Civilisation

We call it “civilisation” as though it were truly and in any measurably definable sense a civil or even gentle presence when all we really mean by this word is that amorphous mass and unknowing ocean of shambling humanity or maddening crowd we find ourselves at any particular time and place quite inadvertently inhabiting. It is by this measure much more an absence or vacuum of unified self-awareness around which we have vandalised some crude notion of commonality which, admirable as aspirations towards collective survival must always existentially be, fails to ever follow the arc and twisted path of history or facts to its unwitting, unwilling conclusion: whatever unbounded peace or beautiful soul might sleep in the heart of us all, it has (it seems) long since been suffocated in the endless gyre and tragic tribe of cruel misapprehension and uncoordinated or adversarial violence (of deed and thought) that has been the way we all have played this game of Self for so long that now we should quite simply feel lost without it.

I have seen the best people rush into conflicts they hardly even understood because it was just the natural and orthodox way of things, of human beings being human, to self-define by anger and aggression. It seems that there is something about destructive urges that optimally aligns to tribal self-identity in ways which suggest that our only path to peace and freedom lies in non-existence and complete and irreversible extinguishment of our ego selves.

Such anarchical heresy of a world which might exist beyond the ordered hierarchies that do little more than unconsciously guarantee an effective failure as a gambit to their own sustainable tenure is hard to say when no one can countenance becoming the unbounded life and indefinable nothingness they would have to be to ever become truly free. The unacknowledged philosophical pearl in this particular oyster is that an absence of law or overarching structural governance represents no threat at all to any aspirational status quo because that which is nothing can hardly ever threaten that which is something, it can be overlaid without detriment but this is a nuanced point of logic that hardly sits well in a world so clearly and intransigently biased away from such substantive conceptual sophistication or subtlety. This is an essentially investment in peace and freedom but nothing is quite so threatening to this chaotic shared world of anger and fear as anything that even vaguely approximates to an unrelenting or well-informed optimism that the world just might become that better place we have (almost all) dreamed of.