What Are People For?

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Waking up late, the day after Christmas, after a long fuzzy night, I started reviewing Wendell Berry’s work, particularly his essay, “What Are People For?”, from the book of that name. Berry was an agrarian philosopher and poet who believed that modern humanity had become alienated from our common home, the Earth. He advocated for a return to an older, simpler lifestyle where we reconnect with soul and soil. He wrote: “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only hope.” The word “belonging” comes to mind: Berry inquired into what it means to belong, and how we might intentionally redirect our energies to find our way back home.

I feel Berry’s critique and deeply sympathize with and love his perspective, although (to my annoyance) I don’t completely agree with it. My friend, the arch-materialist Howard Bloom, offers an antithesis to Berry in his books like The Lucifer Principle, The God Problem: How a Godless Universe Creates, and The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Revision of Capitalism. For Bloom, man’s striving to transcend, dominate, and exploit nature is built into our evolutionary program and is inherently positive and creative. He welcomes the creative destruction inherent in Capitalism, driving us insatiably forward: “The beast that created prosperity is the same beast that lifts us to new levels of meaning and connection.” I also don’t agree with Bloom, entirely.

The question Berry asked, “What are people for?”, is one I think about all of the time — the phrase returns to me often. If not daily, certainly every few days. It is almost a fixation. I feel it is becoming an increasingly urgent question for contemporary civilization as a whole. At the moment, we lack a good answer to it. We need to find one quickly. Then we need to collectively agree on our answer. This is a tall order!

Situational Awareness: Where are we now?

We are one month away from ushering in whatever this new regime will be. As I have written fervently over the last months, I have many deep concerns over what’s coming. I have been telling people, privately, for years that I suspect the US — under a Right Wing government — will eventually invade or annex Canada. Still, it is astonishing that Trump is now stating this directly, repeatedly, even before he gets into office:

Trump, clearly, intends to go for it on every level, in his effort to leave his mark on history. I am sure Canadians can’t wait for the Trump tax cuts and new American-style social security and medical care. Exciting times!

I feel that most people in my extended networks still don’t have a comprehensive idea of what’s happening, and why. I don’t know if I do, but perhaps I have done more thinking about the situation and the possible scenarios than most. It now feels to me that this outcome was structurally inevitable — the Western neoliberal Capitalist system checkmated itself. The systemic gaps in logic, the various layers of corruption and dishonesty allowed monstrous greed and criminality to dominate and finally triumph.

Chris Hedges writes well, if relentlessly, about this. You, too, can enjoy his latest jeremiad, “How Fascism Came”:

President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism.

Bracing stuff!

I don’t have any particular personal animosity toward Trump or Musk (Trusk? Mump?). I see them as, more or less, inevitable personifications of larger forces. It helps me, also, to hold an esoteric perspective from Rudolf Steiner, Dzogchen (Namkai Norbu, Longchenpa), and writings on the prophetic unfolding of our situation from Jose Arguelles and Sergio Magana, based on Mesoamerican wisdom traditions. Also, the works of Carl Jung on archetypal processes and Bernardo Kastrup on our “dreamed up reality” help me find stable ground in the superstorm.