FOR AT LEAST FIFTEEN YEARS, I’ve been publicly arguing that this culture is functionally, inherently, systematically unjust and unsustainable, and that while legislative approaches can slightly mitigate some of the injustices or unsustainability, these approaches will never be anywhere near sufficient. Well, I was wrong. I recently undertook a thought experiment in which I challenged myself to imagine a piece of legislation that would solve the injustices and unsustainability of this culture.
Maybe I should back up a little bit. A central problem of this culture is a near-total lack of accountability on the part of perpetrators of violence on every level, from domestic violence and rape (only 6 percent of rapists spend even one night in jail) to government-sponsored torture and war crimes to massive crimes against the environment. A not-very-funny riddle should make my point. Q: What do you get when you cross two nation states, a large corporation, forty tons of poison, and at least eight thousand dead human beings? A: Retirement with full pay and benefits (Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide). I’m not the only person who has noticed that those who are destroying the planet almost never pay any real costs themselves. What happened to Tony Hayward, CEO of British Petroleum, who among others should be held accountable for the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill? He was released from his position with a $1.6 million severance payment, as well as an annual pension of about $1 million (he also holds several million shares of BP stock). While some daring souls have boldly asked whether it might be a teensy bit appropriate to, ahem, politely request an inquiry into whether this severance package should be reduced even the tiniest bit, I’ve not seen many public calls (though I’ve heard a lot of private calls) for Hayward’s head to be paraded around New Orleans on a pike.
The solution I dreamed up to this lack of accountability is a robustly enforced legislative version of the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle suggests that if an action, or policy, has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, the burden of proof that this action is not harmful falls on those proposing to take the action. They can’t act if they can’t prove no harm will come. So, for example, instead of presuming that deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is safe, and only suspending drilling when there is proof of harm, we should presume that this action is harmful until it has been proven otherwise. The same logic should apply to the emission of greenhouse gases. In fact, there are thousands of examples of harmful actions that would be stopped by any reasonable application of the precautionary principle.
Of course, a perverted form of the precautionary principle is already employed by our culture, but instead of serving the public or the environment, it serves corporate entities: actions that protect the real world, including human communities, must be shown to not harm profits before they can be seriously considered. Today, potential harm is typically calculated through a process called “risk assessment” wherein the corporation that’s going to conduct (or, more accurately, perpetrate) some harmful activity writes up an often large, often unreadable document that purports to lay out the project’s potential risks and rewards. There are many problems with this process. First, the documents are often based on absurdly false pretenses, and the documents themselves are openly falsified (the environmental impact statement for the Deepwater Horizon rig, for example, contained references to the potential effects of an oil spill on walruses and other Arctic mammals). Second, these documents are often approved by bureaucrats or technicians who are as corrupt as their corporate equivalents (and indeed, a revolving door exists between these two seemingly oppositional entities), under duress (approve these documents or lose your job), or in cahoots (or even in bed, literally) with members of the industries they purport to oversee. But all of the above is trivial compared to the primary problem of so-called risk assessment, which is that the profits from the projects being assessed generally go to the company’s leaders and shareholders while the risks are foisted off on those humans and nonhumans who suffer when things go wrong (or often even when they go right). Union Carbide derives profits from a factory manufacturing bulk industrial chemicals (most of them toxic) in Bhopal, India, while the people of Bhopal suffer under the day-to-day operations of the factory and die when the factory explodes. British Petroleum gains the profits from drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, yet the Gulf and its human and nonhuman residents suffer the toxic, and now disastrous, consequences.
It’s a ridiculous system that leads unavoidably to atrocity. It’s like a gambling house where the heads of corporations make money if the dice roll right, and if the dice roll wrong, you die. No wonder they keep rolling the dice. No wonder we keep dying.
And so, if we want to maintain a livable planet, we must change the calculus of risk assessment. The enforced precautionary principle legislation I came up with goes something like this: if someone attests that some policy, action, or product will not harm the public or the environment, and then puts in place this policy, action, or product — that is, imposes the risk of harm upon the public or the environment — and the public or the environment is then harmed, that person should be brought to justice: put on trial, sentenced to return all of the profits to the victims and to clean up the mess, and assigned some other sizable penalty appropriate to the scale of the damage. In other words, since the rewards are internalized, so, too, should be the risks. After all, if the people putting these policies, actions, or products in place are telling the truth, and there really is no significant risk to the public or the environment from deepwater drilling, greenhouse gas emissions, dams, or the manufacture of toxic chemicals, then they have nothing to lose, right? Such a policy would only be a problem for them if they were either lying or mistaken. And when you risk the lives of others, you certainly shouldn’t lie, nor should you be cavalier about the possibility of being mistaken.
If those who were enriching themselves as they destroy human and nonhuman communities had to take risks commensurate with the risks they imposed on others, their destructive behaviors may very well stop overnight. And now imagine if this applied not only to policymakers and CEOs, but to all people significantly associated with the project, from engineers who design destructive products and accountants who find ways to pay for them to marketers who advertise them and bureaucrats who sign off on them. This suggestion isn’t even all that radical. There exists significant legal precedent: if you and I are hired by a third party to rob a bank, and someone dies because of our actions, all three of us would face charges, even if you were the triggerman and all I did was drive.
Bureaucracies, of which corporations are one form, have as one of their primary functions the dispersal of accountability. I didn’t do anything wrong! I was just doing my job! I was just making the trains run on time. Never mind that the trains were heading to death camps. If you are a public servant entrusted to review environmental impact statements for the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and you truly believe that deepwater drilling doesn’t pose serious risk to oceans, ocean life, or coastal communities, you should be willing to share some of the risk with all the other creatures who will be harmed when that drilling technology does what we all (probably even you) knew all along it could do — fail. And how’s this for a novel idea: if you don’t truly believe it, you shouldn’t sign off on it.
Comments
A lucid, perfectly sensible argument, and overall one of Jensen’s finer columns, though seriously, seriously compromised by the whole “head on a pike” comment. Hyperbole or not, I don’t think there’s any place for that in a conversation about healing our world.
Aw, don’t get your knickers in a twist. There’ll be plenty of pikes and pitchforks if things keep going the way they are. That’s what happens when the rich and powerful grotesquely overreach and can’t seem to change course. Of course, I wish they would… change course. And prove the precedents wrong.
I have a problem with Jensen’s argument. I don’t have a problem with it being a sort of a magic wish, or perhaps a thought experiment. What I do have a problem with is … that different rules will somehow save us. Never mind that the rules are enforced by the rule makers, and the rule makers like irresponsibility built in? Never mind that if somehow a different rule was pushed through the heroic efforts of a Greenpeace coalition on rocket fuel, wouldn’t they immediately work to alter it and to carve out loopholes, along with directing the enforcers to go light on the perps by, say, cutting their funds? I say the whole idea that different rules would make all the difference is, well, completely silly. Sorry, Derrick.
Will the pikes and pitchforks be made in China?
Heh. A good guess. Though a well shaped branch will do in a pinch. 🙂
I thought ‘head on a pike’ was the best part of a very well thought out column. There’s a problem with being non-violent; your enemies, and the enemies of the environment who are by definition sociopaths, count on your nonviolence, which in this venue is the same as being a doormat. How’s that working for you?
While I support everything the Zeitgeist Movement is proposing, their resolutely nonviolent stand bothers me; I understand the reasoning behind it; there’s the obvious ‘nonviolence is good’ one, and the underlying one of ‘if we propose violence, they’ll shut us down’ one. It weakens and slows the process though, and time is running very short. A few well chosen heads on pikes would go a long ways towards convincing certain people that graft and greed is not necessarily a good life-choice.
Is Wendell Berry a doormat?
He’s a poet and a thoughtful man, but I question whether soft quiet talking is really going to make enough difference now. After the French Revolution, the French aristocracy ceased to be a problem… Perhaps you don’t live near a homeless park and see them everyday like I do. There’s a LOT of anger out here in reality-land, which is a long ways away from academia-land.
Yes, I would like to see accountability! Good points in article and in comments, and… how do we get there? It seems to have been tricky grounds for 1000’s of years to pass on a sense of morality and ethics.Critical mass is on the horizon- every conversation is critical. My favorite Wendell Berry quote, “nothing exists in isolation”.
Yes, but is he a doormat?
Risk management is all very well in theory. The fact of the matter is that it has not been applied. Human society did not apply the precautionary principle to the use of limited natural capital to build and operate the vast structure of civilization. It took the risk of devastating its life support system under the understanding that it would not have to pay the price. It was wrong. The damage has been done. The clock cannot be turned back. Sensible application of the precautionary principle in the future can only ease the inevitable powering down.
I like the analogy regarding “I just make the trains run on time.” I perceive that this could be extended to the press. Right now the Main Stream Media is as corporate as one can get. And they have failed miserably in regularly covering stories like the Gulf of Mexico in a meaningful and coherent manner. And it is no accident either. Corporate Media should stop presenting itself as the Fourth Estate, since clearly it is simply a corporate mouthpiece meant to distract or appease the people, and at times just promote disinformation and propaganda.
As for OOPS! If I were to come into a person’s home and pour Corexit into their automatic icemaker or surreptitiously place some other poisonous substance in their home with the knowledge that it would be consumed–I could be charged with criminal conduct–a felony. And if I lied about it after the fact, that would be perjury and obstructing justice. If other people tried to help me cover up with lies, they would be accessories and co-conspirators.
