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To my fellow ethnic Northern Europeans
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by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Dec. 17, 2006
We Northern Europeans, following the example of
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previous empires of
the Middle East, Far East and Rome, allowed our elite to impose
terror and oppression on the rest of the world in order to enrich
themselves and we settled for wallowing happily in the scraps from
their blood feast.
Now that the elite have about finished with the
rest of the world's population, it seems that it is our turn to be
terrorized, occupied under military rule, suppressed and robbed.
What goes around comes around and we Northern Europeans are just at
the beginning of the coming around part. Maybe we will learn the
lessons from our current and future suffering that we failed to
learn from the suffering of those who came before. We have chosen to
learn from experiences we would rather not have had.
Maybe we will be able to come together to resist evil rule. But I
doubt that we will be able to free ourselves from our current evils
without the combined help of all the people of the world who yearn to
live free. We will need to come to view the legitimate interest of
all people as overlapping with and equal to our own.
Along with a solidarity of all non-elite oriented humans, there will
need to be a new common understanding of just what the enemy is. It
will be necessary to learn that responsibility for our common
suffering, and for the destruction of our life support system itself,
which threatens all future generations of all peoples of the world,
lies not with the individuals playing the roles of rulers (which is
not to excuse them their crimes), but rather with the concept of
"rule" itself.
The systems of power that have produced our tragedy are the actual
enemy. Without these systems there would continue to be individuals
with character defects that make them a problem to deal with, but,
without the positions of power that hierarchical organizations afford
them, individuals with these character defects can not have their
influence so magnified and so malignant.
A village bully is a
problem. A bully in charge of an army is a catastrophe.
We will need to understand that systems of power seek out those
individuals for high office and enforcement duty who have been
weakened by moral, ethical and intellectual defects. Only these
defective individuals can be effectively exploited by these systems
as willing tools and species traitors. The real problem is not these
individuals, the George Bushes, the Henry Kissingers, the Conrad
Blacks, the Rupert Murdochs, the Pat Robertsons and Dr.
Strangeloves of the world, but rather the systems of power that find
such impaired humans useful.
Lewis Mumford, in his seminal work The Myth of the Machine examines the
historical and anthropological origins of large scale organizations
and their deleterious effects on human life. Freddy Perlman in his
long historical essay "Against History, Against Leviathan," carries
forward the metaphor of the hierarchical organization as a new form
of life that was first introduced by Hobbes in his important book
The Leviathan, published in 1660. Whereas Hobbes saw the
submission of individuals to the will of the organization (the State
in Hobbes' time but now better understood as the giant multinational
corporation) as an inherently good thing, Freddy sees it as the
source of the evil that afflicts modern humans. Freddy identified
these large organizations as a new form of parasitic life that uses
some humans as tools to exploit masses of other humans.
What is called for is an adjustment of our collective perception that
allows us to see these large hierarchies as virtual (but actually
very real) functioning animals in their own right that parasitize and
then utilize humans much as ordinary organisms use individual cells
to construct organs. After all they do meet the criteria for a life
form. They seek out and consume energy. They grow. They reproduce.
By seeing large organizations through this biological lens as mere
emergent properties of the evolution of an intelligent social animal,
we can come to see them as creatures that parasitize human life. By
coming to this realization we create an opportunity to effectively
focus our attention and our energies on the real source of our
suffering. We will be able to stop being manipulated by these
organizations to prey on each other.
From this perspective, large scale organizations can be seen as just
another form of human parasite that needs to be combated to ensure
health for our communities. The medicine that is needed is
decentralization of power. We need to develop a dedication to taking
apart and decommissioning all large scale institutions, to decreasing
dependency on trade and long distance travel, to outlawing all forms
of organized coercion, to stop doing anything that acts to support
and energize these deadly parasites.
Granted it is hard to see how this will come about, but we don't need
to imagine the tactics and manner of our future actions in order to
take heart. Once we see the source of the problem, opportunities
will present themselves and most of these opportunities are likely to
be non-violent in nature.
Non-cooperation, as championed by Daniel Quinn in his useful book
Beyond Civilization, is likely to be a more potent poison to rid us
of these giant vermin than direct attack. For instance, once we see
national currencies and precious metals as part of the machinery of
oppression by these super beasts, we can find means to make money
local, and barter, once more, the usual thing. Once we see large
projects and production facilities as spoor of the beasts and stop
saving, large capital investment will become difficult to accomplish
and ultimately so unnecessary that the great banks and stock
exchanges will dwindle.
