TrueLife - Excess Consumption = Sustainability

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

Production is the holy grail of profits, profits are magnified by excess consumption and excess consumption is the opposite of sustainable. How can Multi-national corporations, Governments, & Politicians possibly be serious about instituting policies of sustainability?

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear, Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope your day is going beautiful. I hope you have someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to. I once heard if you have all three of those things, then you have the ingredients to make a life worth living.

What are we going to talk about today? It's a great question. Thanks for asking. How about this? I've been reading a new book. It's called The Disappearance of Rituals. And it's by Young Chulhan, a really interesting gentleman. And I think you'll find some of the points I'm going to talk about.

that are in this book, really rich, rewarding, maybe a little bit sad. I want to begin with the compulsion of production. It seems odd, right? This race for production. If you listen to some of the experts in the world of finance, if you listen to some of the experts, period, they'll tell you that the way our world gets out of a depression is through production. We need more production.

But I want you to think about that for a minute. Does more production get us out of a depression? What's the point of more production? It seems a bit of a dichotomy when we have all these giant corporations. We have governments. We have politicians. We have people in the World Economic Forum

trying to tell us that we, need to consume less. We need to save the planet. We're spending too much. We're consuming too much. We're consuming too much energy. We are taking, taking, taking. How can that be? How can people at a place called the World Economic Forum? How can our politicians and our governments? How could they possibly tell us something like that? Each one of these entities has a business model built on excess consumption. The entire profit model of the world is built on excess consumption,

and these same people get up in their ivory towers and tell us to consume less. The profit margin is built on people becoming more and more productive. But if you're constantly producing more and more, don't you need more and more consumption? It seems to me we're at odds. I don't know how you can have both of those things. How can you have a business model of excess consumption and tell people to consume less? Those two things are incongruent. It's a horrible strategy.

However, I think it's a strategy that is not only playing out in the world of finance and the world of production. I think it's a strategy or something that's playing out in the human condition. I'd like to read to you a quick little excerpt and then give you some commentary. This is from the first chapter, the compulsion of production. Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent and pass on the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication. Today, however, communication without community prevails. I want you to think about that last sentence for a minute.

Rituals bring forth a community without communication. Today, however, communication without community prevails. Today, we have a world of connections, whether you're on LinkedIn or Facebook or YouTube or social media. You have all these connections, but what you don't have is a real relationship. The same way that COVID brought about Zoom learning. It's just another form of connections.

You may be making connections, but you don't have relationships. The only relation you have in a connection is a digitized person, in front of you. You don't even know if that person is real. However, when you sit down next to someone, whether you're a child, whether you're an adult, regardless of what type of meeting you're in, when you're next to somebody, you have the felt presence of the other. There's a lot of information exchanging between eye contact,

between facial features, between pheromones. The proximity you have towards somebody, changes the relationship you have to them. When I'm in a meeting with someone and I say something that is offensive, that person could punch me in the face. When I'm on a Zoom call, there's not a dang thing that person can do. They could use some bad words, they could yell,

but there's zero physical consequences for my bad behavior in that aspect. So in a way it sort of promotes bad behavior. It's very forgiving on the topic of bad behavior. It allows you, it's sort of the same premise when you're in a car and you're driving and someone cut you off and you get road rage. You're protected by this 2,000 pound behemoth so you feel a little bit invincible. When you're separated by geography and you find yourself on a screen, you're also protected from the consequences of your words and your actions. So that's the difference between connections and relationship.

And that is also what the author is arguing is the lack of rituals, the lack of community with communication. And again, what we have today is communication without community. I think it's a weird sort of paradox how. these particular technologies promise to bring us together but in reality they drive us apart

it's the illusion of being closer together it's the illusion of friends your Facebook friend your LinkedIn friend while maybe a stable acquaintance never has the

formality the formal presence you never get to make the true connection of the felt presence of the other. I'd like to try to explain the building blocks of the felt presence of the other. Can you have a community without communication? If a ritual is a community without communication, what might be exchanged in that community? That's what I want to talk about.

and the vehicle to exchange information in the ritual, the basic vehicle are symbols. So let me try to explain that a symbol serves the purpose of recognition. Does that kind of make sense? If you and I both behold the symbol, we both recognize what that symbol is. So when we see that symbol, we can recognize what it means without saying anything to each other.

We've experienced the ritual. We understand the symbol. So now, by seeing that symbol, we are automatically taken back to the ritual that we both experienced. And no words need be exchanged. We have participated in the ritual. We're familiar with the symbol. Maybe you're like me and you're thinking, man, what do you mean recognition, George?

What does it mean to recognize a symbol? What's a great question? It's not merely a question of seeing something for the second time, nor does it imply a whole series of encounters. Recognition means knowing something as that with which we are already acquainted. knowing something as that with which we are already acquainted, the unique process by which man makes himself at home in the world.

That's what Hegel would say. Recognition always implies that we have come to know something more authentically than when we were able to do when caught up in our first encounter with it. recognition elicits the permanent from the transient symbolic perception as recognition is a perception of the permanent this brings us into the concept of time and I think Mersay Iliad wrote about this

about sacred time and profane time and this dovetails with rituals think about a ritual like marriage. Hopefully most of you had parents that were married and you're married now. The ritual of marriage

as a time, your parents went through a marriage ceremony, a ritual. You went through a marriage ceremony, a ritual. That's a sacred time. And you can say that

that time is something that both of you experienced. You experienced the time of marriage. And it's the same time. The same ritual happened for your parents that happened for you, that may happen for your kids. You went through this ceremony and you get to experience the same feelings your parents had.

