Need is a Nasty Word
Say hello to the last throes of America’s collective dementia. No amount of medication in the form of alternative therapy, I mean alternative energy, is going to repair the years of abuse to our collective body and spirit by the machinations of Empire. Antidepressants, I mean anti-inflationary economics, are rapidly losing their effectiveness. We’ve reached peak insanity. We’re sunk. Thank the gods. It’s all downhill from here.
We need help.
I come from a quietly dysfunctional, but highly functioning, middle-class American family. My brother and sister have both had incomes way into six figures for decades. I think. It’s not polite to discuss income so I can only presume.
I never had the guts to go there, to make a lot of money. I never felt I had the right to profit wildly from the abusive and exploitative system we call American capitalism. Well before I understood the nature of the crimes that American wealth is based on, I knew something was very wrong.
I traveled to India briefly during college. On my first day there I faced a tiny child who reached out with pleading fingers, still in her mother’s arms. I felt sick inside. What right did I have to live with privilege? America’s endless appetite left little to be shared. Members of the living community, human and non-human were suffering. Thirty-eight years later that little hand still tugs at my heart.
In India we were told not to give to the beggars. If we did, a hoard of needy humanity would engulf us. So we walked by. Several times a day, day after day, we walked by. But I never forgot.
My father has just entered a small facility that cares for people who have Alzheimer’s. My mother and sister, after years and then weeks of hyper-heroic efforts to care for him at home, at last decided it was time. Luckily for him and for them they can afford a small, homelike environment rather than an institutional nursing home. He is being cared-for by a well-paid and compassionate staff of saints. I can write about this without drowning my keyboard in tears because of that.
Our family can afford that kind of care because my parents and my brother and sister never had any qualms about making lots of money.
I have lots of feelings about all of this. I feel guilty that I couldn’t help my dad more in the last several years. I feel sad that when I spend more than 24 hours around my family I feel like my head is going to explode. I feel angry that the non-monetary gifts I have to offer the situation are not what the rest of my family want. Those gifts include the ability to listen with compassion and to speak difficult truths. My family’s quiet dysfunction doesn’t seek these things. Conversations are stilted. I just end up crying a lot. There is a huge gulf between us I have given up hope of ever healing. There’s too much I’m called to do apart from struggle with my family of origin. There is an empty place inside I don’t expect to be filled. I’m okay with that.
When I spoke with my brother about my dad’s condition I heard a sadness in his voice that I’ve never heard before. He talked about how hopeless the situation is, how my dad’s mental condition has deteriorated despite, or perhaps because of, the plethora of prescribed medications. Dementia is clearly big business for the pharmaceutical industry. My brother and I reflected on how wise or unwise it was to try to stave off the inevitable with expensive technofixes, I mean pharmaceuticals.
It’s been hopeless for years for my father, and for centuries if not millennia for Empire. It finally got to be too much for my mother and sister at ages 83 and 61 to cope with my father’s decline. Caring for him at home was unsustainable. They came to terms with that. My brother said my mother seemed at peace with the decision to let others take over my father’s care. She was at peace, he said, because she could see that she had “given it her all.”
I don’t have any desire to criticize my mother. But when I heard that I couldn’t help but think “How American!” We just have to give it our all, don’t we?
My mother’s voice over the past three years has evidenced growing exhaustion. I don’t think my family had any real sense how difficult the situation was. Even toward the end, when things were becoming totally unmanageable, my sister calmly reported to me, “It’s 24-7.” When I enquired further she just calmly repeated the same, like she was reporting on the weather or the price of gas. The story was that everything was okay. That’s not what I heard in my mother’s worn out voice. Finally, I guess, the situation got so extreme that they gave up and admitted defeat.
My family is only an extreme example of the typical. Need is a nasty word in my family. Rugged individualism, the American identity, is their calling card. Our family simply does not need help. That’s why everyone works so hard. In order to accumulate enough money that whatever is needed can be quietly bought. There’s no need to admit any deficiency. We work hard and we buy what we need. We don’t depend on other people for hand outs.
And my family does “what’s right.” Our kind don’t give up just because it’s hard. We give our all, 24-7. Especially in latter stage dementia.
As I write this I am slammed up against the dogmatic creed of rugged individualism. It is in my bones. It speaks in my head. “What’s wrong with that, Sally? What’s wrong with hard work? What’s wrong with taking care of yourself and your family. What’s wrong with giving your all?”
Let me continue.
I’ve always been the exception in my family. It is one of the advantages of being the youngest, the baby. I insisted on being able to need, to be dependent, to feel and express my feelings. As the baby those things were tolerated, at least in small amounts. But need and feeling was not catered to, not affirmed. The above inner questioning–“What’s wrong with that?”– is just a mature permutation on the childhood mantra: “Stop whining.”
