In the 1999 film The Matrix, Agent Smith, the embodiment of an AI security program, explains that humanity follows the pattern of “…A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.”
Regardless of the source, this is worth considering. We do colonize, multiply, and consume resources. We do damage, destroy, or conform environments to sustain our own comfort. Other animals, even predators, exist in a state of balance with their environment.
Unlike a virus, however, we can choose to have a positive impact on our surroundings. As individuals, we can choose to contribute to the equilibrium. We will always consume, but we can also cultivate. We can form symbiotic relationships — with each other, with our environment, and even with the microscopic ecosystems that live on us and within us.
Really, we’re more like bacteria than a virus: some destructive, some beneficial. Some deplete the system they depend on, while others work to stabilize and support it.
Maybe what defines us isn’t whether we consume, but how we participate in our ecosystem. Do we take without thought, or do we help restore balance?
And if we zoom way in, we can find the same story playing out in our own bodies. We are our own ecosystem. The microbes that live on us aren’t all bad. Some protect us, train our immune systems, and even influence our mood. When we sterilize haphazardly based on a distorted concept of cleanliness, we destroy that equilibrium.
This is a founding principle of Anti-Soap. The idea that “clean” does not mean sterile, it means balanced. Our goal isn’t to sterilize, but to support the skin’s natural environment, and by extension, the broader one we all share.
We can’t separate human health from environmental health. Every product we rinse off eventually ends up somewhere. Our drains flow into the same rivers and oceans that sustain life. If our cleansers are harsh enough to strip life from our skin, what are they doing to the ecosystems downstream? And if we continue to needlessly damage our environment it will have an exponentially negative impact on us.
When we treat our skin like an ecosystem, we start to see that our environment is just an extension of ourselves. And maybe that’s how we prove Agent Smith wrong: by becoming the kind of bacteria that will help its host thrive.
-Anti-Soap founder
