Unless You Like Living in This Dystopia, We Need a Revolution
We Need to Rebuild the World For Potential, Not Profit and Power — Or Else We Won’t Have One
umair haque
Dec 14 

I know, I know. Things have gotten dark around here. Sorry. Sometimes…I struggle, too. And then fate intervenes. Patricia emailed to say:

“Your writings are unremittingly dark, with literally no hope that I can ascertain, no suggestions for countering the toxicity of our times. It is very, very hard to maintain sanity when reading all that is crashing and will crash around us. Would it be possible for you to include a bit of eudaimonics in each piece? In this way, you can educate us, your readers, to what is really happening around us while you educate us on the fundamentals, the principles, the strategies for the complete reset you brilliantly propose.”

Patricia, you’re right. Let’s talk for a moment about the future, or how to begin having one again.

We need a revolution if we want the project of human civilisation to endure. Our civilisation now needs to make a quantum leap forward and upward. It’s not going to be easy, and so far we haven’t even begun. Hence, just a smattering of the headlines from this morning: the Antarctic’s melting faster than predicted, yet again, there’s a new Covid variant ripping across the globe, and American democracy is on its last legs. Like this dystopia?

So what kind of revolution am I talking about? The glorious socialist revolution Marx spoke of — and the American right still fears? Sorry, that one already more or less happened — everyone in Western Europe and Canada has basic human rights. I’m talking about the next one.

How did we end up in this dystopia — that’s collapsing at light speed? Well, mostly, it’s because of economics. Economics is the real invisible hand, the force which runs our world. Sadly, the economics which we practice — or which we’re forced to live our lives under — is hyper capitalist. That means it regards everything in terms of first its use value, and then its exchange value.

Think of a tree or a river. The way our world is designed, they’re just commodities. Their only worth is their use-value, and then their exchange-value. The tree has this certain financial value, which is its use-value, which is derived from its exchange-value, which is what the stuff that can be made from it can be sold for.

And that’s it. You can shade it in the details that proceed from there, if you like — mega-corporations owned by “hedge funds” then pillage and plunder the planet, turn the average person into a mindless consumerist zombie, and reduce and degrade them to fighting the next person for a morsel of money, food, shelter. But everything about our collapsing civilisation begins there — the reduction of everything on the planet, which is all life and everything that supports and nurtures it, to use and exchange value.

Marx made this point about human beings. It turns out that he didn’t go far enough. It’s not just human beings who are degraded by a system which reduces them to use and then exchange value — it’s everything.

Think of what it means to say that a thing — a tree, a river, you, me, us — are only worth their use and then their exchange value. It means that we’re all just commodities — to be exploited, and exploit in turn. It means that nothing and nobody has inherent dignity, inalienable worth, inalienable rights. This isn’t some kind of minor quibble, in other words. It is the philosophical basis for an entire social order, a world, a way of life. Believe it too much, and you end up like America — where nobody does have dignity or inherent worth, so they don’t have healthcare or now reproductive rights. Believe it too hard as a civilization…and where do you end up?

(All this is what you might call a Nietzschean-Darwinian paradigm. We’re all just here to prey on each other. The strong survive, the weak perish, and that’s what justice really is. As long as we can ensure that, the pack’s fitness grows. This was Nietzsche’s “master” versus “slave” morality — a misapplication of Darwin’s theories of biology, which themselves were influenced by capitalist economics.)

You end up at collapse if you follow this logic. That is what we know now. Because when we reduce the world, and everything in it, from us to nature to democracy, to use and exchange value, we have made a terrible mistake. We are undervaluing everything. Which part of everything? The potential of everything.

Every thing has a certain potential. Now, “potential” has become a bad word in America, because corporate types overuse it. Don’t let that get to you. It’s the concept we need to think about, to really understand, if we want a future.

Everything has a certain potential. Think of a river, a tree, my puppy, and a poor kid in some random impoverished country. The river’s potential is to run clean and pure to the sea. The tree’s potential is to reach for the sunlight. Snowy’s potential is to care for us all, and to be loved by us in turn. That poor kid’s potential? It’s up to them.

Now. Think about what actually happens in our civilization, world, societies. The river doesn’t run clean and pure to the sea. It’s laced with pollutants and drowning in plastic. The tree is chopped down long before it can reach for the sun. The animals are being annihilated at rates that parallel history’s great mass extinctions. The kids of the world? They’re growing up in this dystopia, without functioning systems or institutions or societies.

What happens in our civilization? What is the big mistake we are making? Mostly, potential is never attained. Never fulfilled. Our civilisation’s great flaw, it’s Achilles Heel, is that it squanders potential.