Stop whining Sally. When I was little, I whined when I needed something. Now I write blog posts.
My family is America. We expect to care for “our own,” no matter what the cost. We expect to maintain our lifestyle, no matter what. We give our all, our children, our young men, our whole lives, working to realize the Dream. We do this without thinking, or more to the point, without feeling what that’s doing to us.
America does not admit to need or weakness because that would make us dependent. And that’s just not right. Americans are rugged individuals, both as people and as a nation.
We won’t give up. Until we have given our all. Until the situation is extreme. Until the dementia has advanced to it’s final stages and we find ourselves stumbling around in the night looking for something we can’t remember.
I’ve always known there was something wrong with this whole story. And, in spite of his American identity, so did my dad, when he could still think. Many years ago he sent me a clipping. It was a piece by Daniel Quinn called The Secret Plan. The Secret Plan is this: “We’re going to go on consuming the world until there’s no more to consume.”
My dad knew there was something wrong with American individualism. And so did the rest of my family. They all read Quinn’s Ishmael. They even read The Story of B. They could think about all of these things. They could see the world being gobbled up. But they couldn’t feel it. Feelings and needs are intimately tied together, in case you hadn’t noticed.
So even with huge financial resources to draw upon, my family wouldn’t ask for help. They can’t break their identification as rugged individuals. They substitute the care, comfort, and fulfillment that comes with dependence on a larger community with the dubious pride that comes of not needing anything from anyone.
With rugged individualism as a main value, my dad looks pretty bad. He needs everything now.
His ability to be a rugged individual has crumbled. It was quite humiliating for him as his abilities declined, especially in the context of our family system. That’s why he’s had to take more and more powerful antidepressants: to numb him to the shame of needing. It is very sad.
And America is in the same sad shape as my dad. We’ve taken this insane experiment of industrial civilization to its tragic conclusion. And sadly, we don’t face that. We don’t admit that we are clueless and helpless in the face of the converging storms of resource depletion, climate change and ecosystem collapse. Instead we grasp at the straws of more medication, I mean, technology, to numb us.
To admit that there is no fixing this situation looks bad, really bad. To admit we need help, that we can’t fix it, is humiliating.
Not even the rich are served by this system. The rich are the most duped and numbed of all. Like my family they are seduced by the flimsy pride of being “financially independent.” It’s a sorry substitute for the fulfillment and comfort to be had in needing connection to something greater than themselves. American’s ability to exploit and hoard without anyone noticing, to appear to be free and independent, just doesn’t rival the experience of connection, the mystical give and take of Being.
There is no escape from this inevitable condition: we living creatures need each other. And humans are some of the neediest of all. To survive and continue to evolve we need ecological diversity more than less complex life forms. Simple life forms have, and will, outlast us if we don’t accept our highly dependent state and learn to cooperate.
It took an extreme situation for my mother and sister to surrender to to their limits, come to grips with the fact that they can only exceed the carrying capacity of their bodies for a time before the effects of that excess take their toll. I have no doubt they would have pushed themselves even farther had it not endangered my father’s physical safety.
The parallels between Empire and my family are neither surprising nor coincidental. Only when it becomes physically impossible to continue are Americans willing to surrender.
Surrender. There’s another nasty word. It means defeat, relinquishing control, giving up. It’s not attractive if you are an American steeped in rugged individualism to contemplate these things. But surrender is exactly what we need to do.
How many examples in the current world predicament can we count that parallel my family’s resistance to surrender?
Let’s see. There’s peak oil. There’s climate change. There’s aquifer depletion. There’s mass extinction. There’s top soil and soil viability loss. There’s huge dead zones in the oceans and seas of death-dealing plastics swirling within those oceans. There’s pesticide contamination and soaring cancer rates. You want more? Google it. It’s all there. And that doesn’t begin to count the social, political, and economic trials that loom.
When we interviewed people for What A Way To Go we always asked the question “What’s it going to take for people to wake up and change?” Invariably the response was: “It’s going to take a catastrophe that actually affects the individual.”
We’re hopeless. Only when the system collapses will America come to terms with the accrued costs from having so thoroughly divorced ourselves from a life where most of us had our hands in soil and stream, our faces in fresh air and sunlight, our feet actually on the ground itself.
Our food and energy systems will collapse. They are already collapsing. World grain reserves are at a record low and grain production is falling despite our best efforts to pump up the system with more drugs, I mean chemicals. And only the very naïve can believe that rising gas prices are just about price gouging.
But listen. Those systems are falling only in the wake of the deeper collapse, the spiritual and social collapse that stems from the collapse of our sacred relationship to Life and to each other that has already been in process for centuries and millennia. We’ve grown farther and farther away from being indigenous to a place. We’ve lost our sense of truly belonging to each another as a people.
