Tor Matson, Contributor
Waking Times

Requiem
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

–Kurt Vonnegut

What is life? Who am I? And most importantly, what do I do next, and why? Practical philosophical questions.

Everyone who’s more or less human has some sort of working philosophy, be it elegant or incoherent, noble or base. We all do what we do for reasons, informed by some sort of theoretical structure of the universe. The thing is, what we’re doing is mostly wrong, collectively, and that means that we’re each mostly wrong, individually, most likely. Sorry, but there it is.

We’re suffering from a defective philosophy, a failed worldview. The evidence of this surrounds us. We are literally murdering the only planet we have, along with making most humans and nonhumans suffer a lot, and if that isn’t prima facie evidence of a fundamentally failed approach to existence, I don’t know what is. My idea of success at life is more like planetary peace, sustainable abundance, and a thriving, healthy world with happy humans and climax ecosystems everywhere. We are creating the precise opposite. We are failing to even maintain the bare minimum for our physical existence, instead perversely and suicidally destroying our entire world. We’re murdering the living earth in exchange for…  what? We’re killing everything and enslaving everyone in order to produce crappy consumer trinkets and grotesquely enrich a few of the worst people?  The end utterly fails to justify the means, to put it mildly.

It took many millions of years for life to build up the rich biological systems we inherited. If you’re scientifically minded, you ought to respect the deep time and huge amount of work that went into this. If you’re religiously minded, you ought to see the world as the handiwork of the Creator, and cherish and protect it. Which worldview is it that supports contempt for life?

We inherited a planetary starship, a colony ship on a journey to eternity. It is provisioned with perfect nanotech, the most sophisticated self replicating, self-improving micro-machines possible. Check out flagellar motors, if you haven’t… They are ancient nanotech electric motors, still spinning at high rpm today, powering all sorts of microbes. Have you seen the latest work on cell biology? Every cell is a perfect machine, as small as possible in this reality, with scale determined by atomic size. Cells use proteins that are not much more than a very large molecule, but somehow these large molecules, without brains, control systems, or much of anything except a geometric crystalline structure, appear to communicate, to move with agency and purpose, to coordinate activities, and to do all sorts of other stuff impossible to describe without attributing qualities of mind to what “ought to be” (by reductionist dogma) a mere clump of dead matter. And much as we have tried, we can’t seem to produce that special spark of life in the lab. We do not understand life, although we can manipulate it. We don’t understand how any of it is possible, how it could have evolved (or been created) or how exactly it all works at the smallest scales. So far, the deeper we look, the more amazing features we find. The physical technology of life is millions, billions of years beyond our clumsy human tech.  So why do we want to trade a robust, self-maintaining, self-repairing natural system for a fragile, expensive, ultimately globally lethal manmade system that can’t possibly replace the original? It is madness, and murder, and suicide.

Over the last hundred years, we’ve nearly broken the biosphere, and when it really breaks, we all die shortly thereafter. At this rate, we’ve got maybe one human lifetime left to try to fix this, or the Earth will become a place where humans can no longer live. Vonnegut’s last poem will come to pass.

In this context, I think that anyone who’s more or less human, and therefore trying to evolve, needs to dedicate himself (or herself, or itself- when will we get past gender issues?) to a genuine response to the global situation. We have the internet, and everybody knows, or should know, what’s up. In this context, more is required than changing your lightbulbs to CFLs, or even to LED’s. Driving a Prius instead of whatever is not a valid, or even moderately helpful response. Voting is not the answer. Protesting is absurd. Violent resistance is ultimately counterproductive and largely impossible anyway.

Our culture has failed, at every level, and is rotten to the core. We need a completely new culture, with a completely new basis. At a minimum, we need to revere life, and to see the living world as sacred, as the infinite gift that it is. We need to nurture the natural life of earth, and keep the planet in a state of climax ecosystem, pretty much everywhere. We need to live in a good and basically workable way. This isn’t negotiable, it’s simply what’s required if we want to keep being here. We need to create a culture that lives in harmony with the earth, and we have to do it right now, because we are running out of time. After we get the world healthy, we should then see how much tech we can make without harm, and restrain ourselves from making more. We need to get our values and our priorities straight.

We also need to abandon the false concept of ownership, which is simply the illegitimate idea of total control. No human deserves total control of anything or anyone, because we are not Gods, we’re humans. The “I” to which a person is usually referring is the ego, the personality, so to say “I own land” means really, “My ego has total control of this land” and why should anyone’s ego have total control of anything? By what right could an ego gain that sort of absolute power? It’s silly, this delusion of ownership. We need to respect, negotiate, and share, from the perspective that all of life is a gift that we are given, and are privileged to be able to share with each other. We need to talk about usufruct, negotiated rights of use including the idea of non-abuse, rather than ownership and absolute power. Absolute power is an inherently disgusting idea. The Ring of Power is power. Cast it into the volcano, unmake it.

Nobody owns land. It’s absurd to declare ownership of something that pre-existed you. Claims of ownership, especially of land, are simply assertions of violence against other humans. Ownership is theft from everyone except the owner, by means of violence. We live in a world full of greedy, deluded monkeys trying to steal the world from each other. It’s absurd, tragicomic. If it weren’t for all the suffering, it would be funny as hell.

To state the obvious, what we need to do is to love each other, share of our abundance, and act on simple timeless human morality. Ownership and profit-making, upon which our culture is based, just aren’t basically ethical. Shocking as it sounds, we need to get to a gift-based economy.

It seems to me that life is a gift. It looks to me like I’ve inherited a huge amount from the past, and I have an obligation to the future. I am defined by my relationship to the Earth, and to other beings. It seems right that I would be a steward and a caretaker, but an owner? No.  How? Why? I want to share land with people and life, not own it. I want to take care of the land and make it abundant. I want to live in a good way, and for whatever reason, I’ve been born into a culture that’s gone a long way down a bad road. At this point, what keeps coming up for me is to get some combination of land, money, people, and tools together, and build a sustainable eco-village, an artists’ and artisans’ cooperative, an open-source modern medieval cultural experiment, living center, thing. That’s what’s next for me. If you’re interested in helping out or being a part of the core group, drop a line. Otherwise, do something else awesome! It’s time.

About the Author

Tor Matson was raised by wolves in the Arctic, living in the desert Southwest, surfing the Apocalypse. Visit his blog, here.

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