by culicomorpha » Wed 23 Jan 2008, 02:22:01
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('threadbear', 'I') wonder how some of you feel about the resurgence of interest in New Age ideas, as a social force, from a more anthropological view point?
Well, despite my complaints about the new-agers, I think they are just searching for something deeper, more meaningful than what we find in our world today. And in a lot of ways, that seems to me a good thing. I applaud anyone who is seeking something more, a different way. From all religions or beliefs.
For me personally, the mundane world I live in is a hell that I would rather not be in if I had a choice in the matter. The fact of the matter is that the culture in the US, particularly, is absolutely out of its mind, and has one and only one possible end-point unless things change dramatically from the current direction.
How many cases of cancer will it take before people understand that you can't just alter the world with immunity? For me, it's the place where my spirituality intersects with the reality I live in. And I know I'm not alone in feeling this way.
One of out of 2.7 people living today in the US will get cancer. One out of 10 couples cannot conceive. 5 million people have Alzheimer's. Obesity and diabetes are way beyond the 5% criteria for an epidemic. And things are getting dramatically worse because medicine only treats symptoms, but the causes are off the table.
Sure, we can blame this stuff on lifestyles, but come on. There is a much deeper problem that we don't want to face: our way of life, our taken for granted assumptions about the way the world works are simply false. But we pretend that everything is fine, and hope that maybe things will get better on their own.
This seems to me to be chaos magic writ large. It is what happens when many people hold a false epistemology. One of my favorite quotes seems apropos in this regard:
"If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against all the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your conspecifics against the environment of of other social units, other races and the brutes and the vegetables.
If this is your estimate of your relation to nature
and you have an advanced technology [his emphasis], your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic byproducts of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite." Gregory Bateson