"Ghosts without a Shrine" - How Globalism uproots the connection we all crave
"Ghosts without a Shrine" - How Globalism uproots the connection we all crave
... and why we need to strike roots and learn to become indigenous again --- [Estimated reading time: 20 min.]
There is an expression in the Thai language that describes the fate that has befallen not only us Westerners, but urbanites and those aspiring to become one all over the world, with astonishing precision: ผีไม่มีศาล (pronounced “Phee Mai Mee Saan”).
The origin of this expression is found in the still-widespread folk belief in ghosts and spirits (predating the arrival of Buddhism, perhaps by several millennia), who often reside in large trees, mountains, lakes, rivers, and the like. People build tiny wooden shrines for them, so-called “Spirit Houses”, and regularly make offerings of fruit, rice, tea, incense, and even cigarettes and rice vodka (depending on the spirit’s individual preferences). The worst thing that can happen to such a spirit is not having a residence, no place to be revered and worshipped, and thus not having roots. Lacking any purpose, those spirits wander around aimlessly, lurching in the shadows and haunting the living, condemned to an eternal existence between realms. In the absence of any offerings, they are plagued by a profound hunger that can never be satisfied.
Now, how well does that describe most people in today’s globalized world?
Culturally, those ghosts are similar to the Native American myth of the Wetiko (sometimes spelled Windigo1), likewise a hungry spirit prowling the landscape, although ghosts without a shrine are more passive in their Nature. Like the Wetiko, they are a metaphor for certain exploitative and destructive behaviors, are likened to a mental disease that befalls humans, and represent a cautionary tale that describes what happens when connection is severed.
Outside of a spiritual context, most Thai people use this expression with great caution (if ever!), because it is a serious offense to call someone a ghost without a shrine, an insult that you can’t just take back and expect to be forgiven. I’ve witnessed the term being used in a pejorative fashion when referring to ragged homeless people suffering from debilitating mental aberrations, who can be seen walking along the highways occasionally. But ghosts without a shrine are much more ubiquitous than that.
You can see them at any airport, at any shopping mall, slurping overpriced Starbucks coffee while hastily typing away on their MacBooks, or shuffling down the endless aisles in the ubiquitous supermarkets selling the same poisonous goods all over the planet. They are the most common sight in the pedestrian malls of the inner cities and along the beaches of popular holiday destinations around the world. There are billions of them, people living in standardized boxes stacked in massive concrete monoliths, hasting to work and back daily, dressed in plastic and eating food that looks like it has never been alive, bouncing their way from one job to the next, from one city to the next, chasing promotions and salvation in the form of more money.
They are the hordes of restless ghouls roaming the planet, unsuccessfully trying to satisfy their hunger through ever more superficial consumption: more junk food, more movies, more experiences, more money, more clothes, more video games, more travel, more toys – always more.
I know this, because I was once one of them.
I once was a ghost without shrine, born into an inhumane culture that I despised, an exploitative economy I learned to abhor, and into an oppressive2 country I could not identify with. I never felt “at home” in Germany, and I always longed for something new, an adventure, anything to lift the heavy veil of boredom that rests so onerously on the shoulders of the citizens of Global Civilization.
I was once a cog in the machine, working a warehouse job that was bound to become obsolete due to automatization, should technological progress continue to run rampant. The tiny, standardized apartment I “came home to” every evening could have been anywhere in the world, another standardized box stacked upon other boxes in endless rows that eerily resemble battery cages in industrial poultry farms. Produce, consume, produce, consume, until you either relocate to the next poultry farm – or until you’re used up, discarded, forgotten, and the next pitiful creature moves into your box.
We are redesigning the world to fit universal standards, and we are in the process of making every place on Earth look the same. No matter where you go, you’ll find power lines and highways, cell towers and industry smokestacks, empty Coca-Cola cans and torn plastic bags, neon-colored soccer jerseys and Supreme baseball caps, and urban sprawl slowly devouring the battered countryside.
This seemingly unstoppable cultural homogenization, whose hidden downside is the utter annihilation of thousands of unique local cultures and traditions, is called Globalization, and we’re assured that it’s a good thing. It’s “Progress”, and we are told that progressing from the miserable, obsolete, superstitious, squalid and long-expired ancient way of living to North American consumerism is desirable, inevitable even.
