Illusion Of Abundance

The abundant availability of natural resources in South Africa has sustained an illusion of economic convenience that has made many citizens and their households overlook the cost of manufacturing energy in any form for the consumption of an ever growing population.  

The illusion of ubiquity of these resource regimes also exacerbates the disregard for  
the environmental cost of extraction and manufacture of commodities consumed on  
a daily basis; and the waning predictable pleasure of abundance recedes to fear  
when these resources become scarce. 

With consumer and media culture geared to deluding the young of affluence and   aspirations of grandeur, we are now faced with an entitled populace; lacking in conceptual innovations that can leverage their livelihoods and enrich their bloodlines for posterity.  

Each one is seeking momentary satisfaction at the expense of future joys, bypassing the present as invaluable, but the indigenes have to cultivate a subliminal resistance to those virulent distractions, feeding our common disregard of poverty, our collective needs, as well as love for ourselves and others. 

But when we contemplate the inevitable demise of all ecosystems due to our insatiable lust for forcing the earth to yield to our muster, we are left with a solemn picture of a derelict place inherited by generations who never revered splendour. 

In a country where descendants of missionaries and settlers have overthrown  
indigenous people’s sense of determination, now emerges a spiralling nationalist fervour that assimilates even their most sacred identities as symptoms of difference  
from their African brothers and sisters.  

When contemporary political discourse has veered us far from ancestrally ordained   futures, to the detriment of life systems of the planet, what ways are there for us to  
rediscover life? 

Can an economy of minimal things align our desires to be cognisant of the impact of our consumption on the planet when the illusion of abundance is feuling ubiquitous exhibitionism? 

And as our fear of “missing out” and conspicuous consumption has altered the  
architecture of our cognition, as a species, we have to develop a vast ecology of intimacies with other species on the planet. We need to encounter our eternal entanglement with all that is around us in order to venerate and evolve an empathy that is beyond curiosity. 

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Existing in a country inundated with rampant crime, unemployment and teenage pregnancies, there is need to survey how this population growth impacts our place on the planet.  

Theories of anti-nativist nature are certain to fail among a populace that has elevated sexual promiscuity to an art of self-love, where men boast of deflowering young women who happen to be one’s son’s age. 

A population that has become arbitrary about the privacy of intimacy, where sexual  
demeanour is explicitly flaunted as gender conquest will inevitably grow gender  disparities that will become violent as each detest one.  

Development and population growth and urban expansion of social territory has altered landscapes and affected human and non-human inhabitants.  

Yet each person dreams of having their own acre of a dream farm without asking how that dream will impact the environment. 

Todays society is obsessed with accumulation and ignores warning that consumption of resources has longstanding effects on future generations and their livelihoods. 

Anti-natalist social theories has been flagged as a dangerous notion among black communities and this increasingly accepted norm has the potential for catastrophic  
population growth that will cripple world economies. 

Younger generations of South Africans caught between seclusion and expansion through technological exposure, have no clue about the importance of water and the impending scarcity faced by future generations, because water as a vital natural resource is proving to be finite in the face of a species that is wasteful and negligent. 

But what moral and social infrastructure is available to shape a collective awareness of legitimate concerns around environmental issues when communities can cut down tree because of fear of criminals hiding in the foliage?  

How can we educate the current generation to sustain longterm change in behaviour, and develop a reverence for the planet as source of their continue existence on the planet, in order to bring humanity from the precipice of self- 
annihilation?  

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Our resolve that is faltering in the face of growing rise of influencer culture has veered to barbarity in guise of alliance, where frivolous lusts are fulfilled through instant gratification. Our dreams are for lack of a better word, juvenile, and are not vigilant of the present as it approaches catastrophe. 

Abundance, as an impermanent condition with profound political, social and economic implications, has begun to rupture man’s inflated self-reliance and super-ego.  

And at the expense of all non-human entities on the planet, this lack of empathy for life has led to a breakdown of many rules-based system of social life, where economic inequality escalates a variety of planetary events that range from global warming and forced displacement of populations through migration. 

The joys of ethical living within the rapid rhythms of contemporary existence have  
been manipulated for profit and isolationist dreams are personality traits for many  
facing a world founded on potentials of affluence.  

And in this lonely quest through the complex entanglements of lived and imagined experiences, mankind has woven a cocoon for their hibernation from the catastrophes playing out in realtime. 

Obsessed with automobiles as symbols of sexual attraction, branded apparel as  
garbs of nudist aspirations and lenses as portals for voyeuristic perversions filtered  
and airbrushed for monetised exhibitionism; these are traits of demeaned and commodified bodies parading their final ritual chorus as masters of a dying planet.