Try something else

Human survival means returning to a sacred animist culture.

Market based capitalism is destroying the world. If humanity survives, we will return to an animist existence. Within a century or so industrialised people will either be completely immersed in living in a living world, or dying on a dying one. Possibly the only remaining question is how far we can make that process democratic, egalitarian and non-violent. The answer may be “not very”.

This tumultuous journey will strip away much of what we currently consider freedom, common sense and rationality. Our task is to decide what should and can be saved.

Our main challenge will be to defuse the bomb of our own psyches. Pretty soon we’ll be doing it in the middle of psychic, intellectual and actual war zones. It’s going to be quite something.

Especially as we’ve discarded religious and spiritual belief and a whole load of other stuff central to what human culture actually is. Without them, in all their eccentric and nonsensical glory, we aren’t fully human.

I sometimes wish I didn’t have certain instincts and emotions. But there’s no healthy way for me to eliminate, override or ignore them. That would leave me a hollow shell of a person.

This is what industrialised individualism has done to us.

Our attempts to suppress essential aspects of our humanity are unsustainable. They’re doomed to failure. They’re what makes our society unsustainable. And yet, all the talk of sustainability barely addresses, let alone undoes this. Suppression doesn’t lead to elimination. It leads to perversion, stalled maturity, pain, discontent and confusion.

We think we’re ever so grown up. We don’t believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden. We don’t commune with spirits in the landscape. Instead, we operate as if we believe that the world is inanimate and infinite. We believe we should all compete to use it all up as fast as possible.

But the spiritual, animate aspects of our humanity seep out anyway. Because they’re intrinsic to the real experience of our existence.

Look around you. Do you see all the pseudo spiritual messaging in a supposedly secular culture? Adverts. Movies. Music. Do…