But when a huge corporation does this–it’s just “OOPS!” Did I do that? Oh well, sorry to hear about the cancer and the fact your children will be infertile. Well–carry on.
“Sensible application of the precautionary principle in the future can only ease the inevitable powering down.”
Unfortunately, we’re still stuck in the inertial pull of ignorance. This country is full of people who think that precaution is for pussies and hand-wringers, a fictional concoction of the perfidious Left set up to roadblock the beneficial energy of American business.
Maybe now that the phrase “the Koch Brothers” is becoming ubiquitous, that ignorance will eventually be replaced by awareness of who the real criminals in our society are and why precaution is imperative.
And I’m down in the abstract with the heads-on-pikes thing, though that kind of thing can get out of hand when put into practice, history shows. I’d almost be happy with a few hundred televised perp walks over about a year’s worth of highly publicized white-collar prosecutions, with most of the sentences being 20 years or more and with forfeiture of sufficient assets to repay the people–and states and countries–that lost millions and billions in investments, economic growth and productivity, etc. They keep their heads, in other words, but lose everything else but the state-owned clothes on their backs. And maybe bring back Eliot Spitzer to lead the prosecutions and to finish what it appears he’d gotten started before his abrupt departure, which sure looks to me like a “precaution†having been taken by someone feeling some heat from the AG’s office.
The BP drilling operation was undertaken because that particular reservoir has lots of vuggy porosity(about 35%), high rock pressure, and the vugs are connected, resulting in high permeability. What that means if very high open flow without the need for treatment like hydrofracturing or pumping. So the besides the rig itself there is little initial investment needed to get alot of oil back out. That well had the highest withdrawl rate and reserve of any single well in the world. It was an excellent choice for a well site. So that did it because it was even cheaper oil.
Unfortunately the oil had a lot of dissolved natural gas in it. So when it came up the pipe it outgased and there was a relatively minor methane explosion and fire. This is of itself would not have caused any spill. Unfortunately one of the technicians panicked and withdrew the pipe from the wellhead. Out of concern that the pipe might have a rupture if it was twisted as the drilling platform shook, which was highly unlikely. But he didn’t disengage the pipe from the baffle and stopper that are designed to completely plug the well head if the pipe was blown out of the wellhead. So the baffle and stopper tore and there well head was open. I see alternative and primary media harping on and on about extra backups for blow-out preventers, but backups don’t work when they are ripped out of the well head. Basically that only thing needed to stop this thing from happening is a closed electronic circuit for the pipe winch that opens when it is connected to the wellhead, and only closes when the pipes connection to the wellhead is broken. An open circuit would make it impossible for the pipe winch to get electricity, since the circuit would be interrupted when ever it is connected to to stopper at the wellhead.
And before anyone screams “the company was to cheap for this system !1!1!!1one!” no such system has ever been needed in the forty years we have been drilling, because no one has ever been stupid enough to pull out a pipe without disengaging it from the well head. Because it breaks equipment and costs money. And for that matter most winches are very slow and would stall before the tear the stopper, I wonder why they had such a high powered winch? But if this accident makes such a system mandatory then the drilling platforms will be literally idiot proof short of someone taping a stick of dynamite to the pipe when they put it in the wellhead.
The problem here was human error because Transocean(the company that runs the BP platforms) does not train i’s employees as well as the Oxidental or Exxon employees have been trained for the past seven years. BP actually had little to do with the operation sides shipping and the original geologic work . But BP should get bitch slapped around for subcontracting to Transocean, which is shunned by the other oil producers as a liability. The actual equipment functioned well and is used to extract from similar wells in the Gulf and off the coast of Argentina with no history of failure despite being used for nearly 20 years. But if you don’t know how to use the equipment then you’re going to get fuck ups.
Derrick I think you’ve taken a wee turn to yourself. While the thought experiment is a nice idea, its pie-in-the-sky with custard. Do you seriously think such legislation would ever get a foot in the revolving door? You can’t use a corrupted system to bring that same corrupted system to account. It’s corrupted!
It’s also silly. No risk assessment, no matter how realistic, can ever cover all the bases. You would effectively bring all human activity to a halt. We have something akin to this enshrined in UK Health & Safety legislation. It ties up any new initiative, no matter how benign and worthy, in so much red tape it stifles it at birth.
Legislation never solves anything. As Gandhi said “Good government is no substitute for self-government”. What we’re seeing now is the full expression of a cultural history that is centuries old. It’s deep. It’s systemic. The only thing that’s going to change it is a fundamental revolution in individual attitudes and ethics. That revolution has now begun and is enshrined in the non-violent protests starting to erupt all over the globe. Non-violence is key. It epitomises the force of the moral dimension so lacking in the present system.
The corporations may have all the monetary power, but money is just pieces of paper. Tokens. It’s what YOU do with it and how YOU react to it that determines its influence. The present system relies on a potent combination of apathy, fear, greed and ignorance to maintain its dominion. It’s potent because it exploits basic human weakness and reduces us to these common denominators. Human nature is so much more than that, but for it to be so requires individual engagement and conscious choice.
The real power resides with the people. It always has. Individually, we can take that back in an instant, and if enough join together to do so, and hold fast in the act, the ‘battle’ is won. The moral dimension is central and key. Without it, you don’t change the game; only the players.
This quote from John Lame Deer sums it all up …
“Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn’t have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn’t know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don’t know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.”
For years Peter Montague put forth info, ideas, examples, etc. of how the precautionary principle would work. But because $ and profit are all that matter to decisionmakers, risk assessment is what we have. And if it costs too much money to avoid the risks, even if those risks are loss of life, ecosystems, clean drinking water, and so on, then the $ wins out. Every time.
I always get a kick out of it when someone says of a disaster such as what hit the gulf last spring/summer, “It was human error.” Of course it was human error! Humans are the ones that decided to drill where we have no real control of anything (despite all our technology and book smarts). Human beings made ignorant overall decisions. Blaming it on one man who may have made a mistake doesn’t absolve the whole damn process of energy exploration and drilling from the massive destruction and suffering (human and nonhuman, present and future generations) caused by those decisions. The current massive fracking operations are another excellent example of human decisions gone so wrong it’s unreal.
And while individuals can make some choices that make a difference, one thing I’m sure of, nothing I can do at this point in time will change the course of the destruction of this planet as we dig, drill, blast, for energy all the while contaminating everything good we need to survive. The ONLY thing that will change this is for massive, and I mean massive, demonstrations in virtually every major city/power station/drill site/corporate headquarters/etc. in this country. It’s only my opinion but I see nothing to refute it. Will this happen? Highly unlikely until things get so very bad in so many ways that finally people don’t have anything to lose. Not realizing that right now, this moment, every moment, we are losing so much beauty and life and true (nonmonetary) value.
Re: Ooops – you know, it’s the real simple things that could actually change things. Something as simple as saying, “No, you can’t do that because we don’t know the harm it could cause, and based on past experiences with similar things we know there’s a good chance harm will be caused if you do it.” How simple is that? But then these days if something is that simple and obvious then no way will anyone pay attention. Such a simple thing as the precautionary principle could happen IF people forced the issue.
OK, Snackman, whatever the precise details of the cause, even you are not saying that the (in your opinion) simpleton/poorly-educated-employee who made the wrong move is the only one responsible for the debacle. On average it’s true that you’re ALWAYS going to get some fuck ups. Here we have a contract for drilling rights between the US government and a solvent corporation that should have sufficient insurance to cover BIG problems like this (if they don’t they shouldn’t be doing it in the first place – and whether or not anyone should be doing it in the first place is the question at hand here now). The consequences for such a fuck up should be severe enough that even a holy corporation could become extinct. The existence of this level of consequences would have the same effect as Jensen’s idea.
I agree, Wendy, that no risk assessment can cover all the bases.
The abstract corporation has an abstract head (besides the flesh and blood ones who never legally have to show their face). That’s the head we need to see on a pike. Let’s begin constructing the corporate guillotine.
Wendy and Susan, I agree that the only way to initiate the changes needed is by a massive movement of people. The challenge I see is how to help enough people see that we are indeed hitting rock bottom (or nearly – how much worse will it have to get before enough people wake up?). To make this happen is hardly easier than creating legal consequences for these acts. Corporations control the media (and seek more control by assaulting PBS/NPR). Most working people don’t have the time or energy to look beyond Fox for their worldview. They’re not stupid people. They just haven’t yet come across a truly balanced set of facts.
Several years ago I devoured both volumes of “Endgame” and found myself in agreement with not all but certainly major parts of Jensen’s thesis (theses?). So I was disappointed to read “The Age of Ooops.”
Jensen wants to invoke a “precautionary principle” whereby “‘they’ can’t act if ‘they’ can’t prove no harm will come.” Come to what I’m not sure. There is a logical fallacy here: It is impossible to prove a negative. For example, one cannot prove that mankind will never survive. It is a matter of faith.
Even were it possible to prove a negative, does Jensen seriously propose that capitalists (or any other ruling class will not find a way to obviate such “rules”or laws?
In “Endgame” Jensen consistently holds that it is civilization itself that is responsible for our plight. Braudel, without actually saying so, maintained the same in his monumental three volume work on Capitalism.
