Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
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Published on The Doomstead Diner July 16, 2017
Discuss this article at the Kitchen Sink inside the Diner
Is our techno-industrial way of life fundamentally benevolent? Is it advisable to continue perpetuating a civilization that is predicated by non-renewable fossil energy sources as well as unsustainable rates of renewable resource extraction? Our civilization requires an ever growing GDP to be considered healthy. This is a measure of production in terms of consumption. Our literal benchmark for the health of our society is based on how much we can consume in a year as a nation. The reason for this is to create monetary profit for the individuals of this society whom have shares in the corporations controlling this production. The actual physical wealth of the world is subjugated to the tune of dollars and cents. To make this pathway possible it requires a proletariat class willing to sell their lives for an hourly rate. This hourly rate is the lowest possible rate so as to not reduce the profit that’s stolen from the resources of the Earth and the energies of its peoples. This hourly rate is about making money and not about stewardship of any kind. It does not have to be like this, but that is a delusory sentiment based on idealism.
The road to ruin for our species began with agriculture. Before agriculture emerged there was no need for money, and so it did not exist. Agriculture allows for civilization which requires money to function. With the creation of money we stratify into economic classes of people. Once money is created life becomes about servicing this need for monetary acquisition. Before money life is about engaging with nature to acquire food, fuel, fiber, medicine and shelter. In aggregate these actions create a healthy human culture. Agriculture allows for money and removes the limiting factors for our numbers. Before agriculture the limiting factor is the amount of food that can be sustainably hunted and gathered. The hunter/gatherer life is mostly nomadic as we follow the animals and plants through the seasons which define their lifecycles. Our lives are imbued with rich somatic meaning as we engage with the body of nature. We are from this Earth, and we inhabit it as a corporeal being made of the elements. We evolved both physically and spiritually within the framework of our physical Earth. Our health depends on engaging with nature to create life and its meaning. The fall from paradise began with domestication which is nothing less than the taming of wild nature. Domestication is tandem to agriculture and literally creates civilization. What is being civilized if not the opposite of wild? The two are anathema to one another.
Agriculture means that we stop moving around. It means that we domesticate ourselves as well as the wild beasts of nature. It sets up the conditions that allows for a great competition between us and nature. All of a sudden our culture becomes one of domination and control rather than harmony. Being rooted in one place we begin building monuments to hubris. We get bored and invent competition. We stockpile food and create war and plague. We set up the conditions for disease and famine and warfare (although nomadic people still do occasionally fight with opposing tribes). We argue and debate and create inequality amongst our people. Life becomes a struggle to create meaning and avoid boredom. Eventually, as we move further and further from our natural origin, habitat, and culture the enchantment of being evaporates. We are left with a driving urge to consume to fill this void of meaning that emerges due to our domestication. Time continues forward and our habits create technologies to service convenience. We become lazy and our bodies grow fat with our sedentary nature which arises from our domesticated captivity. No longer do we need our bodies for anything more than acquiring money. We then want pleasure to fend off boredom and meaninglessness. Life is no longer about dancing in the wild where we are from and where we return to. Civilization is nothing more than something to do in the great illusion that we create for ourselves. This is the way that it is. The Matrix was born with the first surplus of cereal grain.
Is there anything that can be done about this? It seems to me that we are at the end of this failed experiment in hubris. There is no harmony in domination and control and consumption. There is only waste, disease, and poison by way of ecocide and genocide. Our quest for the production of unlimited energy against the gradient of entropy has created cancer. In the end we cannot dominate nature. Aside from money the quest for domination is the great fallacy of civilization. We cannot think our way out of the limiting factors of ecology. Our modern techno-industrial civilization will run out of the fossil blood that sustains it. We will lose the capacity to safely maintain the nuclear power plants that liter the surface of the Earth. They will spew out DNA damaging clouds of radioactivity as they have already begun doing. The rain will become poisonous to life. As we fight to continue this failing technotriumphalism we will continue increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere which will continue heating the human supporting biosphere. Natural disasters will continue increasing in number and severity. Our hubris has metastasized into a cancer that will shrink our settlements as the habitable regions atrophy. Nothing is going to stop this process now. All that remains is answering the question of what to do about this inevitability. We have entered into the age of doom.
There is no escaping this destiny that we have perpetuated. The most unfortunate aspect about this hopelessness is that man cannot live without hope. Hope makes life worth living. Is hope itself a delusion? What are we to hope for? The nature of existence is a destiny with death. The time we have between birth and death needs to be animated by meaning. Meaning is derived from a harmony with all life. Our civilization is marked by domination and control. There is no harmony in control. The great struggle is finally about the nature of life because life wants to live. We must maintain ourselves within the boundary of our skin while we are here walking the Earth. The overwhelming desire is to do this devoid of pain and misery. The tragedy of man is to think that he can avoid his own nature by the creation of a technological utopia. Life cannot be about domination and control, but that is what man forces it to be. We are teetering in a suspended animation just before the moment of expiration. We are flailing about in denial of this process of resolution. Maturation as a species must culminate in an acceptance of suffering and death. We must accept our temporary nature, stop struggling, and lie down in the great current of life. We swim against this entropic process everyday as we participate in this civilization. We collectively attempt to keep the center from flying apart under the pressures of our own technologically created centrifuge. We struggle in vain against the pressures of physical dissolution. We create illusions to fight against the natural process of becoming to fall apart.
The first act was rife with physical struggle within the framework of existing in harmony with nature. Hubris arose and we thought we could become gods using the power of physical manipulation. We thought we could master the universe with our cleverness. We are collectively a breaking wave, and nothing will stop the pull of gravity as we are recycled back into the void which we originally manifested from. Idealism is nothing more than the ravings of a mental lunatic. Idealism is a delusion that is born from the struggle to acquire more than we need. Fighting against entropy is finally not worth it. Yet this fight is what it means to inhabit a physical body.
In the final analysis life must be about observing beauty. Without beauty it is not worth living. We have made a mess of this beautiful blue/green orb that’s floating about the universe. We have partied our way to desolation. Yet the Earth keeps spinning around in outer space in its dance with the sun that sustains us. Every morning the sun reemerges to give us another day of life. Our great challenge is to honor this life by creating beauty and not it’s opposite. We have created a lot of ugliness. Maybe the secret to this 21st century hopelessness is to learn how to make beauty out of malevolence. Or maybe we should just stop struggling and accept the final act of misery which we have written for ourselves? Or maybe we can simply embrace our collective ugliness with grace? Without love and beauty this great struggle that is life is not worth it. The greatest challenge that we face is learning to love and observe beauty even as love and beauty vanish under the oppression of our own collective delusions.
The nature of a body is to act. How are we to act? We should act to minimize suffering for all sentient beings while honoring our bodily nature. Every day is a new day to make the right decisions. Yet every day requires a certain amount of money. This is why my conclusion is that a lifestyle that requires no money is the only truly benevolent lifestyle. That lifestyle is a fiction in this world we have created. This world is quite literally hell on Earth. Therefore we must learn to love and find whatever beauty we can while in hell. We must not resist as we realize our ultimate destiny of assimilation with the machine we have created. I’ve tried finding work arounds to the truth that life is suffering, but the only way to win is to let go, stop resisting, and accept the nature of this great delusion. Manifestation is transience in action, and our resistance arises within that transience only to dissolve back into the void that is death. All that is created within that resistance is more suffering. Yet still we must act in the world, and how should we act when our actions only serve to create more suffering? The heart of our civilization is the creation of suffering, and to participate only adds to this toll. Not participating in this civilization can be our only spiritual redemption. For the life of me, and my children, I cannot figure out how to not participate.