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Page added on April 5, 2014
Welcome To The Asylum
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.
Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.
Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.
Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile, exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society of the Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation. Descartes argued, for example, that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use was the duty of humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans, satanic. It had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the technical order resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence,” in the primacy of “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker.” Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer, Slotkin notes, became “national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”
The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”
The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
In William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero is stranded on an island where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive “monster” Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island’s wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity for self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous evil since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed and power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire, also would expose the same intoxication with barbarity.
The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was “adopted” by the Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in “Ancient Society” about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly, in his “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. … Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”
All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, “as a looking glass does his face.” And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush.
Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and now that the game is up we all go down together.
27 Comments on "Welcome To The Asylum"
Davy, Hermann, MO on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 12:54 pm
ARTICLE SAID – When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
It is the nature of a species with a large brain to develop to a point through knowledge, technology, and economy that drives itself to over population and carrying capacity overshoot from limits of growth and diminishing returns of complexity. Read Jared Dimond’s “Collapse” and see what happened on Easter Island. These people were still relatively primitive but at this level they still for abstract religious reason destroyed the forests that supported them. Our large brains developed knowledge and technology quicker than it could a moral and ethical order to control the horrors that technology and knowledge develop. We did not have time to adapt culturally to the technology we quickly developed. The primary problem for this lack of balanced was fossil fuels. If we could have remained with 17th and 18th century technology without the introduction of fossil fuels we most likely would not have seen the industrial revolution. Let us face it the industrial revolution was Pandora’s box of the evils that development and economy lead to in its excess. Human nature and human knowledge is capable of good and evil human actions. Technology and knowledge trend towards mechanizations and control of the environment and neighbors in excess. We may retain good within the tribe but we unleash evil on our neighbors as soon as competition develops. Throw in technology and knowledge and this process gets ugly. We are now faced with AGW, WMD’S, NUK WASTES, LIMITS OF GROWTH, AND OVER POPULATION. Our large brains are evolutionary dead ends that will likely take us back to the Stone Age with a greatly diminished ecosystem. This may bring our large brain species back into harmony through a bottleneck and loss of most if not all modern technology. We will be back to the noble savage with extinction very possible.
rollin on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 1:14 pm
As “civilization” dies, some will make heroic efforts to sustain it. Others will just grieve and try to ease things on in a safe and comfortable way. Some will just walk away as they realize it’s a wasted effort to try and prop up a dying thing.
Some of those that walk away will walk toward something new.
As far as extinguishing beauty, the only real beauty exists in nature and the human race is doing a fine job on that front. Still there will be pockets of surviving nature to nurture and provide for those that continue on.
One of the big advantages that we have today is that the so called “elite” and many of their minions have almost no real survivability. They are so dependent upon money to obtain everything and to be propped up by their machine world that many will come to a very quick end. The rest we should not listen to or follow, for what the offer has little value in a failing society.
rockman on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 2:04 pm
“The rest we should not listen to or follow”. As was taught by one of my tribes early in my life: The value of not being one of those folks who wants to live forever. IOW no one gets out alive anyway so stop worrying about not surviving and just do your duty. A good philosophy IMHO but difficult to hold to.
paulo1 on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 2:32 pm
Such a romantic view of Native Culture and disdain for current lifestyles can only be seen from the eyes of an educated elite, from one who has reaped all the benefits of ‘evil capitalism’ and most likely been cloistered for life in safe academic studies. Life in NA native society was far from idylic. There was hand to mouth existence, perpetual wars and fear of being anniliated by your closest competitor, dirt, slavery, and repetitive boring subsistence. In my area native groups would change encampments when they became too filthy to stand any longer, returning when sun and rain and time cleaned up after them. I don’t think it would be so great wearing cold and wet clothing made of prepared cedar bark, and sleeping in groups in a communal longhouse alongside a smokey wet wood fire to stay warm…alongside your aunt or uncle who lets salmon farts go 24/7 while the rains pound down day after day, week after week until spring. To remain busy there was always bark to prepare, food to gather, wood to scrounge, whatever. In reality it was cold and misreable work regardless of the weather. Digging clams with a pointed stick is not my idea of fun. Fishing with nets made of bark and weights from stones with holes scraped in them for the bark line to pass through…..no, I’ll take my lead weights and Penn spinning reel.
