As the Titanic sinks, the orchestra plays. Glaciers are melting, ocean levels are rising, species are disappearing, but reality TV (which is the exact opposite of real reality) is breaking viewership records. Bees disappear, natural resources are depleted, the soil becomes dry – but Ronaldo buys a racing car (and we envy him…), we renew our wardrobe every six months and fast food multiply.
One day, the press is talking about global warming in apocalyptic terms; the next day it announced that Boeing and Airbus would sell twenty thousand more planes in the coming years. The tone is cheerful: growth is good, coco!
No, Coco, it’s not good.
Are we unable to see the connection between a series of bad news stories and a series detailing their causes? Are we collectively stupid?
That. It is undeniable, we are. But why?
“We other civilizations now know that we are mortal,” wrote Paul Valéry and went on to mention “Elam, Nineveh, Babylon…” He could have added Akkad to the list. We must begin to understand the problem with the Acadians. After a strong demographic growth, more than four thousand years ago, the Acadians encountered the physiological limits of wheat cultivation. The earth, exhausted, dries up. The empire is gone. Civilization died out like a population of bacteria in a test tube: the bacteria ate all the food, multiplied and then died when there was nothing left to eat. Same thing for a mite Typhlodromus pyri. The mite doesn’t ask questions: if it can eat, it does. Future? He doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t know what it is. He has no brain.
But what does that have to do with us having a brain? Are we still wiser than the Acadians?… At least more than mites?
No, actually.
Why? Here we must take an interest in this deadly weapon which is the human brain. It is a time bomb or a fragment bomb. This ‘miracle’ is unfortunately built on a perverse principle. The cortex, the seat of inventiveness, imagination, everything that makes us human and not raccoon, is the result of recent evolution. But it must coexist with what is most primal in us: the striatum (or ‘striated body’). We have the same striatum as mice or lemurs, and it has only five motivations or goals: eat, reproduce, gain power, gather information (to better achieve the first three goals), and do it all with minimal effort.
And here is man’s wiring error, the fundamental problem: his superior cortex serves his very primitive striatum. Whatever he can invent, it is the striatum that will use it.
(I remember writing in these columns a few years ago, Note about a Bahraini citizen who, as soon as he got his first smartphone, divorced his wife via SMS. In other words, the cortex of thousands of scientists around the world invented this extraordinary object that is a smartphone; the Bahraini striatum immediately used it to get rid of the buttocks and thus start looking for a new sexual partner…)
We are therefore slaves of the striatum. He has His power over all our actions. How? Dopamine. In this respect, we are no different from fish: when it finds prey and feeds on it, its striatum releases dopamine, the ‘happiness molecule’, which strengthens the neural control circuits that successfully completed the operation. It’s a learning experience, actually – a pleasant learning experience. Appearing on earth several hundred million years after the lamprey, we function no differently. We can even directly induce the emission of the happiness molecule: by consuming cocaine. (I don’t recommend it.)
Obsessed with the ‘striped body’? Of course. It could not be otherwise: natural selection preserved only individuals with this way of functioning of the striatum, which gave them these orders: a) eat as much as possible b) mate as much as possible c) be more important than others d) accumulate as much information as possible about the world – in order to better dominate him.
Here we find the three forms of libido that Saint Augustine distinguished fifteen centuries ago: libido scindi (desire for knowledge, curiosity), libido sentienti (sensual, carnal desire) i dominant libido (will to power); and we remember that Aristotle said, more than two thousand years ago, that the desire to learn, like desire in general, is natural. Modern science has confirmed these intuitions. But unlike Aristotle, this apostle of moderation and the golden mean, our striatum adds (and it’s drama!): “And you do this more than others, because otherwise your genes will be drowned by those of your competitors. Therefore, first of all, do not limit yourself, do not limit yourself for anything in the world.
Yes, that is the crux of the problem, that is what explains the impasse in which the human species finds itself. We master more and more technologies to meet our needs, but we are not able to moderate the application of these technologies. ‘Always more!’, in short – and that imposes the striatum on us.
Only in the animal kingdom do we have bark, and what is it for? Incredibly inventive, he envisioned the Industrial Revolution, intensive agriculture, biotechnology (which continues to ‘improve’ pigs, cattle and chickens – the first featherless chicken appeared in 2002), Artificial Intelligence; and these cortical formations combine their efforts to satisfy the bulimia of the striatum – in vain, moreover: it is insatiable: the deep structures of our brain do not have a STOP function.
There is no STOP function: it is a human tragedy, it is what is destroying the planet.
‘Masters and possessors of nature’, as Descartes wished, we consume 300 billion kilograms of meat every year and that figure is still growing. And the worst thing is that we don’t even need this overabundance: we produce too much, we consume too much, we are overweight. More people on Earth die from overeating than from malnutrition.
But there is something else. Among the goals of the striatum is power ( dominant libido), resulting in an ‘advanced’ society in search of a higher social status. During my studies in economics, I became particularly interested in Thorstein Veblen. Veblen studied consumer motivation in the United States more than a century ago in his classic A theory of the leisure class (1899). An individual or family from the bourgeoisie (which he called the leisure class) protected from want, their main motivation becomes the desire to imitate and, if possible, surpass their neighbor or neighboring family. Consumption becomes ‘ostentatious’ (we find this idea in Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Mason and others) and leads to waste. These are well-known topics, but new discoveries take on a scientific dimension since their physiological basis has been discovered.
In 2002, researchers from the University of Ulm showed that the mere sight of sports cars excites the striatum of men. The desire for social status is manifested in the acquisition of artificial adornments, such as beautiful Italian shoes, racing cars, the latest iPhone, dining in the best restaurants. A tan acquired in far latitudes, in the heart of winter, is not bad either: five thousand tons of sunscreen every year soaks up the coral and slowly destroys it. Our social ambition comes at a price.
Advertising discourse has relied on this mechanism since its invention. Does your neighbor own this car? You can do better. In the 1920s, Charles Kettering, one of the heads of General Motors, stated: “The key to economic prosperity is the creation of organized discontent (sic).” It is, therefore, about creating needs – “You have to have it, your neighbor has it!” – and about their satisfaction.
In short, all this is a bit discouraging. What can we do?
We cannot amputate the striatum of every human being; but the first thing to do is to understand the problem. We are slaves to our striatum. Let’s try to shake off its yoke. How? Directing our desires towards intangible goods, which do not harm us or our environment: art, poetry, reading, singing and playing music, sports, etc. And especially children must be educated in this way.
Music, singing, poetry and introductory art classes are sometimes seen as a luxury at school, reserved for various ‘Missions’ or elite private schools. Quite the opposite: they are a vital need: escaping the dictatorship of the striatum is the only chance to save the planet and survive the human species. Just that!
A message addressed to those responsible for national education…