The level of discourse within which we typically attempt to
understand our world is the product of cultural habit and biological
adaptations to, what were in our evolution, consistently important causal and
correlative environmental events: the human generated informational environment
of today has only the most tenuous relationship to that history. In other words, our capacity to generate
changes to the conditions that immediately surround us has not only modified
physical surroundings by many orders of magnitude on many dimensions, but has
constructed changes in the probabilities and importance of events to the point
that our responses to those events, and understandings of them, have become
essentially arbitrary. The arbitrary and
the random have become the “solid” ground upon which we judge and guide our
present and our future.
But we are not biologically equipped to recognize the
arbitrary and the random. Our cognitive
machinery will produce a cobbled-together order out of almost any disorder as
the only option; and an “order” so created will almost certainly be maladaptive
even as it seems to take on the quality of being essential for the functioning
of social systems. A social system
driven by arbitrary order, like a poorly made machine, will, quickly in
biological time, tear itself apart through its own operation. Human history is a record of social systems
self-destructing more and more rapidly, and with increasing consequences, as
the systems are based on more arbitrary and random elements and fewer
environmental/biophysical realities.
We have reached the point where a few billions of people value
financialized activities more than the actual, hands on, production of food,
cleaning of our environmental wastes, delivery of potable water, construction
of protective dwellings, socialization and education of children, equitable
distribution of resources or other primary productive activities. And billions more wish to join more closely
with that madness, to be “freed” from having to consider activities that are in
their essence the basic biological activities that directly sustain life
itself.
One need only ask themselves what would this Planet of Life
be like ‘if every animal and every plant were “freed” from having to live
within the restraints of its biological condition’ to realize the absurdly
arbitrary standards that “civilized” humanity have come to. The scientific details of climate change,
evaluations of industrial pollution, measurements of ecosystem degradation, descriptions
of and choices among political/economic processes, are all symptoms of this
larger and ultimately simpler understanding.
The essence of life on earth is in the direct living of its
possibilities by each organism, the taking and giving that maintains the
precarious balance of those possibilities.
An organism that takes too little and gives too much quickly disappears;
equally, an organism that takes too much and gives back too little destroys the
conditions that sustain it: it is this simple calculus that has guided evolutionary
processes through the many billions of iterations of the living organism.
That an ape evolved an adaptation allowing it to put off
the consequences of living outside the basic evolutionary paradigm does not
change the calculus. The consequences
are put off onto other organisms and the biophysical systems that sustain the Living
Order. The ultimate consequence can
never be avoided: biophysical systems and ecosystems will simplify as their
integrity is challenged, removing the ordered and stable conditions required by
complex life. That such a process takes
thousands of years is no argument against this form of change; it is the
expected time line.
The ape we are lives within the sophistry of our own manufacture:
a product of the arbitrary, the random and the unavoidable biological nature of
a nervous system that creates order whether it exists or not. And we come to depend on that manufactured
order, not only for the sense of safety that any order supplies, but for the
most basic biological needs. We largely ignore the actual origin of need
meeting, conflating and assuming that the needs are met as the ‘natural’
consequence of political and economic choices rather than from organic growth,
biophysical soil production, wetland water filtration, hydrological cycle,
carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle and so forth.
So, we ignore the actual origins and focus our attention on the
arbitrary order that seems, but, of course, is not, more immediate.
It must be a key understanding that our organism will
produce an ordered mental/social structure from our experiences. If those experiences are closely connected to
biophysical Reality, our ordering systems will align our behaviors with the
sustaining Reality, quite independently of how we might ‘think about’ or
describe the reasons for that alignment.
If our experiences are disconnected from biophysical Reality, our
behaviors will come from the arbitrary ordering of random experiences
regardless of how well we might ‘think about’ scientifically sound biophysical
principles.
This means, quite simply, that much of humanity must change
drastically how it lives out daily experience if our behaviors, as a species,
are to comport with the most foundational of biological/evolutionary principle:
neither take too little or too much and neither give too much or too
little. The functioning of this
principle requires intimate, immediate, constant and effective connection to
the events and processes of biophysical Reality: the kind of connection enjoyed
(and suffered) by every organism on earth with the exception of a majority of humans
and their several ‘servant’ organisms.
Essentially all maladaptations are traceable to the
disconnection of daily experience from biophysical Reality, traceable to some localized
‘bubble’ reality quickly forming and popping.
The human adaptation of Consciousness Order is admirably suited to the
creation of such “reality” bubbles.
Religions, economic forms, political systems, social systems, all have
become primarily represented by ‘reality bubbles,’ self-referenced systems with
little connection to biophysical Reality.
No amount of “right thinking” or scientific clarity can overcome the
maladaptive consequences of living in such ‘bubbles’ of experience.
Humanity needs a revolution. It must be the most revolutionary of
revolutions; a reordering of the present experience of life. Such changes will only come with a heavy
price, since we are so far away from where we must eventually be; most of humanity
will cling to maladaptive order to the bitter and brutal end. And it is even possible, even likely should
such a revolution actually begin, that its very brutality would so sour the
well-spring of human feeling that the result would not be worth the price. This, however, cannot be a reason not to try;
the other option is for our maladaptive behaviors to run their course to an
even more bitter and brutal end.
