As a writer with an unruly muse, I’ve gotten used to accepting inspiration no matter the quarter from which it arrives. Even for me, though, this essay is a little odd. We’re going to be talking about one of the weirdest movies of the early 1970s, which is of course saying something; about a widely praised short story by a major science fiction author from the same era; and about what these two products of the same cultural movement have to say about the nature of human society, and thus about the kinds of futures we can expect as industrial civilization winds down.
The movie in question is the John Boorman film Zardoz, which premiered in 1974. It was one of the less fortunate beneficiaries of the early-70s attempt, doubtless inspired by the psychedelic excesses of the previous decade, to make movies profound through sheer visual disorientation. You probably remember it, on the off chance that you remember it at all, because it featured Sean Connery in crossed bandoliers, thigh-high boots, a bright red jockstrap, and nothing else. There’s also a novelization, by Boorman and coauthor Bill Stair, which I read long before I saw the movie. (12-year-olds in those days had free run of paperback SF novels but weren’t allowed into theaters to watch movies that featured lots of bare breasts.)
I’ll summarize the setting for those who haven’t seen the movie. The year is 2293 and the earth is devastated. Humanity still survives, but is divided into two populations: the primitive Brutals, who eke out a precarious living in the wasteland, and the Eternals, a privileged minority who live in the Vortex, a community guarded by force fields, where birth and death have been made obsolete by advanced technologies. To keep the Brutals from overpopulating, the Eternals have created a warrior society, the Exterminators, who are supplied with firearms and lectures on zero population growth by a gigantic flying head of stone, the fake god Zardoz.
All is not well in the Vortex, however. Unable to die, many of its privileged inhabitants have lost their will to live and exist in a dull trance state, and their number is growing. Alongside these Apathetics, who are quite literally wrapped in plastic for storage purposes, there is an underground movement of Renegades who are scheming to overthrow the Vortex, even though they run the risk of being subjected to artificial aging if they are caught. Yet the Renegades have a secret weapon the rulers of the Vortex do not expect: Zed, one of the Exterminators—yes, that’s Sean Connery—who is being secretly prepared for a mission that will send him into the Vortex itself and bring the whole system crashing down.
No, it’s not especially original. Those of my readers who know their way around the fiction and films of the era will recall plenty of changes rung on similar themes—the 1976 Michael York vehicle Logan’s Run comes to mind—and like most of the supposedly avant-garde ideas of the late 20th century, those ideas had already been explored at length by writers during the golden age of science fiction in the 1930s. (Fans of Clark Ashton Smith may recall his elegant 1938 story “The Dark Age.”) The reason it came to mind now has less to do with the film itself than with a thoughtful little book titled Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo, published two years ago by a left-wing press in London and recommended to me by a reader a few weeks back.
I found Galluzzo’s book well worth reading, even though—in fact, specifically because—I disagree sharply with its conclusions. There’s a lot of food for thought in its 74 pages, and most of this will be passed by without comment in this essay. What I want to discuss is a movement of thought that Galluzzo discusses, and the way that this movement’s relation to the lurid imagery of the film casts an uncomfortably clear light on why that movement failed and why its current equivalents are failing just as dramatically.
The movement in question did quite a bit to shape the cultural tone of the late 20th century. It included, among many other influential figures, novelists Ursula K. Le Guin and Russell Hoban, philosophers Ivan Illich and Theodore Roszak, psychologist Norman O. Brown, and scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Intellectually diverse as they were, their common themes were a principled rejection of the technocratic utopianism of the era and a quest for a more ecological sensibility and a more decentralized politics. It’s one contribution Galluzzo makes that he highlights this movement and gives its members a good name: “critical Aquarians.”
It’s a useful category. I find it especially striking because many of the writers and thinkers in this category had a potent influence on my thinking when I was in my twenties, and the Seattle Public Library’s downtown branch—well stocked in those days with critical Aquarian writings—was my main refuge from the tedium of the minimum wage jobs I took back then to scrape by. I read all the authors just named and many more of the same kind. Those readers who are familiar with them will easily be able to follow the footprints of their ideas in my writings to this day.
Nonetheless I moved, over the course of a decade of reading, from an uncritical embrace of critical Aquarianism to a recognition of the internal contradictions of the movement, and the way those guaranteed its failure as a meaningful response to the crisis of industrial society. That was what Galluzzo’s book brought to mind—that, and a recognition that the issues in question remain live today. Thus I don’t think it’s a waste of time to glance across the bleak future landscape of Boorman’s film and spend a little while talking back to the flying head that claims to be a god.
Let’s start with Galluzzo’s analysis of the way the movie maps onto the social world of the present and recent past. To him, the Vortex represents the industrial capitalism of the developed world, and especially its privileged classes, sheltered by force fields nearly as tangible than the ones in the movie. The Brutals, in turn, are the rest of the world’s population, and the devastated landscape stands for the slightly less ravaged planet on which we happen to live these days. On this foundation he erects a familiar sort of social criticism, but illumines it in interesting ways.
He is particularly concerned with the currently fashionable ideologies of Silicon Valley, with their obsessive attempts to flee from nature and embrace a wholly artificial existence of robot bodies and computer-generated pseudorealities. Here his analysis is particularly strong, as he points out just how much that fantasy depends on the covert exploitation of the world of nature it supposedly transcends, just as our current industrial societies depend on the extraction of wealth from the underdeveloped (and never-to-be-developed) nations of the global South.
One resource he deploys in his discussion is Ursula K. Le Guin’s acclaimed 1973 short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Like most good works of fiction, Le Guin’s story violates all the rules you were taught in college. It has no viewpoint character and no real plot. It’s a narrative about the city of Omelas, a far more appealing utopia than Boorman’s Vortex. Yet the happiness of the city depends on the fact that a child is imprisoned in a basement room in utter misery. Most of the citizens are fine with this, perhaps reflecting that you can’t have an Omelas without breaking eggs, but there are those who can’t accept it and leave town.
That’s the story. As this summary suggests, it’s full of moral ambiguities that Le Guin never resolves. Critics have pointed out tolerably often that none of the people who walk away from Omelas ever get around to doing anything about the child’s misery. None of them, for example, seem to consider the possibility of slipping into the room in the dark of night and taking the child with them to a better life somewhere else, much less doing something more active along the lines of Boorman’s Renegades. Their sole concern seems to be making sure that nobody can blame them for participating. “Virtue signaling” is a harsh phrase, but it does seem to fit here.