Only as climate change has become extreme are people willing to take even the tiniest of steps to change. How many terminally ill people does it take to change a light bulb? A way of life? To halt mass extinction? How extreme does it have to get for us to return to the sacred? Why are we as a culture so out of touch? Why did it take my family such extreme conditions to accept they needed help?
I am not better, only, perhaps, a shred more conscious. The same denial of need, the same urges to push past limits, to work to exhaustion, exist in me.
Yesterday I wrote in my journal for the first time in two weeks. My journal is my touchstone. It is the place where I pour it all out, where I dive in deep, where regularly I find my Self. How could I have neglected my journaling practice for over two weeks? I’m not being hard on myself. I’m just looking. Journal writing is my spiritual practice and I neglected it for over two weeks. Why?
I got caught in business, the business of promoting What A Way To Go. The business of moving to the mountains for the summer. The business of answering email. And on and on.
My soul was hijacked by the terrorism of Big Business. Big Busy-ness. The whole point of leaving day-to-day life at home to come to the mountains was to have time to read and reflect, and to write. Big Busyness took over. I fell into the pattern of giving my all, even my soul. I got lost along the way.
That’s true for most of us Creatures of Empire. We have lost our way. Thankfully, it looks like we have collectively created the end to that. But that end is not looking very pretty for the vast majority.
Talk about creating your own reality. America faces extremes at every level, on every front. How many will stop and sit and think and, most importantly, feel about it? How many will engage in a spiritual practice to come back into contact with themselves? How many people will write in their journals, or meditate, or walk in what precious little of the natural world is left? How many will feel the implications of what Empire is doing?
I’m ready to surrender.
Not to Big Busyness, but to need: for connection, for rest, for clean air and nutritious food.
I’m ready to surrender to the need to feel the peace that will come when I no longer have any part in hogging more than our share of the world’s pie. Only then will my piece of the pie taste truly sweet and satisfying.
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May 25th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Dear Sally,
thank you for this, thank you so much for this.
I am in deep gratitude to you.
At our breakfast table this morning I read parts of an article by Paul Watson outloud. I received it yesterday and he quotes Einstein saying, when the bees are gone, humans will have four years left on earth. Some of us know the bees are disappearing. When I received this article yesterday that he wrote for Earth Day (even though he thinks Earth Day is silly) it spoke of things so dire and so depressing that it made me feel better.
How can such awful stuff make me feel better?
He was being truthful about how bad it is and not greenwashing or green technoing it.
I feel most days that I am wading through mud.
I feel like I am living in a reality that doesn’t exist around me, a reality where I see and feel what is wrong on mother earth. That is not a popular as I am sure you and Tim know. I feel like Cassandra or Chicken Little and I’m often treated as such.
My partner thankfully is conscious and believes the stark realities of climate change and peak oil and yet he is at the stage where it is information to be acted on. I feel like I am at the stage where it is information to grieve and feel hopeless about.
This difference in how we both cope, with what is on this planet, creates upsets between us, he bless him, wants to get on with it, do something, take action, I want to wake others up and mostly I want to cry for what we are losing. I have two sons, one living far away in Montreal who is about to enter University for music and philosophy, who is constantly reading. I have been imploring him to read The Long Emergency for about 6 months to no avail. My youngest son is just about to graduate from a school system I wish I had never let him enter. He is being prepared for a world which will not exist. He doesn’t want to hear my stuff, who would at 18, when they have bought the package and who can blame them, when what do we have to offer, the truth of loss and destruction. So what this leads to is more disconnection, disconnection with self and disconnection with one another as we all struggle to cope with it as we see it. I feel the only thing we have left is to connect with our source through prayer or meditation and do the painful work of being real with ourselves and each other so we can remain alive when everything is calling us to disconnect, the dominant culture and the pain from the truth we are facing. I feel like I am losing so much right now the loss feels so huge but the biggest loss is if we lose ourselves in the process through denying how much it hurts.
There is still a small flicker in me that hopes but what keeps it alight is truth not denial about how dire it really is. Thank you again Sally for being another voice in the wilderness telling the truth.
It is like gold to me and literally keeps me hanging on. I know with our aliveness and our connection we can create alternatives to the madness that has reigned for so long but first we have to admit really admit how far off course we are, then and only then will we be able to set a new course.
