THE REAL WORLD

Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.

—HENRY MILLER

 

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN

 

There is an objective reality out there, but we view it through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values.

—DAVID G. MYERS

 

Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.

—EDWARD ABBEY

 

 

 

WHAT SHOULD, OR WOULD—or do—any of us do, living in this culture that is alienated from and destroying the earth, if—or when—we realize that this world would be better off had we never been born, or having been born, if we were to die?

For now, at least, I see several options that many people take.

The first option, taken by nearly everyone within this culture, is to do everything we can in increasingly frantic, desperate attempts to keep this realization at the unconscious and not conscious level. Thus jetskis and off-road vehicles, thus Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Magic Mountain, and Six Flags over Everywhere. Thus scuba diving and whitewater rafting. Thus the existence of hundreds upon hundreds of television channels, with movies and movies and movies and Deal or No Deal and Dancing with the Stars and basketball game after basketball game after football game after football game after baseball game after baseball game. More and more. Faster and faster. Thus the internet, with its ever-increasing ways—spectacular ways—to kill time. Thus Doom 1, 2, and 3. Thus Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, and Half-Life episodes 1 and 2. Thus Second Life, MySpace, and YouTube. Thus the tidal wave of pornography, sports, and financial news, all with their simulacrum of diversity, all with titillation, all with excitement, all promising to transport us somewhere, somehow. Thus the obsessions with Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt. Anyone but those in front of us. Thus the abuse of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines. Thus so many other addictions, like the stock market, the economy, politics. Thus the frantic-happy, frantic-smiling faces—all of them just alike—on the evening distraction—I mean, spectacle—I mean, news. Thus toys and more toys and more toys. Thus the obsession with playtime by adults who work at jobs they hate. Thus diversions to divert us from the diversions that divert us from the diversions that divert us from the myriad realizations we must never have if we are to maintain this way of living and to maintain our role in the ongoing destruction of all that is real. And beneath these myriad realizations are more diversions, and more. There is phony meaningless optimism and phony meaningless hope and phony meaningless actions like putting plants on truck factories, all keeping us from staring into the abyss of destructiveness that is right now staring straight at us. And all of these phony meaningless diversions divert us from the understanding that our failure to stare at this abyss will not stop it from swallowing us, as well as everyone and everything else. Beneath these diversions there are phony fears of despair, phony fears of hate, phony fears of rage, phony fears of sorrow, phony fears of love and loves: real loves, fierce loves of self and others that cause us to at all costs—and I mean all costs—defend our beloved. And beneath all these fears? A dreadful fear of responsibility, a fear that if we get to this point, if we survive the annihilation of the self that is so meticulously, so violently, so repetitively, so mercilessly, so relentlessly, so abusively, so obviously forced upon each of us in order to allow us to continue to breathe, to work, to labor, to produce, then we will need to take responsibility for our actions and for the wonderful and beautiful and stunningly extravagant gift of our life that this planet has given to us. Indeed, we will need to act, and to act in such a way that the world is better off because of our actions, because of our life, because we were born. And as with sustainability itself, what was at one point as easy as eating, shitting, living, and dying, is now more and more difficult.

We fear death. And not just the death that all experience, but another that scares us far more than the real death that comes at the end of our phony lives. This other death that we fear even more comes before the real death—sometimes long before—if it comes at all. This is the death of our socially constructed self. Once that self dies, then who will we be? We cannot face the possibility of actually living, of actually becoming who we really are and who we would be had we not been so violently deformed by this culture. We cannot face the possibility of being alive, of living, so we turn, to return to the beginning of this discussion, to jetskis and off-road vehicles, to Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Magic Mountain, and Six Flags over Everywhere. Most of us would prefer our real, physical selves die, and indeed the world die, rather than face the realization that, given our socialization, the world would be better off without all of us who allow our socially created selves to continue to breathe, to work, to labor, to produce—and that, of course, is the real point.

That is the most popular option for members of this culture.

And it is precisely the same inversion of what is real that we talked about earlier, with the interview by Andy the obnoxious radio host. Do you remember his inversion of what is real and what is not real, where dying oceans and dioxin in every mother’s breast milk are not the real world, where the real world is industrial capitalism? It’s easy enough to laugh at his stupidity and insanity—if insanity can be reasonably defined as being disconnected from the real, physical, material world, then I’m not sure how much more insane one can get than to suggest that such tangible physicalities as oceans and breasts are not the real world—but how hard will we laugh when we realize his stupidity and insanity are mirrored by nearly everyone within this culture, including nearly all of those environmentalists who even purport to care about the natural world?