What makes this yet more challenging is that it points straight to one of the core weaknesses in the entire critical Aquarian movement. That movement rarely proceeded from theory to action, and when it did, its tentative ventures toward the real world never went far. The mild, slightly fusty odors of the university library and the scholar’s study always clung to it. Since the movement was dominated by university professors—that is to say, beneficiaries of the very social order they attempted to critique, dependent on that order for their salaries, benefits, and social status—there were sharp limits to just how far the critical Aquarians ever tried to pursue their vision. In effect, the constant concern of the movement was figuring out just how far out they could go and still get back to the faculty club in time for lunch.
That concern becomes painfully clear in some places. I’m not sure whether Galluzzo would consider Joseph Campbell to be one of his critical Aquarians, for example, but he was surely a formative voice in that broad movement of the collective mind. His tetralogy The Masks of God devotes a book each to primitive (sic) mythology, south and east Asian mythology, and ancient Mediterranean mythology. The fourth book? No, it doesn’t deal with modern mythology, even though there’s no shortage of myth in circulation these days that could benefit from a clear assessment: the myth of progress, the myth of the human future in space, and the myth of apocalypse are just three examples that come instantly to mind.
Instead, Campbell beat a hasty retreat to literary criticism, which was after all the focus of his day job as an English professor, and filled the pages of a hefty book with reflections on works well removed from the popular myths of his day and ours. The same thing happens all through the literature of critical Aquarianism: its authors were enthusiastic radicals about anything that didn’t affect their lives directly. Nor, by and large, did their convictions lead them to abandon the comfortable positions so many of them held. The great problem with the ones who walk away from Omelas, it turns out, is that while they’re always walking away, they never actually leave.
Now of course there were plenty of ringing calls for action in the literature of critical Aquarianism. Quite reliably, though, the action was supposed to be done by someone other than the author. I long ago lost track, for example, of the number of figures in that movement who called for the rise of a new ecological religion that would harness the energies of faith in the service of nature. Only in the rarest of cases, however, did the people who proclaimed these new faiths embrace their carefully manufactured belief systems themselves, least of all with the wholehearted belief of the genuine convert. No, they wanted other people to sacrifice themselves for Gaia. The inevitable result was that those new religions were one and all stillborn.
This same habit reached a bitter zenith of irony in the writings of Theodore Roszak, whose magisterial Where the Wasteland Ends had an immense influence on my thinking. In his early book The Making of a Counter Culture, he became one of the first serious intellectuals to proclaim the Baby Boom generation as the harbingers of the great Aquarian transformation. His last book, The Making of an Elder Culture, was thus a plaintive jeremiad trying to talk the Boomers into fulfilling the utopian role he had assigned them, before they finished the normal human trajectory toward senility and death. I know of no reason to think that any significant number of them heard the call; history shows in harsh detail how few have responded to it.
Galluzzo’s own ringing call for a green ecosocialist future in the last chapter of his book, though it avoids quite so explicit an embrace of absurdity, falls victim to the same difficulty in a less blatant manner. Of course the revolutionary Marxist proletariat is as mythical as a hippogriff these days, but even if that fabulous beast were to put in an appearance, its members would not be likely to choose their reading material from among thoughtful, heavily footnoted ecosocialist reviews of 1970s movies. Nor, I think, is there any great risk that Galluzzo’s reflections will be adopted in any other way as the guiding light of a mass movement.
Yet there’s a deeper issue here, because even if some bizarre turn of events brings Galluzzo’s book or the ecosocialist ideas he wants to promote into the hands of a genuine rabblerouser who can do something practical with it, the chance that it will have the kind of results Galluzzo has in mind might best be measured in imaginary numbers. There’s a reason for that, and it can be seen in a detail that Galluzzo mentions but (as I see it) misinterprets: the fact that, as research for his film, John Boorman toured a series of California communes, which he described as “sterile.”
Galluzzo responds archly to that assessment by saying that this was “a term not often associated with the back-to-the-land movement,” but Boorman’s assessment was wholly correct. Plenty of participants in that movement proclaimed that they were building a new society that would inevitably replace the old. Au contraire, most of the communes imploded within a few years, and the few survivors lingered on as brittle, fragile anachronisms propped up by financial inputs from the society their members claimed they were rejecting. As a genuine alternative to the status quo, they were just as sterile as Boorman guessed.
Nor was this outcome any surprise to those who know the history of alternative communities. Since the early years of the 19th century, when Charles Fourier’s giddy prophecies launched the first great wave of communes, there have been thousands of attempts to design and build a new society according to abstract first principles. The average lifespan of those which actually got built is about two years. What’s more, those that outlived the odds reliably got drawn back into the society they thought they were replacing, until all that remained of the original transformative impulse were fading memories and a few nostalgic habits.
What makes this especially challenging is that the same thing is consistently true of the more grandiose project in which Galluzzo puts his hopes, the Marxist vision of socialism as the inevitable next stage of human social organization. Here again, socialism has been tried many times, and when it doesn’t simply fall flat—as it often does—it soon settles back into the mold of the society it tried to replace. What’s more, despite the fossilized rhetoric that surrounds it, more than a century has gone by since Marxism has had any particular appeal to working classes; its partisans these days are intellectuals from middle class backgrounds—the same audience that rallied around criticial Aquarianism back in the day, right down to the fine details—and the criticisms leveled at that movement above are just as applicable to today’s ecosocialist circles.
This brings the unintended ironies in Galluzzo’s work to a very sharp edge. Pay attention to the interviews Boorman gave around the time Zardoz was released and it’s clear that the Vortex isn’t intended to portray modern capitalist society. Rather, it’s a carefully drawn and unsparing portrait of the movement that Galluzzo thinks will replace capitalist society. Critical Aquarianism, in other words, was never a challenge to the Vortex—it was the Vortex. Sedulously shielded from the Brutal realities of life behind potent force fields of middle class privilege, the critical Aquarians went through the motions of their artificial lives under the pretense that their actions mattered. As the pretense wore off, many of them became Apathetics or Renegades, though this took a less dramatic form than it did in the movie: a haircut, a new wardrobe, and a change of reading material usually did the trick quite adequately.
We can take this further, though, because Galluzzo isn’t wrong in pointing out that the artificial existence of the Vortex has a lot in common with the transhumanist fantasies so popular with Silicon Valley tech-bros these days. What he fails to notice is that the movement he supports doesn’t differ from those fantasies in any way that matters. Central not only to Marxism but to the entire spectrum of radical political ideologies in the Western world is the conviction that human nature is entirely a product of cultural forces, and these in turn are produced by such material considerations as the ownership of the means of production.