The colorful cultural landscape of bygone days is replaced with the grey mishmash of a world culture that knows no roots and has no home. No matter where you live, you can eat the same food, drink the same drinks, and you don’t even know where any of it comes from. It doesn’t matter. As a ghost without a shrine, all you need is calories to keep you going, and salt, sugar and fat to help you forget that the food you’re eating is as soulless as yourself.
You work on the same computers and with the same machines, no matter on which continent you are, you sit in the same ubiquitous airplane seats, drive the same cars, and use the same words as all the other ghosts. You listen to the same music, and binge the same brainless entertainment – think Squid Game – as all the other ghosts. You believe in the same religion – money, scientism and materialism – and follow the same traditions and rituals; Check in at the airport, empty your pockets, take off your shoes, spread your arms. Check into the hotel, hand over your passport, scan the QR code. Enter the restaurant, pretend to be nice, absent-mindedly eat your food while scrolling down the bottomless Feed. You try to amass as much money as possible, and spend it as fast as you get it. If I would just get a little more money, I’d finally be happy and content, say the ghosts to themselves.
But what is the real price we pay for this life? Can we even measure it with money?
Humans strive for connection. We need connection, to both our fellow humans and the landscape we inhabit, with all its myriad non-human inhabitants. We need to feel connected to a Greater Whole, something that is much larger, much more important, and much more powerful than ourselves. It is a spiritual connection we crave, as well as a physical one.
Social media companies have sought to exploit this need, and it made them rich – filthy rich! – even though they’ve accomplished quite the opposite in the real world. We have become estranged from one another, and alienated from the land from which we arose and which sustains us, feeds us, keeps us alive. They promised connection, but all we got was connectivity.
In fact, quite the opposite has happened. Whereas people used to go outside and children used to play in the woods (I know, I sound like a boomer, but it is what it is), interactions of all kinds now happen mainly online. Whether it’s your boss, your coworkers, your friends or even your family, the Creed of the Ghosts values convenience over reality, virtual over physical. Zoom is the new conference room, lunchroom, classroom, playground, and dining room for the family reunion. Blurred faces in small rectangles of illuminated pixels, lagging awkwardly as the internet speed ebbs and flows.
It has long been known that any online interaction with other people releases only a fraction of the hormones that we would otherwise experience in a real-world encounter.
We live in a world that is hailed by its leaders as the most interconnected society ever to exist, so why is it that people today feel as disconnected (both from each other and from the Natural World) as never before?
We discard traditional herbal medicines, wisdom amassed over countless generations, for industrially produced pills and powders, exchanging dependence on the land for dependence on profit-driven pharmaceutical multinationals.
The complete “decoupling of humankind’s material needs from nature [sic]”, to use their own terminology, is seen as something positive, a desirable goal, by technocrats from Mark Zuckerberg, who wants to facilitate the ultimate disconnection by creating a digital “Metaverse”, to so-called “ecomodernists” – basically just regular modernists and neoliberals who painted themselves green to jump the “environmentalist” train that seems to be gaining traction in some circles (more on them in a bit).
Globalization pulls apart families and communities, scatters us all over the globe, and deprives us of the previously universal human experience of inhabiting a broader natural community, to which one is connected through countless bonds and reciprocal relationships. Globalized people live as if they are constantly on the move – not in a nomadic-hunter-gatherer kind of way, but more akin to being on the run, endlessly chasing “happiness”, which is supposed to be right around the corner, just one purchase away.
The more Globalization impacts our lives, the more rootless (and hence restless) we become. We discard traditional herbal medicines, wisdom amassed over countless generations, for industrially produced pills and powders, exchanging dependence on the land for dependence on profit-driven pharmaceutical multinationals. We trade gathering plants, collected free of charge from the forests, meadows and gardens that surround us, for industrial products full of chemicals and devoid of nourishment. You tell me which is better.
With what fervor Globalism wants to uproot us (and prohibit us from ever striking roots again) becomes obvious if you listen to what its proponents have to say. The fear of deep spiritual connection to the land and the “rootedness" that results was expressed explicitly in a recent globalist propaganda piece published in Noema Magazine, titled “Brown Shirts, Green Dreams”, in which the author tries to equate connectedness to the landscape one inhabits with xenophobia, fascism and national socialism. Yes, you read that right. According to this logic, indigenous people must pretty much be proto-Nazis – but Columbus endeavor, on the other hand, was an overall positive one, since it connected the world and uprooted people on both sides of the Atlantic. For all their self-proclaimed openness, tolerance and progressivism, the Globalist Creed is built on irreconcilable opposites: colonialist values and humanitarian ideals.
