Words Fail Me…
One last "dark" post….
This is a difficult time to be sensitive…1
There’s one thing that keeps coming to mind amid all the confusions arising from incoherence. It has to do with a curiously pervasive myth that grew out of some pretty weak, throwaway attempts at making a buck in entertainment in the mid-Twentieth Century. That tenets of belief built up around it have become near sacrosanct only adds to their perplexity.
I’m referring to The Space Age!™ The era that’s been just over the horizon since the closing of the old frontier and the insistent belief in a manifest destiny that would not let the idea of frontiers die a natural death. Leaving us all in a position to instead come to a very unnatural, but still very fatal end.
We have absolutely no proof that any organism, certainly not a complex, social organism like human-beings, can survive, let alone Thrive and Prosper!™ when removed from the biosphere of its birth.
Wrinkling out inconsistencies in any dogma is a thankless, and endless, task; but there’s one aspect of this particular Edifice of Thought we find ourselves trapped in that has never even been mentioned to my knowledge. The more I reflect on it, the more it seems to me to not just be a hole in the belief in Conquering the Stars!™ Even more egregious than the need for hand-waving about Warp Speed or Hibernation Pods to deal with the immense distances; it seems to be an actual axiom of life that’s been completely ignored and that might require a bit of consideration before another second is wasted on whether it’s prudent or not to Colonize Mars!™
We have absolutely no proof that any organism, certainly not a complex, social organism like human-beings, can survive, let alone Thrive and Prosper!™ when removed from the biosphere of its birth.2
When, roughly, somewhere around half of the cells within our bodies “belong” to our internal flora-fauna; it seems strange that I’ve never heard anyone bring this up in regards to our Space Destiny!™ The same is true for even the shortest list of necessary host-species we rely on every day to stay alive. Still, somehow, it’s just so easy to set all this aside and fantasize about how we might just start over on the latest newly discovered “life-friendly” exo-planet, “only a few hundred light years away….” Or our dead-world neighbor, Mars….
Except in a world where “doing the science” has become a performative act, a reversion to science’s roots as a binary pole to Catholicism, from which we are daily accosted by headlines extolling how the most obvious and glaring truism has been “discovered to be really true.”
“Animals feel pain!” Comes to mind as a perennial favorite of this kind of discovery. I guess when your “Founding Fathers’” love of rationality gave them permission to discount whatever they did not find convenient to believe, leading them to posit that except for Reasoning Frenchmen, or British, or Virginian Men of Reason; we lived in a world of automatons who could neither think nor feel….
Back then, the psychological concept of projection was a few hundred years away from being “discovered.” Only something Savages and the Unmanly might dream of. At this point it is more than clear that their legacy has brought us to a world where the only things allowed to survive are; or at least act as if they were; automatons….
Every individual of every species that we know that has ever lived has done so immersed within the biosphere they evolved in.
What more do we need to be able to grasp such a simple, all pervasive fact?
As with heedlessly increasing atmospheric CO2 in an explosively compounding fashion; and, say, strip-mining the oceans for profit; or maybe, just about any of the received wisdoms of our day; it doesn’t take doing that much Science to figure these are not good ideas. The same is true here. The most basic back-of-the-envelope visualizations should suffice.
Every individual of every species that we know that has ever lived has done so immersed within the biosphere they evolved in.
What more do we need to be able to grasp such a simple, all pervasive fact?
As the flawed from its inception, Scientific Revolution has collapsed into its own opposite; a competing system of religious belief; it’s become harder and harder for any of us to use any of the tools of reason or logic or experience it took as its own and find ourselves able to think our way out of a paper sack. Everyone “has a Theory.™” Everyone is bunkered off from The Crazies!™ whose Theories™ disagree with our True Beliefs!™.
This Fragmentation of Mind has been, as with everything this culture acknowledges, weaponized. Starting with UFOs, a convenient propaganda tool to divert attention from a few misguided test aircraft. Remember the Flying Wing? The Personal Hovercraft? These were the kinds of Breakthrough Technologies!™ that were going to Revolutionize Warfare!™ in the late Forties. These were the reason behind creating the category of the Flaky Conspiracy Theorist so well documented in so many Hollywood/CIA productions over the last seventy-plus years.
As with every other Good Idea!™ This one has gone on a tear. It’s now fragmented what had once been a fairly stable category labelled, Public Opinion; and this has brought us to a world where it has become impossible to tell if anything being promoted as News!™ has any kernel of truth in it. We’re reduced to the role of Kremlinologists in the Seventies, trying to decipher the onion-peeling perversities of every public pronouncement. Except that now in our Multi-polar World, there is no single countervailing set of beliefs to keep us “centered….”
Drunks believe that, “Just one more drink!” Can’t hurt them. Heroin addicts know they’ll catch the Fairy dragon if they just shoot-up one more time. This is the level of public discourse we’re reduced to today.
Any attempt to posit a useful distinction as a basis for developing a way to consider a viable next step is hammered upon from multiple sides as an attack on someone’s cherished beliefs.
Every attempt to vilify one’s opponents is seen as a heroic act.
As we each hide in our personal ruins we shut out anything that might ask us to confront our fears and discover, for ourselves, that we are entangled in a deeply failed, bankrupt way of trying-to-be.3
Now; to point towards some changes in my own perspectives as the consequences increasingly come due; let me end with this quote.
Go to where your suffering is aligned with your capacity to meet it. You don’t have to go to death row or live in a monastery. You don’t have to sit with the unsheltered if that’s not your work. Go to where you can care safely and deeply and broaden that capacity over time.
Roshi Joan Halifax4
This essay was written in 2023. Just getting around to posting it. In a non-humorous, “funny” way it’s odd how its tone fits this moment as well as it might have felt premature then. Everything we were brought up to believe has been a lie….
Yes, Tardigrades….
I do apologize for expressing myself with such a high level of bitterness. It’s perhaps an expression of the cognitive dissonance I experience whenever I encounter the extremity of credulity expended on the stupidest concepts.
This might be a place to start….