It’s a perennial theme of these ideologies that the way people behave nowadays is entirely capitalism’s fault. Replace the current system with a alternative based on some other ideology, and in theory, people will behave the way well-meaning leftist intellectuals think they ought to behave. Notice how close this is to the tech-bro dreams just mentioned. In both cases, you’ve got a bunch of intellectuals insisting that humanity is nothing more than raw material to be reshaped into whatever form their ideology demands. It’s purely a difference of means: the tech-bros want to make the rest of us conform to their fantasies by way of new technologies, the socialists want to do exactly the same thing by way of new social forms.
We don’t yet know how the tech-bro version will turn out, though the evidence so far suggests that “not well” is a good summary. We do know how the radicals’ version works, and the same summary applies even more forcefully. No matter what kind of social straitjacket you force them into, as the saying is, humans gonna human. Even if you take children, isolate them from society, and raise them according to ideologically correct notions—and of course this has been tried, too, many times over—you’re not going to end up with angels.
What you’ll end up with, rather, are brittle, neurotic, unhappy children poorly equipped for life, because human beings are organisms, not machines. They have their own hardwired imperatives, put there by millions of years of evolution, and this means that they can’t simply be programmed in any way you like. In exactly the same way, what Galluzzo and his peers are trying not to realize is that societies are organisms, not artifacts. You can sometimes improve them in certain ways, within certain hard limits, but trying to construct one from scratch on the basis of some seemingly plausible theory is like claiming that you can design and build a better tree.
I think this is one of the things that Boorman had in mind when he made the fake god Zardoz a gigantic flying head. Part of that image came from The Wizard of Oz, as the film itself makes clear, but it’s also a mordant critique of talking heads, notionally disconnected from the realities of embodied existence, who preach whatever doctrines benefit the inmates of the Vortex: a class to which too many of the critical Aquarians belonged, and also one well represented in today’s notionally alternative culture.
The stunning final scene of the film, in which the wrecked flying head becomes a Paleolithic cave dwelling, offers a crisp rebuttal to that pretense of detachment. It reminds us that inside every talking head, the same primeval patterns remain, as powerful and irrefutable as they have always been. Any meaningful attempt to make sense of the futures that will take shape as industrial society unravels will have to take those inescapable patterns into account.
Excellent post! I think I’ve personally treaded the path from Idealist Utopian, to now accepting the vagaries, evils and uncertainties of the world. I fear that I may be turning into one of those cynical Apathetics! Any tips for avoiding that fate?
Three paragraphs in, I couldn’t help thinking that someone had been speed-reading Plato while tripping on acid… 😉
Nice article!
Not directly related, but did you ever get into the author Gene Wolfe? Despite reading fantasy and Sci-fi for a lot of my life, I only recently read him, and I’m obsessed.
Wow. What an interesting post. It really helps clarify the forces in play that shaped our culture in the past, and how it arrived to where we are today. Gonna have to reread this one a couple more times.
JMG wrote, “…to make movies profound through sheer visual disorientation.”
The movie “Easy Rider” comes to mind, a drug filled story which cinematically is quite impressive.
It appears that the wealth and expansion of the middle class in the U.S. after WW2 through about 1980 allowed for a more leisure pace in life with less stress, but in turn also allowed for the increase of recreational drug use – the effects which are still being felt today. This drive to create or exist in a fantasy reality today seems to be a significant obstacle to dealing with The Long Descent.
One modern myth i prescribe to is Arthur Koestler suggestion that we need a new calendar and his theory was, pardon me if its bad paraphrase folks, that our condition of life ending solely on our own through earthly tribulations ended after the first atomic weapon was unleashed. Now there we can all die together at blink of an eye. Therefore today i say Happy new Year P.H. 79 folks
The 1970s certainly had a lot of memorable dystopian future movies and shows: Soylent Green, most of the Planet of the Apes movies, Zardoz, Logan’s Run, A Clockwork Orange, Rollerball. They were certainly evocative of the spirit of the times. 1970s Hollywood cinema in general had a reputation for being notoriously dark and gritty. G-rated movies almost completely disappeared! One has to wonder what would have happened had George Lucas died in a motorbike accident and Steven Spielberg was eaten by a shark in terms of popular culture!
You wrote: “It’s a perennial theme of these ideologies that the way people behave nowadays is entirely capitalism’s fault. Replace the current system with a alternative based on some other ideology, and in theory, people will behave the way well-meaning leftist intellectuals think they ought to behave. Notice how close this is to the tech-bro dreams just mentioned.” This next to a picture of soldiers with the caption: “Khmer Rouge soldiers. Like so many others, they thought they were creating a better world.”
Reminded me of another movie quote: “Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that”
—- Malcolm Reynolds’s, “Serenity”
And round and round we go. ‘‘Twas ever thus?
Thanks for the as-usual insightful essay. Yes, a bit unusual but only the vector as opposed to theme. I so enjoy this site!
You got to that one quick. For those who missed it, I mentioned Galluzzo’s book and my own review of it in the last open post. You can read my review here:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/zardoz-critical-aquarians-and-degrowth-utopias
One thing I liked about Galluzzo’s book was how it he talked about imperfection in utopia, and how he supports degrowth, though I weary of Marxism in critical literature.
I suppose that is why I have enjoyed so much music from independent labels, and books by independent researchers and publishers. They are at least creating their own thing while they are talking. Rather fond of musty libraries though, much better for information / knowledge searching than google.
The way I see it is these and other independent types forming their own subcultures beneath whatever the neocameralist McGovCorp has running if that is the direction the overtaking entrpreneurial class moves things (as it seems to me at the moment).
Thats darkly funny to this Gen Xr that Roszak thought the boomers were our saviors. To that all I can say is OK
I remember that movie. Charlotte Rampling’s character’s hormones turned on during her attempt to interrogate Zed and the machine called it out for everyone else to see. It was definitely a weird movie.
As for “Now of course there were plenty of ringing calls for action in the literature of critical Aquarianism. Quite reliably, though, the action was supposed to be done by someone other than the author.”
That instantly reminded me of Richard Heinberg. He had this brilliant plan to move 50 million Americans from the cities to organic subsistence farms where there could do handicrafts in their copious spare time. He of course was excluded from that group because of his expertise. This was all laid out in “Muse letter 189” which has since gone missing from the archive. At the time it made me mad enough to stick in my mind.
Speaking of hypocrisy, “In just 9 months, Mark Zuckerberg has cruised in his superyacht so much that the $300 million vessel has burned 2 million liters of diesel and spewed 5,300 tons of CO₂. The Facebook co-founder has now sent his yacht to the La Ciotat shipyard in France for repairs and upkeep.”
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/mark-zuckerberg-superyacht-in-repairs-08052025.php
A yacht tender also follows the main yacht around of course.
