Everyone Will Always Be Wrong

For anyone waiting for the perfect intellectual leader, you’re going to be waiting a long time.  In all likelihood, you’ll never stop waiting.  Everyone has their “kill whitey” moments, where they say something so stupid that you lose confidence in everything else they already said.  If it was as easy to analyze every facet of people’s personal lives as it is today with our ubiquitous camera phones and social networking websites, figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and even Bob Marley would likely not have such immaculate reputations.  In fact, despite the lack of intrusive surveillance in those times historians have still accumulated quite a bit of evidence that proves how flawed they really were.  It makes you wonder if they would have had the same support from their followers had such technologies existed in their time.  How much worse would the horizontal hostility have been between relatively like-minded groups?  Would they have gotten anything accomplished at all? 

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.  Not too long ago Deep Green Resistance, one of the few groups I consider worth listening to, lost a lot of what little support they had because of some controversial statements they made regarding transgendered people.  Having recommended their books and videos to people many times before I found it pretty disturbing that I could suddenly be seen as a supporter of a hate group.  It was especially surprising considering that I’d never heard or read anything about transgendered people in any of their projects.  It didn’t exactly seem fitting with their other ideas.  My initial hunch was that this was probably based on a misinterpretation of their radical feminist rhetoric, which I’m not a fan of either.  As I started looking into it, trying to figure out what they could have said that caused such a backlash, it became increasingly apparent that their critics had no idea what they were talking about.  Their main criticism seemed to be that the founders of the organization were against the idea of letting men who wanted to be women use women’s public bathrooms, locker rooms, dorms, etc. (sounds fair enough to me).  They have addressed the concerns saying basically that they don’t hate anyone based on how they dress but it’s disrespectful to all those women who expect to be in a dick-free zone to give men that permission.  Radical feminists also consider gender to be a hierarchy in our current society and therefore consider the idea of gender to not be a choice.  I find this part of their philosophy a little confusing myself but I do sort of agree with what they’re trying to say.

 

Admittedly, when I first started looking into this, I didn’t even know what the distinction was between transgendered, transsexual, transvestite and just gay.  This is something I never really thought about at all and so I found it pretty annoying that I could be accused of being anti-something-I-don’t-even-have-an-opinion-on.  I didn’t start supporting DGR for their trans policy or their hardcore feminism.  I supported them because their ideas on environmentalism and social justice were closer to my own than any other group I’ve come across.  In fact, I generally share their work with the caveat “I don’t label myself a radical feminist.”  It’s not that I necessarily disagree with radical feminists.  It’s that I find their explanations to be overly confusing for topics that are already so complicated and controversial.  For example, if patriarchy is a word used to describe male-dominance then why is matriarchy the word used to describe egalitarian societies?  And if you acknowledge that men are being victimized as well since it’s more a class hierarchy than a sex hierarchy is patriarchy really the most accurate word to use in the first place?  How is it “blaming the victim” to point out that women should take precautions (such as not advertising themselves as sexual objects, not misleading men to get them to buy them stuff, not drinking themselves unconscious and expecting someone else to take care of them, etc.) and treat themselves with self-respect?  Why is it wrong to point out the problems with what women of western culture consider normal but not the destructive behaviors men have become accustomed to?  How are women innocent and men guilty if they were both trained how to act by their culture? 

 

I could go on and on, and to be fair feminists would have answers to all these questions but they would only resonate with other feminists who already speak the same language.  This is why I don’t agree when people call feminists “anti-man”, or just flat out crazy, but I also don’t blame them for coming to that conclusion.  It really is more a case of bad propaganda than anything.

