In an environment where extreme altruism is common and rewarded with social and resource-access, I suspect the vast majority of human persons would prosper. But living places, ecosystems, and the natural symbiotic companions of our species might also have a shot at prosperity, and the opportunity to exist in a state that is more than mere survival.

What we have here is the opposite: an environment where representations and fetishes of power are traded as commodities — and traders and their henchfolk are rewarded in proportion to their capacity to sell harm as value. The animals and what remains of the anciently conserved ecosystems are understood as necessary sacrifices to the gargantuan chimera of war, commerce, and technological ‘development’. They are, in effect, ‘free game’.

Altruism is openly punished, and rewarded only in peculiar contexts which serve and defend the overarching principles of domination, disempowerment, blame, rape as commerce, punishment, war, grandstanding, and toxicity.

But in a culture where altruism was the norm… we might begin to compete in a unique way that led our species away from greed and terror-based economies into those of gifting. That is to say: the free exchange of real and relational assets among people working to establish a humane and animane world for themselves and the other living beings of Earth.

We have the capacity to produce a form of competition that would shock most scientists into silence: a competition where altruism is rewarded, developed, and becomes ‘the most interesting thing going on’ in and as us and our world.

It starts with me and you.

Here and now.

Nothing other than our agreement and action is required.

Nothing else will suffice.