Archive for the ‘Simplicity’ Category

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Humans: Pathology at its Best

Monday, March 1st, 2010

The human race as a collective is very sick. We are damaged goods, broken. In today’s civilization, it is impossible not to be broken because all we see around us is hordes of death, destruction, murder, robbery, genocide, disease, overpopulation, etc. Our culture has turned us into a bunch of living, walking, breathing zombies that care more about how they can get ahead than how we can all work together. It is a natural reaction to the kind of world we live in today. We feel that we always have to be better than other people because we will see more opportunities and have a better life. An endless path of progress until our ultimate demise. This type of thinking is flawed. It is exactly the type of thinking that brought us such great innovations such as the Holocaust and genocide of the Native Americans.

We are so far out of balance and our consciousness shows that.  We continue to destroy our natural habitat in favor of sterile monuments and monumental buildings that represent little more than corporate dominance.  We are slaves to this accident called civilization.  It may not be accurate to call it an accident, because we knew damn well what we were doing and what we are doing now.  The problem was that we became addicted to the power.  When we finally mastered agriculture and the domestication of animals, we became more numerous and were able to gobble up more land for our consumption.  And as this spiraled out of control, our numbers grew larger and larger and central authority was established because once we reach a large enough number of people, there has to be someone in charge, no matter who they are or what their motives are.

And so it goes.  We initially developed agriculture as a survival mechanism to help us through one of the ice ages or other trauma that happened some 30,000 years ago.  We had to adapt and because we had developed such large brains from either eating tons of meat or other factors, we were able to take control of our food supply, which seemed perfectly rational at the time.  It was either make some food or go extinct.  So it is our own superior intelligence and mental adaptability that will ultimately be our demise.  I don’t blame the early homo sapiens for doing what they thought was necessary because had I been in their shoes, I would have done the same thing.  I don’t think they ever thought what would become of our world thousands of years down the road.  They were just doing what they had to.

Let us not forget about the Industrial Revolution that created orders of magnitude more people than grain agriculture.  Let us not shy away from all our medical advances that allow many people to live that would have otherwise been selected out due to living a natural life.  We just keep extending our power beyond our empathy until it is too late.  Where is this civilization going anyway?  Do we really want a world with 15 billion people and over 1 billion Americans?  Is that what we want?  People living in pods designed by GE and eating Monsanto GMO crops?  Because that is the only way we are ever going to feed and house a population of over-consuming, overpopulated humans who just don’t know when to stop.

Thankfully, our civilization should crash well before that nightmarish scenario ever happens.  But people are working to make all our unsustainable technologies more sustainable, which is a nightmare if you ask me.  Do we really want a police state sustainable?  Or a one-world-government?  Do we really want 1984?  Is that what we are shooting for?  A high-tech security state where every move we make is documented and even our private thoughts are being read by government officials?  Because that is where we are headed if we keep up this civilization.  I just pray that we crash fast and hard in the next century and never recover to the point we are at now.

We can gobble up all the natural resources and all the land, but then what?  What is the means to this end?  When there is no more power to be taken, what will those in power do?  When humans have control over every living being, will we expand into the universe and start making all universal life our slaves?  Technophiles are the ones who dream this kind of stuff up.  And they are the ones who are making many of the decisions.  They say that there is always a solution to maintain the status quo and to keep moving in the same direction infinitely, but that is not the case.  It is only a matter of time before we run out of the very fuel that is powering us.  It took millions of years for all the fuel we are using to form.  And in a couple of centuries, we have depleted nearly all of it.  Does that seem very logical and rational to you?

So what are we supposed to do about all this?  I would argue there is nothing we can do on a small scale that would make any significant difference.  The only suggestion I have is to learn how to be self-sufficient and how to live without some of the manufactured necessities we now are blessed to have.  The electricity will come off.  The water will stop running.  There will be catastrophic crop failures.  It’s just a matter of when.  And it is a matter of knowing how to get by on much, much less than we have been.

