Protected: Dominant Culture Disease

78 verbiagesnesses that need sexyificationizing!

Unsexy verbs that I want to keep will be blue.

Unsexy verbs that I am having trouble with will be red.

(What does an undiseased/healthy culture look like? What are examples? What is healthy about the society?)

Do you ever have the feeling that everything fundamental to your life is fundamentally wrong? Once you smash a few of your assumptions and values, you question the rest of them, too.

(Paragraph about “Don’t believe me?” Where to fit this in?)

(state things as and use the words “assumptions” and “values” more below)

For me, I think it (what is “it”?) really started with transportation. Sitting in traffic seemed like one of the most miserable and inhuman activities possible. This was pretty basic; it was a few more years before I fully realized all of the other things wrong with cars, and right with walking and bicycling.

(transition sentence) Michael Pollan really opened my eyes to how far off the path of right we have gone with food. (1) What’s next, breathing? Yeah, even that one is fucked up. You can’t even walk in front of your house, let alone go for a run in your neighborhood or a bike ride to a friend’s house without having to inhale car exhaust. And, a lot of children with asthma in much worse neighborhoods have a much better case than I do on this one.

Why stop there? How about another basic human function: sleep. Americans don’t get enough of it, nor do we get nearly enough exercise, nor enough time in nature. Every fundamental thing – and we’re talking about basic components of being a human animal – about the average American’s life is fundamentally wrong.

After I realized a few of these things, my skepticism of conventional wisdom grew. I assumed that the truth would continue to enlighten me on an increasing number of subjects. When I stepped back for a second to look at the big picture, I realized that the entire framework that encompasses all of these practices, habits, beliefs, traditions, and ways of life — our culture — was itself fundamentally flawed. This framework is the culture at large, and all of these things that are wrong with the culture are merely symptoms of a culture-wide disease.

All of the above is merely referring to aspects of the culture that affect our personal lives. Unfortunately the symptoms are much more serious than that. Deeper down, the disease corrupts our entire system of power, expressed in the form of ubiquitous unjustified use of authority. The disease makes our entire economic system into one that allows private ownership of land, slavery, and wage slavery. The disease has even attacked the very climate of our planet, with global climate change that continues to be ignored, resulting in deaths of millions of humans, the deaths of thousands of species, and with the threat of being one of the largest die-offs our planet has ever known. Certainly not last nor least, the disease has spawned countless and endless wars resulting in the deaths of millions of innocent people.

(talk about causes of disease earlier)

(what is a disease?)

These are all symptoms of a culture that has been diseased. I do not only say this to show how horribly jaded I am – although this is also true – but also so we can analyze the possible solutions in relation to how one might treat a more traditional disease. Because, it is clear that we need some fresh perspectives and tactics to tackle all of the problems before us. What we are doing now is not working.

Before we attempt to treat this disease, might we want to explore further its nature? I have already described some of the symptoms, but there is a reason these symptoms develop; anyone that truly tries to do something about any of the symptoms is futile in their attempts through hitting countless roadblocks, or society attacks them so thoroughly along the way that they either give up out of fear, their own government kills them, or they are unable to survive without giving up. Just as diseases that affect our bodies can attack the very immune system that is treating the disease, our culture attacks the activists who treat our culture’s many ills. This is the true evil of this disease that infects the dominant culture, AKA Dominant Culture Disease (DCD). (name the disease earlier)

Our culture and its corollaries, civilization and globalization, also cause disease. (put this somewhere else)

I speak as an experienced activist myself. I have supported an actual sane presidential candidate, and been mocked for it. I have reached out to my fellow citizens, and been summarily ignored. I have shut down access to a BP gas station. For that, the cops threw me in jail for sixteen hours, surrounded by shit, vomit, and horribly bright lights. I have even tried to get cars off of our sidewalks and run into roadblocks every step of the way. So, sure, there are many more experienced activists, but I do write from a position of experience.

(Include HIV?)

Having these experiences has shown me that Dominant Culture Disease mirrors Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Just as AIDS sabotages the body’s white blood cells that fight off disease, so does DCD sabotage the activists that treat our culture’s ills. (DCD and AIDS both make secondary diseases more likely, allows them to more easily take root.) Seeing these connections informs us as to how we will approach DCD.

AIDS is treated differently based on how far the disease has progressed. Battling AIDS includes things like condom use to prevent getting it in the first place. If caught early, a person may live for many decades with expensive antiretroviral drugs. If the patient discovers AIDS infection later, more experimental and less effective medication can be used, with worse side effects. If the prognosis is bad enough, one may even choose the option of hospice. That is, the patient has given up on treating the disease and focuses on simply maximizing the quality of her life in her remaining time alive.

