It's been 7 months since I wrote the first draft of Anarcho-Tantric Hedonism: A Treatise, and since, I've had plenty of new ideas stewing in my brain which are now finding expression in an upcoming Addendum treatise.
Enjoy Section 13, my fellow counterculturalists:
The
homeless man of the Pacific Northwest, in a climatological respect,
is in worse straits than the homeless man residing in Los Angeles
where, despite the occasional rainstorm, the climate is fair enough
year-round to facilitate a satisfactory sustainment of the physical
body. In respect to social forces and the rate of violent crime for a
myriad of mingled and networked reasons, however, the homeless man of
the Pacific Northwest is (speaking generally despite the thesis of
this particular section) in a better place. In particular I make
reference from perspective in my own life, imagining myself homeless
on the streets of Powell River, where, despite being satisfactorily
fed and clothed, the climate would permit little in the way of
bearable living through the winter months. Los Angeles, in a
statistical context due to the sheer amount of intermingled lives
forced into social co-dependency, would be more likely to house
psychopaths with an itch to kill and eyes likely to see the homeless
as easier prey than the named and average middle-class white male
residing at a physical address, easily located via ZIP codes and
other documents of social reality.
The
modern world, although on local levels making attempts to address
such problems, is of an intrinsic inability to solve them due to its
rootedness in conceptual generalization in all fields of thought and
action. Coupled with this, globalization represents a trend of
attempting to economically homogenize the planet as a whole despite
organic circumstance and existentially essential differences which,
unallowed to develop in themselves both on collective and individual
levels, has lead to the deprivation of something requisite within
each of us, represented on a collective level by the economic
deprivation of sustainable existence for certain 'kinds' of people
known in the dangerously general sense as the 'lower class.'
All
of the above is an illustration for the sake of analogy; although
truth is represented, the whole truth regarding such issues as
homelessness is infinitely more complicated in all respects; from
climate to food availability to psychology to appearances to social
context in all forms, the world is networked in such a way as to make
even my generalization for the sake of description nearly completely
null and void, thus proving my point.
Nature
in itself is made up of what is similar-but-different; not
necessarily inevitable, but inevitable only in the sense that it is.
If
we imagine the globe as a wheel representing the colour spectrum
(fig. 1), we can clearly see what nature is in its
different-sameness; each colour, although different than the next,
fades into one another as it is. This isn't to assert that this
occurrence was ever a philosophical inevitability, but regardless of
such speculation, it is inevitable
as it is what it is.
From space, too, the same phenomenon can be witnessed. Although the
paints added to the Earth by each of our individual personalities,
cultural mind-models, political standings, and spiritual beliefs are
an invisible paint only available at ground-level, they are still as
consequential as the fading of deep jungle flora into desert, and the
upwards jut of ocean into land. For the sake of expediency and
economy-of-line, we will refer to this different-sameness as the
'natural fade.'
Fig. 1
The
requirements of life in the desert are radically different than the
requirements of life in the rainforest or the requirements of life in
the Arctic. Modern nation-states are a chunky and inefficient
expression of the natural fade which, instead of blue sliding into
pink and slowly into purple, or Algerians fading into Libyans and
slowly into Egyptians, opt for an arbitrary line at an arbitrary
point designed and calculated with obsessively microcosmic accuracy.
This
obsessive microcosmic accuracy represents an antithesis to the
natural fade in which it is not top down or bottom up, but a
mutuality between the two with neither taking exclusive reign. It is
the compartmentalization of preexisting generalizations into smaller
generalizations based on certain areas in certain spaces at certain
times. The globalization of economy, although by implication leading
to an overall reduction in terribly catastrophic world warfare due to
economic interdependence (for example: the Golden Arches theory of
Conflict Prevention states that no two countries with a McDonald's
have fought a war with one another since the introduction of the
franchise into each respective nation), has led to an all-pervasive
generality which threatens to homogenize the entirety of the world as
if attempting to erase every colour from the spectrum and expand it
all into a solid red (which, by analogy, may very well occur in blood
as individuals, races, and cultures of all different colours, in both
physical as well as spiritual terms, are violently squeezed out of
existence as they are not red enough to appease the oppressive
artists painting in stiff brush).
What
is being illustrated throughout this section is one of two things:
the essential differences of populations and as such, cultures,
economies, laws, and customs, as well as the way in which these
differences are not static or binary blocks of area or thought, but
connected and interdependent fades into one another in the same way
that a lake flows through a river, down a waterfall, and into the
greater scheme of global ocean.
Prior
to the age of satellite imagery and the internet, ones experience and
point of view within the world were understandably limited and
fragmentary, thus leading many to draw lines around what they knew
and saw in order to properly orient themselves and give grounding to
their consciousness on all levels. This illusory fragmentation,
represented in the form of a 'worldview' walled-off from a dauntingly
greater terra incognita, stuck around despite the advent of
global and somewhat universal awareness, just as often expanding its
borders as manning the walls and preparing to fight the now
encroaching 'everything-else' outside.
In
this day and age, it is often encouraged that one expand their
borders and worldviews beyond their traditional outposts. It is
unlikely, in modern generations, to find walls built in defence (as
their parents and grandparents had done before). Instead, many employ
the haranguing and lonely border guard of scientific objectivism to
question all immigrants and tourists into their developed sense of
reality, denying entry to any who cannot properly satisfy its
interrogation.
Although
this is a step forward from previous states of mind, it still exists
within binary borders which do not completely accept the existence of
the natural fade. In fact, it is simply as was stated above;
microcosmically reduced generalizations in a blocked and neatly
ordered spectrum all revolving around an objective centre (fig. 2).
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Fig. 2
Granted, there is an element of
fade, but it is not a progressive flow, and is instead a logical
continuity, almost a chain of causality between colours. Some borders
are blurred, which in analogy could represent the slow and inevitable
disintegration of humanity into proper unity over time, however
others stand clear and concise against their neighbours as if there
is a relation, but the water in their particular cup cannot be
trusted to the ocean.
