Francis Bacon, Dystopian "Fiction", and Emergent Abundance
Including Exposing Deep Sea Mining, Leviathan Societies, and More!
#32 Daniel Firth Griffith - Releasing Control to Foster Emergent Abundance
This week, we are sharing our interview with our friend Daniel Griffith, brilliant steward of the Timshel Wildland in Virginia and author of Wild Like Flowers. We had the fortune to go to his property in April and make the following video for the Savory Institute, where we had the beautiful experience to document a donation of calves from a regenerative dairy to “inoculate” abundance into their community in the form of animal impact. It was such an incredible experience. You can see the video below:
Additionally, we talk about the importance of relinquishing control, the role of humans in the landscape, and the relationships that are borne out of being a conductor for resilience. For more on the wildland, click here.
#31 Julia Barnes & Joshua Clinton - Deep Sea Mining, the Scottish Wildcat, and Bright Green Lies
This weekend, we released an interview we did with environmentalists Julia Barnes (Sea of Life, Bright Green Lies) and Joshua Clinton and discussed a wide range of topics, including their campaign against deep sea mining, Joshua’s new film project highlighting the endangered Scottish wildcat which is being threatened by a Swedish wind farm, and what it’s like to be young filmmakers opposing the mainstream environmental narrative. We really enjoyed this conversation!
For more information on the environmental destruction and marine devastation that will be required to implement deep sea mining, check out this short film below, created by Julia.
Check out Joshua’s latest CounterPunch article laying out the Bright Green Lie of deep sea mining. To help support their campaign against mining in the deep sea, check out their website.
Mr. Bacon, The Vegetarian
The Fathers of the Mother: Part 1
The author Daniel Quinn describes something that has been very pivotal in my structure of thinking, which is the concept of “Mother Culture”. I find it to be a constant reference in the regards of the way I think about the world. When I first heard it I thought… “Mother” like a nurturing Ur culture, the original culture, stem culture. But Quinn has a different meaning. He means the culture that mothered the modern world. The world of industrial civilization, the mother of the machine-world, the world in which we currently inhabit, the world destined to ecocide.
Perhaps, for Quinn, the point of identifying Mother Culture was to elucidate the operating system of an entire society that causes its own demise. I sense that the creation of the concept of Mother Culture stems from a longing for the bigger answers. It is his attempt to answer the question of why? Why do so many of us long, intuitively, for a different world? But still succumb to the current one? Because of Mother…
I have been on a mission, whether I realized it or not, to find the birth of the Mother: this sick sociopathic paranoid mother of ours. Who gave birth to this monstrosity and let her rule?
Let’s define the Mother: the Mother tells us what the world is and how it operates. To begin, the Mother tells us that everything is mechanical. The world is a machine, you are a machine, your loved ones are machines, all animals, plants and the workings of the stars… machines. So therefore, just like machines, the world, you, your loved ones, the whole web of life, is unconscious, imbued with no real subjectivity, no true awareness, all perceived awareness is an illusion produced by the machine that is the brain. All things can be understood by observation, reduction, and linear logic because our own machines are built with linear logic. With all things being understood we can, and will have, utter control over the workings of the universe – one day abating all illness and death. And with this particular Myth of the World, we can justify everything, and have justified everything. This is how the universe operates after all…at least that's how the story goes.
But is my Mother your Mother? Or the Mother of humanity? We have been human for at least 300,000 years as far as someone can tell. Have we always had the same mother? If we have had the same mother all those years then why have we only become what we have become so recently? Is it possible that other peoples of other times and places had a different cultural mother?
We are the children of the Deterministic Materialistic world of modern science. Or what biochemist, Rupert Sheldrake, would describe as where “science has gotten stuck.” The “scientific worldview” is so profound and influential in every regard of our lives because of the applications of our scientific understanding, not necessarily the understanding itself. And the applications are derived by the cultural values, the stories, and mythologies that culture tells itself. The technologies and cultures of societies are a self-feeding loop– they reinforce each other.
The founders of mechanistic science such as Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton all have an interesting and notable similarity (because of its implications on the worldview of their own lives) which is that they were all practicing Christians. I find this very interesting because the world in which we inhabit is largely the vision that these men prophesied, but this vision was directly born out of the growing divide between Christianity and the Material world.