Vivienne
May 25th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Thank you Sally for putting your heart out for us to feel what you feel. My life is in the middle of the transformation necessary to continue to have hope and survive what is upon us and rapidly moving the entire world into a transformation of its own. I am a psychologist, and the past 17 years has taught me just how this contorted world really works. You might say I dropped out a few years back while I realized the ramifications for my health and my children’s as the family “die-off” began with my beloved mother’s ending from Alzheimer’s. For a while I tried to stay away from psychology, but found myself back in it, this time working soul to soul with the elderly in nursing homes. It has been a good experience, with the exception of Medicare always cutting our fees. I live simply, have control over my schedule, and take better care of myself and those to whom I am committed. I am soon (very soon) on my way to Western NC to find a safer place than being in the path of a potential hurricane, and an economy based on tourism, which will soon be shattered. I hope to find people like you and Tim, to join in surviving the many storms which threaten our very existence. I am into natural medicine…because that is all we will have before long. If you know any good places, let me know will you?
May 25th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Hi Sally
You honour us with your pain, sadness, neediness…and deeply revealing insights.
Thank you.
Again, I’m very happy to be amongst real people, even if this is via the internet from the other side of the planet.
I too feel the need to get out of ‘busyness-as-usual’ for rest, community, fresh food, fresh air….how to do this when stuck in this insane culture is terrifying. I have given up false hopes of surviving. I just hope I can help slow the insanity down, help with heading off in a different direction, for all life.
Thank you
Ted
May 26th, 2007 at 1:14 am
hey sally.
we met, very briefly, at malaprops last year when daniel quinn was speaking. i had two crazy wild toddlers with me, you were with tim.
i just wanted to say hi! i found my way to your blog through word on the movie (congrats on finishing it, btw! i’m excited to see it.) and find the way you express your heart and soul through words to be powerful and beautiful. thanks for existing, for being “out there”, and for talking about it in a public format. you let me know, as michael franti so beautifully puts it, “i know i’m not alone…”
much love
tracy
May 26th, 2007 at 4:57 am
My experience was/is a carbon copy of yours, Sally. When my dad eventually passed in ‘95, my mother was so into denial of need that there was NO expression of grief on her part and she would abide no outlet whatever for grief within the family circle.
The ability to feel and to operate from a second-tier consciousness drives a whole different set of values, from which flow a whole different set of behaviours and attitudes toward the planet. It’s a cleft stick, isn’t it–these people are our kinfolk, our flesh and blood and we can’t get through to them because they are so caught up in the old paradigm. It is exactly as you say, “We’ve reached peak insanity. We’re sunk. Thank the gods. It’s all downhill from here.” It’s time to prepare for the worst possible outcome while working for the best; there’s no soft landing in sight. Keep up the good work, Sally!
May 28th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
sally, thank you so much for all you are sharing…your heart, your pain, the TRUTH. you have a gift in being able to articulate it all. i have felt all of this for years but just don’t have the words that “people caught in the old paradigm” can hear. it’s so sad and terrifying…the deepening disconnect between people!
i feel truly honored to be standing alongside all of you!!
May 29th, 2007 at 12:53 am
Thank you, Sally, for putting it all so eloquently.
I, too, am in the place so many of us are at this time: seeing the slow motion, bleak and near apocalyptic horror of what is unfolding - resource wars over oil and water, world drought and genocide, Peak Oil energy shortages, disconnected communities, deeply unhappy North American people,a polluted environment, and soul-destroying cities.
Meanwhile, most of my well-off friends and relatives around me are in total oblivion to it all — in sheeple denial — with their abject ignorance of history or politics or literature (they can’t “be bothered” with politics,is what I often hear). Worse yet, I know a few who live in corrupt complicity (knowing what’s coming but believing somehow that mammon and solar panels will save their individual families, either that or they’ll be dead by the time the SHTF. “Peak Oil? That’s a ridiculous conspiracy and a laugh — hydrogen run cars and solar panels will save us.”)
I’ve tried to engage people I know and love and meet in so many different ways: with humor, gentle persuasion, hints, by discussion, outright polemics, by showing films and sending out articles — nothing, I repeat, nothing can reach Canadians and Americans who’ve been conditioned like slow boiling frogs their whole lives to live in our foolish, cheerful, Disneyesque culture where all that counts is personal happiness and optimism (read: McMansion, new big vans, nice clothes, comedy movies and nothing but, career perks, weekend golf and skiing, expensive tickets to rock concerts, massages, false nails, bleached hair, and trips to Mexico and Hawaii at least once a year.)
The worst, I think, are my highly educated, upper class friends, those with graduate degrees from near ivy-league schools (but who, since college, have never read anything beyond a John Grisham novel or “The Secret,” thinking that that counts as literature:). These are the same people, and who, while tsking tsking over (or deny our role in ) “global warming,” or “poverty of the homeless,” or “Iraq and Afghanistan” (although they say, “we have no choice but to be there”), continue to live their lives in a manner that promotes these very horrors.
