A meditation over a capitalist ego in the face of climate emergency. A provocation

Abstract

In this meditation, I will challenge my own inability to take in and act on the seriousness of the situation of today’s world: Its planetary crises affecting all life. I do so by addressing the violence and domination inscribed in me through being schooled in the western capitalist culture in which I live. A culture in which perfection is the end goal of everything. I challenge this ego of perfection, by embracing the un-harmonizable plant-ness of life and joining the joint struggles against eco-based as well as gender-based violence.

Introduction

This short text is written as a provocation, in which the author, me, are challenging all, who like himself are formed by academic life, modernity and capitalism. I do not mean that we willingly are embracing modernity and capitalism, but rather that it is simply not possible to live completely outside of such hegemonic reality (Rancière, 1999), and that we, or in this text I, need to find ways of dealing with this fact. Particularly since it seems acute to find a position, an attitude, and a way of being, in which the overwhelming impacts of the climate emergency and the emotional and intellectual exhaustion that follows can be resisted. That I here consider “reality” in its hegemonic formation means that I have to implicate myself in challenging the conditions under which such reality takes form. I live in this reality. It is part of me.

The text is written as a meditation, in the meaning of being a thought experiment rather than a classical argument in which I want to challenge my position in modern capitalist life, and the borders of (my) reality. I have, though in several texts (Säfström, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023; Säfström and Loughran, 2025) researched and developed the argument itself, but in this text, which opened the symposium on which this special issue is built, I wanted to do something else. I wanted to implicate myself, not in order to make myself special, but rather as a challenge to that ego which is “more than me”. That is, that ego that is formed already as a consequence of modernity and capitalism, and regardless of the I living it. I wanted to explore my fatigue and exhaustion, following from the enormity and abnormality of the climate breakdown, and in the process searching for a life affirming energy beyond a capitalist ego with its violent consequences. A life affirming energy in all life.

And so it starts

The meditation attempts to reach a point not previously held or understood by me but intensely felt. It deals with the climate emergency, its devastating threat to human life and my incapacity to take it all in. The meditation deals with the devastating paralysis that tends to creep up on me when I see the world burning in front of my eyes. Summer paradises become places from hell, affected by severe drought killing plants, animals and humans, where there were before beaches with sunbathing people, fruit trees, and fertile land. Devastating pictures of burning forests in Canada, whose size and scope it is hard to comprehend fills news worldwide. When the smoke fogs up New York thousands of miles away, people living there tend to understand the seriousness of the situation and express their worries for climate breakdown in interviews on my TV. Not until one breathes the smoke, not until one’s home is burned down, is the reality showing itself in its undisputable disastrous directness: “Our house is on fire”, says Greta Thunberg et al. (2021). With its spectacular images on television, news magazines, and other outlets, the climate emergency - our planetary crises - is overwhelmingly washing over me, up to the point where it is no longer possible to be denied and to look away. The horrifying threat to the life we live, to my life, to my children’s life, to all living, sticks like glue on my retina. The threat is all over my life, it slips into my mind and soul and are haunting my dreams in the night.

Parts of Italy are without drinking water in the summer, rivers are drying up for the first time in Spain and southern France, and multiplied in country after country across Europe. Parts of Africa are beyond repair with human-caused disasters killing the fruitfulness of the land, making it unsuitable for humans, animals, and plants. Instead the heat from the warming planet produces deserts and dead earth on a scale never seen before. Consequently, climate refugees desperately trying to find life elsewhere are drowning in the Mediterranean Sea while governments fight over whose responsibility they are. And then the spreading feeling of distrust, not trusting governments to actually do something other than turning inwards upholding what is left as all we need. What we have is all there is, they say, and we should value it and defend it from alien species invading our land, the land owned by our birthright; “We were here first!” they say. Invasive plants and people alike create the problem, they say, thereby upholding a vision of an original perfect state of mind in a perfect nation-state, belonging to the already chosen ones at play. The irritation, the disturbance, and the emergency always come from somewhere else, from the outside. The question then arises for me:

Can I grieve those lives who, in trying to save themselves, their families and their children from the escalating hardship from an unforgiving soil, are drowning as we speak? Can I grieve the extinction of thousands of species as I go on with my daily business? Are the plants and animals burning in the fires at all grievable? Are women, children, and men drowning in the Mediterranean Sea at all grievable?