 

So having said that, what gets someone labeled as transphobic?  And what even qualifies someone as transgendered as opposed to transvestite, transsexual or just gay?  I’m certainly no expert on the subject as I’ve said already (and it wasn’t too long ago that I was using “gay” and “fag” as derogatory terms for anyone or thing that sucked in some way, even though I didn’t really have anything against homosexuals) but it is a pretty nebulous term.  It’s generally used to refer to those who identify with the opposite sex more than their own.  So it’s not really about the way they dress or what surgeries they’ve had or who they’re attracted to.  It basically just comes down to whether they’d like to be treated as a member of their biological sex or the opposite.  This of course brings up questions about accepted gender roles and what makes a woman a woman as opposed to a man, etc.  I mean, can a heterosexual tomboy or male hair stylist be considered transgendered if they choose to be?  This may sound like an insignificant question but it has pretty profound ramifications when you start to consider the rights that some transgendered people are demanding.  It’s one thing to ask to be referred to as a Mrs. Instead of a Mr. but when you consider it a hate crime to be denied access to bathrooms that are designated for the opposite sex you’re really pushing it. 

The other day on Democracy Now! Amy Goodman interviewed a transgendered actress (meaning a man that lives as a woman) and they discussed some pretty disturbing statistics about the struggles transpeople deal with.  Between the hate and the confusion surrounding their lifestyle they’re likely the most persecuted demographic in our society, facing much higher rates of suicide, murder, homelessness and incarceration (Nearly half of all black transwomen spend time in prison).  So of course the question of whether transwomen should be sent to women’s prisons instead of men’s came up, and I was pretty surprised how acceptable the idea is.  To me it seems completely ridiculous to allow them to choose which one they go to.  How hard would it be for any other male prisoner to present themselves as transgendered and get themselves locked up with a bunch of vulnerable, sexually deprived women considering the obscurity of the word itself?  Obviously men’s prisons aren’t a great place to be for a transwoman, or anybody else for that matter, so I don’t know what the answer is for these people but opening up the door for further sexual assaults on women isn’t it.  Yet this seems to be exactly what the majority of radicals and progressives are proposing, and I really don’t get it.

It’s especially strange for the anti-civ crowd to be so shy about criticizing transpeople who use plastic surgery, artificial hormone therapies and who basically embrace everything they claim to hate about the modern materialistic shopaholic female.  It makes absolutely no sense.  These are people who rant nonstop about how disgusting the medical industry is and how wasteful and shallow rich white girls are but if the same behavior is demonstrated by a man it’s suddenly sacrosanct?  I don’t mean to stereotype transpeople or try to create the impression that they all fit into this category.  I’m just pointing out that any time someone is this logically inconsistent they’re either confused or insincere.  They’re being political.  I mean, how do you write books about how disgusting the pharmaceutical industry is, pointing out the effects of pollution from the manufacture and disposal of their products as well as the political clout their profits have given them and the negative social and psychological effects of their advertising then have no problem with someone subjecting themselves to unnecessary surgeries and making themselves dependent on artificial hormones?  This is the type of behavior that under any other circumstance they’d consider a self-induced disease or a further sign of society’s psychological degradation.  It represents everything that people like John Zerzan (one of DGR’s most outspoken critics and someone who agrees with 99% of what they say) would usually decry. 

 

You find this with virtually every group out there.  In fact, it’s as rare to find groups who have almost nothing good to say as it is to find groups have almost nothing bad to say, most being somewhere in between, none of them being perfect.  In Zerzan’s case, his best solutions seem to be breaking windows and reading poetry as far as I can tell.  I actually listen to his radio show sometimes since there are so few people out there discussing these subjects and one of his books is on my bookshelf even, and with him solutions almost never come up.  These days he tends to rant about his hatred for Derrick Jensen and Chris Hedges, which I found confusing for a while until he complained how they criticized the way black bloc anarchists conducted themselves at Occupy protests, basically trying to break windows and light shit on fire while blending in with non-violent protesters, practically using them as shields (Zerzan’s radio show is called Anarchy Radio).  Like I said, it’s clearly politics.  Their criticism wasn’t even against the “violent” tactics per se, but about sabotaging peaceful protests.  Again, seems fair enough in my opinion.