One tiny example? Last weekend I attended the bridal shower of my wealthy cousin’s extremely obese daughter. Most all the women there were dressed to the nines in their pretty little heels, wearing nail polish, driving SUV size vehicles, and had brought obscenely expensive wedding-calibre gifts as shower presents wrapped in expensively ribbon-decked paper (when my brother was married I threw a modest, pragmatic shower for my sister-in-law and requested kitchen gifts under $10 - I was chided for it by guests who ignored my request), and of course, at my cousin’s daughter’s shower… the foolish bridal games passing as sophistication and”fun”: 5 groups of the women wrapping 5 grown women with rolls and rolls (must have been 30 in total, at least) of toilet tissue and tape, to make “bridal gowns” - all of which was thrown into the garbage afterwards, as were all of the plastic utensils and food cartons for the catered hors d’oevres. And may I remind you that this is only one small example of our culture’s idea of “community.”
If you dare raise your voice in small, reasonable protest or question against any one of our society’s excess — dead silence ensues, as you are viewed alternately as a “crab, kooknut, eccentric, doomsayer, crazy, nutball, doomgloomer, pessimist, anarchist, treehugging dreamer, angry bitch, sunshiner spoiler, partypoop, communist” I could go on and on. This includes some in my environmental group who think that society will transform itself into a better life by sheer osmosis and world meditation, and by no other method, such as petitioning, legislation, letter-writing campaigns. (Never mind that I’ve spent considerable hours of my life examining, reading, thinking about these issues - thinking and feeling doesn’t count for smack in our culture. Only participating in the brain-dead, T.V.-hypnotized, “fun in the sun” society, counts for anything at all.) I have now moved away, psychologically speaking, from many of my old friends whom I still love but cannot much frankly bear to be around, and have, thankfully found 3 new ones who see things more as I do. Some may not be so lucky.
Recently, I sent out 100 short e-mails trying to raise awareness and support for an important specific environmental issue to our community. The upshot? I received exactly 1 “Thankyou!!!,” 1 “Sorry, we can’t help your organization”, and 98 no replies whatsoever. Some community spirit we have in our great, enlightened, modern, Westernized society. I lived in Africa for a year and saw more love and respect for human beings in the dirty little Arab grocery store under my apartment in one week, than I have in my life, here, in a year.
As a highly educated single woman (who I think actually has a good sense of humor) there are times lately, that I despair, having no one but my mother and two or three friends who actually listen and share input, but mostly I feel just very very sorrowful for a society that simply has lost its ability to see and, more importantly, act upon the truth. Of course, I have to live, too, and carry on and try to enjoy my family as best I can, despite its general, good-natured ribbing for my “kooky hippie” opinions, and my own sad thoughts of the sinking dinghy we are all precariously standing on.
My greatest joy comes from reading others who speak the unvarnished, heartfelt, so thank you, Sally, for this column.
Wasn’t it George Orwell who said something like, “Speaking the truth in dangerous times is a revolutionary act”? That’s what it feels like, now, to speak out to anyone but one’s closest, like-minded friends. Everyone is afraid.)
May 29th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
anonymous…you said “thinking and feeling doesn’t count for smack in our culture” and i couldn’t agree with you more. since 911 that’s exactly what’s happened. friends i’ve known, some as long as 30+ years, and been quite close to have excluded me from their perfect lives because they can’t stand the heat. i’ve never stopped letting myself feel what’s happening and they hate that about me, insisting on calling me a victim and a negative person…all of which drove the stake ever deeper. the only communication i get from these people, anymore, is a fwd from others saying that i shouldn’t be sweating the small stuff (you know, they send those pictures of the universe and imply that everything we’re worrying about is small stuff and we should be so humbled…how utterly insulting!!). they don’t seem to have anything meaningful to say and they absolutely cringe when i open my mouth….deer in the headlights syndrome…NO NOT THAT!!!!!!!! it’s insane!! this is soooooo surreal!!!
i feel closer to the truth, here, than with anyone else…anywhere!! we can be real with each other and that means the world to me!! thank you ALL!!! aloha!!
May 29th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Just dropped back in and felt a lift at all the comments that are echoing how I feel.
Thanks everyone I feel saner every time I drop in here.