And it is also shedding this notion that we are entitled to everything this Earth has to offer.  Not to mention taking what the Earth gives us and not forcefully creating our food and shelters in such a way that we destroy the majority of all other life around us.  It is getting rid of all these unnecessary laws and regulations that are just used to control us when what we truly are are wild animals.  And until we embrace our wildness and get back to nature, we will see how we used to live just by watching the animals and how they live.  We will regain more and more of our primal selves and start to realize that the way we live now is totally insane and the way every other creature on this planet lives makes perfect, logical sense

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Posted in Anarcho-primitivism, Anti-establishment, Inspiration, Rants, Simplicity, Theories | 2 Comments »

The Human World is Going to Hell

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

The human world is going to hell and it is taking the rest of the natural world with it.  We’ve poisoned everything in sight for our own selfish “progress.”  We’ve even poisoned ourselves.  Try finding tap water without chlorine and fluoride in it.  Things seem to keep getting worse, too.  We are nearing the collapse of at least the USA, and possibly the global economy as we know it.  America will no doubt become a third world country.  This is, of course, due to our behavior as a species.  The United States makes up 5% of the population and uses over 25% of the world’s resources.  If that isn’t unsustainable, I don’t know what is.  Americans don’t even produce hardly anything anymore, yet another sign we are headed down the road of becoming the other, the nondominant nation.  And it is entirely our own faults.

When the settlers first arrived here in America, the landbase was pristine, a paradise.  Now it has become the United Malls of America.  We have destroyed this entire continent and called it progress.  We have drained the land of every natural resource we could think of and had a misguided assumption that they would last forever.  God forbid we would think ahead.  I have the most dreadful feeling that in the next 50 years, this whole planet will become nothing more than a stinking ball of garbage and radioactive materials.  And we’ll have 15 billion people if some plague or virus doesn’t wipe out half the population.  I already feel overcrowded with just almost 7 billion people on this little rock.  Imagine how fucked up this world will be if double the people live on it.

Lucky for us, the current way of life is unsustainable, so we probably will never see 15 billion people.  And if we do, it will be a tipping point that will lead to the complete destruction of civilization.  There will be some kind of crash this century and I would argue that we are already in it.  The economy is destroyed.  Most of our food supply is created in a lab.  People either have no job or a job that doesn’t allow them to cover their expenses.  There are millions of rivers of money going from the poor to the rich and the Federal Reserve has our country by the balls, quite literally.  The future looks bleak, and there is little we can do about it but pull up a chair to watch everything crash and burn.  I’m sure the television news will put on quite a show.  And we’ve all got a front-row seat.  Sure, it will be a biased report, but you can’t argue with the facts of what is going on.

People are suffering today worse than ever before due to our psychotic and domineering society and culture.  We are told there is only one way to live and we either live that way (the exact way that is getting us into so much trouble in the first place) or be phased out with violence or simple assimilation.  Just ask the Native Americans about how compassionate civilized humans are.  We are all victims of this culture.  We didn’t ask to be born into a world where 1% of the people control something like 50% of the wealth.  The game is rigged, the scales are tilted and we are all in the dark–intentionally.  Nobody at the top will tell you that you’re getting fucked and have been getting fucked since you started your first day of school.  We are only taught what we are meant to be taught to keep us docile, compliant, and subordinate.  We are taught to never question authority and to accept that rules are rules and laws are laws no matter how ridiculous some of them may be.

So here we have a population of people who are completely devoid of critical thinking.  Sure, there are some people who are resilient enough to break out of the propaganda, but for the most part people just take what they see and hear at face value and believe it, especially if it comes from a trusted media outlet.  The news is the main tool of propaganda, and this is exactly why there are 24-hour news channels.  The powers that be want us to be exposed to their manifestos at all hours of the day and night to keep us thinking the way they want us to think. Here’s a link to Bill Hicks’s JFK assassination joke that shows how the totalitarian media tells you what to think and distracts you with meaningless entertainment.  Even shows that are supposedly entertainment express these same views through the characters’ values and ways of life.  Their main messages are that buying things will make you happy, your government always knows what is best, and that we as a people are entitled to whatever we want, no matter the cost (financial or ecological).  We are told that to challenge authority is a big no-no and to think for yourself makes you a radical.  To propose ideas that are not widely accepted by the brainwashed masses and those who are doing the brainwashing is grounds to get you assassinated (at least some of the time).

