Civilization isn't mankind's biggest whoop-de-doo. It isn't "the pinnacle of human success. " It ain't even really all that fun, especially for most of the folks who make the whole silly thing possible the workers and small businesses that are called the backbone of the "economy".
How can I say such "blasphermy"?
Because our kind of civilization, specifically the one we live it, is a large hierarchical social structure coupled with some very rigid beliefs and bureaucracies. In our civilization, all the food is put under lock and key and we must pay for what the earth produces naturally. All the land is "owned" by the force of almighty legal papers, and the mutterings of 'law' made for kings basically makes us slaves to the people who will profit most from this way of life we lead for them. It's killing us slowly and making us miserable, confused, and unhealthy. Even our sugar-addicted over-processed foods are not designed for human consumption, but to maintain a profitable civilization.
We, the working class, go to work for most of our lives doing shit-work, busy-work, or creating new inventions with the most vibrant parts of our intellect to make someone else wealthy. We give them the fruits of our brains efforts and dreams. You invent something at work, it ain't yours it's the company's proprietary information, by the power of law and paper. Your ideas have been taken, assimilated, copyrighted and they are no longer yours. Basically, you can't profit from your own inventions if it's on company time, which is a huge chunk of your lifetime with equipment you could never buy on what you get paid.
We work away the precious hours of our lives, as our kids grow up, our friends grow old, and when we retire we can't deal with who we married anymore because we weren't there. We didn't see our husband or wife change into someone else, while our relationships were put in deep freeze, while our noses were to the grindstone.
We make this horrific sacrifice for those who may already be very wealthy, who have time to develop relationships, who can easily afford to live the lives we deny ourselves because if we didn't work we would be losers. We are conditioned from birth to desire a job, and we so truly believe in it we are convinced we would not be able to acquire food, find land to live on, or defend ourselves against bullies or bully nations without this sacred state of dependant slavery.
We are conditioned that to be "lazy," to be a scavenger, or just choose not to participate in modern pyramid-building games (jobs) somehow makes you a huge failure as a human being. Did you ever question what all this "productivity" produces for you? How much stuff is in your house you never use? What is your "productive" compulsion covering up, or denying in all this busy-bee bullshit?
Well folks I hate to bust yer bubble the only people who could possibly find happiness in busywork or slavery are the slave masters when the check rolls in, sadists, machines, the brain damaged who don't know any better, pathological masochists, or people paralyzed in a self destructive belief system they think is reality.
In history there were "mysteriously abandoned "cultures like the Maya, the Anasazi. Archeologists found out that these civilizations failed. The usual excuses, like crop failure, flood, or wars, just didn't fit with archeological evidence. So eventually they had to admit that these people abandoned their "cities" and went back to hunter -gatherer tribalism.
It took a long time for archeologists to even think of this idea, because this idea is not an option in our preserve-civilization-at-all-costs belief system. Time and time again archeologists find magnificent high culture type cities. . . and could find no good alternative explanation as to why they ceased to be occupied. It was like people just up and left the cities. Why would they do that? Where did all these people go? There is no evidence of mass ruin. Could it be they went back to being tribes of hunter-gatherers? Why? Could it be that the slaves to the idea, the people doing the grunt work, the busy work, found that a "civilized" way of life was unfulfilling and in a fit of honesty just walked away with their friends into the woods and picked berries and caught rabbits, lazed in the sunshine and sang songs and played?
Let's do some math.
"A hunter gatherer who needs 2, 000 calories a day to live has to expend only 400 calories to get them because that is the rate that hunting and gathering pays off one calorie of work gets you five calories of food. By contrast a farmer who needs 2,000 calories a day to live has to expend 1,000 calories to get them because that's the rate farming pays off one calorie of work gets you two calories of food. For a food-hungry person to trade hunter-gathering for farming is like a money-hungry person trading a job that pays five dollars an hour for one that pays two dollars an hour." Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization
This bears truth in my experience. When I was a kid I knew where there were some wild blackberry and raspberry bushes in a huge patch in an overgrown corner of a field near my home. In July through mid-to-late September I could eat 2 pounds of sweet, succulent, relatively bug-free berries two times a week, without much effort, and for free. I would pick more to take home sometimes, fill up a kettle with them. These bushes were prolific. When the raspberry patches were plowed over to build a fundie Baptist church, that free food source from childhood was gone in a few hours.
