Modern life: What is wrong with it all?

A few years back a couple of friends and me decided to cycle a well known UK route called the C2C. As the name suggests it goes from sea to sea. In this case, from Whitehaven to Sunderland. We packed up our bikes with tents, food and other essentials and set off on the 4 day trip across the land, camping by night. It is possible to do the trip in one day if you are very fit, but we were not, and the additional weight of carrying what we needed to camp etc., slows you down, hence the 4 days. It was relative hardship compared to ordinary daily life, peddling our way across the Cambrian mountains, through sunshine, rain, fog and hail. The aches and pains of leaning on the handle bars, the bruising and soreness on your backside, revealing themselves more assertively each morning as you start the next leg of the journey, make for discomfort that us pansy-ass townies are really not at home with. Additionally, the late night sounds of your mates snoring and what I can only describe as half-goat-half-pig-half-goose mating grunts at 3 am in the morning, eminating from perhaps 20 feet away, amongst other strange noises, leaves you tired if not exhausted each morning. But still, we got on our bikes and peddled. On the upside, you see the country from a completely different perspective. You start to enjoy the rolling hills and peaks, at least when you're coming down them. You encounter people in a new context too. Folk are helpful, friendly and sympathetic to your quest, perhaps to some degree wishing it was them. By the end of the trip we were truly exhausted, though simultaneously elated at our small achievement, and enriched by the experiences along the way. But, something else had happened to us. We didnt want to stop. We didn't want to go home. We wanted more. What and why?

There was a comradery that developed, despite sleep loss and fatigue induced grumpy exchanges, that I have not experienced in daily town life. Something about the shared hardships and joys that creates unspoken bonds that we don't experience in modern life, save perhaps within the family home, but even then there is something different about this. There was more than just the bonds that made the experience so memorable and precious.

If we step back and look our lives and peer down from a larger perspective there are hints at why. We are constrained by having to pay for our homes and life in them, which forces us to take paying jobs, with our homes creating physical barriers to all outside the four walls. So for the most part of our lives we are either in our homes or in the place of work doing work, where the opportunities for the kind of experiences and comradery I'm talking about do not really exist. Furthermore we are bombarded constantly by marketing, everywhere, it is even piped directly into our homes courtesy of the box in the corner of the room. It teases us, manipulating our desires and emotions, making us addicted consumers of products, somehow dulling our brains to the fact that we are forced to pay all of our lives to live on a tiny patch of our own planet. The bricks and mortar having been paid for just a few years into our mortgages, and the rest just pampering the rich who hold our planet hostage. In this sense we are slaves to the rich. We are forced to live within their laws and ideologies, and skillfully manipulated and coerced into accepting this way of life.

Out on the road, we discovered something about freedom and friendship that is difficult to find or experience within the highly structured system of modern life that is imposed on us. Perhaps the fact that being on bikes, relatively unconstrained by road laws, allowing us to go just about anywhere also had something to do with it. I can't even adequately describe the meaning and joy of what we discovered. It is only something that can be appreciated by embarking on such adventures I think. But it changed me. It continues to change me. Every time I do something outside of the norms of the system now I feel that freedom and joy, and it's addictive. More and more I reject modern life; it's fakery, the celebrities, the rules, the slavery. And I feel good about it.

We can't continue our existing way of life. We already know it. The exhaustion of resources, the damage to our ecology, the wars that will probably ensue, the biological hazards, the nuclear hazards. If the constraints of wage slavery and these mentioned threats are not enough to compel you to change your existence, your existence will change anyway. The question is, do you want it to be on your own terms or are you going to let the terms of others, specifically the rich and powerful, be imposed on you?

My experiences have taught me that there is a much more fulfilling existence for us, waiting for us, beyond the walls of this fake life imposed on us by the rich. It will involve work too, but not this meaningless 'existance' as servants. We have to fight for our rights and freedoms, and that takes comradery and solidarity that doesn't come from ordinary modern life. You can experience it on an adventure, in protests and demonstrations, through participating in life with fellow ordinary folk. It creates meaning for your life that you wont find on your TV, in the supermarket or at work, but you have to seek it out to understand it. As the famous anarchist Rosa Luxembourg once said "those who do not move do not feel their chains", and that is something we cannot truly grasp whilst continuing to go through the motions of the life that has been designed for us by the rich for the rich.

Do something you have never done. Do something beyond normality. Understand what the word liberty means, and how we give it up by continuing with modern life. Become addicted to freedom and learn how to fight for it.