Think about the prominent “solutions” suggested to help curb the worst of global warming. What do they have in common? I’m talking about every major “solution,” from those proposed by Al Gore (compact fluorescents, inflating tires, reducing packaging, and so on); to James Lovelock (nuclear energy); to Newt Gingrich (giving polluters tax credits to lean them toward voluntarily reducing their carbon emissions); to the various ideas proposed and promoted by scientists, such as the idea of dumping tons of iron, or alternatively, tons of agricultural waste—how conveeeenient!—into the ocean in the hope that this will cause algae to flourish, absorbing CO₂ into the algae’s bodies and, by the way, doing god knows how much damage to the already-being-murdered oceans; or that of injecting sulfur particles high into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space; or a further refinement of this idea, put forward officially by the United States government, to put giant mirrors in outer space to reduce the sunlight that arrives here; or (and I can hardly believe I’m not making up these obscenely and insanely stupid ideas, but each one has come from a “respected” source and received a lot of mainstream media attention) an idea pushed by NASA scientists to move the Earth farther from the Sun.²¹⁵ I never thought I would see solutions presented that would make me pine for the relative sanity of plants on Ford truck factories.

What all of these “solutions” share—and of course the same is true for the “solutions” presented by people like William McDonough, Paul Hawken (who wrote Natural [sic] Capitalism and The Ecology [sic] of Commerce ²¹⁶), Al Gore, and nearly all of the so-called environmental intelligentsia (or “Bioneers” as some call them)—is that they all suffer the same stupid and insane reversal of what is real that Andy did. They all take industrial capitalism as a given, as that which must be saved, as that which must be maintained at all costs (including the murder of the planet, the murder of all that is real), as the independent variable, as primary; and they take the real, physical world—filled with real physical beings who live, die, make the world more diverse—as secondary, as a dependent variable, as something (never someone, of course) that (never who) must conform to industrial capitalism or die. Even someone as smart and dedicated as Peter Montague, who runs the indispensable Rachel’s Newsletter, can say, about an insane plan to “solve” global warming by burying carbon underground (which of course is where it was before some genius pumped it up and burned it), “What’s at stake: After trillions of tons of carbon dioxide have been buried in the deep earth, if even a tiny proportion of it leaks back out into the atmosphere, the planet could heat rapidly and civilization as we know it could be disrupted.”²¹⁷ No, Peter, it’s not civilization we should worry about. Disrupting civilization is a good thing for the planet, which means it’s a good thing. Far more problematic than the possibility that “civilization as we know it could be disrupted” is the very real possibility that the planet (both as we know it and as we have never bothered to learn about it) could die. Another example: in a speech in which he called for “urgent action to fight global warming,” and in which he called global warming “an emergency,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave the reason he wants urgent action to combat this emergency: “We must be actively engaged in confronting the global challenge of climate change, which is a serious threat to development everywhere.”²¹⁸ Never mind it being a serious threat to the planet. He’s worried about “development,” which is in this case code language for industrialization.

This is the same perspective of those who do not hide the fact that they are grotesquely antienvironmental. Just recently, Bjorn Lomborg, the latest in a long line of writers who are paid well to deny or understate the damage this culture causes to the natural world²¹⁹ finally acknowledged that global warming is happening, and that it is caused by industrial civilization. But his next move was mind-numbingly predictable: he immediately shifted to the fallback position of saying that nothing can (or should) be done about it, stating that it is “somewhat silly” to think that this culture can change.

And it’s not silly to harm or destroy the planet you live on?

As always, it is this culture which is primary, permanent, immutable; and the real world that is secondary, and that (rather than who) must bend to this culture’s will.

Trying to force sustainability onto a functionally unsustainable culture causes severe cognitive dissonance, and makes people suggest absurd solutions. No solution can be too absurd so long as it fulfills its primary purpose of keeping us from seeing that the culture can never be sustainable, and that to attempt to sustain this culture is to harm the world. The real, physical world.

