If life isn’t worth fighting for, is it worth living? Gaia won’t rebound until we master our desires.
There are many reasons for the ‘mystifying’ partial paralysis of humanity’s collective response to environmental collapse. Our No 1 biological imperative is survival, but like a solar panel on a cloudy day, it has been overshadowed and disabled by our ‘greater’ imperative of ‘junkie’ consumption.
Foremost of these barricades to action, is sheer intractable momentum. Our modern life is like a runaway freight train on a downhill stretch of track, surrounded by a forest we don’t see — too immense and all pervasive to be recognized as we remain focused on the minutia of our petty concerns.
More readily obvious, and therefore generally accepted causes, stem from the genocidal rampage of the Fossil Fuel industry, the scorched earth policies of corporations in general and the various methods they all employ to facilitate and mask their crimes. These include a veritable dust storm of lies and misinformation, as well as decades of well ‘funded’ and carefully crafted legislation enabling Gaia’s rape, while shielding her violators.
The long game of creating consumer gullibility, dependency and complacency, through both ‘convenience addiction’ and the centralization of the urban landscape into a dirty-fuel consuming ‘rat’s maze’, provides the silken barbed wire which binds us. If we are lucid enough to see past the deceptions, this latter infrastructural dependency makes escape nearly impossible. Just for added security, the wealth interests and corporations, as well as a largely compromised media, make generous ‘contributions’ to insuring that environmental pro-action remains securely shackled.
But this seemingly unassailable construct is not my subject here, as I choose to focus on the keys we already possess for unlocking survival implementation.
While they are ‘in our pocket’, we mostly remain unaware of it, simply because we are looking elsewhere for our salvation. We need to look inward and recognize our avoidance of choosing to accept our own place in this mess. Once we own our part, it will empower us to act immediately on an individual basis, as well as, coalesce to create a stronger front for mounting an effective counter-offensive.
Worse than going into a fight with your hands tied, is not knowing they are — especially when that knowledge is the ‘knife’ with which to cut those bonds.
We possess the ability to bring these giants to their knees, but without understanding our ‘role’ in creating environmental collapse, we remain unable to do so. In order to tame and control the Beast, we need to stop feeding it, and to do that we need to address the cause of our compulsion to do so. A workable awareness of this can only be achieved through exploring the denial strewn landscape of our ‘inner world’, for this is the well-spring of so much human failure and suffering.
Lording over all other nonfeasance is human stupidity, which has more facets than a ‘brilliant’, but none of the sparkle. If there was an Olympics of Stupidity, there wouldn’t be enough gold in the world for all the medals awarded. Since all of us have first hand experience with it, I don’t feel the need to go into depth about its contribution to environmental response paralysis. Suffice it to say, it permeates all the other causes of our inaction.
It’s what makes us stand waist deep in the ocean and stupidly watch this approaching Tsunami.
Too many of us are unable to react until the need to do so is so threatening that our only options become panic impaired and often futile attempts at damage control — accompanied with calls for divine intervention.
Of the seven deadly sins, all but wrath and lust make the list of pro-action ‘cement overcoats’. Greed, sloth, and gluttony are front and center in their roles — while envy and pride move behind the scenes.
‘Publicity’ and ‘public relations’ are handled by denial and its various avatars: cognitive dissonance, despair, despondency and doom — and they should all have been fired long ago. Although they are all highly skilled, their expertise is misdirected and they are driving us into insolvency.
Denial is the ‘star’ player here, with extraordinary abilities. It is a shape shifter, with double blind capabilities and it knows no boundaries. It can flow uphill as well as down, leaving no-one safe from its dominance. Its dominion is the human mind, and it rules with an iron hand (in a kid glove). But it shuns pomp, preferring to lurk in the shadows, while remaining largely non-visible due to its stealth adeptness. Although it’s goal is to clear the cognitive table of extraneous concerns for greater focus when dealing with first-come first-serve demands, denial has gone ‘off-rail’ taking on the enormity of environmental collapse. To protect our inner comfort, it’s willing to destroy everything (comfort included). In this, it is simply doing its job, but with a level of efficiency and remarkable efficacy that threatens our survival.
I suffer from something resembling a form of low level ‘PTSD’, which I acquired from the ‘shock and awe’ of my life. It manifests as non-specific anxiety which I keep in check with exercise, work and other engaging pursuits. In many situations distraction is eviscerating, but when properly channeled, it can be empowering. Observing the effect this triggered anxiety has on me and recognizing the related signs of it in others, I have come to the conclusion, that many suffer from some form of it, especially the elderly. This realization led me to wonder if we aren’t contaminated by it collectively, as a species, due to the unending abuse we subject each other to. Over-lapping wars and conflicts create ‘Death Necklaces’, unevenly strung with poison pearls of various size, the noxious fumes from which permeate the body collective. These traumas then get passed along in compensating behavioral patterns imprinted by parents to offspring. There is reason to believe that they may also be transferred for a couple of generations as a genetic legacy. This alone would be sufficient to leave an unbroken chain of post-trauma comprised from the shock-waves produced by our carpet-bombing of life.