It is a mad, mad world out there and a self-destructive one at that.  We are literally biting off the hand that feeds us and it is only going to end one way and at this point I do not believe there is any way to stop the crash.  We are already in it.  Things will get a lot worse before they get better and people will die.  When we run out of the fuel that sustains us, what will we have left to keep up this standard of living and to support this many people?  Hell, even our own crops are grown with fertilizer derived from oil.  Us humans may have been smart enough to control the world, but to do it in a way that will allow us to do it forever is beyond our reach.  We extend our power beyond our understanding and beyond our empathy to the point where we even hurt ourselves in the process.  Can we ever recover from this type of behavior?

I think time will tell whether or not we can overcome this pathological death cycle we are caught in right now.  Of course, after we have a major crash, there will be someone next in line to assume power and control, but only it will be much harder to control an entire population without all those natural resources.  I hope that one day we can start living from the land, not exploiting it, but I very much doubt I will see this in my lifetime because people are so resistant to change, especially one of this order of magnitude.  And if we do form a society without guns and exploitation, what is to stop another neighboring tribe from doing the opposite and overtaking us, much like every culture that exists today once did?  Perhaps the Earth is better off without humans altogether, but try pushing that idea on people.  Not going to happen.

I have faith that one day perhaps we will realize the folly of our ways and revert back to our hunter-gatherer real selves.  How we get there is unknown to me, but once we realize that it is more intelligent to live in balance as a whole species and retain that species consciousness without being seduced by fancy new tools that increase our power at a hidden cost, then it will be a possibility.  I’m just hoping that eventually we can live the way we are supposed to once again, the way nature intended.

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Posted in Anarcho-primitivism, Anti-establishment, Nature, Simplicity, Theories | 5 Comments »

DNA and Natural Selection

Friday, January 15th, 2010

At our very core, us humans are all the same. We all want to survive and to pass our genes on to the next generation. It is built into our DNA. This is why the act of reproduction feels so good. We are programmed to reproduce at any cost possible because we originated from a world with very few humans with very low survival rates. Natural selection took care of the people who were ill-equipped to survive and the ones with the strongest genes lived on to replicate their DNA time and time again, ensuring the species a better chance of surviving. This was back in our hunter-gatherer days.

In comes agriculture. This new invention forced upon the entire world over time increased our population due to a greater abundance of food, and this led to more people and more food and so on to the point where we for the most part do not go hungry and have more than enough food to feed the world many times over. More and more people are surviving that would have died back in the hunter-gatherer days because survival has gotten easier and easier every generation, evident by all those people you see walking around. So we have a diluted gene pool that just keeps reproducing at the speed of light, with exponential population growth, leading to a resource scarcity and a destruction of our Earth’s ecosystem. The stronger gene people mixed in with the weaker gened people and turned us all into a homogeneous population of consumerism-obsessed “zombies.” Now I use the term “zombie” to refer to the mass of people on Black Friday who want a good sale so badly they trample a Wal*Mart employee to death. We are overcrowded and we sense in our DNA that there will not be enough to go around, so we become agitated and fearful.

We are living so far out of balance, even our own bodies can sense it. Every time I see a tree being cut down or factory-farmed animals in cages, I feel for them. I feel like we could be doing so much better as a race, but instead we look after our own narrow-minded self-interest instead of working towards the greater good for all of the world. We buy sneakers made by child slaves and fur coats made from dead animals that were seen as no more than a commodity, an expendable life for the purpose of fashion. But we don’t want to know. We don’t want to think that the animal we are serving up for dinner spent its entire life in a cage, never seeing the light of day and then was slaughtered in a very bloody death, but all cleaned up by the time we get it at our local supermarket. It wouldn’t have to be this way if there weren’t so many people that we had to start domesticating animals and using them as tools to serve us, rather than allowing them to live their lives as well.

I would argue that natural selection became human selection after some time in civilization. We exterminate all life that doesn’t benefit us, and we keep the things around the we use or find nice to look at. Everything else is expendable. Our own selfish needs, brought about by our selfish DNA, which cares about nothing more than survival of itself and its species, will go to great lengths to make sure we have everything at the expense of every other living creature on this planet.

We are what we are. It’s hard to change a species’ consciousness. We are doomed to keep up this behavior for quite some time until we crash and burn into a place where we are forced to live like we once did, but who knows if we’ll just repeat the cycle over and over for all eternity, crashing and burning, then rebuilding, then crashing and burning again? Since the human lifespan is not infinite or even more than a century at best, it’s hard to really know if we will ever learn from these mistakes we’ve made or if we will ever change our ways. It’s possible that we are hardwired to keep up the destruction, even well after we have lost everything due to resource depletion. Always the optimist, I know.