It’s important to note that the Christianity practiced at the time of these thinkers is not the same as the Christianity of today in many regards. The Christianity of the time was far more animistic. Until the 17th century, during the time of the scientific revolution, scholars and theologians viewed the world as alive, pervaded by the spirit of God. There existed no separation between matter and the essence of life. At that time many world religions had the same point of view. The Tao of Taoism is the same concept: this all pervading force that is present in all things that creates the fractal living algorithm that causes all life to grow. Until the 17th century, all plants, animals, and people had souls. Even the stars, planets and the Earth itself were living beings. This is the animistic world view. The same animating force that is in you is in a rock and a tree.
This is in stark contrast to what 17th century science begins to bring into the world as a guiding vision. This emerging science saw the world as a machine intelligently designed and started off by God, the “God as the watch-maker” vision. Everything was determined by mathematical laws, and the laws came from the mind of God. The vision went from God is in everything, the spirit of creation is in all matter, to God is distant and separate from the material world we inhabit, but he does exist.
This new emerging vision did not deny the presence of God. It just introduced a distance between God and the world. In this way, religion was able to survive and adapt to this emerging mechanical view of the world. God was not yet dead, he was just somewhere else. It must be noted that the church at the time put up a fight for its stake in human consciousness that it was now being forced to share with “science”.
The Roman Inquisition was the prosecution of individuals during the second half of the 17th century who were being accused of a wide array of crimes relating to religious doctrine and alternative religious beliefs. The Inquisition primarily started as a response to the spread of Protestantism which could be interpreted in a way as a move to survive the changing world views that the scientific worldview added to the equation. Religion as a whole had to do a little dance to keep its power and influence with the undeniable emerging world that was being created by the clever applications of science.
Mechanistic science began to reject core doctrines of the original Christian worldview at the time. Firstly, it expelled all souls from nature, the all-pervading creative force was no longer here. The material world became inanimate, a machine. Matter was purposeless and unconscious. The entire physical universe was dead. Except for the human mind. This was the concession the founders of modern scientific thinking gave to the universe (a whole essay could be written about Descartes and why he justified experimenting on live animals due to him believing they were just automatons). To Francis Bacon and the like, the human mind was the only non-mechanical, non-material entity. These organs were part of the spiritual realm.
Eventually Christianity of the time learned to adapt to this growing world view. First, it tried to extinguish this fire as the trial of Galileo in the Roman Inquisition would attest to. But soon the Christian Church and the Church of Science began to be separated into mutually respective realms. Science claimed the realm of the material universe and religion remained in the realm of God, angels, and human souls which had now taken a meager position in the pineal gland.
By the time of the French Revolution, “Material Scientists” rejected the concept of the two separate realms. They began to only accept one reality, the “material” world.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was a politician and lawyer who became the Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon prophesied more than potentially anyone else the power and potential of a society arranged around a materialistic worldview. In 1624, Bacon wrote The New Atlantis in which he describes a utopia built upon technocratic ideals in which a scientific priesthood made decisions for the good of the state as a whole. With this vision, the separation between church and state began and the union of state and science ensued, despite The New Atlantis being heavily laden with Christian morals and superiority.
It can’t be understated how influential Bacon and The New Atlantis were and have been in the times of past and present. “Salomon's House,” the institution which provides utopia in The New Atlantis, is credited with being the standard upon which 17th century scientific academies, including the French Académie des Sciences and the English Royal Society, are based. Just do a quick Google search of those 2 institutions to find out how much of the scientific understanding of the world was a by-product of these two institutions.
In The New Atlantis, explorers leave the coast of Peru to sail out into the South Pacific Ocean. On the brink of failure and death at sea, the crew discovers a secret island whose inhabitants are of a highly advanced society. This land is called Bensalem, as the sailors discover, after being welcomed to the island. After a number of meetings with island officials, they are told the story of how this utopian society began. They learn that 20 years after the death of Christ explorers discovered this land and are shortly gifted a vision of God:
“As it might be some mile into the sea, a great pillar of light…in the form of a column, or cylinder, rising from the sea a great way up towards heaven; and on the top of it was seen a large cross on light.”
