When Jeff Bezos said, “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it,” he was talking about turning human and physical resources into money and then converting that into different resources to shoot them into space [1]. What is truly remarkable about this is that in order to exploit the Earth’s natural resources all he brings to the table is money which, on its own, is a singularly useless thing with no intrinsic value or practical use for anything.
Let’s talk about resources and us, human kind, in particular. Firstly, like all of nature, we are a natural resource, and we’re a phenomenal natural resource, like nothing else in nature. We combine both physical resources, strength, dexterity and endurance, giving a remarkable return for a little food and rest, capable of producing far more than we each need in order to live. If we work the land we are each capable of producing enough food for many, many others, or if we make things, we are able to turn out enough to supply others as well as ourselves for our mutual benefit through a system of exchange and barter or even giving away the excess above our own needs. Yes, we’re capable of that kind of degree of abundance and working with the abundance of nature we’ve been able to work cooperatively to produce the entirety of human civilisation, from agricultural settlements to vast cities and the incredible infrastructure of modern life. Which leads neatly to our other remarkable resources, sentience (the ability to be self aware), thinking and communication, which are at the very pinnacle of nature and evolution as the seemingly miraculous engines of progress and human development.
They don’t teach this in schools, though they really should and it would be fair to ask, ‘Why not?’, human workers are the naturally gifted engines that drive the human world, our physical and mental capabilities are unique in nature, endlessly creative, sociable, adaptive, capable of thinking and learning, of retaining instructions and ideas and rethinking and adapting them according to circumstances.
Looking back to Jeff Bezos, what did he mean by Amazon winnings? How did they come about, who produced them and why were they all siphoned into his account in such fantastic amounts he doesn’t know what to do with them other than convert them into space ships? Just by the by, the resources that he plans to shoot into space are the Earths resources, resources that will no longer be available to the Earth or us once he’s shot them into space. You could be forgiven at this point for thinking he’s really not the brightest collection of cells in the human gene pool.
What Jeff Bezos and his kind do not seem to grasp is that we’re all on this journey of life together and that the thing that has driven human progress and development is cooperation, although we’ve been less than cooperative with the Earth, exploiting it at enormous cost to the planet and other forms of life. Inevitably the Earth is paying the price for human progress, we don’t seem to have grasped yet that the Earth is a closed system and therefore finite and we’ve reached a point where it might be time to pay attention and do something about it.
Whether people think that humans are driving climate change or not, living in cooperation and in harmony with the Earth is simple common sense. This is our home and, surprise, looking after our homes is something we all have to do, except when it comes to the home we call Earth. That’s just dumb and we’re smarter than that.
There’s a great deal that isn’t taught nearly enough, among them, self awareness, self respect, respect for our skills and abilities as human beings, respect for the planet we live on and respect for all life on this little blue speck in the universe which has given us life. Nor are we taught to protect ourselves or the planet against exploitation as Jeff Bezos so amply demonstrates.
We can do better.
Keith Lindsay-Cameron aka KOG. 06 October 2020.
Conspiracy of Kindness 