b) gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules and obligations. Is there an action more irresponsible than killing the planet? Now consider the norms, rules, and obligations of this culture. Norms: rape, abuse, destruction. Rules: a legal system created by the powerful to maintain their power. Obligations: to get as much money and power as possible.
e) incapacity to experience guilt and to profit from experience, particularly punishment. How much guilt do you believe timber company CEOs experience over the destruction of ancient forests? And the word profit here does not mean the financial profit they derive from killing forests, oceans, and so on, but profit in terms of hindsight. After deforesting the Middle East, all of Europe, much of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, does it seem at all plausible that those in charge are learning from their past mistakes? Are they learning anything from their decisions and policies that are altering the climate through unrestrained burning of coal, oil, and natural gas?
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Sadly the same destructive forces and mechanisms of denial are now being turned on the average citizen who may find that society has as little concern for him as it has heretofore shown for nature, indigenous peoples and those chickens in the cage. If environmentalism is to ever succeed it must somehow demonstrate to people that their interests and the interests of nature are ultimately the same and that those who destructively exploit nature are doing the same to humanity.
Mr. Jensen gives the impression the madness is a recent thing. I believe the madness began with the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, where it all began 6,000 years ago, and is now reaching its logical conclusion. The rise of the city-state was accompanied by big agriculture, authoritarian religion, ideology, militarism, the money economy, and the conquest of indigenous peoples and nature. Driving that conquest has been hubris, beginning with Gilgamesh clear-cutting the cedars of Lebanon, defying the gods and destroying the forest guardian, Humbaba, leading to the ecological collapse and desertification that destroyed the early Mesopotamian civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates valley where present-day Iraq is located. Although Mesopotamian civilization did not survive, its legacy of deforestation, overgrazing, water depletion, soil erosion, and war lived on, spreading throughout the Middle East, further West to Greece and Rome, then followed Western civilization to America. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida have deep roots in this first civilization. So does Europe. So, for that matter, does America, from the Columbian landfall to Manifest Destiny,and our current, politically dysfunctional, hyper-consumerist society. The madness always existed but industrialism has multiplied the effects of the madness by increasing the technological power of destruction.
The article has an interesting title. the world had not gone mad. It is the human population that has gone mad, as so soundly described. However, the mad decisions made by humans are unsustainable because they are destroying the life support system. Natural forces have always been in control of what happens and they will continue that control even as the delusion that is civilization disintegrates. No amount of rhetoric or financial manipulation can alter that stark reality.
I see people in the workplace that are borderline psychopaths. They continue to work in a toxic environment with those like themselves and wallow in their communal
psychotic comraderie. It is evil that breeds evil and Americans are very good at it and have been getting away with it far too long.
I will literally run out and get that book, The Master and His Emissary. I am an artist and work mostly with the right side of my brain but I see a lot of left brainers that lean towards psychopathy. But then, I wonder what leanings Hitler possessed.( He did design the VW Bug) It is truly a mind boggling subject.
Science is a psychopath: it deconstructs and examines the minutest particle while completely FAILING to see the big picture. (atomic bomb, ddt, plastics) It has developed vaccines and cures for that which would otherwise keep the human population (naturally) in check.
Mainstream regimented schooling is a psychopath: it brainwashes young children by feeding them propaganda from their countries viewpoint, usually stifling individuality and free thought. (the same can be said of militaries)
The alternatives to these institutions are conceptually simple but nevertheless terrifying to contemplate for most people. The alternative to private finance is community finance in which risk is socialized, so that we do not have to demand interest as the price of infrastructure investment. Some forms of infrastrusture investment already follow community principles (e.g. roads, bridges, schools, etc). When we build a new school we do not give money to a school corporation and then expect them to pay us back with interest out of the tuition fees they collect. We simply pool our collective resources and build the school because we believe it is a useful piece of infrastructure. This kind of investment needs to be extended to manufacturing infrastructure as well. The first question we should ask about any piece of infrastructure is whether it will help to maintain the welfare of the community in the long term, not whether it will make money for private investors in the short term.