A wise man present at the vision who after being lost in deep prayer raises himself up, with arms stretched to heaven, and proclaims:
“Lord God of Heaven and Earth, thou hast vouchsafed of thy grace to those of our order, to know thy works of Creation, and the secrets of them: and to discern (as far as appertaineth to the generations of men) between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts.”
With this vision and prayer the wise men of “Salomon's House” commit to understanding the workings and control of the universe all in the name of God himself and to the reclaiming of the long lost paradise of Eden that man so rightly deserves.
We learn of the great Solamona, the great lawgiver of Bensalem. Solamona erected and established the institute of “Salomon's House” – the great institution of the state of Bensalem.
“The noblest foundation that ever was upon the earth; and the lanthorn of this kingdom. It is dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.”
The name of the house is derived from Solomon, king of the Hebrews, who was believed to have all the knowledge of plants and animals and the workings of nature. Therefore dedicating this new state order to the knower of “all things that have life and motion,” Salomon's House is referred to by the islanders as the College of the Six Days Works (as in the days that God created the world in Genesis):
“God had created the world and all the therein is within six days: and therefore he instituting that house for the finding out of the true nature of all things.”
Finally after earning the trust and respect of the islanders our travelers get to meet the high priest of the House of Salomon, where he entrusts with them all the secrets and operations of the House of Salomon.
“God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have. For I will impart unto thee, for the love of God and men, a relation of the true state of Salomon’s house. Son, to make you know the true state of Salomon’s House. The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”
The “Father” goes on to describe what has very accurately come true. The expansion of the “Human Empire”. The House of Salomon has fields of research such as advanced medicine, where illness and the prolongation of life have been achieved, some hermit members of the society live for hundreds of years and abate death. They have technology for soil fertility (NPK fertilizers), meteorology, refrigeration, wind-power, solar-power, hydro-power, Water of Paradise (a magical liquid to prolong life), artificial weather engineering, more technologies for renewing the body and elongating life, GMO’s and hybrid plants and animals, animal testing for scientific research, highly processed food, pharmacies, modern textiles, smelters for industry, movie theatres, radiology, x-rays, modern optical technology, various technologies that employ the understanding of the light spectrum, various musical instruments and sound recording and amplifying technologies, massive engine houses where giant generators are employed to generate power.
After this long list of very accurate predictions that the modern scientific institution has created, we are told about all the positions of engineering that must be employed to apply this knowledge, we hear of engineers and doctors, technicians of all kinds for each niche of the sub industries created. Essentially the modern workforce.
“These my son are the riches of Salomon’s House.”
The New Atlantis and other works clearly envisions the intellectual project that has, in reality, consumed the world. And at the core of this vision is the intention to defy limits and boundaries. He believed that through the sciences of understanding nature and, subsequently, with the practical applications of control over nature we could find our way back to the Garden of Eden: the God-given paradise where humans reigned dominion over the world and we had lives spanning hundreds of years, where all disease was abated.
To clear the way for this vision, Bacon needed to show that there was nothing inherently wrong about acquiring power over nature. To acquire financial support, Bacon coined the term “knowledge is power''. Bacon hypothesized that man’s technological mastery of nature was the recovery of a God-given power, rather than something radically new.
This was a return, a religious endeavor: this would be a returning of man's lost power. Not only this lost power, but a lost purity, cleanliness, and enlightenment, and a return to the purity before the fall. This tantalizing vision inspired many minds and is largely considered the starting point of the Enlightenment.
“Even members of the Royal society - the pinnacle of British scientific exploration chartered by Charles II in 1662 - thought that they were gradually working mankind back to the universal knowledge enjoyed in Paradise.” - Tristan Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution
Bacon was obsessed with the quest to discover the secret of long life. It appears all throughout his personal history and his writing. In many ways, I see the same thinking in the reasons in which I went vegan and is at the core of the modern plant-based movement. You can break down all the arguments and find the nuances (and lies) within the environmental breakdown of the plant-based movement, but what it really comes down to, and what it came down to for me, was a far more ideological one.
