Wild Free and Happy sample 83 Update: Human Web

[Note: The following is some new and updated material from my rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy.  It will be included in the revised Human Web section, which was originally released as samples 52 and 53.  The other samples of this rough draft can be accessed HERE.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd has been reading and recording my book HERE.]

Magical Thinking

Imagine living in an era when bubonic plague epidemics were common and horrific.  Geoffrey Marks noted that the Black Death arrived in England in 1348, and was followed by epidemics in 1349, 1361, 1363, 1365, 1369, 1371, 1373, 1375, 1378-1382, 1390, 1399-1400 …and on and on… until the Great Plague of London in 1665-1666.  Over the course of several months, the Great Plague killed about 100,000, almost a quarter of London’s population. 

In 1772, Daniel Defoe (author of “Robinson Crusoe”) published “A Journal of the Plague Year.”  He was a young boy during the Great Plague, and had a front row seat on the horror show.  As an adult, he interviewed a number of survivors.  His uncle kept diaries during the nightmare.

The city was a fantastically filthy nightmare.  Sewage was dumped in ditches along the streets.  Horseshit and garbage everywhere.  Everyone had lice, bathing was rare, and great mobs of rats enjoyed a wonderful life. 

When folks heard news of an approaching contagion, anyone who had options (nobility, clergy, physicians, officers, etc.) fled London in a great stampede.  Poor folks were left behind to experience what the fates would deliver.

Efforts were made to slow the spread of disease.  When someone was known to be infected (or so suspected), a red cross was painted on the door, and the dwelling was guarded day and night by a watchman, to prevent escapes, and to provide necessities.  Thus, the entire family was condemned to die.  Folks were infuriated, and there were riots. 

Bell ringers moved through the streets, shouting “bring out your dead.”  They were followed by buriers or bearers who loaded the dead carts.  Large pits were dug in which to dump the corpses.  Defoe wrote, “It is impossible to describe the most horrible cries and noise that the poor people would make at their bringing the dead bodies of their children and friends out of the cart.”

Doctors had no cures, and prayers got no response.  Johannes Nohl reported that during plague years, a number of communities in Europe engaged in ceremonial dances, hoping to drive away the evil spirits.  Hundreds danced until they collapsed from exhaustion.  Folks were overwhelmed with despair.  People rolled in filth, begging others to beat them.  “Otherwise modest maidens and matrons lost all sense of shame, sighed, howled, made indecent gestures, and uncovered obscene parts of their bodies.”

It was obvious to everyone that the plague was killing the clergy at especially high rates (it was their job to visit the dying).  Why did God have no interest in protecting his own special agents?  Many priests lived with concubines, an abominable sin.  Did this mean that the baptisms they performed were worthless?  Many lost their faith.  While large crowds danced, the churches sat empty.   A furious mob of Germans went to Liège, determined to massacre all clergy.

One tradition noted that in 1424, a lad named Maccaber arrived in Paris, and took residence in an ancient tower next to a cemetery.  Folks believed he had supernatural powers.  He initiated an ecclesiastic procession.  Every day, for months, crowds of men and women danced in the cemetery.  Folks wore scary masks to drive away the evil spirits. 

Over time, in many places, during many plagues, folks experimented with a wide variety of rituals.  Despite good intentions, their efforts failed.  The rats and fleas remained alive and well, and the grim reaper worked overtime.  Blind faith in rituals is called magical thinking.  Unfortunately, beautiful wishes don’t always come true. 

Today, of course, global telecommunication systems and the internet allow magical beliefs and assorted conspiracy theories to spread through large populations at astonishing speeds.  Societies become fiercely polarized, echo chambers roar, intolerance punches, courtesy vaporizes, bullets fly, and daily life becomes a surreal tragicomedy.  Elections no longer have losers — every candidate claims victory!

Humanism

Many humans imagine that our species enjoys a superior status in the family of life.  Indeed, many hiss and snarl at the notion that humans are animals (!!).  We are obviously smarter, stronger, and greater in every way!  A number of religious traditions assert that humans are something like the glorious crown of creation, the managers of the world.  Earth is our playground.

