Loyalty to Humanity and the Planet: A Foundational Ethics
Our first loyalty is to humanity as a species and to the biosphere that sustains it, because every other political question is downstream of these two facts: humanity is one interconnected whole, and the planet is the only material basis on which that whole can survive. This is not sentimental cosmopolitanism. It is a materialist recognition that class society artificially fractures a species that shares one evolutionary origin, one set of basic needs, and one finite ecological inheritance. To claim loyalty to a nation, a race, a religion, or a market system above humanity itself is to mistake a historically contingent structure for a natural one. Nations, borders, and capital relations are inventions; the species and the planet are not. Our allegiance runs to what is real and permanent, not to what is manufactured and temporary. From this flows our allegiance to the innocent and the defenseless: children, the colonized, the disabled, the elderly, the environmentally displaced, and all...