Ironically, the huge force-ripened raspberries you see in the supermarket go for 3 dollars a quarter pint
and they are sour too, they will rot before they ever get sweet!! In Japan, raspberries are a luxury item. They go for 6 dollars for just a few berries!
There are rabbits, deer and ducks in my yard. Every fall, Canadian geese fly across the country. Grocery stores throw out perfectly edible food everyday. If you get there early you can get free food if you are willing to scavenge. Dumpter diving at apartment complexes is a great way to get free furniture. I have gotten some very nice things because they were out of style.
Americans have been taught to loathe what appears to them as poverty. Scavenging or 'loafing' it doesn't bode well for the economy, not if people don't buy stuff. Just look at George Bush a few days after "September 11," urging people huddled around the TV to go out and shop and spend. Funny he says that when bankruptcy is at an all-time high and savings accounts are at an all time low and credit cards can charge as high or higher than as 20% interest on a purchase!! So get in that gas guzzling SUV and shop till ya drop, slave.
Originally before civilization taught us to be unwise all lunches were free lunches. The perception of what looks "poor" is only relative to your class position. The wealthy see working-class stiffs as the troublesome poor. Working-class stiffs see welfare moms as the troublesome poor. Welfare moms see homeless crack-heads as the troublesome poor. Yet the wealthy sometimes "slum it" and steal each other's clothes during parties why?
Being working-class or running a small business, it is imperative that you loathe the homeless, the bums, and the freaks. Businessmen have looked down on people who do things like gather scrap metal, panhandle, or steal from corporations. Corporations, in case you didn't know it, are cynical enough about this civilization that their "standard accounting" factors in merchandise loss due to theft from pissed-off workers and those who 'fall through the 'cracks'
onto the pavement in this urban jungle.
Look at those fellow human beings living like trolls under a bridge. It's harder to look at them like upstanding good people like yourself when they don't play by culture's rules. They ignore the rules of going with the program that painfully bind you too. They're living in the gutter, when all your struggle, all those hours at work just got you on the curb, socially and societally. Misery loves company. And bullies need culture for company, so they can get social sanction for their acts of cruelty. Coincidence? Nope. The wealthy are born secure in their towers of possession and over-the-top social esteem and cultural power. So emotionally, they can afford to go into the gutter once in awhile and let their hair down and be "uncivilized " for a few hours and not feel threatened by the way the other half lives. They live their leisure lifestyle closer to how the bum and the hunter-gatherer lives in freedom. The rich just aren't doing it in a hole, and they have us hunt and gather all our lives for them.
There are several beliefs that keep us chained to this unsatisfying way of life:
#1. We are powerless people who can't invent a way out of our own mistakes.
#2 There is only one right way for all groups of humans to live their life.
#3 The private or governmental ownership of land, water, food and other necessary things to support biological life is 'normal' or even necessary.
#4 Growing all your own food is the best or only way to acquire food.
#5 Money is necessary to exchange things.
#6 Human beings are intrinsically greedy, narcissistic, power-hungry, evil beings that must be controlled.
#7 Civilization in its current hierarchical form must exist at all costs.
#8 Tribalism is always bad and must be primitive or non technological to be truly "tribal".
#9 All social revolutions must contain violent bloody upheavals to topple a 'hierarchy'
and these revolution "winners" must then set up a new civilization.
#10 Walking away from civilization, withdrawing any support for any self made "leader" or "boss and doing and nothing to help them or their projects, companies and finding new ways of sustaining yourself is impossible to do.
