Victor M. Toledo
L
the dangers that humanity faces, and in general life on Earth, are so vast, complex and unpredictable that they are difficult to understand, and one of the most important has to do with time. Various thinkers have brilliantly contributed to revealing the dangers of time in contemporary society. Thanks to their contributions, today we can connect the global phenomenon of sudden acceleration of everything that exists with the behavioral consequences of this phenomenon, that is, with the impacts on the behavior of individuals and on institutions. It is a virtuous connection around time in the modern world.
We owe to JR McNeill, an American historian, the environmental history of the 20th century. In his magnificent work Something new under the sun, 2011, revealed in great detail what happened between the years 1900 and 2000 and its greatest effects on the balance of the planet. A second book, written with P. Engelke ( The Great Acceleration, 2016) revealed with great finesse an unprecedented process of general acceleration. “Earth has entered a new era – the Anthropocene – in which human beings have become the most powerful force on the global ecosystem.
Since the middle of the 20th century, the accelerating rate of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth have led the planet into an experiment without control.” And they add: “… the period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in all of history. Three quarters of the carbon dioxide that has been injected into the atmosphere has accumulated since the end of World War II, and the number of humans on the planet has tripled (from 2.3 billion to 7.2 billion between 1945 and 2015). )”.
In these seven decades there has been an explosion in the use of oil and other fossil fuels, in addition to other factors, as a result of technological innovations, such as the production of artificial fertilizers, the appearance of containers for the transport of goods and the proliferation of plastics. All of the above was demonstrated by the 24-factor curves. Everything suddenly accelerated after 1950 in surprising synchronicity: human population, city dwellers, number of cars, cell phones, world gross domestic product, energy use, greenhouse gases, water use, dams, deforestation, paper consumption, tourism, McDonalds, etc. (https://www.scinapse.io/papers/2139274755).
But this global acceleration that has taken place in the world of things
is also expressed in the concrete dimension of the world of beings
and it also has an origin. It obeys the principle of the insatiable desire for profit, that is, it is a direct consequence of the needs of capitalism, as the Mexican philosopher and historian Luciano Concheiro (LC) has brilliantly demonstrated in his book Against time”, 2016. The governing mechanism that capital imposes is contained in the formula by which money becomes a commodity and then back into money (DMD). However, the money obtained at the end is always greater than the initial money, and this surplus is what is known as capital gain
.
“The history of capitalism –says LC– can be read as a permanent succession of technical and technological innovations, all of them aimed at accelerating production or circulation times”. In other words, the more the turnover time of capital is shortened, the greater the profit. Speed then appears as an ally of the infinite accumulation of wealth. In the industrial age, time accelerated as we moved from the steam engine to the internal combustion engine, to jet engines, and to ion thrusters. Or from the telegraph to the telephone and the Internet. Life became faster as it passed from mercantile, industrial and financial capitalism (or turbo-capitalism). In the latter, profits are achieved in fractions of a second thanks to supercomputers and developed algorithms (see the series billionson Netflix).
LC masterfully examines the effects of this process on politics (short-termism), the ephemerality of merchandise (planned obsolescence), frenetic consumption, relationships, bodies, and psychic health. Under the speed dictatorship
individuals become stressed and anxious beings and therefore live permanently tired (see The tired society, from Byung-Chul Han, 2012). In short, the speed of modern life strips existence of meaning
(LC), dangerously threatens the balance of the planet and, above all, threatens the good living
. These are the dangerous times of capital.