These beliefs typically emerged in cultures that became addicted to the exploitation of domesticated plants and/or animals — turbulent societies that cleared forests, planted fields, raised birds and herds, and radically altered (and damaged) the ecosystems they inhabited.

Our wild ancestors were far more humble.  They were hunters and foragers, not planet smashing thunder beings.  Peter Ungar wrote that when an anthropologist in Tanzania asked some Hazda hunters how humans were different from other animals, they were completely baffled.  There is no difference.  What a stupid question!  We all eat, drink, breathe, excrete, wander, and reproduce.  Many carnivores think we’re absolutely delicious, and they eagerly enjoy every opportunity for having us for lunch.

Richard Nelson spent time (1976-77) with the Koyukon people of Alaska.  Their often quoted proverb is: “Every animal knows way more than you do.”  They believe that animals can understand everything we say, regardless of distance.  The Koyukon were not a culture of motor vehicles and glowing screens.  They were a hunting culture that had an amazingly deep understanding of nature, and absolute respect for it.  Modern folks have lost this intimate wild connection to home.  Nelson wrote, “We live alone in an uncaring world of our own creation.” 

David Ehrenfeld wrote The Arrogance of Humanism.  It was an aggressive critique of the widespread belief in human supremacy.  He wrote that humanism was “the dominant religion of our time.”  It’s essentially the air we breathe.  Humans are absolute geniuses, and our technology is amazing.  There is no problem we cannot solve.  We have no limits.  As resources become depleted, we’ll readily develop excellent alternatives.  Our children will enjoy even better lives than our own, and the best is yet to come.  Yippee!

Ehrenfeld wrote back in 1978, when pollution controls, if any, were weak, and the air and waters were heavily contaminated with noxious substances.  The entire city of Gary Indiana was hidden in a stinky orange fog of steel mill filth.  The Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught on fire.

In the ’70s, numerous eco-disasters were occurring around the world, but the general mob paid little attention to stuff happening elsewhere — out of sight, out of mind.  Network television avoided the yucky stuff, and hypnotized folks with generous servings of sports, entertainment, and happy news.  School systems tirelessly preached the holy gospel of humanism, and celebrated the age of miracles that students were so lucky to enjoy.

While the thundering human juggernaut was beating the living shit out of the planet, the mob barely noticed.  They were busy polishing their new cars.  Most remained zombie-like cheerleaders of the wonders of modernity, and the beautiful future that laid ahead.

This baffled Ehrenfeld.  Nobody <bleeping> cares!  The poor lad apparently suffered from a devastating incurable mental disorder known as critical thinking.  He was a sick pariah.  Humanist culture has zero respect for hopeless nutjobs, defeatists, misanthropes, oddballs, and doom perverts.

Ehrenfeld shrugged.  “Evidence is growing that the religion of humanity is self-destructive and foolish.  But the more it fails, the greater our faith in it.  We imagine that what we want to happen is actually happening.” 

He was not a misanthrope.  He didn’t hate, distrust, and avoid humans.  Actually, he was an “anti-humanist.”  He detested the ridiculous mass hallucinations — the enthusiastic celebrations of human genius, and the wondrous technological utopia that we have brilliantly created.  We are so lucky to live in the spectacular gushing orgasm of the entire human experience!

Ehrenfeld noted that pure anti-humanists were rare.  Most folks who know how to read have spent their entire lives in fanatical humanist cultures.  We’ve been constantly absorbing humanist ideas for years.  They have deep roots in our minds, and a strong influence on how we think.  It’s sort of pleasant to imagine that we’re on the path to a better tomorrow.  Progress will wash away the pain.

On the other hand, having read a pile of anthropology books, it’s clear that wild folks who lived undisturbed in their traditional way, in their ancestral land, tended to be enthusiastic and shameless anti-humanists.  They seemed to be nearly unanimous in perceiving civilized folks as being absolutely batshit crazy!  How could people be so stupid?  How can they have no respect and reverence for the natural world?  Why are they so aggressive and selfish?

Ehrenfeld wrote that a general rejection of humanism is now long overdue.  It won’t be easy.  Blind faith in humanist hopes and dreams remains strong, and the insanely furious war on the family of life rages on, and on, and on.