 

As for DGR, I’ve already criticized radical feminism a little bit.  They’re also guilty of romanticizing pre-civilized societies, saying things like rape didn’t exist in the Americas until the European colonizers showed up (literally) and that Native Americans never hunted any species to extinction.  Derrick Jensen actually makes a pretty big deal about Pleistocene Overkill in his book Endgame, and he could be right about it but I’m definitely not convinced.  Honestly though, I don’t even see any reason to worry about it.  Of course Native Americans made mistakes, especially during their first years on the continent.  That doesn’t invalidate anarcho-primitivism, bioregionalism, permaculture or anything else the anti-civ crowd advocates.  What should matter is how they learned from those mistakes and later developed sustainable cultures (as well as how some didn’t learn and made a lot of the same mistakes Europeans did).  At least their romanticism isn’t as annoying as mainstream apologism, such as the idea that the desertification of north Africa and the Fertile Crescent is solely the result of the Earth’s 20,000 year cycle as it wobbles in its orbit and has nothing to do with human activity.  The History Channel really pisses me off.

 

This is sort of what I’m trying to get at with this post.  We don’t need to select an entire package of solutions from any one group.  We can select parts from many flawed ones if we want to.  And Deep Green Resistance remains one of the few groups I’ve found saying the things that I think need to be heard.  I’m not going to reject everything they say simply because they aren’t perfect.  Similarly, New Age spiritual pseudoscience annoys the shit out of me but I still recommend listening to Charles Eisenstein for his insights into economics.  I consider the Zeitgeist movement’s solutions to be so delusional as to be dangerous but I find their criticisms of the current system to be some of the clearest and most persuasive.  I consider the Transition Town movement to be too little too late but I appreciate the success they’ve had in making radical ideas more acceptable to the mainstream.  Feminists and tree-hugger hippie types explain their ideas in ways that don’t resonate with those who most need to hear what they have to say but I recognize the importance in challenging the type of language the mainstream accepts as normal.  And the list goes on. 

 

Nobody will ever have the one perfect opinion about everything.  Not only that but even the attempt to develop such a thing is itself destructive.  There is no one philosophy that translates the same to every region of the globe.  And even if there was, we should still allow for variations.  Uniformity is inimical to resilience and stability.  As is the never ending crusade for knowledge that scientists call progress.  If knowing everything about everything is the only hope your culture has of not destroying itself then you’re fucked for one thing, and for another you’ll use that to justify atrocities (what are generally referred to as “experiments”).  The alternative is what some have taken to calling an “ignorance based worldview”, an acknowledgement of our cognitive limitations and a more realistic approach to problem solving that doesn’t inevitably lead to further complexity. 

 

Of course, this is a pretty nebulous concept as well.  The desired level of “ignorance” (or the maximum amount of information that can be learned and remembered without the aid of unsustainable and immoral practices) is certainly open to debate.  The way I look at it, much of our information and our “accomplishments” are inherently destructive to hold on to.  Think not only of the maintenance required for our industrial infrastructure but even our collection of books, artwork and historical artifacts we continually reprint and try to keep from decaying.  Think of what it takes to keep our supposedly accurate history lessons going, all the materials, training and coordination required.  It actually necessitates the repeating of the mistakes that the history is supposed to warn us against.  Isn’t that ostensibly why we make such a big deal about this stuff?  If the importance of history is to learn from the mistakes of the past such as slavery, imperialism and environmental negligence what’s the point in using an education system that contributes to those very problems?  Producing so much paper, building enormous universities that are large enough to shelter thousands from the elements (and that aren’t actually used for that purpose) and producing the excess needed for specialists to dedicate their lives to study and teaching is a brief experiment in human learning and it won’t last much longer. 