I believe rather that it is _this_ civilization that is destroying the world. We cannot return to hunter-gatherer status, nor would I particularly want to. Emma Goldman, American hero extraordinaire, and her compatriots knew over a century ago who was responsible for our plight. Capitalism must go. I am not a violent man (and despite her rep, neither was Goldman) but some way must be found to displace this mind-numbing, soul-ravaging, and world-destroying system of wage-slave exploitation. Just witness the current concerted effort to remove what little power working folks have for collective bargaining.
The problem I have with Jensen and this attitude in general is this.
1) Nothing is for free. Universe runs on the gibbs free energy equation. Energy is constantly being loss, their is no such thing as balance or even dynamic equilibrium. And ultimately there is no such thing as sustainability.
2) The precautionary principle is supposed based on the guess of the loss vs gain of any action. I losses are always greater than gains then you are still having a net gain. This is not the fucking hippocratic oath. I am an MD, I am a PHD in carbonate geology. I will do harm if the gain is greater than the potential harm.
3) We are not running out of hydrocarbon fuel sources. There is still a 78 year supply of cheap oil(cheap meaning able to produce gasoline for less then 4.10 2001USD/gallon assuming a 5% increase in demand compounded yearly) based on known recoverable reserves. And their is a 225-300 year supply of coal, assuming a 8% increase in demand compounded yearly. And a 150-200+ year supply of gas assuming a 4% increase in consumption compounded annually.
My number was based on the current estimated known recoverable reserves from cratonic(on shore) oil drilling only, from various AAPG Bulletins. The peak oil graph you guys use alot on your sites is on the Hubbard Decline Curve. However this only counts proved recoverable reserves rather than known recoverable reserves. Proved means that you have 4 wells within the drainage radius of the proposed well site, which ensures that you will hit oil. Putting this way, proved reserves are for areas with active drilling, while known reserves are estimates based on geology but in sections of oil fields without enough active drilling to prove the reserve exists. I always used the lower estimates though, so the number should be as conservative as the current data allows. Hubbard Decline Curve is also optimized to predict decline of oil production from Texas limestones, in fields where all data is available(Texas law states that all companies have to give their well logs and production reports to the state and that they must be accurate), and that there are outside markets that cause diminishing returns from marginally producing wells. This was an excellent graph that tracked the production of Texan oil very well. However a graph showing the worlds production of petroleum as it is exhausted would be a descending plateau rather than a peak, since there is no outside source of oil to make the marginally producing wells undesirable. So instead of a 150 year slow decline from a peak, you get a 75 year plateau and a steep drop off at the end.
4) Who says we want a biosphere anyway? Of course it is much cheaper an easier to rely on it for the moment, but in a few hundred years it may be cheaper to eliminate it and replace it with human artifice. We won’t know until it becomes cheap enough to test out, but even today we could keep a few hundred thousand humans alive indefinitely without utilizing the biopshere. It would just be hard and ridiculously expensive to do so.
Snacks, the human body is a biosphere. A large percentage of what makes up a human body consists of organisms cycling thru this particular area of space we call ourselves. “We” won’t need a biosphere if we voluntarily become extinct in the process of transferring our personhood to a new species of robots that will “be us” into the future.
In your plan I sense a profound disdain for most of humanity. And I suspect I wouldn’t be one of the ones invited aboard your spaceship.
Also, in your second point, I imagine you meant to write the opposite when you wrote, “I[f] losses are always greater than gains then you are still having a net gain.”
It seems the only people willing to put their lives on the line for food and the dismantling of empires are anywhere but here: Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia… OK, let’s see what comes of the Wisconsin party.
Hey snacks…
Glad to see you worked out the math… we can just keep burning this fucker, until… oops, what just happened to Japan… it is disappearing before our eyes. Nothing to worry about; we didn’t need that piece of land or those people. Anyway, what we do to the earth has absolutely no Fucking impact on the environment… Boy, sure glad we understand that!
Hey snacks… what other bright ideas u got to share with us poor slobbering imbeciles?
Can’t wait to hear more!!!
I think a lot of people already know we’re hitting rock bottom, Ed, but our daily lives make it possible and necessary (if we’re to get anything done, and of course doing is THE most important thing because otherwise we have no $ to survive) to push that awareness to the very bottom of our concerns except for every once in a while, like the BP disaster, when circumstances force reality to the top. Then the powers that be say the equivalent of “the oil is almost gone” and life gets back on track. Of course the oil isn’t almost gone, it’s still sitting on the now dead ocean floor, people and animals are sickening and dying but that isn’t making mainstream news either. So it’s hard if not impossible to keep our true reality always up there in focus so it actually informs what we do, how we live. I’m one of those Cassandras who can’t force the reality to the bottom of anything, which feels truly like a curse.
What will it take for enough people to finally hit the streets as they have done in Wisconsin over union rights? Not sure. People have to make the connection between their own failing home economies, the rise of corporate control and dominance, and the destruction of the planet that supports that corporate rise and domination.
Re: “balanced facts”. What is that? Facts are facts. And as someone who has researched and written about things like GMOs, food irradiation, corporate control, “free” trade, energy issues, and so on for the past 25 years I now believe that while facts are important (if only to save my own face and reputation), they rarely actually make a difference in how someone lives. What ends up helping people to change is when something hits them emotionally. When their beach is ruined, when an animal they feel particularly drawn to is harmed or endangered, when their child or wife or lover comes down with a disease associated with a particular kind of chemical or pollution, when their favorite place is razed for a factory or shopping mall or drill site, etc. Then it becomes personal, their heart aches, they get angry and want to know more and do more. This is why it’s so heartrending that the Gulf disaster was covered up as much as possible. So many people were shocked. So many people really cared. But inertia still won.
Right now I sense the Earth is pretty angry. Not in a personal way as we humans get angry, there’s nothing personal about it. But she’s angry and we’re witnessing the results everywhere, more and more, all the time. Some day enough of us will wake up. Of that I have no doubt. Because so much is happening it will become impossible for the powers that be to keep it under wraps like they are able to do now (for the most part). But by then it will be too late.
Ooops!
Susan, by balanced facts I mean the situation where a newsperson or pundit knows ten things about a situation, but four of them don’t support his agenda. An honest person or news organization would bring out all ten and then try to explain why they still believe what they believe in spite of the four troublesome ones. The Fox, on the other hand just hides those four under the carpet. And in good Orwellian doublespeak they call that fair and balanced.
I understand what you’re saying about the involvement of emotions in decision making, but transparency and access to sufficient information can shape those emotions, too. Yes, things have to get up close and personal before we finally react. As things are going that may happen sooner than we expect.
“That’s the head we need to see on a pike. Let’s begin constructing the corporate guillotine.” Intriguing, Ed! Tell us more?
Daniel, lately, Derrick seems to write contrary to insights he so eloquently established earlier. Disappointing.
Snack reminds me of the engineer who got famous in the 60s by writing that the earth would support a trillion (?) people, up to the heat death line. Of course they’d have to live entire lives in cubicles, and get permission to go anywhere or to exercise, but heck, who cares? With a future like that, who needs apocalypse?
Kultur, yer in fine fettle! 🙂 Thank you for saying what needed to be said.
Vera, as you’ve noticed before, altho I don’t believe in magical or quick idealistic solutions, I do think that legal and political steps brought us to this state of affairs, and that it’s not a one way street. What was done thru these methods can be reversed thru these methods.
It’s a lovely cowpie you’ve aimed me toward, but why should any one person imagine that he or she can draw the detailed roadmap out of here? I don’t really expect to ever do more than paint the picture in broad strokes. I’m generally just trying to convince people that altho corporations are extremely powerful they’re not invincible. If I had a clearer plan than this then I should be the one writing these articles, not just occasionally commenting.
A slight shift in the membership of the supreme court could be a step in the right direction. If we can keep the Republicans out of the White House and out of power in congress and the senate, even tho corporations also fund Democrats, enough Democrats would seize the day and do the right thing. The state of the economy is bringing things into clearer focus for a lot of people – frivolous things falling by the wayside, more attention to what really matters. The faster we fall the sooner we’re likely to bounce back up.
It’s all about small incremental steps. Many systems of personal growth show us that process gets you there, not goal oriented-desires. Not giving up on the idea of democracy no matter what form of it you have at hand.
On violence vs. nonviolence – I think Martin Luther King put it best in his last speach – It is not a choice between non-violence and violence, but between non-violence and non-existance.
There may be some situations where a group is under such dire risk of destruction that armed resistance is the only hope of survival (eg. active genocide), and I cannot condemn that choice unless I faced it myself. But otherwise, violence usually brings on more problems than it solves. Armed conflict is one of the most destructive forces on the environment and on people there are, and it is nearly impossible to have armed action without many innocents killed in the process. In a world where the powers laid against us have nuclear weapons, violence can only lead to global destruction. Active non-violence, on the other hand, can bring down tyrants, as we have seen in the last few weeks.
John
Snacks, I always enjoy and welcome an alternative view…and who knows how this sucka will play out..but to flippantly dismiss the biosphere as so much potential collateral damage hits me as, well, nuts.
You obviously have a large store of knowledge on fossil fuel issues, and I wouldn’t presume to argue your technical points, but let me pose you one: What viable energy alternatives are you banking on to carry us over that depletion threshold and beyond? (And for the moment, let’s just use an optimistic window of 75 years)
ED T….I’d just propose that if we could all just put aside the idea that one political idealogy or another is the reason for our current sad state, we’d then be on the road to a better life. As soon as the left, and the right, wakes up to the fact that they’ve been played for too long by the ends of power, the better off we will all be. Political irrelevance for all politicians is the only way out of this thicket, says me.