I can still recall the shocking picture in the Guardian some years ago, picturing two drowned Roma sisters washed up on an Italian beach where people just continued sunbathing. Going on with their business as if nothing else was going on. Were the sunbathers particularly heartless people or were they people like you and me? Zygmunt Bauman (2004), in his book Wasted Lives, describes how we have created societies in which parts of the population become superfluous, treated as waste, and not part of the people on which the liberal democratic nation-state is built. Those girls did not matter to the people sunbathing, had no value, were worthless, human waste, and did not affect their lives. Judith Butler (2020) shows how injustice and inequality take form in the possibility of grieving someone openly. During the AIDS epidemic in the US, the ones dying from AIDS, people, loved ones, partners, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, were not grievable to the extent people normally are; they were instead threated as “the untouchables”, themselves to blame for their predicament. The dying of AIDS was, says Butler, entering the grey zone of calculable grievance. They were losing the undisputed worth and value bestowed to other people. In their dying they did not only lose their life they lost the incalculable worth of life. As a response, Butler asks of us to restore the living, all living, the worth of life. All life, says Butler, is grievable to equal measure. All living is worthy of value. Education, as dealing with the liveability of and in the everyday of life, and as founded on the fact that we do live with others on which we depend, is a place where this restoration necessarily needs to start. Education takes place when the incalculable value of life are verified, enabling you to speak with your voice, your emancipated voice (Rancière, 1991). To teach is to recast value to all life, and particularly to life that has been denied.

The problem I face then, is that what is often considered a way of dealing with the climate emergency in all its facets and complexity is not really a response but formed as actions within the same reality with which it deals. A reality which already denies value to whoever and whatever falls outside its business as usual. The solutions, instead of provoking fundamental change, tend to be caught up in a reality it shares with the conditions responsible for the emergency in the first place. They tend to be solutions designed to save a capitalist life rather than fundamentally changing the way we live. There is at least a question whether electric cars are for saving the planet or for saving the car industry. It can hardly do both. I call this reality a capitalist reality since capitalism is not only an economic system but a way of life; it is deeply existential informing all facets of life. As Antonio Gramsci (2011) would say, it is hegemonic, total, all-inclusive, and as such it is fundamentally existential. Capitalist life creates its totality, striving to reduce everything to the same reality. It is a reality constructed for us and by us, it has a history as well as a presence, and in that I include myself. I live in this reality and contribute to it by living it. I am living a capitalist ego.

My meditation so far has brought me to this shocking point. My own ego is part of the problem I am trying to deal with, formed of energies way beyond my life, but as such producing the conditions in which my life is to be lived. In consequence, a fundamental question is raised for me, forcing the meditation to be moving on, digging deeper: If the incapacity to comprehend and respond fully to the climate emergency and its consequences is part of my reality, my ego, what does that say about the I living in that reality and that reality itself? Can I hear the other calling me beyond that ego? Can I hear the earth talking to me beyond that ego? Can I hear that which is not already formed as a life to which my ego belongs?

The meditation has taken me to a place where I am not only implicated in the crime but where this implication is deeply rooted in the very way life itself is organized, in its totality, being the present state of things. In moving on, I need to contemplate the birth of our modern reality, our Western way of life, to contemplate the invention of man giving rise to such an ego. Such invention, “man” as we know him throughout history, says Jaeger (1939: xxii) is the remarkable invention of the ancient Greeks, of not only “man”, but a state mirroring that “man”.

The invention of man and state

In Western culture, the ancient Greeks are celebrated as those who define the very parameters through which “our Western way of life” emerges: from the way cities and states are organized to the foundations of science and culture, to the invention of education and teaching, and the conditions for social life as we know it, namely, the invention of public life as separate from the household and the ecclesia and more. The ancient Greeks, say Jaeger “invented man” (Jaeger, 1939: xxii) and identified the conditions in which “man” can take form as such. Who are that “man”? And what are those conditions in which this “man” forms?