 

There’s a reason no cultures did these things before the age of cheap fossil energy.  They couldn’t.  It takes too much to support these things.  It requires more than any local landbase can provide.  This is why they used songs, stories and other mnemonics to remember what we store in volumes of textbooks and hard drives.  And this is why we should start considering a resurrection of this type of education.  It would be a good idea for us to pick out our most important lessons, leave out the trivia and start translating these ideas into easy to remember myths and jingles, something closer to fairy tale type stories than the dogmas that people have been encouraged to take literally.  Most religions were sort of scientifically designed this way in their inceptions, meant to perpetuate certain desirable behaviors while warning against others.  Teaching the origins of the universe was never really the point, at least not as much as getting people to stop asking such a pointless question.  I’m not trying to say that the ideas are scientifically valid.  As a tool for social coordination however, it does exactly what was intended (which wasn’t necessarily to promote peace and happiness, obviously).  Anyway, how to keep the lessons we’ve learned from our scientific endeavors without a massive industrial infrastructure is something we need to start considering.

 

Think also of our own personal accomplishments, namely the careers and possessions that are the result of all our hard work.  Think of our identities, everything we’ve committed ourselves to and vehemently advocated, everything we think we deserve.  Letting go of such things can be rough.  What will it take to admit that so much of what we’ve done and taken pride in was not only a waste of time but actually immoral?  And to get this post back on subject, what will it take to admit how wrong we are?  All of us?  About everything?  And that we always will be?  Well, the word “miracle” comes to mind.  Being a little more pragmatic though I guess I’d say something like “a way out.” 

 

In my last couple posts I went into detail about the importance of losing our dependence on the industries that are currently destroying the world, and therefore the need for what you could call “primitive infrastructure,” basically land restored and designed to produce everything humans need as well as settlement patterns that can give all people local and free access to those necessities (which inevitably requires mass relocation from cities to farmland).  While this may still fit into the miracle category, it is the only possibility to sustain anywhere near our current population size and likely the only way to reverse climate change even with a smaller population so therefore I see no reason to advocate anything more “realistic.”  I’m not going to reiterate my entire argument here for a third time but my previous essays are there for anyone interested.  I also highly recommend listening to people like Geoff Lawton, Allan Savory and John D. Liu for more detailed explanations.  If we’re serious about solving our problems then we really need to stop with the unrealistic prospect of attaining enlightenment and actually get moving with this stuff.

What is Worth Protesting?

 

Not everybody in the world is an asshole.  There are a lot of sincere and concerned activists out there working hard doing what they believe is right.  Protesting against Monsanto, the fossil fuel industry, austerity policies, wars, and animal cruelty are all good things.  And fighting for a higher minimum wage, equal pay for equal work, a fairer tax rate, easier access to education and legalized cannabis all show that their hearts are in the right place.  However, without aiming for the root causes of these problems there isn’t any real chance to achieve what they want.  A lot of them don’t even seem to know what they want, only what they don’t.  We’re facing a highly complex predicament that most busy people don’t have time to fully investigate, thanks partially to the assault of propaganda from vested interests in a misinformed public.

 

I want to discuss why these protests have been so ineffective but first let’s look at the effect all these changes would have if activists were successful.  Imagine that the tax burden increases for the rich, the wealth gap narrows a bit, enough jobs are created for everyone to stay employed, minimum wage is raised proportionally to inflation (which is the least any worker should accept considering that if adjusted to match worker productivity as well would be around twice that), renewable energy is subsidized and the price of emitting carbon is raised closer to its “true cost” giving incentives to businesses to create more energy efficient products and to consumers to buy them, employers are required to pay women as much as men, farms become organic, wars cease, and everyone has access to free healthcare and higher education and permission to buy medical marijuana if a doctor gives the ok.