There is a lot wrong with our culture, for sure. But I for one enjoy sitting on a warm toilet rather than squatting in the bush in the rain. I absolutely love that first cup of coffee around the woodstove in the morning and marvel at the great music emanating from the sattelite radio. I like having a shower when I need one, and when I am sore from working too hard there is nothing like a good soak in the tub with a glass of Crown Royal. I suppose I could wash up in the river but it is too clod to swim in even in summer.
These writings of extreme romanticism and scoffing at the amenities that even the poorest in our society have; the ability for medical care in emergencies, warmth when the nights will kill, enough food to survive and clothing to wear (even if it comes from the Sally Ann), are beyond the pale and can only come from the pen of someone who has never wanted for one damn thing.
Certainly, there are hellholes many are forced to live in and hellish lives, but here in NA it doesn’t have to be and is an exception and not the rule. Capitalism is not evil, some people are, but capitalism has done us quite well for the most part.
Give it a break.
Paulo
Makati1 on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 3:03 pm
“… now that the game is up we all go down together…” busy taking ‘selfies’ and posting what we had for breakfast to people who don’t give a damn because they are too self-involved to care and we are too self-involved to notice.
Extinction couldn’t happen to a more deserving species. The real pity is that most do not even see the 2X4 of reality about to hit them between the eyes as it is not on Facebook or the evening news.
Makati1 on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 3:08 pm
Paulo, did you know that ‘flushing’ toilets are as old as Rome? They were only possible for the wealthy, but they did exist. Of course it meant controlling a stream to divert some water through the system, but it did work. It was basically a small stream flowing under a bench seat in a special room. English castles, and monasteries had them. Some things are not new.
Stilgar Wilcox on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 7:10 pm
“The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship.”
Instead of bringing people together it has moved us apart, as we each live a life of royalty (compared to previous ages) gathering as much stuff together to call our own as we can. The more we self-worship the less we care about others and their plight as net energy declines.
From everything I’ve read about ideas for what awaits in a post fossil fuel age, is the need for communities to come together for survival, to till the soil, etc. Our days of cocooning are numbered, but in the aftermath those that make it through the bottleneck will have much less tech available to distract us from our connections to others and in turn much less prone to mental illness. Humans are social, and the reconnection of community will in many ways be a positive transition.
noobtube on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 7:42 pm
Americans are not adapted to any other way of living, than by destroying every and anything around them.
The American lifestyle (suburbs, highways, malls, 3000-mile snow globes) creates trash producers that can only survive in the most coddled way possible.
It’s like the United States produces adult children (me me me, I want it my way, forget everyone and everything).
Fat, stupid, and lazy… nothing admirable about an American.
Ted on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 8:01 pm
Blah! Blah,,blah what a load of utter crap! Written by some rich white elitist who in between taking a break from watching game of thrones or some other bs…….The people on here have so much F…ing free time! Do any of you actually work for a living? I see the same names come up time and time again…are you just cowards trying to scare others as to being fearful as you are? Yes your mommies and daddies won’t be able to save you but shut the hell up please….Your whining and tearful woes are so embarrassing to watch….
rollin on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 9:31 pm
Teddy is throwing a tantrum and needs to go to his room without supper.
J-Gav on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 10:31 pm
Rockman – That’s a decent philosophy to live by but the difficulty remains as to exactly what one’s ‘duty’ is …
J-Gav on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 10:47 pm
Paulo – Though I believe you’re right to point out that not everything that capitalism has brought with it is ALL BAD, I don’t agree that indigenous found themselves in a perpetual state of war. Treachery, thievery, murder – all that existed between and within tribes but as far as conflict is concerned, there was much more macho posturing and skirmishes going on than outright war.
J-Gav on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 11:09 pm
Regarding Chris Hedges, he was shipped out by his family to become a member of the ‘elite.’ Later did Harvard Seminary School etc. If you’ve read his writings, you will know that he has described in detail how appalled he was at the attitudes he confronted daily. The callous refusal to see the amount of suffering in the world or to even attempt to understand how to make our lives better, as opposed to wealthier…
He didn’t become a priest, but a war correspondant. Saw it all close up and denounced it for what it is : a murderous racket.
I don’t agree with all the positions he takes but he is up front about it, doesn’t hide, and to brush him off as just another useless, elite-educated half-wit is short-sighted to say the least.
GregT on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 11:37 pm
“Your whining and tearful woes are so embarrassing to watch….”
If it rants like a smurf, swears like a smurf, and insults like a smurf………….
