Humanity, science, business, and yeast

The end point of humanity seems to be roughly the same as yeast in a batch process. Yeast multiplies in a substrate with finite nutrients. The byproducts include ethanol which eventually reaches a level of fatal toxicity. In a confined environment, yeast literally accelerate their multiplication, mindlessly using up all the available resources, and eventually poison themselves with their own effluent.

This edition started out as a comment on the words “evidence-based”, and “scientific”, which are thrown like confetti in marketing and sales documents, and in social media. Most people who use them have no idea what they mean. Most people who’ve been through universities may know what they mean but have no idea of the implications of their intense training in narrow thinking. That first paragraph appeared, however, and it was too good to waste. So, I use it as the basis of my point, which is, we are so consumed by consumerism and capitalism that we focus our attention on maintaining them. We completely ignore the big picture, and we are all complicit.

Science, broadly speaking, is a methodology. The scientific method is one of theory, hypothesis, empirical observation, and experiment. “Science” produces the best information, extremely carefully, and in an intensely informed way. “Evidence” is part of this process. Science seeks to understand and explain. It does not promise to have the answer to everything all the time. Information is gathered, examined, and discussed. At least, that’s how it happens when it’s working well. Much of the output of universities in recent times has been minute tweaks to existing knowledge. This promotes an extremely insular, inward focused culture of extreme specialists. I say this is not science, this is academia. Science allows informed ideas and questions to be asked. Increasingly, academia does not.

Our reliance on “science” to “prove” everything has led us down a highly questionable path when it comes to psychology. Psychology has been in thrall to analytical philosophy for about a century. While I don’t propose that scientific investigation is done away with in psychology, I do firmly state that science should be the method used to investigate only that which is suitable for it.

To mechanise human experience into numbers denies our humanity. Our struggle to communicate our experience of Being with natural visual and speech symbols is the one thing that elevates humans from all else (excepting opposable thumbs, and we don’t have a monopoly on the ability either). It robs us of our tantalisingly difficult to describe, but easy to share, humanity. Turning humans into work units and attempting to predict how they will work has been a massive mistake and has never worked out. Yet the acceptance of economic reality inside the church of consumerist capitalism keeps the myth alive. Psychology, along with everything else, is now owned by business. Even counselling and clinical psychology, whose function it is to return work units to work ASAP.

Business is understandably obsessed with numbers but forgets that all businesses were the people in them. I say ‘were’ because the coming of AI looks increasingly like a tiny number of people will own the capital that is the legal rights to AI. Business will increasingly be done without reference to people except as consumers. This is the end point of the numerification of the facticity of humanity, and consumerist capitalism.

There are a tiny number of individuals and families who own business. All of it. Whether directly, or indirectly because all business is reliant on huge businesses. Huge business is the end point of consumerist capitalism; the elimination by subsumption, or removing the financial viability of competition. This is achieved through the same network of mega-wealthy families who own global banking.

Business, in a consumerist capitalist world, owns politics and Government. Business has subsumed humanity.

I’m using zoomed out, big statements here when of course there are nuances. The point I’m making is that our human experience of the world reached the point long ago, where it became the same as the raison d'être of consumerist capitalism. Again, a big bold statement, but unless we get on top of this realisation as a big bold thing, we are about to go the way of the yeast.

We are a species which relies on social cooperation. An expression of this is tribalism. We now have a globally inter-connected and dependent metaphysical Being upon which we humans have become dependent. One tribe is going to want control of this. By which I mean, one tribe wants control of this, to its own benefit, exclusively, with all others subservient and able to exist only to feed it. There are a few contenders for ‘top tribe’, and all have the capability to end life on earth for higher life forms.

We who killed God, have created consumerist capitalism in its place and no matter how much we pray to it, it has turned us into yeast.

Some people say I must be less pessimistic, and I say, why? Some people say I should be more hopeful, and I say, why? Well here goes anyway. Organised religion was overrun by science largely because literacy and education improved. I am sure there is a ‘God’, and I think that is everything. Rather as it is explained by Animism. My being sure doesn’t make it so. No organised religion being sure makes it correct and every other one wrong. What we do know is that once absolute certainties issued by religions are shown to be utter nonsense by empirical investigation, then we can either hang on to the mystical and reject the absolute decrees, as I have done, or, we can reject the mystical and replace it with science.

Science is owned by business. Business owns religion too. Business, and by this, I mean consumerist capitalism, owns our lives. It directs us how to live, and what rules and laws we have. It infests our thinking with marketing and advertising in myriad ways. Business owns politics and Government; the mechanism is called “Money-chains”; lobbying and sponsorship is a big part of that. Big sweeping statements to think about and I hope we can discuss. However, this is why I’m less than optimistic.

There are a few very wealthy people who think they’re going to survive what’s coming… They are only behaving and thinking in the same way rich and powerful families have done for millennia. Previously, relatively small populations of underlings have been expendable in the prosecution of this way of being. This time it’s all of us, including them.

I’ve suggested the solution. I’m not alone. It’s not anti-business, it’s anti-capitalist, and very much anti-consumerist, in their current forms. I’m very much pro-business, and improving lives, education, health… human fulfilment. However, the answer is a direct link between everyone and their lives. A dilution of the ownership of capital. NOT equal, but everyone involved in the fortunes and misfortunes of every business. The realisation that people at the pointy ends of org-charts and owning the capital to the extent that they are ‘in charge’ is an extremely poor way for a species to behave. The realisation that everything available to us has now has a global consequence.

Currently, in terms of thinking about our future flourishing as a species, business, which now owns everything, seems to be capable of the same level of forethought as a jar of sourdough starter.