Trading Corpses for Rain: How Global Capital Became a Deity

Ancient Greeks and many other civilisations were obsessed with the concept of “sacrifice for the greater good”. They believed that if they let go of something precious, they can earn something in return. It was a naive concept made to one’s measure: you got to pick both what you wanted, as well as what you were willing to sacrifice for it. Yet this absurd concept of random sacrifice became very popular and was in fact central to countless human civilisations: from the Ancient Greeks to the Aztec empire thousands of miles away, the same exact custom emerged independently in multiple locations around the globe: if I kill some random strangers that I picked off the street and dedicate their corpses to you, God, will you please make it rain? 

If only such a fairy tale solution was effective.  The fact that these identical sacrificial customs emerged in civilisations completely isolated from each other, reveals how strong the cognitive drive was to seek fairy tale solutions to real world problems –  like trading corpses for a bit of rain.  Nothing has changed since then: the human mind would rather pretend to trade its crises than face them head on, mitigate or resolve them. Whether it means trading human lives to invoke rain or trading carbon credits to avoid solving the climate crisis, our thinking patterns of denial, avoidance, simplification and deception have barely changed over thousands of years.

Global capital, the modern incarnation of this primitive mindset, is the culprit.  Capitalism will always prefer to sacrifice humans than sacrifice its profit, and will opt for profitable technological fantasies over real solutions.  Humans would rather create fictional carbon trading markets which have been proven to be corrupt, than lower their carbon emissions. At least ancient civilisations had an awareness of the concept of sacrifice, of the fact that something must give, and they were actually willing to sacrifice something. This, despite their lower education and higher superstition, which in theory made them more susceptible to fairy tale solutions. 

It would seem that, if anything, we have regressed since then.  Today, business is not willing to sacrifice anything for the health of the planet.  Countless “sustainability” fraudsters on Linkedin advertise their magical consultancy skills which will help businesses simply “calculate away” the climate crisis. They are modern Shamans and voodoo doctors promising to make carbon go away.  They are hired by global professional services firms to sit behind a desk all day and make tons of money, finding ways to make carbon “disappear” by burying it under paperwork. It is the most useless and unethical bullshit job that ever existed.

There is little difference between a sustainability consultant and an Aztec shaman about to skin alive yet another human sacrificial victim.  While the ideological narrative of ancient human sacrifices involved the deities of rain, drought and so on, the deity we worship today is capitalism. We are at its mercy in the same way we were at the mercy of the god of rain: rather than get over it, we have resorted to appeasing it through carbon trading.  And although today we know what actually causes rain, what prevents it, and what we need to do to restore the climate, we still prefer the magical thinking of Aztec shamans and Greek paganists.

Perhaps the best-known sacrificial tale is that of Agamemnon: he has to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, so that the goddess Artemis allows his fleet to safely sail to Troy. Aside from inspiring drama, something which the Greeks invented and excelled in, these types of stories aimed to explore the concept of compromise, sacrifice, and the struggle of balancing personal benefit against the benefit of greater society. If Agamemnon thinks only of himself, he can save his daughter’s life but lose the war, possibly condemning an entire nation to subjugation. But if he decides to think of his country and his fleet first, he will sacrifice Iphigenia. He will be safeguarding the greater good, possibly the future of generations. It really is an impossible decision, because it is a lose-lose situation: either one of the two choices are extremely painful and detrimental. Yet he chooses to sacrifice his child. He chooses society, and future, instead of his family.

And this brings us to an example from real life, still in ancient Greece. Because in 399 BC Athens, the philosopher Socrates was waiting alone in a prison cell, faced with a difficult dilemma.  This time, it involved his own sacrifice:

A) He could denounce his critical views of the corrupt Athenian Democracy, stop being an enemy of the state, and apologise for what he believed in. If he did this, he would walk away from his cell a free man.

OR

B) He could insist on his views but would have to die by drinking hemlock poison in his cell. He would maintain his pride and dignity, but he would have to pay the ultimate price: his own life.

To Socrates, this was an easy choice: it was a choice between dying as himself, a truly free man holding on to their beliefs, or continuing to live as an impostor having denounced the very things he had been fighting for. In a sombre atmosphere, as his students visited his cell to plead with him not to accept the death sentence, he explained to them that one is only alive when they are themselves. If they denounce their own beliefs, they are effectively dead. He took the poison. Socrates was the equivalent of Just Stop Oil activists, thousands of years ago.

The fallout from Socrates’ death gave birth to a renaissance in philosophy, and the impact of his conscious choice, his personal sacrifice, would reverberate through the ages by nucleating an entire new philosophy movement which became Athens’ biggest export to this day: a philosophy that championed individualism, the human spirit, and questioned where our ethical responsibilities lie both as individuals and societies. Many of Socrates’ students became philosophers, leaving behind a legacy that left its mark on today’s activism. Socrates, and Iphigenia, are alive with us today, and they are facing the guillotine of global capitalism, once more.

Fast forward to the present time and enter the climate crisis. Where do our responsibilities lie? What are our choices? Is it all lose-lose or can there be a win? Can politicians actually put society first, and themselves second? And which are the values that we need to uphold, no matter what? The answers should come to us very easily if we have been paying attention.  Yet we continue to worship the god of global capital, absolving ourselves of our own agency, responsibility, and capacity to solve a problem which already has thousands of potential solutions.  This civilisation has completely given up. 

Gods are dangerous, mostly because they don’t really exist.  They neither reward nor punish, but they do provide a subterfuge, a distraction into inaction.  The more we defer and refer our problems to them, the more they remain unresolved.  This civilisation unconditionally surrendered to the God of capital, convincing itself that capitalism was inevitable.  The reality is we had other choices which we ignored, because they involved taking responsibility: becoming the Gods of our own destiny.

The more we delay making a choice in our impossible dilemma, the more likely the third, most detrimental choice will be made for us: Agamemnon will lose both society and his daughter. And while those ancient civilisations were genuinely blackmailed by nature’s droughts, today we have blackmailed ourselves: we caused all of this climate mayhem, then we invented the God of capital to pretend that our hands are tied. Making oneself feel hopeless, helpless and enslaved to a deity is incredibly convenient for those who don’t want to lift a finger. 

Our dithering civilisation has entered a Greek Tragedy phase, and we are all part of the audience in this performance: chained down to those ancient, marble seats baking in the hot Greek sun, about to watch our very last show. Because just a few decades ago, the level of sacrifices we would have had to make paled in comparison to the ones we need to make today, after having wasted so much time emitting, destroying, burning, while appeasing the God of capital.

We have wasted precious time and reached a lose-lose situation: choice one is to take draconian measures to cut emissions which will destabilise society as the planet continues to heat up anyway.  Choice two is to continue to do nothing but offer plastic flower votive offerings to the carbon credit gods.  Choice one is the obvious one.  Not only because it is ethical, but because it has the potential to downgrade the polycrisis from a nuclear apocalypse to a biblical catastrophe.  Regardless, even if we sacrifice Iphigenia, we still lose our war fleet. This is what happens when you run out of Gods to blame.

Many politicians today are in the place of Socrates or Agamemnon, but sadly they are neither one or the other.  They know that climate change is happening, and that action was due yesterday. Yet they won’t take any action because they will most certainly lose their job, thousands of votes, and the backing of carbon-trading mobster lobbyists and solar capitalists.  They have served us all a nice, cold, cup of hemlock poison. 

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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