Partly inspired by the discussion on the Mitigation post, I wrote a new poem called: Adapt, Adopt, Adept
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/adapt-adopt-adept
Your statements near the end remind me of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” I’ve always found that one haunting.
The poem’s moral is quite simple: no matter how far “social progress” takes us (commanded by what he fittingly calls “the gods of the marketplace”), the natural “gods of the copybook headings” will always remind us of the brutal realities of life.
@David Ritz: G-Movies are dead again. Hasn’t exactly been a good thing for cinema, especially if you’re a parent.
The exterminators outfits look ridiculous. Also ugly and not terribly practical for warfare/trying to harm others who are either running away or fighting back. You’d lose a battle with a thornbush and are vulnerable to sunburn, a thrown rock or being poked with a pointy stick, and you’re easy to see from a distance. I bet they weren’t thought up by someone who had to wear them, either in universe or as actors.
Thank you from a 71 year old Boomer. Unlike most of the movies seen since the 70s this one stuck. I need to re-view it.
As I mentioned in my review, the seventies were the golden age of SciFi films until Star Wars came along and fracked it all up. Death Race 2000 is a particular favorite.
John:
IMO, perhaps the greatest clairvoyance ever put to music: Jonathan King “Everyone’s Gone To The Moon”. What do you think? Didn’t he nail the dystopia we’ve created pretty much exactly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ks2TPPyho&list=RD73ks2TPPyho&start_radio=1
I can hardly think of a thing we’ve “bettered” in the last sixty years which didn’t, ultimately, turn out to have severe downside consequences arguably worse than the problems. Where is the learning and wisdom?
A few years back you wrote a very helpful and hopeful post on spiritual warfare. Maybe a follow on post, might be the missing, magical ingredient?
re: silicon valley
The top level “tech bros” are very different people to the rank and file, which as I understand it these days, have all gone dangerhair and troonytunes. And the ones that haven’t, got boiled off. I think I would summarize and say it’s probably the greatest collection of imbalances the world has ever seen. Not many normies there. It’s definitely the most family hostile place I’ve ever seen, which means it ultimately doesn’t have a future. Ironic for such a forward looking and thinking place. Perhaps they sense that at some level and part of their thinking is trying to stave off that lack of future? Don’t know.
I can’t tell you how many times I saw someone get married, have kids and then a few months later announce they were leaving for some other part of the country, because they now have kids and well, silicon valley is family hostile.
There were a class of people having families and putting up with the misery though – H1Bs. They’d put up with just about anything. Management loved them for that. A little too much. It was really depressing to watch.
—
Is it just me or does that flying head look a lot like Karl Marx?
I think I know who inspired this week’s post… *g*
As for the tech-bros, no, they’re not planning to reshape humanity; they’re planning to replace it with AI, according to this article: https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/did-an-ai-company-just-fire-someone
Apparently, the discussion among these people isn’t about whether humanity should be omnicided, but HOW.
I first wondered if I should post it on the covid forum, because it does throw a certain light on how that one went…
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current only to 7/14). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May
J Guadalupe Villarruel Zúñiga, father of CRPatiño’s friend Jair, who suffers from terminal kidney and liver damage, respond favorably to treatment and be cared for at home. May he also remain in as good health as possible, beat doctors’ prognosis, and enjoy with his wife and children plenty of love, good times and a future full of blessings.
May 12 year old Sebastian Greco of Rhode Island, who recently suffered a head injury, make a prompt and complete recovery with no lasting problems.
May MindWinds’ father Clem be healed of his spinal, blood and cardio infections and returned to good health and wholeness; and may he and his family keep up a robust sense of humor and joy in each others’ continued company.
May Marko’s newborn son Noah, who has been in the hospital for a cold, and Noah’s mother Viktoria, who is recovering from her c-section, both be blessed with good health, strength, endurance, and protection, and may they swiftly they make a full recovery.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis‘s fistula heal, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Jack H.’s father John continue to heal from his ailments, including alcohol dependency and breathing difficulties, as much as Providence allows, to be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Audrey’s friend’s daughter Katie, who died in a tragic accident June 2nd, orphaning her two children, be blessed and aided in her soul’s onward journey; and may her family be comforted.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May SLClaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is undergoing dialysis for kidney disease, be blessed, and may her kidneys be restored to full functioning.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Okay, yes. I have no belief in utopia, including the capitalist mode. But I wonder: what is the essential qualities of the human organism that explains why projects to perfect society fail. What is a functional society? Has one ever been seen? Is it a problem of scale?
I remember Zardoz. Bill and I saw it a few years ago (thank God for libraries and DVDs).
What a bizarre, incoherent nightmare-scape!
A few notes on what I remember:
The Vortex inhabitants fell into apathy because they had nothing to live for. No future, no children, no past, just endless millennia of ennui.
No wonder our heroine fell madly in lust with Sean Connery! He was a real man, walking through fields of daisies wearing the loose, outward form of men. Men who obviously couldn’t sire children.
I have a practical mind and am easily distracted by practical considerations. Where did the folks in the Vortex get their food? What was the power source? Who maintained it? Who made the guns and supplied the ammo? You never see the people slaving behind the scenes in these movies or books.
Sean Connery is wearing a badly tied, poorly cut langot, one of the many, many forms of men’s undergarments developed by cultures who don’t have elastic. If you design a planet or fantasy world and don’t have elastic (or spandex), you quickly default for men to langots, fundoshis, breechclouts, loincloths, or boxers with drawstrings. Ladies have similar issues, especially since they don’t have outdoor plumbing. Traditional clothing MUST allow its user to urinate and defecate without ruining expensive, handwoven, hand-sewn garments.
Sean Connery should be wearing some kind of body armor as every warrior does, even it’s boiled leather. Maybe his coolness factor compensates for the lack of armor. Every culture’s fighting men wore armor. IIRC, a few years back, Greek special forces soldiers wore replicas of what looked ceremonial Middle-Eastern armor (Babylonian? Sumerian?) They were weirdly shaped. But when the Greek soldiers put them on, they could move easily and fight.
It’s a reminder that in Hollywood, the coolness factor and gratuitous female nudity will always trump reality, even when reality makes itself known in other ways.
@ The Other Owen #17
I wonder who folks like this think they’re building their brave new world for.
The future belongs to the people who show up for it.
If you refuse to have children and make it difficult for other people who do have families, you’ve said that the future ends with you.
I went to see Zardoz when it came out with a group of friends. We found it, well, interesting I suppose., although one of the ladies couldn’t stop giggling every time Sean Connery appeared wearing his kilt. Two thoughts on the wider issues.
