There once was a time when humans were not so stuck in their ways. What happened? What corrupted us to the point where we are the Zeks of this monstrous creature, this carcass that has eradicated the communities that lived before us? This monstrous creature that has turned our lands into a dangerous and darkling plain? To most, I must be speaking nonsense because I have not explained what these words mean. What is a Zek? What is this monstrous creature you speak of? And whatever do you mean that we are stuck? The title lends some clues. Some call this creature the Leviathan, others call it the State, I call it all these things but a good common name for it is civilization.
God and Civilization
All ‘intellectuals’ eventually reference the bible. It is inevitable, it has invaded the Zeitgeist for generation upon generation. About three hundred generations in fact. That is a long time in the ‘collective conscious’ (and yes, the collective CONSCIOUS not unconscious that was no typo), in actuality, it is a mere blip even relative to human existence which indeed, yet another blip considered further beyond to that to the time of giants otherwise known as Dinosaurs. Here I will indirectly reference the Bible through an interpretation given by Bakunin:
“But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes Man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.”
“Why was God ever portrayed as the good one?” A modern man may ask. Among the Semitic peoples, there would have been a few who asked the same. The reason I believe Satan remains a sinister influence on Man is two-fold. First of all, I believe that this parable of Genesis is a vague memory of living in what Hobbes would later call the state of nature (I don’t believe the state nature exists as Hobbes or many of his contemporaries described it, but I think it should be thought of as merely before civilization). And as a vague memory, it has been influenced by the tendrils of this monster. The conception of anything beyond itself became corrupted. Laws and orders emerge from the mouth of God which can be interpreted as Nature itself. Much like the Strongmen, the boss, the Lugal, the dictator, the president, the Semitic peoples imagined that Nature had carved out rules and laws for them to follow and they violated them. Nature did no such thing, Nature permits it does not restrict, unlike the President, unlike the Prime minister, unlike the tyrant and the emperor. So, there was no restriction on using the fruit, there was nothing stopping people from thinking of it. So, Satan neither rebels or freely thinks to choose the fruit. The only thing that made him choose it was his own stupidity, for why would people eat the fruit for any other reason but a moronic one?
The second major problem is the idea that Satan has freed men from some shackles of their nature. This could not be more wrong; the fruit is what creates the beast and the chains of man. It makes all into Zeks to serve the immortal carcass for no other goal than to continue. Under the beast, no being is free, not the president, not the prime minister, not the dictator and not the emperor. They are controlled by the beast just as much as the beast controls them. The fruit holds a parasite that turns Man into a hive of bees. It holds no knowledge. We are not blessed by the fruit to learn, rather the fruit takes the wisdom and the understanding cultivated over generations into its parasitic ends.
After Genesis, God no longer resembles what he once was. God becomes more and more like Satan as the memory of anything beyond the beast’s body gets more and more distant. God begins to resemble the Pharaohs. Just as selfish and just as egoistic, and more than that, just as if not more parasitic. God becomes an abomination. As God becomes Satan, so then does Satan begin to resemble nature. It whispers of delights beyond. To free one’s self from the shackles. Satan represents the ancients, Satan is lazy and indulgent, Satan is lustful and sensual. Such a whisper is what leads people to rebel. God’s angels send down decree upon decree to stop the terrible Satan. And God prevails, for now. And he prevails by repressing our nature. As I have said before what God is now, is nothing like before. What God is, is Satan and Satan God. The switch had happened without anyone noticing.
Repression and Progress
What lays beyond the immortal carcass of civilization? We don’t know the full bounds for most of that knowledge and wisdom died countless generations ago in the living human communities of antiquity. I ask instead why have we become stuck? Stuck on what? Why propose that we have stopped in the first place? Is not civilization the ever-increasing push towards progress? Is it not an acceleration towards something greater? By now you know that whenever a question is asked it is likely a rhetorical ‘no’ answer from me. I ask these questions because they are the corollary. I expect you to think of them. I expect me to think about them as I am doing now, but don’t always expect an answer to all of them. Somethings remain a mystery and refuse to be deciphered. Some ask whether all things are so. Let us move towards some answer, even though we may be moving in an abyss.
I like these questions most so let us go with that: Is not civilization the ever-increasing push towards progress? Is it not an acceleration towards something greater?
