Meditation #82: Some ramblings about society

Today is a pretty nice day, and days like this always make me lament having to go to work. A day like today makes me realize what a shame it is that we are all born into this society that we are expected to partake in without question. We have to maintain the status quo to sustain the status quo.

It just highlights to me how unfair it is that we are born into this cycle of having to go to work, having to go places, having to do anything. To sustain the society we live in we have to participate in the society we live in.

I always think of the animals in the wild. When the fox wakes up in the morning, he’s not like, “Well, guess I’ve gotta go do the thing now.” No. When they wake up they think, “I’m hungry,” so they go get food. When they think, “I’m thirsty,” they go get water. When they think, “Ack, a bear!” they run away. They don’t think about it, and they don’t have to ignore their urges.

They just respond to their environment as it happens, and that’s it. They don’t have to ignore their urges to. The fox isn’t like, “I’m really hungry I should go find some food. But, ah, it’s not lunchtime yet. I guess I’d better get these TPS reports done first.” No, they just do what they have to do to survive in that moment and that’s that. But we can’t. We have this structure, and we’re just born straight into it, and we have to do what we have to do to survive within the structure. We don’t get to just do what strikes us in any given moment, because if we all did that then society would collapse. (Or so they say. I’m skeptical of that to some degree, but never mind that for now.)

And yet, although we’re human we are still animal. What we have built, this society, is no less natural than what any other animal builds. More complex, more destructive, more problematic, but no less natural. And like a beehive, it’s built to ensure our survival. We developed this thing called “society” as insurance against an unknown future. We built it and agreed, implicitly if not explicitly, to give it our time and our freedom in return for protection from bad things that could happen. Starvation, freezing to death, being suddenly homeless, getting stabbed in the face, etc.

And yet, we end up giving it so much more, too. It’s like we’ve said, “Alright, society, I feel pretty confident I’m not going to freeze to death or starve naked in the streets. Thanks for that. Now I think what I really want is a leather recliner. I’ll give you some more of my time and my freedom for that, too.” I think what I’m looking for isn’t a return to “nature,” because that’s where we already are. We’re natural, and our society is by extension natural. What I want to find is a simplification, a simple appreciation of not freezing to death or starving naked in the streets, and a contentment that that’s enough. That survival is enough. That comfort and convenience is overrated. Having access to every movie ever made isn’t necessary. Having a car that goes from 0-60 in five seconds is far from fundamental. Even having a house with a different room for every possible activity is hugely overrated. (Seriously, you can only be in one room at a time. Why are you paying for so many empty rooms?)

And yet, perhaps it isn’t the society at all that’s at fault. We don’t look at the beehive and think, “Oh, poor bees. They’d be so much freer and happier if they didn’t have to work for the hive all day.” Of course not. The bees are happy doing what bees do. And ‘happy’ doesn’t even factor into it, really. To be happy assumes there is another way to feel. It assumes feeling at all, and feelings are just tags assigned to thoughts. To a creature like a bee, that doesn’t even come into the picture. They don’t have a consciousness that forces them to assign value to their experiences. That’s something only we higher primates are burdened with. We have the ability to think about counterfactuals. We alone can daydream and think about what life could be like “if only.”

So really I shouldn’t be raising my fist at society, I should be raising it at consciousness. I should be wishing to be as simple and oblivious as a bee.

 

Meditation #40: Wolves and otters don’t complain.

Edward Abbey, environmentalist and novelist, wrote in his book Desert Solitaire that animals “do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.”

We should take this as instruction for our own lives. We are just animals, after all, albeit rather clever ones. But cleverness comes with its own problems, as it makes us feel  like we are better than and separate from the rest of nature.

We aren’t. We’re the same flesh and blood, guts and grime, bones and teeth as other mammals. We’re made of the same elements, so everything that applies to them applies to us as well.

In other words, take a tip from nature when life doesn’t seem to be going your way: What would the wolf or the otter or the deer or the ostrich do?

Simply: quietly continue on.