There’s no doubt that that period was full of silly things and impracticable ideas, but there was also an unmistakable change in the atmosphere, and the beginning of the understanding of the importance of environmentalism. The change was rapid and unmistakable, as much in poplar culture as in government policy (the UK set up an Environment Department in, I think, 1973.) The filthy, dirty London of my youth (I though St Paul’s was made of black stone) changed radically for the better in those years, as coal fires were outlawed and vehicle emissions put under control. People began to buy and display posters with “Here is the Earth, don’t use it all at once.” Yes, a lot of Aquarian nonsense was talked at the time (I speak as an Aquarian actually) but on the whole the movement, in my observation, did more good than harm.
Which leads to the second point: the baby and the bathwater problem. George Orwell was fond of saying the Socialists never claimed to make the world perfect, only better, and the argument that the world cannot be made perfect is too easily twisted into an argument that it can’t be made better at all, so why bother. This was exactly the argument used by slave-owners and traders in Britain at the start of the nineteenth century: slavery has been around for millennia, it’s an economic necessity and no economy can manage without it, take your utopian ideas somewhere else. Alternatively, I was born in a 1930s house, one of the first to be built for rent with indoor toilets and a bathroom. Great was the scorn at the time when these plans were announced: the working class never washed, so what was the point of including bathrooms? Utopian dreamers.
That said, the remains of the Aquarian movement can be co-opted like anything else. At least in Europe, the old Green parties have turned into parodies of themselves, more interested in making life grimmer and less enjoyable than making the world better. My own impression is that sadly, the heart has completely gone out of what you describe at the Aquarian tradition, and its leaders have effectively given up.
Just add to the list of surrealist movies from that era: El Topo, anything by Werner Herzog. Did anyone mention 2001? John Lennon’s How I won the War, pretty much any of the Beattles films.
Seventies sci-fi and other genre films were willing to accept a miss or two for one hit out of the park. There is often more of a payoff, especially later on when the special effects no longer dazzle and it’s easier to notice the underlying themes (also easier when you get older). Two in particular are the original Alien (working class screwed by their employer) and Outland (crime and greed will always be with us ’cause human gonna human).
An interesting record of both movie.aking and contemporaneous views of occultism would be comparing The Wicker Man (still holds up!), the remake of The Wicker Man (Edward Woodward’s revenant should have exacted revenge for this atirocity) and Midsommer (not bad to watch but highlights so much that is irritating about the modern intellectual artist).
Following on Theresa’s comment at #21: “Traditional clothing MUST allow its user to urinate and defecate without ruining expensive, handwoven, hand-sewn garments.” Let’s not forget menstruate – without modern conveniences it can be awkward, to say the least. (Said as a man who had no trouble stopping by the relevant aisle to pick up my wife’s “feminine care” products…)
re silicon valley, the latest wave of automation of things like retail jobs and AI. I can’t help but notice that it usually seems to make life worse for ordinary people, and a lot of us don’t like it but there doesn’t seem to be an easy to avoid it or say ‘no’. It’s being forced down our throats against a lot of our wills.
In general, ‘Stop the world, I want to get off. I don’t like the future they’re making for us.’
It seems likely that such things will crash and burn in the long run due to energy and other resource constraints, but we have to live through the intervening years first, and I don’t know how long this period is going to last.
How to shorten this period, and how to live a decent life during it?
The Amish strike me as an example of a group of people who left their society and thrived. Is there something I am missing? Their lifestyle seems to be turning heads these days.
>I wonder who folks like this think they’re building their brave new world for.
Build? They stopped doing that in the ashes of the .com bubble. What arose after that was something highly parasitic. They were desperate to survive. So no brave new world. You’ll get a lot of angry talk out of them if you point this out, but much like Briggite’s Bulge – look for what they’re not denying.
Commentariat, the Apathetics aren’t cynical, they’re just passive and inert. The best advice I can give for avoiding that fate is “don’t watch television.”
Sven, a case could be made, but it wasn’t me. 😉
Bonaventure, I read the four books of The Book of the New Sun when they first came out. I haven’t read any of Wolfe’s other work, though; I should probably revisit that.
Drhooves, that was certainly part of it!
Hawk, a good-sized hurricane releases more energy than you’d get by setting off all the nuclear warheads in the world at once. I see the notion that nuclear war could exterminate our species as one more example of the overinflated human ego at work; it would kill a lot of people, sure, but leave more of us alive than there were on the planet in 1945.
David, nah, there were also plenty of G-rated movies — keep in mind that I was 7 going on 8 when the 1970s dawned, and G-rated movies were most of what I watched back then. It’s just that so many of the G-rated movies were incredibly bad. If you ever want an evening of really awful entertainment, you might try The Boatniks (1970), Pufnstuf (1970), or any of the Benji movies (1974 on).
Laughingsong, I admit to now and again, in my weaker moments, hoping that people will learn from repeated catastrophic failure. Then perspective returns, and I realize that we almost cetainly never will.
Justin, I did indeed. Your comment piqued my interest; I looked up the book, ordered a copy, and decided it would make a really good follow-on to last week’s post. Thank you for the inspiration, and also for the poem.
Siliconguy, yes, I remember when Richard did that. That was when I realized that the peak oil movement wasn’t actually going to matter two farts in a cat-5 hurricane.
EchoEcho, I’ve loved that poem since I first read it:
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm
Pygmycory, oh, granted. One of the things about early 1970s movies is that the costumes only made sense if you assumed the designers were binging on acid with a little too much rat poison in it.
Darrell, it’s readily available. I made a point of getting a copy of the novel, which is also easy to find these days.
Justin, I actually thought the first Star Wars film wasn’t bad. It was once that became a huge hit and a big money franchise that everything useful got bled out of the corpse of science fiction generally.
Gnat, it’s pretty solid.
Other Owen, fascinating. That really does support my thesis that the internet has become possessed by evil spirits — those who are too deeply enmeshed in it are becoming as crazily unbalanced and dysfunctional as the spirits themselves.
Athaia, I’m increasingly convinced that the whole large language model (“AI”) boom is going to turn out to be the most catastrophic boom-and-bust cycle in history. The sheer volume of fantasies being piled onto brute force statistical prediction promises one for the record books.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Brandi, well, what do you mean by “a functional society”? What functions do you expect it to carry out?
Teresa, oh, granted, the lack of visible means of support was rather striking. It echoed a lot of the old 1960s and 1970s communes, though, which never produced as much as they consumed (and made up the difference by drug dealing, or simply sponging off some sugar daddy or other until the cash ran out.) As for the rest, I thought Zardoz was interesting, in that it also put the male lead into a costume designed to show plenty of gratuitous flesh!
