Anyway, All The Dogs Are Howling a POSSIBLE FUTURES Podcast Exploration 1: Basics Conversation 9: Anthropocentrism More on this POSSIBLE FUTURES podcast at https://decolonise.possiblefutures.earth/anyway Samantha Suppiah: Hi, this is Samantha Suppiah, and you are a fly on the wall here amongst the POSSIBLE FUTURES Collective. [dogs howling intro] Let's go back several centuries, before Portuguese colonisers first set off to find a route to undercut Asian merchants across the territorial and maritime Silk Road. Across what would become the colonised world, the vast majority of human beings lived in villages and towns practising indigenous or traditional cultures, in which most of their activities consisted of agriculture, trade, local construction, festivals, family, social engagements, and, of course, creativity and play. A very small minority of the human population were permanently resident in high-density urban areas like merchant or administrative cities. To most human beings, animals were our teachers, our neighbours, our creative inspiration, our spiritual mediums, our co-workers, and our occasional menu item. Most human beings reared animals within our households, with pheasants like ducks or chickens for eggs, and goats, sheep or cows for milk. Many human beings hunted wild animals, and many in harsher climates were nomads caring for large ruminant herds upon which their survival depended. What I am describing is a symbiosis, in which animals mattered as much as humans. If the animals were healthy and thriving, then the humans were healthy and thriving. So the humans oriented their cultures around ensuring that the animals were healthy and thriving. What changed when? Well, the first livestock farms and abattoirs served cities. These were centres of high human density where capital was concentrated sufficiently to warrant buildings built specifically for the mass killing of live mammals. They were supplied from local livestocks, purchased with money raised within the city, often again from taxes paid by rural farmers themselves. So we see that European colonisation did not introduce anthropocentrism to the different continents, just as it did not introduce slavery to the different continents. What European colonisation did was extremified the justifications for the violent subjugation and mass killing of free animals, and industrialised the process of factory farming and animal slaughter. The Europeans introduced mechanisms of rationale, scale, and profiteering that accelerated ecocide by many orders of magnitude. Just as they did slavery. The Great Chain of Being, a Western civilisational logic justifying the cruelty of the Greek and Roman empires, was a convenient starting point making both white supremacy and anthropocentrism into celebrated scientific fact, using another Bible mistranslation for its own benefit: in Genesis, in which God gave Adam and Eve "dominion" over all of God's living creatures in the Garden of Eden. A mistranslation that was originally meant to refer to stewardship or responsibility, not ownership or to dominate. Anthropocentrism is far older than European colonisation. It really goes back to domestication and livestock farming with the first human civilisations. Animal rights activists have been around for millennia. Jesus Christ himself was from the Nazarene sect, a group of people who practised and continue today to practice Christian vegetarianism and veganism, under the belief that all living creatures are to be protected and taken care of. European colonisation used the Great Chain of Being to justify marketing the idea of meat and animal products as status symbols, as shows of power, as one of many "benefits" of participating within modern Western civilisation. These were benefits that went hand in hand with genocidal and ethnocidal oppression, slavery and war that made European colonisation possible in the first place, through the military industrial complex. — Anna Denardin: Yes, as you said, there was a time when most humans were connected to their contexts, living in symbiosis with their human and more-than-human communities. That still exists, and healthier ways of living remain accessible through the everyday choices we make. Our personal lives and habits may be the most easily accessible way to make change and live in accordance with values. But coloniality doesn’t want you to make that choice. Other options are made inaccessible, or made to seem inaccessible, to keep us invested in the colonial narrative that turned self-enslavement into the “normal” pathway for a human life. Anthropocentrism is an entitlement. It’s the belief that humanity has inherent value while everything else holds only instrumental value, worth only insofar as it serves human purposes. It’s not the recognition that humans matter, but we matter more, that our desires automatically override the survival and flourishing of other beings. And over time, this entitlement became naturalised, woven so deeply into the logic of civilization that most of us no longer perceive it as entitlement at all. It simply feels like truth. As you said, anthropocentrism existed before colonialism, but colonialism elevated this into a pathology. Different from other empires that also conquered and extracted, colonial powers sought to remake the colonised in their image by exporting the extractive worldview itself. This is where anthropocentrism has evolved into civilisational narcissism. The narcissist experiences their own desires, thoughts, and perceptions as the structure of reality itself. When they demand something, they do not experience it as a demand because they cannot perceive other beings as real in the same way they perceive themselves. Civilisational narcissism operates identically. Our culture has constructed a worldview in which human desires are the only legitimate metric of value, in which all other beings and systems exist merely as extensions of human purposes. We do not experience this as entitlement; we experience it as reality. And this narcissism cannot recognise consequences. It can see suffering only as a regrettable side effect. It can acknowledge climate change intellectually while continuing