A deadly addiction...

In this episode, we explore an addiction so infectious that it now affects everyone in the world, and so deadly that it may yet kill us all…

It starts out as just a delusion, but it soon becomes as addictive and all-consuming as the most deadly of narcotic drugs.

As with many addictions, it provides a short-term ‘hit’ that gives a temporary illusion of satisfying the need, followed by a ‘crash’ that creates an ever-more intense desire to satisfy the need. The addict’s time-horizon narrows, commonly to an inability to see beyond the ‘current quarter’ - three months - but often less than that.

In this case, the addiction creates an illusion of ‘success’ in the short-term, but only does so by offloading all of the consequences of that ‘success’ onto others either elsewhere and/or elsewhen, or onto the broader milieu as a whole.

Like many addictions, addicts increasingly depend on stealing from others in order to support their addiction.

The addiction commonly causes adults to regress to the developmental level of a two-year old. This is characterised by symptoms such as an obsession with ‘glittery objects’, demands for the latest ‘shiny new toy’; increasingly-extreme self-centredness; an inability to share, or even to understand the need for sharing in a social context; an active rejection of any form of self-responsibility; and a relentless demand that, relative to the addict, others exist solely to serve them.

Somewhat like cocaine, the addiction creates a delusion of superiority, energy and invincibility in the addict, whilst actually destroying the context upon which the addict ultimately depends. In relentless pursuit of the addiction, the addict will destroy their relationships with others; the social, economic and other mechanisms on which they and others depend; and ultimately the viability and sustainability of the society as a whole. The addict will also strive to drag others into the same addiction.

Wherever the addiction takes over an entire culture - or maybe even actively promoted within that culture - the result is often a paediarchy, ‘rule by, for and on behalf of the most childish’. In that type of context, the relationships across the context as a whole will often shift to a ‘winner steals all’, as the nature of the societal-scale addiction means that resources tend to gravitate to wherever they are least needed. We also see self-centredness and narcissism actively rewarded, and social-responsibility actively penalised or even punished, creating increasingly severe disincentives against anyone taking any responsibility at all, especially for the longer term.

What is this addiction? Short-answer: a delusion of possession.

And it’s an addiction that, unless we can find a way to stop its impacts and its spread, is well on-track to kill us all.

Not A Good Idea…

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Yes, true, it’s an addiction that’s been around for a long time. There’s some evidence that the first signs start to appear as far back as perhaps ten thousand years ago. There are sporadic outbreaks - particularly in the form of nation-scale paediarchy and pandering to extreme narcissists - even back into Biblical times. By the end of the Middle Ages, it was rampant throughout much of Europe. And by the time we get to the so-called Enlightenment stage, to quote the 18th century English jurist William Blackstone:

There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. And yet there are very few, that will give themselves the trouble to consider the origins and foundation of this right.

Everything else that we currently think of as ‘the economy’ then builds outward and upward from that ‘sole and despotic dominion’ of personal-possession: private-property, the money-economy, monetary-debt, loans, insurance, pensions, taxes and much, much more.

Which, again, is basically the two-year-old’s view of the world: everything is mine! mine! mine!, unless I don’t want it, in which case it’s Somebody Else’s Problem - unless that Somebody Else actually wants it, in which case it’s definitely mine and always was. So not just a purported ‘right’ of possession, but also a ‘right’ of anti-possession, the ‘right’ to not be responsible for waste, the unwanted, the supposed ‘anti-property’ of the world.

For example, look at the wreckage left behind on the literal former goldmine behind where I currently live. Everything was trashed: everything. Every tree cut down for pit-props; the soil blasted away with high-pressure water-jets to get at the quartz-bearing reefs beneath:

A hundred and fifty years later, the forest is still only in the early stages of recovery:

But yes, it gets worse than that. Back in the 1860s, extracting just a third of an ounce of gold per ton of quartz - literally, ten parts per million - was considered profitable. The mine-owners walked away with all of the profit; the miners who worked for them for a pittance were simply discarded if they become injured or ill; and the entire waste - literally, 99.999% of the quartz-rubble, along with the vast quantities of cyanide, mercury and worse that were used to extract the gold - magically become Everyone Else’s Problem that we’re still dealing with today. The mine-owners became very rich, whilst everyone else paid the real price for their purported wealth - all because of imaginary, inherently-indefensible ‘sole and despotic dominion’ over the things of the world.