Aurelien, there were certainly some important reforms made around that same time, but I question how many of them came from the critical Aquarian movement — it’s indicative, for example, that the major environmental laws in the US (the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, for example) were all signed into law by a Republican president. As for your second point, the question there is whether socialism does actually improve anything — as I see it, it’s simply one of the ways for a managerial aristocracy to replace an agricultural aristocracy, with all the mixed benefits and drawbacks that this implies.
Stephen, there’s no shortage of other examples!
Gollios, sure. Silent Running was a major fave of mine back in the day, to name another.
Pygmycory, a useful question, and one to consider in a future post.
James, the Amish didn’t try to replace existing social forms with a brand new system drawn up according to abstract considerations. They simply didn’t want to leave the 18th century — and since they already had a functional system in the 18th century, it worked.
To be honest, I do like the original Star Wars movie and Empire Strike Back… and handful of others from the 80s. The money franchise of the whole Star Wars thing is what bled the force out of it. Glad you enjoyed the book. I thought you might find it interesting.
You responded to OtherOwen: “That really does support my thesis that the internet has become possessed by evil spirits….”
Cha, and they trained AI on it! Kinda explains everything about it really….
Yes in agreement my friend. The info of the volcano that unleashed in 536(hence the grail story revelations) had the impact of 80 neutron bombs or even higher if my memory serves me right. i just like the idea of a new calendar. He was my go to reader in the Stanford library when you were able to sneak in and read what the special people read. Great essay by the way. My muse is like punk rocker who does not accept no for an answer and if you do not answer plays hazing games with you. Hence still on this tour listening to the earth and she is funny like you say Not saying what i thinks she should say. But the more i dont think ,more is revealed.
“Hawk, a good-sized hurricane releases more energy than you’d get by setting off all the nuclear warheads in the world at once. I see the notion that nuclear war could exterminate our species as one more example of the overinflated human ego at work; it would kill a lot of people, sure, but leave more of us alive than there were on the planet in 1945.”
There has been a long-running collaborative scenario of a post-apocalyptic world where there is a different Soviet officer in charge of a key station in 1983 if you are interested.
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/1983:_Doomsday
“David, nah, there were also plenty of G-rated movies — keep in mind that I was 7 going on 8 when the 1970s dawned, and G-rated movies were most of what I watched back then. It’s just that so many of the G-rated movies were incredibly bad. If you ever want an evening of really awful entertainment, you might try The Boatniks (1970), Pufnstuf (1970), or any of the Benji movies (1974 on).”
One has to wonder if the Japanese may have conquered the world of family entertainment in the 1980s and 1990s in the same way they conquered the world of video games in our reality had it not been for the Blockbuster Era.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MediaNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983
JMG,
That was a great post. Thank you very much for this.
When we get the Nuke Plants rolling up on our moon, surely the Utopia is not far behind!
The subsidy dumpster industry continues it’s story arc to the stars.
I came of age in the seventies, and thanks to my working class background, I’ve always been suspicious of better world schemes. Forget other peoples money, it was other peoples labor that I was protective of, and the big brained theorists clean hands were a big red marker through their betterment propositions. Namely, do as I say, not as I do.
Looking forward to tracking down Zardoz, and getting some Roszak on my shelf.
This connects to a point I was thinking to add to last weeks huge comment section, but better still offers a tie in for some of my recent exploration of our Age of Aquarius.
First let me preface my point by saying that I would deeply appreciate a couple more sentences connecting the critical Aquarians to the sign of Aquarious, I think I have the vibe vaguely, but would appreciate some more threads of connection.
To my point, healing from the chaos of gender roles, and the rise of meaningful cultural forms in responce to (gestures wildly around) both are likely to start in the same place. The gutter as we call it. I went to a Rainbow Gathering national this year. Good times, I enjoyed it alot, but the gathering has changed very much in the 12 years since I last went. Smaller, more punk, less hippie, and with people much more hurt on the surface by times than there used to be; it is a much rougher and I suspect less sterile scene.
There were a fair amount of very dumb relationship drama at the event. Nudity, inexperienced young people, old people with arrested development, and copious drugs all contributing their part in fostering that. But there were also some couples I got to meet and befriend among the whole who had some very wholesome relationships which have lasted a long time and felt good to be around; none of which fit any of the molds we used to use, nor were they formless malarky; they were real partnerships forged by the one force powerful enough to connect people and over come all the cussedness and reasons that people aren’t worth connecting wiht; necessity. I meet some couples who were strong together because each person absolutely needed the other, could not do with out. Relationships and communities, and movements I think are united that people are going to be too lazy to do them well in most cases, unless then need to do them well to avoid terrible consequences.
This is why the middle class is sterile, it always has an escape hatch and a safety net. At this rainbow there were of course many middle class festival kids, and tourists, and nostalgic retirees, but there were a good number of proper gutter trash traveling kids who were their because it is a vital networking and ride hopping node in their larger culture. There isn’t an idealism in me for the specific cultural modes I saw emerging at the rainbow gathering, but seeing the ‘dirty kids’ there (a term used largely for a sub culture whose core is not in their thirties, and who are now running many important cames and infrastructure) I realized that they were an example of a culture forming based on need. There is no niche for people with their (generally) complicated histories, mental health struggles, substance histories, and so on in main stream life; but life finds a way.
If America were to follow the Soviet Union into a massive fall of power, I’d expect something like these dirty kids, or a comparable sub culture from another part of society to influence a flavor of the coming American gopnik.
It is where folks need a new social form first that the seed crystals start. Not want, dream or idealize; but need. In my home community I see this, there is some cool community going on here, even sometimes friends setting one another up for blind dates and the like, doing the things the Aquarians talked about in abstract, but not because of a bettering of human conditions, and not in the clean peaceful enlightened way. But because we cannot coverthe taxes and the insurance bills if we don’t form communial bonds and share resources in ways tat skipped a few generations.
The bright thing is a defence of the Aquarian Flying Heads. Yeah their big master plans are kinda silly, but there is a real future for some of their ideas to be scavanged by grittier more vibrant cultures, and put to use in their origional or in novel contexts. At the Rainbow Gathering I went to a meeting on intentional communities and, being in a cross mood that day because of some drama elseware, I heard the same hippie commune platatudes I’ve personally known for 20 years and can trace in history back about 60 years; and hearing that, I gave them a piece of my mind, about how the ammo and cammo compound cultures in America were anymore better hippies than the fit to be tied and dyed folk; I went on which a lot of critique beyond anything relivent to this conversation group, but I stopped to thank the collective back to the land IC culture. There are people who don’t live in flying heads who are really truly using ideas and notions and philosophy pieces left behind.
