A dangling carrot from pandora’s box
I recently read a book that reminded me that we as a species are around for maybe as long as 350.000 years and that we started agriculture about 12.000 years ago. Before agriculture people roamed the land, gathered and hunted what they needed to survive. Nothing more nothing less. The desire for ownership and possessions was barely existing and most was reduced to self-preservation and survival of the group. But then the human animal discovered that it was able to cultivate the land to its own desires and grow crops and keep domesticated animals. All of a sudden it was a big advantage to have possessions. The more you own, the more power you wielded. This fuelled our primal instinct for more attention, status and eventually greed.
In the beginning our greed was limited by the possibilities that where available. But as time went by, technology made it possible to possess and do things that even the most powerful kings and rulers of the ancient world could only have dreamed about. Eventually whole industries were erected to feed this ever-growing greed of the human animal.
In a world that has started to unravel the last mysteries of the universe, we started to feel naked, without any meaning and craved for anything that could give us a feeling of identity. Companies saw this as a business opportunity, starting to treat people like empty vessels needing to be filled with the identity they could provide; You want to feel like a real man? Smoke our cigarettes! You want to look successful? Wear our brand and drive our car! You want to be as beautiful as your favorite star? Use our makeup line! Whatever gave meaning and increased the hunger for even more goods that provided status and attention, companies found ways to exploit it. Like a group of mindless zombies we eagerly accepted the message that was fed to us: “Owning things is good, more money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good.”1
By now this message has reverberated so many times over, echoed from all corners around the world, that most of us don’t even realise that their decisions are the product of profit-maximizing institutions. By replacing our own inner voice by theirs, we have entrusted our happiness to the soul of company stores in trying to keep up with the Joneses. As a consequence the average person isn’t able to put into perspective what is really important anymore. But lo and behold, we have the self-help industry to fill in the gap!
The problem isn’t so much that by now we belong among the walking dead, but that we destroy the very environment we need to live in. Like a virus, our capitalistic society has started to consume every available resource to meet the growing needs of so many to be smarter, more attractive, richer, healthier, more popular, more successful etc. But despite all its intelligence the human animal is like a dog chasing its own tail, not realising that this is a futile enterprise. No matter how much wealth we amass, we will never reach a lasting level of happiness. As the Buddha discovered so many years ago; life is unsatisfying by nature. Our primal instinct for gene distribution, blindly forged in the furnace of evolution, simply drives us to keep on running in order to catch one carrot after another dangling in front of our eyes.
Unable to experience a lasting level of happiness however, is one of the reasons for our evolutionary success. One only needs to imagine what would have happened if our ancestors would have experienced eternal bliss after having sex the first time. As soon as our conditions improve, hedonistic adaptation kick in. We start to compare ourselves with others and long for even more. Before we know it, the things that we have worked so hard for to achieve are already a source of dissatisfaction and we are running again to catch a bigger carrot.
A misconception would be the idea that we are caught by this psychological system. Like having a bad flu. No, this not the case. Because being caught would imply that we could escape it. Yes, we can be aware of it and like any other primal impulse decide not to act upon it (meditation is a big help), but we can never escape it. Because, as Thomas Metzinger in his book the Ego Tunnel described it, “we are this system”.
So, there we are, one of the driving forces behind our evolutionary success as a species appears to be pandora’s box that can’t be closed anymore. Will it lead to our demise? I don’t know, but as Nietzsche once put it; “it is the same with man as with the tree.The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep — into evil.”
[1]: From the book Tuesday with Morrie by Mitch Albom