Vivienne
May 30th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
“Who cares to admit complete defeat?” This quote from the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions reverberated through my head as I read this post on Carolyn Baker’s site. It’s crazy a little, but I once tried to share a bit of this stuff at an Al-Anon meeting, which would seem to be an appropriate place for it, on the surface. Alas, Empire Sand-Castle Shapers exist everywhere. I shared rather elliptically at that, but I could sense that the denial was pretty thick. I’m just wondering if Empire Anonymous or Civilization Anonymous might not be an idea whose time has come? Just a thought…
I look for the means to surrender, and it’s lovely to see that there are kindred spirits who see the value of this, of admitting complete defeat. I didn’t cause Civilization, I can’t cure Civilization, and I can’t control the Civilization Deathwish. And so every day I try and turn it over to God Herself, knowing that I’ll take my will back because like you, like everyone I know, I get the bejeebus scared into me by fear entities. And I think I have the illusion that I can do something, when I need to not do anything and sit there. I’ve been thinking that Cindy Sheehan has awakened to something like this. When I read she wasn’t going to participate in this mishagoss, I thought “hallelujah! She gets it!”
Having time in various 12-Step fellowships has at least taught me that what other people think of me is none of my business, and that I need to “go to where it’s warm.” As the culture starts to twist and turn in the winds of change, I’m hopeful that more and more people will be moved to change because they either must or they will die. I had to face that with my sugar addiction, but it took me years even in being immersed in 12-Step work before the denial cracked me open. I did have to get to a place where i was 300 pounds and wishing I was dead before the moment of surrender occurred, and you know, I didn’t even know I had done this when it happened. It was only later that I realized surrender had graced my life.
So I pray for grace to descend upon the humanity inhabiting this Gaian realm. I quietly let you know that I surrender my will to that of divine powers who are aligned for the greatest good, whatever shape that may take. And I trust a serious dialogue will be initiated.
May 30th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Dear Sally,
I had a somewhat similar experience in Vietnam; part of the killing fields, (women and children), from a distance, (shelling). -Destroyer Hamner, Op. Linebacker 1, Quang Tri Province.
This has MOTIVATED me to create a plan for world peace and to leave Christianity in favor of Buddhism. But the emotional memories never go away, (ptsd).
The culprit for our evil at home and abroad is Calvinism, (selfishness, measuring up, racism, class bigotry and religious bigotry).
You are on the right path, if I can help, send me an email. Yours respectfully, -Bill B.
May 31st, 2007 at 9:08 am
In my opinion, the whole “rugged individualism” thing is a compensatory psychological phenomenon. It compensates for fear. And where does the fear come from? It comes from being too comfortable - from not having to rely on one’s own resources, and having those inner resources atrophy.
The “richer” one is in this society, the more dependent he is. If you are middle class, look around yourself. Everything you see likely required someone else to make or grow. If those people hadn’t agreed to spend their time, ingenuity and expertise doing it, would you know how to do it for yourself? If you say no, you likely compensate for your vulnerability and neediness by adopting a “rugged individualist” persona.
I feel sorry for wealthy people in this society. It is hard for them to avoid becoming superficial, fearful, self-indulgent parodies of human beings. Due to the constraints put on them by whatever they have to do to make their money, there are usually large parts of their own potential that just lie dormant. And when they do need emotional and mental resources - such as in the coming economic collapse - they’ll just revert to the dependent, whining children they’ve actually always been. They’ll be no good to themselves or anyone else. Who among them will, like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, develop inner fortitude and resourcefulness? Who will give up the silly compensatory mantle of “rugged individualist?” Time will tell.
May 31st, 2007 at 11:27 am
Hi Sally-very good post about the nature of Need. Philosophically the modern age began with the idea of “self-sufficient Being” and it is breaking down, as you so vividly describe it, in “Self-sufficiency as Dementia.”
You might be interested in my recent reflections on related topics.
http://from-the-catacombs.blogspot.com/2007/05/hysterics.html
June 1st, 2007 at 12:57 am
My neighbour talks here and not at our porches and in the grocery store. We lament the loss of community on our blogs and live fractured independent lives –not in groups, alone.
” To admit we need help, that we can’t fix it, is humiliating. ” so we soldier on, and DO NOT TALK TO OUR NEIGHBOURS.
Why? we all know the value of a close community, what are we afraid ? Why am I afraid to talk to the family next door and plan gardens with them?
June 4th, 2007 at 6:11 am
hey Sally,
read your article on CarolynBaker, and it just puts it altogether extremely well, and with such feeling. And now after reading yours and Tims blogs and all the commenters, it is like, ah, something is falling into place here. This is the first website where I really get a sense of ‘community’ in the comments sections. It is about encouraging and sharing insights. Not all the one-ups baloney people love to practice elsewhere. But that just really fits, doesn’t it. Because that desire to excel above others, is, I think, at the base of why the WAWKI is such a failure. Ironic huh.
A hearty thankyou to you and Tim. Your work is important here, and I predict it will be growing. Not that that is what it about.
