Image: korkut bostanci

A Few Paragraphs Toward the Problem

Jami Heinricher
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

When I say that I think Capitalism is destroying our planet and our social fabrics, it doesn’t mean that I advocate for Communism. The way I see it, the chance for a balanced and natural human existence on earth went out the door thousands of years ago, most likely with the evolution of certain structures in our brains. Those structures animate what I call the ‘tertiary position’ — a cognitive dimension that permits us to objectify ourselves and engage in dialectical thinking, which then escapes into culture-building. Our expelled-from-the-garden moment.

We are stuck in a chaotic world of human manufacture and we have enabled mostly systems that reject social and environmental feedbacks. We have permitted the simplistic, heroic algorithms of Capitalism to install into this space and run its user-abusing operating system. (It promised us so very much.) We created and then subordinated ourselves to institutions that intercede for us but they barely account for our fundamental humanity and fail totally to abide the logic of evolutionary systems upon which we depend. Nearly everything we do for each other at the social level is remedial — safety nets for the free fall designed into (or more specifically not designed out of) the system. We pretend and proclaim this systemic failure is one of personal character. Our economies have reduced the deep essential exchanges between people and the earth to abstracted transactions tragically unable to balance the most important accounts.

A managed economy that limits the rapaciousness of powerful sociopaths may be all we can hope for but it’s not going to fix the problem. We are the problem. Our genius for dissociation, our infatuation with purely linguistic and linear pathways through dimensional and interdependent reality, and our insatiable appetites for ease, novelty and entertainment — these bring us constantly closer to systemic collapse. We search for some connection with the essential but we are sightseers at best — unable to confirm our feelings until a selfie (the tertiary position manifest) confirms our presence and exposes our emotion to a hypothetical social viewer. Our entertainments and even our lives begin to look like pantomime. We possess all the neurological assets to commune with our planetary selves but we are trained intensively from earliest youth to traverse reality with the precision tools of valuation and we’re coaxed and cheered into seeking advantage. We live in the cacophonous noise of unrelenting self-attention and social broadcast. And we are trapped inside aesthetics that we have dutifully and even suavely cultivated that now render much of the world ugly to us.

)
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade