thoughts on civilization...
Collected here are some interesting passages and quotations that I have copied from a blog named “Kill Civilization.” While the name of the blog may be less than inspirational, many of the posts it contains are worth contemplation. Please note that while I think the posts I’ve copied and pasted below are interesting and worth thinking about, they are not my ideas nor do I necessarily agree with them.
I don’t know the solutions to all of what ails our modern world, but I do recognize that there are more than a few problems that need to be addressed sooner than later; if we don’t, we may end up killing civilization ourselves.
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“He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.”
- Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing
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”Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.”
- Derrick Jensen - Endgame
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“In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.”
- Derrick Jensen - A Language Older Than Words
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For all the ceaseless chatter, the disharmony of insomniac prattling, not a word worth hearing is ever said. I crave wisdom, and have lost faith that any man left living has it within himself to bestow. Voice box noise kicks in every door. Declarations and demagogues and so much electric factory hum. Cast iron, coal fired, empty minded heat filling every space. A slurry of hyperbolic mawing, constantly, pervasively.
Is this our ceremony? Do we believe our incantations are the world itself?
- killciv (no other credit, so I have to assume this is his)
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Ours is a society that demands respect, though it respects nothing and no one. If these aren’t the end days of our civilization, then God help future generations. Everywhere I see grown up babies, wandering through life so thoroughly convinced of their entitlement — feeding upon death, and misery, and slavery, and yet so terribly uninterested in any of it — so entertained by the accidental excrement that is their life that they couldn’t be bothered to even lend a glance, a nod, to the corpses on which they stand as they drift aimlessly on a river of blood.
I’m trying very hard to not be as such — but to open myself to the world, to the true and actual world, to allow myself to be where the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind. I want to leave, to return to the wild places, to no longer punish my hands with the sensation of plastic, but to draw upon the memories stored with the bowels of wood, and leather, and flesh, and stone, and moss.
I want to be immersed in that which is holy. I want nature’s stoic wisdom guiding me with it’s simplicity, it’s silence, and it’s righteousness. A return to the order of the world which man is hell bent on destroying. I want to know it before the maniacs succeed in their juvenile quest for our extinction, which they through some magic of their childishness simultaneously believe to be impossible yet imperative.
- killciv (no other credit, so I have to assume this is his)
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In times of war, art should reflect the conflict. It should make the brutality and the lies and all of the senseless ugliness stare back at itself. It should make every nit wit zombie stooge who supports the violence realize, even if only silently in some dark recess of their remaining conscience, that they are nit wit zombie stooges.
At this point in history, despite the ongoing battles in Afghan provinces and Iraqi cities, the greater war is a cultural war. The great enemy is not an axis power, but the great lie of civilization, under whose umbrella we have forgotten everything that made us creatures of soul, in exchange for creatures of comfort.
Until we remember our place on this planet, and amongst one another; until we remember that the health of soil is the health of our species; that bountiful plant life gives us bounty in our lives; that the animals and the water and the rocks and the forests are not resources for our exploitation, but the integral components of a living system to which belong — on which we rely to exist at all; any art that does not reflect truth onto the great lie of civilization is not valid. Further, any art that serves this lie, whether to sell us a product beyond itself or not, is despicable propaganda to be regarded as shit, and left to rot in the gutters like shit.
- Hunter/Gatherer
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Film is dead. Music is dead. Art as we know it has been completely co-opted in an attempt to sell us an image of ourselves that is far preferable to the one that blinds us in the mirror each morning, all so we’ll buy more shit food, shit soda, shit clothes, shit gadgets — all of which make our bodies look like and feel like shit, so we can start the cycle all over again tomorrow morning.
The only art left is the art of living. Go try some shit. Strange shit. Dangerous shit. Go do something that would make all of your family members worry about you. Stop paying your taxes, get rid of the license plates on your car, hell, get rid of your car, plant food in your neighbor’s yard, hunt in a public park, do something to re-attach yourself to the waking world.
And for fuck’s sake, get off of the computer.
- killciv (no other credit, so I have to assume this is his)
Source: http://killciv.tumblr.com/