Any solution that springs from the (most often entirely unconscious) belief that the culture is more important than the world (or that the culture is real and the real world exists only as a backdrop and a source of raw materials) will not solve the problem.

One more example. I posted this section of the book to a global warming listserv, and one of the activists there replied (and as with McDonough, I’ve put my responses to some particulars in endnotes), “If you feel civilization is the problem, then you need to have a realistic and practical solution. If your idea of a solution is to have 5 billion people²²⁰ behave as lemmings and jump in the ocean²²¹ you could see why most people would respond with a ‘you first.’”²²²

I find his response interesting because it reveals the precise inversion of reality we’ve been talking about. When I suggested that civilization needs to go, he immediately equated that with human suicide. I wasn’t talking about humans being exterminated. I was talking about ending civilization. He and I don’t speak the same language. The same is true for many members of this culture. We do not even agree on the answers to the most basic questions: What is real? What is primary? What are we trying to save? Hell, not only do we not agree on the answers, we don’t even agree on what these questions mean. So I’ve started making a translation dictionary. Here are my first four entries: when I say world many people in this culture hear industrial capitalism; when I say the end of the world they hear the end of industrial capitalism; when I say civilization they hear human existence; and when I say the end of civilization they hear the end of human existence. But those are not at all the same. Worse, as we’ve laid out, within this culture the world is consistently less important than industrial capitalism, the end of the world is less to be feared than the end of industrial capitalism, civilization is more important than human existence, and the end of civilization is more to be feared than the end of human existence.

It’s insane. Literally. I’m sorry to have to be the one to break this news, but the planet is more important than this fucking culture.

And of course these thinkers care more about this culture than the planet: that’s how this culture has taught us to feel (or more accurately to not feel) and to think (or more accurately, to not think). This culture could not have gotten to this point of planetary crisis without inculcating most of its members into this perspective.

And this perspective is really fucking stupid.

And it’s really fucking insane.

And it really doesn’t work. Industrial capitalism can never be sustainable. It has always destroyed the land upon which it depends for raw materials, and it always will. Until there is no land (or water, or air) for it to exploit. Or until, and this is obviously the far better option, there is no industrial capitalism.

Industrial capitalism is a social construct. Civilization is a social construct.

It’s embarrassing to have to write this, but you can’t have a social construct—any social construct—without a real world.

The real world is the independent variable. Our social constructs—any social constructs—must be dependent variables. Our social constructs—any social constructs—must conform to the real world. Our social constructs must make the real world a better place, a more diverse, more resilient place, a healthier place. If they don’t, they will destroy the world—the real physical world. And if we allow social constructs to destroy the real, physical world, well, then once again the world would be better off had we never been born.

We must destroy that which destroys the real physical world.

How do you stop or at least curb global warming? Easy. Stop pumping carbon dioxide, methane, and so on into the atmosphere. How do you do that? Easy. Stop burning oil, natural gas, coal, and so on. How do you do that? Easy. Stop industrial capitalism.

When most people in this culture ask, “How can we stop global warming?” that’s not really what they’re asking. They’re asking, “How can we stop global warming, without significantly changing this lifestyle [or deathstyle, as some call it] that is causing global warming in the first place?”

The answer is that you can’t.

It’s a stupid, absurd, and insane question.

To ask how we can stop global warming while still allowing that which structurally, necessarily causes global warming—industrial civilization—to continue in its functioning is like asking how we can stop mass deaths at Auschwitz while allowing it to continue as a death camp. Destroying the world is what this culture does. It’s what it has done from the beginning.

How can we stop global warming?

You know the answer to that.

Any solution that does not take into account—or rather, count as primary—polar bears, walruses, whippoorwills, bobwhites, chickadees, salmon, and so on, and the land and air and water that support them all—is no solution, because it doesn’t count the real world as primary, and social constructs as secondary. Any such solution is in the most real sense neither realistic nor practical. Any solution that does not place the well-being of nonhumans—and indeed the natural world, which is the real world, which is the stable, healthy world (or was, before this culture began to systematically dismantle it)—at the center of its moral, practical, and “realistic” considerations is neither moral, practical, nor realistic. Nor will it solve global warming or any other ecological problem.

Ask yourself: what is real?

Industrial capitalism—Andy’s real world, William McDonough’s real world, Paul Hawken’s real world, Al Gore’s real world, the real world of so many—is killing the planet.