Epilogue

The following is the rough draft of the last section of my upcoming third book.

So, here we are in the twenty-first century.  We are not a generation born wild and free, running around naked in lush tropical rainforests, nibbling on fruit, nuts, and grubs.  We inherited an age of challenges, the result of a long string of risky experiments.  Negative consequences have piled up over the centuries, and we now stand in the dark shadow of a mountain of predicaments.

Humans are not cursed with defective genes, but we have succeeded in creating a highly unsustainable way of living and thinking — a defective culture.  The clock is running out on this troublesome experiment.  It would be wise to acknowledge this, and mindfully explore saner ways of living and thinking.

Like all other animals, humans focus their attention on the here and now, the immediate vicinity.  Many animals are capable of foresight.  Some know that panthers hunt at night, so they sleep in the trees.  With regard to the manmade realm of techno-innovation, foresight is largely impossible.  Nobody could have imagined the enormous consequences of metal making, fossil energy, or the domestication of plants and animals.  A few wild cultures still live sustainably with barely any technology.

Low impact cultures do not believe in human superiority.  They do not suffer from a persistent itch to hoard personal property.  They have exactly what they need.  They do not control and exploit the ecosystem, they adapt to it.  They have time-proven cultures in which everyone practices voluntary self-restraint.  In this manner, they could enjoy extended periods of real sustainability, living in a healthy wild ecosystem.

High impact cultures, by definition, cannot have a long-term future.  In their spooky fantasies, the primary goal is to pursue economic growth, by any means necessary, for as long as possible, without regard for the generations yet to come.  Nothing is more important than perpetual growth, at any cost.  This is the dominant paradigm in consumer societies, where it is perceived to be perfectly normal and intelligent.

But deviants on the fringe, who enjoy an amazing ability to recognize the obvious, warn us that normal is insane.  For revealing this inconvenient truth, they are called doomers.  But the consumer hordes, who are enthusiastic lifelong participants in the most destructive culture in human history, are the true champions of doom.

Consumers are annoyed by the truth tellers, and denounce them for their negativity, but it’s actually the other way around.  Sending tons and tons of waste to landfills, via a lifetime of recreational shopping, in an effort to gain social status, is a heartbreaking tragedy.  It’s a path of ferocious negativity.

The truth-telling deviants are not doomers, they are simply more present in reality.  For them, the foolishness in our culture becomes less invisible.  Being present in reality, in the fullness of the darkness, puts them in a far better position to think clearly and make wise decisions.  They become less vulnerable to peer pressure.  They become less willing to mindlessly do what a mindless society expects of them.

In the process of healing from acute ignorance, you cross a painful threshold.  One day, you realize that the consumer fantasyland has little relationship with reality.  Big storms are coming, and the future will not be a prosperous and pleasurable joyride.  This realization hurts.

When this occurs, despair is an appropriate response.  It’s OK to grieve for the loss of a major long-held illusion.  At the same time, it’s also appropriate to celebrate your mind-expanding awakening, your successful return from the realm of the living dead.  Despair is like a hangover, a painful headache resulting from an unhealthy binge.  It’s a normal temporary experience on the long journey to growth and healing.

The consumers scream, “We can’t go back,” and that’s true.  We also cannot indefinitely remain on our current dead-end path.  John Trudell, the Santee Sioux activist, summed it up nicely.  “There is no old way, no new way.  There is a way of life.  We must live in balance with the Earth.  We must do it.  We have no choice.”

Eight words precisely describe the one and only sustainable destination, “We must live in balance with the Earth.”  That sacred destination has never been farther from where we now stand.  So, what should animals with legendary big brains be doing?  Obviously, we need to change how we think and live.

At the moment, consumer society feels little or no desire to question its mode of living and thinking.  Many have chugged the Kool-Aid of the techno-wizards, and have a blind faith in the wondrous solutions promised by clever experts.  Many others have little or no understanding of reality, because they suffer from ignorance, or limited ability to think.  Still others can sense the growing darkness, but are paralyzed with fear and powerlessness, and block out the yucky feelings with false hope.

