Value Beyond Materialism

In this speech at the Bioneers conference in 2012, Dr. Gabor Mate defines materialism as “a system of belief or behavior which considers material things, and particularly the control and possession of material things as more important than human values such as connection, love, or spiritual values such as recognizing the unity of everything.”

Dr. Mate presents “a broad perspective that enlightens and empowers people to promote their own healing and that of those around them.”

This view points toward a more “holistic” perspective, which is sometimes associated with hostility toward establishment ideas and figures. What I want to lift up here is not the notion that experts are “wrong” or “corrupted”, but that there are broader unintended consequences to the frames of objectivity that we habitually inhabit. Facts alone do not constitute liberation. Even though an objective stance is merely a tool, it is entrenched as a cultural practice such it resonates within the collective body as a worldview, and part of each and every one of us comes to view our own lives as defined by disciplines which detach themselves from human experience as a practice. Information from experts, however important and useful, is still subject to the deeply woven negativities of a materialist culture.

“Legal tender curbs on the value of human,” Terry Ajayi informs his viewers, evoking another negative facet of extreme materialism.

Terry is a “Ulogger” and self-styled “legitimate illiterate” in the Phillipines who shares his unpolished revelations to promote his somewhat mysterious startup ventures. Because they both examine the spiritual dimensions of knowledge using very different language and style, I thought it would be interesting to attempt to weave Terry’s perspective with Dr. Mate’s. My intention is not to make a philosophical argument, but rather to play with ideas, map out territory rich with potential, and engage with the living world in doing so.

Love is a strong currency on a small scale, as between a mother and child. On the society level, we still believe that love makes us weak. It is only useful for domination and mastery on the psychological level (think of a product that is “made with love”, or the commodification of spirituality).

No amount of money or knowledge can directly communicate things such as love or compassion. Our culture simply does not allow for these things to be scaled, at least not in a way that translates directly. We say “love is the answer” as if it was something you can download from the internet. It’s within us, of course, but we have never known a system effectively designed to draw it out. We only manage to do so through our relationships and innate passions, and the potential benefits to all of creation are never realized. If our highest values are to flow beyond those we touch directly, we must develop systems of expression beyond knowledge, control, and material value and reach entirely beyond a culture defined by religious dogma on one hand, and indifference to the cosmic order on the other.

The notions of separability and objectivity seem to empower us to claim that “belief has nothing to do with it”. The ability to engineer convinces us that we have overcome the irrational nature of the universe and our selves. However, these are themselves irrational beliefs. Embedded in these beliefs is a desire to completely master, or else violently reject what we don’t understand. Structures and institutions of knowledge are decidedly cultural and not synonymous with facts and truth – their role is to create a context facilitating the discovery and communication of such things in our lived experience. Culture, values, and environment can’t be artificially separated from the knowledge and tools we use to solve problems. Information is not neutral. Social values drive the construction of knowledge itself. If we value information and instrumentality for its own sake, what we are really lifting up is the implicit values and intentions put into the construction of these things, which unavoidably includes the legacy of a culture of violence and disconnection.

Source: Decolonial Futures

Terry explains how the logic of domination and control is built into “knowledge” itself:

“The world is so painted and has become unreal… knowledge is kept complex and monopolized by few. Many things are in reality simple but are made complex on purpose so that knowledge becomes this sought after thing. Humans lose value in the process, while superficial inanimate things garner more value than fellow humans. “

Our supposedly rational assumptions keep us imprisoned:

“Have you gone to the atm, with confidence, and instead of $100 typed in $1,000,000, for the sake of exhausting a humanly possible act? Many times the best answer is in the first simplest obviousest solution.”(sic)

This isn’t nonsense. It points to the very practical matter of claiming your inherent worth by going directly to the source and asking for what you need before proceeding to more more complex solutions.

When it comes to public health, expert opinion and research is no doubt invaluable, but, the perils of the current “media apocalypse” or “infodemic” notwithstanding (and, I would also argue, because of it), I think it is overemphasized. When the public is conditioned to see health through the eyes of experts (or anyone who speaks with authority), we tend to ignore that the “first simplest obviousest solution” is to improve our quality of life, which is accomplished by nothing more complicated than caring for ourselves and each other. There would be little need for complex knowledge if we could only get that part right. Gabor Mate’s work informs us that public health is largely an issue of social justice, poverty is an issue of human development, and addiction is not a drug problem but a stress problem and coping mechanism for what is lacking in relationships:

“The culture itself, quite apart from the physical toxins that we spew into the the environment, in the way in which we’re altering the very air that we breathe and the very sun that shines on us, gradually [is] affected also by the toxicity of human relationships, or the lack of human relationships that this kind of society that emphasizes material values teaches us to pursue.”

A materialist culture only sees power at the points where physical or political intervention can be exerted. The burden is placed on individuals to adapt and get ahead in a toxic environment, ignoring the crucial role that environment plays in the development of circumstances. This orientation further contributes to the context in which alienation, willful ignorance, unprocessed grief, physical contamination, and vulnerability to disease develop.