 

What that means is that the upper class is now funding the corruption that the lower classes were before, more money goes to people who spend it quickly as opposed to those who have more than they know what to do with (those who hoard most of it), more products are produced and consumed stimulating the economy, women are further encouraged to pursue a career in the same dispiriting and destructive industries that mostly men have been subjected to so far, “our resources” remain in foreign countries forcing recycling to become as close to zero-waste as possible (probably not very close),  more people attend brainwashing universities and over-medicate themselves to a zombie-like state, anyone can buy small amounts of an easy to grow plant at exorbitant prices and anyone who accidentally burns their house down while trying to secretly grow it inside (it’s still expensive enough for people to kill each other for it) won’t have to flee the scene for fear of arrest.

 

Well, I can’t say that wouldn’t be an improvement.  It’s kind of like taking the long, winding route to the dentist’s office.  And even that might be too kind an analogy.  It might be more like taking the normal route while receiving fellatio from the passenger and listening to a New-Age mantra repeat itself on the radio the whole way.  “I am a great person.  I am a great person.  I am a great person…..”  Basically you feel better even though you’re headed for the same outcome.  The easiest way to elucidate what I mean is to point out that a thriving green economy as envisaged by mainstream liberals is basically just consumers buying twice as many gadgets that each waste half as much energy.  It’s hardly worth the effort.  What they’re missing is that an economy which depends on growth is inherently unsustainable no matter what the energy sources are or how equally wealth is distributed or even how happy and nice everybody is.  Limits still apply.

 

In my last post I described the need for degrowth in some detail.  To summarize, we have a dangerously stressed ecosystem that the world economy pretends it can live without.  The natural resources that become our products are diminishing and pollution and greenhouse gases are threatening our habitat.  Part of my conclusion was that our money system, which necessitates growth by loaning money into existence as interest-bearing debt, and the capitalist system, which encourages growth by rewarding those who are most productive, have to go.  This needs to happen for any of the other changes that protesters focus on to have any real effect.  That means that this needs to happen first.  Yet, hardly anybody even dares to bring the idea up for discussion.  As a result, the majority of protests are just congregations of people delaying the damage of problems that they will ultimately fail to stop.  This is because even they still depend on these problems existing.  Remember all the iPhones in Occupy?  And look at me, typing this on a computer and posting it on the internet to be read by other computer users. 

 

You can’t have less consumption, less pollution, and less military conflicts with a perpetually growing economy providing more jobs, high-tech medical procedures and a higher standard of material wealth for everyone every year.  Therefore, my first proposal is to protest the growth imperative itself, realistically focusing on fractional reserve banking and not so much on capitalism yet.  Whether that takes the form of End the Fed or Transform the Fed, the idea that growth isn’t desirable just needs to be drilled into the majority’s heads.  I was actually hoping that this would be what the Occupy Movement decided to focus on when they started trying to limit their demands.  It never really became the focus of more than a few fringe groups though.  The emphasis remained on things like student debt, corporate personhood and increasing taxes on the rich.  Again, all good things but impossible without addressing the root problem. 

 

I can’t honestly say that I believe a new or updated form of the global industrial economic model can be made sustainable.  I’m trying to focus on what I think can be accomplished with protests though.  Charles Eisenstein, David Graeber and others have some alternative economic ideas worth looking at, most with rosy names like Sacred Economics, The Economics of Happiness and The Circular Economy.  Transitioning to one of these models, or more likely some perversion of one, could at the very least buy some time for more pillows to be thrown in front of the brick wall ahead of us. 

 

One pillow that I think could soften our crash, and least controversial of the few I want to propose, would be an improved education system.  Yeah, not exactly a new idea but let me be more specific.  I’m not concerned with buying a computer for every desk, new football fields or the like.  What we need are new ideas.  We need to stop treating education like job training for office work and industries that have no future.  This could be as simple as adding a permaculture class to the curriculum or updating the textbooks of all classes so they no longer glorify technological progress and globalization over everything else (even dictionaries demonstrate subtle forms of propaganda).  I’d rather see high school education greatly improved and businesses required to provide their own training than college education more affordable.  For the vast majority, there shouldn’t be much need for college.  Like I said before, most of the industries kids are being trained for have no future and would never have existed in the first place if our culture actually had respect for anything.  The future depends on people being more self-reliant, meaning able to provide more of their necessities without money, so that’s what kids should be prepared for.  Without addressing the growth imperative though, good luck bringing this change about in a world that wants the complete opposite.

