“Society is a madhouse without doors and windows”
| From Wwoof SerbiaIn today’s technological society everything is under control, everything must be managed, and even the “environment” (which is a technocratic term for nature in the Orwellian Newspeak). “Wilderness” is subjected to special “protection techniques” of national and international agencies. Whom do they protect it from and what is the purpose of their protection? Is it protection against the greedy corporations, industry and developers with their bulldozers and excavators, or maybe against us, ordinary people? Who, in the end, use and benefit of that “wilderness”? What socialites hunt, drive jeeps and build ski resorts there, and later sell those “pleasures” to others? More important than the social divisions and inequalities in access to nature as a property and “resource” is the question: How does the average person in mass society feel about nature, where is its place in our collective consciousness? How is it possible that treating nature as a “factor of production” and “an enormous reservoir of stored energy”, content of exclusive goods and services and background of media spectacle, has become widely accepted and commonplace? |
Breaking from immediate, vital relationships with the communities of living beings in nature and progress of specialization and division of labour among men, stand for the famous beginning of agricultural and industrial civilization. Since then, with each new generation, people experience nature all the more mediate, increasingly distance themselves from it, isolate and sterilize dead environments in which they live, work, consume, and have fun. Danger, dirt and chaos lurk behind the walls of comfortable flats, schools, hospitals and prisons! The driving force of that deviation, in which terminal phase we live today, is the feverish urge for establishing control and domination over the nature. The fields which were once the habitats of thousands of plant species, are now covered with a single industrial monoculture. Lined up in columns and rows like an army, selected, modified and chemically treated for generations, these plants are the reflection of people’s situation, as well.
I wonder why theaters, cinemas and concert halls don’t get daylight? Why does eternal darkness rule inside them, occasionally interrupted by powerful, artificial lights? Why are these temples of elite and mass spectacle, so unrealistically isolated from the outside world? We can notice the same sick phenomenon in modern supermarkets. These “artificial paradises” of the workers/consumers army, are constructed in such a way that when you enter them the outside world ceases to exist for you. Just one generation ago, there were windows through which we could see the outside world. Today these glasses, which were leaking daylight and views of people, are walled or covered with plastic opaque ads, and in the lifeless rooms which they protect, neon light is turned on during daylight, on a spring morning, just as on a July afternoon! The view must be directed to the stage / ad / product, it does not and cannot wander outside of that world, because it is physically impossible. There is no choice inside, you are under a pure coercion (if you don’t count shutting eyes as a choice).
In fact, such a violent attack on the senses is no longer seen as violence, but as a sedative against much worse pictures in the streets, buses, trains, schools, factories, offices… Beneath all the shiny pictures of this society and all its spectacular and skillfully designed goods, lie poisonous industrial waste, sepulchral darkness of the mines, carcinogenic foundry dust, horror, sickness and death of those who drudge in them day and night. Parallel to the pyramids and monumental buildings come across mind as inevitable. Raised by the slave labour of people who had been deported from their land and forever separated from the way of life that has been lasting far longer than any civilization (including our own), these temples of death are today’s tourist attraction for dulled, uprooted and alienated masses, which they admire as magnificent monuments and symbols of human progress, while the remains of destroyed cultures and the people who built it are lying beneath them!
No longer just our health, but also our existence depend on leaving this world and exceeding its limits, which aren’t only the external walls and fences that we see all around us. Strongest barriers are embedded in our heads. This is not a matter of individual psychology or bad faith. Human nurturers (parents, teachers)themselves are intimidated by the warnings, which they just have continued to transmit from generation to generation. Greater was the demand for control, stronger was the thrust on what couldn’t be controlled. The wild, chaotic “residue”, which resists to be controlled and refuses to be “put in order”, has been exposed to constant attacks, outbreaks of destruction, severe isolation and dangerous marginalization. They taught us to fear chaos and wildness, which lurk outside of our sterile civilized world. Frightened people can be easily manipulated, as we all know.
