We live in a culture of self-harm, a culture that is antithetical to life, that is anti-life. Those of us who live in daily contact with human-built environments are immersed in toxins, in unnumbered mechanical hazards, and in an ocean of damaging electromagnetic radiation. We subject our fragile bodies to impacts and collisions ranging from repetitive button pushing and lever pulling to the daily deadly gauntlet of heavy, high-velocity machinery that we call transportation. We ingest poison several times a day — from the overly refined hydrocarbons that make up most processed foods to the preservatives that make those foods transportable over long distances to the chemicals we use to produce these foods. We wear poison and slather microplastics all over our bodies, coming into the most contact with the most permeable — “sensitive” — portions of our skin. We breathe in toxic chemicals with every inhalation — exhaust from the various things we burn to break down the chemical compounds in our quest for more-than-human power; gases and aerosols from lubricants, cleaners, synthetic scents, and the usual continual sublimation of all the toxic solids that surround us; and all the myriad compounds released into the air when we heat up, and therefore break down, solids and liquids.
Look at what we use for “medicine” and “cleaning” and “preserving”. If it says anti-microbial, then it is killing your cells. Granted, we have more cells to lose than a single-celled organism, but we are notoriously bad at knowing which of those tiny parts that make up our complex organism are critical to body function. We can’t know which cells are dying when we take these poisons into our body, and while we do have many cells, most of which are constantly in a state of growth and decay, we don’t know how they all work together. We don’t even understand the things that we can readily observe. “What? You mean this odd snaky thing dangling off the intestines actually does something?” (And yes, it does… turns out it’s critical to our immune system. Who’da thunk?) We have never stopped to ask ourselves why the appendix — an organ we haven’t even seen fit to name properly — is suddenly going bad and causing harm throughout the body. Being more complex means that it is more difficult to fix breakdown. It is more likely that a small failure can radiate outwards and cause system failure. We can’t just take an interdependent part out and expect the body to be healthy again. And yet we have appendectomies…
And then consider what we physically do all day. Does it really need to be pointed out that we are evolved to walk and climb and carry moderately heavy loads all day long? After which we sleep, lying down, in a place that is relatively free from interrupting sensory stimulants like noise and light, impulses that our bodies interpret as danger. We are not exceptionally strong as organisms go. We are not built for short bursts of speed, but nor are we built for standing in one place all day, never mind sitting in chairs — a posture that not only makes the circulatory and other flowing systems work against gravity, but that restricts flow in the middle of the body and compresses the digestive tract into a lumpen knot. We are terrible at being sedentary. This is not what our body is designed to do — or we wouldn’t have feet. We are evolved to be farmers and gatherers. Our bodies are designed to do the gentle but continuous work of wandering about all day long tending to other bodies and producing our own bodily needs in the process.
I assume you’re reading this on a computer screen, an electronic gadget that is fed by rivers of electron flow and surrounded by radiating seas of electron excitation. Did you know that there is probably no completely safe level of electromagnetic radiation? From all we know of interactions between free energy and anything held together by electrochemical bonds — which is everything in the known universe — there are irreversible changes taking place constantly. In Earth-based lifeforms, these changes cause damages ranging from membrane ruptures and other mechanical failures to molecular unraveling to genetic mutations, most of which are deeply destructive, evolution notwithstanding. All things are bonded by electrochemistry. When we alter the energy around atoms, then the bonds change — and most of those changes will result in a loss of bonding. In other words, this is how atomic structures break down, how atoms ionize, how electrons are sent carousing. And yet, we continually subject ourselves to synthetic electromagnetism and the fields of electrons that are created in electromagnetic flow without even considering what this is doing to our complexly bonded bodies.
And don’t even get me started on planes, trains and automobiles… not one thing about any of that is not highly destructive.
These are only some of the damaging things that we do to our own bodies in reproducing this culture. The harm is constant and pervasive, ranging from pandemic human disease and despair to complete biophysical breakdown removing all the bodies that we depend upon for our survival. There is almost no aspect of this culture that does not cause grievous physical harm when it is working as intended. When it breaks down the harm is worse. And this is the harm that is done to those bodies that “benefit” from this culture. Those bodies outside the culture and those that are used as resources and labor are not even considered capable of experiencing damage. We don’t believe that other beings are sensible of pain and suffering.
It’s not merely that we think animals, plants and less animated forms of being are incapable of experiencing similar responses to our neural responses. One of the most obnoxious tenets of racism is that there are humans that are “closer to nature”, meaning that they don’t have complex emotions and neural responses. They don’t feel pain like more complicated civilized people. They are classed as animals so they may be treated as such. (In fact, many racist assholes treat animals better than they do humans of other skin colors and cultures.)