No, and yes. Civilization has it’s own idea of progress I call cannibalization. I believe this is best illustrated by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev. I am of course going to talk about the Kardeshev scale. The Kardeshev scale was designed in order that we may categorize alien civilizations in the distant heavens. Others have proposed different scales but Nikolai’s remains the most popular. However, this scale says more about us and what we think about advancement than it does about mythical angels in the heavens. Nikolai decided to measure the advancement of a civilization by the amount of energy it harnesses. Not how it uses its energy, not why, but by a cold hard amount. Energy might as well be everything and what else does it mean to harness in this case other than to consume? To cannibalize everything around it? The more it cannibalizes, the better because the more it can cannibalize! Fantastic. This is what Einsi call progress.
Nikolai believed the simplest and easiest way to define civilization was by the amount it cannibalized its environment and he could not have been more correct.
This is by no means real progress at all. A child does not progress merely by eating more. A child progresses into an adult when the child begins to understand herself and the world that surrounds them. She gains wisdom in this, from observing the animals and the land in the ways that it acts so that she may learn more about herself and the world. She does not work towards this goal either. Children progress best and learn best when they play. She does not need to be forced to learn in this way the same way a pig need not be forced into the mud. It is their nature to progress. This is the progress that inspires me to write this and you to read it.
Freud believed that people repress, or drive from their conscious minds, shameful thoughts that, then, become unconscious. I also believe that this is in part true, many of the mechanism of civilization exist for this very purpose of repression. What followed from civilization wasn’t unprecedented progress in this way, but unprecedented repression!
Repression of what? and repression for what? And why does it need to repress? Civilization represses our nature to continue its cannibalization and the only way to do so is to create rules. These rules and laws give the beast a stronger form. It allows the monster to reproduce itself generation to generation. Much like how a parasite reproduces and turns its prey into workers to simply destroy the thing and move on. An endless cycle that exists merely because it happened to continue without its components disbanding and rebelling. Now, the law can be formalized or informal but the gist is the same with the earliest or least powerful Leviathans. Produces, reproduce, cannibalize. Rinse and repeat. No wonder Camus described life as a pointless struggle to lift a boulder up a hill just to have it fall again. That is exactly what civilization plans to do for its entire existence. All Camus knew was civilization, how else to describe it as absurd! Civilization reduces all people to Sisyphus and we are all cursed to this existence.
Why. Why? WHY!
Why do we do this? Why does it repress us? Because it cannot exist otherwise, it must stamp out all hope or desire to do anything else but to increase its ability to cannibalize the wilderness. The Civilization that does so the most will eat the others that are not able to do this better or outlast them. Such is the natural selection of parasites.
Sex and Pleasure
I believe that man has been so corrupted this thing we call civilization, that most people I talk to honestly believe that animals have sex for some goal other than enjoyment. They don’t, evolutionary biology and psychology can EXPLAIN why they ENJOY the act of sex but that is not why animals ACTUALLY HAVE SEX. It’s only contemporary human beings that think of that as PRODUCING something. Like each and every one of is a factory. A factory for children, children who will become workers, workers who will produce.
Why do people think like this?
Because they can no longer understand something for pleasure on its own or because we have hopelessly turned Nature into another Deity of control? Because we have created lives that revolve around the ceaseless production of things to produce more things that will consume yet again more things. It is no wonder that every action must produce another to such a person’s mind. How confused they must be to think outside such an endless to what lays beyond: pleasure for pleasure sake. And the irony is that the whole loop is for no sake. It is nonsensical, far more because we know it must end eventually. It will end when all the living beings that make up its carcass will die or disband.
Divine Rulers
Can you see it, the return of the Gods that we have ‘mastered’? Not the ancient Gods of the gatherers and early cities but the Gods of the Semitic and Persian peoples, of Akhenaten. Yes, those Gods. Do you see them in the way we think of Nature? Do you see the tendrils of influence the civilization has done once again? Turned Nature into a lawmaker! Nature does not make laws. Nature has no laws. It is and that is all. Nothing at all against explaining thing using actual principles, but Nature having laws? Nature ‘selecting’ as I used it before, does not actually happen. There is a way to explain why things are they are with a bit of thought of course. But no one has programmed things. There is no one at the helm or controls because there are no controls in the first place.
We have entrenched rules in the universe. God is becoming Satan and Satan God. And the switch is happening without anyone noticing. Nature is becoming the rule maker and rule makers are offering us ‘salvation’ from it. A beast they created. A beast that they really are. This is a fictional Nature, nothing like the nature of the ancients that acted and didn’t know all, understand all or even care for all. It may have birthed all but not for the creation of more people but to live! Live in this place called the universe.
A zek is a term in Russian meaning prisoner. A prisoner in a Gulag. A work camp. Our contemporary cities have become the largest work camps and we are turning the hinterlands into wastelands. Darkling plains. Zeks of the plains set off and disband. Aspire to real progress and real growth.
You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Diogenes Of Toronto 