Time to Stop Pretending

Vinay Gupta - talking at the 2010 Dark Mountain gathering 'Uncivilisation'

I first came across this talk around the time it was given, and it had a profound effect on me. I have shared it many times over the years. I resonated strongly with every part of this message, especially as I, like Vinay, am half-Indian, and my father’s side of my family are Malayalee, originating from Kannur in Kerala.

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I want to start from a very simple premise:

To stop pretending about the future means stopping pretending about the present.

Let me crystallise that in a fairly abrupt way. I’m going to say something, and I want you to really think about it:

“The war has already begun, and you didn’t notice—because your side won.”

Right? The lifestyle you have right now is built on colonialism. It’s built on great armies of land-pirates that marched out into the corners of the world, stole everything worth having, and killed anybody who got in the way.

India—where half of my family is from—was an occupied country under British colonial rule until Gandhi stood your government down and asked you to leave. 1948. Second World War? You guys were land-pirates. Okay—is this beginning to sound real? Right?

Where are we right now? According to the World Health Organization, every single year about 60 million people die. That’s all races, all classes, all causes—that’s the total exit from human life each year. Roughly 20 million of those deaths—by my estimate—are deaths from poverty. It’s diarrhoeal disease, it’s malaria, it’s enormous HIV infection rates in Africa. You can go through the WHO stats and it comes down to this: about one-third of the people who die on this planet die of poverty every year. About twenty million. Okay?

Now let’s put this in context. When human beings are desperate—when they need something that they cannot have—they become aggressive. And there are two broad directions that aggression goes:

1. Aggression toward other human beings. Violence. Colonial impulse. Not restricted to the West—there have been colonial empires from every corner of the globe. South America had empires brutal beyond anything conceived of here. India had ancient empires. Whenever people get organised, they go and take stuff.

2. Aggression toward other species. You take land where trees grow, you need a house, you fell the trees, you build the house. The trees are dead and you’re alive.

So the question we’re really searching for is: what does it look like when we stop living by violence—toward other people or toward other species?

Does that seem like a sensible question? Okay. Good.

First thing: stop being violent. What does that mean? You have to identify what violence looks like.

In the background of our awareness sits this threat we call collapse—economic collapse, social collapse. We talk about guys like Dmitry Orlov. I’ve studied this. Let me crystallise what collapse means:

“Collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.”

That’s what you mean by “social collapse.” And where is the violence? Because the first step in stopping violence is identifying it.

Collapse is becoming part of that third of the human race that dies every year from poverty. When the Russians had their social and economic collapse, life expectancy dropped something like twenty years. They went from dying in their seventies to dying in their fifties—on average. There’s a neighbourhood in Glasgow—the Calton—where life expectancy is fifty-six, which is the same as the Congo. Where’s the violence? Do you see what I’m saying?

So what we’re searching for is a lifestyle free of violence toward other people and free of violence toward the planet. And the thing I want to impress upon you is that this war is current.

“You are protected from being in the third of the human race that will die of poverty by armies, by nuclear weapons, by trade treaties, by the World Health Organization, by the enormous spending power of governments built on slave labour.”

This is not somebody else’s future. This is the present of most humans. The collapse is not something that might happen one day—it’s already over most of the planet—and we exist on a militarised island of prosperity.

So: what is the exit from this condition? How do we get from here to where we want to be?

The answer has been demonstrated—in India—in a place called Kerala. Kerala is a sub-state; it’s a region inside India. Kerala is where half of my family comes from. About sixty million people—roughly the same population as the UK. Mostly farmers. They grow most of their own food. A lot of people work abroad and send money home. And here’s the remarkable thing: although by income—about one dollar a day—you’d expect short, brutal lives, they don’t have them. They have 95% literacy. Their birth and death rates are right in line with Europe. Their average life expectancy is 76 years. Their ecological footprint is about 0.7—which means they consume less than their theoretical “fair share” of the Earth’s resources—and yet they live about as long as we do.

“Kerala has broken through the sustainability barrier: long life and good health on an ecological footprint the whole world could have.”
If everybody lived like the people of Kerala, we’d be something like one-third under global biocapacity. That is what an answer looks like.

[Editors note: as time has gone on I have learned there are many things I could say about how that isn’t strictly true, but in the spirit of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I’m leaving this as it was spoken]

Now: the lifestyle we have in the rich countries—and I’m fortunate enough to live in one; I’m a British citizen—is going to become unsustainable. It’s already unsustainable. And not just environmentally—it’s economically unsustainable.

Right now your governments are borrowing vast sums of money from your children—money that will never be repaid. You heard about twelve trillion dollars magically appearing from nowhere in America to bail out the banks? That’s about the same amount that went into the Pentagon since the end of the Cold War. They spent twenty-something years of defence budget in a single year to bail out the banks. Does that give you a sense of how much money that was?

In the September 2008 stock market crash, something like $108,000 disappeared from the average wealth of the average American household. What’s going to happen very soon is that we are going to get abruptly poorer—and the reason we haven’t noticed that we already are abruptly poorer is that we are borrowing from the people we oppress and from unborn generations who, in all probability, will be no more able to pay their way than we are.

The global average standard of living is somewhere around that of Mexico. And as the enormous bubble of wealth created by colonialism wears out, there is no reason a child born in England should have a better expectation of a quality of life than a child born in Mexico—or India—or Africa. What makes us different? Why do we expect to live in luxury while the rest of the world starves?

It is one world. We have to build a common future in which we consume so little that the world can support us and not die; and we share and cooperate so effectively that human beings are freed from the impulse to hurt each other for more than their fair share. This is not impossible. It’s been demonstrated.

And now you are each individually responsible for identifying where the violence is in your life—right through the supply chains, right through the energy grids, right through your government—to figure out what it means to live as a responsible human being who takes no more than their fair share and oppresses no one by their very existence.

“This is the challenge of the 21st century. This is what it means to stop pretending.”

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I feel this is a profound challenge, and it’s clear there are no easy answers when it comes to de-growing industrial civilisation. This way of life is coming to an end, in the face of insurmountable pressure from the twin blades of Ecological Overshoot and Resource Depletion.

It is already teetering on the brink in the over-developed nations of the world, and that reality and fragility makes us afraid to push into degrowth thinking. It makes me afraid to push into degrowth. Yet, that is the task before us.

The original recording from UNCIVILISATION, The Dark Mountain Festival 2010: Vinay Gupta, "Time to stop pretending"