It’s been a
while since we ran anything by our pessimistic pal Chris Hedges. Maybe I was
making the transition from US politics (barking and dangerous) to Euro politics
(old, corrupt, and dangerous) but this scenario of doom is too good to miss.
The Mayans didn’t put us out of our misery but capitalism may well do the deed.
“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion
and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern
capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said. “It is an absurd
myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have
to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have
had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have
overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem
easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have
to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly.
It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to
readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not
doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical
versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that
what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists
call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies
to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid
because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is
any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what
anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face
of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions,
such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and
save us. “Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain
rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away,” Wright said. “There are
many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took
hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by
outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the
ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise.
They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among
Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians
were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People
came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the
modern world that was intolerable—the barbed wire, the railways, the white man,
the machine gun—would disappear.” Click here for the rest
Click forthe Gates of Eden
The secret
word is Hollow