However, in this regard, our human (but not humane) ‘generosity’ knows no bounds. Slavery, segregation, degradation, exploitation, and subjugation are all fecund with collateral traumatic ‘dividends’, as are crime, social and domestic abuse and run amok aggression. Just for ‘fun’ various catastrophes and whatever else life chooses when using us for target practice get mixed into this piñata of traumatic ‘treats’. That we are capable of functioning at all is proof of our resilience and tenacity.
It bares mentioning here that upwards of two thirds of the worlds population lead desperate lives of chronic abject poverty. This is the result of a ‘Whitman’s Sampler’ of the very worst abuses man doles out to the ‘weak’.
Together these create a debilitating post-traumatic dysfunction destructive enough to forego the need for generational transference, (which takes place anyway). It alone is sufficient to psychically cripple entire societies, by fueling a slow-burn which ensures their chronic underdevelopment. Despite this, in the past and still today, the poor and ‘underprivileged’ have their will to survive tested daily, as they get little respite from life’s challenges. They are ready and don’t have to ‘consider’ surviving. For them it is an integral part of life and they are conditioned for the challenge. We are not.
In the developed world, the more fortunate of the exploited live paycheck to paycheck as they sink into the quicksand of debt — indentured to the corporate Beast. They know little of a fuller world. If their ceaseless spinning doesn’t distract them enough, our society vomits attention bait that these poor devils gobble up — so hungry are they for any stimulation to counterbalance their stultifying lives. This suffocates them and they react by chasing novelty, while futilely evading the vacuum.
The privileged should be in the forefront of this struggle, but collectively we’re failing, because we don’t value our ‘half empty’ privilege and our priorities got screwed-up long ago. We’re ceaselessly dissatisfied with what we have, and in our own way, also grievously impoverished.
If we are indeed collectively ‘saturated’ by the dark stain of all this suffering, one of its most serious consequences lays in our auto-reactive ‘glass half empty’ negative response to any situation regarding human collective capabilities — which has preferentially solidified into a form of ‘negative confirmation bias”.
Although we understandably hold a low opinion of humanities’ aptitudes, this ‘yin’ becomes more in line with reality when tempered with the ‘yang’ of our extraordinary achievements.
Negative events always leave a bigger ‘impact crater’ in our memory than positive ones, because trauma builds deep defensive trenches. Overtime, these keep getting deeper and while some may be abandoned, they are seldom leveled, as we’re too busy digging fresh ones to be afforded timeout for healing.
All of which makes a more balanced ‘yin-yang’ view essential when attempting to rally to face any crisis and indispensable for making workable beneficial decisions for pro-action. Unfortunately, our pro-active efforts, as well as our will to engage, continue to be undermined by our engrained collective cynicism.
Quite recently I had what might be an insight into another factor contributing to climate action ‘kneecapping’.
Perhaps we just don’t want to live bad enough to make an attempt to survive?
Has our semi-artificial lifestyle tipped the balance and deprived us of the benefits of a fuller, more authentic life, psychically devaluing the act of living, while undermining its tensile strength
— leaving us a half-life caused by ‘rational-active’ decay?
Perhaps we have so undermined the life-enhancing stimulation provided by an unabridged engagement with actual physical reality and the accompanying interactions with the multifarious substance of it, that we have damaged our will to survive?
We certainly appear to be at a loss to find reasons enough to get up off our fat asses and make the effort.
For ‘effort’ is the ‘mover’ of life. Life should challenge us, physically and mentally (as these are actually two parts of a ‘divide at your own peril’ whole). Both the good and the bad can act as life affirming catalysts, because by pursuing the goal of preserving good and persevering through bad, life becomes ‘challenging’, which strengthens and stimulates us. A full life should embrace not just the good, but the bad also, because together they add exponentially to the richness of our lives. When dealt with in a constructively pro-active manner, the adverse tempers us and instills depth as well as fullness.
Luxury is toxic and convenience is vampiric, but we lust for them. These dreams blind us to the beauty surrounding us. We are hooked on novelty, and ‘bites’ and ‘clicks’, diminishing our immersive view of the ‘ocean of life’, reducing it to just the light flickering off the surface, while we remain oblivious to the depths below. Consumption feeds off superficiality. ‘New’ is the pixelated carrot luring us ever onward to further insatiable desires. Their shallowness however leaves our souls famished.
