Story That Kills
It is well understood that
each of us lives in a constructed world,
…made up of unacknowledged social narratives
so deeply embedded in our psyches
that we rarely recognize them,
let alone doubt their truth.
To a degree they must conform
to the actual case of “what is”
since if they are too far off,
our stories would kill us.
Some stories do.
Perhaps the most
pervasive and uncritically accepted
developed-world faith is its belief
in the idea of perpetual material progress,
combined with an uncritical
technological utopianism.
Back On Fire, Essays by Gary Snyder, The Mountain Spirit’s True [No] Nature p. 41
Snyder begins his essay with this observation. These sorts of faith commitments, and utopian (illusory) ideals are even more observationally the case now, as in 2002, when Snyder gave this talk at an symposium in Paris. That was twenty three years ago.
American corporations having extracted as much as they could from nature, from workers, and from trading partners of the empire, have pivoted to raw and undisguised violence through Trump administration agency. The shortest route to amassing capital is extortion, blackmail, betrayal, and murder on a global scale. Need to feed that gnawing fever for more?
Just take more. That’s all – Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Ukraine… (The list will grow)
When our expectations, another term for ideals, do not coincide with “what is” violence is the recourse…
Naturally as long as the suffering, the dying is somewhere else, its only an abstraction. But hold on, the die-off on a mass scale arrives here at home. This article originates with today’s New York Times. CLICK HERE
