Denial Vs. Rewilding

Who can live with a light heart while participating in a global slaughter that makes the Nazi holocaust look like a limbering-up exercise?
– Daniel Quinn in Providence

The more time I spend at my job, the easier it gets to ignore my pain. I can shut it off and let my body function. I can remove all external thought and simply become part of the machine, pushing a button over and over and over again, lulling my heart back to sleep with rhythmic clockwork.

I have heard that the key to mediation involves a repetitive motion or word or phrase. I wonder if they mean something like this catchy little jingle from my early teens; “Hi this is Peter with Moore Information, a public opinion research company. Could you spend a few moments on the phone with me to discuss some issues in you state?” Mediation helps you transcend your body, senses and emotions (meaning it removes your humanity) so that you won’t rise up to crush the system crushing you.

After days, weeks, months of this, I can simply forget about Urban Scout, collapse and rewilding. I can bump my schedule up to 5 days a week. I can find “comfort” and “relaxation” in television shows like Dancing With the Stars, Battlestar Galactica, and cheap DVD’s (4 for $20) at the local video store. I could even have a couple beers or smoke a bowl. Than I could go to bed and get up the next morning and do it all over again. Let myself slide a little more. Focus on pushing the button, pulling the lever. Yes sir. No sir. Click, clack, click. If all I have to do involves pushing this little button, and I learn to focus on the button, a sort 0f meditation if you will, than I can ignore my own pain. I can bury it.

I can wake up every morning and read the paper and believe that technology, the government, the scientists or God will save us. I can bury the feeling deep down that any of this Urban Scout stuff ever happened. I could chalk it up to my more “radical” days as I sip on a can of cheap beer around the summer barbecue with the guys, “Ha ha, remember the ideological 20’s?” On weekends I could work around the house, go fishing, go on a hike. Take my girl to dinner, the movies and a bar. I could work on that novel, write some more music, play a few hours of the latest Grand Theft Auto and plan what colors to paint the nursery. I could sell all those philosophical and anthropological books and field guides and buy pop music CD’s to fill their place. I could forget their contents and fill the void with music loud enough to drown out any reminder of life before. I could read my voters guide thoroughly and happily send in my ballot and believe in this culture again. I could make believe that things will work out. It wouldn’t particularly feel that difficult, I’ve done this for most of my life. We all have.

I could pretend again, that civilization and humanity mean the same thing. I could turn away from the horrors, slaves and environmental destruction and focus on the great works of art and culture, the scientific discoveries and space exploration that civilized people seem so proud of. I could forget that for all the beauty civilization creates, it comes as the cost of destroying the world. I could forget about the thousands of indigenous human cultures that created beauty, music, art, culture and lived sustainably. If “ignorance is bliss” than denial means feigning ignorance in order to feel blissful again.

I could continue doing this for the rest of eternity… Except, the way of life that affords this kind of denial has already begun to slide. Soon I won’t have the choice to deny what our culture has done to this planet. No one will.

Instead of remaining in denial, I could continue to recognize that the way I live threatens every living thing on the planet, and the longer it lasts, the worse off of a time we will all have in the coming years. I could acknowledge that civilization will not stop killing the planet. Call it what you want to call it: extraction of resources, progress, economic growth, manifest destiny, we all know the end product looks like the desert wastelands of the no-longer-fertile-crescent. I could allow myself to feel the pain, rather than swallow it into cancers and random acts of violence and alcoholism and whatever else unmetabolized grief turns into.

You want the truth? I prefer depression over denial. At least depression acknowledges the horrors. I would rather contemplate suicide than blow away the truth in a hazy cloud of reefer smoke and video games. I don’t see denial as the way out of depression. I don’t see suicide as the way out of depression (though it seems easy when depressed). I live with depression from time to time, and I move through it with honesty, clarity and solidarity with those who understand what civilization has done to us, and feel it too. I welcome the grief with open arms.

People say to focus on the more beautiful things in the world in order to feel better. But when I see a beautiful world, I also see our civilization destroying it. I have a lovely girlfriend, and a loyal supportive family and group of friends and I also see civilization enslaving them. I have so many things to live for and feel great about, and I feel great about those things, and yet I also see the larger oppressive forces at work. None of these beautiful amazing things will rescue me and the rest of the world from the clutches of civilization. When people in denial say “focus on the beautiful things” they really mean “ignore the destruction.” So while I have a lot to feel thankful for, and I do, I more often think about stopping the destruction and escaping slavery.

Of course, this helps me remember that I live as a slave, and that reminds me that I don’t enjoy living as a slave, and that makes me not really enjoy life all that much in a general sense. I focus on the pain because you can only stop it by looking at it and figuring out what causes it. You don’t fix your car engine by disconnecting the check engine light. Pain exists in order to motivate us to change our behavior, because the behavior threatens our survival. We need to look deeper. We need to see the beauty and recognize the destruction, simultaneously. Sometimes we need to escape and only look at the beauty and sometimes we need to feel the full force the horrors of civilization.

I feel like a pendulum, swinging back and forth from the horrors to the beauty to the horrors to the beauty. I have moments of despair and moments of escapism and I try to balance those out so that I can remove civilization from this planet. Eventually the pendulum stops swinging. Perhaps not a pendulum, but a balance beam; an edge. Sometimes I slip and fall one way or the other.

I actually do watch Dancing With the Stars occasionally and Battlestar Galactica religiously. I play video games from time to time, go to the movies take my girl out to dinner, listen to punk rock at maximum volume and tear around my motorhome. I have my vices and use them to relax from time to time, to escape when the pain feels beyond manageable. I also struggle with indulging the vices too much (see my chapter “Addiction Vs. Rewilding”). Everyone has limits, everyone has a different level of support. I don’t judge those who remain in denial, or who lose themselves to their addiction to Civilization. I lose myself sometimes, so how can I judge those who don’t have the support to rewild? I use the support that I have to help support others. If this all works out, it will work because we have created a culture that supports rewilding. I grieve for those who remain in denial, who do not have the support to break the addiction, and I do my best to create a more supportive culture for people to break free. I also recognize that some people will die defending civilization. While I don’t judge them, I still have no problem with stopping them from destroying the planet.

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