causes anxiety and distress. Ultimately, standing up against the majority requires a fair amount of bravery.
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THE WORD “APOCALYPSE” in ancient Greek sounds slightly less foreboding when you know its etymology. In the original definition, an apocalypse is an “uncovering” of knowledge, a lifting of the veil, a revelation. In essence, it is the dawning of clarity. This kind of revelation is what philosophers, sages, and scientists have long been calling for: for humanity to rub the sleep out of its eyes and begin to see things as they really are, to recognize that what we call reality is in fact an illusion.
Many great thinkers have written about the reality bubble. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, prisoners watched shadows projected against the cave wall and came to believe the shadows were the real thing; they confused appearance with reality. The ancient Indian texts of the Upanishads introduced the concept of maya, the veil obscuring the true, eternal world. And in Buddhist philosophy, the foundational principle of dharma, or cosmic law, leads practitioners on a quest to see reality as it is, rather than as we perceive it to be, and understand that in this bigger picture everything is connected.
To see the world clearly, we must first become aware of the veil; we must recognize our blind spots. The way we’ve come to perceive reality is so deeply ingrained, so socially and inter-generationally enrooted, that we’ve lost sight of the manner in which we think. This is important, because what we think creates reality. Clock time, with the five-day workweek and the nine to five of the “real” world, exists not because of some cosmic temporal order but because we invented it, we maintain it, and it’s become the reality we adhere to.
Inheriting a reality makes it that much harder to see it for what it is. As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann write in The Social Construction of Reality, “If one says, ‘This is how these things are done,’ often enough one believes it oneself. An institutional world, then, is experienced as an objective reality. It has a history that antedates the individual’s birth and is not accessible to his biographical recollection. It was there before he was born, and it will be there after his death.”
Our constructed world has become so real and dear to us, we’ve forgotten that what we call reality is a product of our minds. This collective amnesia is perhaps not so surprising considering the decades we spend educating and socializing the young. We expect our youth to grow up and conform like subjects in the Asch experiment, to see a reality that isn’t really there. It’s ironic, then, that we say children live in a world of make-believe, because in truth, adults do too. The difference is, children can tell you that their world is made up, whereas adults cannot.
This make-believe world is now so powerful that even its antecedent, the natural world, has become its hostage. As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens, we lived in the past in a dual reality: “On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations and corporations.”
It is with these manufactured entities that we legitimize our prerogative over nature. After all, that’s what gods, nations, and corporations do. They give us legitimacy. They back up the belief that Homo sapiens own the whole world.
Only one species believes it owns the air, owns the water, and owns the land. We have given ourselves the rights to buy and sell space, and buy and sell time. In fact, that is the foundation of the global economy: that we can own the very dimensions we inhabit. But critically, not only do humans own the planet, we own all the life upon it. Our species alone operates with the belief that at our discretion we have the right to buy and sell other species. For us, life itself is a commodity. And with the hyper-accelerated pace of commercial trade, it is unsurprising that life itself is now disappearing.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, by 2020 we will have seen a staggering 67 percent decline in wildlife populations around the planet since 1970.*1 With threats from food systems and agriculture, habitat loss, and species exploitation, more than half of vertebrate life—more than half of our wild mammals, birds, and fish—has already gone.
But it’s not just the animals. As I type these words, news headlines are revealing a sad fate for the baobab. These ancient behemoths, some standing since the height of the Roman Empire, are dying at an unprecedented rate. Botanist Adrian Patrut believes the most likely culprit is climate change. Since 1960, the number of baobab trees in Africa has halved. According to Patrut, who has been radiocarbon-dating baobabs for over fifteen years, it is time to list these long-lived trees as endangered.
That Africa’s iconic “tree of life” is dying is symbolic. As my friend the late activist Rob Stewart observed, “By mid-century, if we continue on our current trajectory, we face a world with no fisheries, no coral reefs, no rainforests, declining oxygen concentrations, and nine billion hungry, thirsty people fighting over what remains….In the lifespan of one [baobab] tree, we’ve consumed most of our life support system.”
This stark vision of the future has put fear in the hearts of even our most dystopian science fiction writers. As William Gibson has darkly observed, few people today even consider writing about a future beyond 2100. In an interview in Vulture magazine, he said, “What I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see
the phrase ‘the 22nd century.’ Almost never.”
If we are to survive into the twenty-second century, we will need a new global model. We must throw off the constraints of past political ideologies, whether left or right, because they all begin with the wrong question. They ask who should have the right to own the world, not if we should have that right at all.
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YOU OFTEN HEAR PEOPLE say we need to fight the system, or that the system is broken. But what is the “system,” exactly?*2 Where is the system?
The system, as I’ve argued in this book, is our life-support system. It is the system we have built so that we no longer have to rely on the whims of nature’s cycles. It is the system that made us the most powerful species on earth. And while it would be easy to assume that the goal of our system is our species’ survival, it is not. If it were, then every human being would have enough food and energy, and enough time and space, to thrive. But we know that this is not the case. The irony is that our survival is merely incidental to the goal of the system: ownership. The real goal is simply to own as much as possible: to own time, to own space, to own food, to own energy, to own everything except our waste. This is the model that runs the world. A system in which nature’s gifts are no longer free. And now, to acquire its goods, we must sell the most precious thing we are born with: our time.
There is however, another critical factor that eludes us and that is where the system is. We cannot see the system because it exists in our blind spots. It is nature in disguise. Today, if we fail to see our connection to the natural world, it’s because most of our products look nothing like it: a chicken nugget does not look like a bird; coal does not look like an ancient forest; and fertilizer bears no resemblance to air. Nature has been transformed into a product. In fact, every year it’s transformed into trillions and quadrillions of products. These feed our booming population and voracious desires, which leads us to plunder these natural “resources” at an ever increasing rate. As a consequence, the economy grows, but nature dies. And while we are clever animals, none of us could have foreseen the twist in the plot. None of us could have guessed that in the end we will need to pull the plug on our own life-support system, and if we don’t, it will destroy us.*3