Dualism and Destruction

How dualist ideas were exploited for the capitalist cause

Hello readers,

Last week, we explored the dark origins of capitalism, an economic system that we’ve all taken for granted.

Just how have we come to assume that it’s the only game in town? Or to go a step deeper, how has this idea taken total precedence over our minds? As we saw, the idea deeply benefited a small group of elites while wreaking havoc, murder, and destruction on the rest.

Surely people wouldn’t just submit to such a system of economic organization. So how did capitalism win the narrative? What ideas did it recruit and how did it change people’s minds so it was taken up without being questioned?

These are all key questions and to answer them, we have to examine the way people used to think about the world and their own place in it- their theory of being (ontology) and how the capitalist system proposed a completely way of thinking to suit their ultimate ends.

To do so, they conveniently took advantage of a system of philosophy that was gaining precedence in the 16th century: dualism. Before we jump to the causes and effects of such a union, let’s examine the pre-capitalist people’s worldview and how they perceived the world.

The ‘mind over matter’ idea was shrewdly exploited

Anthropologists have long studied a school of thought that was predominant among forest dwellers, tribes, and farmers called ‘animism’. This way of thinking considered all things- plants, insects, animals, rivers, rocks, etc to be alive and animated with a spirit. For them, humans are just a part of an entire web of living beings, operating with each other in a harmonious way.

The tenets of this philosophy dictate that man’s relationship with all of nature must be reciprocal- because nature is not a thing but a living being itself. So we can only take back from nature what it can afford to give us. It also involved a sense of respect while engaging in such exchanges. For example, if a tribe hunted down an animal for lunch, they’d pray to it and offer their respects before proceeding.

Does this idea sound weird or dumb to you? If yes, I’d not blame you, because this way of thinking was a big obstacle to the capitalists and they did everything in their capacity to brand it as stupid and unscientific. The reason is pretty simple.

Capitalism, as we’ve explored, is based on the idea of perpetual growth and this growth can only come when we extract resources from ever-increasing swathes of the planet: mowing down forests for wood, drilling for oil, destroying ecosystems for mining, and so on.

Now, executing such actions at an eye-watering scale (for instance, cutting down millions of trees just so we can keep buying cool, new furniture) requires you to strip down the status of those forests and trees- from living, pulsating beings who deserve the right to life to a bare natural resource that exists purely to serve our needs (via ruthless plunder). You can start to see how such an inversion of thought would find itself at a collision course with the philosophy of animism.

Animism is the exact opposite of this idea- trees aren’t just lifeless resources, they are living beings. Forests have a life and aren’t meant to be destroyed in a non-reciprocal manner. We can only take as much as it is possible for the ecosystem to regenerate.

And herein lies another core difference between the two: for capitalism, the relationship is one of pure extraction. It is never reciprocal- we never have to give anything back, and only take as much as we can, with all the costs borne by external actors that never affect the capitalist’s balance sheet. It is this very idea of endlessly extracting from trees, oceans, animals, and insects that have tipped the ecological balance to such a scale that we’re heading right for an environmental car crash.

Sheer reduction

So if you want to carry on Project Extraction without running into animist objections, you have to totally defeat that idea at the narrative level- and invent a new way of thinking altogether. This is where the capitalists and the church (which was also an enemy of animism because it threatened the position of God by worshipping nature) took help from several Enlightenment thinkers to deal a severe blow to this idea.

The first of these was the much celebrated Francis Bacon, who is widely known for being one of the early proponents of scientific thinking and experimentation to arrive at truths. While he may have been a forward-thinking man, his worldview with regard to nature was deeply problematic and exactly the kind of thinking that the capitalists needed.

Bacon’s project was to uncover the laws of nature through constant hypothesis & experimentation. But he took this idea too far and spoke about torturing nature to reveal her secrets. His was a project of total conquest- and he branded nature as a ‘common harlot’ that invited control and domination.

Perfect. These were exactly the kind of thoughts the elites needed to degrade the status of nature. These were not living beings but mere resources.

The second blow came from the man who has become so famous we keep quoting him to sound cool. It’s the man behind “I think, therefore I am”. Yes, I’m talking about Rene Descartes, the French philosopher who famously created a distinction between mind and matter. This was the essence of dualism, and its implications were disastrous.

Descartes lent support to the capitalist cause (unwittingly, I guess) in an even bigger manner. According to his philosophy, humans are above all animals because they have a mind, whereas all animals are automatons- mere machines that cannot feel anything and operate in a pre-set, mechanical way. He went on to even conduct grotesque experiments like dissecting a living dog and explaining away the poor creature’s cries as just things it was doing out of its mechanistic dictates- and that it wasn’t really feeling any pain.

You can now see how useful his ideas were to the capitalists. By declaring all animal life as inferior and mechanical, he justified the domination of these ‘beasts’ for our purposes. Such arguments helped humans unleash their collective wrath on these beings- from which they still haven’t found any respite.

But an even bigger feat was his idea of ‘mind over matter’: that mind is supreme and takes precedence over the body. With this idea, a contrived distinction was created even among men- that some men with intellectual powers were superior and it was totally okay for them to dominate and lord over other inferior men and use their bodies for endless labor. People were reduced to bodies that could be traded over the market and put through endless work because they were purely productive tools.

This was a total win. Recruiting his ideas, the capitalists went on a rampage, reducing nature, animals, trees, and even humans to cogs in the growth machine whose sole purpose was to become objects for extraction, just so they could keep the capitalist wheels chugging.

The victory was so total that even today, we see that this kind of thinking has seeped into our language. They aren’t people, they’re ‘resources’. They aren’t living, breathing, animals, they’re ‘sources of meat’. Workers are often reduced to a “Rs 4 Lakh candidate”- not individuals with names and unique identities.

A lot of scientific studies have consistently been showing how wrong these ideas are and how animals and even trees are complex living beings with many characteristics that are similar to us. Many Earth scientists are even positing ideas suggesting that the entire planet is akin to a living system that uses mechanisms just like any other living being for regulation (Gaia Hypothesis).

But ideas are sticky, and it’s easy to be seduced by our consumerist comforts and turn a blind eye to the needs of all other living beings.

This, alas, is how dualist philosophy was weaponized for the capitalist cause and led to centuries of total apathy and destruction.

If we are to do better, it’s important for us to recognize nature and other forms of life as living beings that are equally (if not more) important, and reevaluate our own position in this web of life.

We can’t afford to consider ourselves so special. After all, we’re just a different kind of monkey that needs to do some serious thinking to avoid catastrophe.

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