Which potential? Well, first of all, human potential. Kids growing up in this dystopia are already struggling — they’re not moving out, because they don’t have money, not forming relationships, not making the transition to adulthood. So how are they going to become the scientists and artists and novelists and so forth of tomorrow? Most of them aren’t. We have a huge, huge human potential problem. You can think of the way that America’s biggest employers are Walmart and Amazon… which basically has an army of people sorting parcels for insta-delivery…while the world burns. That’s human potential going up in flames, too. Nobody wants to work at Walmart or Amazon. People want to do things with their lives…things which matter.

So why can’t they? Because, since it doesn’t value potential to begin with, our civilisation doesn’t invest in people. Doesn’t give them the resources and tools to say, hey, instead of being trapped at this crap, pointless, bullsh*t job, here’s some money, a place to live, real freedom, go take a few years, and invent, create, discover, begin something new, beautiful, astonishing, vast.

Who’s going to save the world when the world’s trapped in bullsh*t jobs? Jeff Bezos? Good luck — he could literally vaccinate the entire planet tomorrow…but he doesn’t care about millions of people dying.

And so we come full circle back to the fundamental problem: our civilisation squanders potential.

Let’s think a little more about how we squander potential. Take the animals. Don’t you think that every life has a right to live itself out according to its potential? To raise its young, to grow old, to have its little home in the mud or dirt or water? I do. You should, too.

Why? Because the potential of each life matters to all. Let me say that again. The potential of each life matters to all. When I reach my potential, whether it’s to write that song, book, invent that vaccine, discover that theorem, I enrich your life, too.

When any life’s potential is reached, every life is enriched.

Let’s think about that principle. The trees give us air to breathe. The rivers give us water to drink. The fish clean the rivers and the little animals turn and nurture the soil in which our harvests grow.

All our basics — water, food, air, medicine — come from life around us reaching its potential. When we squander that potential, then our basics come under threat, too.

We cannot survive as a civilisation by squandering and wasting and abusing the potential of life and the world around us. No civilisation ever has or can.

So what kinds of changes do we need to make, to make this revolution happen? Well, we need to put potential first. Really put it first. Not in some kind of corporate “team exercises” way. But in a real and mature and thoughtful one.

Let’s take nature again — and we’ll come back to humanity. What would we do if we believed that every life on this planet deserved to live to its potential? Take the polar bears. They’ll be driven to extinction as the poles melt. Nowhere left to live. Starved to death. If we really built a world on potential though, it would look radically, completely different.

Nature would have the fundamental rights we do — personhood. As in, inviolability. “I’m a person” means you don’t have the right to violate me. I have some level — though not much — of safety and protection, even if corporations and governments can exploit me. Still, they can exploit those that aren’t people yet much, much worse. Along with personhood comes political representation. And so every parliament would have a Speaker for the Animals, a Speaker for the Trees, a Speaker for the Oceans. Sound too radical? The real question is: Why don’t they already?

Let me turn that around. What happens when nature is left out of our politics? It gets abused and decimated and ravaged. We’re “free” to abuse its potential, because it doesn’t have a voice, any real power. And that’s because we only see “it” — which means every life on the planet apart from us — in terms of use and exchange value. And then profit and power over potential means that all that life gets squandered, and we collapse as a civilization, going short of everything we need to survive.

So already, building a world on potential — not power and profit — means that democracy and the rule of law have to make a quantum leap. Can it? That part is up to us. That’s the challenge. So far, we’re at a handful of court cases for personhood for an endangered species, or maybe one river. We’re nowhere near a politics in which there are Speakers for the Animals and Speakers for the Trees. But quite obviously — go ahead and look at a dying planet — that is the only form of democracy that is going to survive.

I don’t think that liberal democracies — like America — will ever make that shift. They’re already imploding back into fascism. Liberal democracy has failed. But social democracy might be able to. What would even call that next kind of democracy? Eco-democracy? I don’t like that word. It feels too narrow. You tell me.

Just as democracy and law have to make a quantum leap, so too do socioeconomic contracts. It’s not enough to just say that nature needs personhood and political representation. It needs a lot more than that — and so do you and I.

Now let’s come to humanity. If we build a world on potential, not profit and power — what would it look like? How would it work? Well, if I took your potential seriously, I’d agree that you should have the basics — food, water, shelter, sanitation, medicine, education, information, and so forth — so that you could be free to fulfil your potential. To explore and discover and reach it.

Let me shade in that point. What’s our potential as human beings? Well, in one regard, it’s a common one — all of us would like to have families, of some sort, even if they’re not nuclear two-parent two-kid etc ones, to live in peace, to have social bonds, to be happy and respected and do work which matters. It’s not so hard to understand, and all that’s common to more or less all of us. The first thing we’d do if we really valued potential over profit and power is to give everyone the ability to live up to that basic level of potential.