The beginning can be only of the weakest and most
unsatisfactory sort: a local, gradual change in how some people think about
their lives. As they change the way they
think about and value the activities of their experience, then their
experiences will also change. And these
changed experiences will change, even more, how they think and value. It is the great and only hope that such
thinking and understanding have always existed in some small percentage of
humanity; some people have always seen through the bubble realities and
struggled to maintain some meaningful connection with the substantial world of
earth and life. Added to that hope is
that even many of those people who live within the bubbles of maladaptation
feel a sense of ill-ease and unrightness; creating a admittedly weak readiness
for something different.
Of course, in powerful opposition to increasingly Reality-based
conceptions and actions will come from those who benefit from the details of
bubble realities – each such bubble reality has its own constituency: the
temple priests, the obscenely wealthy, the warmongers, the power-mad, the
sadists, the psychopaths and sociopaths – the true dregs of society and
community: they of the velvet lie, the arcane theft, the concealed knife, the
openly pointed gun and the threat of atomic annihilation. These are the champions of sophistry, of
solipsism.
These are the people who must ultimately be repatriated as
human beings, defeated and reformed or destroyed. There is no glossing over this bit of reality
bubble: the Great Many, if they were not essential to the various so-called
elites, would be thoughtlessly destroyed by them – and where they are not
essential, have been and will continue to be destroyed in the most sadistic
ways (un)imaginable. And yet we recoil
in horror at the thought that the Great Many might have to control or remove
the so-called elite (a truly parasitic and pathological lot) in order that
humanity might continue to live on in a world of biological stability and
health. Keep this thought in mind as we
proceed.
The most important thought up to this point is: “The
functioning of this principle (evolutionary principle of Reality-based
adaptation) requires intimate, immediate, constant and effective connection to
the events and processes of biophysical Reality: the kind of connection enjoyed
(and suffered) by every organism on earth with the exception of a majority of
humans and their several ‘servant’ organisms.”
Humans must live in “natural” communities that have intimate, immediate,
constant and effective connection to the events and processes of Biophysical
Reality. Such an arrangement would not
make living a utopia, but would only make living possible.
Our species would have to take a great deal less from, and
give back a great deal more to, the biophysical systems that sustain life in
the thin fecund layer covering much of the surface of this planet. Take no solace in the thought that if we do
not do this voluntarily, that the evolutionary process will do it, only with
greater pain. There is only voluntarily:
unless we make this revolutionary change by our own actions, the momentum of
human exertions on the delicate and finite living space will almost certainly
reduce its capacity to sustain complex life to a level that will leave only a
few, if any, mammals and birds, drastically change the composition of the
atmosphere and the oceans and make a comparative waste-land of what is now millions
of species organized into complex life sustaining ecosystems.
Our species, all of us, must come, very soon, to live with
a material simplicity largely unimaginable by the 2 billion or so people of the
industrial nations; a simplicity that meets the condition of intimate,
immediate, constant and effective connection with the actual processes and
conditions of the planetary surface. And
in the process of adapting to a materially simple life, the wealthy peoples
must supply the substance by which the poorest peoples are given the most basic
material support to develop local sustainable, need-meeting systems appropriate
to a materially simple, but informationally complex world.
This doesn’t mean that all people would have to live in
wickiups, chickees or tipis, though some might find living in the great out-of-doors
pleasant. Quite a bit of present
technology would remain and even expand, though at a somewhat less frenetic pace
since resources would move more slowly and in reduced amounts through human industrial
and research systems. Energy systems
could easily be localized and reduced in scale, communication systems could
expand in scope and importance.
I am imagining a world of tiny houses and large gardens
organized into communities numbered and size-scaled by the principles of
face-to-face communication and effective walking distances. Industrial production would be scaled to be
served by public transportation from one or several communities, and would be
part of the commons as worker run cooperatives.
Educational institutions, health institutions and most governing would
function on a similar model.
* * *
From the perspective of the present collection of bubble
realities, how to accomplish such changes is impossible to imagine with any
actual detail of action. There are no
institutions designed to collect the wealth of the rich and organize its salutary
uses among the billions of the most destitute; our institutions are structured
to steal the labor of the poor and concentrate it in the hands of the most
pathologically greedy, and to protect that collected wealth from being used for
the benefit of humanity. In fact, the
primary ‘bubble reality’ is grown from the almost complete ascendency of the
economic/power elite in their long and committed struggle with the essential
basis of the species, the very numerous ‘average’ human animal upon which the
elite depends for all that they have.
What makes this time so different, however, is that human
action, especially as led by the power elites, is not just impacting other
humans with marginal consequences on a few other species, but is changing the
chemical composition the earth’s living space, modifying the basic energy exchanges
among land, sea and air and endangering all of life…. Sorry, didn’t mean to burst your bubble!
