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Intelligence is a mental capacity that allows us to understand our
environment. We label our perceptions with different attributes, and
through that process we build in our thinking the world around us. In
the process of labeling different qualities are attributed to what we
perceive through our senses. And to the extent that we avoid personal
judgments, we refer to the object in its essence.
One consequence of the patriarchal and capitalist society in which we live is that this objectivity that filters our understanding, objectifies what we want to dominate, it becomes an object. So does today with the land, water, air and knowledge: free commons and for free that are objectified and become commodities in the hands of predatory elites, for which there is no more personal judgment that their infinite greed.
So, for that process of commodification that makes inanimate merchandise everything it touches, life itself is nothing but an obstacle to their purposes. Life ceases to be one more attribute and becomes a barrier to be overcome. That is why indigenous people are loosing their livelihoods and are evicted from their lands, the native food crops disappear in favor of foreign crops for export and biofuel production, and forests, jungles and savannahs are natural architectural barriers that hamper progress of extractivism.
Human being, imbued with the mentality typical of the capitalist system, has become a mediocre God for himself: being able recreate nature, but without meet any universal human value. Our actions and inactions define our moral and our existence, and facing the progress of self-destruction and death the one and only choice we have is rebellion and passion.
One consequence of the patriarchal and capitalist society in which we live is that this objectivity that filters our understanding, objectifies what we want to dominate, it becomes an object. So does today with the land, water, air and knowledge: free commons and for free that are objectified and become commodities in the hands of predatory elites, for which there is no more personal judgment that their infinite greed.
So, for that process of commodification that makes inanimate merchandise everything it touches, life itself is nothing but an obstacle to their purposes. Life ceases to be one more attribute and becomes a barrier to be overcome. That is why indigenous people are loosing their livelihoods and are evicted from their lands, the native food crops disappear in favor of foreign crops for export and biofuel production, and forests, jungles and savannahs are natural architectural barriers that hamper progress of extractivism.
Human being, imbued with the mentality typical of the capitalist system, has become a mediocre God for himself: being able recreate nature, but without meet any universal human value. Our actions and inactions define our moral and our existence, and facing the progress of self-destruction and death the one and only choice we have is rebellion and passion.
"The goal is not to dominate nature but irrational social forces and institutions that threaten the survival of mankind"
Erich Fromm.
If in our mental categories we are not able to label life with those attributes that differentiate it from the inert, and we only appreciate their market value, the process of commodification will have won the game. Objectively, the death will have prevailed over life.
In these circumstances, the attribute that can best define life is its rebellion. The rebellion of men and women who love life and resist a globalized industrial agribusiness model. Who resist the privatization of the commons. Who resist, ultimately, to the commodification of life itself.
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