Nothing can stop the coming storms of change, all paths lead to turbulence.  You can’t save the world.  You can’t fix everything, but you can use your gifts, and do what you can to confront ignorance, protect your ecosystem, and lessen the long-term damage.  There are infinite opportunities for doing beneficial work.

It’s time for unlearning, identifying the silly nonsense we’ve absorbed over the years, and hurling it overboard.  It’s time for learning, continuing our exploration of reality.  It’s time for communicating, helping each other learn.  It’s time to get outdoors, without electronic distractions, and develop an intimate relationship with the planet of our birth.  It’s time to grow and heal.

We are living in the most momentous century in the entire human experience.  It will be a time of immense learning and awakening.  As our glorious house of cards disintegrates, we will experience a beautiful die-off — countless idiotic myths, fantasies, and illusions will lose their hypnotic power, tumble into the tar pits, and never again entrance us.

It will be a century of huge lessons, an era of tremendous enlightenment.  No, climate change was not a hoax!  Yes, there really are limits!  Concepts like carrying capacity and overshoot will become well understood by any who survive.  The powerful storms of the Great Healing will inspire a great tide of questioning, critical thinking, and clear understanding.

No matter what we do, the Great Healing will eliminate a number of key predicaments, even if we don’t change our ways.  Whether or not we get serious about rapid population reduction, the current population bubble will become an ex-predicament.  Finite resources will certainly strangle the mass hysteria of consumer mania.  As we move beyond the era of climate stability, every ecosystem will be hammered by big changes.  The consumer lifestyle will no longer be an option.

Big Mama Nature has little tolerance for overshoot.  One way or another, sooner or later, some form of balance will be restored, with or without us.  But if we summon our power, and strive to live with responsibility, we may be able to prevent some destruction.  It’s essential to understand the mistakes that got us into this mess, so we will not be tempted to repeat them.  Learn!  Think!  Heal!

God Save Me From A Normal Life — Part Two

My father was born 100 years ago.  One hundred years from now, the seven-point-something billion people alive today will be gone.  There will be no cars, TVs, computers, phones, and so on.  The vision of a technological wonderland will be forgotten and extinct, replaced by many new low-tech survival-oriented pursuits.  If humans continue to exist, they will not be very fond of our generation, and the messes we left for them.

Every civilization eventually exhausts essential resources and collapses.  As predictable as the sun, civilizations rise, peak, and then set.  In the wake of every collapse, the survivors usually regroup and repeat the same mistakes.  It’s the easiest option, or the only option.  This is a primary curse of the agricultural era — once the dirty habit of soil mining takes root, it’s very hard to quit before the ecosystem is entirely wrecked.

As the collapse of modern society unfolds, the consumer lifestyle will eventually go extinct.  Returning to a genuinely sustainable mode of nature-based living will not be possible until nature recovers and the human population adjusts to the new scenario.  This may take a generation or three.

Meanwhile, the safe bet is that muscle-powered subsistence farming and herding will once again become the primary human activities, utilizing severely depleted cropland and grassland, without the magic chemicals and machines.  The survivors will strive to recreate something resembling a pre-industrial peasant way of living — a backbreaking lifestyle, with a short life expectancy, in which everyone lives close to the brink of starvation.  (Some scientists speculate that changing climate may blindside agriculture at some point.)

The long-term future of these neo-peasants is easy to predict.  After 10,000 years of experiments in agricultural civilization, there is no place where the cropland and grassland remains as fresh and healthy as it was on day one.  Indeed, vast areas have been reduced to waste, and new wastelands are being created at an ever-growing rate.  Agriculture is a dependable path to ruin, because it is almost always unsustainable in the long run.  Industrial society is a dependable high-speed path to ruin. 

Wise guys persistently question the wisdom of remaining on any obvious, clearly marked path to ruin.  Our ancestors were not imbeciles or evil monsters.  With good intentions, they innocently adopted agriculture.  It was impossible for them to foresee the disastrous long-term consequences of their experiment.  Today, we cannot plead ignorance.  The long-term consequences are far better understood (but generally disregarded).  Like all other animals, humans primarily live in the here and now.  Long-term thinking had no purpose when we lived in balance with nature.

