Just in the peak days of enslavement, somewhere in the middle of South American sugar cane farms, it once said that slave owners affixed iron masks, which prevented the slaves from committing suicide by shoving earth into their mouths, a slave was the property of its owner, when they die they are no longer the property of their owner so this why slave owners affixed iron masks to their slave. Ownership, a concept that any particular body has the right to possess another particular body as their property, actually came from nowhere but human’s mightiest raw abstraction called desires. It is generally acknowledged that every move humans ever make is controlled by our desires for everything, not only humans but animals and even plants too. But how human satisfies their desires is far more sophisticated than any known living things do.
Once our brain catches impulses from our empty stomach signalling that there is no substance left to be digested, the brain sends an algorithm to our whole body system that we need to search for another food to eradicate our hunger. We then compiled ideas on how we could find food to eat. In other species, plants for example, the answer is simple: extract, save, and if you need it, use it; in animals, the answer is also simple: hunt, eat, and done; in humankind: cook or go to the nearest restaurant with sufficient amount of money.
While hunting and extracting food from minerals is a simple one-step process of getting food, cooking or going for food in a restaurant is a complex and well-developed process of eradicating hunger, an example of how sophisticated human developed a mechanism to fulfil their desire. How humankind gets food has evolved over millennia. First, we hunt and gather: we saw animals hunt their food, crushing a bone with their jaws, we tried to do so, failed, and then developed an idea of crushing bones with flints, then we could master it, with the help of flints we could hunt more efficiently. Then we think that this process took too long time that we couldn’t fulfil our other desires—having more spare time, our daily activity is only about getting food and we think having that way of life is too dull. After the discovery of fire, we started to cook. We know that compared with raw food, cooked one has major supremacy for us, it gives our belly easier substance to digest. Giving us more energy from a lesser amount of food. We don’t need to do much more hunting and gathering compared to when we cook our food before we eat it. It satisfies our desire to have much more spare time as we don’t need to collect much amount of food. The next thing is, we found out it took less energy to have a stock of food with farming than with hunting and gathering, why don’t we have animals and plants domesticized so we own those things? When everything is on our own it is easier to take advantage of any of it. Our desire to possess something has given us more stock of food to eat. We don’t need to worry about our food stock anymore. We are very smart creatures that after some amount of time we think that we could improve our lives by implementing specialized tasks for people, we know that someone is more talented at making shoes than cooking some meals. We developed the way we could trade one thing for another and then create complex civilizations. So when we are hungry, if we are not talented enough to cook we could go to the nearest restaurant to find food, trade the payment from our specialized job for a plate of spaghetti.
The process of getting food is one simple example of human activity to fulfil their desire. There might be a million ways to fulfil our desires, the modern human civilization is a complex system developed by human to ease the way to fulfil their desires, and it is evolving over millennia. Two or more different people who don’t know each other might be interconnected and working on the same thing for their desires. For example, a garment factory worker in Bangladesh and a fashion supermodel could work for the same fashion brand and don’t know each other, yet their aim is the same: make sure that those brand can sell their products and get paid, from a payment they got for their work they would spend it to fulfil their desires. These two people are still interconnected, assembled by the complex economic system at the heart of our modern civilization.
Whilst developing modern civilization for ease of desire satisfaction as its locomotive, owning something has become an integral part of desire fulfilment for humankind. Our modern world has been shaped by materialism as its core value, to own something is to fulfil our desire, and the more you own the more successful you are. Our desire to own something is like a train that has no functioning brake system. It is always on the move, passing station over the station with no definitive destination, it is running through an infinitive railroad which no one knows where the end is.
Just imagine this, fulfilling a person’s desire is just like commuting by train. The journey to fulfil a person’s desire to be able to communicate with another is started. After arriving at the first station, a person could own a communication device to connect with another, the journey could have been done, and the desire is fulfilled. But the train of a person’s desire to own a communication device is on the move as this person aimed to have a communication device which has more function on it, which is a smartphone, he could have it after he arrived in the second station, and as time goes by, finally he arrived. But the train is still on the move, after passing the second station it still searches for another sophisticated device featuring more technology, the feature itself has nothing to do with the fundamental function the person searching for which is to help him communicate. And so on. Billions of trains arrive every day at the station and the communication devices in every station are in short supply. To anticipate supply shortage, communication device makers are producing more and more devices, but the problem is, to make a smartphone, you need cobalt and another chemical element for its battery, is cobalt supply adequate for battery demands? If yes there is no problem. If not there would be another train of human desire fulfilment, at this time it is a train to fulfil the collective human desire for cobalt supplies to make batteries for their smartphone devices.