Similarly hostile sentiments towards indigenous communities are expressed in the Ecomodernist Manifesto,3 which equates – hold your hat! – indigenous inhabitants foraging in a rainforest with exploration of the same forest by a multinational corporation:
Whether it’s a local indigenous community or a foreign corporation that benefits, it is the continued dependence of humans on natural environments that is the problem for the conservation of nature.
Who’s the Nazi again? Who sees indigenous people as living relics of the past, people who missed the train departing for the Future? Who would like to re-settle them into concrete boxes, cut their ties to the land, and bind them to the market economy instead? The Globalist Creed does not allow any gods before it, nor does it allow any alternatives that might expose it for the sham it is.
Not to mention the fact that 80 percent of global biodiversity is found on indigenous lands, statements like the above can’t be surpassed in absurdity and ignorance. Yet, according to the globalist view, indigenous people are ideologically not far away from Blut-und-Boden (blood and soil) ideology, because they are dangerously rooted in certain bioregions.
Uprooting them is obligatory. Globalists want everyone else to become ghosts as well, never satisfied, never quiet, never home. Once there’s only ghosts left, people will believe that being human means being a ghost without a shrine.
The globalist propaganda piece in Noema Magazine continues with nonsensical equalizations:
What we are witnessing […] is a revival of an older kind of ecological and political thinking, a traditional attachment to home, to soil, to blood. Eco-fascists are not co-opting the left’s environmental struggle, but rather the reverse. It’s the deep ecologists on the left who are embracing aspects of a counter-Enlightenment reactionist movement that’s been around for centuries.
[…]
[Jorian] Jenks, also a member of a national socialist club founded by Nazi sympathizer Rolf Gardiner that promoted ruralism and self-sufficiency, was a prime example of the interwar right-wing obsession with catastrophism, antipathy toward industrial society and a nature-loving, back-to-the-land ethos.
Because of this one man, Jorian Jenks, anyone who opposes industrialism, loves Nature, and wants to go back to the land is automatically an “obsessed right-wing Nazi sympathizer?” Staggering.
The author of the article quotes political scientist Jonathan Olsen, who recently proclaimed that the “notion of human ‘rootedness’ can have unintended and disturbing political manifestations,” and concluded (after comparing several far-right documents with bioregionalist texts such as Kirkpatrick Sale’s iconic Dwellers in the Land) that a “defense of particularity can all too easily become a narrow and politically dangerous particularism opposed to one of modernity’s greatest legacies — a commitment to the notion of a universal humanity which, by its very definition, is ‘non-rooted.’” [Emphasis added]
We have to shut ourselves off from Nature, they say, cut all ties, and build the human world as the antithesis of the Natural one. We have to forget that it ever was otherwise, and we have to vehemently deny that we have any similarities with the lesser creatures that we once shared our lives with.
Let that sink in. Humans must be non-rooted, otherwise they are probably proto-fascists who want to purify their communities from contamination by subhuman outsiders. We should therefore live cosmopolitan lives, akin to the lives of eternal refugees (just with bigger budgets and more privileges), forever on the move, never resting, never settling in.
Needless to say, I have yet to encounter an indigenous tribe that seeks to exterminate its neighbors to expand their Lebensraum.
“There exists a connection,” writes the author, “between right-wing xenophobia and the localism of climate activists.”
The anti-aviation activists of Extinction Rebellion, Plane Stupid and Stay Grounded, for example, don’t explicitly make calls to eliminate rootless cosmopolitans, but their campaigns, if they were successful, would drastically reduce people’s ability to travel globally, and the humanizing effects of intercultural communication that go with that. If the green left’s much-desired radical retreat from globalization back to the local were to come to pass, trade and migration would necessarily stutter, and the ethnic homogeneity so desired by the far right would be much more achievable. [Emphasis added]
If you want a racially pure ethno-state, all you have to do is oppose aviation, the rest will purportedly happen all by itself.