Wade, if I recall correctly, you’re a lawyer, so I appreciate your weighing in on this.
I wonder up to what point you might agree with my interpretation that, thru a series of legal decisions, the corporations have been given, if not Carte Blanche, then at least an extremely unfair advantage compared with the will of the people in this country. And their interests are totally contrary to ours.
I’ve read a couple years of your comments, so I have some sense of where you’re coming from. But don’t you think it’s necessary to address the legal underpinnings of this situation that vastly favors the few and almost ignores the interests of the many?
I know that both sides can be very disappointing on this and other matters, but the Republicans seem to go in lockstep with the interests of the corporations, while the Democrats can go one way or the other depending on the balance of power in the congress.
I personally would like to ignore the whole thing and live off the grid like I did in the past, depending mainly on interactions with neighbors, who weren’t even that close by. But I have children and grandchildren. They’re all more tied up in this mess than I need to be. And with the present and growing population, walking away from it is an option for a precious small percentage of humanity.
Ed, I think the rule of law has been the number one casualty in the last couple of decades, and even as a lawyer I have to say that my faith in laws (and the political parties that champion them) to lead us to a brighter future is severely impaired. It is often noted that America doesn’t lack for laws (or, consequently, lawyers) and that the utility of enacting even more laws seems to have long ago reached a point of diminishing returns. The binary, zero-sum result political system continues to offer up the illusion of winning or losing to the citizens it purports to represent. I think it is high time we stopped believing that fable. To do that, we’re going to have to turn loose of a lot of dearly held beliefs. One of which, I’d just propose, is that a certain political party (or radio talk show host, or TeeVee pundit, or NFL franchise, or Dancing with the Stars team…) speaks for me, or you. They speak to their own power, and never did otherwise, but only now we are really seeing the end-game of that craven dedication.
On the corporation issue though, I think we all first have to appreciate that corporations are inseparable from the political process, and that has gotten way out of control in our lifetimes. But, to think that if a certain number of “our†Supreme Court justices would only get themselves appointed we could reign in corporate power is hopelessly quaint, I believe. I see many good and conscientious people around me playing the “next election we’ll finally win†game. That sure keeps them busy, and I’m sure that it is no accident that this channels energies that might be more usefully spent charting their own destinies. It is fun to root for a team, I can’t deny that.
As a parent also, I think a lot about the issue you raise. I think that the greatest gift a parent can give is to instill in the child the idea that blame begins and ends with them, and the will to put that belief into practice. If we have enough people taking that degree of personal responsibility, we’ll get where we need to go. Right now, on this topic, I think that this would mean that pointing the finger at the opposition is the most futile of acts.
So much for me. What do you think?
Wade, I’m not ready to give up on voting at every opportunity, supporting organizations I think are working toward the right goals, talking about the political process even (or especially) with those who think it’s useless, and, from time to time (definitely not constantly) showing up on the streets as a supporter of this or that. I’m probably not far from your position on the effectiveness of all that but I’m still ready to do all those things more or less consistently. Obviously I’m not a confirmed revolutionary.
I agree with you about personal resopnsibility. And since I was the only constant presence in my children’s lives, I sure can’t blame anyone else if they didn’t get that from me. And as a biologist I’ve also tried to get them to see survival in terms of finding the right niche.
Thanks for your thoughtful response, and let’s not give up on the Magna Carta.
You too Ed. And I probably was a little too strident in my manifesto to personal responsibility. More exactly, I think my view is that the individual should assess themselves for blame before looking for it in others. Obviously, in this life, there are others who legitimately have some blame to own.
The older I become, the more I realize that my sphere of real influence is truly tiny, and I probably have more potential to do that than many others. The internet seems to have expanded the illusion of influence, but not necessarily actual influence. What I see mostly is collective finger pointing, to the point of dysfunction. There are only a few that I’ve found that truly are taking the higher road. John Michael Greer, the Archdruid, is currently one of my heroes in that regard. The cat is just flat-out lucid..amazing intellect. His message though is one of having less to own and manage, not more. That is not a message likely to be found palatable by your average Joe. I’m convinced it will be, and sooner than we think. We can eat the offering willingly, or be force fed. I’m working on my appetite now.
Jumping back a few posts, I have to say I agree with Plowboy on Snacks comments – I actually appreciate the knowledge that Snack shares on fossil fuels and the alternative perspective on peak oil, if at the same time I cringe at the dismissal of biospheres.
To be honest, I think some portions of the environmental movement are too deeply invested in peak-oil collapse. Some of it seems more closely rooted in Revelations than in actual ecological understanding (the “rightous Gaia will kill off the undeserving billion of eco-sinners†attitude that one hears, even in forums like this). That attitude is frankly just genocidal. I suspect some of this “longing for collapse†comes from despair, depression, and feelings of powerlessness – an almost suicidal impulse to bring on the destruction we fear.
However, I also see a misguided hope that collapse will bring about the changes that we don’t seem to be able to bring about through our own collective action. In many ways it reminds me of the communists during the late 19th century who predicted that capitalism would collapse under its own contradictions before the end of the century. Of course, that didn’t happen – capitalism turns out to be incredibly resilient in maintaining and adapting to new conditions and new means of exploitation.
I can’t help but think that we are making the same mistake about peak oil – hoping that somehow the destructive system will collapse on its own, because the long slog of building a movement for change against overwhelming odds seems, well, overwhelming. Or hoping that a collapse will finally shock people into realizing that they need to change their ways and see things the way we do, which we seem ineffective at communicating by other means. Even simply the hope that somehow the oil will run out before we tip climate change into the truly cataclysmic range. But I suspect that industrial capitalism is more resilient than we think, and will find ways to substitute for depleted resources and energy sources and otherwise kick the can down the road far longer than we suspect – leaving little of the natural world we love left, and causing immense human suffering along the way.
As for Plowboys question about what to do in 75 years when it finally does run out – well, there is coal for a few hundred years after that, and the nuclear breeder reactors, as well as advances in renewables and more efficient uses of energy. That puppy can probably keep running for a lot longer than we think – but at a steep price.
John
@ Plowboy and EdT more recently – I think the mistake is to limit the range of actions that we consider important. Who gets appointed to the supreme court next can make a big difference in the outcome of many things. Who gets elected in the next elections can make a big difference. Planting a community garden can make a big difference. Talking with your friends and neighbors – and listening – can make a big difference. Direct action civil disobedience can make a big difference. The real solution is multi-faceted, multi-pronged, and non-linear, and while there is room to critique what seems to be ineffective, we should never make the mistake of thinking that there is one answer.
John
Capitalism has realized its destiny to occupy every corner of the globe. So it now stares down the barrel of its most explosive internal contradiction. There is nowhere left for it to grow…yet grow it must, or die.
But, there are no untapped markets left and every human being, outside of a tiny parasitic ruling clique, has been enslaved. Some of us are chattel, the rest are slaves to debt. The entire globe has been overrun by the false promises of the prophets of prosperity.
Capitalism, this dangerous elixer, has now been heated to the point that it is ready to explode; and we are sitting on the powder keg. In its death throes capital will launch a killing spree of historic proportions. Millions will be murdered, poisoned, and deprived of lives by way of neglect, deprivation, abuse and torture.
Capital will strip the planet of its eons-old carbon layer, burn that carbon for fuel and quarterly profits, warm the planet and acidify the oceans until the Earth becomes uninhabitable. As it continues to self destruct, perhaps ‘the living will envy the dead.’ Let us stop for a moment and rethink our commitment to capital.
Ragweed, you wrote: “Who gets appointed to the supreme court next can make a big difference in the outcome of many things. Who gets elected in the next elections can make a big difference. Planting a community garden can make a big difference.”
Of those three examples, I’d honestly say that the third is the only one that has much of a hope of bringing change. I despair in saying that, but after witnessing too many years of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” I’m resigned to accept it. Or maybe this is how it should be, who knows?
As much as I have gone on in these pages about “awakeningâ€, I do enjoy a good long snooze from time to time. Someone forgot to tell me the Jensen Festival had come to Orion City once more. Belatedly waking today, I plunged into the rich stew of dissensus being served up, and swallowed the whole darn thing almost without chewing. Burp!
I did note with approval that the acrid smoke of overheated emotions had yet to dim the clarity of the discussion. Not that I have successfully avoided that pit of no useful outcomes at all times myself. How easily irony turns into invective! Absit omen. Or heaven forbid as is more currently invoked.
Give me a little time to digest all this good thought being shared. But just for now, my first thought about Derrick’s latest piece was, “You have got to be kidding!†DJ knows better than almost anyone that his proposal has not a chance of being enacted, and would not mean squat if it was. Our problems have much deeper roots and more branches than such pin pricks could ever resolve. Maybe he is just playing Zen Master to get us to think a little more deeply about our real problems?? I sure hope so. Otherwise, there cracks a noble mind…..
Plowboy,
Its all connected though. Whether you can plant a community garden depends on the local government approval of using public space in that way (or on someone having the money to donate the land). Who is in that government, and which people have influence can make the difference between a park becoming a community garden, vs astroturf and stadium lighting. Frankly I think there are a lot of elected officials who are deeply committed to the change we want to see – Bernie Sanders comes to mind.
I do agree though that there is too much emphasis on the personality of an elected official and the “team”. It doesn’t so much matter who holds office, as the pressure that is brought to bear on them. The mistake many people made with Obama was to throw an incredible amount of energy into getting him elected, and then not follow that up with building public pressure to keep him focused on what they supported him for in the first place.
