My Own Fault
Through no one’s fault but my own, my ideas have only run into uncomfortable silences and changes of subject. Even the idle thoughts of Anarcho-Primitivism achieve better results in agreeability than those of mine. However, despite the quiet rejections of my peers, I am also told that my sentiments make sense, albeit far different than what is expected (or wanted) in this age. As has been the case for over 10,000 years, my questions and criticisms of agriculture and its resulting cultural system of civilization is out of season. However, the current age is most ripe with the opportunity to turn a new leaf in thinking about self and community; while a global culture hangs more heavily on each person’s shoulders than ever before, we also feel this weight more acutely, and are searching anywhere for the semblance of escape. So my peers inevitably turned to nihilism and solipsism (the two greatest pastimes of the Agricultural Revolution) in its many physical and spiritual forms: drugs, alcohol, recreation, exercise, astrology, tourism, sadism, experience hoarding, etc. After cycling through it all, my peers proceed to wonder why they feel so empty, lost, and wanting in life, and why there doesn’t seem to be an end to the bloated deceptions of our global culture.
Yes, this is a ripe age for hucksters to distribute self-help books that will guide these lost souls to even better looking forms of nihilism and solipsism. Perhaps self-annihilating meditation and checkout charity will be the answer. This is my terrible problem: I have nothing to sell. My ideas, while tied together by broad themes of agriculture and civilization, have no conceptual center, precisely because there is no central concept to explore. On One Boiled Frog, I write about civilization, technology, governance, and outdoor recreation—not because these concepts are central to my ideas, but because they have the ability to embody the trials and tribulations that I see in our global culture’s sense of life. I often repeat this: I do not particularly care about the environment—it’s not in danger. When we exploit and extinguish the Earth’s natural ecosystems, we are not compromising the environment but ourselves, for our body and spirit are directly tied to the ecosystem as it was then and is now. When I mention the “destruction of the environment”, I mean to say it is the destruction of the environment we know and love—a collection of biological ecosystems the human body and spirit thrived in for millions of years, which we are now mistakenly bent on destroying and escaping from. At the pace we are going, the body and spirit will break well before the Earth—species better-suited to the changed environment will continue on without us. The environmental lens of One Boiled Frog should not be misconstrued with an environmental philosophy, but a call to return philosophy back to its roots by interrogating origins on a spiritual basis (if this is not philosophy’s root, then I must go another direction).
I can only blame myself for committing to a treacherous act in an age of militant atheism, timid agnosticism, confused religiosity, and exhausted scientific minds: I reintroduced spirituality to the world. Despite billions of apparently religious members holed up in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, I see little uncompromised religiosity in the world. It appears to me that they quickly bowed to the most powerful religion—capitalism—in just a few centuries.
Now, all I see are spiritual window dressings who put materialism and monetary security before God and religious community. Who can blame them? When offered only two options, God or food on the plate, what will most people choose? Attempts at reconciling the two options as part of one whole are laughable when you add up the amount of economic violence committed by some of the most religious nations in the world: Indeed the God of Food (also known as global economics) has more sway than any God of Love. What of the atheists, who are religious about the absence of God, and can provide no better life than the religious? The agnostics, who do not take a side, are most ready to side with the God of Food for they have nothing else to believe in. And the modern scientific establishment, weighed down by three centuries of academic, institutional bloat, live like goldfish as its members can’t reach further back than fifteen years of research because of an insatiable appetite for content over substance, and a predilection toward overspecialization which once caused pediatric doctors to forget how to treat concussions. For our exhausted scientific community, “evidence-based” implies inaction when lacking institutional evidence—thus our short-term scientific memories depend on those willing to fund research and its resulting “evidence”. In light of these modern phenomena, I don’t find it presumptuous that I did act in treachery by reintroducing spirituality.
When people are raised in such circumstances, how could one not dry heave in the face of the modern human spirit?