Excerpt from The Myth of Human Supremacy

When Others Look At Us (p. 306)

From chapter "Self-Awareness"

When we look in the mirror, what do we see?

We see God’s image on Earth or the pinnacle of evolution. We see the greatest gift the universe has ever given itself. We see the bringers of the light of consciousness to the universe. We see the universe knowing itself.

We see those whose responsibility it is to bring this light of consciousness everywhere. When we look at our technics, we see only our own brilliance.

When others look at us, however, they see something completely different. They see those who have become Death, destroyer of worlds. They see those who invent machines to outsource Death, and to outsource and facilitate the destruction of worlds. They see those who lack the self-awareness to perceive, much less comprehend, that they have become Death, destroyer of worlds. They see those who lack the perceptiveness or honesty to acknowledge that they are murdering—sorry, reorganizing—the planet. They see those who are so entranced by the technics that control them that they believe there is “no evidence” these technics are inherently destructive, and that there are no “costs” associated with these technics.

They see beings who care more about money than life.

They see beings who care more about power than life.

They see beings whose imagination is so impoverished that they cannot imagine living without industrially-generated electricity.

And they see beings whose empathy is so impoverished that they can imagine living without salmon, passenger pigeons, whales, snub-nosed sea snakes, ploughshares tortoises, and on and on.

They see those who when they even acknowledge the Death they cause—in their agriculture, in their economics, in their science, in their religions and philosophies, in the extinctions they cause—they see only how this Death will affect them and the technics they serve.

When others look at us, they see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that they don’t even acknowledge—can no longer even conceptualize—that anyone else actually subjectively exists. It is impossible to be less empathetic than that. They see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that they routinely torture those they perceive as below them on the insane Great Chain of Being, that hierarchy they had the lack of empathy and creativity to come up with in the first place. They see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that the males of the species now routinely rape the females of the species. They see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that they attempt to destroy the empathy of those unfortunate enough to encounter them. They see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that they have developed an economics, a politics, a science, an epistemology—an entire worldview—based on projecting this lack of empathy onto the real world, a worldview that makes a virtue and a fetish of this lack of empathy, that attempts to naturalize this lack of empathy, that attempts to pretend empathy doesn’t exist in the real world. They see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that they use the empathy of others—empathy they are all the while pretending does not exist—to kill these others. Recall the whalers who would intentionally wound, but not kill one whale, then kill all others who came to help. Recall those who would do the same to the Carolina parakeets. They drove Carolina parakeets extinct. They are driving the world extinct.