Letter to a Human Nation

Dear Humanity,

     I'm writing you out of love and concern for your well being. You are both wondrous and wonderful and I would hate to see you go. You know that you are sick but you are still confused about what the ailment is and what to do about it. I know that you are smart and I think you are figuring it all out. As an honest being you are consuming and assimilating your accumulated knowledge, all points of view, for without it you are blind. Your vision is still very blurred but I believe we can fix that fairly easily, so long as you want to, and I believe you do.

    I don't know what you know and as yet you don't know what I know, but at least I am listening to you and I hope that you continue to listen to me, especially since I am you also. My language is not refined and my humour is often misunderstood, I can be dry and academic, I can be imaginative and poetic, I can be confusing or even crass, I can be brilliant but make the most obvious mistakes, my words have meanings to me that may be slightly different in meaning to you, but still I think it is possible that you might hear me, so I shall continue.

Brains

    I want to talk about brains for a moment. Brains, I believe, will be the agents of your journey to health. Every living being has one. They all function at different rates, assessing different kinds of data. They are made up of trillions of neurons all talking to each other. Each neuron experiencing the world around it and responding in the ways it has learned. A brain can be sick, and it is notable by its overall dysfunction. Internally we find that the brain has ceased to communicate properly, with regions and functions chattering away but other regions and functions unable to receive or interpret the messages properly. Some neurons attack other neurons, functions or even whole regions in the belief that everything else is the problem, oblivious to the fact that the problem is the miscommunication and thus only adding to the problem. If only we could just fix those lines of communication then we might at least ease the suffering if not cure the ailment. Is it possible that a single neuron or perhaps a small group of neurons could hold the key to this puzzle? And if it were possible would that tiny region or function of the brain be able to get through to the rest of the brain? It seems like a tough challenge but I see it beginning to work. One neuron is chattering wildly into the white noise around it, burning up far more energy that in needs, poisoning itself and those around it with some misguided notion that its frantic behaviour is the only way to behave and to communicate. Something changes, perhaps the series of events that has shaped our brain has led inexorably to a change in the neuron, but has not affected others yet. The neuron stops chattering wildly and starts doing what it should be doing. It has stopped attacking its fellow neurons and the attacks from them are tailing off as they always do. Its new found behaviour is much more relaxed, self aware and soothing to those around it. It turns out that this behaviour is communicating the means by which it became content and calm and gave rise to its new-found and considerably more harmonious function. Very soon all of its 'friends' or 'family' are doing what they should do and they continue to do because they like it. One might liken this phenomenon with a virus, but then that is the nature of ideas at every level, both good and bad. Luckily neurons do know what is good even if they have temporarily been distracted by fear, anger, sorrow, guilt or any of those intense emotional experiences that can wash through the population, derailing it from proper course for a while, but it finds its way again. Saner heads prevail. The destructive levels of emotion start slowly to drain away and as the harmonious neurons grow in number their soothing song soon resonates throughout the population thus restoring balance between heart and mind.

    As you can hopefully see with my description of the brain here that I am weaving in and out between observable reality and philosophy or religion as some might prefer to call it, whilst creating a metaphor, analogy or model. The interaction of neurons is very much like the interaction of humans, and in fact of all life. There is a sizzling roar of communication at every conceivable level in what we call life, assuming you are prepared to stretch your conception of the term communication for the purposes of understanding what I am trying to tell you. If you are prepared to do that then it does not take much more of a stretch to see that the Earth has both a body and a brain. It has the means of its own self sustenance for quite some time to come, so there is good reason to be hopeful.

To the Stars

    Is the Earth brain the only planetary brain? Is it merely a neuron trying to reach maturity where it might start to communicate with other neurons. How many other neurons are there? Are any of them already communicating? I don't know, but the Universe seems awfully big and it would seem like a terrible waste of space if there weren't other neurons. Imagine the life forms that may have emerged in different galaxies, their strange but beautiful technologies. Life may have arisen in many places but never having reached maturity, dying out before ever having the enlightening and rapturous experience of reaching out to the stars and communicating with others. We are tantalizingly close to being able to reach out but we are not quite there yet, and our sick brain is squinting in the bright glare of its own activity, on the verge of seeing with clarity but also perilously close to a fatal fall as it blunders forward.

The Tower of Babel

    There is a tale told in the Bible about something called the Tower of Babel. The story goes that men tried to build a tower to reach the place of God, and God brought down the tower and scrambled the languages of men so that they could not collaborate in such a plan again, or so he thought...

    A tower is a structure, constructed from substructures and layers. It is hierarchical in construction, and it is this that we should be looking for if we want to unveil 'T2'. Hierarchy is widespread in human society today though contrary to common belief it is not necessarily a fixed formation in human gatherings and organisations. Many ancient and even remote modern cultures are virtually structureless or flat. In the Western World, we see towers reaching to the sky all around us but most of the time fail to see that they are mostly substructures. What separates us from flat societies is an idea that gained footing before the Romans; that depriving other sentient beings of life and liberty is good practice. The idea has been passed by various means but usually from parent to child.

