THE
CLASH
The
(losing) war against human nature is taking place on many fronts
in the trodden down fields of human endeavour. Some of the battles
are of course more consequential than others. If we are indeed
a species in peril, as many climatologists and nuclear war professionals
forewarn, and if individuals, en masse, through subtle coercion
(advertising, peer pressure) are being inveigled into making
decisions that compromise not only individual health and happiness,
but the health of the environment, we can propose as a subject
for debate that there are two major opposing players that will
determine the destiny of the species and the planet earth: the
‘cares’ and the ‘care-nots.’
In
a letter to Hannah Arendt, the philosopher Martin Heidegger
writes, “we change ourselves into that which we love.”
Allowing for individual experience to occasion the universal,
how does this very personal and deeply felt observation implicate
the cares and care-nots?
The
care-nots, above every other consideration, care for themselves.
The world’s most influential care-nots (see Forbes
500), by channeling their discipline, dynamism and
aptitude into amassing all that the accumulation of wealth converts
into easy purchase (a fleet of Rolls-Royces, golf courses, yachts,
islands), declare before the twin altars of self-aggrandizement
and instant gratification that they love themselves, their possessions,
power and influence more than all the world’s human and
natural resources that provide for them.
The
cares in turn love the things we all love and want for ourselves
and our children. They care about the air we breathe, the quality
of foods we consume, the respect and minimum consideration owed
to strangers, the elderly and infirm who cannot help themselves,
and prior to the things of the world in their aggregate, cultivating
and propagating those ideas and ideals that vouchsafe for the
dignity and betterment of mankind: freedom of speech and assembly,
universal health care, equal opportunity under the law, equitable
pay.
The
word care comes from Middle and Old English Caru; akin
to Old High German kara, to lament, to sorrow, grieve, be troubled,
be anxious, to offer mental attention, to heed. In Swedish,
kära means to fall in love.
To
care presupposes anxiety, concern. In our present century, among
the countless number of disquieting developments over which
the cares are concerned is the rising sugar content in food:
its adverse effects on dental hygiene, type II diabetes and
obesity. The cares want food manufacturers to reduce or eliminate
altogether sugar from most foods.
In
the documentary Big
Sugar, Brian McKenna lays bare how the sugar
barons periodically contribute to Kellogg’s coffers and
are handsomely rewarded for their largesse: the sugar content
in Kellogg’s Corn Flakes has doubled since the 1950s.
According to The
Telegraph, the sugar content in children’s
cereals has gone up by 33% in the past three years.
In making their choices, the care-not sugar barons advertise
to the world that they don’t care about the deleterious
health effects of their products on consumer health, and neither
do the companies that agree to spike the sugar content of their
imbibables and edibles. For both cane growers and retailers,
it’s a win-win proposition that trumps all other considerations.
Among
other big winners are our much-in-demand dentists whose livelihood
is directly related to the cultivation of sugar dependency.
Sweet-toothed Canadians consume an astounding 88 pounds of sugar
per year. In the acid light of what some psychologists have
characterized as suicidal consumption syndrome, it constitutes
a dereliction of professional duty if your dentist hasn’t
advised you to use a water pic. Every dentist knows the water
pic is the first line of defense against tooth decay and especially
gum disease (periodontitis). Every dentists knows that chronic
periodontitis reduces life expectancy between two and and five
years. Your dentist’s silence is nothing less than a crime
of omission, an open confession that he doesn’t give a
damn about your teeth or your life. His sweet life is guaranteed
by your addiction to sucrose: refined white sugar. It wasn’t
so long ago that a person would have to chew three
feet of cane for the equivalent of one teaspoon of sugar.
Skipping dessert was not an option.
The
tobacco leaf, in its natural state, isn’t nearly as harmful
as its sundry adulterated derivatives: pipe and chewing tobacco,
cigarettes, cigars, snuff. According to WHO
(World Health Organization) there are 50 known cancer causing
chemicals in tobacco. Smoking will result in the death of 80
million people in the 21st century. The business model that
grows, refines and disseminates the leaf speaks in a single
voice. From the top down, the CEOs don’t give a damn about
the state of the nation’s lungs as they continue to lobby
for the right to develop and insert addictive chemicals into
their products. They only care about the number of zeros in
their bank statements, most of which, pace the Panama
Papers, ends up in off-shore tax havens.
Despite
their lack of funds and agency, the cares, many of whom are
volunteers, whose collective voice is but a whisper next to
the powerful care-nots, have made it their mission to stand
up to the tobacco producers in order to save the world’s
most vulnerable (our children) -- one million of whom will perish
from second-hand smoke.
As
for which side is likely to emerge victorious in this and other
cares versus the care-nots value conflicts, a quick survey of
the state of the planet earth confirms what we already know
anecdotally. The world marches to the drumbeat of the care-nots
for whom all self-serving ends justify the means. If a particular
law or regulation is at odds with a financial objective, the
care-nots will do whatever is necessary to have it annulled
or modified in their best vested interest. We all know that
the paperboy and parking lot attendant didn’t lobby for
the establishment and legalization of off-shore tax havens.