Some of the critical Aquarians did inspire people to go out and fail, and the real treasure was the failures we made along the way.
A very long time ago, during a discussion with my missionary father about the evangelical concept of “eternal life” and why, although it packed the “eternal”, it somehow seemed to lack some of the things that I associate with “life” (like death and birth), I had the “lightbulb” flash moment of revelation – which was this.
If you eliminate death, you must also eliminate birth. It stands to reason… if no one can ever leave, sooner or later you will have to stop letting anyone new come in. So, to all of those who have fantasised (in my presence) about endlessly prolonging the span of human life, and/or eliminating death, I’ve always had the rejoinder – “well, what have you got against babies?” (which often gets a doubletake – “say what?”)
And if you eliminate both birth and death, you also eliminate the whole point of the bit in the middle, which presumably involves growth, learning, risk, challenge, trial and error, (also trial and accomplishment), consequences, experience, perspective, and all of those things that can only happen during that bit in the middle, between birth and death, which we call “living”.
I have not seen Zardoz (himself has… and greatly enjoyed hearing me read this post out loud, for which he thanks you)… but the depiction of the Apathetics, in the circumstances, does not surprise me a bit. 🙂
>Other Owen, fascinating. That really does support my thesis that the internet has become possessed by evil spirits — those who are too deeply enmeshed in it are becoming as crazily unbalanced and dysfunctional as the spirits themselves
Perhaps someday, I’ll tell you the story of how I saw the equivalent of a coin flip heads 10 times in a row. Yes, there’s something not quite friendly ruling that place. I would say you stay or get boiled off, but there was something, something that I concluded was not my friend, that wanted me to stay and wanted that desperately. I’m glad I didn’t, looking back. Shrug, I wouldn’t be here, if I did. I’d be dead already.
As far as the internet in general goes, I don’t know if it’s a law, call it the Law of Internet Insanity, but if you interact with the internet long enough, it will drain all your sanity away from you. I don’t care who you are or what part of the internet you’re interacting with. Sanity – gone. I’m semi-disciplined about the time I spend on the internet these days, I don’t just sign on unless I have a reason for it first, like some question I need to answer, etc.
And with that, I’ll see you all again in a few. As the kids say – “Go touch grass”. Or mow it. The grass is calling, it’s saying “mow me, mow me”.
Well, I’ve never heard of Zardoz before, but your analysis maps very well with my experience in leftward circles. I used to be a Marxist, but I eventually became skeptical of the Marxist theory of history and realized that ‘progress’, technology, and productivism are the environmental problems, not solutions. After that I got interested in anarchism and degrowth, but as you have discovered, the degrowth movement is by-and-large impotent because it has a laser focus on making everyone else ‘degrow’ and little focus on self-degrowth. So I fell out with that ideology as well.
To give the degrowthers their due, I have found some who are genuine. But the genuine ones aren’t the affluent marketers of the project in academia, they’re usually young people who have little money to spend on consumer products anyway. The ones I’ve met in my city are very frugal and try to create systems of mutual aid that exist outside of the neoliberal market economy. They have a ‘really free market’ where people donate excess goods so other people can use them. They teach people how to sew and repair clothes, and they give gardening classes and encourage people to grow food in their yards to reduce dependence on the global food industry.
That’s the only place degrowth can be effective: self-degrowth.
I watched Zardoz by chance in a real cinema some 20 years ago. It is so rare one goes into a movie without having the slightest idea what it is about! I was duly impressed by the total weirdness of the clothes, the props and the plot.
Any reader of yours knows how much you appreciate certain books of Le Guin and Roszak. I do also remember your using the story of Ormelas in a quite different way, asking readers if they were willing to walk away. Has your thinking changed on this? It is of course easy to imagine a plot element that stops those who walk away from actually helping the child. Dissidents in the Soviet Union had a very small radius of action.
None of this is to take away from your main point, which actually reminds me quite a bit of your Wagner series.
Say what you will about their idealism, but I miss hippies. Counter cultures are now so quickly assimilated that they don’t seem to have any effect whatsoever except to inspire the next round of entertainment.
Thoughtful essay this week. I watched the movie, and found it hilarious, in an unintended horrible way. Also, a painfully obvious critique of all utopian movements: they created the perfect society, only to have it fail.
As you write about the abject failure of human-improvement schemes which are inevitably the product of abstract intellectual notions based on the fallacy of the perfectibility of humans since the writings of Rousseau, I cast my mind to the current and long-ongoing tale of the “60s Scoop” which saw thousands of indigenous children taken from their homes by child protection services and placed in well-meaning white families to raise as their own. A very large number, despite being raised from infancy, have gone back searching for their roots, because, like many schemes, it presumes humans to be far more malleable than we are. It assumes something called a universal human being, which can be interchanged with all others on the planet, if one just teaches them the ‘proper’ attitudes and beliefs.
I made a comment a few months ago about independent variables in human beings, and I think one category is genetics. I am beginning to wonder if the genetics of different pools of people don’t predispose them to certain attitudes and characteristics of the cultures from which they come, which shapes us as much as the cultures we grow up in.
The broad intellectual assumption is that culture is the dominant factor in determining behaviour, but I am beginning to wonder how little this is true, based on the aforementioned “60’s Scoop” and how very many of those children are seeking their ‘true’ heritage, rejecting the one they received and also based on the reports of identical twins separated at birth, who nonetheless, despite vastly different family upbringings, turn out to be very similar in many regards, including taste, sense of style, humour, and culture, i.e. preference for sports, music, &c.. Apparently genetics is, while not the sole determining factor, obviously a very strong one.
Furthermore, any intellectually abstract concept of ‘improvement’ is wholly to the taste of the person in question promoting such a scheme. Improve society by teaching children to be more peaceable? Produce young people who aren’t able to deal effectively with others aggression who fall apart when the going gets hard. Improve society by making people more in touch with their feelings? Generation who gets easily upset when things don’t go their way. Whatever is defined as ‘improvement’ invariably has a downside, usually never considered, often a critical weakness.
“a good-sized hurricane releases more energy than you’d get by setting off all the nuclear warheads in the world at once” – I would object that if the average inhabitant of East Providence had to choose between ONE nuclear warhead or one cat-5 hurricane to hit the city, only very few people will be convinced by this logic to choose the former.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Hey JMG
I have had a curiosity about watching Zardoz, and also Galuzzo’s commentary on it, for a long time. I think I should finally indulge in it.