Mike K – I would give Jensen a little more slack. Part of successful organizing is having a vision and a goal to fight for, and having a concrete proposal, as opposed to abstract “change the system”, can help coalesce organizing. It’s nice to see an actual proposal out of Jensen, whether or not there are the means at this point to implement it.
Where I take issue is that the precautionary principle is not a new idea, nor is it original to Jensen – yet he writes as if this was something he just dreamed up. It makes him sound like he is either out of touch with the broader environmental movement, or he is disregarding their contributions. Either way it feels very individualistic – and real change only comes from people working together. Let’s at least acknowledge that people have been working on this and thinking about it for decades.
I guess that is one of the biggest issues I have with Jensen – it always feels like he is working alone. He is always exhorting people to change society, but he never offers a picture of how to work together to do this. His lectures have no sense of “we”, of the give and take of working with others. Even his frog article, which I loved, was about Jensen making a difference, alone.
John
In my opinion, the strength of Derrick Jensen’s writing is in his uncompromising facing of our reality, regardless of the depressing and almost hopeless feelings that engenders. Only the truth has any possibility to free us from the nightmare we are collectively enacting. Only a rude awakening can deliver sufficient energy to blast us out of the profound sleep we live our days in. That first step could propel us onto a path of transformation to create a better world.
Gradualism, lukewarm gestures, and unrealistic hopes will only enable the ongoing disaster of history. These consoling attitudes are a major source of the crisis we are facing. To imagine that some version of the same failed ideas that got us here will somehow pull our chestnuts from the fire is a fatal delusion.
To think that because we cannot at this point deliver some guaranteed one-shot solution to our deep and complex problems that have only grown worse since the dawn of civilization, justifies putting our reliance on familiar (failed) approaches would be a fatal mistake. We need to exit the box in which we are suffocating. If new ideas and actions cannot be developed there is no real hope of our growing beyond the death trap of the modern world.
It would be helpful if those truly concerned about our world would quit picking apart and ridiculing every attempt to point towards innovative possibilities, and join with those seeking new directions. I can only hope that DJ will go back and read his own stuff, in order to clear his head from the delusional thinking put forth in his recent essay. Stay true to your principles Derrick!
Back to Plowboy, I have been following Greer’s blog for over a year since someone here pointed him out. You’re right, it is lucid writing and obviously someone worth paying attention to on a regular basis. Also what you said about the limited influence we have here in the pixel world sadly I think is true.
Ragweed, I like your point about people’s failure to keep the pressure on Obama after the election. Actually, pressure on him and all elected officials seems to be the only way to make most of them do their jobs.
For a community garden this year I had to go one town over to even get on a waiting list. My balcony’s going to be very green and multi-layered – good for my mind but not so satisfying for my belly. But I’ve seen a few plots that I’ll have to start poking the local officials about.
Ragweed: Here in the South, we have our all purpose excuse handy, always: Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission! This has always been my default m.o. on incidental matters, and I find it increasingly useful. As our technological capacity descends, and our hallucinated “wealth” leaves the system, there is going to be less and less time, energy and money available to regulate and prohibit the purely mundane and cosmetic niceties, such as neighborhood covenants. I see this as a very positive development. More and more, we’ll just decide to do these things out of necessity, and our neighbors will no doubt do the same. No voting necessary!
Plowboy: I wouldn’t count on technological collapse to reduce regulation. We forget how highly regulated peoples lives were in the middle ages. Nearly everything one did was regulated, licensed and taxed by local officials and the church hierarchy. If someone died in the road, there was a slew of regulations that had to be followed – burying a body before the local priest and undertaker got there cut could get you sent to the stocks or worse. There is no reason to think that a descent of technological capacity will be one where power is decentralized – we could just as easily go feudal. After all, 18th century plantation slavery was low-tech, pre-industrial and organic.
Though I think the “better to beg forgiveness,” attitude is a good one to have. It’s not just the voting, but the collective will to resist being dominated that keeps power at bay.
Mike T – but no rude awakening will make people wake up from their big sleep and see things our way. Think of how the Great Depression brought about the New Deal in the US, and Hitler in Germany. Both are possible outcomes of a “rude awakening”.
There are no easy answers. Nothing is going to shock people out of their complacency and all work together to avoid the death trap. We need to work together and respect other people as human beings, not sheep. Which is not always easy when we see the crisis coming and lots of others don’t.
Where to put your feet when you take your first steps on the path is as important as where the path ultimately leads – you need both. I don’t think its fair to criticize Jensen for thinking about the steps to take on the path. I just wish he would acknowledge that others have gone this way before, and we are not in it alone.
John
I guess you’d have to have lived it Ragweed, as I have. Not sure where you are, or even if you are in the U.S., but I’ve lived in, and visited, most of the continental U.S. When you move from a relatively wealthier and more highly regulated jurisdiction, to a relatively poorer and minimally regulated state like the one I now reside in, the differences are pretty stark. Yes, some of that is a matter of priorities, and local attitudes in general, but a lot of it is not. There just isn’t a lot resources for that sort of thing, and that is the wave of the future for most governments. Things slip through the cracks, because nobody has the wealth to repair those cracks, and they widen as things get further along. The bad side of this is, of course, that even the “good” regulations get short shrift, and some we’ve just not gotten around to enacting, to avoid unwelcome economic repercussions (Like car inspections, believe it or not….can’t burden the poor drivers who wouldn’t have transportation otherwise, don’t you know) But, it would truly be an ill wind, and I find that being the beneficiary of benign neglect does has its advantages.
Prophets are those who point out things which are totally obvious to people awake to reality, but completely obscure and incomprehensible to those who have become ignorant and deluded through acceptance of the cultural myths foisted on them. Gradual progress, voting to effect change, capitalism, popular religion, science, will fix everything, etc. That somehow things will work out well in spite of the vast array of dysfunctional beliefs held by the majority of humans is being disproved every day by the escalating disaster around us. Those surviving in small enclaves free of the worst aspects of modern life may still indulge in fantasies of progress, but the rest of us can only wonder how bad will it get, how soon? Unwarranted optimism is just another nail in the coffin of our higher possibilities. Real hope is based on an unflinching assessment of our situation. Real hope accurately gauges the enormous task of inner transformation facing us.
Plowboy,
I’ll believe you there. I actually have some knowledge of that, as my parents live in rural southern Ohio, basically in the edge of Appalachia. And yet, I find it interesting how much time people spend complaining about and meddling with their neighbors who live a half-mile away.
Mike,
Ok, I will buy that. Now what do we DO.
John
John — I am tempted to answer as Gurdjieff answered Ouspensky when he asked that question: “DO!? Man (as he is) can DO nothing! He let O. mull that one for a while before he explained: “Before a man can DO, first of all he must BE.†I’ll leave that one sit there for what it is worth. If one were really interested, he could read Ouspensky’s account of his meeting Gurdjieff and his ideas in his book In Search of the Miraculous.
As a popular saying has it, “we are the one’s we have been waiting for.†Well not quite. I would rather say, we could be the ones we have been waiting for if we join in the kind of transformational work necessary to discover/create a new way of dealing with our problems on Earth.
I have written in these Orion pages quite a bit about specially designed small groups to accomplish the various stages of a constructive process to resolve the numerous problems facing our continued life on this planet. I have answered quite a few questions regarding the initial design and gathering of these creative groups in a piecemeal fashion. Recently, however it was suggested by some commenters that I put it all together in a more extended document. Being characterologically averse to working on extended writing projects, I have so far avoided doing this. I have alibied my laziness by thinking, “after all, if folks can’t take a hint from what I have put out so far, and get involved, what are the chances that they will work to create the groups I envision?â€
I am not temperamentally a salesman type. Unfortunately, most folks think they already know what small groups are, and many an other thing. This presumption of prior knowledge about a whole host of areas is the greatest obstacle to embarking upon something totally new, unexplored, and creative beyond preconceived limits. Now I feel I have gone on too long, and probably alienated anyone with the slightest interest in alternative solutions….
Mike,
I get the Gurdjieff point, but let me raise you Voltaire “Yes, but we still must plant our gardens”.
Collective movements can change the world – Ghandi among many others have taught us that. Maybe it is not the most perfect action, maybe it did not have the most perfect outcome, but we are all better for what was accomplished. I see the value of small-group organization (it is at the heart of the affinity group concept in direct action, the CR groups of 2nd wave feminism, etc.) and I would like to read more about what you have in mind. But I also think we need larger scale collective action.
Frankly, I don’t know that the kind of transformation of consciousness that you are talking about can exist without being part of a larger movement, in all it’s imperfections. Being a part of a movement for change can be an incredibly powerful force for changing consciouness.
What I still don’t quite understand is what these small groups you are talking about will do – other than the vague idea that somehow out of them will come new ideas. Which is great – we desparately need new ideas – but in the meantime, a planet is being destroyed as we speak, so lets also work on the actions we know do some good. Or at least, lets not trash someone for thinking of a concrete plan.
John
Plowboy,
Another thought that came to me after reading Amartya Sen last night.
Democracy and elections do matter – if for no other reason than the fact that there has never been a famine in a democratic country with a free press. This is pretty well documented historically, at least in the last 200 years or so -famine only happens in autocratic regimes, or colonial dependancies. India, despite being extremely poor and having had some major crop failures and other economic and social disasters, has not had a famine since independance, because democratic elections have made sure that government has an incentive to prevent large numbers of people from starving.