Dr. Mate contends that “Medicine is not simply a science. It’s much more than that. It’s also an ideology. It’s a way of looking at human beings. When we look at human beings as individuals, without understanding the importance of the social relationships and the emotional, psychological relationships with others, that’s actually a manifestation of the individualistic perspective of the entrepreneur, who says that only I matter and what I gain or what I control matters, and we’re all in competition with one another. So you see that economic ideological perspective also showing up in its own particular way in the practice of medicine.”

An overlooked answer to improving many of these toxic conditions is to actively develop a more holistic, humanistic, and even sacred cultural context. This starts at the intra- and interpersonal level. Our existing culture continues to inflict harm because it is undergirded by unbroken patterns of violence, alienation, and disconnection perpetuated within us, by us, and against us. Civilization cannot claim credit for healthy relationships and social “progress”, when these only exist in opposition to the dominant patterns. We do not even know what a culture defined by care and healthy relationships looks like. The denial that anything is missing or needs to change is itself part of the structure.

The age of the internet promises to connect us more in certain ways, but also serves to further destroy meaningful connection that does exist by reducing our interdependence with the immediate environment. The value of humans as sources of information has been greatly diminished in recent years. Indeed this type of exchange was a basis for relationship – that is, through an inquiry, more was exchanged than facts alone because it required engaging with the complexities of a human interaction – greeting, asking, negotiating, role playing, reciprocity, gratitude, and unexpected opening of further channels for connection between the two individuals, with other parties, or with the world as a whole.

Now that most of us can simply pull out our phone and look something up, accessing this type of knowledge has become very convenient. At the same time, potentially rich human interactions have become obsolete, reduced to an instantaneous transaction with a device. It is no longer as valuable to have a brain full of facts and explanations. Further, the information itself has become more one-dimensional, redundant, algorithmized.

Essentially, this social function has been automated. While running for president, Andrew Yang was ridiculed for claiming that increased automation will lead to massive job loss. This dismissal is based on one-dimensional analysis that fails to examine the accelerated restructuring of social roles already in progress and the overwhelming, even disturbing trajectories of AI technology.

Employment is ultimately a social bond and the distinction between work, community, and education is artificial. Loss in relationship, belonging, and perceived worth as humans constitutes a type of unemployment. If we reflect on the true significance of unemployment numbers, we are actually looking to these numbers as an indicator of the stability of relationships within the collective body. It is an extremely reductive measurement, however. If a person lacks the opportunity to form meaningful bonds with others, to find a safe and affordable environment to live in, or to find adequate meaning to go on living, then it is of little consequence whether that person is technically “employed”.

Perhaps the supposed consequences of automation have not yet played out in our economy (though I suspect even that is a half-truth designed to suppress debate about real issues, but one does not need to be an “insider” to see these patterns. It is quite evident that the logic of the market aims to remove costly humans from the equation wherever possible, assigning real value only to the minority with the technical mastery to operate the machines that extract our knowledge and value in order to replace us. For the past two decades, the search-engine information economy has been a prototype for that being played out in our personal lives.

Naturally, the loss of freedom and autonomy in supposedly democratic nations comes not by force but by convenience. The myths propagated by the ultra-wealthy, advertising, and our own minds tells us that our empowerment as consumers (maximum material benefit to those with funds and access) allows us access to magical worlds we can’t afford to miss out on, so it is well worth the creeping losses of collective agency. The consumer model negates our role as agents in cosmic creation, limiting our imagination to what can be accomplished through market demand and centralized management. Materialism has rationalized and sublimated the authentic expression of ourselves into irrelevance.

Authentic imagination is less susceptible to commodification than knowledge and labor. Obviously a great deal of imagination goes in to popular entertainment, but it has been stripped of its living spark of intention once it arrives to us in a consumable format, because the market cannot consume that which reaches beyond the paradigm of consumption.

As an alternative to consumerism, Terry seeks to remove “all barriers to entry everything good, so that everything good becomes for every/anyone”. Through imagination, we can conceive of that which is unknowable through conventional construction of knowledge: “Are you mining of the content the is innate to you? Or is 95% of your brain Google?”

This gets at the question of source – that is, where information come from? From what is value ultimately derived? One thoughtful response might be, “Well, it’s not really just one thing; it takes many coordinated processes coming together to produce something of value or relevance.” So it could be said that that synthesis itself is the source of value.

Automation is not possible without redundancy. What may once have been a remarkable and hard-earned discovery is now a formula. If we wish to draw from our immutable worth as living beings, we must honor and develop those faculties which resist being “pummeled into redundancy”. This includes our capacity for novel synthesis and holism, and drawing from the edges of our experience, pushing into discomfort to invite interactions pregnant with meaning and mystery. In doing so, we invite ourselves to proactively create culture that honors the wholeness of humans, nature and all that is sacred in our lives. According to Terry, “It is possible to use every human activity to consciously evolve… In a world with full-blown humans, money is the smaller things.”