Wise guys persistently recommend that we move in the direction of sustainable living, because all unsustainable options, by definition, have no long-term future.  In a smart collapse, the transition to subsistence farming would be seen as no more than a temporary transition on the high-priority path to a genuinely sustainable future.  It would be awesome to actually acknowledge the big lessons of history, break out of our 10,000-year cycle of repeated mistakes, and strive to live more mindfully.  We inherited big brains; we should use them.

A huge plus is that the new generation of radical thinkers is providing us with a different way of perceiving the world.  Agriculture was a stunning mistake.  The long-tarnished reputation of “primitive” nature-based living has been dusted off, spiffed up, and recast as a brilliant, enjoyable, healthy, time-proven mode for living far less destructively, or even sustainably.  It was not problem-free, but it left far fewer scars.

Half-baked intelligence got us into this mess, and our only hope for survival is a new and improved intelligence, heavily armed with clear thinking, reality-based history, state-of-the-art foresight, respect and reverence for nature, and a fervent, uncompromising contempt for deeply rooted pathological traditions.  With powerful wisdom, perfect luck, and more than a few miracles, humankind may once again be wild, free, and happy, a century or three down the road.  Imagine that.

A huge minus is that the road ahead is treacherously littered with slippery banana peels.  Say hi to the hope and optimism crowd, the “normal” mainstream consumers who comprise the vast majority of modern society.  For them, the consumer way of life is sacred and non-negotiable.  They conjure quirky comforting dreams that the current way of life will continue for the rest of their days.  The economy will recover and grow like crazy, everyone will have high-income work with outstanding benefits, the housing market will make everyone billionaires, everyone will drive monster trucks, death will be cured, and technology will clobber every problem — heaven on Earth!

This is false hope and irrational optimism, better known as denial (or psychosis).  It attempts to distract our attention from the pain of despair.  This psychosis dominates our culture, like the air we breathe.  Everywhere we turn; it’s there — entertainment, education, politics, religion, everyday conversations.  It dominates the minds of most people, for obvious reasons.  It’s all they know.  It encloses their minds in a cocoon of magical thinking, shielding them from uncomfortable inputs.  The world outside of the well-padded cocoon is an intensely unhealthy and unstable reality.  So, close the curtains, lock the doors, roll a joint, turn on the TV, and hope for better days ahead, right?

Is it possible to survive without false hope and irrational optimism?  Yes, in fact, it is.  Some of my best friends are present in reality, and they are quite smart and interesting.  For anyone who is even slightly present in reality, the path ahead is obviously jammed with 800-pound gorillas, as far as the eye can see — climate change, deforestation, mass extinction, energy depletion, economic collapse, wars, famines, pestilence, and on and on.  The deeper you explore reality, the more gorillas you find. 

Sadly, if you outwardly acknowledge the presence of even one gorilla, you suddenly change into an abominable monster of pure negative energy — a sick, pessimistic, brain-damaged doomer!  But wait!  Realistically, isn’t it sick and pessimistic to hope that the most destructive experiment of the entire human journey remains alive and well for as long as possible?  Do you really hope that it continues destroying life on Earth?  Circle the true doomer in this picture.  Everything is backwards.  Words can be very slippery.

If these hope fiends could slip outside their cocoon of magical thinking, they would see that genuine optimism enthusiastically embraces the sane and healthy desire to eventually return to a sustainable way of life.  Genuinely positive people are interested in freeing themselves, overcoming their addictions, rejecting the toxic values of mainstream society, resigning from soul-killing and planet-killing occupations, remembering what it is to be authentically human, and celebrating the perfection of creation (what’s left of it).

But the “normal” hope and optimism crowd has no interest in being enlightened or saved, and any attempts at doing so are usually a waste of time, and more than a little depressing.  They are committed to shopping till they drop.  The mainstream worldview is a maximum-security prison, and it will never open the gates when reason and logic come calling — instead, these sensible visitors will be warmly welcomed with a shower of boiling oil.  Obviously, humankind does not march to the beat of reason and logic — these are new, immature, and unstable mental powers.  So, the human mind is a bouncy slippery fish, and the path to genuine sustainability will not be short or simple.

I shall now reveal an immensely hopeful and optimistic plan that has a very slight chance for success — my reason for writing this book. 

To be continued.