But in regards to the Critical Aquarians, I think being all theory and no practicality when it upsets their “gravy train” is a common habit for most intellectuals these days, so I don’t think one can say that it is a fault unique to them. That being said, I wonder if there were any Critical aquarians who were actually active and practical in any way, or if there are any people who put there ideas into practice at least?
Mark Boyle the “Moneyless man”, an Irish writer who famously spent a year or more living without money is the only example that I can think of at the moment.
https://moneyless.org/book-moneyless-manifesto
I read The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargent in the 80’s, in that book the women were inside the walls and the men outside. I was newly married and in my 20’s and thought the book was great. I reread it a few years ago when I was in my late 50’s and my 40th anniversary was a few years away. I thought it was stupid and unrealistic. The men would have found a way to build another civilization and the women would have gossiped and back-stabbed each other back to the stone age. Who Gets To Live in the Fortress stories seem to have been quite popular for a time. Maybe it’s related to the nuke fears that boomers and gen-x were force fed.
@gnat #16 – “I can hardly think of a thing we’ve “bettered” in the last sixty years which didn’t, ultimately, turn out to have severe downside consequences arguably worse than the problems. Where is the learning and wisdom?”
Then you would probably find it interesting to talk to my father who was born shortly after WWII in a large industrial city in western Europe. The son of seemingly deeply traumatized parents whose parents in turn immigrated from eastern Europe and started with more or less nothing. Growing up in a totally grey city full of rubble, dangerous places and loneliness. From time to time – like most of the children of his age – subjected to practices that were totally normal back then but would count as child abuse today, and for good reason. He could tell you about the hard work, struggle and sometimes sacrifice – both individually and collectively as a society to raise from the rubble and out of the shadow of the past. All I can say here is that yes, they succeeded. Both: My parents and society as a whole. Not without flaws and the result is far from perfect, but they achieved a lot. And as far as my knowledge goes – 60 years ago, the most difficult part of their work had not even begun.
I understand that growing up and living in a country that hadn’t seen the kind of destruction and misery that Germany experienced (if you live in such a country) may change that perspective … a little bit – but on the other hand nothing of the basis which is already on a level that it couldn’t even be bettered in the course of 60 years is solid and granted, which is true on both sides of the Atlantic. People seem to have forgotten who they are and where they came from and are throwing it all away, bit by bit. (Just like the generation of my parents – for all they have done right – has thrown away all the good and useful household stuff they’ve gotten from their parents which would last until today if they hadn’t. Well, I guess they, too, are not without flaws 😉 )
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Reading your essay I couldn’t help but think about the habit of “intradaytrading” or “microtrading” that so many are practicing to “earn” money. A few weeks ago, for example, I observed an acquaintance casually making money during a gathering of friends in this manner. I hadn’t even noticed if I hadn’t glanced over when I put out his phone. Some other friends are making between 1 and 15 k€ a year by means of microtrading. The thing with a vortex is this – if you’re in it, it’s hard to get out and it usually pulls you in unwanted directions…
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
This is one of my favorites of all your posts through the years.
Many thanks
@JMG,
I’m thinking Battlestar Galactica (aka Exodus in Space) deserves a rewatch these days, unless it’s just the excellent 2003 remake that had the Cylons created by Man, and rebel. “All this has happened before…”
@David Ritz, #34,
Any weeb will tell you the Japanese deserved to! There is a reason individual manga series regularly outsell the entire US comic book industry. I don’t know in terms of numbers how anime squares up against Western cartoons, but in terms of quality there isn’t much to of a contest.
Just want to provide a counterpoint to all the Star Wars hate I’m seeing. I know a lot of people here, including JMG, aren’t fans, but I think it’s valuable.
First, Star Wars and its success were a response to the self-important and often esoteric films of the time. It wasn’t loved by all, but many people wanted something fun and less heavy – the fairy tale in space was exactly what they needed. Especially if you were a kid.
I personally don’t get the “it’s just a mishmash of X and Y so it’s unoriginal” argument, but granting that, there’s no arguing Star Wars isn’t an aesthetic achievement. So many other moves tried and failed to capture the same look, and that aesthetic certainly helped resonate with the audience.
And it’s not like the story failed. My wife, who hadn’t seen Star Wars until we were dating, cried at Vader’s redemption. I know I wouldn’t have my love for storytelling or openness to spirituality had George Lucas not planted those ideas in my head.
Outside the movies, the EU has some stellar works. Star Wars became a playground for artists with all sorts of ideas. When Lucasfilm wasn’t a Disney property where everything was a calculated focus group effort, Star Wars was a great pulp setting churning out lots of entertaining stories – and some are pretty deep. I know a lot of people criticize the good-evil dichotomy of the setting, but Legacy of the Force really plays with that. It’s one of my favorite novel series.
I just hate seeing such a fun universe getting trashed all the time. I’m fine blasting the post-Disney stuff, but before then I think a good argument can be made for the franchise’s existence and why it means so much to so many people – myself very much included.
From “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’:
“They feel anger,
outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child.
But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile
place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were
done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and
be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in
Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the
chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.”
But it’s never stated *how much* the prosperity, beauty, and delight would wither and be destroyed. Would things just become ordinary? Or would there be floods, volcano eruptions, and cattle disease?
I agree that the US has never had a significant Marxist revolutionary group, but Europe certainly did. It still has many parties that trace their roots to Marxism, as do its social democracies.
I think it’s because European workers still remember when they were peasants, while the US never had a white peasant class. Memories of subjugation last a long time.
Omgosh, ZARDOZ! Haven’t thought about that movie in ages… my beau and I have it on dvd and used to watch it periodically back in the day… will certainly revisit soon with popcorn in hand after this marvelous post filled with insight and illumination… thank you JMG!
I don’t know, maybe it’s the old yogi in me but I’m starting to think that the only REAL and meaningful and vital change must come first from individual and personal transformation … and let the human collective evolve as it may.
Personal transformation (Self, soul, spiritual revelation) is hard work and in my opinion, requires Divine grace. Trying to reshape the collective just seems like so much ego drama to me. But only my opinion from my perspective. Maybe some are just born with a life mission to try to achieve social “justice”…who knows?? I’m getting very cynical in my old age… but wait… could it be wisdom😊😉?
@JMG et.al. … About the critical Aquarians and the ones who walked away from Omelas but did nothing to rescue the child …. We had a saying in my day about people like that: “N.A.T.O.” Meaning “No Action, Talk Only.”
Or as they say in Texas, “All hat and no cattle.”
What about Christianity? Didn’t Jesus come, incarnate god, to change the world? And didn’t he?