Our ways of thinking, emotions, and behavior patterns are shaped by the world we built for ourselves. It is not indifferent, therefore, that ours is an extractive one, including when it comes to food.
| This post is part of a reading series on Stellar, by James Arbib and Tony Seba. To quickly access all chapters, please click here. Disclaimer: This chapter summary is personal work and an invitation to read the book itself for a detailed view of all the authors’ ideas. |
Following the first domestication of plants and animals at the dawn of the Neolithic Revolution, humans went from being part of nature to wanting to control it. As successive generations became accustomed to seeing themselves as separated from nature, the drive for efficiency led to the development of mechanistic and reductionist models of thought. We came to see the world as inherently linear, reductive, and siloed.
“The holistic approach of the hunter-gatherer, which sought to understand the diversity, complexity, and connections between things, was no longer an advantage. There was little benefit to understanding complexity or to thinking about the cascade of consequences triggered by any particular action. . . . Doing so would have compromised the ability to compete with others. Simple (linear) systems thinking was an advantage over complex systems thinking.” Extraction didn’t just lead to separation from nature, but also from our fellow humans, as we became competitors with one another. This sense of separation laid the foundation for our social models of thought to this day, which helps understand how all forms of oppression, including slavery, were eventually justified.
“A sense of identity emerged, reflected in individual’s specific roles within extraction that defined their utility, and their status and place in society. . . . We built identities based on external factors such as roles or positions in society, possessions or wealth, and people we knew – attributes that came to define success.” Reversely, given the precarious nature of one’s possessions and status in a world driven by greed and selfishness, the fear of losing what defined one’s identity became existential. It pushed us out of the present, forcing us to plan and accumulate beyond our needs to protect ourselves as much as possible from becoming outcasts.