When our ancestors first traded the liberty of hunting and gathering in the forests
for the hard labor of the fixed farming life, they laid the foundations for the world we live
in today. In place of gifts and sharing, we have competition and the “scarcity economy,”
which develops and manufactures more and more new commodities in order that something
may still be scarce enough to fight over. In place of our faith that nature would
provide for us as its children, we have the defenses science affords us as it spins the last of
our natural resources into war machines and waste. In place of the joys of wandering new
and changing landscapes, we have cities that double as corporate theme parks, linked by
dual tourist and commuter tracks. . . while the final fugitive aspects of existence are reduced
to binar y code for virtual reality. We won’t trust anything to chance—and thus
chance cannot entrust us with anything greater than our routines, our expectations, our
control manias.
Perhaps this world will never be free of misfortunes—people will always die before
they are ready, just as perfect relationships will end in r uins, adventures be cut short by
catastrophes, and beautiful moments be forgotten. But what is most heartbreaking is the
way we flee from those inevitable truths into the arms of more horrible things. It may be
true that ever y man is fundamentally on his own, and that life is capricious and sometimes
cruel—but it doesn’t have to be true that some people starve while others destroy
food or buy mansions. It doesn’t have to be that men and women are forced to waste their
lives away working to serve the hollow greed of a few rich men, just to survive; it doesn’t
have to be that we let meaningless traditions and doctrines autopilot our lives into bewildering
voids. It doesn’t have to be that we never dare to tell each other what we really want,
to share ourselves honestly, to use our talents and capabilities to make life more bearable—
let alone more beautiful. That’s unnecessary tragedy, stupid tragedy, pathetic and pointless.
It’s not even utopian to demand that we put an end to farces like these. It is simply our fear
of trying and failing with success in reach that restrains us from letting ourselves believe
that these absurdities can be transcended. But fear, once recognized for what it is, can ser ve
a different purpose: if we make a practice of doing what we fear most, it will guide us with
more certainty than any compass over the unnecessary boundaries we have built around
ourselves, and into ne w worlds.
Let us be great enough to follow our fears out of this darkness, to recognize and face
the real, inescapable tragedies of our lives, and to contest the rest without hesitation or
doubt. Could it be that the bountiful jungles of old still wait for us somewhere beyond the
edges of this factory farm civilization, and that all we have to do to be free is to drop the
anxieties and tools of control, and set out into them?
Against the farcist pigs! Smash farcism! Be Free!!!