Bacon was a vegetarian. From my reading of Bacon’s personal life, it would seem to me that Bacon went vegetarian for the same ideological reasons that persist today. This belief in the impurity of meat, the belief that a long, deathless life awaits us if we could only shed the habits that caused the fall of humanity, the habits that tie us to the earth, the habits that make us carnal and physical. Because the physical is just something to escape – it’s our Gnostic prison – what awaits us is the un-embodied and eternal, and meat eating represents physical, death-ridden reality. It represents the uncontrollable nature of nature. By being strict with the body, it was believed that the soul could be cleansed of sin and made stronger. Our ancestors before the flood lived long lives with good health, and there was a way back there.
As a vegan I spent time around many people, including myself, who believed that our veganism would extend our lives, make us disease free, as if we were pure enough immortal. Yes, immortal. Some of the chosen few of the purity-cult would become Breatharians who would transcend the need for physical food. Through grace and purity we would transcend the needs of the physical body. Our lives would require no death, and we would transcend the one true limit of the universe.
Death.
The basis of Bacon’s Intellectual efforts to reclaim antediluvian knowledge led the groundwork for the 17th century’s “progress” of learning.
“Bacon’s experimental philosophy would restore mankind to the universal knowledge lost in Adam’s Fall and discover the secret to longevity. Vegetarians would join forces by testing the dietary hypothesis and simultaneously restoring mankind to lost innocence and perfection. The dietary means of returning to antediluvian health was also a route to spiritual restoration.” — Tristan Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution
There are many reasons people may go “plant-based”—environmental, health, ethical/moral, and spiritual. Those were the reasons I went plant based, but subsequently found none of those things to be true. But I did find another immutable truth of the universe: my life required death, including my own.
I write this piece because this unconscious belief within myself that I could transcend the truths of this universe, live indefinitely with perfect health, in fact very seriously damaged my health. It lead me down a delusional path, antithetical with reality as it is. And through the acceptance of what my plant-based diet had done to my health, I uncovered the layers of Mother Culture that informed how I saw the world, and inevitably how the rest of society sees itself in the world. This is not a one and done-gotcha explanation of climate change and veganism, but a personal exploration of why all these things have something in common. The rise of industrially produced plant-based foods, alongside industrial techno-solutions to climate change all stem from the same Mother Culture in my eyes. The culture and beliefs that informed Bacon informed the Enlightenment, and have informed the so-called-solutions to the problem it created.
I find nothing inherently wrong about humans' desire to want to understand, nothing wrong about our species' long journey for wisdom about the universe, but the application of this knowledge seems to be where we have gone wrong. In the words of Bacon himself, “knowledge is power” – we have built the tower of scientific application upon the desire to want to control. To abate death and the utter lack of control that it represents.
I also don’t think that Bacon is the sole founder of “Mother Culture”, or the Scientific Revolution, he was merely a product of millions of conversations happening at the pubs, aristocratic gatherings, and various socializing events of his time. The zeitgeist of the human mind was trying to give rise to something, something that had long been in the works for 10,000 years. Bacon and the like were only beginning the cunning attempt to project the long held morals of the culture onto the rest of the universe. At this time, humanity had already deployed the machine-worldview that totalitarian agriculture had been employing in its global-scale, soil destroying ways.
I feel that Bacon’s death, in a way, has its own interesting lesson to be learned here.
“Driving out of London over Highgate Hill on a cold March day in 1626, Sir Francis Bacon noticed spring snow still lying on the ground and seized the opportunity to test whether ‘flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt’. Bacon descended from his carriage in a flourish of compulsive inquisitiveness, purchased a hen from a poor woman, made her gut it, and then stuffed it with snow himself. Before he could publish the results of this, his last experiment, the snow chilled Bacon’s own flesh, and he was struck by a coughing fit so severe he could not return home. As he lay in the damp bed in the nearby house of his friend the Earl of Arundel, his condition worsened, and within days Bacon, one of England’s greatest philosophers, was dead.” Tristan Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution
The universe has a wicked sense of humor, and I am sure my death will in some way resound to those around me as ironic and fitting. And in this way Bacon left his last great musing, the control of nature, and the death defying proposition of modern materialistic science brings upon that in which it so strongly promises to abate.
