Our Actual Reality - the Disappearance of Modernity

Fog rising over a farm field in Virginia

Formed in part by the question of my last article (What is our actual reality?), today's article brings up a topic I covered a while back that keeps coming back to my mind. I asked a question in Is Hunting and Gathering Really Better Than Agriculture? that many people may find ludicrous at first glance. Yet I find more and more evidence routinely that hunting and gathering was not just a much more sustainable way of living, but also a superior way of living in many respects. In fact, many communities actually tried agriculture and civilization and returned to hunting and gathering or even practiced a combination of both, something that local Indigenous tribes (Miami Indians here in northeast Indiana) engaged in. Corn and other crops such as fruit trees were grown at the confluence of the St. Mary's, St. Joseph, and Maumee Rivers (an area known as Kekionga) but the tribe moved around a lot (possibly due to disease and pressure from European Americans) and had various locations where they typically stayed (including Miami Village northeast of present-day Columbia City and Forks of the Wabash west of present-day Huntington). 

Rather than give an historical account of hunting and gathering or prepare an account of Indigenous principles for living, I shall instead provide the link for an article which explains nomadic communities in more detail. The article asks why hunter-gatherers refuse to be sedentary (or in other words, accept civilization and technology use as a way of life in today's world). This is something which has been particularly difficult for most people today to understand, primarily due to the psychological denial of wetiko, a function of the very cultural programming and indoctrination it enforces upon societies. Because wetiko masks itself so well, most people don't even know that they suffer from it, and because they live in a world where they accept and believe (have faith in) in technology use, they will naturally find it difficult to accept that there are people who reject modernity (civilization) based upon their knowledge that it is metastatic and self-terminating.

Once one comprehends all of this, how we arrived at this point in time becomes far more understandable. The fact there are communities of people who see all too clearly that the way most of us live is destined for the dustbin is spectacularly wondrous. It still boggles my mind that most people today have never questioned any of the systems we live embedded within and seen that they are all unsustainable. Needless to say, I have found myself on this train barreling down the tracks and I want off the ride, but unfortunately there is no escape. Sure, I could go live with an Indigenous tribe if I so chose, but what would doing so accomplish? One less person indulging in civilization can hardly be seen as progress as more than 46 million people have been added to civilization so far just this year! So, while there are responses which are rational that can be undertaken, few people will actually do so, and the train continues roaring towards the Seneca Cliff. The scenario actually reminds me of The Eagles' Hotel California. The last sentence of the lyrics: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

Dan Vie commented on a recent podcast post, providing this analysis, quote:

"Our complicity with ecocide makes us schizophrenic, which is a sane response to an insane society. Health can be restored by shifting to resist and take action against structural oppressions, which takes shifts not in individual behaviors, but in large-scale organized actions acting to change complex systems.

A supplicant politics suggests that if environmental activists only beg hard enough, their governments will be moved to see the error of their ways, and implement radical actions for course correction that will steer us away from the path of extinction. Doomers say the systemic dysfunctions are incurable, that the military industrial complex is too invested at every level to give more than lip service to radical changes in agriculture, energy use, war making, and what have you, and that the ecological consequences are baked in and beyond anyone's efforts at reform or bargaining tactics.

The psychological matrix ​of acknowledging one's ethical responsibility for the predicament of civilization and our role in perpetuating it is indeed crazy making. The obstacles are great, and if the best we can do is be happy hospicers, witnessing the inevitable loss of every part of our nature, as our species endures a bloody and apocalyptic end game; it wouldn't surprise me if there are some screws loose and blown gaskets here and there.

It's a mass spiritual crisis far beyond any spiritual fix or psychedelic medication, as it demands a deep acceptance of our role in this destructive narrative. Coming to terms with this acceptance is the default outcome whether or not anyone takes steps to engage in therapy, although therapy may help motivate priorities about what one chooses to do with this wild and precious life."



It is vitally important not to assign blame, as this simply projects one's emotions out into the wider society and negates any personal responsibility of his or her own. Recently, a post of this video caught my eye, and I made this comment underneath the post:

"The video is a bit too reductionistic for my liking. There's really far more than emissions and climate change to think about, since BOTH of those are nothing more than symptom predicaments of overshoot. Yet ecological overshoot isn't even mentioned. Then, the video blames special interest groups and lobbyists for blocking "political action" when in reality, civilization itself has always been unsustainable to begin with (political action is but a part of civilization). Really, there is a ton of denial of reality in this video. I could only watch half of it before clicking out of it."