So elections do matter, even if they are flawed and corrupted.
John
John — The small groups I envision would be interested in planting gardens, a la JM Greer’s Green Wizards project, and also involved in creating a large movement — of small groups. AA is an example of a movement affecting millions, composed of small groups.
As I see it, people need to undergo a deep change in several dimensions of themselves in order to become the true and effective agents of the kind of actions needed to usher in a new and better world. The sorrowful results in India following Gandhi’s death, were largely the result of his extremely numerous followers being unable to follow his example of rigorous personal practise in self transformation. Hence they were woefully unprepared to follow in his footsteps. (I am fully aware of the other causes for the disaster of Partition and other misfortunes that have befallen India.)
I pointed out in a recent post that most Americans, even the “educated†(in some ways especially them) are woefully ignorant concerning the global disaster in progress, and its real deep causes. One basic function of small group study would be to counter the delusions and misinformation common among us. We did not learn in school the things we really need to develop in order to survive as a species. Neither do the Media or our so-called leaders know this crucial information. It is past time to confront Reality. Small intensive groups can foster this second education (in many ways so contrary to the first one foisted on us).
Above is a sketch of the first step of awakening from our fatal trance. There are further essential steps, but without the willingness to engage this first one, the others would be beyond our reach. Thanks for your interest, John. I am fully aware of the difficulty for most folks of even considering that some of the most basic truths are things they have yet to learn. How to invite some of them to that possibility would need another post. If we could sit together for a couple of hours and converse, I might be able to give you a clearer idea of what I have in mind, and its feasibility. Some things are hard to deliver in the unforgiving finality of print. It makes you seem inflexible, even if you are far from that….
John….careful now, I didn’t say elections don’t matter (at least I don’t think I did). My point is that the idea that either of the two current major political parties have any other concern than staying in power, or that there is a victory to be had on choosing one over the other, is a flawed theory.
Interesting observation on democracy and food. I’ve not read Sen, but I’m afraid that is not correct from my point of view. The Confederacy suffered, by any definition, a famine throughout most of the war years, and even after those states had technically rejoined the union. I guess that you could argue that there was martial law imposed throughout much of the South, both during and after the war, but there were free elections. Too, you’d not convince any displaced person of the dustbowl years that they weren’t in the midst of a famine. There certainly was a political component to that disaster as well.
Wade
There is a difference between persistant food-shortages and actual famine (where a significant portion of the population actually starves to death).
I am not sure what the numbers on teh confederacy are, but that was a situation of a population under a major war and martial law, as you say (not to mention the slave population under the confederacy). Post-war, much of the population was disenfranchised and under occupation – much like Ireland during the potato famine.
As for the dustbowl – it is actually surprising how few people died of starvation during that period (though several thousand died of dust pneumonia). There were enough relief efforts to prevent wholescale famine in the region. People were hungry, and 2.5 million left the region, but the numbers that actually died from starvation were low.
John
I am glad Derrick Jensen took this tack, but I do not believe our current civilization can be reformed. We need to part ways with all the concepts that have informed the entire history of civilization–the central governments, standing armies, macro-economies that have defined the entire history of civilization and move toward a post industrial, decentralized, peaceable, democratic organization of society. Industrial civilization is on an inevitable destructive course. It is inherently unsustainable and cannot be redeemed by legislation, especially when the fox is guarding the henhouse, when there is a revolving door between the USDA and Monsanto (a practice of the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations–and for any starry-eyed Obama supporters still left out there, keep in mind it is his government that lied about the severity of the Gulf oil spill). Few of you may notice but we are actually in the midst of industrial collapse. As evidenced by the Gulf disaster, the nuke disaster in Japan, the system is breaking down helped along by increasingly violent weather and earthquakes and tsunamis. Nature is winning and for this to be win-win for humans, a sustainable way of life, steady state economy, and a way of organizing human society that respects nature’s arrangements is the only way out for humanity. So we better “get it” because nature will win out, with or without us. Or as Ken Kesey once said, “You are either on the bus, or off the bus.”
Griz — What you say makes a lot of sense to me. I wish more people would wake up and jump off that “civilization†bus that’s bound for hell in a hurry. But this time let’s get on a vehicle that’s not running on magic cool-aid. That trip left the dreams out in space, and lots of wreckage on the ground. Maybe we learned some things? I sure hope so, because this trip is way too important to blow.
Most folks are completely out of touch with the realities of Planetary Initiation. They think that this must be some New Agey delusion or crackpot occultism. The simple fact is that we on Earth are now facing exactly that situation. The evolution of intelligence on any planet in the Universe inevitably reaches a stage where the Power unleashed by their growing knowledge exceeds the capacity of those manifesting it to wisely utilize it. Unless this situation is resolved in a timely manner, that population will destroy themselves, and forfeit the opportunity to develop further and join the community of more highly evolved intelligences.
The necessary first step towards planetary salvation is for a significant number of persons to awaken to the impending doom, and take effective measures to avert it. The means to effect this first step are not beyond the present abilities of any one not too deeply asleep in cultural lies and delusions. Small groups of such persons can be designed to attract and educate others, with the potential to become a movement with sufficient numbers and innovative solutions to meet the world crisis. A fundamental illusion is that ordinary people are powerless and incapable of making a real difference. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that nothing other than this will be capable of meeting our pressing need.
Mike K–The Ken Kesey allusion in no way implies another electric kool-aid acid test. I just like the quote and it works for me. The ‘bus” we need to get on is one bound for a sustainable and democratic re-organization of human society that respects nature’s arrangements.
Griz — I did not mean to imply that your Kesey quote put you in the position of a 60’s throwback. I am still a fan of Kesey, in spite of all that unfolded from the unstable mixture of idealism and craziness back then — after all I was a part of that. The evolution of a true revolution is bound to go through some unsuccessful experiments in its course. So much the better to learn from. We could use some of the energy that motivated folks back then. Breaking out of the lukewarm doldrums we are stuck in now will take some fire.
I do agree with the direction you are pointing to. It will take some hard rowing to fight our way clear of the deadly currents of our present misdirections. The falls of our oblivion are much nearer than most realize….
mike k–I think what your posts are saying is that we cannot rely on government or legislation to point us in the right direction. If I am optimistic about anything is that much good is happening below the radar–individuals, small groups, NGOs, whole communities are actually doing things–planting gardens, starting CSAs,carrying out the technology transfer to renewable energy all without government help. I think you are also saying that for this to happen humans will need to evolve and that evolution will be a consciousness evolution. I do not mean to be warm and fuzzy in making this point. It will require of us a rigor and self-discipline unprecedented, but this should be joyful and fun not dour and puritanical. But it will take effort and realism, rather than runaway idealism.
I think Derrick Jensen is an interesting thinker. But this piece is an amazing exercise in total naivete. How are we to understand society today with such an a-historical analysis, so oblivious of class consciousness?
The question to be addressed is how did the present society develop, and what do we have to do to get rid of it? Of course, “this culture [read: system] is functionally, inherently, systematically unjust and unsustainable.” Previously, Derrick Jensen has been known for saying that civilization itself is unsustainable. But now, in this essay, he proposes a “legislative” solution which (unless this is a joke… on me and others like me) can only be called unrealistic capitalist utopianism on steroids.
The present system is controlled lock stock and barrel by the very corporations that are raping and plundering the earth. These corporations also control the political system. In fact, the political system is their state, not ours. When you think about it, they (the corporations/banks/capitalist ruling class) have all the control, and we have none. How different, for instance, is our political system from say Hosni Mubarak’s, the former Egyptian tyrant? We have two parties? Both of these parties conspire to keep all third parties out of the debates, and both take a commanding lead through corporate donations, which have just been strengthened by the legal system (the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United) which, low and behold, is also part and parcel of the capitalist state. “Legislative” solutions have about as much chance as a drop of cold water in a hot frying pan.
I used to think that Jensen was at the very least a realist, for thinking that the present system is unsustainable. The present system is indeed unsustainable, and will drive us all (starting with the animals but also including us humans) to extinction very soon, unless we overthrow it. But the present system is not necessarily the same as “civilization.” Human beings make their own history, but they make it in light of their past inheritances and experiences. Suppose we were to wake up and break from those past experiences, and revolutionize society according to a conscious design in which the true relationship of man and nature was reestablished? This is what Marx and Engels wanted. Think we can’t do it? We made the mess we’re in didn’t we? So why can’t we unmake it?
I wish you all well. But it is clear that the only road out for humanity is revolutionary socialism: we overthrow capitalism, and we re-design society in accordance with the preservation of both humans and nature. Nothing else will do. Violence might be involved. Sorry, but get real.
— Comradely greetings, Chris Kinder
cstephenkinder@aol.com
Hey, we snagged a Marxist! 🙂 Welcome, Chris. It’s a pleasure to hear from you. You are quite right to be shocked by this silliness from Jensen; many of us here are. Maybe you are right, it’s a joke. We can always hope.
The rest of your solution seems as whimsical as Jensen’s. I used to live in a country that had overthrown capitalism. It did not work out very well. ‘Sides… human troubles did not begin with the birth of capitalism a couple of centuries ago… they began a few thousand years ago… as you would see from the study of the late Neolithic. All the best to you, comrade, and come back any time.
