As Plato once said, Democracy is the second lowest form of government, only surpassed by Tyranny.

“Craig
Jan 7th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
But I think the bigger problem is that people are stupid.”

Bingo.

“Harry
Jan 9th, 2010 at 5:51 am
First of all, we need at least some of the things we have created.”

I advocate for modern medicine (trauma/emergency medicine mostly), public libraries, the history of philosophy, linguistics, and certain scientific disciplines (LHC not being one of the important ones) being saved. I’m all for trashing the rest. Oh, except for the programs that keep watch for asteroids/comets/etc. – I mean what use if we finally get our shit together and then WHAM-O, ninja comet decides to erase us but we could have pulled an “Armageddon” and deflected it while Aerosmith sings in the background? Be kind of pointless. But other than that I’m happy off in the woods with knives and campfires.

Many groups which did develop civilizations, such as the Maya and the Anasazi, eventually realized they were dead ends and walked away from them.

Lots of non-agricultural peoples resisted being forced into civilization. The reason it spread was the simple population growth of agriculturalists, the result of agriculture having circumvented the normal processes by which a species’ numbers are regulated. So farming peoples totally outpopulated and wiped out or otherwise displaced remaining HGs.

So I think the initial hurdle is the hardest part, getting more people to see that a non-agricultural life can be really good. Notice Harry above, whose view I think is understandalble, who apparently thinks today’s technological life is just obviously superior to the HG life. It takes time and a lot of thinking about a whole group of ideas to come to some sense of comfort with the notion of a possible HG life. (Watching a film like Ten Canoes might speed that up a tad.:)

One idea: Worldwide there are 3 billion people living on no more than 2 dollars a day. For them, the life of a HG would be a huge step up in sheer luxury. There’s some value in that, I think, for the future of rewilding. (Not the 3 billion — the human population will have to drop tremendously in the future — but that almost half of everyone would improve their “standard of living” if they could switch to HG.)

Then there is also the importance of cultural mythologies/stories. Some rewilders are heavily into that for good reason. One reason, I think, it that for a future HG culture to last it would need to have built into its fabric mythologies emphasizing the importance, for example, of living in harmony with local ecosystems. (The only peoples who have ever done that are HGs.) Such stories would serve to prevent people straying to unsustainable experiments in “civilization.”

Get past the first generation wanting to get back to TV and a couch, and I think a new (old) way of living could last.

It didn’t take the Indians long before they decided that they really liked guns and steel and horses. As a species we’re hard wired to always want more.

I’ve seen enough Star Trek to know that there is no such thing as a perfect society.

I say society is a good thing. The alternative to being a slave to the empire is living out in the woods with a tent, a campfire and a knife. Without society, we aren’t capable of creating nifty things like the LHC.

What we need is for people to stop living to consume. How is the baby boomer generation spending their lives? Consuming. Society is in the caterpillar phase of its life cycle and I’m excited to see what the butterfly looks like.

While we are ruining our planet and all the other evils we commit, it’s necessary for whatever is next. To make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs. Earth just happens to be one of them. If you want lightsabers and time travel and all that, then society has to make it through the awkward adolescent phase without collapsing entirely.

McDonalds has offered salads since 1983. People would rather have McNuggets. Pepsi Throwback, using the original recipe with cane sugar, sits unbought next to the high fructose corn syrup swill. Parks and sidewalks get torn down because people demand more parking. Without demand there would be no supply.

I really don’t buy arguments about how America’s working class can’t get by or afford better. A pound of beans sells for $1.25 and will feed you for a week. How often does the average American family eat out? How much of our credit card debt was spent on ski trips and whoopie cushions? Grand Theft Auto Four was setting sales records as the recession was picking up steam.

I really think that the powers that be are just giving us what we want. Unfortunately we all want crap, we want it now, and we don’t care how much it costs.

I love that – a new 2,000 year Strategic Plan!!! Will there be a Mission Statement served with that, and I wonder what the catchy slogan will be in our post apocalyptic world? I hope i get to witness the event that springs for the utopic myth of the next 2,000 years.

