The Alibi

I.

You feel it, don't you? The pull. The second sweater you don't need. The upgrade cycle you can't quite explain. The knowledge that this purchase won't fix anything, paired with the certainty that you'll make it anyway.

The feeling is real. The explanation you've been given is not.

We've been told this is just human nature. That greed is hardwired. That accumulation is in our DNA. That if you scratch the surface of civilization you'll find a grabby primate who can't help itself. Evolutionary psychology, they call it. Science.

But here's what the science actually shows: for most of our existence as a species—across many cultures and millennia—we actively prevented this. We didn't just restrain accumulation. We built elaborate cultural machinery to make it impossible.

Hunter-gatherer societies practiced what anthropologists call "fierce egalitarianism." Not passive sharing. Enforced equality. If you brought back more than you could eat, others could help themselves without asking. If you bragged about your skills, you were mocked until you stopped. If you tried to assert authority, you were fought, avoided, and if you persisted, exiled. Across the long sweep of prehistory, we developed sophisticated technologies—not of accumulation, but of prevention.

Then agriculture happened. And with it, something we'd never had before: the ability to store surplus. To defend territory. To pass wealth to children. The archaeological record is striking. Inequality doesn't appear with farming—it appears thousands of years later, once we'd built the infrastructure to hoard.

Here's the thing that should trouble you: you're not running contemporary software. You're running scarcity software in an abundance context. Traits that made sense when resources were genuinely unpredictable—hoard when you can, defend what you have, accumulate status through visible wealth—now misfire in a world of engineered surplus. Evolutionary biologists have a term for this: mismatch.

We evolved for an environment that no longer exists. The feeling of compulsion isn't your nature. It's your nature misfiring.

II.

But someone needs you to believe it's just who you are.

Let me show you something. In the early 2000s, British Petroleum—the company that renamed itself "Beyond Petroleum" while continuing oil extraction—launched a major rebranding campaign that included popularizing a new concept. They helped popularize the concept of the "carbon footprint."

The message was elegant: climate change is real, and you are responsible. Calculate your personal emissions. Feel guilty about your commute. Worry about whether you remembered your reusable bag. One of the most successful acts of deflection marketing in history.

Meanwhile, according to The Guardian's reporting on the Carbon Majors Report, a 2017 analysis found that just 100 companies produced 71 percent of global industrial emissions.¹ BP was among them.

The plastics industry pulled the same move fifty years earlier. When disposable packaging started creating visible waste problems in the 1950s, the industry created Keep America Beautiful. The "crying Indian" ad. The "Don't be a litterbug" campaign. A seventy-year project to make waste feel like a personal moral failing rather than a production system that was designed, from the beginning, to externalize its costs.

Internal industry research, later revealed by PBS Frontline and NPR investigations, showed that large-scale plastics recycling was "neither technically feasible nor economically viable." They knew it wouldn't work. They promoted it anyway. Because if you're busy feeling guilty about which bin to use, you're not asking why everything comes wrapped in plastic in the first place.

This is the pattern. Not companies adapting to consumer demand, but companies constructing consumer responsibility to avoid corporate accountability.

And it goes deeper than marketing. Follow the money.

According to a 2023 analysis published in Science, ExxonMobil's own scientists accurately forecast global warming starting in the late 1970s.² Internal models. Peer-reviewed accuracy. By 2003, they'd been right about warming for twenty-six years. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists and DeSmog, during that same period ExxonMobil spent at least $16 million between 1998 and 2005 alone funding organizations dedicated to spreading doubt about climate science.³ The American Enterprise Institute received nearly $5 million cumulatively. In 2000, an ExxonMobil advertorial stated it was "impossible for scientists to attribute the recent small surface temperature increase to human activity."

They knew. They funded the lie. Because blocking climate regulation protects extraction worth tens of billions in annual revenue.

This is not a market failure. This is not regulatory capture. This is not even corruption in the normal sense. This is something more structural: entire ideological infrastructures built to protect extraction by making it feel inevitable.

The Atlas Network—which has received significant funding from Koch-affiliated foundations and fossil fuel interests—spreads free-market ideology through more than 500 affiliated organizations worldwide. Educational materials. Media briefings. "Freedom summer schools" for young recruits. Their consistent message: markets are natural, regulation distorts human nature, alternatives are utopian.

Convenient, isn't it? If greed is natural, then systemic change is naive. If consumption is inevitable, then production decisions are off-limits. If you're the problem, then they're not.

III.

Now let me tell you what troubles me most. It's not that they're lying. It's that the lie required suppressing alternatives that worked.

