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| The Human family is messing with the rest of my family, and they should knock it the hell off. |
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
-T.S. Eliot
A couple days ago I was kinda down, and I wondered: why do I write this blog? To what end? To change people's minds?
That would be foolish. If you connect with what I write, you would connect with the same things anyway, you don't need me for that. If you don't want to hear, you won't hear, and I cannot change that. The chains of the human mindscape are strong. I wouldn't even care too much if you heard or not, except for the consequences of such ignorance on the world.
That would be foolish. If you connect with what I write, you would connect with the same things anyway, you don't need me for that. If you don't want to hear, you won't hear, and I cannot change that. The chains of the human mindscape are strong. I wouldn't even care too much if you heard or not, except for the consequences of such ignorance on the world.
During the American Civil War, it would happen sometimes that brother would fight brother, and brother would kill brother even. Sometimes a family fights against its own members. Such a battle is a matter of tears as much as anger. I suppose that is what I am doing here in a sense, fighting for my family against my family. Fighting for nature against humans. It's not a very sharp weapon perhaps, words, but it is the only weapon I have. Whether words change anything, is out of my control.
No one should be confused about which side I ultimately come down on. Since humanity has shown almost zero responsibility towards the environment thus far, I would be more than happy to see the human race decimated to a fraction of its former size by disease or economic collapse or whatever would get the job done, as long as there are minimal effects to the environment in the process. Such a stance may brand me an extreme radical, so be it. 99.999% of humans ultimately only care about humans: the world has room for the 0.001% who care about the planet first. Man has sowed the wind, it would not be surprising if it reaped the whirlwind.
No one should be confused about which side I ultimately come down on. Since humanity has shown almost zero responsibility towards the environment thus far, I would be more than happy to see the human race decimated to a fraction of its former size by disease or economic collapse or whatever would get the job done, as long as there are minimal effects to the environment in the process. Such a stance may brand me an extreme radical, so be it. 99.999% of humans ultimately only care about humans: the world has room for the 0.001% who care about the planet first. Man has sowed the wind, it would not be surprising if it reaped the whirlwind.
But while this is in a sense a fight against my human family, it is a fight for it as well. A fight for its soul. Humankind has progressively alienated itself from everything real and worthwhile and of actual value, in favor of fake gods it has made. The sign of sane life is that it is focused on life. Not, life as in, I am going to a Miley Cyrus concert on this day in my life, or as in I am getting a new Playstation 3 on this day in my life. Life as in the existence, cycles and natural processes of living things and the world in which we live. We have placed our fake reality ahead of real reality, and most people can't tell that it has happened because the fake reality is all they know. There are huge chunks of the real world that people are really oblivious to, because all they can see is the fake human world.
FAKE WORK:
According to the standards of many of our ancestors, almost everyone today lives as functionally a slave. Even compared to Medieval Europeans, most of which were actual serfs of some sort, we're slaves. However, the external facts of our work do not reveal the worst part. Most of us do work that only pertains to the artificial human world and not to organic life, and so we are naturally alienated from our work. Insurance agents, fast food servers, clerks, soldiers, bank presidents and many more, have their entire working experience disconnected from anything natural or real and transact their work wearing imaginary masks (may I take your order *fake grin*), working in imaginary fields, for imaginary tokens. Serving the imaginary gods of Capital we made. We would have to become machines ourselves not to be alienated by such a world, and many do aspire to be machines. Look at the video below: surely you can see why I call this the Age of Ghouls:
According to the standards of many of our ancestors, almost everyone today lives as functionally a slave. Even compared to Medieval Europeans, most of which were actual serfs of some sort, we're slaves. However, the external facts of our work do not reveal the worst part. Most of us do work that only pertains to the artificial human world and not to organic life, and so we are naturally alienated from our work. Insurance agents, fast food servers, clerks, soldiers, bank presidents and many more, have their entire working experience disconnected from anything natural or real and transact their work wearing imaginary masks (may I take your order *fake grin*), working in imaginary fields, for imaginary tokens. Serving the imaginary gods of Capital we made. We would have to become machines ourselves not to be alienated by such a world, and many do aspire to be machines. Look at the video below: surely you can see why I call this the Age of Ghouls:
FAKE FOOD:
Food - one of the essentials of existence, a sacrament actually. What is food to the fake world? A commodity, and its actual biological function (promoting life and health) does not matter to its role in the fake world. What matters in the fake world is profit and getting you to repeat the ill-advised behavior of buying their food again so they can profit more. To promote profit, completely oblivious to the real role of food, corporations splice pesticide genes into our food crops and put non-food toxins in our fast food and also promote a system of agriculture that despoils the planet and threatens species. For the sake of a fake imaginary god, and that god is Capital.