The following exploration is built on fragments from my research that came to the fore while writing this text (see references). They belong to my extended studies of the Sophist teachers, and the critique of the philosophic Platonic-Aristotelian orthodoxy and it’s devastating consequences for educational thought and practice following from that orthodoxy (see also Cassin, 2014).

Two things need to be said here about the invention of that “man” and his “culture”, (again, an extended analysis can be found in Säfström, 2023, particularly chapter 5, and in Cassin, 2014):

(1) Plato’s invention of philosophy, is inscribed within education as a figure of domination over everyday life from the point of “the aristocratic man”(the only possible bearer of culture due to Plato). Also, as Jaeger says, “it is difficult for us today to understand the violence” (Jaeger 1939:47, my emphasis) in Plato’s detestation of the sophist teachers, his hatred of the wandering teachers of practical life, who were teaching ”anyone” how to live well in a democratic city-state, not only the aristocratic man. So at the very birth of “European” culture, domination and violence are two characteristics of the relation to practical life, a practical life populated by ordinary people, animals, and plants. For Plato the aristocratic child were the only one to be educated in the image of the state itself. Education is the means for perfecting the state and the educated aristocrat is himself an image of that perfect state.

So what I have so far is a Platonian line of thought, founding culture as such (Jaeger, 1939), by excluding large parts of the actual population as well as establishing violence and domination as a legitimate relation to everyday life and those living such life, which, according to Aristotle was ordinary men, particularly sophists, and ‘women, children, animals and slaves’ (Cassin 2014:6). All those people were by Aristotle likened to plants (Cassin, 2014), and as such excluded from being human. A sharp distinction between man, which from now means an aristocratic man, and plants, which are everyone else and actual plants (nature), are established as a foundation of civilized life. The nature of plants and the inhumanity of all plants raised the problem for Aristotle of radical evil.

2. Aristotle, as well as later Emmanuel Kant, understands plants as the other of man; that which is other is nature in man and therefore hinders man from being perfected, as fully himself, as intended by God. Therefore, nature, in its “plant-ness”, i.e. radical evilness, affecting man from the inside (Cassin 2014), must be controlled by himself. That is, the role of education for Kant is to learn to master the “radical evil” inside of man, his “plant-ness”, to complete God’s creation (which can only be perfect). For Kant, the problem of “radical evil” leads us to the role and function of education. Radical evil is linked to and gives meaning to the relationship between humans and education. It defines the place and role of education, its role and function in producing a perfect moral order by correcting the child, taming the innate “Plant-ness”, the inner radical evilness of the child, so she or he or “they” can fulfil the moral destiny of perfecting “the state”.

What we have so far, then, is an “Aristocratic man” violently dominating the Plant-ness of life, its non-reducible, un-harmonizable polyvalence, its non-perfectibility, and which through violence and domination sets out to be a perfecting life, as such life is built on the image of an Aristocratic man. The threat, the radical evil, that which needs to be morally, politically, and in all ways be controlled, is rather than such a threat a sign of what Charles Sander Pierce called the very fallibility of life itself, and therefore something to embrace as a starting point for human togetherness. The Platonic-Aristotelian-Kantian distinction between man and plants, and the insistence on the role of education to be perfecting man and state in the image of God, are denying by all means the fundamental conditions of life in its non-reducible fallibility of which Pierce, and others, speak (Bernstein, 1983). While the violence and domination following from Platonic/Aristotelian orthodoxy in education are a consequence of the perceived need of the perfection of man and state in union, the violence of the morality of living in that state is related to Kant in his strive for the perfection of human lives by perfecting nature’s work. The strive for (absolute) perfection is not only denying the fallibility of everyday life in which we live with other people, but are as such also inventing that life as imperfectible for some. It produces radical exclusion. By controlling and suppressing the “plant-ness” of life, the totality of a perfect ego emerges, distanced from as well as in complete control of nature. Such an ego is morally obliged to take control of nature and to kill the inherent plant-ness of his own life. To take complete control is, after all, to fulfill the work of God. To perfect man, state and nature in a holy union.