Above
and beyond the egregious power and financial differentials that
estrange the cares from the care-nots are their respective moral
compasses. The cares act according to what they know is right
while the care-nots according to what is right by human nature.
Even our esteemed physicians, who are handsomely paid for their
expertise, are implicated.
The
Sacker family (Purdue Pharma) is
being sued by the Massachusetts Attorney General for hiring
100ds of workers to push doctors to put more patients on opioids
at higher doses and for longer intervals. Thankfully, not all
the doctors signed up. Those who count themselves among the
cares refused lucrative financial incentives while the care-nots,
for whom self-interest counted more than the health of their
patients, toed big pharma’s bottom line. Their dereliction,
their desecration of the Hippocratic oath has resulted in the
lethal overdose of thousands of users – and counting.
The
most eminent of the care-nots are the world’s elite billionaires
who avoid paying trillions of dollars in taxes by paying off
lobbyists and politicians to write tax laws in their favour.
Much of their success is owed to their extensive legal teams,
the cozy cabal of care-not lawyers whom only the rich can afford.
Canada’s most articulate voice in journalism, Lord
Conrad Black, who is all too familiar with the $500/hour
fee lawyers routinely charge for the privilege of receiving
their advice and consent, acerbically notes:
. . . the legal profession is a 360-degree cartel that bilks
society, self-proliferates through its incumbency among
legislators and regulators, and has got away with class
robbery greater than that of the first two estates in pre-revolutionary
France behind a smokescreen of pious claptrap about the
rule of law.
The
above impartial portrait notwithstanding, the lawyers, including
those in Lord Black’s employ, are the great enablers,
just as the billions in tax dollars that have been diverted
from government coffers into the deep pockets of care-not billionaires
are monies not available for health care, dental care, child-care,
vital infrastructure and many other government services.
The
world’s wealthiest that number in the hundreds own 99%
percent of the world’s wealth. A 2021 Oxfam report found
that collectively, the 10 richest men in the world owned more
than the combined wealth of the bottom 3.1 billion people, almost
half of the entire world population. And while they speak in
different tongues and disagree in matters of culture and belief,
what unites them, what defines their brotherhood, is they don’t
care – an attitude or manner of being in the world that
derives from their brilliance and acumen which includes the
uncanny ability to obfuscate their unholy hoarding by engaging
professional publicists (glibsters) to wax loud and sympathetic
over the plight of the poor and disadvantaged.
But
the cares aren’t going away. They remain the stubborn
weeds the care-nots can’t root out. And while the former
correctly regard the cares as aberrations of human nature, the
latter's numbers and ubiquity (through social networking) are
such that they constitute a credible threat to the care-nots’
hegemony, while recognizing that caring, on the scale required
in today’s world of withering values, is an ask that must
fall well short of what is realistically attainable. Seen from
afar as it concerns the destiny of the species, the cares are
drowning in a sea of care-nots, and their rescue is becoming
more and more problematic as the world’s wealth becomes
more and more concentrated in the hands of a few all-powerful
care-nots (Musk, Bezoz, Buffet, Slim).
If
the world, as many proclaim, is indeed increasingly spiraling
out of control, should the cares, despite exemplary dedication
and exertion, be held responsible, or better yet hold themselves
responsible for a strategy that manifestly isn’t working,
for not having figured out how to best the care-nots?
Since
we are not constitutionally wired to care for others outside
of family and friends, is it time (if there’s time enough)
to consider tweaking our constitution?
In
the near future bio-geneticists will be able to intervene and
reconfigure the human genotype. Should the cares seriously consider
channeling their focus and energy into biogenetics in order
to right what is all wrong in the species? Is this man’s
best, last hope? Or are the moral and ethical dilemmas posed
by such an intervention a burden that no human being should
have to carry? How confident are we that a world without care-nots
would be a better world? And yet if caring were not an artificial
construct but a constitutional given, the well-being of the
world would not be an issue.
Not
to be discounted is the remote possibility that the care-nots
will take what matters to them in their own hands and decide
not preside over the toxification of the planet if their own
demise is implicated. Death is a deterrent no one can afford
to ignore.
Short
of rewiring the species, the great challenge of our times is
to convince the care-nots to care for all that which they presently
don’t care for. But they are ensconced in unassailable
fortresses of wealth, and their care-not mandate into which
the very meaning of their lives is woven is a tried and tested
carapace that conscience, thus far, has not been able to penetrate.
Perhaps
it is time for Nietzsche’s new man to appear on the world
stage. Are we ready to make ourselves complicit in his coming?
Philosophy
proposes that the asking of the question is already a new beginning,
a point of departure that implicates a new way of thinking.
The author of What Is Called Thinking, Martin Heidegger,
writes: “To think is to confine yourself to a single thought
that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.”