Hear hear – Chris! Love your energy!! Great point Vera, about the Neolithic.
Dear Friends, Yes it’s true that, “human troubles did not begin with the birth of capitalism a couple of centuries ago… they began a few thousand years ago… as you would see from the study of the late Neolithic.” Human troubles have a long history, under various class-divided societies, starting with the first class division, that between men and women. The earliest agricultural societies as in ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, pretty much wrecked their local ecosystems.
But capitalism? This one wrecks ecosystems for lunch. By driving up the rate of exploitation of labor, and the expropriation of nature, into unheard of heights globally, capitalism has changed the game big time. Now it’s not just local ecosystems, but the whole biosphere that’s at stake.
But you know this. What country did you live in, Vera, that overthrew capitalism, and what went wrong? Have you looked at the writings of Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, who analyzed how Stalinism betrayed the revolution there?
Just as the bourgeois revolution had mistakes and setbacks, so too the workers’ socialist revolution has historic twists and turns. My hope is, we can work these out and move forward to a truly Marxist socialist revolution that can save humanity and the planet.
Comradely, Chris
Love your energy and comeback Chris!!
In solidarity, sandy (living in Siberia!!)
Levity aside people, please don’t let’s get sidetracked into another dual between ‘systems’. We have far too much of this already and all it does is strap every able-bodied mind to a pendulum which, being a pendulum, can only swing to and fro; marking time, but little else.
The ‘system’ is a red herring. It’s completely irrelevant (which is what makes Jensen’s present lapse all the more disturbing). Gandhi nailed it: “Good government is no substitute for self-government.” In a collective comprised of self-governing individuals, ANY system can be made to work. It’s no more than a procedural framework, after all.
It’s human nature that’s at the foundation of our present mess. It’s our immaturity, our childish inability to accept full responsibility for our actions and their consequences, our weakness when it comes to maintaining principles in the face of fear, intimidation or the temptations of self-indulgence, our reluctance to face what’s in the mirror and deal with it, our apathy and disinterest, our fear of diversity and difference which manifests as arrogance and disdain, through intolerance, all the way to genocide.
The revolution that’s needed here is the one that heralds The Age of Self-Government. Anything else is just a swing of the pendulum: same play, different actors.
“It’s human nature that’s at the foundation of our present mess.”
Wendy, I am not sure what you mean by human nature. Homo sapiens existed for 2 MM years. Civ has been around 6,000. What human nature?
“Wendy, I am not sure what you mean by human nature. Homo sapiens existed for 2 MM years. Civ has been around 6,000. What human nature?”
Human nature? Who and what we are, physically, psychologically and spiritually!! The range of behaviour open to us by virtue of that nature, and the choices we make within the contexts we find ourselves in.
What’s ‘civilisation’? It’s just a collective noun to describe the behaviour and achievements of a large group of human beings. It has no independent existence – no ‘thingness’ – of its own. It’s the sum of its constituents, nothing more, nothing less.
The same applies to ‘capitalism’ or ‘communism’ or any other schism. Boil it down to basics and it’s just a bunch of people getting together and agreeing to abide by a certain set of ideas (or a self-selecting elite deciding to impose those ideas on everyone around them).
What determines the success or failure of any ‘system’ is not the strength of the ideas. Ideas are just ideas: they don’t grow food, build shelters, share, trade, cooperate, disagree, fight, injure or kill each other. It’s PEOPLE that do that!
If people can’t govern their own behaviour, what possible hope can there be that any system of ‘government’ comprising such individuals would behave any differently than they do? If those same individuals are not even aware that they have a nature that requires governing … then we really are in trouble!
Wendy – you say that human nature is at the center of our current mess… so, I ask you “Who are we.” “what is this human nature that has created such a mess?”
“Wendy – you say that human nature is at the center of our current mess… so, I ask you “Who are we.†“what is this human nature that has created such a mess?—
@kulturCritic, without a tedious and wholly unnecessary essay on the entire range of human behaviour which is amply evident in any form or format in which people express themselves, maybe you could focus on what immediately followed my initial statement, viz “It’s our immaturity, our childish inability to accept full responsibility for our actions and their consequences, our weakness when it comes to maintaining principles in the face of fear, intimidation or the temptations of self-indulgence, our reluctance to face what’s in the mirror and deal with it, our apathy and disinterest, our fear of diversity and difference which manifests as arrogance and disdain, through intolerance, all the way to genocide.”
It’ll do for starters …
If that is our “human nature” sounds like we are FCUKED to me!!
Wendy — I am in consonance with much that you shared. Plato said, the State (culture) is the individual writ large. Others have opined that the government we have is the one we deserve. At any rate, I feel that a better world can only be created by better people. External rearrangements will never solve our problems. Pogo was right, we have met the enemy, and it is us. The guys in a prison group I took part in came up with this: If you are in a mess, YOU are the mess you are in. This is a basic understanding of AA, and indeed of all spiritual paths.
I agree with your inventory of our many personal defects. My question to you is: by what process are we to become “self-governing†individuals? Also, what arrangements are such evolved individuals likely to create in order to share our planet in peace and mutual prosperity? And I would be interested to hear your profile of the self-governing individual? Thanks for your insightful comments.
Wendy — I posted before reading your interesting dialog with kulture critic. I would say to kc, we are fucked….unless….we do something about it, and pronto.
@mike k, your guys were right, and @kc, if that’s all humanity amounted to then we really would be f*cked.
As I see it, no ‘evolution’ is necessary. We are already everything we need to be. All that’s necessary is that we wake up to the fact and reclaim it. Take responsibility for it, rather than pushing it away and trying to make it someone else’s problem. Responsibility = response-ability.
And as for the process, it’s already underway, and has been since time immemorial. It’s called growing up or, if you want to use psycho-speak, the process of individuation. It’s encapsulated in the myths of the hero’s journey found in every culture on Earth. None of us can duck it because our lives continually deliver up exactly the challenges we individually need. What we can do though, and have been doing to a progressively greater extent the more we’ve dropped the cultural rituals and markers that used to speak to this process, is to ignore it, deny it, rationalise it away as unrealistic, unscientific mythical twaddle, medicate it away, insulate ourselves from it under the guise of ‘health and safety’, or otherwise distance ourselves from it with a raft of excuses as to why it shouldn’t be personally applicable. The thing is through, the more we do that, the greater the challenges become until we’re finally forced to face up to them …
What would a society of grown-ups look like? I imagine, much as it did 250-odd years ago. I posted this quote from Lame Deer a way back on this thread, but it’s worth repeating:
“Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn’t have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn’t know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don’t know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.”
Wendy – I cannot disagree with your last post. I would only recommend you glance at the following monograph.
Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of Anarchy: The Western Illusion of Human Nature
MARSHALL SAHLINS
Wendy — I hope you are OK with some friendly, hopefully constructive critique?
“As I see it, no ‘evolution’ is necessary. We are already everything we need to be. All that’s necessary is that we wake up to the fact and reclaim it.†In the words of my (East) Indian teachers: I am That, You are That, All of this is That, And there is nothing other than That. (And that’s That!) By That they mean that ultimately indefinable Divine Reality which is the real foundation and meaning of everything we can be aware of. So done, case closed.
Not quite. There remains the situation that almost all of us are totally unaware of That, and our unfortunate behavior is ample testimony to that fact. The basic problem of embodied intelligent life is to gain the foregoing Realization, and live among each other on the basis of that Realization. It must be understood that this Realization is not at all a mere matter of intellectual assent or understanding, but a shift in consciousness that reveals a hidden world of Love, Beauty, and Power.
The point is that throughout history it has been understood that Realization is the supreme goal of intelligent life, and it ain’t cheap. This is the rationale for the variety of Paths and their practices, designed over the centuries to assist those drawn to this heroic endeavor. I don’t think Joe Campbell would disagree with me on this. To drop the whole machinery of our acquired ego is not a snap course, hence the small number who have actually managed it to some significant degree.
I hope my remarks do not strike you as fanciful or irrelevant. I am quite serious, and I feel that grasping the difficulty of the task ahead of us to unsnarl and heal the tremendous negative karma we have inherited and are perpetuating will require a realistic appreciation of what we are up against. On the other hand I believe we have the tools to do the job if we are willing to take them up.
I do not mean to say that considerable progress cannot be made, even by the least among us towards the supreme goal. Even a little of this medicine can achieve great healing.
@mike k – In a word, yes. I’m very familiar with what you’re speaking about (indeed have spent decades immersed in it and many other similar viewpoints, working towards a rationalisation of all world views, which is how I’ve come to increasingly more simple formulations that many mistake for naivety 🙂
The thing is, the Eastern world view can get as vastly overcomplicated and sophisticated as the Western world view is wont to do. Homo orientalis is no less prone to drama addition, delusions, misapprehensions and power trips than Homo occidentalis, and the establishment of spiritual hierarchy necessarily requires that you hype it up to the eyeballs and promulgate the illusion that That is something out of reach of ‘ordinary’ mortals. Ooops, there swings the pendulum again …
I’m not convinced most of us are totally unaware of That. Far from it, in fact. It all depends on how you contextualise the question and the language you use to do so. In the last few decades it’s a question I’ve asked an awful lot of people in a lot of different ways and I tend to meet with either acquiescence or outright denial, not the incomprehension that would signify a genuine lack of awareness. If you follow the premises of the Eastern world view and accept that individuality is relative and contingent and that at some level, consciousness is a continuum, then this is something every person not only CAN become aware of (by virtue of being conscious), but usually already is. The problem in the West is more that we lack the framework to hang these experiences on in order to validate, integrate and understand them. Often all that’s necessary is to give someone ‘permission’ to speak about them.