That we would even consider turning our backs on the ‘groaning table’ of the real world, for the sophomorically cut-and-paste faux world of Meta, and it’s myriad of hydra-heads online, is a telling sign of the state we’ve collectively fallen into. Meta clips our senses from 5 to 2 and beggars our capacity to imagine. This last loss becomes serious when trying to gauge our personal value as an agent for change, as well as the value of change itself, for imagination is the leg-up of projective vision.
We’ve become domesticated consumer livestock and are now sufficiently fattened to be butchered by our own hand. As consumers, we’ve been conditioned to be passive, malleable and receptive. Although cattle will stampede if frightened, they’ve never been seen to ‘protest’ against their imminent slaughter.
In the 60s when the young were threatened with destruction by being shipped off to fight in a conflict that they knew to be wrong, they disrupted the entire country and created a backlash the helped get us out of the Vietnam War quagmire. When gas prices were jacked up during the Carter administration, there were protests and fights at the pump. But in the succeeding decades this ‘fire within’ became subdued, if not snuffed out entirely. In the Bush / Cheney era we remained docile, emitting only low frequency grumbling when gas prices were again shoved high up our asses, and this time corporations got in line for the consumer cluster fuck because they knew the ‘pump was primed’. During the unrest of the Trump era, protesting was largely sequestered to minorities; first immigrants and ‘aliens’ in California and then the BLM movement, mostly in coastal cities. Fortunately, we’ve seen the awakening of the ‘sleeping Giant’ in the world wide rallies organized to force meaningful environmental action by politicians and push back on the power of the FF industry. However, the media either ignored it or damagingly underplayed it, and the public at large remains unengaged.
Even though survival is hot wired into us genetically, in order to enable it, our survival skills need to be recognized, nurtured, practiced and strengthened — and this does not happen sufficiently playing games online.
Our will to survive is withered by courting ease while spurning challenge, and real life enforcing stimulation does not come so much through the pandering ‘new’, but rather through regenerative engagement with the sustaining ‘old’, particularly that which has had the strength and quality to survive time. For by returning to the rich offerings of human creative fecundity, and embracing the challenge of exploring that extraordinary inventory, as well as struggling to comprehend these riches, life takes on a exponentially more fulfilling experience — one that offers true satisfaction, solace and inner peace, as well as clarity about the splendid wonder and mystery of life, so necessary for ‘charging’ the will to survive. But perhaps most importantly it offers perspective, which we sorely lack from being too focused on temporal stimulation as we live ‘in the moment’, severed from the past while spinning a future built by desires — not reality.
Without the guidance we lose by discarding the past, what are we to make of the future?
The inquisitive side of our minds is conditioned to shut down when dealing with the familiar. Although we find comfort and security in familiarity, that works best when it is accepted as a known quantity and taken for granted. This stops us from developing our cognitive faculties for deep thinking, and so we skim the surface of life, extending very shallow roots which inadequately sustain us and fail to bind securely. This in turn, cuts our resilience and undermines our appreciation for, and love of life. Much of our life experience has become superficial, vicarious and indirect. We’ve become passive bystanders, rather than active participants. Our goal is to do as little as possible, to be as free as possible to do nothing of any real substance. We take comfort in the maze and would be at a loss if we found our way out of it.
The counterfeit consumption driven version of life we currently exist in and embrace through sloth and ignorance, is a landscape of illusions, and like a blue-screen stage, empty until filled with the ‘CGI’ of desire. It is dystopian and an ‘Orphian’ half-world inhabited by ‘shades’.
We’re quickly loosing touch with what it really means to be alive, as we chase chimeras in hamster wheels, and can no longer see what’s worth fighting for. Any insight is quickly swept away down the raging rapids of our swollen ‘river’ of obsessive compulsive consumption.
Exasperating this, our consumer culture has also served to abstract our perception of reality and we view it as if once removed. Television, cinema, advertising, ‘predatory’ news, social media, virtual reality and now A.I. have all partitioned us off from direct experiential life connections. These savory diversions erode immediate interaction with the physical environment of its worth and once cut off from it this way, we’re left apathetic and desensitized with numbed emotions. ‘Dumbing down’ meets ‘numbing down’. Our inner lives become stunted, making us the environmental equivalent of dead-beat dads.
Our fundamental sense of greater responsibility is decimated, which in turn exterminates a primary source of self-worth, by negating the deep satisfaction of providing a meaningful productive contribution to the greater ‘whole’.