In fact, you get to experience the same emotions, and feelings that anyone who's ever gotten married got to experience. You went through that same time. That's a sacred time. And that's what the ritual provides. It provides you with a time that everyone can experience in a similar fashion. That's what makes it sacred. It slows down time.

It allows you to travel through time. Profane time, on the other hand, is getting up and going to work and being a slave for somebody else and having to sacrifice your time for the benefit of a crude idea like monetary gain. That's profane. That time is worth nothing. People have to buy your time for you to do that. They have to give you a large amount of money to sacrifice your time.

That's profane. This is also the compulsion of production. The compulsion of production is profane time. And the more we get away from the rituals, the more we get away from the recognition of symbols, the more we get away from sacred time, from moving from ritual to ritual, the more we're forced into the compulsory.

nature of production. The compulsive nature of production is a spiritual void. The compulsive nature of production steals not only the soul of mankind, but it steals the future of our children. The compulsive nature of production forces us to have connections instead of relationships. in the interest of saving time. What the author is arguing here is that in a world that is symbol poor, data and information do not possess symbolic force, and so do not allow for recognition.

Those images and metaphors which found meaning and community and stabilize our life, those symbols, those rituals, those things, that we get to experience in sacred time. Those are lost in a symbolic emptiness. The human experience diminishes. Time diminishes. And contingency dramatically proliferates. We lose ourselves.

We lose our relationships. We lose everything in a mad dash to get from aid to be and we find ourselves relishing the idea that we saved a few extra minutes and became productive when in fact we've lost everything where we're losing a lot of what it means to be human in the interest of producing the concept of producing and being more productive and then being flogged for consuming too much. Just think about that paradox.

It's ridiculous. No wonder why so many people are dying of loneliness. No wonder why so many people are unhappy. No wonder why there's so many suicides. Our society is schizophrenic. The author makes a really good point here that I'm trying to wrap my mind around. And he says that we can define rituals as, symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world.

I think that's pretty beautiful. They transform being in the world into a being at home. You have time to contemplate and understand what life is truly about. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space. They render time habitable. Just think about that for a minute. Is the time that you have habitable?

Can you live with the time you have? Do you ever find yourself saying, like, there's just not enough time? The truth is, there's plenty of time. You have all the time in the world. But the world in which you live, the society in which you live, focuses on production so you never have enough time because you're being measured. You're being reduced to a number.

You're not a number. You're a human being. Here's a quote from the novel Citadel. Quote, and our immemorial rights are in time, what the dwelling is in space. For it is well that the years should not seem to wear us away and disperse us like a handful of sand. Rather they should fulfill us.

It is, meet that time should be a build-up. Thus I go from one feast day to another, from anniversary to anniversary, from harvest to harvest. As when a child, I made my way from the hall of council to the restroom within my father's palace,

where every footstep had a meaning. Imagine if our lives were not erased from the cradle to the grave to acquire plastic garbage and accolades, diplomas, accreditations, master degrees, PhDs. We spend all our time sitting in a room listening to someone else's experiences so that we can one day leave that room and maybe have our own experience. When will we get to the point of understanding that we don't need all these people in rooms telling us about how great they are, about how great their experiences are?

You need not sit and listen to someone tell you things when you can experience them yourself. In fact, you could live a better, more rewarding, rich, fulfilling life if you choose to forego the ideas of others and live your own life. The author goes on to compare and contrast the previous quote to, Today, time lacks solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences. It rushes off. There is nothing to provide time with any hold.

Time that rushes off is not habitable. How many of us today are just stuck in the rat race? How many of us today are stuck, trying to figure out what is the point? Why are you doing what you're doing for a handful of dimes? Why is there no social mobility? Social mobility seems to be a narrow pathway, a one-lane bridge for a small group of people that can pay the toll.

Contemporary compulsion to produce. It robs all of us of endurance. It robs time of endurance. Nothing lasts, especially when we focus on production. Planned obsolescence. Think about that as a business model. Let's build a lot of things that suck. Let's build this thing that looks nice but it'll break down.

Well, maybe it won't break down, but we can get rid of it and put it in a landfill. Let's make it smaller so people have to buy more of them. The whole process is failing us. I'm not saying there's not things worth saving. There clearly are. And I don't think we're too far off from having a system that is more sustainable. But we need to get away from the idea of production.

production is the cancer of sustainability production as a business model is a giant problem I'm not saying you shouldn't produce but you shouldn't have compulsory production and production should not be the holy grail of profit I think that is the weak point in the chrysalis that people should be

trying to break through. I don't think we need mass production. Maybe this is why, maybe other people are seeing this, and this is why they're saying there's going to be all these useless eaters and people not deserving to live is because people are not past the point of being anything more than cogs and mass producers. I find that so condescending. when I hear people get up and give speeches about useless eaters.

I think anyone who calls someone a useless eater is in fact themselves a useless eater. They're a parasite. Anyways, that's what I got for today, ladies and gentlemen. I want you to think about time, compulsory production, the loss of rituals, and the reintegration of symbols. What do you do in your life that is worthy of being, called a ritual. What symbols do you have in your life that you can share with other people, that you and another person can recognize? What symbols do you have? What rituals do you do?

Think about them. What have you done in the past? What kind of shared sacred time do you have with the people you love? It's an interesting concept. That's what we got for today, ladies gentlemen, I love you. Aloha.