Don’t converse with me too deeply, you’d be shocked, shocked, shocked
With superficial conversation I sound more or less like a reasonable and normal person. But I’m not.
I go out into society and have to hide my buried secret self, who is a radical decentralist beyond sufferance.
I think the world we face — globalized, over-populated, hyper-developed — is insane. I wonder how you can bear to relate to it.
Normal people seem to care about national politics, the news feed about Important Events in Washington, London, and Beijing, Cultural Trendsetters, who’s the current President of the Free World, what’s the buzz tell me what’s a-happenin’.
Not me.
I consider it to be noise way up there in stratospheric geopolitics, mass culture, the institutional-technological terrain, hyperspace, cyberspace, the Technosphere (Barry Commoner), the Surrogate World (Edward Goldsmith), the Synthetic Environment (Murray Bookchin), the Megamachine (David Watson), the Apparatus (Karl Jaspers), the Power Complex (Lewis Mumford), the Domination System (Riane Eisler), the Cosmopolitan Global Economy (Helena Norberg-Hodge), the Industrial Goliath (Rudolf Bahro), the Global Totality (John Zerzan), Consumer Society (Ted Trainer), Empire Culture (David Korten), Taker Culture (Daniel Quinn), Death Culture (Darryl Cherney).
I should care. It affects me as it affects us all. Taxes to the monster have to be paid, bombs rain down during wars, our children might be conscripted, most of us have to Work for the Man, we have little choice but to drive those damn cars, consume the Commodities of the System, hole up in our anomic households, and do our best to thrive despite the spiritual impoverishment.
But it’s kind of daunting. The Leviathan developed over millennia and has enormous inertia. It’s hard to even make a dent. I really don’t feel that I can do much about it. It’s an unfortunate fact of our sorry modern life. Focusing much attention or energy on it tends to lead to frustration.
The degree of my disdain is unconscionable. I can care about nothing bigger than an ecovillage or a sane-scale bioregion. What I consider to be the scale of sanity is unconscionably small.
My crazy opinion is that the way life was lived right here, under our feet, in Lenapehoking, 500 years ago (that’s actually just 20 generations ago) was sane and healthy and natural and fine. I mostly have to keep that a secret. Otherwise: Who would converse with such a crazy person?
