Essay: Competition versus Conservation

COMPETITION VERSUS CONSERVATION (Via 'All is illusion')

We are living now in an age of unparalleled cleverness and unbridled gluttony, in a constitution without conscience.

Contrary to popular misconception, man has evolved hardly a jot since the stone-age, and learned naught of real importance in the process; in fact in many ways we have regressed. Judging from the artifacts we find, our stone-age ancestors (bearing in mind they did not have the advantage of thousands of years of small incremental invention) were just as intelligent as any of us today, and certainly more at home in their environment than we moderns are in ours, in spite of all our mechanical, technological and scientific ‘advances' - they at least not posing quite the menace that we do. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, ever hastened by our money-motivated innovations, we have been trapped in a degenerative spiral - until today we are in imminent danger of disappearing down our own plug-and-play garbage disposal units. There's nothing new in this, there having been other ‘sophisticated' societies throughout history who have trodden a similar path - and gone the way of all erring flesh. The huge difference nowadays, is that in all our accumulated ‘cleverness' we threaten to take the rest of the world with us. The problem, however, only ensues as a result of a mistaken belief which could so easily be rectified.

Ignorance is the coming to conclusions and acting upon them, when every last fact and facet of a subject cannot be seen and taken into account. It is obviously far wiser to admit that we don't know something, than to assume we do and act hastily and regretfully upon it, but our ‘experts', ever quick to demonstrate their cleverness, are ready at any time to leap to the wildest of conclusions on the flimsiest of evidence. The assumption that life is a fortuitous accident, guided to what we see today by fitness of species, only encourages us to act as the dinosaurs did and attempt to show that we are the mightiest and fittest for purpose. Whatever evidence they may produce in support of a natural evolution of species, actually proves not one way nor another whether there is a guiding principle at work in the universe. They are so bogged down in evolution and blinded by their conclusions upon it, the thought never crosses their minds that it could simply be part of the means of expression of this principle - and so not as precarious as they conclude.

What is precarious, is that presumption: it is a big black hole in space, gobbling up all hope and possibility of love and life. A pretence of knowledge from prejudice, it is a dangerous philosophy, encouraging a violent mode of living. If we are to accept that neither is there hard evidence to the contrary of what they preach, and that all belief in a kindly God is blind, unjustifiable faith, then at least the latter allows for the possibility of improvement and justice, whereas their faith in a blind evolution allows only soul-less, unbridled violence. The exponents of this moribund view of Creation are evil alchemists, changing gold into base metal and the miraculous into the mundane, telling us that might is right and cunning is king. What, in their reasoning, since it gets us exactly nowhere, is the point of showing love? Those purveyors of this faith do not know and cannot be certain of that which they preach, yet for their own purpose would have us all believe it; but they will no doubt meet the same fate as their champions, the dinosaurs.

Our ‘devil take the hindmost' approach to living, in which detrimental things like strife and war are common, is either directly or indirectly occasioned by our eternal pursuit of ... Money. The love of this being the root of all evil, in our unceasing quest for ‘progress' and profit, we have created a most ingenious imperator to accelerate the pace of all on the daily treadmill, called COMPETITION. In everything we think and do we are urged to strive to be the best in everything - even to be ‘champions of the world'. And being as we've only one shot at it, we try our damndest to comply, don't we? This is one of the most mischievous devils in our lives. The idea that we should strive to be ‘better' than brothers - whether it be faster, stronger, wealthier, bigger - be it personally, publicly or as part of a big business venture, belongs properly to the Jurassic age when those long redundant dinosaurs with minuscule brains had their beastly way. All that competition has succeeded in doing for us, is to help keep us continually at variance with each other, and hasten the destruction of our environment.

Once-upon-a-time we had a purpose - to achieve as much happiness as we could, whilst getting along with our neighbour. But now, with Western leaders presently at the helm, we have been given new reason the live and die for. According to the purveyors of New World Wisdom, Mrs Jones is no longer our friendly next-door neighbour with whom we can commune over a consoling cup of tea and biscuit, and maybe borrow a basin of sugar from: no, she's actually (why hadn't we realised it before) a consumer, and her offered cup of sugar is a commodity. This being so, we are now at liberty to help ourselves to as much of her hard-saved sugar as we may, empty her larder, and persuade her to part with the contents of her rainy-day-pin-money tea caddy, too. And that's ok, really: it's the name of the game, nowadays - everybody's at it, and as long as the tax man get his due share it's quite legal.

My mother would often say to me "I want, never gets!" and neither, she made sure of, did I. Some folk today would argue that this denial of those things I petulantly stamped my immature feet for was the beginning of a sadly warped life - but I know otherwise, and I know too that she was right to deny me even what she could have afforded: way back then she had a shrewd idea of where it would lead if she gave in to my demands. Today, unbridled, ‘free-market', legalised racketeering, flying its flag of ‘convenience' and insisting it is only ‘giving folk exactly what they want', championed by our laudable politicians, is not only fast-destroying community life, but our world, too. Money is power, and power controls governments. In truth, the exponents of this are but global gluttons, grabbing at the greatest share of our booty ... while growling "To hell with the consequences!" The question has to be asked: since when has what folk ‘want' ever been any good for them?