Once we see armies as the parasitic beasts
that they are, we can begin to find other means of self defense that
are democratic and voluntary (examine the history of the Makhnovist Movement [pdf] to see how this
is possible). When we once again organize ourselves in smaller, more
self sufficient communities, we will be able to see to our own
protection. Police and prisons will become unnecessary.
Without the influences of social degradation, anonymity and child
maltreatment, which are the source of criminal behavior, and a
salient feature of large scale social organization, the job of
ensuring security will once again be much easier. Smaller, more self-sufficient communities of mutually dependent persons, will be less
amenable to the practice of patriarchy as well as all forms of forced
labor. We need not abandon concepts of human rights, in fact we will
be unable to live without them in a world ruled by cooperation rather
than competition, love rather than greed. The good opinion of all
mankind will matter in such a world and will seldom be ignored and
impossible to manipulate.
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Individuals willingly acting in the service of hierarchical
organizations need to be seen for what they are, humans infected with
a deadly disease that affects their behavior in such a way as to make
them dangerous. Think rabies. The exercise of compassion dictates
that these people need isolation and treatment, not extermination.
"Organization Man" needs to be an epithet in common usage.
After millennia of being conditioned to believe that our survival is
predicated on submission to hierarchical authority it will be
difficult to reorient people to see such submission to artificial
authority as a symptom of disease. It will be a difficult transition
to reorient ourselves to the naturally evolved forms of organization
and authority represented by community, but the seeds are there, just
under the surface, waiting to germinate once a critical mass of
humans come to understand that allegiance to ideologies and systems
of power is a betrayal of our species.
After all, as a species, we
have lived for 99%+ of our lives in these kinds of small non-violent
communities and we have evolved to live optimally that way. The mess
we find ourselves in today is a very recent phenomena from the
perspective of the entire course of human history. One hopes that the
growing awareness of our potentially immanent doom from climatic
catastrophe will sharpen the collective will to abandon forms of
social behavior that brought about the catastrophe in the first place.
By abandoning centralized power we need not abandon anything of
importance. We can increase authentic communication between
communities as the influence of propaganda wanes.
In fact, such forms
of authentic communication can be expected to flourish, along with
all forms of art and literature. We can build great libraries. We
can expect a degree of comfort and dignity of circumstance that is
very acceptable and a great deal simpler and less stressful.
By
abandoning centralized systems of power we will not be going
backward, as the propagandist of centralized power would have us
believe, but instead we will be going forward with the project of
human development. By decentralizing and de-industrializing we will
address the looming problems of climate degradation and mass
extinction by shifting to less energy dependent ways of living and we
will have more leisure time to boot.
Industrial civilization is all about mechanization, quantity over
quality. But a sustainable future can incorporate much that is of
value from the industrial civilization that proceeded it. We will
need to abandon the environmentally destructive practices but not the
knowledge brought about by ethical scientific exploration. We need
not see our future as unpleasant, just different. Much of our
current system of agriculture will have to be abandoned very
quickly. Industrial agriculture is not necessary to feed our
populations. We can feed ourselves better by intensive systems of
horticulture such as Permaculture.
We can deliberately set about to decrease the human population by non-
violent means and make room for our relatives from other species. We
can create an Eden, if not for ourselves, then for future
generations. Or we can just give up, give in, and wait for our
extinction. It is a choice.
Jefferson is famously quoted as saying "The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
With all due respect to Thomas, he might have said that we are
condemned to bleed as long as we tolerate tyrants.
So, metaphorically speaking, we are now living in an age of dragons.
Rather than setting out to make war on the dragons, fight on their
own ground, and attempt to slay them, why not just stop feeding them?
© by the author.
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A village bully is a problem.
A bully in charge of an army is a catastrophe.
We will need to understand that systems of power seek out those individuals for high office and enforcement duty who have been weakened by moral, ethical and intellectual defects.
Only these defective individuals can be effectively exploited by these systems as willing tools and species traitors.
The real problem is not these individuals, the George Bushes, the Henry Kissingers, the Conrad Blacks, the Rupert Murdochs, the Pat Robertsons and Dr. Strangeloves of the world, but rather the systems of power that find such impaired humans useful.
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Dr. Herb Ruhs & grandson
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