I am going to speak a lot about something I know very little about. There is a movement I sense in my group of friends. I have only let myself sense it very slightly because it hits me as something so contrary to myself and my ambitions that to comprehend it further would incur a great loss. I catch glimpses of it in their intense drive for communal living and sudden interest in foraging, debt-free living, land rights, and unemployment. They feel trapped. And they are trapped. We all are; captives of a narrative we assume occupies a sole possibility. There is some variance to the tale, but in general, we believe in certain inevitabilities or necessities: rents or mortgages, formal education, the allotted currency, employment, etc. We equate them with survival. My friends clearly recognize the charade. I myself have long read Merton’s observation that we wrap experiences around ourselves as if these rags of accomplishments were the only way we could be seen; an invisible essence made real by what is ultimately the unreal (New Seeds of Contemplation). As he says, “If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications, even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily (people) dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrication designed to protect mere fictitious identities – ‘selves’, that is to say, regarded as objects” (Raids on the Unspeakable). So I have some ground for understanding my friend’s philosophy. I am familiar with this basic concept; that we are caught in a senseless stampede with no idea why we are running, but believing or knowing full well that if we stop we will be trampled. What is new to me is the response. Rather than aspiring to run headstrong and straight into the chaos in some act of counter ethos that engages, there seems to be a belief, or a realization, that removing oneself serves our ambition best. The ambition is, of course, to save the world.
My one friend, whose thoughts I respect deeply, described it thusly: you can work in refugee resettlement, teaching English and helping people find jobs (i.e. feeding industry with cheap, disposable labor), or you can remove yourself from consumerism, consequently removing yourself from the equation that a demand for resources = conflict over said resources = people fleeing their lands = refugee resettlement.
Like my friends, I have no intent of accepting the deceptive myth of a realism that confirms the current ‘reality’. Yet I do want to deal with injustice realistically. As attractive as purist pursuits seem, returning to the laws of nature and forgoing domination of the earth or her inhabitants, I fear that path does nothing for the hungry belly now.