Inevitably, as Dan Vie pointed out, beneficial personal behaviors to reduce overshoot will not have any real effect upon any the larger systems surrounding us unless and until said behaviors gain mass appeal. This means that one can still practice his or her own ethics regardless of whether other people choose to follow those practices, keeping in mind that few people will accept such a challenge.

Quite some time ago, I looked into different movements such as degrowth, Transition Towns, The Venus Project (and similar variants), permaculture, and other "back to the land" movements. I wanted to understand why they failed and whether any of them could be successful. Ultimately, I discovered many of the same processes within each movement that doomed each one to failure, including in many cases faulty assumptions to start with. This entry about The Venus Project covered why that particular entry was doomed from the start, based on failure of logic regarding technology use. Sadly, other movements suffer from much of the same reductionist thinking, and this culminated in my article critiquing the degrowth movement. A little bit later came my article about self-sufficient communities. Of course, each of these movements is different from the others in some key fashion or criteria, but most all of them suffer from common myths about who and what we are as a species, which I tackled in my article about hunter/gatherers. It seems that most people forget specific characteristics about us and instead develop a romantic notion about who we are, thereby denying certain realities that cannot be done away with. The violence of our species (typically a male trait) is one of those traits that has stayed with us since the beginning. Still, there are other specifics as to why these types of movements never gained a foothold in mainstream society, and Alice Friedemann explains in this article.

I have seen many different ideas such as the ones brought up in Alice's article. But as her article points out, these ideas take time (a decade or two at least) to gain support and popularity. I see this type of support and popularity in other countries, but not here in the USA. Considering what kind of timeline I discussed in my last article that we have before major collapse, it looks like here in the US we will be forced into things haphazardly. Right now it appears that a broad portion of society here is still based in exuberance that William Catton discussed in Overshoot. That exuberance is about to get snuffed out. 

There are some signs to be optimistic about as is highlighted in this video with ecologist Dr. Mike Joy, although I'm not sure any serious excitement is warranted. I agree with Mike that there are many younger folks who really do get where we are. Still, change doesn't happen overnight and even the best laid plans can only cover so much ground. Given the time constraints we face, I'd say that most any idea or plan or even an entire collection of them is about 4 decades too late.

The one thing my acceptance of these predicaments (and the most likely responses society will make regarding them) gives me is a realistic, well-grounded expectation; one which takes into consideration that conditions are most probably not going to be to our liking. While I miss the ignorance I once held for the optimism bias that it could produce, I can't imagine suddenly being thrown into the reality I am now aware of through an extreme weather event or collapse or some sort of awful disease (or name some other consequence of any symptom predicament of overshoot here). Perhaps this is just a rationalization of what I've learned? If nothing else, at least the shock value has been reduced. While I don't see hunting and gathering being the coming living paradigm anytime soon, certainly there are surprises awaiting that I cannot conceive of today. For instance, many of us have been on Facebook for a decade or almost two. But what will happen as Facebook fades away? This post from Ugo Bardi might help bring that idea into better focus (or see a similar-themed post here). I have actually been a part of several different websites and/or social media sites (remember MySpace?) that faded away. No differently than the song Ugo mentioned in his article (Gangnam Style by Psy), as a professional MC I have watched song after song after song fade into the sunset (although there are definitely popular ones that stand the test of time on the dance floor). So this phenomenon isn't really a strange or foreign concept; just one we don't often think about. Likewise, most people today can't really fathom the collapse of industrial civilization or the end of car culture or the disintegration of the electric grid. Yet all three will most likely disappear over the next couple of decades. 

This is why I am constantly promoting people getting out and Living Now, while what we have today is still here. Most of what we have today is slowly going away and there isn't a solution or set of solutions, despite what you may have been told by industries which stand to make millions or billions off of people who don't know any better and/or governments complicit in increasing ecological overshoot (and possibly not knowing any better) through hyping the false ideas of "solutions" being marketed by large multinational corporations willing to cash in on the illusions they are selling. Speaking of getting out there and Living Now, here is my latest post on doing just that!