I suppose I've let this one sit for a while.
This is going to be a biggie, so I'll divide it up into parts. It is also going to be a freakin' mess because I've let it sit so long and my workflow has been disrupted, so I'm going to have to pull a few things together haphazardly. And also I've had a bit of tequila to get things moving again and ah jeez here it goes. Apologies in advance.
So then, how does one emancipate oneself from inner, or mental slavery? What sort of condition is this in the first place? What does it mean to be a slave? Is one necessarily a slave if one is genuinely happy in a subservient position? What characterizes subservience? Who has the standing to make such a judgement? Is such a judgment possible?
This endless question-begging could go on no doubt. Like a drill you can go digging down through what is solid until you break through into open space and continue on with a free fall into the void, spinning about and perhaps screaming every so often. Despite the dreadful connotations, I highly recommend tumbling around in existential terror for a while; it is very constructive. So long as you come back out right side up. But maybe now is not the time.
Of course it is never a good idea to barrel into matters such as this and begin pronouncing groundless judgments either, so hopefully we can steer a middle ground and ask some serious questions without becoming too unhinged, however welcome that may be in some cases.
Maybe we could start with the macro, and in so doing, you know, answer some of those more fundamental questions and then carefully zoom our way in to the micro and talk about practical action.
So then what are we doing here? Whence comes this pain, this inner turmoil? Why even ask questions like these?
Let's pull back even further. We have this vast universe that stretches before us, yet we occupy such a small portion of it. There seems to be these limited pockets of space in which environmental conditions allow for the flourishing of life. And on Earth itself, we have this incredible expanse of land, and considering the capacity of our imagination, we could be doing just about anything anywhere. So why do we walk on these strange sidewalks and drive on these strange streets...these slabs of concrete and asphalt that block the very circulation of life?
Yes, it seems strange, these slabs we lay down in greater and greater sprawls that essentially curtail any hope of any organic life to subsist on it, save our own. And even then, you can imagine our living on a total concrete planet, and well, we wouldn't last very long would we? And at this period of time we have created these urban sprawls, these foliage and food deserts, and considering that we are systematically destroying what stretches of arable land we have left, it seems that we have put ourselves in quite the difficult position.
But then a generation or two ago this state of affairs seemed like paradise to most. Well and it all sounded like a pretty good idea at the time. You can try to control the flow of organic life, keep those pesky bushes out of the way, keep the land from deforming due to erosion or plant-life invasion or etc by laying down these perfectly flat, cohesive bodies of rock and tar and what have you. Even these things break up over time but they definitely expand that timeframe. Then it is impossible to sustain other pesky tiers of life such as animals and insects which could be bothersome to the human population. Of course many of these forms of life can subsist on concrete surfaces; you see ants on sidewalks and squirrels running across streets all the time. I'm mainly talking about the more general logic of separating ourselves from the environment with artificially manipulated substances of our own creation, while encapsulating and enclosing all of our open spaces and then purging the interior of these spaces of any foreign organic matter that doesn't agree with us or isn't controlled by us.
On such surfaces we can expect incredible transportation, housing, subsistence, comforts, all carefully crafted in accordance with human knowledge and our use of various technologies to manipulate the world around us. Within such an environment we could experience and contemplate the finer points of existence with our highly evolved consciousness.
You could imagine that theoretically such a mode of control is possible. With our scientific knowledge we could ascertain which parts of the environment we should be cultivating and which parts it is okay to manipulate and impose our will on. This knowledge is out there now as it happens. Everything we need to know to continue subsisting as an industrial society is available in the form of information and probably possible.
Now, today our society could look very different. Arcology, or the concept of combining architecture with an understanding of deep ecology, is a concept that has been around for some time. We don't have to be stuck with these huge wasteful suburban sprawls. We don't have to still be using dirty energies like oil and coal. There are plenty of promising types of renewable energy that we could have been transitioning to decades ago. We could be directing oceans of resources towards research and development, eventually producing efficiencies and lowered costs. But then the political dimension comes in.
Politics can be mostly reduced down to the fact that there are varying types of people all with their own personal histories, intellectual capacities, emotional constitutions and etc and that to have cooperation on a mass scale you have to take into account the dynamics of such a diversity. Now unfortunately there are several natural human tendencies that manifest themselves in every culture. There are people out there that are only interested in the sensation of being superior to another, having power in other words, while seeking to enjoy the various sensory pleasures available to these complex bodies of ours, and seeking ever greater heights in this superiority and pleasurable sensation. And for these reasons these are the people that usually come into possession of a greater proportion of material power, possession of the reigns of the state, of the monopoly on violence, of powerful economic entities and etc.
So we've chosen as a society (well not all of us, a few have chosen) to maintain urban sprawl because it necessitates the consumption of petroleum products, automobiles and the countless other objects produced to facilitate such an environment. We continue to rely on petroleum and other related products mentioned above because it benefits those who control such resources. This choice in turn necessitates all sorts of political mechanisms to manage those left out of the picture: imperial wars intended to sustain the asymmetrical flow of resources to empire, prison systems to contain the superfluous populations (superfluous to the imperial plan anyways), walls, gates, laws, weapons, etc. etc. So it seems that a great cultural idea (and the material civilization that flourishes around it) has a certain inertia, which manifests in the relentless production of conventional individuals, orbiting in the same well-worn pathways of administration.
This social and ideological conventionality crops up in every society across time. It seems that the people that become the most exquisitely aware of the nature of things and the correct way to live and of good ethics on their own without it being taught by some authority are people that have become dislodged in some way from the conventional structure itself, which happens as a consequence of greater processes of what are probably processes of deterioration over time.This is part of what we are. It is how the matter that we are part of behaves.
And the fact is that of all the possible modes of existence we could be exercising, we have chosen to live in this one, this absurd civilization of shopkeepers powered by dirty energy whose processes undermine the very environment it is housed in. Ah but to be fair, such things happen. Maybe we didn't completely choose.
So on a cosmic level, we've reached this point of history by a principle of least resistance. Life grew out of necessity from where it could, and like water flows down a mountain, we've flowed as a species to this point, evolving to solve various problems and escape problems internal to the systems we've evolved to solve the problems, perhaps hardening along the way in this great stream in an attempt to freeze our new-found gains, only to crumble in time and flow on.
However, as comforting as the cosmic explanation is and how it relieves us of the burden of historical responsibility, we are still interested in the human subjective experience of such a process, no? What can we say about what we are experiencing as individuals now? And how to move forward from this point?
In the next parts, on to the subjective and political aspects of this state of affairs, as well as the consideration of the practical work behind emancipation, accompanied by a bucketful of caveats and alternative considerations, as is the custom.
Note: I've mainly described U.S. empire at this point. There's plenty more complexity to this issue, as infrastructure has taken different shapes around the world, but some of the more general characteristics of industrial society as it exists globally apply.
