Our perception of and our ability to respond to the crisis of population and consumption is beyond our immediate awareness.
The destructive cultural processes that have created fundamental social and ecological disturbances are not open to or apt to change. These processes are affected by the lack of direct perception of the gravity of the problem and by our cultural reward systems that have big payoffs for denial.
First, there is no directly perceived one-to-one negative effect – that is, that the negative effect of overpopulation and overconsumption is externalized. The negative effect is not immediate. It represents a degradation at a distance, at a future time and place, or to a perceptually undervalued character (lower class human, natural culture, habitat or the overall integrity of the biosphere).
Culture give rewards and payoffs (money, power, sex, etc.) to those areas that it is fixated on. These payoffs represent perceived core functions (bottom lines) and serve perceived prime values (dominator humans). In doing so they represent the cultural momentum and are the basis for our stories, dreams and careers. Where are the big cultural payoffs?
A cultures’ preeminent reward of material and prestige go to those who develop progressively more comprehensive methods of manipulating, controlling, managing and dominating nature and people. These become the cultural success programs. It is the norm that there is a lot of material and social support given for cultural participation in these programs. Hence, the cultural momentum and rewards are staked on the allurement of humans assuming dominance everywhere.
With the human proliferation of its success programs is a more comprehensive scale of ecological interference and ecological collapse. There are more people and more invasive ways of manipulating and dominating nature. The abiotic momentum takes as a norm the annihilation and degradation of habitat and natural cultures. It takes as a norm the domestication, enslavement, poisoning and torturing of any aspect of nature that can be manipulated toward material rewards.
We are like a successful cancer living inside a larger animal body. Our initial success is in appropriating the energy of the body toward the success of the human enterprise (cancer cells). Our ultimate success leads to the collapse and death of the integrity of the larger body (biospheric processes). All along the way “success is failure”. The more we succeed in turning nature into a resource, the more we get cultural payoffs and the more we degrade Nature itself. Until our prime value shifts toward the health of the habitat and biosphere we will continue to feed cultural engines that progressively consume the natural world.
In this way we are part of a dysfunctional human family that is in deep denial of its ecocidal incentive system. Totally caught up in our success program, we cannot perceive, admit or name the truth of what we are really up to.
Hannah Arendt identified it in a different context as the “banality of evil”. We are exterminating the ecosphere, yet we appear to ourselves to be well-adjusted, decent and utterly normal and even tender in other areas of concern.