And yet another strand in the same addiction: a really destructive delusion that ‘power is the ability to avoid work’ - a perceived ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to avoid any responsibility, but instead offload the work and the responsibility for that work onto others. It’s what drove slave-cultures, with vast amounts of work, effort and more actually expended on entrapping others to do the work being avoided, which makes the society as a whole inherently inefficient. It’s also what leads inevitably to slave-cultures of one kind or another: either chattel-slavery - treating others as ‘possessions’ - or wage-slavery, which is basically still chattel-slavery but where the slave-owner takes no responsibility at all for the slaves. These days the former is mostly gone, perhaps, but the latter is, if anything, more intensified. And wage-slaves increasingly discarded in favour of machines-as-slaves: it’s still a slave-culture, just reliant on machines rather than people - machines that demand prodigious and ever-increasing amounts of energy to operate.

Yet here’s the blunt, unavoidable fact: there is no way to make a possession-based socioeconomics sustainable. It can only seem to work via a related myth of continual-growth - a pyramid-game that drove and still drives colonialisation, countless wars, and systematic expropriation from others either in the present or elsewhen. But when a pyramid game runs out of room to grow (or even the ability to provide an illusion of ‘growth’), its only remaining option is to cannibalise itself into oblivion, from the base upwards. Another blunt fact is that it is not possible to have infinite growth on a finite planet: and we’ve known this fact for at least fifty years, since the first Limits to Growth study and the like. Yet for the most part, that fact has been studiously ignored for all of that time, in order to protect the addiction, and continue to hold the addiction’s myths and delusions above the ever-increasing warnings from Reality Department. Not A Good Idea…

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I’ve described what we might call as possessionism above as an addiction. In many ways, though, it might be more accurate to describe it more as an infectious disease, triggering severe mental and social illness, because it shares many of those characteristics too. Historically, it starts out as a social aberration, a developmental-failure, most likely in just one place in the world. It then becomes endemic in that region, infecting a tribe, a territory, a town, and then fading away for a while as more sane heads take over. Then, being infectious, contagious, easily spread like an addictive drug, it becomes not just endemic but a full-blown epidemic, again, again, again - until, in our times, it’s a seemingly-unstoppable pandemic, affecting everyone across the entire globe, either addicted themselves, or trapped into coping with the consequences. And whilst influenza or COVID-19 may kill ‘only’ one percent of its victims, and the Black Death killed more like thirty percent, this addiction is so lethal that it kills untold millions in every war, every societal-failure, and may yet kill us all. Possessionism is, literally, the most deadly disease that we know.

So what can we do about it? Answer: treat it like an infectious disease. Do everything that we can to eradicate it. We did it with smallpox: we can do that with this, too.

The catch is that we have to eradicate it completely: no exceptions. Again, like any lethal infectious disease, we cannot risk any recurrence: any outbreak could spread like wildfire, bringing us straight back to the knife-edge that we’re on right now.

Eradicate every form of possessionism, everywhere. No exceptions. Otherwise it will kill us all.

Given that right now we have a global society and global economics that’s largely built on the myths of that ‘sole and despotic dominion’ of possessionism, that’s not going to be a small change. More like the largest change in several thousand years, at fully global scale - and it’s likely we have at best only a handful of decades to do it. Yeah, that’s one heck of challenge…

It’s huge, yes - insanely huge. But not actually impossible: I’m sure of that now. Yet what do we need to change? From what to what? Where do we start? What can we do to make it work? I’ll show some practical suggestions - and, yes, straightforward small-changes that anyone can do - starting in the next episode here.