practices that cause it, because the abstract future and the distant suffering do not register with the same reality-weight as present desires. The entire apparatus of abstraction and disconnection that colonialism created serves this narcissistic logic perfectly: it allows us to cause harm while remaining innocent of it, to benefit from exploitation while denying our participation in it. — Samantha Suppiah: That is so important. You've just broken down the logics of how colonial and civilisational narcissism, entitlement and consumption legitimises itself: through the justification of ecocidal violence, through the subjugation of animals, plants, and broader nature. This works because as a species, whether we practice indigenous, traditional or modern cultures, we have long been crafting narratives to justify our activity. In terms of the dominant activity we have undertaken over the few hundred years during which we have wreaked planetary havoc, we have generated unprecedented, untold wealth by stealing from centuries of planetary futures. European colonisers created structures to operationalise and benefit from this dominant globalised human activity. Most of us, coloniser and colonised and everything in between, have devoted our efforts into feeding, repairing, improving and replicating these parasitic human cultures that destroy planetary systems. What is insane about this is that we are fully aware of this, and we tell ourselves that we are doing our best to fix the situation, while making superficial pledges and minute alterations to the lifestyles, cultures and structures we nurture and uphold. Is it the case of a deer in headlights paralysed by fear, mesmerised by incomplete information, or frozen in a state of shock? Or is it the case of a sadistic serial killer having killed every of their targets and now decides to indulge in self-cannibalisation? Arguably, both dynamics are happening within different parts of civilisational cultures that serve this collective narcissism ideology. What is the difference between branding a human being with a serial number and a barcode, and tagging a mother cow with a RFID device? We were able to operationalise genocide against human beings because we already knew how to do the same to animals, with all the same narratives, rationales and justifications based upon unequal, unjust and unsustainable entitlement. Extraction and commodification that is literally justified by extraction and commodification. From where I stand, this is what makes us no longer human. I want to be part of a human civilisation that does not exploit, does not commodify, does not enslave. Unfortunately, such a human civilisation, especially in the context of coloniality that persists over civilisations, is a fantasy. — Anna Denardin: Precisely, I love what you just said. You brought in the metaphor of a sadistic serial killer that turns into self-cannibalisation. And the system does the same: it devours itself, consuming its own resources, stealing from its own future, and perfects this act of killing by outsourcing and abstracting it. In face-to-face societies, where people encounter the consequences of their choices directly — where they fish from the same waters their children will fish from, where they see the faces of those they trade with — extraction becomes difficult to justify. But colonialism required creating distance, opacity, and abstraction. Through global supply chains, financial markets, and the logic of commodification, you can participate in exploitation while remaining entirely disconnected from it. You can eat meat without ever having to kill the cow. You can contribute to genocide simply by buying from a brand, without ever having to face that directly. The people who make the decisions are rarely the ones carrying out the killing. The term "desk killer" emerged after World War II to describe bureaucrats and administrators who orchestrated mass killings from behind their desks, especially in Nazi Germany. They didn’t commit physical violence themselves, but enabled, managed, and optimized systems that did. The current colonial system perfected that violence to the level that it is so abstracted, so bureaucratised, it passes through so many layers of approvals, until accountability evaporates. That is why boycott, disinvestment, and sanction matter. That is why personal choices matter. The only effective way to counter many of those violences is to attack the business model, to undermine the only things that truly matter behind carefully crafted purpose statements: profit, and the perception of relevance. The commodification of everything, the rupture from right relationship and accountability, is perhaps colonialism’s most enduring masterpiece. — Samantha Suppiah: And it is an impressive masterpiece, industrialising the collapse of planetary systems to accelerate billionaire bank accounts into the stratosphere. The desk killers' carefully-crafted purpose statements are not new. In Jesus Christ's time, the buildings that served the function of mass killings of mammals, as well as many other functions, was the temple. Matthew 21 in the Christian bible recounts Jesus arriving in the city of Jerusalem, a major city within the Roman empire, as a prophet whose reputation preceded him for the divine miracles he had demonstrated. Crowds of people welcomed him as he approached the city, laying tree branches and their own clothes onto the road for him and the donkey he had with him to walk on. "Hosana in the highest." The whole city came out to see him, wondering what all the commotion was about, wanting to know why crowds of people welcomed him. And they answered, this was Jesus, the famous Nazarene prophet from Galilee. He entered the city and went to the temple courts, where he drove out the merchants who were buying and selling animals in the temple. This was when he famously declared, "My house shall be called the house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves." He received blind and lame people at the temple, and he healed them. The chief priests and teachers of the law saw his actions as disruptive, and confronted Jesus. He left the city however, spending the night in