APITALISM: a word derived – like ‘cattle’ – from the late Latin capitale, derived from the Latin caput for ‘head’.
Vaccine: a word derived from the Latin vacca for ‘cow’.
Fact: a word derived from the Latin factum: an act, deed, feat etc. Ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European dʰeh₁: to put, place, set.
When Bruce Pascoe’s radical book Dark Emu (2014) came out, and the Right attacked his account of Indigenous farming traditions, the Left reflexively defended it – as if agriculture per se were proof of progressiveness (ditto inefficient, habitat-harming solar and wind farms). So ideologies fuelled the controversy. Progressives insist that Indigenous farmers were more advanced than hunter–gatherers. Yet whether we other them (like the Right) or strive to identify (like the Left), lifeways counter to ours made their land use sustainable.
We know that agriculture arose around 12,000 years ago. As to why, the jury is out. And was the associated population growth a cause or an effect? Or both? Climate change after the last ice age no doubt helped. And here we go again. As we watch our 21st-century climate morph exponentially, agriculture gets ever more extensive: displacing forests and all their occupants, poisoning water and soil, genetically modifying crops with long-term toxic consequences.
Agriculture originally gave us division of labour: beasts of burden, serfs, slaves, porters, packers, sorters, stackers, overseers, chiefs, kings, emperors, high priests and so on. Thence, private property: fences, forts, theft, laws, warfare, detention centres, gas chambers, mortuaries, cemeteries, storage, waste, inflation, golden calves, cages, hobbles, yokes, carts, harnesses, bridles, bits, saddles, whips and and confinement of formerly free animals and women. And over time, through overuse, huge tracts of earth became infertile. So as cities expanded, the quest for resources turned towards trading, and invading and colonising new land.
And now our civilisation is past its prime, we’re helpless to stop its decline, despite nonstop hype about the troubleshooting smarts of AI, which isn’t omniscient even if its keepers insist that how it knows as much as it does is a mystery. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice of Goethe’s poem (popularised by Disney’s Fantasia), they can’t control what they’ve set in motion. Yet AI is revolutionising healthcare, designing new mRNA vaccines. Should we be impressed? Because the giant fact farm where we all graze on opaquely processed information is headed for monocultural wasteland. It looks like Left and Right – Dems and Reps or Labor and Libs – are opposed. But as governments have rapidly grown to resemble GMO crops, the Western political landscape has lost diversity, so you only get choice on the surface.
As AI, if fed more balanced data, might tell us. Yet, so terminally entrenched is Western capitalism, the dominant economic system for such a short span of history, that we doggedly seek to solve all global problems via its logic, as if no other options exist. Why so attached? Well, for instance, modern medicine has lowered mortality, raised life expectancy, implanted eggs in older wombs, granted sex-free conception, and promises to cheat death (even as mass extinction threatens), while, for our convenience, animals bred to be eaten suffer all-too-frequent artificial insemination only to keep losing their young in an endless cycle of pain, which we can ignore thanks to boundless entertainment made more predictable by the minute with DEI remakes, sequels, prequels and spin-offs.
You are what you eat. The idea derives from a gastronomic text penned by an 18th-century Frenchman. More than mere metaphor, it applies to all we consume. And some of us are more sensitive than others. Long ago, when I first ate magic mushies, I felt my neck lengthen like a stem – like Alice in Wonderland’s neck after a bite of fungus – and wallaby salami shifted my awareness from the folk and things around me to the pathways between them. Yet whether or not we’re sensitive to it, factory-farmed food continues to shape and subdue us.
And as we’ve adapted to a processed diet produced by means that hurt the Earth and all its denizens, us included, we’ve also consumed the information (food for thought) our media feeds us via procedures akin to industrial production. Before the dawn of agriculture, humans were nomadic, roaming varied terrain through the course of seasonal changes, encountering a wide range of raw information. Human perception was far sharper. Our species lived in nature, not beyond it. Today, our information source has narrowed from the whole cosmos to a small device that distracts us from our surroundings: the ground beneath our feet, local sounds, and even the air we breathe. We’ve traded a vibrant wilderness that once embraced and sustained us for a technological maze geared to rewire our brains.
Factory. Factitious. Manufactured. Satisfaction. On the one hand are facts of nature, some of which become folklore as scientific knowledge evolves, or flawed/fraudulent data degrades it. And on the other are facts accessed online via news (fake or just skewed), social media, Wikipedia, and all of the above reconstituted by AI. As the once free-for-all internet grows ever more heavily censored – a trend scarily evident during the Covid pandemic – it starts to resemble selective plant and animal breeding: systematic cultivation of obedience.
Big Tech is our shepherd; we shall not wander. It maketh us to lay down ingrained patterns: it leadeth us to buy still more. It withdraweth our souls: it leadeth us in the paths of riotousness for its own sake. Yea, though we walk through the virtuality of death, we will fear no evil: for AI art with us; its words and its images, they come for us. Thou propagandise for us in the prisons of our animus: thou annoyest our heads with noise; our inboxes runneth over. Surely digital surveillance shall follow us all the days of our lives and we will dwell in the hell of Big Tech for ever. Just sayin’.
Capitalism has sold us the story that we can have it all: Indigenous wisdom, the age-old knowledge of hunter–gatherer–farmers whose spirits belong to their ancestral land; and AI, a fast track to Armageddon birthed from the heads of monomaniac tech bros. Yes, capitalism pretends we deserve the best of both worlds without end, as it tempts us into endless debt.