The West is woefully underequipped to deal with this dimension of our existence. The priesthood of organised religions don’t tend to ‘allow’ such experiences in those who aren’t card-carrying members, and the scientific priesthood don’t ‘allow’ them at all. So it becomes something we keep to ourselves or rationalise away as imagination or misapprehension. Or we sign up for the Eastern route or some New Age confection and make a career out of making it all as dramatic and difficult as possible. (As for ego, it has a vital function in maintaining the integrity of the individual. It becomes problematic only when it attempts to assume the role of master rather than servant, so I’d caution against following any exhortation to rid yourself of its entire machinery.)
At the end of the day, it’s all beautifully simple. It always is. We don’t even have to DO anything. We just have to be what we are, and in being so, we have no option but to be instruments of That. Or did you really think the thoughts in your head were yours alone?!!
Chris: “Human troubles have a long history, under various class-divided societies, starting with the first class division, that between men and women. The earliest agricultural societies as in ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, pretty much wrecked their local ecosystems.â€
That’s not a very long history. Going back 10,000 years, that’s only 5% of our species history. Maybe less, if a longer sapiens timeline emerges from studies. Before that, we were more or less egalitarian, more or less did not wreck ecosystems, did not wage wars (tho there always were skirmishes) and did not have the fabulously wealthy oppressing everybody else. And populations were more or less stable.
“But capitalism? This one wrecks ecosystems for lunch.†But isn’t that just what was already going on in Mesopotamia, scaled up via technology and oil?
“What country did you live in, Vera, that overthrew capitalism, and what went wrong? Have you looked at the writings of Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, who analyzed how Stalinism betrayed the revolution there?â€
Czechoslovakia. What went wrong? People who thought they knew better than other people, got into power, wrecked the old system, created a shitty new system, and eventually ran out of plunder and out of patience of the population. Without the Soviet Big Stick, it was a house of cards. And no, I don’t think Trotsky woulda done it better. Once you drag out the old shiny boot to force your fellows to make your ideals happen, human hell results.
I would be delighted if you took a peek at my favorite somewhat-disillusioned Marxist on my blog.
http://leavingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/logic-of-power-i/
“Human troubles have a long history, under various class-divided societies, starting with the first class division, that between men and women. The earliest agricultural societies as in ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, pretty much wrecked their local ecosystems.†That’s not a very long history. Going back 10,000 years, that’s only 5% of our species history. Maybe less, if a longer sapiens timeline emerges from studies. Before that, we were more or less egalitarian, more or less did not wreck ecosystems, did not wage wars (tho there always were skirmishes) and did not have the fabulously wealthy oppressing everybody else. And populations were more or less stable.
“But capitalism? This one wrecks ecosystems for lunch.†But isn’t that just what was going on in Mesopotamia, scaled up via technology and oil?
“What country did you live in, Vera, that overthrew capitalism, and what went wrong? Have you looked at the writings of Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, who analyzed how Stalinism betrayed the revolution there?â€
Czechoslovakia. What went wrong? People who thought they knew better than other people, got into power, wrecked the old system, created a shitty new system, and eventually ran out of plunder and out of patience of the population. Without the Soviet Big Stick, it was a house of cards. And no, I don’t think Trotsky woulda done it better. Once you drag out the old shiny boot to force your fellows to make your ideals happen, human hell results.
I would be delighted if you took a peek at my favorite disillusioned Marxist on my blog.
http://leavingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/logic-of-power-i/
(I apologize if this is a duplicate. My first posting vanished.)
Wendy, as I see it human nature is not far removed from chimpanzee (our first cousins, slightly removed) nature. And of course no discernable human evolution is possible on even a millenial scale. Subtle cultural changes maybe. This is what everybody’s talking about when they refer to evolution.
I like your image of the pendulum simply marking time – yes equals no, and here we are. It’s time we made the best of it.
Wendy — “At the end of the day, it’s all beautifully simple. It always is. We don’t even have to DO anything. We just have to be what we are, and in being so, we have no option but to be instruments of That. Or did you really think the thoughts in your head were yours alone?!!
For me, to think that there is nothing for me to do in a world that needs so much done is a very disempowering thought. Also to think that meditation, study, service to others is unnecessary flies in the face of millennia of wisdom teaching about the importance of following a spiritual path. Spiritual growth just does not come that cheaply. Your remarks remind me of “teachings†I heard from hippie gurus in the sixties. With all respect, I just don’t buy it.
kultureCritic — Sahlins seems a typical academic, in that he takes pages and pages of irrelevant erudition to finally state a simple truth in his final paragraph: That we are primarily what culture has made us. I have spent too much ink in these pages already making the same point about the “human nature†canard, without taking and ungodly amount of time to do it. Oh well, I suppose paid intellectuals have to do their thing. Thanks for sharing it anyway. The Greek history was interesting.
@mike k, you misunderstand what I’m trying to convey. The last thing I’m advocating is sitting around gazing at your navel with a flower up your nose. ‘Being’, as opposed to ‘doing’, is not a passive occupation. Far from it. It’s difficult to convey these ideas in this medium, but I’ll try and summarise as briefly as possible. Take it as read that there are truckloads of subtle nuances.
We’re here on this forum avidly discussing what the hell we ‘do’ about the mess we’ve got the planet and ourselves into, trying to come up with workable ideas while taking Jensen’s apart, getting hung up on ‘system’s and their various merits and demerits, etc, etc, as if it’s all down to us to come up with a solution and put it into action.
In being what we are – cells in the body of the planet, coalescences of consciousness, however you want to formulate the relative and contingent nature of our individuality – we have no option but to do exactly what the planet’s homeostatic mechanisms are directing us to do. We just have to follow the path and perform the actions that the deep urges within each of us are prompting us towards. But the longer we cling onto the idea of ‘doing’ the more we get in our own way, the more we labour under the misapprehension that our woefully inadequate intellects are up to the task (which is simply another instance of ego overstepping its bounds), and the less we actually achieve.
In ‘being’, taking care of others is a given too – it’s part of our nature as social beings. We do it without thinking. It’s when we start thinking that problems arise. Perform whatever spiritual practice you need to to get out of your own way and drop your conditioning. It can be as complex or as simple as you like or need. But in the simplicity of ‘being’ lies a far more elegant solution than the ones buzzing around in the ‘doing’.
It might all a bit seem paradoxical, but as Niels Bohr famously said, “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
I find this article relatively weak compared to the otherwise very cutting and direct criticism of Jensen. In former columns his arguments were directed at that political action, regulations, authoritarian rulership does not lead us anywhere. Even though this was meant as a thought experiment and it is reasonable to assume that the author and most of the readers do not really believe in it coming real, it nevertheless leaves a feeling of credibility to regulations and proper laws to hold the possibility of saving the planet from destruction. This is what environmentalists of all sorts dig and what caused things like the EPA, Greenpeace and the WWF (meant in this context as negative examples of watered down environmentalism!). The head on a pike comment was more what I would have expected.
The underlying concept is interesting though – the natural concept that each one should be fully responsible for his actions, even if that action was part of a larger operation makes very much sense. Though of course it loops back to lifestyle choices as it comes back to individual purity. How can I call for machine operators or accountants of a corporation to take part of the blame if I myself am also complicit by buying their products? Lifestylism is not the solution and Jensen already wrote about that, so in a way this leaves me puzzled – where is the line to be drawn between those who are to blame and have to pay in case of a disaster because they “did their jobs” and those who can rightfully say that they were “just doing their jobs” without taking the blame?
There is no clear distinction in the article, so I find it very confusing and overall one of the weaker ones from Jensen.
Wendy, you say: “In being what we are – cells in the body of the planet, coalescences of consciousness, however you want to formulate the relative and contingent nature of our individuality – we have no option but to do exactly what the planet’s homeostatic mechanisms are directing us to do. We just have to follow the path and perform the actions that the deep urges within each of us are prompting us towards. But the longer we cling onto the idea of ‘doing’ the more we get in our own way, the more we labour under the misapprehension that our woefully inadequate intellects are up to the task (which is simply another instance of ego overstepping its bounds), and the less we actually achieve.â€
The problem is that we do have other options than the preferred one you have indicated, and we are relentlessly pursuing them. As indicated by Sandra’s article in this issue of Orion, the directors of Monsanto show little intention to stop poisoning us all. The American military continues to operate under the aim of achieving “full spectrum dominance†and destroying or enslaving all who oppose it. I am sure you can think of numerous unhealthy options being enacted by agents in our world today. It seems unlikely to me that folks are going to change their harmful behaviors just because I have decided to be on the basis of the homeostatic mechanisms of the planet urging me to do so.
I have problems with checking my intellect at the door in order to enter an unthinking state of being mysteriously informed by planetary vibrations. I believe we are going to need our best thinking, as well as other resources to confront the complex web of difficulties we are facing. Intellect is like other powers: it can be used skillfully and constructively or it can be used poorly and destructively. It is up to us to discriminate, and choose the former.
Your prescription for living in today’s world has failed to hint at any methodology for propagating it to others, or methods by which people could enter what in fact would be a rather distant and rare state compared to what they have up to now experienced and acted from. Therefore I must take your ideas as a wishful daydream, rather than a practical program.