This has been used to justify brutal abuses all around the world throughout the modern period, abuses that continue today. A dark skinned woman in the hospital emergency room will not get the same pain alleviation as a woman that passes for white. A brown man will be forced to work double shifts without breaks because he doesn’t need the rest accorded to a white man. Non-white bodies are subject to all kinds of bizarre whims of science — from experimental surgeries and drug treatments to large-scale social and psychological manipulation. And consider the vastly different rates of conviction and severity of punishment between white and non-white bodies accused of crime.
So do not doubt that the pain meted out by our culture’s normal functioning is several orders of magnitude worse for non-white bodies — by design. It is how the system is supposed to function, the only way it can function. If all bodies must be damaged, those who nominally benefit from this system must at least suffer less than those who are of inferior status.
To my mind, all this harm that we do ourselves is reason enough to just stop everything we are doing and start over. Toss out this whole painful mess of a culture. But the physical harm is not the worst aspect of our culture. There are subtle and more devastating forms of self-harm daily reproduced by us.
Take the myth of scarcity. We are integral and integrated beings, living embedded in a planet that meets all our needs, and yet this culture requires us to believe that there is such scarcity that billions must go hungry, that millions living in the precarity of being without a safe resting place is an acceptable collateral consequence, that there must be competition for scarce resources rather than the reality — which is that all the Earth’s resources exist to support every Earth body equally.
We work for wages so that we can buy back our native rights to feed and protect our bodies. Those who are not granted access to high wages, or any wages, do not get access to the basic resources needed by their bodies — that which is freely available to all bodies outside of this culture. Isn’t that ridiculous! Scarcity is an artificial imposition put upon us so that, in seeking to meet our needs, we are forced to build wealth for those who control access. Because of scarcity, we live in fear of tomorrow, fear for our lives, fear of our lives. We could go hungry tomorrow, lose what safety we’ve cobbled together, suffer so much worse than we already do — unless we work hard to reproduce this system every minute of every day. But scarcity is such an obvious lie. If scarcity of basic needs existed in reality, then we would not. And we can’t see that patent fact because we are mentally and emotionally damaged by this system we are propping up.
This is a rather extreme cognitive dissonance. We are enculturated to assume scarcity and fear. So that is what we see, hear, feel, experience, and know, regardless of reality. Therefore, we are not living in reality… which is a nice way of saying we are living lies – all to perpetuate a process that, at its best, harms everything and confers some monetary benefits on the very few people who make the rules. And this distortion warps all our perceptions. We see cruelty in the world that created and nurtured us. We see nature, red in tooth and claw. We see violent conflict — where there is almost nothing but interdependence and interrelated cooperation at all scales, where, in fact, nothing would exist if competition were the rule.
Do the math. Competition means at least one loser in every conflict. Competition over basic bodily needs means that nearly every lost conflict is one death, is one less living and functioning part, and is therefore harm to the entire system, including the nominal winner. Obviously, this is an equation for universal annihilation after none too many iterations. In words, this means if competition were the rule, life would be extinguished. Or perhaps it would never have arisen.
The thing is, we can all understand this. This is simple, mathematically and logically sound common sense. And yet I bet there are many people even among those who are reading these words right now who think that’s just bat-shit crazy hippy talk, because we are conditioned to consider everything counter to the basic precepts of our system as bat-shit craziness — and that conditioning overrides all evidence. Isn’t that just too nutty…
Our basic understanding of the world is flawed. We can’t make sense of anything because we filter all our senses through these false assumptions. We distrust what we actually experience and recast all our experiences to fit the lies we tell ourselves. This makes it very hard to understand love or empathy or even basic reciprocity and responsibility in the world. But it also makes it hard to understand ourselves. It makes us ignorant and confused and afraid and so, so very alone. It divorces us from our lives.
And that is the greatest harm that we inflict upon ourselves. This culture, by design and by intent, steals away your one and only life.
How? This culture has one fatal weapon in its philosophical armory: dualism. It kills as indiscriminately as the poisons we eat. This idea pits a superior, essential and eternal mind (spirit, self, immaterial state) against an inferior, temporal and fallible body (matter). The eternal is I-am. The temporal is just meat and can be abused because it can be replaced and will ultimately be abandoned altogether. What we suffer in these meat bodies is only a temporary inconvenience before we go on to better, presumably pain-free, eternities. We treat our bodies, our lives, as unwanted and ill-fitting garments that we can cast into the compost pit at the first opportunity‚ when we’ll all wear gossamer wings forever. That there has never been one hint of these eternities has not dimmed our ardor for them. And we waste our lives, looking toward the nothing that follows.