According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, in 1885 the Canadian government criminalized the potlatch—a ceremonial practice among Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples where leaders gave away or destroyed wealth to demonstrate status.⁵ Not through accumulation. Through disbursement. The ceremony embodied principles of wealth circulation and reciprocal obligation that ran counter to capital accumulation.

The colonial government's reason for banning it? Explicit. Capital could not exist in a community where potlatching was practiced. The concepts of savings, debt, and bankruptcy were impossible to impose on people whose labor and property were directed toward something other than capital accumulation. So they made it illegal—for sixty-seven years—to practice an economic system that worked on different principles.

The English enclosure acts, between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, transferred millions of acres from common management to private ownership. One-fifth of England. The commons had functioned for centuries—shared grazing, shared resources, collective governance. The enclosure was called "improvement." The improvement was for the aristocracy, who gained estates. The commoners who'd managed the land became landless wage laborers for the new factory system.

Karl Marx called it "the systematic theft of communal property." He wasn't wrong.

Switzerland has alpine commons that have been collectively managed for centuries. Elinor Ostrom—who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work—documented hundreds of cases of successful commons management in her landmark book Governing the Commons.⁴ Not failures. Not tragedies. Successes. The rules varied by context, but the pattern held: clear boundaries, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution, participatory governance. They worked.

Yet we're still taught Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" as if it's empirical fact rather than ideological projection. Hardin's thesis—that shared resources inevitably collapse unless privatized—has been deployed to justify privatizing health care, enclosing Indigenous lands, giving corporations tradable permits to pollute. The theory was refuted by the Nobel committee. It's still gospel in business schools.

You see the pattern? Alternatives weren't tried and failed. They were eliminated—legally, physically, ideologically—by the systems that required their elimination to function.

After massive deforestation in the 1600s, Tokugawa Japan implemented deliberate conservation policies. Closed logged areas to regenerate. Required licenses for tree cutting. In some valleys, cutting one tree cost you your head. By the 1800s, the forests had returned. Deliberate restraint. Enforced limits. It worked.

We know what works. We know how to prevent the misfiring. We've done it before, across cultures, across centuries, at every scale from the village commons to the island nation.

The question is not whether humans can choose limits. The question is who benefits from convincing us we can't.

IV.

Let me bring this back to where we started. That feeling of compulsion. That sense that you should be able to stop but can't quite manage it.

Milton Friedman wrote in the New York Times in 1970 that the social responsibility of business is to increase profits.⁶ That's it. No stakeholders, no community obligation, no long-term thinking beyond quarterly returns. Just profit. The Economist called it "the biggest idea in business." It became the legal and moral orthodoxy for fifty years. Greed wasn't a vice to be managed—it was a fiduciary duty to be maximized.

This was presented as economic logic. Natural law. The way markets work. But it was a choice. One that made extraction compulsory and called it freedom.

When someone tells you that humans are naturally greedy, that consumption is inevitable, that systemic change is utopian fantasy, you're not hearing anthropology. You're hearing an alibi.

You're hearing the voice of systems that profit from your misfiring. Systems that dismantled the cultural technologies that used to prevent exactly this. Systems that spend billions to make their extraction feel like your nature.

The carbon footprint wasn't science. It was BP. The litterbug wasn't environmentalism. It was the plastics industry. The tragedy of the commons wasn't research. It was privatization propaganda. The naturally greedy human wasn't evolutionary psychology. It was ExxonMobil's think tank budget.

We built mechanisms to prevent accumulation across cultures and millennia. Then we built systems that required accumulation. Then those systems built the story that we'd always been this way. That the long history of egalitarian mechanisms didn't count. That the alternatives were naive. That this is just who we are.

V.

I want to be precise about what I'm claiming and what I'm not.

I'm not claiming humans are naturally generous. We're not inherently anything. That's the point. We're context-responsive. Behaviorally plastic. Capable of astonishing cruelty and astonishing cooperation depending on the systems we build and the incentives those systems create.

The evidence for this is everywhere. Chimpanzees and bonobos are equally related to us genetically, yet show radically different resource behaviors. Some human societies developed fierce egalitarianism; others built empires. Behavioral economists have shown, again and again, that humans cooperate, punish unfairness at personal cost, and care about outcomes beyond narrow self-interest—none of which makes sense if we're the rational maximizers that classical economics assumes.

We're not naturally extractive. But we're also not naturally restrained. We're naturally responsive to context.

Which means the context matters. The systems matter. The rules matter. And who writes the rules matters most of all.

Right now, the rules are written by actors who profit from extraction and fund the ideology that makes extraction seem inevitable. That's not a conspiracy—it's a business model. The same business model that criminalized the potlatch, enclosed the commons, spent millions on climate denial, and convinced you that your reusable bag is the problem.

