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Erik Rittenberry · Follow

Jan 29 · 13 min read

Civilization Is Flinging Itself To Pieces —

Stand Back

“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians
and not to their poets.”

― Jonas Mekas
I t’s mostly all horseshit — this profane pageantry of idiocy that we call
contemporary society. If you’re being honest with yourself, you know it. You
see it all around. Don’t lie.

The nine-to-@ve, conniving insurance companies, inept institutions, outrage

addicts, “sensitivity” training, soap-opera politics, celebrity worship, 24-hour
“news” cycle, sound bites, mass consumerism, Twitter wars, identity labels, Big
Pharma, crystal healing, widespread obesity, scripted headlines and press
releases, morning talk shows, the billboard hot 100, sterile architecture, out of
control debt, rampant inJation, constant surveillance, Chris Cuomo, big tech
censorship, soulless suburbia, reality shows, Instagram models, participation
trophies, Hallmark cards, unceasing extended warranty phone calls, endless
advertising and propaganda, “war on drugs,” food additives, “fact-checkers,”
internet/spiritual gurus, ill-written self-help books, innumerable diets and
fashion fads, the “hustle & grind,” emotional support animals, horoscopes,
“empaths” and “inJuencers,” safe spaces, NPR, etc.

What a shitshow of a spectacle we’ve created for ourselves, huh?

A frivolous spectacle intentionally designed to keep us tense, fearful, divided,

mindlessly busy, distracted, and laughably dumb. A spectacle designed, in the
words of Vance Packard, “to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently
discontented individuals.” A spectacle that has dangerously severed us from each
other and from the full richness of this brief yet beautiful life.

It was the poet Jim Harrison who once said, “the danger of civilization, of
course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”

Indeed, Jim.

I often wonder if those “God-fearing Pilgrims” who sailed over to this once
unspoiled land would’ve reconsidered their hostility against the Natives and
against NATURE itself if they knew in advance that we’d end up erecting this
glittering cathedral of nonsense?

Hell, we’ve ravaged the countrysides, paved over and through the mountains,
meadows, coastlines, and valleys to build mega-malls, quick-marts, high-rise
buildings, resorts, banks, fast-food joints, and countless pantheons of half-baked
amusement. And we’ve dotted the land with prisons, barbed wire fences, rehab
centers, hospitals, and madhouses to deal with civilization’s ill-adapted.

What a horror show.

In the words of historian Morris Berman: “We live in a collective adrenaline

rush, a world of endless promotional/commercial bullshit, that masks a deep
systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.”

I once read about this old Indian sage many years ago who once made a visit to
that overpriced little fairytale place we call “Disneyland.” Afterward, he simply
remarked: “There must be very little joy in a culture which needs to have that
much fun.”

If you haven’t quite noticed yet, I seem to harbor this perennial, albeit healthy
discontent with the fallen world — this hollow world of lies and strife and
superJuous noise, a world where so many of us live in opposition to our essence.
In spite of the harsh tone though, I’m not bitter by any means, or nihilistic, I
promise, and I’m not hell-bent on changing anything on a systemic level. It’s
futile.

I write for the solitary individual out there who might have a sense that
something is deeply o\ — for those who are looking for something a little deeper
beyond the charade. I write to express what I see around me with my imperfect
eyes. That’s it. I hold no nostalgia for what could have been.

And, apart from a radical change of consciousness and a reconnection to the

elemental, there are no sweeping solutions. It’s too late for solutions. As Berman
put it, “long ago, Americans bet on the wrong horse, and they are now unable to
change horses in midstream.”

Or as the great Tom Robbins so bluntly wrote, “Society, in general, maintains

such a vested interest in its cozy habits and solidi@ed belief systems that it had
rather die — or kill — than entertain change.”

It is what it is, as they say.

It doesn’t take a keen mind to discern the obvious though — civilization, or

what’s left of it, is dangling on a tiny thread over a shadowy abyss.

Many great writers and thinkers of the past saw the writing on the wall early on.
Over a hundred years ago Oswald Spengler wrote his famous work, The Decline
of the West (1918). His thesis — all civilizations arise, Jourish for a short while,
and decline in a cyclical pattern. “Through money, democracy becomes its own
destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.”

It was the great Ralph Waldo Emerson who bleakly predicted that “the end of
the human race will be that it will eventually die of too much civilization.” And
the Genevan philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who de@ned civilization as
“a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
Novelist Ray Bradbury wrote that our “civilization is Jinging itself to pieces.
Stand back from the centrifuge.” And it was that old Kentucky poet, Wendell
Berry, who once said, “You can best serve civilization by being against what
usually passes for it.”