In 2016, 126000 tonnes of cobalt were mined, it is estimated that the global need for cobalt will grow 7% and 13% from 2017 to 2030. Considering the annual supply and demand balances in the world, the deficit of cobalt demand would be around 64000 tonnes in 2030. Cobalt is essential for every electronic device that is using conventional battery chemistries. It ranges from smartphones to electric vehicles. Electric vehicles are believed to be the future of commuting as it is considered more environmentally friendly. Human desires have changed over time from the ease of commuting during the economic boom to another case of ease of commuting for a sustainable environment. It is generally acknowledged that since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, our addiction to carbon and deep earth minerals has driven us to environmental instability. At first, the first industrial revolution gave us exponential growth in economy and technology, it was the time when technological development grew very rapidly and it supported our economic boom.
We want to have a more prosperous life, and it came with the Industrial Revolution — with all minerals extracted from deep earth as fuel. But after a moment, we realize that extracting too much carbon from our earth would result in carbon pollution, drive global warming and invite climate change to our beautiful life.
Paris Agreement was signed in 2016, it collects 195 signatories from all over the world. It represents a human collective desire for industrial and economic development mechanisms, a mechanism in which every country should implement a national policy to consider the effect of environmental instability in every aspect of their economy and industry. Everything should change to a greener and more sustainable way of production
Deep inside this sustainable mechanism, it should be noted that in fact, carbon and deep earth minerals are still our industry’s ecstasy. Electric device/vehicle batteries that are believed to be more environmentally friendly are still very dependent on cobalt, earth minerals found in Earth’s crust. How we could find a cobalt?, it is no different than how we could find a coal: Earth extraction. Furthermore, in the technology that we believe would create a better and sustainable world e.g. solar panels, wind turbines, messiah of a green energy-dependent world, they are still, indeed, using rare metals for their sophisticated energy grids to enable power savings. Unfortunately, rare metals (vanadium, germanium, platinoids, tungsten, antimony, beryllium, etc.) are a concentration of atoms with outstanding properties, their quantity is limited. Our desire to create a sustainable future has not stopped us from our desire to own, extract, and make use of every mineral in Earth’s crust.
The more staggering fact is when we look deep inside D.R. Congo’s cobalt mines, miners are facing deadly work conditions with substandard wages. They are often injured in unsafety working environments and sometimes it might take their life. Is it true that slavery is still there? No, it might not, if we compared this situation to the one in South American sugar cane when slavery was at its peak, it is a blatantly different situation. While slave owners owned their slaves as their property, the modern-day capitalism mechanism tells us that the corporation where you work today does not own you, they own your time to create something, they own your work. Indeed, they should provide workers with a safe environment and standardized wages. The case is, that if safe working conditions and minimum wages are not satisfied, it is still slavery in an alternative way. Slave owners owned slaves, and capitalist corporations owned the worker’s work, without giving them their rights. The human desire to own something is still no different, it is a human horrible sense that has no boundaries. Rare minerals mining activity is often destroying the environment. In Ganzhou, mainland China, toxic waste dumps from tungsten production had polluted many tributaries of the Yangtze River, and tones of chemicals released into Xiang River in Hunan jeopardize the province’s drinking water and the health of its residents. It could practically be proclaimed that our desire to make environmentally friendly life still hurts the environment itself, creating environmental instability in untold ways. Since the dawn of civilisation, our desire to possess everything is terrifying. Down to our collective mindset, everything on this planet is on our own. It is ‘halal’ for us to extract every mineral from Earth for the sake of greater need. On this Earth, other parties except humankind are the victims of human collective desires.
In the middle of the South American sugar cane farm when slavery was at its peak, human desires made us do cruel things for another human. The day when the practice of slavery had its peak was long gone. Removal of slavery wasn’t done in one night. It is a long process of societal evolution that calls for human rights, that a human is not the property of another human, and that we should not own another human. But still, human desires have led us to another slavery, the modern one, the situation when workers are placed in unsafety working conditions and provided with substandard wages. Our economy and technology’s exponential development at first is fueled by coal, and our remarkable mobility is fueled by gasoline, which led to global carbon emissions. To this day, we take a great leap in subtracting our dependency on carbon emissions. But the technology we thought would bring us to a sustainable and eco-friendly future still hurting our Earth by the way we make its components, extracting more and more of Earth’s rarest minerals in unsustainable ways.
In the end, we always slave to our desire, for our greed, bargaining everything for the sake of our greater need. There are still billion train of human desires out there. From the dawn of civilization to the Industrial Revolution and until this modern world, it changes its form from gravity mechanized train to coal-fueled locomotive and subsequently electric light rail train vehicle. With an infinite number of stations, we should go by.
