How Human Supremacy Killed the Search For Knowledge

Manufactured narratives of conflict and supremacy pervade every aspect of human civilisation, even the very areas tasked specifically with questioning, challenging and reframing toxic narratives we created over the millennia.  The so-called vanguards of human thought, objectivity and innovation have never been truly objective.  Scientific disciplines may have invented new technologies and uncovered new knowledge, but they hardly ever investigate the wider implications of their discoveries. Most scientists today are executive assistants for corporations: trained to become butterfly collectors who study individual species or other systems in complete isolation from the big picture.  They will usually focus on a product or “solution” without any thought going into how their discovery may negatively impact society or the environment.  Knowledge and research work in silos far away from their direct sponsors, who have only commissioned the work with profit in mind.  This means that risks and downsides to technologies are either censored or left unearthed in the first place, as this would result in financial loss. This is not real science.

Genuine and objective search for knowledge has therefore largely died.  The study of the most important aspect of knowledge, which is its implications for society and the environment, is at best an afterthought.  It is usually left to outsiders such as humanists, cosmologists, sociologists, philosophers and off-beat ecologists who will enter the picture when it is already too late and pick up the pieces of yet another natural or humanitarian disaster caused by greed.

The search for knowledge has become mechanistic and transactional, rather than inquisitive and spiritual. Our academic obsession with cataloguing and recording other life forms is a capitalist, objectified view of Earth and its species which is only motivated by the desire to own and dominate.  Because of the commercial and human-centric angle of scientific research, the emphasis has always been on how we can exploit other life forms, rather than how we can understand them. Academic institutions have stopped learning and have prioritized profiting, making money for themselves and the corporations they partner with.  But when knowledge becomes a business, it is not knowledge anymore.  It is the propaganda of those who sponsor it, and who ultimately select the “learnings” and technologies that best fit their financial target.   

For humans, Earth is nothing but a huge supermarket: we are much more interested in owning it than understanding it.  All the planet’s life forms eventually become products on supermarket shelves where they have surrendered all sovereignty in exchange for an expiration date. The right to exist has been superseded by capitalism.  The brutal objectification of other sentient beings is a narrative which has served industry well, giving scientists the licence to destroy and disrupt nature in the name of “knowledge and discovery”.  To ensure they don’t stray away from the target, scientists are conditioned to become emotional zombies: completely detached from their subject matter even as they get closer to it.  Emotion is wholly excluded from the scientific process, leaving our civilisation completely unprotected against the unchecked development of dangerous technologies.

Scientists are only allowed to use data when studying their subject matter, forced to put on mute all their other ways of sensing in case they may become too emotional.  There has to be zero emotion and zero connection with the item under study, which may impact “objectivity”.  A climate scientist is not allowed to mourn the disappearance of an ancient glacier, except in their own private time away from the public.  The same goes for the scientist conducting lethal animal experiments.  They are not allowed to take a moment and sit with their feelings, let their emotions “interfere” with their scientific study, because these emotions will very likely jeopardize the entire research project.

But underneath heartless capitalism and cold-blooded science lies the narrative of human supremacy. The disconnection of the researcher is always dressed up as “scientific objectivity”, when in reality it is human supremacy at its most dangerous.  We detach ourselves from the subject matter whether it is an animal, a robot, or an entire society not because we want to be objective, but because we do not want to give “it” any rights of its own within the framework of the study.  The subject matter of all scientific study needs to become a passive, helpless “object”, so that we can do to it whatever we please.  In our eyes it only ever existed to be used, by us. 

This pretentious objectivity is always dressed up in unproven and untested sentience supremacy narratives: the superior, intelligent human is the only one capable of objectively studying the inferior, much less intelligent organism: not as a life form with flesh, blood, emotions and sovereignty over its own body and soul, but as an object for personal use and abuse.  This human supremacy narrative objectifies all organisms and does not even permit them to be “living”, let alone exist as biological entities.   But they, just like us, are living beings, and they are extremely fragile.  They have equal rights for access to the right temperature, food, and water at regular intervals.  They have the same needs and entitlements to comfort and affection, however low in the “pecking order” of intelligence we decide to conveniently, and arbitrarily, place them.   Those who view nature and its beings as objects lack any palpable sense of who they are themselves, what they are, or even where they are. They spend their entire lives in an impenetrable darkness, living through millions of failed attempts to feel, see, and hear.  In the end they become objects themselves, half-filled vessels depleted of the elements which once rendered them “living”.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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