My involvement in the arts has had a profound effect on my life and my love for it. I’ve more than paid for my price of admission in hardships, but that has had the benefit of deepening my comprehension and appreciation of the achievements of others. Art and music are not just vehicles for beauty and a map of our inner emotional landscape — they are a pathway to the ‘mysteries’ and the soul. And the best art is fathomless. So instead of running to the next X-men movie (which I find thoroughly enjoyable, like ‘spun’ sugar), I return to the same Vivaldi concerto over and over to plumb its depths, while pacing myself to savor the expanding pleasure it imparts.
I did not turn my back on our consumer culture, because I never embraced it in the first place.
I’m too deeply invested in the ‘old fashioned’ world and the dividends it pays have too great a value for me to be enticed away by ‘snake oil novelty’. Over the course of my life I’ve learned to recognize authenticity and beneficial change. In the process, I’ve constructed a ‘firewall’ that guards me from being hornswoggled by half-baked diversions. When surrounded with creative production generated through selfless devotion, as well as being intimately steeped in an abundance of cultural pursuits, one intuitively recognizes the worthlessness of consumer B.S..
To put it bluntly, I don’t want the shit they’re ‘selling’ and rarely ever have.
When I view the current and potential level of destruction resulting from climate collapse, my concern goes way beyond myself, my loved ones or my species. The profound depth of my cultural interconnections sharpens the edge of the pain I suffer for the loss of all this ‘treasure’. My artistic, as well as athletic abilities, provide me with a deeper comprehension of the horrific consequences of our squandering of these riches for the sake of ‘shiny baubles’ and mind numbing distractions.
For decades, when I visit a museum, the sumptuousness of the experience becomes tattered by the ‘rude’ awareness that everything enthralling me may soon perish. The eternal has become transient.
Perhaps a partial list might help bring better focus: music, mathematics, food, art & architecture, literature, cinema, archaeology, history, sports and etc. — or sharpening the focus: Mozart, ice cream, the Mona Lisa, the Parthenon, “War and Peace”, baseball, Paris — in short everything, with barely a scrap left and no one to appreciate and marvel and dream.
(Also, making up an infinitely empty list of its own, ‘the what could have been’, as our potential shows no bounds.)
Yet all of this pales when seen in the light of the natural world, because my love of nature has been strong and nurturing all my life. It is a bond that won’t fray. When my life completely collapsed years ago, and I lived in a ‘twilight zone’ for countless months after, it came to my aid, valiantly struggling to fill the void. When day-after-day was a waking nightmare that crushed my senses, if I chanced to hear a bird chirping outside my ‘prison’, a tiny aperture would open in the dark windowless cell which was my consciousness and for just a moment I could ‘look’ through and ‘see’ that the world I’d been torn from was still out there waiting for me to return. And that sustained me and gave me the hope of perspective. Nature is an overflowing spring of splendor, wonder and mystery.
It is our Mother.
All of this is just to say that I ‘get’ why life is worth fighting for. I’ve gone in search of Eurydiceand the netherworld brings me no comfort.
For too many of us, Nature is the lawn and the weeds and the bugs which exasperate us and the weather which is rarely to our liking. It’s what we see from our our car windows as we speed past.
We’ve collectively, very effectively cut ourselves off from nature in increments and have reached the point where the disconnect is so thorough, that the landscape around us has become like a backdrop, to be discarded once the play has had its run. Our primary interaction with the natural world consists in fighting it back, as it attempts to reclaim what we’ve usurped.
We have robbed our selves of our source of renewal and strength and can no longer see the harm of our abuse, rapaciousness and neglect. The murder of Gaia seems inevitable as we can’t find the ‘reason’ to stop it.
By removing ourselves from the deep interconnection with life our not-so-far-distant ancestors experienced, we have ‘dehumanized’ ourselves into nameless abstractions, stripping away essential aspects of communication and interaction and in the process undermining social integrity and cohesion.
Coupled with overpopulation, human worth has taken a life threatening blow and we respond with a wild-swing of over-compensation in the form of rampant narcissistic ‘privilege’.
Consequently, our over stimulated lives are under stimulated in the most vital ways. And when searching for the strength to survive, this becomes a serious deficit.
Nevertheless, though I do think we’ve hobbled ourselves, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that when pushed hard enough, we will discover that certain bonds are indelible. While our survival imperative has been buried like a corpse without rites, it will soon erupt like a volcano.`
Of course, the real test of my theory will come when the density of environmental collapse blocks evasion through the mists of our delusions, forcing us to choose. Although we’ve chopped our will to survive into pieces, like a flatworm, it will reappear from a fragment, because there really is no choice.