We have indeed tried Bacon’s vision of the world. The House of Salomon has come to reign supreme and we have created a wasteland of a planet. What if, rather than understanding and controlling, we tried understanding and cooperation. That would seem a more fitting vision of the future. The experiment of total control has failed.
It has turned humans into an antibiotic on the surface of this planet. Maybe it’s time we were a probiotic.
The Reign of the Machine: Seeking the Hinterlands of the Mind
An Analysis of 1984, Brave New World, We, and The Power of the Powerless
“A genuine, profound, and lasting change for the better… can no longer result from the victory (were such a victory possible) of any particular traditional political conception, which can ultimately be only external, that is, a structural or systemic conception. More than ever before, such a change will have to derive from human existence, from the fundamental reconstitution of the position of people in the world, their relationships to themselves and to each other, and to the universe.”- Václav Havel: The Power of the Powerless, 1978
The warnings of both 1984 and Brave New World are clear in our modern context as people seem to oscillate between being motivated by their fears and their vices. We can see clearly a Huxleyian oversaturation and therefore fleeting consumption of information, which may paradoxically parallel the 1984 protagonist’s career at the “Ministry of Truth” to delete information that is unsuitable to the narrative of “the Party.” Drowning any and all discomfort with sex and “soma,” Huxley’s Fordians had no need to even consider their enslavement.
What few people know is that both Orwell and Huxley were inspired by a novel that was published in 1924 by the Russian dissident, Yevgeny Zamyatin. His book, entitled We to represent the totality and lack of individualism of his “One State,” describes the endpoint of Thomas Hobbes societal theories, wherein each individual is merely one corporeal automaton in the greater Body Politic, one cog in the Machine, one part of the “million-footed Leviathan” – a nameless, personality-less cipher.
In the later published books, the myriad derivatives are clear. For example, in We there is no privacy, as all people live in glass apartments and can always watch one another. In 1984, Big Brother is always watching on the “telescreen,” and the surveillance driven by the Thought Police or the child-informants called the Spies imbibes an omnipresent threat of exposure. In We, it is at the museum-like “Ancient House” that D-503 (under the corruptive influence of the icy femme-fatale, I-330) is first able to experience freedom. Similarly, 1984’s protagonist, Winston, brings his dissident lover, Julia, to an old house full of pre-INGSOC relics in the lawless prole part of London. For the members of the One State, it is written into law that “each cipher has the right to any other cipher as a sexual product.” In Brave New World, there is no love, no companionship, only sex, to the degree that there are people specifically bred to be more promiscuous and satiating than others.
While these similarities warrant deeper analysis, there are three broader philosophical motifs shared by all of these great dystopian books of the mid-20th century that I think are useful to focus on: truth, control, and freedom.
Truth
To begin, let us assess the question of truth: where does it come from, who decides it, and how are we meant to deal with it? In Brave New World, the truth is of little interest to the drugged, sexed, and cognitively enslaved inhabitants of the splendid new utopian London. In 1984, the truth is deleted, omitted, rearranged, and reconfigured by the state media, and if one finds himself infected by awareness of the real truth, the Ministry of Love will torture such a perversion of official doctrine out of him. In We, the devotees of Fredrick Winslow Taylor known as “ciphers” find their truth through their utter faith in the Machine, the regimenting of their lives into an automatic, mechanized routine of service to the Great Benefactor. Truth is concretized as implicit doctrine.
How might “truth” be defined in reality? Contrary, yet parallel, to the world of Oceania in Orwell’s dystopia, the world we live in today seems to have millions of iterations of truth rather than a systematic erasure of the truth, despite the censorship we are seeing (tragically, being fully embraced) at the moment. In a less political take, one may see that for any given thought, there are a hundred ways your ideas are likely missing context, and therefore are never close to the whole truth. For any definition of any given word, there are 7.87 billion unique interpretations, some that might fully contradict the other. The truth feels elusive and slippery, like we can never quite grasp it, and our leaders lie or tell us half-truths in the theater production we call “politics”. Mendacity seems inherent to a structure with so much built-in complication, and is used deliberately to serve the obstruction of the truth, as in the case of lobbyists writing legislation so impossible to understand that only they can interpret it to the very lawmakers they are meant to convince. A world of “2+2=5” has been constructed around us with such a deep complication that we are functionally reliant on experts to interpret it for us, and so we let them to disastrous degrees.
