The Myth of the Dog Eat Dog World

Humanity Has Evolved Beyond Survival of the Fittest, Why Can't We Let it Go?

(Enjoy this essay read by your fearless writer!)

Hark! Hark! The Dogs do Bark! Johnson, Riddle, and Company, LTD. 1914 PUBLIC DOMAIN

Hello, Friend,

Years back my mother said something so profound I have never forgotten it.

“What kind of god would create a world where living things have to eat each other to survive?”

Sit with that and chew on it for a moment because it’s a lot to digest.

It is a powerful thought. It is a brutal thought. It is a perspective shifting thought. Living things must eat each other to survive. It was and is true on a fundamental level. Life feeds life. That is inescapable no matter how you parse it. Even if you believe that eating plants is preferable to eating animals, you’re still eating living things. Those living things have a consciousness that is complex in ways we’ve only just begun to comprehend.

Our modern existence causes living creatures to die, even if we aren’t eating them. Contrary to current efforts at eliminating the evidence, climate change is real. The threats it presents are increasingly challenging and may already be irreversible. The implications of this fact and the myriad ways they threaten the future are profound. Our choices come at a significant cost, one we would be wise to consider if we want to survive.

“The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in which air, water, and continents are interconnected. That is our home.”

David Suzuki

The older I get, the more I wrestle with my choices and their consequences. I want to be a steward, not a predator. I want to create, not destroy. I want to elevate, not depress. I want to leave this world having made it better, not worse. I want to take less so that I might give more. Yet every day I make choices that have negative impact, including tapping into this keyboard and publishing here on Substack. Our digital footprint is not limited to the digital landscape.

Beyond the literal eating of living things is the metaphorical eating of living things through the social survival of the fittest we’ve created through the illusions of money, commerce, financial systems, nation states, wars, religions, political parties, and race, gender, and social constructs. In continuing to exist within these systems we have to eat each other to survive. We rationalize violence, murder, greed, suppression, death, and the increasingly disparate hierarchies of wealth and social class. We tell ourselves that some nations, some people, some gods, some ways of being in the world are superior and therefore more worthy and in contrast others inferior and therefore less worthy.

This is a lie.

We have reached a point through advances in science and technology where we no longer need to accept this mythology. There is no need for poverty, homelessness, hunger, excessive death from curable illnesses, social inequities, exclusion, violence, and war. We don’t have to destroy the planet. We can work with nature instead of attempting to dominate it. We can, if we choose, care for each other, the other living creatures, and the planet itself in order to survive. No one has to be left behind.

“We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden.”

Joni Mitchell

Why do we continue to embrace the lie of the Dog Eat Dog World? Who benefits from this lie? Who suffers? What is it going to take for humanity to shed these toxic illusions and embrace a new reality? We’re teetering on the edge of destruction with a Mad King and his corrupt cohorts who want to consume everything in their quest for more money and power. Their need is insatiable and ever expanding. Some of them imagine they can live forever in a digital half-life and are willing to destroy everything in pursuit of this dark fantasy. Autocracy is rising across the world, divisions are expanding, wars are being waged, species are disappearing, extreme weather events are increasing. This is more than an American problem, this is a humanity problem. It’s a global eco-system problem. It’s existential in nature. It is the end game of a world where we have to eat each other to survive. Whatever happens next, even if we wrench it back, we will never be free from these cycles until we collectively decide that we need to care for each other and stop eating each other.

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

Chief Seattle

It is in recognizing the connectivity of all life that we can find a way forward. New studies have suggested that our consciousness is not confined to our brains, our brains are conduits for the universal consciousness. There is no separation, we are inextricably woven together. We are connected to each other and everything in the universe, forged of the stuff of stars. Limitless in potential, we really are infinite. That’s powerful stuff to consider, everything is connected, every choice ripples outward, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

We choose.

Death or life.

Sociopathy or empathy.

Fear or love.

Cruelty or kindness.

Eat each other or care for each other.

We balance on the precipice. A leap in one direction plunges us into oblivion. A leap in the other opens up a bold new paradigm of possibility.

What do you choose?

(As always, the links offer you the opportunity to dig a little deeper and explore these concepts further.)

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