The question of hope falls into this category of accommodations to abuse. We cry out for the necessity for hope as an antidote to paralysis and despair. What is difficult to realize is that hope and despair, paralysis or fervent action fall into the categories of binary double-bind thinking that abuse fosters onto the abused.
Before we can get to any question of what to do we need to come to grips with this. We need to see that there is no functional difference between paralysis and ineffectual activity, between a hope that attempts to bind us to an untenable position and a despair that clouds all that we see.
Psychopathy is a real and serious mental condition. To relate to those exhibiting it as you would to normal people could prove disasterous. This kind of response that ignores who these folks really are and what they are up to only enables them to wreak their depredations.
I am assuming by your remarks that: 1) you are not one of those scum; 2) you have not risen to the top; 3) you are sitting in the back benches throwing handgrenades because of 1) and 2). Therefore, anyone can ignore your categorizations as the rantings of a malcontent. Am I missing something here?
Often we cannot control what form our descent to our bottom takes, or what awaits there when we arrive. Often the bottom proves to be our final resting place. For those who are more fortunate, some lifeline, such as AA appears, and only through that grace, and our willingness to use it, are we salvaged.
The other point is, that like so many things, hope has two faces. One face is the false hopes of victims of abuse, but the other face is the realistic, healthy hope that there exist ways to actually break the hold of abuse and move decisively out of its sphere altogether. Even Jensen has that kind of hope, although I disagree with some of his ideas of how to deal with our abusive culture.
Lastly, most people are unconscious and in denial of the pervasive abuse that our whole civilized culture embodies. The amount of feverish criticism and abuse heaped on Alice Miller for uncovering this reality was testimony to the lengths people will go to to avoid facing this frightening reality. We are born into a world saturated with abusive structures and their agents. Tough pill to swallow, but it is an essential ingredient of the Red Pill. Cheers!
She may want to ban all manner of vaccines (some are controversial), anti-rabies shots, insulin, etc. but I personally believe population can be held in check by other more humane means. I refuse to go down the eugenics road with her. I discourage such thinking in the strongest possible terms. The Orion article rightly warns us against going down that road and points out how we are vulnerable to and tempted to make that kind of argument.
I am fascinated with human civilization and it has some major accomplishments (it is not all bad), but as I said earlier this 6,000-year history is nearing its end, either in collapse or a new form of organization for human society resembling more the arrangements of primitive society, but quite different at the same time since modern technological innovations will come into play. I do know one thing: we can no longer go on like we have.
Part of the problem, I suspect, goes back to the organization of our senses. Modern civilization is primarily a visual world spread our in front of us; a Pleistocene world is more fundamentally aural, it surrounds one with sound. This provides a fuller experience of the environment than a predominantly visual map. In fact, as J.Z. Smith wrote years ago: Map is not the Territory. The territory is encompassing, a map provides only a visual field spread out before one. We must recognize how deprived and empty life in this modern world has become; emptiness due largely to the eclipsing of the sensorium by the demands of civilized existence under the watchful eye of Father Time.
Can we step back enough to reclaim a more natural place within the animal kingdom, and recover from our early civilized need to dominate nature, and the substantial hangover that really came into its own with Francis Bacon and the scientific method, and our transition into the modern era of infinite progress.
This pathology, this disease, if you will, is a feeling of dis-ease with our own feral core, a cloak foisted upon us through 6,000 years of indoctrination to the Curriculum. But, modern Homo sapiens appeared almost 200,000 years ago, and the earliest species of our genus, Homo habilis, two million years back; they lived in relative harmony with nature and with one another; and they lived without history or the terror of historical consciousness until its eruption with the birth of civilization. What the scholars will not tell us is that there was something substantial lost with the emergence of this new consciousness and the subsequent construction of historical thought approximately 5,500 years ago. Recovering this buried genetic memory trace must begin with a recapitulation to subjectivity of our bodies and a complete re-association with our sentient selves.
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