The misfiring isn't inevitable. It's maintained. Maintained by the deliberate dismantling of alternatives. Maintained by the strategic funding of "naturally greedy" narratives. Maintained by systems that externalize costs and internalize profits while telling you it's your nature they're serving.

VI.

Here's what I've learned from sitting with this for longer than I care to admit: the question itself is the trap.

When we ask "are humans naturally extractive?" we've already accepted a frame that protects extractive systems. Because if the answer is yes, then regulation is futile and alternatives are utopian. And if the answer is no, then we're left arguing that humans are naturally good, which is just as essentialist and just as wrong.

The real question—the one that actually helps—is different.

Not "what is human nature?" but "who profits from this particular story about human nature?"

Not "are we naturally greedy?" but "who needs us to believe we are?"

Not "can people change?" but "who benefits from convincing us we can't?"

Because here's the thing that should haunt you: every successful commons, every egalitarian mechanism, every case of deliberate restraint, every society that chose limits and made them work—all of that is evidence. Evidence that the compulsion you feel isn't bedrock. It's context. And context can be changed.

Swiss alpine commons have functioned for centuries. Ostrom documented hundreds of cases. Tokugawa Japan reversed deforestation through policy. Hunter-gatherer societies maintained equality across deep time through mechanisms we can name, study, and understand.

We know what prevents the misfiring. We know what works. We've known for centuries, across cultures, at every scale.

The reason you don't hear about it is that knowing would be inconvenient. For the oil companies funding the think tanks. For the plastics industry funding the guilt. For the systems built on the assumption that your compulsion is your nature and their extraction is just meeting demand.

VII.

I find this almost unbearably sad, which probably means I've been thinking about it correctly.

Not because humans are doomed. We're not. We're adaptable, which is the whole problem and the whole hope.

But because we've convinced ourselves that the last 200 years—this tiny, unprecedented window of fossil-fueled extraction—represents our essential nature, while the long history of sophisticated anti-accumulation mechanisms across cultures was somehow the aberration. We've accepted the alibi as anthropology. We've mistaken the exception for the rule.

And the cruelest part is how personal it feels. That compulsion. That guilt. That sense that you should be able to stop but can't quite manage it. It's not in your head. The feeling is real. But it's not you failing to overcome your nature. It's your nature misfiring in a context designed to make it misfire—and profitable for it to keep misfiring—and ideologically committed to convincing you that the misfire is the feature, not the bug.

You're not broken. You're running scarcity software in an abundance context while someone else collects the revenue.

This doesn't absolve anyone of responsibility. You still make choices. I still make choices. We're still implicated. But implication isn't the same as inevitability. And understanding the architecture of the trap is the first step to seeing that it is a trap, not a fact of nature.

We can build better contexts. We've done it before. We have centuries of evidence for what works. Commons management. Graduated sanctions. Participatory governance. Deliberate limits. The mechanisms exist. They're documented. They're peer-reviewed. They won a Nobel Prize.

What we don't have is permission from the systems that profit from us not knowing.

So perhaps the question—the real question—is this: At what point do we stop asking for permission?

VIII.

The alibi only works if you believe it.

Here's what I mean. If you believe you're naturally greedy, then your compulsion feels like confession. Like truth. Like the authentic you, finally stripped of pretense. And in that frame, restraint becomes repression and systemic change becomes denial of reality.

But if you understand it as mismatch—as scarcity software misfiring in abundance contexts, as traits that made sense in one environment becoming maladaptive in another—then the compulsion becomes information. Not about your nature, but about your context.

And context is designed. Which means it can be redesigned.

The carbon footprint wasn't inevitable—it was a corporate rebranding campaign. The litterbug wasn't emergent—it was a seventy-year deflection strategy. The tragedy of the commons wasn't empirical—it was ideology laundered as research. The naturally greedy human wasn't evolutionary psychology—it was millions in think tank funding.

Once you see the architecture, you can't unsee it. The question stops being "am I naturally greedy?" and starts being "who funded the campaign to make me ask that question?"

This is not despair. Despair would be if humans were incapable of coordination, of collective decision-making, of choosing limits and making them stick. But we're not. We're staggeringly good at it. We did it across cultures and millennia.

What we're facing isn't human nature. It's human systems. Specifically, systems that require your compulsion and fund your belief that it's inevitable.

The trap is sophisticated. But it's not permanent.

We've built the mechanisms before. We can build them again.

The question is whether we'll build them before the systems that profit from our misfiring convince us we never could.