Dismantling the military-industrial complex of the most developed countries of the world and redirection of such unimaginable wealth to those who are dying of hunger and against further devastation of the biosphere, is not possible even if all decent and “civilized” people would vote for that. But, they are afraid of the danger which lurks from the “other side”, so the existence of security rings, which has been firmly tightening around us, is finally left undisputed. Once the communists were the biggest threat to freedom of mass consumerist society, today it is the terrorists, both within and outside of that society. The Other is always needed, to be blamed for misfortune that has befallen us and to divert our attention from the real causes of the bad situation in which we find ourselves. It’s an old psychological mechanism, systematically introjected by conditioning that lasts for several millennia, on which Sigmund Freud lucidly pointed out: “The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” John Zerzan goes even further and notes that since the time of the first cities, people have been constantly frightened by the warnings: “Outside of the cities is nothing but chaos and death, you can’t go there, you’re safe here, there is no other security, you’re in civilization now and don’t try to go back… It’s been always said. How do you hold people hostage to the project of domestication and civilization? I think that’s interesting in itself. This No escape mantra is absolutely nothing new.”
Urge for rejecting the role of soldier of mass working / consumerist / technological society, given to us since the day we were born, is a healthy impulse of our bodily minds. The society has created a special industry of culture, knowledge, and just activism for people in whom that impulse beats stronger. It may strike one as a strange, but some people are not yet aware that they won’t find exit from the death technoculture in its philosophies, arts, symbols and ideas, whose main purpose is (no matter how “radical” and “provocative” they seem) to distract, divert and contain us in the dimension from which we may try to get out. It is an already developed mechanism or a trap in which many still find themselves, while they search for “another world”. The dangerous margin has always been attractive, because it hides the power that can bring about change. However, all alternative people and outcasts of this society, in the next generation become its heroes and new fuel for its industry. The rebellion has been even more rapidly turning into a spectacle (if it ever was something else). This is the most severe disease of this society, of this way of life: this practical and theoretical incapability to transcend its structure, to break away with the rules of its death game.
The way out from this gloomy dimension is on the other side, not in the distant other worlds, but here on earth, among us, in our relationships, in what is still alive in and around us, which resists indisputable logical thinking and to be managed and governed anyhow. Paul Shepard has spent his entire creative life to point that out and at the same time was deeply aware that it is unnecessary to render an accurate map by which we will find it. No, we do not need a new ideology and revolution, we do not need mass organizations, or avant-garde intellectuals who will lead them. We need something much simpler: it is turning to ourselves, to our true needs, immediate sensual relationships, the human community and non-human nature as their indispensable conditions.
This is the main message of Shepard’s essay Nature and Madness (http://www.wwoofserbia.org/sites/default/files/files/Nature-and-Madness.pdf), made from parts of the first and last chapter of his book with the same title. This public intellectual has written widely and deeply enough about things that concern us all and his prose could understand every educated man. Today, you will not easily find such people among the academic intellectuals, whose education does not liberate and open minds of the people toward the new possibilities. On the contrary, it diverts and keeps them inside the bleak industry of knowledge that produces masses of frightened and mechanized individuals, according to the demand of technological society. Millions of students across the globe are compelled to listen to their “bad music” in rooms that bear an uncanny resemblance to the aforementioned supermarkets and spectacle temples. The growing division, professionalization and specialization of intellectual labour, does not allow prisoners of academe to step outside of the narrow scope of their departments. Why should they do that? To risk their benefits as members of the privileged highbrow caste?”Thus in time, specialized knowledge, “knowing more and more about less and less,” finally turns into secret knowledge — accessible only to an inner priesthood, whose sense of power is in turn inflated by their privileged command of “trade” or official secrets.” These are the words of Lewis Mumford, another public intellectual of the 20th century, who easily crossed the border of academic knowledge and opened a bigger picture of human existence before our eyes.
It should not be surprising that this chronic spiritual fatigue and denaturalized academic thought are entirely consistent with the popular philosophy of despair and cynicism, which says that technoculture is our true nature, that another one actually never existed, and that for us humans, all has always been mediated by separate and fragmented symbols that produce their own meanings, in fact, that we never thought outside of language and text. Questioning the very beginnings of our relationships, thoughts and feelings has always been, in an open or disguised manner, prohibited or otherwise counterfeited.
Paul Shepard was patiently pointing out exactly to that forgotten and deliberately marginalized beginning of our life on earth, behind and beyond the “official” beginning, that is, entering into our well-known world of drudgery, social fragmentation, constant wars, meaningless bloodsheds, epidemic diseases, domination and control over nature and people, and falsely interpreted longing for the “lost paradise” on earth. That’s why with him we should start questioning the relationship between humans and nature (http://www.wwoofserbia.org/nature_and_humans), throughout history and across its recorded borders. The possibility to drift away from the prison or madhouse we call society will probably open to us in this adventure.
SOURCE: http://www.wwoofserbia.org