Each moment of time, in essence, possesses its own unrepeatable quality. But Big Ag and all its baggage enforce repetition until resources collapse. Language, which used to work literal magic, each letter charged with primal energy, has been reduced to information usurped by corporate agendas. Numbers, once endowed with sacred values, now do little more than tally debit/credit/profit/loss, gauge productivity, count off the calendar, and quantify every aspect of existence. And art has succumbed to the fate of endless reproduction: Campbell’s Soup Cans, Frida handbags, genre fiction spawned by wannabes, reissues, reduxes, remixes, remasters and covers of covers of covers over and over forever and ever, amen. Could the allure of Aboriginal dot paintings involve the soothing effect of rhythmic analogue patterns minus mindlessly dull mechanical sameness, because, like the buyers for whom they’re intended, no two dots are identical? Or does the fragmentation of an organic dot matrix mirror our own state, outer and inner, yet offer, instead, a unified (vs. centralised) vision?
observer of times 
Thank you as always…the line that really jumped out for me and will be steeping in the soup of my thoughts is …”so you only get choice on the surface”. There is so much in these words that are at the core of the ‘hungry ghost’ epidemic of our times. Such a simple use of words but I haven’t heard anyone say this so simply.
The magicians of capitalism have created such a spell, that it’s even hard to name the curse that we know we have all been placed under…not by one person or persons but by systems.
I love the term ‘deep time’, it evokes a perspective that places humans not at the center, now I contemplate, ‘deep choice’. What might the qualities of ‘deep choice’ be? A question that Raine Maria Rilke would have me “live into” rather than seek for an answer.
With gratitude 🙂
Thanks, yet again, for your deep engagement w/ the ideas barely touched upon here. Deep time? I think such awareness was/is innate to humans living in intimate contact w/ the Earth & heavens who erected stone circles aligned to celestial movements, bearers of Dreamtime myths etc. Now, it’s just a sciencey concept brought to us via technology. Though I think its reality is coded deep w/in us & accessible via, say, meditation or psychedelics.
Your idea of deep choice invites deep reflection. And I wonder whether, if we go deep enough, choice is just another illusion? If, below the surface static, we tap into cosmic patterns & merge w/ or surrender to a flow, a vast dance? When I think about the best choices I’ve made, those I feel have freed me or brought deep fulfilment, they seem less like choices than just being open & turning up in the right place at the right time w/o expectations. Sort of opposite to how cultural pressures work: apps & experts to tell us where to be, & when, & what to expect.
…yes, cosmic pattern/flow rather than choice resonates deeply with me. Beautiful. I relate very much to the experience of my best ‘choices’ not seeming to be choices at all but a surrender to the next step in the dance. Not a contrived or forced or pressured surrender, more like grace.
I am definitely leaning towards the understanding and experience that ‘choice’ is indeed an illusion. An illusion that has made a few people a lot of money and power and most of us prisoners. It excites me to be engaging with this understanding.
I sense that ‘deep time’ is encoded within us…in what I call the ‘indigenous body.’
Grace – yes! So maybe choice is merely an illusion of ego, & as our culture puts ever greater stress on ego, we get stasis, w/ consumers fixated on an endless array of mostly meaningless choices while a few elites make choices big enough to matter, so society grows increasingly atomised &, so, ever further from coordinating effective resistance to corporate planetary destruction.
Notice how much of the current overwhelming emphasis on racial (& other minority) identity in our society is fed by top-down machinations: keep the people bickering amongst themselves over how they prefer to be referred to etc., while jacking up the cost of living & enabling ever more debt, inflaming resentment between classes & genders & generations & so on – deflecting any focus from what we share at a deeper level. Would love to hear more about what you call the ‘indigenous body’ & whether you can recommend any writers/thinkers on the topic.
…I have no idea where the term ‘indigenous body’ comes from.
I have been processing belonging for years as a migrant from England and feeling at once privileged and deeply uncomfortable to be living in this country.
I am hyper aware that I am not indigenous to this land and yet feel more connected to it, than my so called homeland. What is it in me that connects to this land? Where and what am I native to? The answer to both those questions seems to be my body, in all its layers of perception.
I have been inspired by Miriam Rose Ungunmerr Baumann a First Nations woman who has offered her understanding of Dadirri, which is a ‘deep listening’ practice which she says, although an ancient practice of First Nation peoples it is in no way restricted to Aboriginal experience. Which I know to be true. Deep listening, as in not just with our ears but with the complete and innate awareness that you spoke of in an earlier comment that all of our ancestors had activated. Miriam Rose offers it as a ‘practice’ because we are no longer naturally initiated into these perceptions but I sense most of us know this was not always the case. This is the longing for, the re-memebering of; ‘indigenous body’.
Other people who have inspired my process around this are; You, Charles Einstein, Joshua Schrei, James Bridle, Robert Macfarlane, Artistasfamily, Tyson Yungkaporta, Richard Powers (in his novel the Overstory) Emergence Magazine and many others along the way. Thanks for your interest. 🙂
Thanks for this rich, articulate, thought-provoking response, & for sharing your personal process so openly & giving context to the work of these communicators, all of whom seem to me devoted to healing divisions, whether inner, or between individuals/groups, or between humans & nature, other species, Earth, spirit.
For me this land, unlike England, is – partly due to its vastness – still wild enough, despite all the devastation wreaked in 2+ centuries, that more direct/immediate contact w/ primal awareness is possible. Environments shape us, & so I live near ocean & tend to roam less trodden routes. This ancient land is, w/ its young imported dominant culture, less civilised than the more populous continents. Which I experience w/ deep gratitude as a kind of freedom.
…so beautifully said 🙏🏼