It’s possible that we may find that balance again where we live with nature and enhance it, but how we get to that point is beyond my knowledge. Even a plan that looks good on paper is going to hit many, many obstacles that will destroy any hope of a nature-based human world. Humans will go extinct in the future, but it will take a long time, but this exploitative and self-important type of behavior will certainly hasten our demise into oblivion, which is a good thing in that scenario anyway because we’re not living in balance. If we could find a place where we fit and stay there in a nature-based culture, it would also be fine because we could exist for millions of years and still have everything we started with.

But I don’t know if humans are capable of going back. Time will tell.

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Posted in Anarcho-primitivism, Anti-establishment, Inspiration, Intentions, Nature, Simplicity, Theories | 1 Comment »

Milk and Other Issues

Friday, November 6th, 2009

I haven’t drank milk in a long time because I just find it to be counterproductive when it comes to my health. Pasteurized milk from sick cows just allows the factory farming system to raise cows in ever-worsening conditions, pumping them with more antibiotics and growth hormone to the point that milking cows only live a few years, 3-5, and then die well before their usual lifespans. Cows that are fed genetically-modified grains (mostly corn) instead of being able to feed on grass–their natural diet. What exactly is in our milk anyway? It certainly no longer does a body good. It sure used to before all these laws were passed to outlaw raw milk in most of the country and ever since Monsanto was allowed to put rBGH into 95% of our milk supply.

Sure, these laws were passed because of our own incompetence. The pasteurization laws were passed because some dirty farmers were trying to sell milk from sick cows and people got sick, so milk was deemed no longer safe. Much like the raw almonds of today. One outbreak of salmonella and they spray all almonds in California with a toxic pesticide. Milk is so healthy in its natural form and yet it is almost toxic in the form it is in today. A large proportion of our population can’t even digest milk because the enzyme lactase was destroyed in pasteurization and homogenization. Would we expect any less from our government? Could we expect any better from totalitarianism and helpless dependence by an entire nation?

I just want a healthy mixture to put into my fucking coffee. I don’t want some science experiment in my mug. And don’t say soymilk because I’m not too keen on developing breast cancer or breasts for that matter. And let’s not forget about the antinutrients that are found in non-fermented soy. And I’m not really in the mood to drive up to Amish country every time I want some raw cream from a healthy cow.

I’m sure I could find a farmer here in the great state of South Carolina, but it shouldn’t have to be this way. Farming is dead now anyway. Most farming is done by corporations with their genetically modified crops. Corn, soy, wheat, and that’s pretty much it. Those are the staples of our civilization. Of course they factory-farm all our animals and feed them all the corn, soy, and wheat that is unsuitable for human consumption. It is nearly impossible to get healthy meat or dairy from anywhere when even 100 years ago it was easy. Well there were so much less people, too, so there wasn’t half as much competition. And now the medical industrial complex is profiting from the inferior standards imposed on our food supply because we keep getting sick due to eating foods with less than half the nutrients they had 100 years ago. I just want some healthy food and drinks, God damn it! I don’t want toxic waste in my water, antibiotics in my meat, and rBGH in my fucking milk! I want whole, natural foods grown ethically and without poisons.

Of course pesticides go with the given assumption that all the world’s food is for humans and every other creature that tries to eat “our” food should be killed. Vegans say that they are ethical consumers, but their diets contribute to billions or more of animal and insect deaths every year. Sure, it is less than meat eaters, but not by much. Just creating those monoculture farms kills off entire ecosystems. So it is the whole system that is broken. But my readers already know my position on that. But I’m not going to change the whole system, but I sure as hell can raise awareness about it, can’t I?

I’m not going to boycott eating meat or become one of those freegans. Not that I don’t agree with their philosophy.  It’s just that it’s not going to make any real difference and I’m not too keen on picking my food out of the garbage.  Besides, where am I going to find high-quality, organic foods in the garbage?  The only person I’ve heard of that has been successful at that is Ran Prieur.  Here is his Dumpser Diving FAQ if you really want to go down that route.  Sure, this is more ethical than supporting a corrupt system financially, but this goes way beyond my comfort zone.