On the other hand, as in Huxley’s novel, there also seems to simultaneously be little interest in seeking the truth. Taking our modern equivalent of “soma” in the form of antidepressants, alcohol, or even certain strains of weed coupled with an endless media saturation and entire industries dedicated to creating the most addicting entertainment possible, it’s easy for us to avoid the discomfort and uncertainty that real truth-seeking brings and instead gravitate towards consumerism, entertainment, and blind-faith in authority and institutions. We are as tantalized by creature comforts and momentary pleasures as the characters in the book.
As previously mentioned, in We, truth is fundamentally structured around faith. From the vantage of faith, truth ceases to be subjective and alterable and enters into the realm of de facto objectivity. What is truth other than what is perceived and thus framed within the construction of our pre-oriented awareness? Herein lies the paradox: truth is objective only through subjective lenses, therefore it is inherently impossible to grasp in totality. Truth to each individual is obscured by their epistemic framework. Therefore, in the case of the One State, the “truth” is always underpinned by the assumption that the Machine World is the natural endpoint of human development. Anything that negates this obvious direction of human development is heresy, or, to steal from 1984, untruth.
As will be seen in the film, Death in The Garden, we are attempting to argue that our culture is functioning from the very same epistemological worldview. That reduction, rationality, uniformity, mechanization, and simplification are the foundational tenets of a mythology that we are largely hitherto unaware of, yet enacting constantly through our own unconscious automatism.
Control
The dream of the totalitarians in the 20th century, and largely the dream of Bolshevism at large is the industrialization of man. These authors were all keenly aware of the communist implementation of machine-thinking and deification of mass-production via Henry Ford and Fredrick Winslow Taylor, thereby the utopians of Brave New World have replaced “Our Lord” with “Our Ford,” and ciphers in the One State worship Taylor similarly.
Orwell’s Oceanians are controlled by constant fear as they live in perpetual war and the surveillance state is always seeking out and silencing even the most minor dissent. Huxley’s hatched clones are controlled by temporary pleasure. But Zamyatin’s Taylorists are ruled by something deeper: the faith in the Machine-world— that these qualities of rationality, uniformity, mechanization, reduction, and logic leads to ultimate happiness. Surely, we can see these implementations in our reality. Violence has been used as a method of control in slavery in US history, genocidal dictatorships such as the Khmer Rouge, and enforcement in regimes such as in North Korea. The domestication of the Western mind through incessant comfort, entertainment, and relative ease has created a culture of people entirely dependent on the system to provide for them, as most people have very few practical skills of their own. The belief in the Machine World —the techno-utopia— offers an implicit relinquishing of control: we must rely on the fruits of industry to bring us into that future, therefore billionaires are permitted to travel to Davos every year and make determinations about how all people on Earth ought to live.
Before a civilization can seek to control the individual, that person must be made into a commodity. This is where communism and capitalism find their synergy. Whether you yourself are viewed as capital as in our current corporate oligarchy (which is really a social welfare state for the rich, and a “free-market” for everyone else), or you are merely viewed as one “millionth part of the ton” in a collectivist dictatorship, individuality must be denied. One might argue with me and say that in the West we are hyper-individualized, which seems to be true on the surface, but an ambient anxiety is omnipresent: we are all replaceable, none of us are “essential,” and we are infinitely exploitable. From this angle of control, domestication, and commodification, there is very little difference between these ideologies.
The attempt at controlling nature, in the case of Brave New World, denying the experience of birth in favor of “hatching” or “producing” human beings, or in We as represented by the “Green Wall” where “mankind ceased to be wild beast… mankind ceased to be savage… when we isolated our perfect, machined world by means of the Wall, from the irrational, chaotic world of the trees, birds, animals”— control over nature is paramount: an obvious extension of the Machine world, which denies the existence of all mystery, all beauty, all diversity. As we spend our lives increasingly in-doors in temperature-controlled spaces without a hint of wildness around us, it’s easy to be averse to any notion that we may have to give this level of comfort and “safety” up. The Magnificent Bribe of Doordash and Netflix has us in its clutches, and therefore we rail against anything that might indicate this way of being cannot be maintained.