Nothing that follows as an I-am, that is. There is undoubtedly some form of essential ground being that is separate and separable from matter. After all, all the matter we know about in this universe makes up less than 5% of the necessary stuff to explain the existence and form of the universe. So there’s a lot out there we don’t know about. And when it comes to life, consciousness, and other emergent properties of matter, we can produce no explanation at all without resorting to woo-woo mysterious flames and so forth. So why not call it spirit? What else is life but a continual evolution of the energy that pervades everything? The Ground Being of Matter.
However, that spirit is not you. (It is probably not even all that differentiated into distinct beings, or it wouldn’t function.) But you gets one existence. And that state of being is temporal and utterly dependent on its particular body. You may be, very likely are, connected to Eternal Spirit and, through that, to all other bodies. All that is you may well be recycled into that Eternal Spirit, as well as flowing into all other bodies. But you do not exist outside this particular body. You are an emergent property of your body, and you will cease to exist when that body fails.
All this is to say that when you give up your time in this body doing things that cause your body pain and shorten your time in your body, when you waste your embodied time on the lies of this culture, you are giving up your only time of being you. You are giving up your life. You are quite literally killing yourself.
This is quite a large thing to gas-light away. And so, you must be made to believe that you are eternal and that what happens to this body is immaterial, or you would not cooperate with this system that uses your body and your very few precious hours and leaves you with eternal nothing. Any time given over to things that harm you — even if it’s just spending it doing things you don’t believe in, things you think are wrong, or things that make you unhappy — is irreplaceable time lost from your being. This is time that you are not being you. You are not doing you. You are not living. And you don’t get that time back.
This culture is unmaking you, relentlessly and remorselessly. But if you don’t willingly allow your lifetime to be stolen, you will break the system — and that cannot be tolerated. And in fact, if you don’t absolutely and unquestioningly embrace dualism and its incumbent eternities, you are ridiculed and ostracized up one side and down the other. You are named ignorant, lazy and incompetent. You are deemed dangerously irrational. You are called a fantasist, living in a world of imagination — when, in fact, consciously taking back your time from this fantastical system of eternities and immaterial embodiment is the very definition of being real.
This culture can’t afford for you to see that…
This is why any world view that sees the entire world as an entangled, embodied spirit — for example, paganism — is such a dire affront to our culture, particularly to those who benefit from our culture. Seeing this world as it is in all its interdependent and abundant glory is antithetical to a culture that, of necessity, treats all things as mere resources to be added to a balance sheet, that treats you and the entirety of your one existence as a resource, a tool to build wealth for someone else. Our culture’s disregard for life is irreconcilable with any philosophy of sanctity, even its own holy eternities. But deeming all life sacred does not allow for self-harm, for stealing life-time, nor can it perpetuate the lies and distortions that buttress this culture — and for that we who see the world as it is, not as our culture perverts it, are condemned.
The crime of being Indigenous or animist or pagan, that which is brutally punished in every culture that rubs up against ours, is that of being unwilling to participate in this self-harm, unwilling to cause harm to other beings, and unwilling to accept that this harm is necessary so that a few — generally non-Indigenous — people can extract wealth from the world by any and all means. And by any and all means, our culture means to beat those ideas out of people.
Happily, our culture has not won that fight. It has not managed to erase a sense of reality, a common sense. There are still many people who are truly fighting the system, trying to keep this culture from spreading its poison everywhere on all beings. Water protectors. Zapatistas. Pagans and peasants. These people know and understand the harm that flows from our culture and will not allow it to ooze into their lives. And all the force that our wealth brings to bear on the problem has not eliminated it.
We have not convinced them to see as we do…
And this is good. Because the world is tiring of our culture’s irreverent attitude toward life. We have harmed too much. There are so many compounding calamities that there is no chance that this complex culture is going to survive itself. But the peasantry will. Those who live off the land and by the land and for the land will, of course, endure with the land. So those who can see the causes of destruction and refuse to participate will be ready with a new vision of the world when ours finally founders under its own too much.
There is an end to this culture of self-harm. It will not be comfortable, I’m sure. But it will not be an end of the world. For most of us, it will be a return and a reclaiming. And those who walk away receive the invaluable gift of a full and holy life. Who could refuse that? Why stay? I can’t imagine that anybody would ever be stupid enough to choose our way of life… over life itself.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eliza Daley is the pen name of Elizabeth Anker. Elizabeth worked in geochemistry at the University of New Mexico and has degrees in math, history and journalism. She was the owner of Alamosa Books, a now-closed children’s bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She’s taught science to elementary school kids and freshman geology at UNM. She had two books of poetry published by Indiana University Press and is an award-winning musician and composer. She is also an avid gardener, baker, and home-maker who believes firmly in creating place. She currently publishes the blog
By My Solitary Hearth and writes for All Poetry as Elizabeth Murmuring. Her work can also be found on Resilience.
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