Alienated ecomodernists reject the notion that “that human societies must harmonize with nature to avoid economic and ecological collapse,” and instead want a complete decoupling of “humans” from “nature [sic]” – a pair of binary opposites for them. We have to shut ourselves off from Nature, they say, cut all ties, and build the human world as the antithesis of the Natural one. We have to forget that it ever was otherwise, and we have to vehemently deny that we have any similarities with the lesser creatures that we once shared our lives with. Only then can we float weightlessly along the concrete jungles, another ghost among billions, free from any dependency on such lesser entities as forests and rivers, and free from the drudgery and filthiness of former times. Being rooted makes this impossible, so you have to extract yourself from the ground and stay on the move.
Native American scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer has written about this peculiarity of colonizer culture in her phenomenal book Braiding Sweetgrass:
After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, “The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.” This same observation is heard from some contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentlessly materialist culture the fruit of homelessness, a rootless past.
Indigenous societies are by far the most connected to the landscape they inhabit, and no other human culture has so far achieved a similar connectedness. They know every animal, every plant – even the tiniest insects – by name, and can tell you all their characteristics, behaviors, preferences and relations.
Chauvinism and nationalism are entirely different concepts, based on perceived superiority of a populace sharing the same skin color and residing within mostly imaginary borders, arbitrary lines drawn by people decades or centuries ago. The false rootedness it promotes is based on allegiance to a random assortment of bioregions that ends where the nation’s borders end, and to a single species inhabiting this territory. This is not rootedness, it is arrogance. It is a toxic mimicry of rootedness, just like rape is the toxic mimic of sex.
Globalists are afraid people are going to stop playing their stupid games if they find out about the attractive, alternative lifestyles that exist in the shadow of the dominant culture, and they are afraid to lose their privilege to treat the whole world as their playground and resource stock. They are so alienated that they actually think a substantial part of the human experience for hundreds of thousands of years – a profound spiritual connection to and a physical dependence on the landscape one inhabits – is facilitating fascism.
Yet rootedness doesn’t beget feelings of superiority – quite the contrary. Being rooted means being humble, realizing that you are a tiny part of a much greater Whole, and that life is neither a competition, nor a war. It means knowing your place, your boundaries, and understanding that nothing good comes from transgressing those boundaries. It shows that real freedom is not, like the Individualist Doctrine wants you to believe, the freedom to “do whatever you like”, but to be a functioning member of a larger community: the local bioregion you inhabit, which in turn is part of a larger community which ultimately spans all species and continents. Real freedom means realizing that you’re never alone. It means that you are allowed to be a human animal, to follow your instincts and fulfill your predestined role in the Greater Scheme of things. Real freedom doesn’t mean infinite choices, it sometimes means not having to choose at all.
“Being white” is certainly a privilege in the industrialized culture of exploitation that “white people” have built – but not in the Natural World.
Rootedness comes naturally to some people. If you're lucky enough to be born among one of the few remaining relatively undisturbed indigenous tribes, or as a member of a First Nation that is in the process of reviving their ancient traditions, you are born firmly rooted in the land.
But not to me. Not to someone born in the region of Middle Europe called Germany, an area where virtually the entire landscape has been transformed by Civilized Man's hand – not for the better, mind you – to fill Civilized Man’s pocket. Our situation is, thanks to the horrors of the last century, a lot more complicated. Feeling rooted in Germany basically makes you "völkisch", which is another term for Nazi. The Nazis appropriated and abused the concept of rootedness for Germans, and after the War was lost it became unusable, even taboo. Most people there feel deep shame when thinking about the cruelty that our own ancestors inflicted just two or three generations back. I guess it is similar for North Americans of European descend.
The more I learned about the cruelty of this human supremacist cult(ure), the more I felt ashamed of who I was. “White guilt” and “white shame” were constant companions in my youth. Wealth stolen from defenseless aboriginals halfway around the world financed the world I inhabited, and slave labor built it, from materials violently ripped out of the body of our Great Mother Earth. How could I ever feel at home in such place, how could I strike roots there? Wouldn’t that make me an accomplice?
“Being white” (meaning “a child of the dominant culture” – there are deeply rooted people with white skin, even in Europe: the Sami of Scandinavia, for example) is certainly a privilege in the industrialized culture of exploitation that “white people” have built – but not in the Natural World. In terms of connectedness and rootedness, and as inhabitants of the biosphere, the ghosts without a shrine are phenomenally underprivileged.
