I love this video. 
Edit:
OMG, I just got it.
"Walk without rhythm, and it won’t attract the worm"
In the middle of a Fatboy Slim song is just about the last place I would have expected to find a Dune reference.
Life will exploit all available resources. This is, as far as I can tell, a universal. Take any form of life, plant, animal, bacteria, anything, and put it in an environment with resources it is capable of exploiting and it will immediately set about making the maximum possible use of them. And it will do so with great zeal. There has never been observed, as far as I can tell, any form of life which has ever, en mass, refused an available resource for any reason.
The world has until recently worked fairly well with this system. There was a staggering variety of life forms, each with their own resource-exploiting capacities. And since what was a byproduct of exploitation to one form invariably became the resource to another form, everything was pretty much self-balancing.
The problem came when humans started developing cognitive capacity far beyond anything the world had seen before. As we grew in cleverness, we figured out how to exploit more and more resources. And the more resources we had available, the more clever we were able to become. This self-perpetuating cycle started very slowly but eventually grew into an exponential curve that skyrocketed into our current state. We have reached a point where we can exploit practically every part of the world and are furiously working on figuring out how to exploit the few remaining “useless” bits.
It has been observed that most indigenous cultures do not practice this type of rampant exploitation. However, I find myself wondering if they are truly more enlightened or if they have simply not been able to exploit as many resources as the industrialized world. Certainly, vast numbers of indigenous cultures have been decimated through brute force, but at least as many have been lost to simple exposure to industrial culture. Speaking in broad terms, when they see our resources, they want them, just like any life form does. They want our medicine and weapons and all the other “advanced” things we have developed. Of course, they can’t take them without taking industrial culture as well, and their own culture is rapidly consumed by it.
I find further evidence that indigenous cultures are not more enlightened than industrial culture in the fact that they are also just as brutal to one another as we are. Men still dominate women and one tribe still makes war on the next. Again, I see this in terms of resources. Men are able to exploit women as a resource, and so they do. A stronger tribe is able to exploit a weaker tribe for their resources, and so they do.
It seems to me that one of the unique things about the Axial Age is that it was, as far as I can tell, the first time in the history of life on earth that there was, en mass, a message that we had a higher priority than resources. A value that all things were equally part of the Sacred (by whatever language) and thus all life must be considered as your own. Of course, this message was so radically out of line with our ancient programming that most people promptly took it up in terms of resources (holy wars, anyone?) and missed the point entirely, which is still the dominant way it is understood to this very day.
In this way, I think the message of the Axial Age is still the message we need to hear. There is a higher order to things than survival and the resources needed to maintain it.
I like to think that there is something out there that will make it apparent that this message works. Because once something is seen to work, it needs no activists. The industrial revolution didn’t need any promoters; it spread like wildfire because it worked so well. We are finally starting to wake up to the fact that rampant resource exploitation doesn’t actually work on the large scale, but we haven’t yet really found something that does work to take its place. The old formulation of the message from the Axial Age is no longer relevant.
I have a sense that this new thing, this different way that will spread across the world because it just works, is already out there and beginning to germinate. But I think it needs our help to get started, especially if we’re to start it in time for us to not destroy most of the life on this planet. The industrial revolution didn’t need activists, but it did need engineers. It needed creative, paradigm-breaking thinkers to find what worked and then put it out in the world to work its magic.
We need life engineers. The next thing that works needs us to help it be brought into the world.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
I’ve started reading a few webcomics, and so far my favorite is xkcd, “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Here are my favorites.
In trying to stretch the way I think about things, I’ve been trying to see if I can find any other ways to think about the Axial Age.
It occurs to me that perhaps the AA was not the emergence of something new. Perhaps it was the re-emergence of something old in a new form.
In reading about Robert Wolff’s Original Wisdom, I came across these quotes regarding his experiences with the aboriginal Sng’oi of Malaysia:
“When I leaned over to drink from the leaf, I saw water with feathery ripples, I saw a few mosquito larvae wriggling on the surface, I saw the veins of the leaf through the water, some bubbles, a little piece of dirt… How beautiful, how perfect… The all-ness was everywhere, and I was a part of it… I could not be afraid - I was a part of this all-ness.”
We can know neither how much of his experience came from the Sng’oi nor how much the Sng’oi’s perspectives might resemble those of pre-agricultural animists, but that passage sounds very much like a description of an experience that could be considered to be grounded both in mystical monism and the macrocosm of love relationship.
If we assume this is the case and further that it bares some relation to ancient ways, then the AA becomes not a discovery but a sort of reformation. After thousands of years of forgetting that we belong to the world and not the other way around, sufficient tension built up to burst through our conditioning and allow us to see the Sacred again. But this time we interpreted that experience through a radically different filter; through the eyes of civilization builders. Which is to say through the eyes of people for whom it was a given that their role in the world was to be above it.
And so we constructed elaborate philosophies which placed us in a hierarchy: the world below, us in the middle, and some sort of transcendent reality above. Our role then became to disdain the world, to escape it, to be saved from the alienation of the mundane and released into the bliss of the Sacred.
Of course, the trouble with that is that we created the alienation within ourselves. In actuality, there is nowhere to escape to and nothing to be saved from. There is only the immediate reality of this world which is the body of the Sacred. Our reformation was very skewed.
Obviously this is an exercise in wild speculation, but it feels like it could have some elements of truth in it.