My only critique of this article would be in the reference to people as “masses” similar to what conspiracy theorists do in calling people “sheep” or anarchists “slaves”. All perhaps appropriate in a way, however it is the insulting nature of reference that may loose credibility or attention of potential thinking people. We are all people, though I can see the difficulty if figuring out less insulting ways to describe a situation with more than six billion people living destructively. I guess I am not calling the reference to people, “masses” inappropriate as it definitely refers to the domestication of humans, just as herds for cattle or sheep. Personally I would just like to see it avoided though when seeking solutions within the thinking person community.

That said – two thumbs way up Scout ! Well written article.

Look at the three Abrahamic religons. No one could have predicted the power of their stories in our world today. The writers of many books of the Bible would be shocked that their literature is used to facilitate classism. The books where written to largely combat classism, the idea one human bloodline is better than another or that “God” is exclusive. We must begin our new 2,000 year plan and I have no doubt the seeds have already been planted. We are the leaves reaching to the sky, collecting the sun light to power our roots. We will fall but our stories will continue as new leaves grow. The water bearer has brought us spring rains and we know now. Civilization is Primitive.

How do we really get free? I agree that this civilization would have to come down for that…

Possum

I simplified it to that statement because that’s how I interpreted what you wrote — that nothing will be better until the empire is gone. That presumes that taking down the empire is a means to and end and all the time from the imagined “here” to “there” is an absolute shit of a time. That’s how I perceived what you wrote at least.

I can’t say there are any set actions one should perform to most effectively spread freedom or change or whatever. And this relates directly to that quote, that it all depends from which mental framework one looks out onto the world with.

Sources of meaning are the patterns of thought each of us practice over and over in our minds — for example, children from Africa may see a white man digging garden beds and think to themselves, “Why is this white man digging? Digging is for the poor, the farmers… white men are rich, aren’t they? Can’t they pay someone to dig for them, to grow their food?” In their mind, they assume Caucasians as rich and powerful people, and farmers as the lowest, most poor of people. Just like many Americans may see someone driving a very expensive car and think to themselves, “They must have power, wealth, plenty of self-worth.”

To summarize the statement, just because one happens to form certain ideas about the physical world or certain objects in the physical world, does not mean that those ideas or patterns of thought have any affect on those physical objects, more so, it’s those very patterns (the quality and content of our inner lives) that effect our relationships to the physical world.

But, what specifically should we do? We must shout down the politicians and their “solutions”. Any political system with an elite class of “representatives” is corrupt by its nature.

I believe TRUE democracy is our only hope. We must come together as a community in the public square and vote with raised hands. No more secret ballots. No more elections. No more politicians.
Every person gets one vote. Accept nothing less.

You said, “The only way to truly end empire is if everyone stops participating in it.”

Can you tell me more about what you mean by this? What do you mean by everyone, and what do you mean by participating in it?

Hey Mark,

You said, To be quite honest I don’t think that’s an effective strategy for looking at the problems of the world — to step back and “say ‘well the only way things will get better is if we stop all the bad people’.”

I feel you have greatly over simplified my words and in doing so twisted them. I would say more accurately that I mean; the only way for us to live free lives involves dismantling the prison. because say when we escape, they will hunt us. Maybe not a few people, but if many escape, they will hunt us and enslave us again.

You said, “Those who make the most effective and lasting change start within themselves and spread outwards from there.”

I agree. But the question remains, what does it mean to “spread outwards from there”? What choices will actually free us from empire? Certainly not choices that Empire allows us to make.

Also this quote you added: “The choices we make in response to our surroundings affect our relationship to the sources of meaning far more powerfully than the surroundings themselves, and those choices depend on the quality and content of our inner lives, not on outer factors.”

There are a few premises in this statement I want to address:
What are “sources of meaning?”
Why does it matter how “powerfully” they affect our sources of meaning? Did they do the job in the physical world they needed to?
Why do those choices depend on the quality and content of our inner lives?

This statement really means nothing to me. I keep trying to put it into use in a particular case and it sounds like gibberish. Can you put it to use, explain what it means, using a particular example?

Those who make the most effective and lasting change start within themselves and spread outwards from there. Apathy is useless and dead.

I think it’s enough to say that empire is incompatible with a sustainable human way of life (I did mean human, not humane, although wild human culture tends to be that also, to some degree), and then prepare to deal with that knowledge and that reality. We really don’t have any other option, unless we want to take up nukes ourselves and go toe to toe. I don’t, you don’t, and nobody in the rewilding movement does so let’s figure out the alternative. Well, OK, you already are.