FriedrichKling on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 11:49 pm
Paulo- Your admiration of unfettered capitalism is as misguided as your assault on Native Americans.
You and “Ted” fail to grasp the central theme of the message, which was well stated by Davey, ” Our large brains developed knowledge and technology quicker than it could a moral and ethical order to control the horrors that technology and knowledge develop. We did not have time to adapt culturally to the technology we quickly developed.”
FriedrichKling on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 11:53 pm
Ted-
Do you have anything intelligent to add to the conversation? I can see based on your comments that the truth is far too difficult for you to assimilate, thus the temper tantrum type response. You are a perpetual child like most of American society.
GregT on Sat, 5th Apr 2014 11:57 pm
Paulo,
I’ll be the first to admit that I enjoy immensely, all of the niceties of modern industrial society. The sad fact of the matter is however, the west coast native lifestyle lasted for some 15 thousand years, and was sustainable. Our way of life has lasted for a couple of hundred years, is not sustainable, and is coming to an end shortly. Let’s just hope that we don’t take much of the rest of life on Earth with us, when this insanity comes crashing down.
Ted on Sun, 6th Apr 2014 12:39 am
Oh yes I forget any comments that are not in complete agreement and don’t commiserate with the “group” will quickly be marginalized. If you really believe in complete destruction why are you wasting your time here?!!! If a doctor told you you had a year to live is this how you would be spending your time? Oh and Fred what “great society” do you live in?…it must be on another planet because as far as I can tell there is no great society here on earth with clean hands…..there is blood on every hand here….don’t give me your Al Gore liberal pious attitude…you only have a few years left….be bigger than that….I bet most of you have advanced degrees but don’t know the first thing about how to survive…and have never killed in your life but sat idly by while others did it for you…..
Makati1 on Sun, 6th Apr 2014 12:51 am
Ah, the venom in Ted’s veins is killing his ability to see reality. That a few of us use this forum to express our views and to debate the situation, seems to upset his view of the world according to Ted. That we prefer this mental stimulation to that provided by drugs or the latest Hollywood profit maker, is our decision, not his.
And yes, Ted, it appears that most of us ‘regulars’ do have an advanced education and/or many decades of living experience. Is that a problem?
FriedrichKling on Sun, 6th Apr 2014 1:45 am
Ted-
Your assumptions demonstrate you are a fool’s fool.
I served in the military as an 18 year old draftee and saw more blood and guts than can possibly be imagined.
I also grew-up on a farm so I know all about the bloody business of butchering livestock.
You would feel much more at home if you re-joined FOX “noise”. So shut your pie-hole and buzz-off.
Ted on Sun, 6th Apr 2014 4:02 am
Fried you are so full of S…. what army did you serve in? I was in the 101st….let me know who was your commanding officer…don’t lie just because you are on the internet……..I call your bullshTTTTTTTTTT.
Ted on Sun, 6th Apr 2014 4:15 am
Yeah…that’s what I thought……..
GregT on Sun, 6th Apr 2014 4:58 am
Get help Ted. Before you hurt yourself, or someone else.
Joe Clarkson on Sun, 6th Apr 2014 6:53 am
I think that Paulo (elegantly) and Ted (rudely) both get at an issue that invites disdain from just about everyone. No one likes a hypocrite, and there is a kernel of hypocrisy when anyone glorifies the ‘noble savage’ from a position of ‘civilized’ comfort via the internet. It surely would have been better if the author of this article had been reporting on the lessons of his personal experience living with the bushmen of the Kalahari or with a tribe in the New Guinea highlands.
But as GregT pointed out, the indigenous people of the Americas, or anywhere else, didn’t threaten the livability of the planet. If the author had left it at that, instead of railing against the effects of capitalism on the arts, our psychological health, and just about anything else he doesn’t like, his argument would have been rock solid.
FriedrichKling on Sun, 6th Apr 2014 7:46 am
Ted-
Like I need to justify my service to a POS like yourself. And who gives a rat’s ass that you served in the 101st.
Now, if you want to make a substantial monetary wager, than put your money where your mouth is. I am serious.
FriedrichKling on Sun, 6th Apr 2014 7:56 am
Ted-
Just located my DD-214 so anytime you are ready to put your money where your big mouth is just let me know.
bobinget on Sun, 6th Apr 2014 2:57 pm
Because our lives are short (and brutal for many) even the empathetic self medicate.