The faces on the people I know often carry the looks I see on caged animals, endlessly pacing (if these animals have room even to do that), as if they know something is terribly wrong but they’re not quite sure what it is. Call this what you wish — confinement, disconnection, domestication, oppression — the incapacity to be our true wild selves seems to be at the root of our disease. The problem is, seven billion people cannot be their true wild selves or, like a horrifically overcrowded cage of rats, the result would be large-scale violence and murder. Some would say that’s exactly what we have already. Civilization disease is a complex phenomenon, but it’s easy to see the symptoms all around us: people living in a constant state of stress, fear, anxiety, grief, anger and sadness; endemic boredom, escapism and addiction; endless and escalating wars and intertribal and internal violence; large parts of the population traumatized and dissociative as a result of early childhood exposure to domestic violence, abandonment and rage; epidemics of chronic physical and emotional illnesses; systems collapsing from diseconomies of scale; large segments of the population debilitated and socially dysfunctional; and the kind of constant, numbing grief for the massive loss of biodiversity, the ghastly desolation of our planet and exhaustion of its resources, the endless and horrific suffering of creatures, human and non, in our increasingly brutal civilization cutlure, and our dread and insecurity about the crises we see looming before us. We are all suffering from civilization disease, though of course it manifests itself differently in each of us, and we are brainwashed into believing it’s our own (or some other immoral or criminal individual’s) fault, rather than the inevitable result of exposure to civilization in the declining state of its cycle. It’s a complex system phenomenon, so we search in vain for a ‘cure’ for this disease: new leadership, redistribution of wealth and power, better innovation and technology, reinvention, salvation, a transcendence of human consciousness.~ Dave Pollard howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/05/22/too-many-rats-in-the-cage-civilization-disease/
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 09:09:46 +0000