What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #10

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When I look closely, what I see is that human

capacities and characteristics have always been

medlated by the larger society.

Always.

One person I spoke with who discussed our

present predicament in terms of inherent human

characteristics was Richard Manning.

to survive in our hunter-gatherer

days. . . a very narrow field of vision.

You had to be concerned with what

was happening around you in the

immediate hundred yards.

You had to be worried about what was going to

happen in the next ten seconds or five minutes.

Where was that tiger going to come from that

was going to bite your neck and kill you?

So our strongest instincts are

geared to the immediate.

Our adrenaline doesn't start to flow

when we read about global warming.

It starts to flow when somebody

put a fist in our face.

And yet the Haudenosaunee evolved a

culture that balanced those strong instincts.

They make decisions based on their

impact on the seventh generation.

Contrast that with the culture of Empire.

What we've never been able to do is recognize

a limit coming from thirty or forty years out

and behave accordingly.

And so we haven't seen climate change coming.

And most people don't see oil depletion coming.

And there are other forces in the universe

that play out over the long term.

Exponential growth and population dynamics

can both unfold over generations making them,

for humans blinded by their

own culture, difficult to see.

William Catton explains

another long-term process.

C. Wright Mills of Columbia University -

kind of a maverick - gave a nice

physiological definition of fate.

Fate is what happens when innumerable

people make innumerable small decisions

about other matters that have a collective,

cumulative effect that Nobody intended.

Ok. That's what's happened

when we overpopulated the world.

Nobody intended to overpopulate the world.

Nobody intended to pollute the oceans. Nobody

intended to start the greenhouse effect.

So this is part of what I've come

to about how we got here.:

a snarl of assumptions and

behaviors and beliefs and stories

that form the backbone of the culture of Empire,

a fusion of forces that severed

us from the laws of life.

this culture tells us that we can

live apart from those laws.

Without limits. Without rules.

But doing so has left us,

and the planet, battered and beaten.

It isn't working out the way

we've been taught to think it will.

Offscreen Narrator.: Well boys and girls,

how do you like living without rules?

I hate it!

This is no fun.

It stinks.

Over and over I've had to ask.: why do we keep

destroying the planet, even now, when the

evidence that we are doing so is overwhelming?

The first thing to note is that all of

these historical forces are still in play.

And some new forces have arisen in our time.

It's sobering to consider that we're

trapped in an economy that must grow or die.

The economy will, can and

must continue to grow.

Now of course this is an absurdity.

Because we live on a finite spherical planet.

so there's only so much stuff

to chew up and spit out.

We're assaulted by corporately

controlled media that keep us delusional.

People tend to think that they have a choice

about what information they take from television.

And we are sitting and receiving a

form of information, which is very very

powerful. It comes in the form of images.

And once the images go in, they don't come out.

it's almost science fiction in its implications.

It's Big Brother.

And yet we think it's perfectly normal.

As people's real lives become more

and more degraded and unsatisfying

and petty and vulgar and irritating and sterile,

then the appeals of those glorified

images became all the more powerful.

There's a great line be Zygmunt Bauman that -

he says that rational people will go

quietly and meekle into a gas chamber

if only you allow them to believe it's a bathroom.

And I've lost all hope that my government is

capable of looking clearly at the situation.

Sadly, it looks as though much of our

educational system leaves us totally unprepared

to question the dominant culture.

It numbs our critical thinking

skills, instead of developing them.

And it goes along with technical, industrialized

society because you need to turn people into

interchangeable machine parts

where you can pull one person out,

stick another person in the same spot.

Narrator.:
These children are being taught

to accept uncritically whatever they're told.

Questions are not encouraged.

I've certainly never been encouraged to question

how our culture creates disconnection.

Every one of us is living in this little comfortable

bubble that's completely disconnected

from the real world of animals and plants

and soil and water and natural forces

that produces everything that's of

any meaning whatsoever on this planet.

If your experience is that your food

comes from the grocery store,

and that your water comes from a tap,

you will defend to the death the

system that brings those to you.

Because your life depends on it.

If your experience is that

your water comes from a stream

and that your food comes from a land base,

you will defend to the death that stream and that

land base because your life depends on it.

Systems of manipulation and exploitation.

Structures of disconnection and delusion.

Institutions of domination and deceit.

I had to ask.:
who would create such things?

Only people who have become almost

wholly disconnected from their world.

People who have forgotten who they once were.

People who have been deeply wounded.

We've gotten lost in a hall of mirrors.

Everything that we receive - everything

we see, hear, smell, taste, feel - originates in,

or is mediated by, humans and machines.

That affects our consciousness.

It gives us an inflated sense

of our own importance and of what reality is.

As if, because we've made it,

It makes it most real.

As any narcissist knows, it's endless.

We can never get enough of that:

enough of that reflection of ourselves.

What we're really aching for is real relationship.

Our animal bodies, I think, formed by

the Earth itself, want and require a

real relationship to the world.

To the water, wind and soll.

To the animals, plants and fellow

humans that comprise the

community into which we were born.

But we're stuck in the hall of mirrors.

And we've begun to lose our sanity.

So that you see the beginning of something like

dissociation, like post-traumatic stress disorder,

like schizophrenia, like multiple

personalities, you know.

You see that the fragmentation in the world

today is being mirrored in all of these kind of

very severe psychological disorders.

if you're in that sort of solitary confinement

you're going to start hallucinating.

And you may end up believing strange things.

Like the idea that humans are superior.

Acting out of that belief of superiority,

of entitlement, of invincibility,

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