# 11 Refusing to seek obscene amounts of wealth and endlessly acquire possessions you do not really use but have anyway is crazy.
#12 Doing more of a thing that doesn't work already will fix a problem. Doing something else will make the problem worse (social programs).
#13 Other people must agree with your way of perception, and must listen to it as if it is gospel truth or they can't be trusted. They can't be allowed to grow at their own pace, and since they won't grow fast enough for those of us who want to try a new way of life, we must wait for them to learn to be like us before we try becoming free ourselves.
What would you do if all these 13 beliefs were just things installed in your head, these perceptions you believe so strongly you were willing to be uncomfortable all your life for it. . . Beliefs running so deep you go to work at a useless job you hate all your life because you are convinced it's so damn true and so absolute. . . Beliefs you hold too close to what you are that you willingly go to war to die because you believe there is no other way of life possibly worth living?
For just a moment . . . (humor me)
Go over the list of those 13 things by yourself, in the privacy of your own heart. Try to develop an inner imaginative "what if" scenario. What do you imagine? Chaos? Upheaval? Or people forming communes of friends and kin, working together, sharing resources, gathering, scavenging, hunting, learning. Having the time to find themselves.
Imagine what your life might be like for you, if those 13 things were proven to be lies? What would you do, with that freedom? What would it feel like scary, a huge responsibility? Or strangely liberating, but perhaps painful?
They are only beliefs, holding civilization together
and if this kind of civilized life makes you unhappy you can change it, you know. You can go beyond it, either gradually or suddenly. It may be a grand adventure, the kind of adventure that the civilized chess game of bloody wars never offers. These beliefs are no more real than say, a rabbit's foot is really lucky, or leprechauns dance around pots of gold at the end of a rainbow (you won't find them 'cause rainbows are circular).
These beliefs only seem real because we invest them with our own belief-power and make them so true.
And our beliefs, be they conscious or unconscious, can mold our perception of reality for us, like which "lenses" we choose to look at the world through. If these beliefs are strong enough they will shape how we interact with this world, and how we see our lives. Beliefs can restrain a person
or set them free as they deconstruct every belief they cling to. Beliefs can a build 'civilization' full of people and convince them to exist in places they'd rather not be, just like invisible bars of steel. Tearing down cherished beliefs makes the steel bars disappear, and it can reconfigure your psyche, transform you, and transcend your perceptions.
What would it be like if every belief in your mind was questioned? How does it feel to not believe in this memetic programming you learned from birth, and learn how to question a belief until you can pick the beliefs that work for you and discard them when they don't work anymore? It's only natural to change. After all, by the time we are 7 years old every molecule in our bodies has been replaced by new ones that were not present at our birth.
Our bodies change into new forms all the time, so why don't we let our beliefs change as painlessly? Because we have invested ourselves into it. Invested these beliefs with parts of our identity. And it meets our social needs for a "place" in "society" and recognition of who we (think we) are.
When I thought of civilization and belief in this way, deeply. . . I began to feel like a prisoner, a disoriented slave. I felt so exploited, used, denied, powerless, and pissed off. I got pissed about the raspberry bushes. I felt duped and bullied by this culture, duped by my parents, who were duped their parents, etc.
all the way back to the "fertile crescent" or "birthplace of civilization". I felt like a hypocrite, a liar, an outcast, a blasphemer, a heretic. I felt I had acted irresponsibly towards others by letting these "representatives" in government wreak havoc all over the world in the name of profit while I shopped at Wal-Mart for a pair of jeans.
I felt so alone, thinking this far outside the box.
I felt the humiliating sting of my own lack of self empowerment, confidence and inventiveness in seeking my way to my own damn freedom. I felt silly for all the times I assumed people were assholes when they were just confused, in pain or going with the cultural program laid out before them, living the lives not quite lived that these beliefs run for us all, in our heads.
After the pain of realization, I got some motivation. I felt the urge to slip over the prison wall and take as many brothers and sisters as I could, if they were willing to go with me . . . and go.
