Supremacy In the Mirror World

Conflict, genocide and ecocide have always relied on supremacist rhetoric.  The reason we have failed to root-out prejudice, speciesism and discrimination is because supremacy, in all its incarnations, is a boundless economic powerhouse.

Supremacy narratives facilitated the creation of false hierarchies which propped up power structures and enabled the worst of capitalism:  black vs. white, poor vs rich, dumb vs. smart.  Once these false hierarchies were put in place they were easily monetized through slavery, colonialism and extinction, enabling empires to grow through an endless cycle of exploitation and destruction.  Supremacy narratives became the ideological bedrock of the psychonomy, bringing to power countless opportunists who emerged with the promise that they would fight for those who “belong at the top” of the social food chain. It became a popular narrative for fascists and beyond.

In order to create their false hierarchies, narratives of supremacy exploit differences: difference in skin colour, income, education, and so on.  These differences are then arbitrarily assigned a value e.g. white is better than black, and a hierarchy is therefore created.  But all hierarchies are arbitrary, artificial, and baseless, because nature never creates “higher” and “lesser” beings, or races.  The ecosystem is a democracy, not a plutocratic theocracy.

Yet human societies always highlighted differences rather than similarities, because differences are monetizable.  Religion, government and almost every social institution under the sun weaponised these differences for their benefit.  And while we may have learned to recognize many types of supremacy within our civilisation, human supremacy against all other species is seldomly addressed.  This is because this is the only area where all humans actually agree:  we are simply “better” than all other beings.

As this civilisation sinks into its digital mirror world, supremacy narratives are easier than ever to create, amplify and weaponize.  Strange cults can grow like mushrooms overnight, engineered by an invisible misinformation dystopia that has become the favourite playground of rabid leaders.  As truth becomes buried under mountains of junk, we enter an era of the most fantastical fairy tales competing for domination.  During this time the prevailing power structures will want us to continue focusing on what makes us different rather than what brings us together.  Only if we accept, respect and allow differences between species and humans, can we defend society against the most dangerous narratives of conflict yet to come.

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

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