The result of this union is what I call a capitalist ego, or at least an ego that is compatible with a capitalist mindset. It is a mindset in which nature is to be used, to be dominated, and in which the desire of man is to perfect himself in the image of the state, and in God’s name, symbolizing the moral right to violently dominate “the plant-ness” of life, inside himself as well as all around. Being perfect by mirroring itself, this perfect I is an ego identical to itself, in the centre of “Western thought” forming, as Jaeger says, the condition of what we understand as culture and education. However, if this is so, there is no ethical position possible, no relation to the other which is not already a mirror and projection of the perfect ego (Levinas, 1994). There is no “plant-ness” possible inside or outside oneself. It seems that the ego discovered in this meditation is at odds with my ambitions of living a life with other people, as well as animals, and plants. It doesn’t make me “ego-free”, but it fundamentally is questioning that such ego is helpful in living a life embracing all beings, as well as trees and clouds as worthy of value.

The provocation: Un-harmonizable plants talks back

Platonic/Aristotelian orthodoxy in education are teaching parts of the population to be perfect in order to realize a perfect state, and while doing so, simultaneously defining what and who are excluded as being non perfectible; establishing what I have called the un-harmonizable plant. So what happens when the excluded plants talk back? When the plant claims the part that has no part, as Rancière (1999) says.

What happens when the profound imperfectness of the world we have created is hard to dismiss? What happens when the by definition un-harmonizable plant arrives on the scene and disturbs the desired perfect symmetry of aristocratic man and state in holy union? And moreover, how does it change our perception of the relation of human/non-human others when we can hear the actual plant screaming when put under stress? What happens when people, all people, men, women, and children are embracing their plant-ness, and as such, move beyond the sharp distinction between perfect life and its counterpart radical evilness, and instead of upholding the distinction are embracing the plant-ness as a condition for life. A life with other people as well as animals, trees, and clouds? What happens when we move beyond a fundamental violence and domination inscribed in Platonic/Aristotelian education? What happens when we no longer accept perfection as our leading star, but rather embrace imperfection and all life as worthy of value?

As I understand it now, the violence and domination inscribed in me, is also violence on me, on my own plant-ness. It is dominating and hindering me, or at least restraining me from living a full life in the everyday with other people, as well as the more-than-human others. It is a violence on all of us who embrace our plant-ness, and through this embrace create a disturbance from the margins of the “perfect” order just by demanding our imperfect lives as worthy of value, of equal existence: Existence rebellion belongs to the plant, all plants.

My meditation has led me to this place, to accept my plant-ness and my shared existence with all plants as an “opening and cutting” and as a beginning. This beginning is the place from which I now can speak, beyond the dead end and passivity of the modern ego. And by doing so, to be joining common struggles shared by all plants. To join the resistance to the dominating forces shaped by modernity and capitalism killing all plants. Such resistance necessarily has to be based on action as a result of introspection, as well as political and ethical insights. In other words, the resistance is to be fundamentally shaped by education beyond the Platonic/Aristotelian philosophical orthodoxy dominating educational thought and practice.

What I have learned, then, through this thought exercise, through this meditation, through this form of writing, is to move beyond the violence and domination that grows out of the strive for perfection and what necessarily follows it, the identification and extinction of the imperfectible. The philosophy of perfection is also giving birth to a particular form of ego, today formed by modernity and capitalism. Such ego has different consequences but which all stem from the same form of perfection/imperfection, the production of perfect man by the production of the imperfectible others. This form has many consequences in practical life. One such consequence, and with which I end my meditation, is the link between gender-based violence and nature-based violence, as pointed out by the curator Alona Pardo. She says in an article by Natalie Hannman (2023) in The Guardian concerning the exhibition ‘Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology’, that:

“This is really a show that is shining a light on the nefarious activities that go hand-in-hand with gender based violence and nature-based violence. And how we begin to bring these two constituent struggles together as interlinked struggles. It becomes much more meaningful for all of us – we can all feel part of that struggle and part of the resistance.”