The most notable fact about the treatment of AIDS is that there is still no cure. The only way to prevent oneself from dying of AIDS is to not become infected to begin with.

(Will a comparison with cancer be useful?)

Before we see how these treatments of AIDS translate to treating DCD, we must identify the cause of DCD. As discussed in A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen, we can trace all of the most serious problems of our culture to objectivity. We normally associate the word “objectivity” with fairness in observation, but in this case I use it to simply mean treating something like an object, rather than like a living being that deserves respect. (In any case, even with the positive version of “objectivity,” it still means that we remove all emotion from our observations. I do not think we should strive towards this too enthusiastically.) And how do we know that this culture does not respect life on Earth, but instead values the dollars and comforts that those living things provide?

Because if we respected the Earth and its species as living, we wouldn’t bleed her for oil. We wouldn’t burn this oil at the rates we do, under the premise that running our gadgets is more important than the existence of thousands of species and the lives of billions of humans who will either starve or have to relocate (2). The amount of rape in our society wouldn’t be so high if many more of us respected women and children as individuals rather than seeing them as resources to exploit. (add to this paragraph)

Everyone reading this essay should already be aware of how much human and nonhuman suffering goes into all of our gadgets, like the ones I am using right now. If you’re not aware of these things, I’d recommend you stop reading right now and do a bit of research before picking this essay back up. (Add links)

Now, if you didn’t just leave me one sentence ago, then join me in a short thought experiment.

Imagine that aunt made your iPod and thousands of iPods just like it by slaving away for fourteen hours per day, getting cancer as a result, or perhaps killing herself to escape from her hopeless situation (3). Imagine further that the rare earth materials needed to assemble your personal entertainment device were mined from your mother’s back yard, poisoning her water supply (4). Your malnourished and uneducated little brother worked the mines (5).

Would you buy an iPod in that situation? What would you say or do to a friend who used one?

One can do this thought experiment with any of our major problems. If you respected the human and nonhuman lives that were diminished or sacrificed for the furtherance of your lifestyle, you would do things to protect those lives rather than carrying on like everything was peachy.

Almost all of us are guilty of this exploitation to some degree. Some of us try harder than others to be decent people, but the very participation in our culture is to be guilty of the suffering that results from it. There are several reasons why this guilt is inescapable, but the main one is that we live within a curious human invention called civilization. Civilization makes it impossible to know all that touches your life. As defined (in a rather lengthy way, as he is wont to do) by Derrick Jensen:

[Civilization is] a culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts— that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning city-state), with cities being defined—so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life (6).

So, at its most basic level, civilization results in objectivity because you, by definition, don’t know and respect all that is in your life and therefore see the things in your life as things, rather than living beings. Requiring the importation of resources means that if they aren’t given or traded willingly, which they often aren’t, the resources will be taken. They will be taken unwillingly from people and they will be taken unwillingly from the Earth, at grave costs. In civilization, this is unavoidable, especially in our modern version of civilization where avoiding its evils is a full-time job and virtually impossible to achieve. We now have a clear link from civilization to objectivity to exploitation and destruction of life.

With all of this in mind, we may now begin to tackle the potential treatments of Dominant Culture Disease.

As discussed earlier, the first step to combating AIDS is prevention: don’t get the disease in the first place. Our particular culture, the dominant culture, is so clearly diseased that prevention will not work with us. But prevention is still important, because there are still a very few cultures which have not been diseased yet, and we must take care to protect these cultures. Unfortunately, the main vector of infection of another culture is via rape, which is the hardest to protect against, just as the same is true of AIDS. Once a culture is being actively oppressed for their natural and human resources, what will come out on the other side is another diseased culture. For examples, see almost every indigenous culture in the history of the world, which after being forcefully brought into the culture of civilization does not respect life in the same ways in which it had.

Medication

Surgery

Hospice

(Is doing anything but Hospice simply prolonging the diseased culture? Is there any hope for a cure? At what point can the culture be considered to be cured? At what point can the culture be considered to have died, and replaced by a different culture? Is any of this useful?)

(Addiction, and how to break it. why addiction creates needs that weren’t there before, and how this affects things)

I want to talk more about how to enable activists to actually do all this important work from above. For any of the methods, an activist will face resistance from society at large. The resistance will increase exponentially as the work becomes more important and effective. If you only choose to make individual changes, which are important but also basically the least you can do, you’ll still face resistance in the form of disapproval and uncomfortable questioning from those you work with, your friends, and your family.