Huxley noted in his 1946 foreword to Brave New World that there need be no reason to assume that modern authoritarians will look anything like Stalin or Hitler or Mao, noting how our advanced technology does the enslaving far more efficiently than “firing squads, artificial famine, mass imprisonment and deportation,” and that “inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost” in our modern era: a nod to the Machine. He writes, “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” The bribe we have been given provides us with so much abundance and luxury that we’ll do anything we can to maintain it, even if it is destroying the Earth and our human society.
“Technology - that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modern metaphysics - is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction.” - Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
Hence Davos Men’s insistence on (and our reluctant belief in) them being the “good guys” as they systematically deepen our dependence on them through an ever complexifying network of goods and services. They are attempting to resolve “the problem of happiness” as Huxley put it, which is really “the problem of making people love their servitude.” Their efforts, however, are clearly failing, perhaps because of one, fundamental human drive.
The drive of agency, of sovereignty, of freedom.
Freedom
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
All of these books face the conundrum of freedom. In step with control, freedom lies within the individual’s ability to be themselves: it lies within the soul’s desires. In We, a soul is a disease that which a person must have surgically removed. In 1984, freedom lies in the ability to perceive “the evidence of your eyes and your ears” which is, in essence, to be one’s own arbiter of the truth. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows,” writes Winston in his clandestine journal. In Brave New World, as we see above, freedom is the right to not be taken care of by a society he deems tyrannical. Or, more aptly put, it’s the freedom to be responsible for oneself.
Václav Havel, a Czech dissident during the Soviet Union’s reign, and later the President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, wrote his book The Power of the Powerless to illustrate the power of the people merely “living in the truth” and how threatening that is to the dominant and totalitarian power structures, rejecting the common notions of overthrow being an effective agent of change. He writes, “A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed,” thus placing the onus of responsibility upon the individual to seek hinterlands in which to create “parallel structures.”
As in these dystopian novels, in a world that has been wholly conquered, commodified, and colonized, the most important hinterlands to reclaim are within our minds. If freedom is the freedom to know that 2+2=4, that is the freedom we must exercise. Havel writes that “people are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies” and similar to Huxley’s foreword, notes that this manipulation comes from “the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertise, commerce, consumer culture” and a “flood” of information. This, of course, is all in the service of our enslavement to the Machine world – the world of industry, technological acceleration and expansion, and an increasing divorce from nature, which is actually just reality.
Therefore, he writes, “A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of ‘higher responsibility’, a new-found inner relationship to other people and to the human community – these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go.”
Responsibility is the other side of the same coin which is freedom. Without responsibility, true freedom can never be attained. In the case of these novels from the early 20th-century, we see societies wherein it is nearly impossible for an individual to attain any semblance of real, meaningful responsibility for one’s own life. The dystopian stories all end tragically; D-503 elects to betray his love and have “the operation”; Winston’s resistance ends in torturous ruin, with him being fully reprogrammed to love the Party; and the Savage kills himself after his entire being is reduced to little more than a circus animal.
These are indeed perilous warnings from the past. But, thankfully, these are just stories. Warnings, yes. Fables, yes. But prophecies, no.
We are not yet so far gone that we can’t take responsibility for our lives, outsourcing control and truth to the powers that be. Though we may have a long way to go, we are indeed on the precipice of a deep, lasting change. We may never attain it if we don’t fundamentally assess how the forces of truth, control, and freedom interact in our lives. What is innate to our being that we are denying? In what ways am I constrained from being my true self? How might I be responsible for my own freedom?
A totalitarian, global, industrial system that denies life is not inevitable. A brighter future can be upon us if we so choose to start honestly seeking that which tells us that 2+2=4, if we work towards undomesticating ourselves from the system, and if we look at the problems of the world and do not seek to outsource responsibility to our Davos overlords.
“For the real question is whether the ‘brighter future’ is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?” - Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
If you’d like to join our Discord community for as little as $1 per month, you can either join our Patreon or upgrade your “free” Substack subscription to “paid.” Thank you so much for being here, and for being patient with us as we edit our film together, write the scripts, and attempt to release content in a remotely consistent manner.