You’re still not going to pull high-quality food out of the dumpster anyway.  It is the same shit that they sell at the grocery stores.  You’re just getting it for free.  And it doesn’t attack the problem at its cause.  It merely attacks one of the effects of our current civilization.  The only way we can go back to getting healthy foods is after we dismantle civilization and central authority.  I guess I’ll have to wait until then to get healthy milk unless I really want to go all Amish on you guys.  Which means this blog will become dormant for longer and longer periods.  Can you have a coffeemaker in Amish country?

I’m at least grateful I can live in a time when my opinions can be voiced.  Sure, I can’t go too far or else Big Brother will take me down.  But at least expression is freer than it has been in past civilizations, but at the same time it is getting tighter.  But as the system keeps getting tighter, it is only because it is getting weaker.  It is starting to break at the seams.  Like George Carlin said some 15 years ago, “I always ask people in every city if they trust the water.  They always say no.  That’s a good sign that everything is starting to break down.”  Of course I’m paraphrasing, but that was over 15 years ago.  Now we don’t trust any of the food or drink we are presented with.  What does that say about society in general?  That things are getting worse, but that is a good thing.  That is the first step in the right direction of us going back to nature, but with the intelligence of having lived through this joke of a civilization we created.

But will we learn from our mistakes after the dust has settled?  Who knows?  Perhaps we are destined to keep rising and falling for the rest of our ( likely) short history on Earth.  If that is the case, I guess we are just all along for the ride.  The key for us all is to mentally get outside of the system.  That is the most important part of liberating ourselves.  We need to live a radically simple life as Dave Pollard puts it in his essay How To Save the World.  He has a whole laundry list of what you can do and what you should do.  He is one of the best anti-civ thinkers out there, but he is a bit pessimistic.  But at least he is honest.  With all the information he has about the real state of the world, he can’t help it.  But as of late, in the last few years, he has become more joyful and has concentrated on living in the present, which is a big help to us all IMHO.

We need to start a movement of back to nature, but preferably in a warm climate because I hate the fucking cold.  That way we can get back to the way it used to be and live our lives the way nature intended with full awareness of how not to live so that we never get sucked into this civilization vortex ever again.  But I don’t have much faith in humanity as a whole.  But I do have faith in individual people to spread the word and raise awareness.  But people will only listen when they are ready.  It’s a shame, but it’s the truth.  My question to everyone is:  When will you be ready?

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Posted in Anarcho-primitivism, Anti-establishment, Food/Health Related, Nature, Simplicity, Theories | 2 Comments »

How to Save the World

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

I’ve been reading a blog entitled How to Save the World again after not reading it for a long time and I really encourage everyone to take a look at what this man, Dave Pollard, has to say.  I would recommend first reading his essay entitled How to Save the World and go from there.  He’s got years and years worth of essays and blog posts that could keep you reading for years.  He is an avid Earth lover and someone who actually has some interesting solutions about how to save the Earth and still allow for humans to live on it, albeit with much lower population numbers.  He is extremely intelligent and may be hard to comprehend for some readers.  He often has all kinds of charts and diagrams to show his thinking in a more visual format.  He is of very high consciousness and has very interesting and true (to me) opinions of what needs to be done to get our species back into balance with the rest of life on Earth.  I’m not going to even attempt to give a summary of what he believes in because I know I’ll miss something and maybe add something that is incongruent.  I would just suggest reading his big signature essay, linked above first and then moving from there.

I would have to say he has one of the best environmental/realistic blogs on the planet and he doesn’t sugarcoat the problems we will be facing in the next century.  The man has read extensively on the state of the world and then read more, and continues to keep reading about all these issues and how they have evolved.  And he keeps writing, and I assume he will continue to until his death, which means there will be plenty of material to be read by everyone.  He also has a reading list that will clarify all the issues he is talking about.  It’s somewhere on his site. There it is.  Just click that link.  I’m not one to go around promoting other people’s blogs, but if I find one that really speaks to me, I send the gift to you, free of charge.  He is the imaginer as he puts it, great at imagining possibilities.  Highly recommended.  Have been a long-term reader on and off for years, at least since 2005.  Happy Reading.

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Posted in Anarcho-primitivism, Anti-establishment, Link, Nature, Simplicity | No Comments »

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