Why it Matters Deeply that Jeff Bezos is Preparing to Leave the Planet in an Aspirational Replica of His Own Dick
ON PATRIARCHY, CAPITALISM, AND ECOLOGY
Note: I’m going to speak bluntly in this article.
One of the great triumphs of Patriarchy, White Supremacy, and perhaps all systems of domination is their ability to invisibilize themselves in plain view. Because symbols always carry talismanic energy, always stand for something deeper than themselves, I find it powerfully revealing to see that the two richest white men on earth are not only both trying to leave the planet, but that one of them, Monsieur Bezos, is planning to do so in an aspirational replica of his own dick.
There is perhaps no more transparent symbol of male domination than the fully erect phallus. The mythology of modernity, which is hellbent on achieving its own cataclysmic ends, is the illusion that man could dominate Nature; could dominate and subdue the mysterious feminine and generative energies of Life. The increasingly obvious endgame of this thoughtform is suicidal, because its achievement is in fact a collapse of the life support systems on planet Earth. I find it therefore fascinating and profoundly disturbing that two of the richest white men on earth, having ‘conquered’ the terrestrial realm, have now set their sights beyond it, and are attempting to climb off the life-giving surface into the celestial realms, riding the same machine that propelled them ‘upward’ here: the erect dominating phallus.
Both Bezos and Musk can be, among other attributes, characterized by their relentless and machine-like cruelty in pursuit of their objectives. An executive in Musk’s company, when requesting time off to attend the birth of his son, was told to, “Get his priorities straight.” As has been thoroughly documented in the media, in Bezos’ warehouses, employees are being turned into the actual parts of an assembly line, their every movement catalogued, repeated, critiqued, and optimized. (See today’s article in The New York Times: The Human Cost of Amazon’s Employment Machine). Amazon drivers have to defecate into plastic bags to complete their delivery routes in a timely fashion. Both men have engineered tremendous organizations-as-machines, and while both of their organizations are inarguably effective–at what cost?
The entire manner whereby a modern corporation functions is extractive. What most companies do is find a way to enclose some aspect of the commons–be it a material resource, such as of the mineral or biotic realm, be it cultural or creative, such as a creative expression, music, or art, or be it ideational, such as knowledge, or process know-how. Property law is the enclosure and privatization of land and the mineral and biotic realms beneath and attendant thereto. Modern intellectual property law is a corresponding system of enclosure for ideas. What a corporation generally does is enclose some facet of the collective commons, leverage legal mechanisms of enclosure to fortify its claim, and then exploit humanity’s needs for what was enclosed. The bottom line of a corporation is, furthermore, an extraction. It is the surplus that the company can take, can extract, beyond the costs required to make it operational. Shareholder capitalism requires that the extraction mechanism become increasingly ruthless, so that it can capture more and more surplus. Mssrs. Bezos and Musk, and their lieutenants, are both ruthlessly effective in utilizing the existing commercial and legal levers to optimize their organization-machines, comprised of humans, robots, and AI, in service of this objective.
While this enriches shareholders in their corporations, and provides the products and services of the company (widgets delivered after one-click) to happy customers it generates increasingly grave and predictable externalized costs. It is a tremendous failure of moral imagination, and a perilous dissociation from reality, to believe that Amazon is the most valuable Amazon. The namesake of Bezos’ company, the real Amazon, is a bio-ecology of inestimable value to life on planet earth, which will always be intrinsically more valuable than any corporation. If we had an accurate reality-based economic accounting system it would also be demonstrated to be vastly more economically valuable than Bezos’ company. The fact that humanity doesn’t realize this explains our startling failure to recognize and interrupt the collective suicide narrative modernity is enacting.
When I was thirty two years old I attended a teepee ceremony in the Native American church in Sonoma County California. Inside of the teepee there were two factions, as it were, who were having trouble getting along, and a group of people who had come seeking solace after a suicide. It could have been a beautiful ceremony except for the conflict that brewed within. Unfortunately, and perhaps necessarily, this conflict also manifested without, and sometime after dark the winds around the teepee achieved gale force velocity. In the center of the teepee, for those of you who haven’t had the privilege of sitting in one, is a sacred fire that is tended throughout the night by a fire-tender. The smoke from this fire ascends vertically, and exits through an opening in the roof of the teepee that exists for this purpose. A teepee is also staked around the edges, and the conical canvas that encloses it is anchored to the base of these poles a couple of inches above the ground. As the conflict within the teepee intensified, the storm intensified, and at a certain point smoke stopped leaving through the opening in the roof, and instead began to swirl inside the teepee. The fireman continued to add logs to the fire, which continued to burn, creating light and heat and smoke, which continued to accumulate, and which, because it couldn’t exit through the roof, was forced back downward and began to leak out the sides. Small and larger particulate matter, and burning embers, in the smoke, began to swirl around the inside of the teepee, hitting our bodies, burning holes in our clothing, and our skin, and getting in our eyes. Still the fireman kept adding logs. At a certain point, it became difficult to breathe. The storm howled around us, outside, the fireman, simply doing his job, kept adding logs. Because there was no harmony in the teepee, no unity of consciousness, no agreement, no one was able to interrupt this business-as-usual process: not Canada, not France, not the United States. No one in the G7. No one counseled the fireman to stop adding logs, and he, who was just doing his job, business as usual, continued.
Let me make the analogy plain: that teepee is the earth’s biosphere. There is no chimney. The fire is the burning of carbon. The multiple factions are the nations of the earth. Corporations are the fireman.
That night? The sun never rose. At some point the day dawned, bleak, raining grey, as the darkness gradually withdrew. The ceremony hobbled to a conclusion. I stumbled out of the teepee, my eyes filled with glass. Every time the lids closed it was like raking glass shards across my eyeballs. I could not see. My shirt looked moth-eaten by embers.
Is it possible that the richest white men on earth realize, quite plainly, that we are burning the house down around us, and have in fact decided to burn more logs so that they can build a ship to leave the teepee? How nice it would have been, in the middle of the storm that we caused through our arrogance, our masculine bravado, our rape of the earth, to have gone elsewhere.
How psychologically rich that Mr. Bezos would like to climb into his own dick and exit the firestorm in the teepee that he has been adding so many logs to. How convenient. Jeff- perhaps if it was your heart rather than your dick telling your mind what to do, we’d live in a different world.
Natureza Gabriel Kram is Convener of the Restorative Practices Alliance: an ancestral neuro-technology cooperative and culture repair engine. If you’d like to explore living in a world where your heart tells your mind what to do, check out his new book: Restorative Practices of Wellbeing.
