A neo-primitivist analysis of civilization
Thorn | 18.12.2010 17:44 | Analysis | Climate Chaos | Repression | World
The past: from which we learn:
17,000 years ago, at the end of the last great ice age conditions became warmer and a human race, adapted to survival under much desolate conditions was able to expand its population.
12,500 years ago, ice age conditions returned during the Younger Dryas period. The increased human population found itself in a desperate situation where it was unable to support its now unbalanced numbers. Rather than allow the harsh conditions to kill off its extra numbers, many went against the demands of nature and turned to agriculture as a means to dominate the land into providing food purely for human consumption. This was in direct opposition to the way of life that had sustained humans for over hundreds of thousands of years; a way of life in which they shared the natures resources with all living beings of this planet.
As climatic conditions warmed again, many humans still clung to agriculture as they had adjusted to its dominant processes. But as more food was garnered from this self-seeking process, so the propensity for an increased populous arose: Instead of learning from the past traumas, these humans were instead pushed into a vicious circle spinning out of control. With the increased populace came a new requirement for survival: the need to extend the practice of dominance to the control of the very people who carried out this tragic process.
It is from these circumstances that civilization was born, 6,000 years ago, as an extension of those twin processes of exponential greed and dominance over the land and its beings in order to maintain survival. We see civilization as a sociological disease that, born out of the deep trauma of witnessing the suffering of a whole species, has infected mankind with the desire to dominate all life forms in order to never witness this apparent evil again. But what of the cost? This condition has led to the extinction of millions of species and the process of dominance has continued into the ways in which we treat our fellow humans on a daily and global basis.
The present: the all encompassing Now within which we must act to preserve a future; any kind of future - some say we are the generation born without a future: we mean to change that.
We resent our current reality: a world where the traumas of the past come back to haunt as in the faces of millions of starving and diseased people who cling on to life at the bottom of civilizations mighty weight. We see this weight dragging down not only human life, but all life on this planet as we know it.
The future: we see a world where the dominant seed of man passes ever further accross the land, from deforestation for cash crops, to the wrenching up of land to rape it of its layers of minerals
we see increasing levels of chemicals poured onto the land and increasing numbers of species becoming extinct.
The seas are being served no better as pollutants from factories, industry and the waste of societies are dumped into its oceans as its species are overplundered and poisoned into extinction. man-made climate chaos forces its global temperature to rise, killing off the phytoplankton upon which we rely on for a sizable proportion of the oxygen we breathe.
the airs are filled with our noxious gasses: all providing a future within which our grandchildren will no longer be able to breathe without technology, unable to drink water without technology, unable to eat food from the land without technology.
And what of this future full of the technology we literally cannot live without: will it be a world where we all live in harmony, working together to overcome the hardships pressed upon us by generations of short-sighted, selfish, greed? Or will it look more like a totalitarian world of continued dominance and forced exponential growth, much like modern day China: an industrial power house that looks set to be the base for the next global corporate powerhouse. A world in which the traumas of the past stream forth, fracturing the future, oblivious to the healing hands of the few who struggle to fight against apathy and depression in the face of the insurmountable odds of worldwide industrial devastation.
And after suffering all that is there any hope of going somehow witnessing a global rebellion over our desperate masters and our inner domestication and somehow carve out a reality of egalitarianism and good will towards all beings?
We have little hope of ever seeing this day, for civilization is born out of a process of extreme adaptation and at the deficit of all modes of thinking save the status quo. Totalitarianism will creep up slowly - as we see it in the formation of military-industrial unification of Europe and America and economically with China. By the time we are witness to full blown totalitarianism it will be to late to rebel because the processes of dominance and control will be fully in place and the technology and conditioning will be of a level that stepping out of the system and bringing it down will be an impossibility.
But even if the improbable scenario of a global uprising or insurrection were to formulate, how long would that process have to break through its domestication and bring the majority of this species back to a state of harmony and sustainability with nature, before the environmental conditions became too far gone to be able to achieve any lasting future? With increased awareness about the positive feedback loops of natures system, we are now aware that the cut off point is surely a lot sooner than we could ever anticipate.
We have little or no hope of achieving this idealistic process and so we must strike at the veins of civilization and bring it crashing down before it can continue to destroy the wild nature any further. Civilization is unsustainable and will end one day, either it ends soon and retain what dwindling resources and wilderness we still have left to help us regenerate our way back to nature, or we can wait till later when there will be less resources available and a lot more people struggling to survive on it...
All who say no to a world dominated by human fear must determine to pour their anger and love into destroying the beast that resides within our populous, and break free from the processes of conditioning and domestication - if we see no way to heal the trauma, we must instead determine to destroy it!!!
Thorn