 

Second, I recommend putting pressure on the current agricultural system.  Protests need to go beyond labeling GMO’s and switching to organic.  Organic agriculture has been eroding soil and emitting carbon into the atmosphere for thousands of years.  It’s the main cause of many of the world’s deserts.  This is an issue as vital as stopping the use of fossil fuels and, like degrowth, it rarely comes up.  We can’t afford to let so much land desertify, which is exactly what will happen if we keep this dying system on life support with chemical nutrients and water from depleting aquifers.  Transitioning to a perennial polyculture model will require many more workers on farms but trying to sell the idea as a way to create jobs would be kind of disingenuous.  Creating these new jobs threatens those who are currently employed producing and selling chemicals.  So I’ll say it again, degrowth is a prerequisite.

 

Third, and without a doubt the most controversial proposal, is land redistribution.  We need to reverse the trend of urbanization.  There’s no such thing as a sustainable city.  When people live in population densities higher than what local resources can feed, clothe, heat and shelter they have to use extra energy to import those resources from far away.  They require extra infrastructure that isn’t necessary for those in lower population densities, such as sewage treatment.  They also disconnect themselves from the impact they have on the land that those resources come from and therefore lose the ability to make good decisions.  There needs to be incentives and opportunities for people to leave cities.  The perennial polycultures that farms must transition to in order to survive are the infrastructure that make a truly sustainable existence for the human race possible.  They make it possible for us to get our food, building materials, heating fuel and clothing fibers locally.  In my last post I went through the statistics of land and population, showing that if farmland was parceled out to those in cities they could all provide for themselves with less land than we use now (due not only to the distance between resources and consumers but also to high consumption lifestyles and the inefficiency of large-scale farming).  It’s unlikely that most people would choose to live that way themselves and there are some good excuses, like the toxicity of the chemical residues underfoot, but they should at least have the option.  The way things are now, self-reliant people are a threat to corporate profits and growth.  However, people who support economic growth are a threat to all life on this planet.  With how hard it is to get people to change, when someone wants to give up their high-tech crap and give the simple life a try, it should be seen as a blessing.  It should be encouraged and facilitated.  Realistically this would start as workers living on the land that provides their necessities in exchange for doing more labor than they need to do just to take care of themselves.  I’d like to imagine that someday farms will have transformed into self-sufficient eco-villages that aren’t required to provide for anyone else or pay taxes to the state.  That may sound like wishful thinking but I honestly don’t think it’s that outrageous an idea.   We may not have such an easy time getting there but if any humans are alive a couple hundred years from now, they are going to be living this way and they’ll only exist because we acted to preserve their habitat. 

 

So there you have it.  Those are my basic suggestions for activists out there.  I could throw some other stuff in there, like decommissioning nuclear plants but I don’t think I’d really be offering any new ideas.  And I was tempted to criticize what I’ve seen from feminists and anarcho-primitivists, particularly the rhetoric they use to explain their views to the public.  Anti-civilization and the matriarchy/patriarchy dichotomy don’t exactly resonate with most people.  When people don’t have the time to look into all the arguments, you have to at least speak their language.  I just feel like without changing the message they could use terms like “anti-empire” and “dominator societies” to reach a wider audience.  And articles titled “Why talking about healthy masculinity is like talking about healthy cancer” aren’t exactly helping gain support for your cause.  The goal shouldn’t be to preach to the choir or to ensconce ourselves into some cult so we can feel like a part of something.  I think I’ll just leave it at that though because I really just don’t want to get into it right now.  Maybe that can be the topic of my next post if I do one.  To be honest, I’m kind of hoping that by the time I get the urge to write again, there won’t be any good reason to.

extra doodles

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

doodles and prose 1