Those understanding ahead somewhat about what’s soon coming, are a kind of vanguard. Don’t worry everybody. The ranks a are going to swell rapidly in the coming chaos. Part of our work will then be to help a lot of freaked out people. I mean look at how most of you feel now, and the shit flying hasn’t began in earnest yet. Can you imagine how you would be feeling if you were only coming to recognize teotwawki only at about the time it gets into the real deep … part. People will be severely traumatized. We will be less so because we are already at acceptance. We might have to perform the role of medics in a battlefield, cognitively and emotionally speaking - if not phyisically too.
We aren’t really mutants. We are just ahead of the curve.
June 18th, 2007 at 6:57 am
Hello Sally and everybody,
Wow, this post on collective dementia really hit a nerve. Everybody’s comments are so eloquent and raw. It’s great to see so much resonance.
Sally says, “I never had the guts to go there, to make a lot of money. I never felt I had the right to profit wildly from the abusive and exploitative system we call American capitalism.”
I loved that admission! It reminded me of when I was in my 20’s and had my first and only close brush with working in the corporate world. I was working in a temp agency in San Francisco, finding jobs in corporations for girls like me. So I wasn’t even in the lion’s den myself, just opening the door for others. But, still, I could smell the stench of deception. I didn’t even understand what it was that was making me sick, but I knew that I’d never survive in that system. The experience helped me to have the courage to go the other way — education in the non-profit world, and not the soul-destroying American educational system.
I’ve always been sickened by lies, and now we see our whole country sickened by lies. The lies of materialism became the lies of corporate commercialism, which have evolved into the economic and political lies of empire. And this sinister epidemic is spreading to the rest of the world through the corporate media and the manic neo-liberal economies that are goobling up ecosystems and souls at a breath-taking pace.
“Busy monster eats dark holes in the spirit world where wild things have to go, to disappear forever,” sings Bruce Cockburn, my favorite singer-songwriter.
Materialism replaces emotional needs with things. The lie is that if we have enough things then we won’t have emotional needs. That’s why we have “retail therapy. This may be the basic lie that is making us all so crazy. Apparently we can never get “enough” stuff to replace our stuffed feelings.
I grew up in an emotionally dysfunctional, materialistic family in which vulnerability and neediness were not allowed. Need was indeed a “nasty word.” I learned this at age three. My vulnerability and neediness as a toddler made my mother insecure. She felt threated by my emotional sensitivity.
When my father forgot to pick me up at nursery school, leaving my little three-year-old self standing alone on a busy city street, my mother saw her chance to strike a deal with me. Since my father proved himself undependable, I was therefore totally dependent upon her. The deal was that if I would take care of her emotional needs and NOT demand that she take care of mine, she would provide for my survival needs — feed me, educate me, and dress me up to look respectable. I received further lessons that reinforced that first one, so that any time feelings of vulnerability and need arose in me, the fear of abandonment instantly followed. She actually threatened to cut me out of her will for demanding genuine communication.
So I grew up to be independent and self-sufficient — insensitive to my own needs while taking care of others’. It’s taken a lifetime to break open that box. But still, I am haunted by a little demon that says that when I feel those 3-yr-old needs for comfort, reassurance and protection, I will surely be abandoned and find myself alone on the street in an indifferent world — “bag-lady” fears. And that basic complex has evolved into the fear of abandonment, exile, and punishment if I speak the truth and point out the lies. Maybe that’s why it takes a child to exclaim that the emperor has no clothes — the adults are too conditioned by lies.
Speaking the truth and refusing to comply with lies is a NEED of our souls. To maintain soul integrity we need to speak the truth as we feel it, and act on it. The truth in Buddhism AND ecology is that we are interdependent. In the sacred wholeness of the Anima Mundi (soul of the world), we are all connected. Individualism and materialism are lies. Seeing this puts us at odds with our sick society. Expressing it puts us at risk of exclusion and exile, or worse.
So I thank Sally and Tim and all who participate in these blogs for expressing your soulful truths. Thank you Tim and Sally for making a movie that tells the truth of our world. May it act as an antibody that counteracts the antigens (toxic lies) in our society by activating the antibodies of truth in many, many souls.
Blessings, Suzanne
June 20th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Mary,
You bring up an excellent point: “Why don’t we talk to our neighbours? Why are we afraid to talk to them?”
Unfortunately, I think we are past that now,so numbed by our culture on all fronts that there is nothing but a real shake up catastrophe — Katrina-like — that will reach the insulated North American psyche of the average citizen now. The broad issues in our society are non-negotiable - ie. don’t bring them up! (As Dick Cheney says, the lifestyle of Americans is “non-negotiable”. He was dead right, try talking about the issues Sally and Tim have brought to their film and the talk stops dead, there, for once and for all.)
