Representing the mystic wilderness

Abolitionism is commonly understood as a movement against literal slavery, or against the holding of slaves. But bioethical abolitionism goes further than that.

Bioethical abolitionism holds that human beings are slaves to pain due to the nature of our biological evolution—but that this can change, and has been changing.  This school of thought seeks to abolish suffering in all sentient life purely through the advancement of biotechnology.

But technological advancement alone has proven to be only one aspect of civilization, an aspect that we have spent the last several hundred years driving to dangerously asymmetrical overdevelopment compared with our  spiritual advancement.  Technological advancement without spiritual advancement leads to what is exposed by Burke as pathological intensity in his ironically-titled work, “The Axemaker’s Gift”.  Today, most would agree that we live in a very pathologically intense world, with overconsumption of resources, relentless acceleration of demands on our time, productivity, efficiency and sanity … all of which conspire to leave our inner spiritual world—our intrinsic humanity—neglected, isolated, alienated, and inevitably, developmentally retarded.

Wild abolitionism offers an holistic counter-argument to bioethical abolitionism: in essence, yes, let’s abolish suffering—but the path of liberation is not through further technological intensification at the expense of spiritual development. Rather, it is through selection and preservation of technologies coupled with a collective return to the wilderness, to Nature, and to primitive individual sovereignty.

As a civilization, we have come a long, long way from home—collectively, we are weary—and like all great stories, ours cannot be complete until we finish the cycle by returning.

The Mesopotamian city-state made us give up our primitive individual sovereignty, essentially our free will, in exchange for the illusions of security and comfort. But times have changed. Today, greater security and greater comfort lie outside the pathologically intensified, crowded, concrete environments of our inner cities. Today, giving up free will to breathe smog, sit in traffic and stand in line for provisions is not entirely sane. Collectively, the centralization and intensification of our civilization is precisely what accelerates pollution, global warming and most varieties of local and global misery. Why is it that we foresake waking up to songbirds, sunlight and the sweet smell of dew on leaves in order to engage in the violence and ugliness of our mechanistic and unimaginative modern cities?

Environment has so much to do with who we are. Immersed in noise and distraction, we forget that life is not a series of ego-driven battles, routine appointments and bills until death or retirement, whichever comes first. Humanity is ultimately dependent upon Nature, and upon relationships with other sentient beings. Cut off exposure to Nature and to genuine, loving discourse with other human beings and the result is the modern urbanite: a stressed, tired physical body awash in toxins and medical prosthetics, surrounded by a fortress of possessions that mean nothing but serve well to socially isolate, and a spirit that has no reference points of deeper meaning to plumb but the formulaic programming of television and nondescript walls of concrete and glass. It is truly a wonder that so many of us are sane. Or are we?

We have been sold a relentless industrial nightmare of centripetal control called modern civilization, and we feed it with our mindless conformity, with our votes and with our taxes. Only some of us are beginning to realize that this nightmare has a dark destiny … yet we are still afraid to wake up aliens in our own bodies, our world invaded by thousands of years of unquestioning complicity with the Mesopotamian model of centripetal control that has turned us into numbered puppets with our wills and individuality forfeited to a body of elite lawyers that we call “representatives”. We refuse to wake up, probably, because our capacity for imagination has been so eroded by centuries of bovine complicity that we cannot envision viable alternatives.

But despite illusions, prostheses and this Matrix-like system of deferred dreams and suspended individuality that we’ve built around ourselves, the simple truth remains: we are sovereign individuals. Each of us can legitimately claim our own destiny. We don’t need to be controlled by others; we have merely agreed to it, in the past.

The Mesopotamian god-kings offered their citizens reliable food and some security in exchange for taxation and obedience. Good news! Today, taxation and obedience to ever-more labyrinthine laws are required, but the god-kings haven’t figured out how to sweeten the deal for their underlings. Reliable food can be attained via local co-ops and the profusion of available agricultural and horticultural technologies, and security is looking pretty dubious in the face of terror and in the undiminished shadow of nuclear war. What better strategy for both of these threats than decentralizing to the point where we present no particularly juicy strategic targets?

Human civilization and technological advancement are ill-served by agencies of national and global centripetal control. Increasing concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer elite individuals will not foster the trickle-down of democracy and freedom to the low. Quite the contrary. If we continue to entertain this charade, we will sell our children into chains they cannot see forged and fastened by masters they cannot resist. The hierarchy needs to be flattened. Individuals need to be recognized, individually and collectively, as sovereign. The holistic view is simple but subtle, and promotes a shift in historically partisan, partitioned and partial reference frames.  We need to start seeing people as whole sovereign individuals, not owned by companies or states. We need to see ourselves as One Humanity, not as Palestinians and Israelis. The Earth can be healed only if we perceive our world as a whole, not as Australia, Asia and North America. Each of us needs to make a choice between two fates: a return to the One Wild, where civilization decentralizes, borders vanish, pathological intensification and all of its accompanying effects diminish and individual liberty and spiritual development take root … or, complicity with an exponentially growing, unimaginative, monolithic hierarchy powered by death (warfare, control mechanisms, fear) and taxes.

This is a perfect time to choose one’s own fate. Become one with your wild spirit, your own wild destiny, and look to our most honest teacher and tireless benefactor: Nature. Leave the cities; we can gather in eco-villages. Let us forget the industrial nightmare of centripetal control and all of its empty promises, for we know its logical conclusion is dark and terrible. It is time that we wake up to our own lives, dream our own dreams and find our own ways, in beauty, love and the sort of physical simplicity that will afford us time and occasion for spiritual complexity and the pursuit of joy.