The McDonald’s lettuce washer reports to the floor manager. The floor manager reports to the site franchise manager. The site franchise manager reports to the regional franchise manager. The regional franchise manager reports to the franchise general manager. The franchise general manager reports to the board of directors. The board of directors reports to the shareholders. The shareholding corporation market subsidiaries manager reports to the conglomerate management. The conglomerate management reports to the conglomerate board of directors. The conglomerate board of directors reports to the conglomerate shareholders. The conglomerate shareholders give 'donations' to the campaigns of politicians who will best represent them, and maybe arrange for the other politicians interested in their line of business to have other things to worry about, like where their children are right now, whether will they be embroiled in a sex scandal in the morning, or perhaps whether they will have an unfortunate 'accident' in their car on the way home.

    Here we have 9 tiers of commercial hierarchy, and a fairly typical arrangement too. Each tier coercing the tier below, usually with the threat of losing their job for more mundane matters..., and ensuring their complicity and compliance in whatever agenda the tier above is operating. This is one way communication. Top down.

    So up there amongst the gods, we have military moguls who do so well out of death by metal and other forms of chemistry, banking moguls who own most of the planet, oil moguls who are doing so well from poisoning us all to death, the Biotech moguls who are doing so well out of experimenting on us and engineering the seeds of life to replace us. It scares us all, but it is what we have done, not 'they'. Every time you have deferred to someone else's orders you have been complicit in the crime or malfunction of the whole. You start to reduce your communication towards your assailant and defer more and more, just as a trigger defers to the finger. The communication becomes more and more unidirectional appearing to lead unavoidably toward a single outcome. Except you are not a trigger and they are not fingers. You can keep trying to communicate and even improve communication. You know you can, you have done it before. So why give up now? Why accept defeat? Why shouldn’t your point of view at least be heard? Well it wont if you don't try. It's really up to you. No one else. You.

    Way up on the belfry of our tower, the wind currents are strong and the passengers on deck still cannot see through the clouds. They can however feel the discontent down below that is causing the tower to wobble. They fear the wobbling at these great heights. They also fear the ground because it has been so long since they were part of the ground dwelling people that they have forgotten that it is no more or less honourable, stimulating or pleasurable to be a ground dweller. They have forgotten that they are no closer to the mind of God or nature than any of us. They don't seem to care that people are being crushed needlessly under the weight and blindness of structures they ride contently. In fear of their own demise they issue more assertive orders to down below, but down below is still in shock from the last stumble and is busy trying to survive it but failing to communicate back effectively, that the tower is not going to hold much longer, and that there is nothing left to do but take it down carefully if everyone is to make it out alive. We don't know for sure if we can all make it out alive but we do know that we won't if we keep the tower up much longer.

Finding the Right Words

Everyone needs and deserves their freedom, no matter what they have done before. We have all participated at some level in the greatest evils of our time but should not forget that at the same time we have all participated in our greatest good. Blaming others is hypocrisy. It is what dysfunctional neurons do in their often short and unhappy lives. We have to stop punishing each other, because we are all responsible. The saviour neuron leads by example not by hypocrisy. Every neuron can be a saviour, it just has to stop shouting and to start listening whilst singing softly in harmonious awe and rapture at all around it. Many of us have found this pleasant and calm state but we call it by different names. 'Finding god' and 'being at one with the universe' will ring cheerful bells to many even if they find the other name strange or believe it to be wrong. But therein may just lie yet another broken line of communication. Every single word we know has a meaning unique to each of us that is a composite of what has gone before from our experiences to our chemistry. We are right about some things and wrong about others. Which is which we can never know, though we may believe. So long as we do not hurt each other or threaten each others only means of survival, so long as we don't nor bully or dominate and so long as we try to communicate instead of giving up, we have a chance to communicate and find blissful union with what we thought we had lost.

Finding the right words to communicate with your neighbour is something that you are already expert in. You can communicate well with your neighbour even if I cannot. If you find accord or inspiration with this letter you may want to write your own. You may rewrite this letter and translate it into the language that you share with your neighbours. I do not own this letter any more or less than you do. It is yours to do with as you see fit. Likewise no one owns this planet any more or any less than you or I do and is ours to do with as we see fit. Seeing fit is what we must do. If you want to dismantle the tower then you will have to speak your every langauge once again.

    I ask of you only this; if you translate this message, that you append your name below. Then we might gather a chain of letters and start to understand the meanings of words to and by those most distant from our own. If you want to send me a copy of your translation I will be very happy to receive it and read it.

Your loving neuron,

Ian Kirwan