In any case, I’m not sure that it’s fear that stops people from trying to communicate all of this, now, but rather, like Cindy Sheehan, a fatigue one feels from constantly being ignored — it’s really tiresome to try to engage one’s friends and neighbours and help shift their focus towards what’s really happening, both here on the local level and at the global level. What I usually get, in the face of trying to bring up important subjects is a yawning boredom in people’s faces, jokes meant to change the subject, outright ridicule at my survival efforts and the worst of all, a moving away - a kind of isolation as if you are some kind of nutty pariah (when speaking with a group of people, something I just now never ever do).
Basically, after a period of trying, a sane person JUST GIVES UP — at least, with strangers and neighbours, if not with one’s own family. At this point, you start seeing that the only way to save your own sanity and perhaps even survival (if there’s a hard landing after Peak Oil), is to quietly pull back, like a turtle in your shell, and say little, if nothing. Just make your own plans and realize you can’t teach the world to sing. Although, luckily, I’m still making the odd connection, here on this website, and out there, with people who seem to understand the world from the same “reality based” perspective as I do, but it’s a limited bunch in a small town, believe me.
Our environmental group had a huge big film day on Earth Day this year. I a town of nearly 20,000 we got — tah dah! — aside from friends and relatives - and audience of six. 6. It’s really discouraging, but we’re still at it, planning a new festival for the fall. After that, I’ll take stock and decide whether it’s really worth the effort. In any case, I’m making plans to leave this satellite town and move to something much smaller and more secluded where I can powerdown as Richard Heinberg says, to a more contained lifestyle, cottagey size house and garden. I’ve looked at it 20 different ways, and it’s the only solution I can come up with for myself and my family.
I wish you all luck and pragmatic skills for the “tempest in an ocean” that’s looming on the horizon. We’ll need them both.
July 28th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Hi All -
** very candid thought here today **
I too have been preparing for the crazy hard times to come as we begin dealing with the effects of Peak Oil, Global Warming and unusual weather, job impacts (low pay, jobs disappearing, etc.)…and some days I feel like I have a mental disorder. I’ve done everything I can to hone my useful “survival” skills like raising animals, making cheese and other milk products, weaving, sewing, gardening, salvaging/recycling, living on less in a very small house so as to remain with my means and not get into too much debt, etc. but I’m still freaked about what the government will do when things get crazy and what people who don’t live this way will do when they find themselves in a new state of deprivation when supplies of things (petroleum-related products) start becoming scarce and energy gets rationed. I see such a huge void or gap in personal preparedness and/or willingness to forego immediate gratification in order to put in stores for the hard times. It’s the ant-and-the-grasshopper story in spades.
My neighbors see me working diligently in my yard, making an investment in my soil so that when I have to become more and more reliant on my own food stuff I’ll be ready, but they just make comments like “that’s an awful lot of work.” Frankly, I get angry (too strong a word?) that they don’t take measures themselves because I know exactly who they will come to when things get rough and they start experiencing “need” themselves. I’m not saying that I don’t need them - to help be the eyes and ears in our little community or to feed the critters if I need to be away for a day or two - because I do - but they aren’t banking any effort toward the hardships I expect us all to have to face. I can only hope that they try to maintain their rugged individualism because I don’t know how I will react when they come calling. Resentment springs to mind.
How are we to cope with those who are not our equals - in understand of the situation, in preparation for difficulty, etc? Generosity leads to being taken advantage of. Segregating oneself leads to social misery. Must we resign ourselves to having to work 3x, 5x, 10x harder to be sure that the there will be “enough” when the unaware and thoughtless start making demands?
I know there is a lot of judgemental language in this posting but when one has invested time and money to educate oneself (certification in emergency mgmt and planning) and has put in the hard work necessary to ensure that, barring some physical calamity, one won’t be a burden to society or others, it’s very hard to come to grips with those who refuse to do so despite all the signs and nudges that suggest they do. I was raised in hurricane country - so I know about pulling together to help each other out but generally we were all pretty much equals - equally equipped, equally prepared, etc. Family pitched in to help family; neighbor pitched in to help neighbor. In that rural environment that was the norm. City dwellers just don’t get it and now that I find myself amongst them, I’m incredibly uneasy. I foresee “Katrinas” happening all over the place and most people just aren’t capable of meeting the challenges.
One can talk until blue in the face, but no one wants to hear it. I see so many of you expressing similar sentiments. I society so cut off from reality that they can’t see trouble staring them in the face?
Help me to understand how we move forward without sacrificing ourselves to the ill-prepared and overly needy majority.
July 28th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
I neglected to mention that I already do a lot to help the neighbors - watching their animals, giving them some of my surpluses when available, exchanging information, etc. I don’t want to be judged as selfish or elitist - that, I don’t believe, is the case. I’m just very pragmatic… when the scales start out of balance - one becomes fearful (?) of having to do it all, for self and others.