Every book I read about indigenous people, each picture I see of them wearing loincloths made from tree bark, painted masks and patterns on their faces made from Achiote pigment, bracelets from Rattan, or necklaces decorated with the fangs of wild boar tusks makes me feel like a Chullachaqui, an empty ghost version of myself, without that deep connection to the living world, the real world. Their bodily adornments are a steady part of their cultural identity, and have been so for ages. I still wear plastic, the traditional garment of ghosts without a shrine.
But it is also a motivation, a reminder of what’s possible.
It is connection that I crave. It always has been. Real connection. Connection like only the few remaining traditional societies and the even fewer indigenous cultures still know. I want to walk the landscape, knowing that I tread in the tracks of my ancestors, stretching back more generations than I care to count. I long to speak a language that arose from the biosphere I inhabit, that has a dozen different terms for various shades of green, and that recognizes the distant relatives with whom I share this habitat, both plant and animal, as kin, not as lifeless objects.
A rooted life comes with a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, connectedness and a happiness that no modern society could ever match, no matter how many serotonin reuptake inhibitors it prescribes.
Robin Wall Kimmerer says that we all can be indigenous, as long as we know how to listen to the land and see ourselves as a part of it – not apart from it – and this gives me hope. I would wish nothing more for my children, and their children, than to feel the deep comfort of the firm rootedness that comes with being indigenous to a place, and that I lacked during my formative years (and especially my adolescence).
To become indigenous is to grow the circle of healing to include all of Creation. By honoring the knowledge in the land, and caring for its keepers, we start to become indigenous to place.
Ever since I stopped running, I have felt roots spreading from my feet. Slowly but steadily, fine, thread-like filaments dug into the soil, and tapped into the inexhaustible source of spiritual nourishment found only there. This spiritual nourishment is a resource that’s vital to human health and happiness, yet it is not a resource that can be extracted by force. You can’t suck it out with a pumpjack, nor blast open an access with explosives. It is available only to those who gently tap into it, with reverence and respect, and who do not wish it any harm. It cannot be monetarized and marketed – that’s why the globalists are so afraid of it.
Rooting yourself is a difficult process, akin to the struggles of a seedling ripped out of the ground elsewhere trying to recover from what gardeners call the transplant shock. I was grown suspended in the air, so my roots never before touched the soft, moist soil they need to thrive.
I eat plants and animals that I have watched growing up, that I have helped nurturing, so that they nurture me in return when the time comes and their Circle of Life closes. I now know the names of (and some personal details about) over five hundred of the plant species that I share this habitat with (or, better, that share their habitat with me - it is them who were here first!) and dozens of non-human animals: birds, rodents, primates, reptiles, fish and amphibians – and I am in the process of getting to know the various insects and their favorite foods better as well (with the help of my wife, who is a bearer of this ancient knowledge and a patient teacher).
My urine, my sweat, tears, and, yes, my blood mix with the soil (mostly urine, though), and I like the implications of this fusion. Does this make me a fascist? Hardly.
I become one with the land, and who I am (or, better, who I was) blends into it. Borders blur. Everyone can do it, irrespective of their skin color. It makes me feel humble and grounded, not superior and aggressive. Unlike actual fascists, there are few cultures that I hold in as high a regard as the Chong, the indigenous people on whose land I live, for inhabiting this landscape for millennia without ever compromising its beauty, resilience and abundance.
To be honest, living a rooted life is not always easy and fun – but neither is the life of a ghost without a shrine. But it is so much more fulfilling than life in even the shiniest of cities. It encompasses the entirety of the human animal experience, with all its ups and downs, a wholesome experience that helps us grow, realize who we want to be, and aids us in achieving our full potential. It comes with a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, connectedness and a happiness that no modern society could ever match, no matter how many serotonin reuptake inhibitors it prescribes.
To fully materialize, to be fully present, we need to have access to the full experience of being a human animal, not the watered-down version of it that the dominant culture has to offer.
Globalization tries to tell us that the “old ways” don’t work – can’t work – in the modern world, that we have to “look forward” and continue doing what we’ve been doing for the last few millennia, only better and more efficient.
The only problem is: it is the globalist lifestyle that does not work. They’ve overlooked the fact that they have to trash the entire planet to fulfill their self-proclaimed destiny, rendering it uninhabitable not only to countless other species, but ultimately to themselves as well. They’ve forgotten that they are one with the World as well, that we are all born to the same Great Mother, and that whatever we do to her will ultimately rebound upon us. You reap what you sow, and if your seed is one of destruction, then destroyed you shall be. The extractionist dominant culture knows no long-term planning, just short-term gains.