"Love thy neighbour" the Nazarene advised us, but it's a bit hard to bond with a barcode. The ‘expansion of global marketing in the maximisation of potential business base' (the battle cry of Europe, today) sounds to be a very fine phrase, and will no doubt prove beneficial for the economy of a certain few countries - namely those who have suffered long under the lash of unfair constitutions and unjust world-commerce policies - but mainly all this consolidation is an ideal opportunity for the fabulously rich and pushy to get even more exceedingly so.

The bigger the business, the beastlier its appetite, and appetites don't come any beastlier than those globally operating companies allowed free-reign to rampage through our streets like galloping Godzillas, gobbling up everything and everybody in their path. These computerised monsters will not stop their ruthless rout until each swallows the other and only one remains: Walmart or Tesco, Shell, or some now emerging Chinese equivalent will be left gnawing anxiously away at its own rear-end in a frantic attempt to stay alive, while we bar-coded, candy-robbed babies will all be dead or dying in a world no longer habitable, due to our mad stampede for that ‘progress and profit' we were all promised.

Not only is our whole existence, in the way we live and work here in the west, constructed upon the assumption of our having only one life, but on there being no justice but that which is dished out in our career-driven law-courts, in which our legal beagles stop at nothing short of strangulation (we at least hope) to secure their own due financial rewards and to have their names added in gold-leafed script to that long role of honour on the oaken walls of their corridors - their little bit of eternity, like the inscription on our gravestone. Yes, like our politicians, they have their ‘legacy' to think of; they all want to be marked down by posterity as ‘bloody good blokes'; which actually demonstrates their duplicity and shallowness - can you imagine blokes like Buddha or Jesus, or even Gandhi being concerned about their image? Having given credence to this ‘one life' theory, it precludes the possibility, and therefore inhibits the operation of any other natural kind of justice, leaving us at least in this life and for generations afterward, purely at the mercy of such people. As far as leaders go, we get what we invite - and unfortunately, believing only in their own kind of justice, they will have their wicked way with us.

But life really is no lottery - nothing is ever gained or lost independently of all else, and our efforts to engineer it so only invite eventual readjustment by a law more consistent and exacting than we ourselves have ever contrived. Whether or not we wish to accept ‘God' is irrelevant, and actually quite unenlightened - what we really must appreciate is that there is a natural universal ‘law' in place, working quite autonomously of anything we may contrive in its stead; and that this ‘law' continues working after and in the face of any ‘justice' we may dole, so compensating in its surer, more exact, longer-term way for all our multi-layered misdemeanours and adjustments. (In the long-term, too, bringing due reward to all our self-seeking legal beagles.) Buddha told us this and so did the Nazarene, but the problem is, we do not believe a word of it.

Nonetheless, what we think, is what we do. From being children we are weaned and reared on materialistic values and capitalist concepts, and carry out our duties in the fond hope that one day our own ship will come in, unload its rich cargo on our doorstep, and make us just like our ‘betters'. Under the mistaken banner of ‘democracy' we are are encouraged at every tip and turn to ‘vote with our feet', and happily for those who seek our votes, most feet will always seek the short and selfish route to personal happiness. We cannot rely upon the majority taking the sensible approach to anything, and far from what folk ‘want' being any good for them, it has now brought us to the brink of disaster.

It all depends on the mind-set of our society, as to which direction we take from here; our every thought and action affects our destiny for better or worse. The world is in this mess because we made it so, and not just in one generation of wastrel ways - but that doesn't mean we can sit back and blame it on our ancestors. Neither is there any point in calling upon our lawyers, politicians, priests or our many and multifarious gods to find a way out of the mess we are in - we ourselves allowed it to happen, and it is we individuals who actually get to try and rectify it. If we decide on the wrong course of action, we could be chiseling our way in record time back into another stone-age, or worse - so instead of thinking ‘competition', and how I might better my neighbour, let's start thinking ‘conservation', and how I might help him live.

The drawback with Evolution is, it is not a just one-way process - whatever winds up it can wind down it, too. A positive evolutionary urge for the better can so easily revert to an equally urgent negative devolution, as a steady decline and degeneration, or a headlong plummet into destruction and oblivion. Does this ring a bell with anyone? It should, for the latter is just what is happening to us now. Up or down, fast or slow, life or oblivion - it's make your mind up time for all! There is a new age with a new plot, struggling to be born, in which these ‘champions of the world' will have no roles to play - and what we each have to decide is, do we wish for a part in it? As far as humanity is concerned, the world is yet young - we could be at the beginning of Man's development, or at its self-imposed end. And just supposing we really are the only planet in the universe with life on it, are we to prove ourselves only a failed experiment?

Tom Manson.

(Read 'The living Kingdom' Whereislove?)

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