Food - one of the essentials of existence, a sacrament actually. What is food to the fake world? A commodity, and its actual biological function (promoting life and health) does not matter to its role in the fake world. What matters in the fake world is profit and getting you to repeat the ill-advised behavior of buying their food again so they can profit more. To promote profit, completely oblivious to the real role of food, corporations splice pesticide genes into our food crops and put non-food toxins in our fast food and also promote a system of agriculture that despoils the planet and threatens species. For the sake of a fake imaginary god, and that god is Capital.
FAKE WEALTH:
What if I told you that you were going to work for me and work hard, and I was going to pay you well, but you would have to pay it all back and die penniless, having accomplished nothing for you and all for me? Would you think that's a good deal? Well that's the deal you get all the time. With one hand, Capital writes your paycheck for your meaningless work, and with the other makes you believe that your only options are to give it back. We buy suburban houses that function poorly as a way of controlling costs for us and work very well for increasing corporate profits, and these are the kinds of houses we are told to want. We buy fancy high-tech cars we can't hope to fix ourselves, leaving us totally at the mercy of some cash-draining company or other. Our suburban houses have front lawns instead of vegetable gardens so that we can support the lawn care industry and incidentally assist them in polluting the environment. We buy electronics that are obsolete the day they are bought. In fact, all these things are offerings to the One True God of the modern world: Capital.
Lets suppose though that the good lord Capital has showered itself in your direction, and you are loaded. Are you any healthier for your money? Are you any happier for it, more well balanced? Do you like your work better? Do you find greater significance in your life? If not, then you have traded real life for poker chips.
Lets suppose though that the good lord Capital has showered itself in your direction, and you are loaded. Are you any healthier for your money? Are you any happier for it, more well balanced? Do you like your work better? Do you find greater significance in your life? If not, then you have traded real life for poker chips.
FAKE LOVE:
Since all work activity has been focused on the fake work in the workplace, part of the original function of love and marriage has been undermined. Honestly, poetry and flowers aside, the purpose of a wife or husband through the vast majority of human history has been to have someone who can work alongside you to further your mutual survival and make your lives better. Since the real and practical underpinnings of love have been knocked aside, we come home tired from our separate jobs and either try to connect in the fake human world or just hope that sex makes up for the distance in our actual lives. Or else you argue about your god, which is to say money. The saying goes, you don't really know someone until you have gone camping with them. In other words, until the fake human world has been forcibly dropped away and you are face to face with reality and having to spend extended time and work with the other person.
THE DECLINE OF MAN:
THE DECLINE OF MAN:
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, humans lived very close to the fundamental powers of life. They had no kings, they had no television, they had no jobs in the sense we think of. Then at some point, some folks set themselves up as bosses, chieftains and kings, and people started worshiping power, and more critically the very tools of discourse started to arrange themselves to feed that power. Kings want you to think that it is not only right but inevitable that they are kings and you are not. They hire intellectuals and image-makers to convince you of this. That was the Age of Power.
We have gone way beyond that age now. This is the Age of Ghouls. What is actually in control is nonliving symbols, institutions and ways of organizing things and people to feed into those symbols and institutions. Even power itself only serves to feed the completely fake and illusory new gods of our world. Fame, glamor, entertainment, scandal, but first and foremost is Capital. A nonliving thing, a nonexistent thing actually, except in the minds of human beings. And so life has finally been harnessed to the nonliving, the living have been sacrificed to the dead, and death has become triumphant. Not even death really, nonentity. The phantoms that shape and organize our world never lived, never were real, but their effect on the minds of humans is destroying the world. It is a machine for eating life and leaving death in its wake.
We have gone way beyond that age now. This is the Age of Ghouls. What is actually in control is nonliving symbols, institutions and ways of organizing things and people to feed into those symbols and institutions. Even power itself only serves to feed the completely fake and illusory new gods of our world. Fame, glamor, entertainment, scandal, but first and foremost is Capital. A nonliving thing, a nonexistent thing actually, except in the minds of human beings. And so life has finally been harnessed to the nonliving, the living have been sacrificed to the dead, and death has become triumphant. Not even death really, nonentity. The phantoms that shape and organize our world never lived, never were real, but their effect on the minds of humans is destroying the world. It is a machine for eating life and leaving death in its wake.
I think it would go without saying that we should all resist this machine as best we can.
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In a way, I feel I have failed to tell you anything but bad news, as essential as the acknowledgement of that bad news is. Partly, it is because I have a hard time finding the words for what it is I am fighting for. I cannot communicate my kinship with the nonhuman world in words. My love of the spirits of wood and water and Earth is a deeply personal matter that eludes precise expression. It is not a matter of rhetoric but of bones; deep in my bones. Perhaps you know what I mean. The real cannot be phrased in the language of the fake, nor can living be expressed in the language of the dead.
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