Bethany. In the morning, he made his way back to Jerusalem and again entered the courts of the Temple of God, where he taught those who had gathered round him. Again, the chief priests and elders confronted him, asking who had given him the authority to do this. Jesus told them that they were not righteous and had would receive less welcome into the Kingdom of God than the tax collectors and prostitutes who repented and became his followers. When the temple priests and elders sided with landlords rather than the peasants, Jesus told them that the Kingdom of God will be taken away from them and given to a people who will produce its fruit. The priests and elders were offended and sought to arrest him, even though he had committed no crime and had the backing of the masses who welcomed him into the city and into the temple. Jesus was, within the following days, captured, tortured, and martyred by the authorities who acted to protect the power structure that centred upon legitimacy of the priests and elders who were offended by him. This is of course the King James version of the Bible, with many mistranslations that have sought to obscure the original scripture. One of those mistranslations is indeed the phrase "den of thieves", which has for a long time been used to teach Christians to avoid worshipping money. Ironic. Solomon's Temple of God was a place of animal sacrifice, where feasts would be held. The blood of each animal sacrificed was let into a bowl by the priests. The blood was sprinkled onto the altar, and the remainder was then poured down a drain within the court. This was only a very small portion of the blood. Most of it came from outside the priest's court, where they hung the dead and dying animals on racks or hooks so that carcasses could be drained of the remaining blood. We are talking about thousands upon thousands of animals being slaughtered at the temple. Solomon sacrificed 22,000 cattle and 120,000 sheep and goats on the day he dedicated the altar. As the population of Jerusalem grew, so did the number of animals being sacrificed. https://templemountlocation.com/bloodChannel1.html This was so much blood that temple architects needed to incorporate a blood channel wide enough for a person to walk through, so that the blood could be drained from the priest's court, with a trap door next to the drain where someone could access to unclog the drain. Each evening the priest's court would be flooded with water to clean out all the blood. As with other temples, the blood channel would empty into the central city drain, dumped outside the city. Religion co-opts spiritual growth for human societies to justify mass violence against animals, turning ritual sacrifices into feast-on-flesh dinners for the rich. All civilisational religions do this. Hinduism, Islam, Christinanity, Buddhism -- original teachings be damned, there is always a modern excuse to uphold systems of violence -- that just so happens to reap immense profits for the centralised bodies of those religious institutions. Two millennia later, the same tactics are supercharged and hyped to kingdom come by European colonisation's world domination project. — Anna Denardin: Sigh. We like to think we've evolved past barbarism, but we've just perfected the logic: sacred violence justified by sacred purposes. Only now, the temple is everywhere, the priests are CEOs and scientists and policymakers, and the sacrifices happen at a scale those ancient priests could never have imagined. Take the modern zoo. Elephants, who walk thirty miles a day, mourn their dead, and maintain matriarchal lineages older than our entire species, are confined in enclosures smaller than a city block. And we call that "conservation". Orcas, whose natural range span entire oceans, circle tanks while we teach children to appreciate marine life by watching captive beings display stress behaviors. The pet industry. Visit any breeder website and you'll see animals advertised like products. French bulldogs bred with skulls so deformed they can barely breathe, selling for thousands because their suffering looks cute to us. We've literalised the reshaping of other species' DNA to match our aesthetic preferences, and we call it "love". The sheer audacity of that. The absolutely unhinged arrogance. Meanwhile, shelters euthanise millions annually, the surplus production of a system where breeding continues for profit while excess lives are eliminated as waste. We've applied factory logic to consciousness itself. Overproduction, inventory management, planned obsolescence. The temple priests would be impressed by our efficiency. Universities operate animal research laboratories conducting experiments on tens of thousands of animals annually, confined in windowless facilities, subjected to procedures that would constitute torture if performed on humans. The justification is always human benefit, medical advancement, scientific progress. The same institution hosting philosophy departments discussing ethics operates vivisection labs in the basement. The pattern repeats infinitely, every iteration of the same ancient logic: their suffering is justified by our purposes. This is the violence that settler-colonial thinking normalised, the logic that divided the world into civilisation and resource. When we talk about being in Right Relationship with the more-than-human world, we're talking about refusing to participate in this extraction, even when it's inconvenient, uncomfortable, impractical. Because what's actually impractical is believing we can maintain planetary systems while treating those systems as resources for extraction. We are the desk killers, every time we participate in systems that commodify life and abstract suffering into logistics problems solved by someone else, somewhere else. The question isn't whether we can afford to change. The question is whether we can afford not to, whether there's anything recognisably human, anything worth preserving, left in a species that has made industrial-scale suffering into organising principle and market-rate cruelty into its comfort. — POSSIBLE FUTURES Crew: This is Anna Denardin. This is Samantha Suppiah. Anyway, all the dogs are howling.