Disconnecting from Disconnection
By Oak Chezar
As activists, we’re all aware that we live inside the engine of consumption that drives a whole system of global destruction through a culture of control. As citizens of this empire of war and lies and corporate capitalism’s bottom line, we’re surrounded by constant and relentless parodies of life. Parodies are distortions, perversions of reality, which can never lead to redemption or transformation. And so, our houses and cars are huge, our storage units are full, our bodies obese, but our hunger is never satisfied, because you can never get enough of what you don’t really need. So we cut more forests, invade more countries, enslave more others, produce more dangerous toys. Yet, in reality, our greatest desire has nothing to do with possessions or power, but with peace and being loved. The way to reclaim rich, authentic lives is to disconnect from the disconnection, and re-connect to the source. We need to slip free of the cultural trance we’re dancing in, and we need to turn people’s imaginations on. To live free of corporate control, we need to launch on a spree of idea regeneration.
I’ve been thinking about memes lately. Memes are idea seeds, thoughts that leap from brain to brain. Meme Theory is the study of how ideas replicate and travel: popular trends, logos, slogans, tunes, and cultural norms. In an authentic culture, the ideas percolate from the bottom up, from people with the sole agenda of describing the world and themselves in it. In a real culture, the best ideas win. But in our current culture, memes ooze down from the top, and the most repeated ideas win. Marketing messages are rammed into our brains relentlessly everyday, as advertisers spend $200 billion a year to convince us that the world is limitless, and we’re connected to nothing but our possessions. We’re also taught from childhood to deny the truths of our senses; the air stinks, the president’s lying, civilization is ugly. Adaptation, the genius of our species, is threatening to destroy us.
Maybe the problem originated in our creation
story, dreamed
up by prototypical patriarchal societies who came from places where
soils were
depleted, forests severely damaged, and droughts, floods, and famines
already
common. When the environment is severely degraded there’s little hope
of
envisioning connection and sustainability.
So, they
placed their hopes in another life, another world. We need to believe
in this
world, and begin to understand sustainability and interconnection. Maybe our own personal pain is so intolerable
that we unconsciously destroy everything that’s wild and real around
us, so
there’ll be nothing left standing to remind us where the true source of
our
power comes from. If the world’s just a strip-mine,
if
the world’s just a clearcut, our
impoverishment gets
easier to bear, because the mirrors are gone. We need to make the
unconscious
conscious, and feel the pain. We need to grieve and dive into the pain,
and
transform our poison into our medicine, and heal. Maybe
The world only changes because we do. Changing our
thoughts
will change our minds and that will change our world. The ideal fitness
lies in
connections and cooperation, empathy, community, limitation and
sustainability.
Can we become a new kind of people? The good news is that structural
change
occurs when the cultural narrative is in overwhelming crisis. Only then
is
there a possibility of a new future arising. The creation of
counterbalancing
memes can be our salvation as we expand our vision to imagine a better
culture.
It’s time for us to plant these idea seeds with our intention and take
control
of defining the memes. Activists all know about telling the story of
the
battle, but this is new territory, meme warfare, and it’s about the
battle of
the story. A battle for the hearts, minds, and
attention
spans of an ever more anesthetized society. Maybe global warming
will be
the issue that will catalyze a mass psychic break and enable us to start releasing
the assumptions of our colonized minds. We can’t drop bombs to fight
this
enemy; we need to be creative. We need to learn to cooperate with other
people
and the earth. We need to examine the memes of “progress” and
“success”.
Worldwide, we see communities rising to the challenges of global
warming,
sowing seeds and cultivating new memes. A brilliant sustainable
transportation
model in
There’s a new creation story waiting in the wings, and we can feel it readying. And there’s another story competing with it, the old story, of power and privilege and Armageddon. We can feel the hopefulness of creation competing with the finality of extinction, simultaneously unrolling across the landscape of our empire, like a race to the end of the universe. These feelings are intensifying, which is why the enforced numbing is increasing as desperate attempts at more and more parodies are thrown our way to distract us and keep us intoxicated with a system of bribes and lies.
It’s time to focus with all our hearts on the creation of new cultural narratives to re-frame the biggest story of our time, the story of competing futures. A meta story of how anti-capitalist, life affirming, democratic values out-compete multi-billion dollar ad campaigns, and our ignorance, apathy, and despair. There’s more to life than being rich, fast, young, thin, beautiful, and technologically advanced. What will save us? Not technology. Not force. Only the imagination, the ability to tell ourselves a different story; many different stories. “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need” is my current favorite meme. There are an infinite number waiting for you to plant them, and harvest them and pass them on. Let’s take the power of creation into our hands, and be farmers of the mindscape.