Although the globalists know the term “extractionism” and define it more or less correctly, they underestimate the broadness of its applicability and the effects of its implications. “Extractionist systems rewards those who take and take some more, and give nothing in return,” says management consultant Susan Webber (writing under the pseudonym Yves Smith) about financial markets, clearly not seeing the broader implications here. This entire culture is an extractionist system, and the remedy is the restoration of reciprocal relationships with the myriad living beings we share this World with. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes:
Reciprocity is an investment in abundance for both the eater and the eaten.
People in this culture tend to assume that indigenous people “live in the moment”, and to a certain extend they do, but that doesn’t mean they deny that their actions today have implications for the future. Take the Seventh Generation Principle, for instance, which is part of an ancient Haudenosaunee philosophy, stating that the decisions we make today should result in a world as least as beautiful and abundant as ours seven generations into the future.
Who thinks seven generations in the future these days?4 How different would the world look like if we followed this simple rule?
The only way forward is the way back. Back to a lifestyle that works, not only for a few lucky individuals, but for the entire world.
As Ghosts, we inhabit a different realm somewhere in between life and death. We are surrounded by dead artifacts, machines, buildings, and pavement. Even worse, the world we inhabit is increasingly a virtual one, which means utterly devoid of any Life. To fully materialize, to be fully present, we need to have access to the full experience of being a human animal, not the watered-down version of it, full of toxic mimicry, that the dominant culture has to offer.
Our shrines are being burned down, by those who want to burn up the whole world. It is the same people who benefit the most from our rootlessness that work hardest to uproot us and throw us in the wind. If we are not careful, we will find ourselves lacking any purpose, never satisfied, and condemned to an eternal existence between the realms of the Living and the Dead. Without the satisfaction that comes from a life firmly rooted in the biotic community, we will always crave for more, and thus always prostitute ourselves5 for the World Destroyers for whom “More!” is a mantra.
The only way forward is the way back. Back to a lifestyle that works, not only for a few lucky individuals, but for the entire world. And that means striking roots wherever you feel at home, and becoming a part of the landscape again. It means rediscovering your own animality, and realizing that this is not a negative thing at all. It means serving Life and giving at least as much as you take, in all your interactions and relations, human or other.
This proposal might seem strange to all the ghosts without a shrine, yet it is not half as outlandish as what the globalists have in mind for our future. We are all descendants of indigenous people, we all share common ancestors who were firmly rooted in the landscape. Somewhere down the line, we were all connected. If our ancestors did it, we can do it as well.
As the collapse of global civilization unfolds and we bear witness to the last desperate gasp of the dominant culture, the old African proverb is more important than ever:
“When the roots are deep, there is no reason to fear the wind.”
I write stuff like the above in my free time, when I’m not tending the piece of land we’re rewilding here at Feun Foo. As a subsistence farmer by profession I don’t have a regular income, so if you have coin to spare please consider supporting my work with a small donation:
* The cover image is a screenshot of a video shared on Thai social media, about a man who burned down his Spirit House after praying to the Guardian Spirit to reveal the winning lottery numbers – unsuccessfully, of course – for three consecutive years. Money is the new religion of the every-growing army of ghosts.
See Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013); Chapter “Windigo Footprints”
There are obviously countries that are much more “oppressive” than Germany, yet it is an illusion to think that you’re “free” as a German citizen. You are under the illusion of freedom as long as you work, consume, contribute, don’t ask too many questions, and don’t step out of line. But if you want to live off the land, an autarcic off-grid life in Nature, it’s just a matter of days until the oppressors come knocking at your door.
The Ecomodernist Manifesto is quite the read, if you have the nerve for it. It contains gems such as “We write this document out of deep love and emotional connection to the natural world[sic].” – how can you love the Natural World if you're physically disconnected from it? – and “Along with decoupling humankind’s material needs from nature, establishing an enduring commitment to preserve wilderness, biodiversity, and a mosaic of beautiful landscapes will require a deeper emotional connection to them.” [Emphasis added] Deep emotional connection through, umm, disconnection. Sure thing. It would be funny if it wasn’t for the large number of highly influential academics who signed it.
Certainly not our leaders, apart maybe from those under the pathetic delusions called longtermism and transhumanism, who think a humble 200 million generations into the future. Seriously.
Isn’t working in an office or a factory “selling your body” as well?