Do we want a living real world, or do we want a social structure that is killing the real world? Do we want a living real world, or do we want a dead real world, with a former social structure forgotten by everyone, because there is no one left alive to remember?

You choose.

Reality has a habit of intruding and revealing one’s fantasies for what they are: fantasies.

For example, I can fantasize all I want that I can fly, but if I jump off a cliff, the real, physical world will backbreakingly intrude on my fantasy.

You could respond, “But you can fly. Thanks to high technology anybody who can afford an airplane ticket can fly.”

There’s a sense in which that would be right, and a larger sense in which it wouldn’t. The answer doesn’t acknowledge the problems of high technology, and more broadly, this culture from which high technology emerges. First, it doesn’t really fulfill these fantasies, but distorts and makes toxic mimics of them. As Dennis Gabor wrote in Inventing the Future, “Science has never quite given man what he desired, not even applied science. Man dreamt of wings; science gave him an easy chair which flies through the air. Man wanted to see things invisible and afar . . . he got television and can look inside a studio.”²²³

Second, these “fulfilled” fantasies inevitably serve rich and powerful humans better than they serve anyone else: in other words, the primary function of these applied technologies is inevitably to further centralize power (how does “flying” help subsistence farmers in India?).

Third, these “fulfilled” fantasies are inevitably used to cause a net transfer of money and power from individuals to big corporations. In my fantasies of flight I’ve never had to use a credit card to buy a ticket from a large corporation, nor have I had to remove my shoes and belt and walk through a metal detector under the eyes of an agent of the state, nor have I had to worry about being put on a “no-fly list” assembled by those in power.

Fourth, these “fulfilled” fantasies don’t make our lives easier or better. Carl Jung weighed in on this one, and I quote it at length because it’s so on point: “Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The ‘newness’ in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied combination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished the middle ages, and classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and then there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the ‘discontents’ of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

“Reforms by advance, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est—all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.

“Reforms by retrogression, on the other hand, are as a rule less expensive and in addition more lasting, for they return to the simpler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the sparsest use of newspapers, radio, television, and all supposedly time-saving innovations.”²²⁴

Fifth, these technological “fulfillments” of fantasies cause massive ecological harm. At this point I hope we don’t have to talk too much about the harm caused by airplanes through the mining of the materials to make the planes; through the manufacture of the planes; through the infrastructures necessary to build and maintain these planes; through the extraction of oil and the refining of jet fuel, as well as the maintenance of the infrastructures necessary to extract, refine, and deliver this fuel, and of course through the harm caused by the military forces necessary to guarantee access to this fuel and its antecedents; through the effects of the emissions, which are by no means limited to global warming; through the massive use of airpower to bomb, or at the very least surveil, those who oppose the will of those in power, in other words, to increase the reach of those in power; through additional ecological effects caused by the ability of the rich to move goods (and themselves) very quickly; and so on.

Sixth, when I’ve fantasized about flying, I’ve been able to control my movement, and if I get in danger, it’s because I chose to fly too fast, or through too-thick trees, or too close to the ground. But once I board an airplane, I have given over control of my life to those who build and maintain the airplane, to the pilots, to pilots of other planes, and so on. In short, with this and other technological “fulfillments” of fantasies, we give up control of our very lives to distant financial and corporate entities, and to their employees. With each new piece of high technology, we trust our lives more and more to those who own those technologies. I hope that at this late stage at least most of us can see how this applies to the larger issue of this culture killing the planet. Further, I hope that at this late stage, at least most of us can see that this is a very bad idea.

And seventh, no matter how high the technology involved, eventually the real physical world will, in one way or another, put a halt to our fantasy. Global warming is a response in part to the perverted fulfillment of this fantasy of flying.

We can perform this same exercise for so many other fantasies, and their “fulfillment” through technological means. People fantasize about leaving a mark on the world, and we end up with a swirling mass of plastic the size of Africa in the middle of the ocean. People fantasize about being able to bend the world to their will, and the world dies at their command.

The point is that in order to maintain these lies—that we are really flying, that we can exploit a landbase (or planet) and live on it, and so on—we must keep pushing away physical reality, and we must keep telling ourselves these lies again and again. The maintenance of these lies is incredibly expensive psychologically, emotionally, intellectually, physically, financially, morally, ecologically, and so on.