Good Order or Chaos

It is a simple matter-- mythic ideas structure our culture-world, with the aim of keeping Chaos, from without and within, from overwhelming us. Hopefully, they give the world we live in, the lives we live, meaning, make us feel connected to the whole of life, structure our ways of life to good order.

We know that our mythic ideas have faded, or have failed us. Foremostly, we live in an order that is believed to create the best order possible to actually-existing humans, but which in reality is a chaotic order which doesn't in fact do this, and most importantly, is destroying the Biosphere as part of its normal operations. Many people now accept this assessment as true, but also accept the way things are as necessary to good order, and in any case inevitable. Which is completely mad.

In such a process of decline and fall of a civilization, you would expect to find bizarre decadence everywhere, as is standard in depictions of that classic example of decline and fall, the Roman Empire-- think of Nero, Caligula. But we have become inured to decadent entertainments readily available in the media, and we know that what could be described as decadent behaviors have become a commonplace over the civilized world. But we don't even use the word 'decadent' anymore, as we don't use 'evil'. What we have achieved, really, is a kind of liberal nihilism which supports individual freedom, human rights, humanitarian concern, but at the same time doesn't actually believe in morality as a 'privileged discourse'. Which is completely mad. Yes, we live in a mad world, where black is the new white, where everything is likely to be quite different from how it is presented and how it appears to be, where people are swamped with information and yet most of them don't seem to have a clue. It's the prevalent condition.

I have myself developed in the culture, so I know how disorienting and corrupting it can be, even if early-on I saw and felt much of the very wrongness of it. As far as I can tell, during my lifetime-- and I am 60 years old now-- the expectations we had when I was young, that the world was, would become, a better place, have not been borne out. Yet there have been improvements in some areas, mainly as a consequence of the cultural revolution of the Sixties. But the reality seems to be like 'with one hand we deal out good, while our other hand deals out ill'.

I don't have the solution to this ultimately annihilating dilemma, but I think the place to start, the one hope, is for people to disengage psychically from this toxic, deranging world civilization, even if they have only limited means to withdraw from it in terms of the means of making a living and of determining their material way of life. This means that we must, as best we can, put up a barrier between what tends toward Good Order and what tends toward Chaos, and we must determine, as much as possible, to live on the right side of it, psychically and behaviorally-- to live for Good Order and shun Chaos-- something like with the early Christians (horrors! cries my pagan soul). But that's what it will take-- a kind of saintly heroism that takes on the actually-existing world and presents a radical, fundamental, shocking alternative-- a culture of Ecological Wisdom structured by the necessary mythic ideas, which may sound, and certainly will be called, extreme, fanatical, crazy, witless, and be presented as a threat to all that is good and holy! This is it-- 'Life fighting for All Life'-- what has been missing, what has been ignored, overridden, kept down. But it is the ultimate sanity and must be bold in the face of a decadent, corrupt world-- Ecology.