Going now all the way to the most effective and important form of activism, the surgery mentioned above, the activist will face the full force of violence from the state, and even from random strangers.

Imagine trying to take out a particularly bad roadway in the middle of the night. If discovered, people will come out of their houses and physically remove you from the roadway if possible. More likely, they will call the police who will arrive with their guns, which they will use if you try to get them to stay away from you.

A way of blunting this resistance to your activism is to be part of a community. The need for this community grows in proportion to both the effectiveness of one’s activism as well as in proportion to the resistance to one’s activism.

To blunt the resistance against individual change, one would be wise to become a part of a community of others who are making similar change. It can make you feel empowered and give you a place to find sympathetic minds so that you know you have support and that you are not alone. It can take different forms. If your main form of transportation is by bicycle, for instance, you could do simple things like take routes other cyclists frequently use, even if it is out of your way. Even better, you could join group rides like Critical Mass where you can celebrate your lifestyle.

When engaging in surgery, the need for community grows exponentially. You need a place where you can find support for things that you do. You need a group of people that will protect you with their lives. Essentially what you need is a family structure that is focused on and has a central tenant of radical activism and radical change.

And it really needs to be a family in all ways except blood relations, although if these exist, too, then all the better.

These need to be people that you live with or near. They need to be people with whom you raise each other’s children. They need to be people whom you take care of in old age. You need to be able to trust them with your life.

The most important work one can do if not engaging in surgery yourself is to support those who are engaging in surgery.

Quick, why aren’t you engaging in surgery? I’ll bet your first concern is something like, “Who will be there for my children if I get thrown in jail for ten years?” It can also look like, “How will my family have enough money to survive?” and “Who will provide loving support to my spouse?” Care for those you are responsible for is the number one thing stopping activists from engaging in surgery. So let’s admit that and then do something about it. Hence forming an activist family. Thankfully, the activist family helps to blunt concern about one’s individual well-being, too. A family will be there for you in any way they can if you lose your income because of activism, and if you get thrown in jail or beaten because of activism.

I readily admit that the above concerns are not entirely eliminated by the existence of activist families. The love and presence of a spouse, child, parent, and friend cannot be entirely replaced. Even when lessened, the fear for personal well-being is still there. But what an activist family can do is lessen all of these factors to the extent that the probability a particular person will decide to engage in important surgical, or other, activist work is increased.

Derrick Jensen has greatly influenced this essay and my thinking at large, specifically his books A Language Older Than Words and Endgame. One of the things he asks is “what do you want?” So, here it is; here is what I want:

(should my “wants” go earlier? I think it makes a good ending. What would be the new ending if it went earlier?)

I want folks to regain their sanity. I want them to regain their humanity. I want them to regain their spiritual connection with the Earth. All of this is to say, of course, that I want us to cure Dominant Culture Disease. (or for this culture to be replaced)

I want folks to value the smell of the dirt and the moss on the trees during a nice morning rain. I want them to value the cold air hitting their skin and lungs in the morning, with the patience and knowledge that the rising sun will gently warm them up. I want their lives to be about engaging with their neighbors, their community, and their land.

In regaining their sanity they would have a visceral reaction to many things we take for granted today. I want to not have to argue basic ideas of humanity, human rights, and the rights of the Earth at large. I want to be able to live my life, and I want others to be able to live their lives, without being engaged in a constant fight and argument. I want to be able to love, be happy, be whimsical, and have cares and worries that are much less epic than the things we are dealing with today.

I want to be animal again. I want to be able to fully express my full range of individuality, emotions, desires, and needs without being judged.

I want to be surrounded by people that are more sane than I am; people that can be living, breathing examples of who I should aspire to be.

I want to be proud of my people. I want to engage in proud traditions that go back thousands of years. I want to engage in oral traditions. I want to be intimately involved with my community. I want to have a spiritual connection with my natural surroundings. I want to shed a tear for the animal that I kill for my food. I want to vow to protect with my life the population that she came from, and the river that she swam in. I also want to live in a world in which such a vow never needs to be fully realized.

—-

Notes: I am aware of my reliance on white, male authors. I would like to, and intend to, become more versed in the writings and thoughts of non-males, people of color, and especially indigenous authors and thinkers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1: Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food
2: Peter Gelderloos, Video on Global Warming: http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/32053132
3: http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/697555/ipod-suicide-investigated-worker-kills-self-maybe-over-lost-iphone/
4: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/business/energy-environment/09rareside.html?_r=1
5: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/world/africa/11iht-mines.4.15181447.html
6: Derrick Jensen, Endgame