Month: December 2022

Science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick said that, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, still exists.”

This aphorism can work as a good rubric for sifting through the noise of modern symbolic culture. Civilization demands that we inhabit symbolic worlds, that we embed our lives inside abstract ideas and surround ourselves with imaginary beings that have no material existence. That in and of itself wouldn’t be a problem if it were not for the fact that this causes us to act in ways that have real consequences.  

What would happen if everyone suddenly recognized the truth—the untruth—of these beings that populate our symbolic menagerie? What would happen if everyone suddenly saw these things as the imaginary entities they are, entities with no abiding reality behind them? Consider corporations as a case in point. Corporations are abstract legal fictions. They are not real things in the world, and should everyone simply stop acknowledging them, they would immediately cease to exist.

What would happen if everyone suddenly stopped recognizing Walmart, for instance, as a real entity? There are buildings all over the place with Walmart signs on them that are filled with material goods. But since Walmart is not anything real, since corporations have no real agency, there is no one with any actual claim to the items on the shelves inside these buildings. If everyone suddenly recognized the unreality of Walmart, then there would be nothing preventing people from just going inside and taking what they wanted and walking out. And, no doubt, that is exactly what would happen.

Of course, if it was only a handful of people who recognized Walmart’s unreality, they would be arrested. And, ironically, this very fact is indisputable evidence that Walmart is not real. It is necessary to enforce actions that comport with belief in civilization’s fictions. You are entirely free to acknowledge the truth that Walmart is not real, but you are not allowed to act on that truth. Notice that it is not necessary to enforce actions consistent with actual reality, with actual features of the real world. There are no gravity police, for example. If you want to stop believing in gravity, that’s absolutely fine, go ahead and walk off the roof of that Walmart building and see what happens. But it is necessary to manufacture consequences in order to enforce the “reality” of Walmart and the deeply tangled mass of blatant lies in which the idea of Walmart is embedded. 

It has been called many things. Quinn’s gorilla called it “mother culture.” But culture is a thoroughly reified abstraction, an entity with no actual potency in the living world. And it is a grotesque affront to our first and most important relationship to grant any sort of maternal status to an abstraction meant to embody something as brutally inhuman as civilized life. But Quinn’s purpose is clear and well-taken: the messages we have been weaned on and made to internalize are not merely false, they are specifically designed to keep us entirely ignorant of our true situation.

Fredy Perlman’s approach was to add an insatiable appetite to Hobbes’ monstrous leviathan, molding it into a creature driven by a single purpose: to consume everything there is to consume. In addition to underscoring the persistent and horrific accumulation of death and carnage, Perlman’s beast highlights the uncontrollable, unyielding, self-directed, and single-minded nature of the civilizing process. There is a sense of inevitability in this that makes me uncomfortable. The genie has been loosed from the bottle, and it appears there is nothing anyone can do to coax it back inside. Perhaps at some distant point in the past the beast was unformed enough to kill, but the weapons presently in our arsenal are not at all sufficient—they are leviathan’s own weapons, after all—and the civilizing process will cease only after everything has been scoured clean and nothing remains to consume.   

Lewis Mumford called it a magamachine, and I feel the most affinity toward Mumford’s appellation. Embedded in the machine metaphor is the notion that it is an artificial thing, not just unnatural, but designed with intention, ultimately a kind of technology—an impossibly complex kind of technology, but a mere device nonetheless. As a complex technological device, its many parts require continued servicing and maintenance. For the time being (despite all the hype and hysteria around AI) it still requires human participation for its continued existence. And this is a potentially exploitable weakness—perhaps its only real weakness: it requires the effort and involvement of biological humans who have authentic human needs that the machine will never be able to fully satisfy. 

Mother culture, leviathan, magamachine, it is all these things. It is none of these things. I prefer just to call it civilization. But it is not really that either—another slippery abstraction. I am increasingly convinced that what we are dealing with is not a dangerous fairytale or a ravenous genocidal beast or a planet-grinding machine, that what we are dealing with is really nothing at all, that its true power emerges only because we feel compelled to name it, to objectify its many parts and functions, and that there is something in this objectification itself that gives it power over us.

If my intuition about this is even remotely valid, then there is a clear and present pathway to back to ourselves, and we are standing on it right now because we have never really left it. Fredy Perlman said it well, the wilderness is right here:

The cycle has come round again. America is where Anatolia was. It is a place where human beings, just to stay alive, have to jump and dance, and by dancing revive the rhythms, recover cyclical time. An-archic and pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice, and its linear His-story as All, but merely as one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left the Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises.[i]

May the sun rise soon!

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[i] Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, p. 302.