Some nations are beginning — just beginning — to do it. Canada and Western Europe are getting there. You don’t have to live in constant fear of your life — like you do in America, which eventually drives you mad, to fundamentalism or fascism or greed or what have you.

But the truth is that as a civilisation, we are failing even the basic test of potential for humanity badly. Incredibly badly. So far, we don’t have a single working worldwide system. Not one. Hence, half of us, probably more, live without the basics — money, food, sanitation, shelter, clean water, and so forth.

Again — our civilisation is squandering potential.

Why does that matter? Well, in two senses. One is that people don’t become tomorrow’s Einsteins and so forth. The grand wheel of progress slows. But the truth is that’s less important than the second effect — the wheel of progress becomes regress. When people can’t live decent lives, they turn backwards. To fascism and fundamentalism and hate. Don’t blame them — their life is a battle for self-preservation, in a world of enemies and rivals for meagre resources. Scarcity and self-preservation will turn the kindest heart to stone. If we want progress — and if we don’t want regress — then we need to rebuild a human world on potential, not profit and power.

Think about it. Why don’t we have a world — or at least societies — where we invest in each other? Take the example of Denmark. You’re paid to go to university. You don’t pay for it. See the inversion from use-value and exchange-value? That’s the kind of leap we’d make. We would literally build societies where people’s potential was invested in and supported in.

All this is a huge, huge philosophical and social and economic shift. From the freedom of a few to exploit the rest, to the freedom to. The freedom to fulfil potential. Our world, our civilisation, is not built on that kind of freedom yet. It isn’t truly free.

Who’s free, in our civilization, reallly? Maybe billionaires, and that’s about it. The rest of us? Wage slaves, if we’re lucky. Beneath us come the world’s masses of poor, then the animals, and finally nature. Any wonder everything’s collapsing?

So let me say it again. We need to rebuild the world on potential, not profit and power.

Now let’s be concrete for a moment. What I’m talking about is the world of generations. Bright young grad students need to rebuild an economics where a trees and rivers and kids reaching their potential is what makes up a better measure of prosperity and success than GDP. What would we call it? How would we even begin to count how a tree or river or kid is reaching their potential? That’s the work to be done on the intellectual side.

On the political side, come the battles for radically redesigning democracy, expanding personhood and representation both, creating inherent worth and inalienable dignity for every life, period, full stop, to reach its potential. That’s the work of a generation of lawyers and would-be politicians — not quibbling over “deficits” and interest rates. If you think AOC’s radical, go ahead and ask her if she thinks there should be a Speaker for the Animals. Maybe you see how much work there is to do.

Then comes the work of rewriting social contracts and rebuilding communities. This is about, for example rewinding cities — so that nature has room to live with us, not just be enslave by us. But it’s also about the very human work of investing in each other. How do even make communities where kids, let alone adults, can reach their potential — instead of get subsumed by the zombie capitalist consumerist machine? A very great deal of that work begins with real investment, again. Freeing kids from the influencer-industrial complex which has them hating themselves — and instead, giving them the space and resources and energy to be kids again.

It means a new level of basics — from basic income to healthcare to higher education to retirement. It means building measures of how well our communities are doing at reaching their potential — in terms of social bonds, trust, health, happiness, and so forth. It means creating spaces and institutions for potential to be explored and nurtured and discovered — things which don’t have yet have a name.

Now. I’ve tried to draw you a little sketch. But the truth is that the important thing is that you get the principle. We need to rebuild the world on potential, not profit and power. The potential of every thing — you, me, the soil, rivers, oceans, forests, animals — needs to matter. Because when any life’s potential is reached, all life’s potential is enriched.

That’s the eudaemonic principle. Every life on this earth should be a well-lived one. It doesn’t matter whose it is. Our civilisation is not oriented around that principle. It is still based on violence and brutality and greed and indifference. But we are learning the hard way that those hit hard limits. They cannot build much more than systems of predation, which eventually collapse from within, depleted, starved, aridified, haunted by fear, made mindless by despair. We have reached the limits of human civilization based on selfishness, individualism, competition. There is no future left that way, and yet that is all we are told there can be, so it appears there is no future.

The future is eudaimonic. Every life deserves to be a well lived one. That is the only way out of this mess. We are a civilisation that squanders potential, instead of nurtures it — so is it any wonder we’re collapsing? We need to rebuild everything now — economics, politics, society, community — on the principle that every life deserves to reach its potential, before any life deserves power over it or profit from it.

Think about that principle. Just sit with it. Let it guide you. The details? How to get there? That part, my friend, is up to you.

Umair
December 2021