"What you share with the world is what it keeps of you..."
It is in times like these that I feel that wisdom and prudence must come back to us all. This is something I have grown up alongside, understanding gradually the psychology behind it all not through some prolonged effort, but through inevitable alienation as to how this society works and how it rests to easily upon private industry and the success of new market models. I've also learned through time that I have to understand politics to be adequately understanding. I even delved into Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations earlier this year to understand just why it is that we are here. It's all overwhelming most of the time. I have my own personal difficulties but my conscience wretches and twists as time tells me that I am a writer and a philosopher, and I must write words with compassion and love in order to overcome this confusion that surrounds me. Let me first talk about love and compassion, and being awake.
I am a young man and as I have grown up I have been struggling against what can only be described as a veil over reality. It is a generation of excess and non-understanding of environment, a generation detached quite remarkably from rural life and understanding of the time and diversity needed for the world to support us as a species. We are a species that has been for ten thousand years cultivating the soil and developing quite lately to believe that it is us who control and select the outcome of our labors upon it. We are young, and this earth is old and wisdom not comparable to human conscience or rational models exists within it. Consider the depth of harmony within the Amazonian rain forest or perhaps a forest in general; based upon compatibility between species activities and growth through diversity, the forest serves to perpetuate itself. Plants were here long before our time and will perhaps outlast our time, and we are a species that has developed a relationship with it, but a relationship which has been uneven more a great length of time.
What is this a result of? The possession of space and of time, the unfolding of space (usually represented by lease or by ownership, which means that space is not only possessed at one point but into the foreseeable future, a space which we have claimed entitlement to somehow throughout the history of our species), is the cause. The creation of value which outstrips the productive capacity of the earth acts as a threat not to the earth but to us. The economy that we live in is incompatible with the economy of the earth, as Alexander Herzen of the nineteenth century is prudent to say. So we place pressure on points where our trust and faith are running low. Private industry dwindles because the imaginary wealth is beginning to show its untrustworthy face; it is the face of something that wants to continue but knows that its ability to give lasting value is diminished, or was never really there.
In our history we did something foolish, and we created value that was incompatible with the earth's productive abilities. Since this began we started putting pressure on other areas that were able to assist in artificial growth, these were called colonies. The industrial age was a period in time when time became a commodity, and in fact a moment of psychological change which can best be gleaned from a reading of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The moments are spaces within which anything can grow but these minutes, these hours, these days were filled with market creation, railway building, competition between countries for the production of iron and the harvest of coal. This economy, based upon a mixture of fear and capital gain was a marked break from natural economy, which was already in motion regardless of our actions, but deeply effected by them in the long term. Ownership led to fear, and led to a climate in which we began to confuse the original principles of freedom with freedoms of private ownership and the ability to make profit on what is really a mutual trust left to us since the creation of the world.
I will finish this small piece on that note. What I insist upon is a break in human psychology and an end to this wild abandon which which we are treating not just our home but the home of other species. Somewhere in this life there is the divine and the spiritual is to be found in living it. I do believe in love and the ability of humanity to repair this gulf that it itself has created. This is the message we are all supposed to find, I expect; that there is love and compassion, and a wealth of feeling and spirituality that couldn't even compare to something we could create. Like dancing or singing, or painting, or running through forests and over mountains filled with rapture it is not a question of reason but a question of overcoming the fear that possesses us. It is this psychological challenge and the further physical challenge of living harmoniously with environment that I expect is next.
I am a young man and as I have grown up I have been struggling against what can only be described as a veil over reality. It is a generation of excess and non-understanding of environment, a generation detached quite remarkably from rural life and understanding of the time and diversity needed for the world to support us as a species. We are a species that has been for ten thousand years cultivating the soil and developing quite lately to believe that it is us who control and select the outcome of our labors upon it. We are young, and this earth is old and wisdom not comparable to human conscience or rational models exists within it. Consider the depth of harmony within the Amazonian rain forest or perhaps a forest in general; based upon compatibility between species activities and growth through diversity, the forest serves to perpetuate itself. Plants were here long before our time and will perhaps outlast our time, and we are a species that has developed a relationship with it, but a relationship which has been uneven more a great length of time.
What is this a result of? The possession of space and of time, the unfolding of space (usually represented by lease or by ownership, which means that space is not only possessed at one point but into the foreseeable future, a space which we have claimed entitlement to somehow throughout the history of our species), is the cause. The creation of value which outstrips the productive capacity of the earth acts as a threat not to the earth but to us. The economy that we live in is incompatible with the economy of the earth, as Alexander Herzen of the nineteenth century is prudent to say. So we place pressure on points where our trust and faith are running low. Private industry dwindles because the imaginary wealth is beginning to show its untrustworthy face; it is the face of something that wants to continue but knows that its ability to give lasting value is diminished, or was never really there.
In our history we did something foolish, and we created value that was incompatible with the earth's productive abilities. Since this began we started putting pressure on other areas that were able to assist in artificial growth, these were called colonies. The industrial age was a period in time when time became a commodity, and in fact a moment of psychological change which can best be gleaned from a reading of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The moments are spaces within which anything can grow but these minutes, these hours, these days were filled with market creation, railway building, competition between countries for the production of iron and the harvest of coal. This economy, based upon a mixture of fear and capital gain was a marked break from natural economy, which was already in motion regardless of our actions, but deeply effected by them in the long term. Ownership led to fear, and led to a climate in which we began to confuse the original principles of freedom with freedoms of private ownership and the ability to make profit on what is really a mutual trust left to us since the creation of the world.
I will finish this small piece on that note. What I insist upon is a break in human psychology and an end to this wild abandon which which we are treating not just our home but the home of other species. Somewhere in this life there is the divine and the spiritual is to be found in living it. I do believe in love and the ability of humanity to repair this gulf that it itself has created. This is the message we are all supposed to find, I expect; that there is love and compassion, and a wealth of feeling and spirituality that couldn't even compare to something we could create. Like dancing or singing, or painting, or running through forests and over mountains filled with rapture it is not a question of reason but a question of overcoming the fear that possesses us. It is this psychological challenge and the further physical challenge of living harmoniously with environment that I expect is next.
Comments
Post a Comment