Today, the boundaries between true and false, beauty and grotesque, sacred and
profane, real and unreal have all but disintegrated.

We are ruled and managed by the least among us and we are greatly divided over
trivial issues.

Over half the population is medicated and chronically ill. Suicide and numerous
mental and physiological diseases are rapidly rising. Fertility rates are
plummeting right along with testosterone rates in men.

History has been blotted out or misconstrued to appease the aseptic sensibilities
of the feeble-minded. The groggy youth these days hardly know who Plato or
Moses is let alone the great enlightenment thinkers. The prominent @gures of
history have been expunged. The lessons of history…abandoned.

Self-harm, suicide, anxiety, and heavy drug use are rampant among teens.

Violence, homicide, addiction, apathy, and crippling fear plague our crumbling
cities. The immense gap between the rich and poor is continuously expanding.

The government and almost all our major institutions have become fraudulent,
domineering, over-politicized, criminally incompetent organizations that can no
longer be fully trusted.

This culture is not your friend.

As Terence Mckenna reminded us, this “culture is a perversion. It fetishizes
objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness,
endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly
cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by
behaving like machines.”

Years and years of over-civilized living, we are what became of it— stiJed
creatures, culprits of our own maladies, well-fed and comfortable yet soggy in
Jesh and soul, digitally connected yet lonelier than ever, perched upon pedestals
of presumptuous virtue, nourishing a @erce denial of our own mortality by
accessorizing our lives with labels, status, pills, and needless shit while gunning
our new, una\ordable sports car down the sad streets of America bought on a 7-
year loan.

This is the modern era— a time when we tend to look for a sense of signi@cance
via Social Media, shopping centers, mindless entertainment, and prescription
drugs rather than in the garden of our own souls. Rootless beings with a
sustained devotion to the arti@cial and inauthentic; good folks devoid of a
conscious life beyond the materialistic charade.

“Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” wrote the great English poet,
William Wordsworth.

Today, mental health problems are the leading cause of disabilities. Is it any
wonder the numbers are rising at an alarming rate given the super@cial, soul-
sucking way of life we’ve created for ourselves in the modern world?

An estimated 40 million Americans are taking psychiatric drugs. According to

one study, “35% of young people (aged 12 to 25) said they had taken a
prescribed psychoactive drug in the past year.”

We’ve now reached a point when more people are dying from psychiatric drugs
than heroin. Fentanyl overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans
aged 18 to 45. Opioid overdoses are widespread and worsening.

Perusing the internet for this article, I was completely stunned to learn that many
pre-schoolers are already taking anti-depressants.

What the fuck is happening?

There’s an immense void in the modern-day soul that we are all desperately
longing to @ll.

Are we merely the inevitable by-product turned out by a society that is so heavily
dominated by mass media, large corporations, and technology?

How much of the neurological and emotional fallout that we see in contemporary
society can be contributed to our drug-induced, screen-time lifestyles?

Mounting evidence is showing how constantly staring into screens changes the
brain in extremely negative ways. One study revealed that “hours of daily screen
time were associated with lower psychological well-being, including less
curiosity, lower self-control, more distractibility, more dimculty making friends,
less emotional stability, being more dimcult to care for, and inability to @nish
tasks.”

Again, in the words of Berman, “screens are generating the emptiest people in
the history of the world, and… there is no way for these folks to get outside
themselves and perceive this.”

This Brave New World that we @nd ourselves in seems to be completely rewiring
who we are on a deep, fundamental level. And it’s not good.

One can’t help but be reminded of Huxley’s disturbing mid-20th century

prediction:

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making
people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak,
producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people
will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it,
because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or
brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this
seems to be the ?nal revolution.”

Lewis Mumford was one of the most important American philosophers of the
20th century. But as with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Robinson JeNers,
John Muir, and all the greats, he’s mostly unknown among my fellow Americans
who tend to embrace moronic amusement over intellectual and poetic
contemplation.

Mumford dedicated his life to writing about “the good life of simplicity, self-
sumciency and community.” He deemed the suburbs “an asylum for the
preservation of illusion.” His works also consisted of urgent warnings on how the
“deceptive orgy of economic expansion” is poisoning civilization. He believed that
limitless expansion eventually leads to total destruction of our cities and breeds
neurosis of its inhabitants.

What a prophet.

In one of his major works, Mumford writes:

“This metropolitan world, then, is a world where Aesh and blood is less real than
paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to
have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously,
as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-
heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love,
where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a
military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their
immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the Dag of their political state, and
in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most
elementary duties of citizenship.

“Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is
outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers
and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of
insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets — living
thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They
become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral
patterns of behavior.”

At this point you might be saying to yourself: “Calm down, Erik. What a fucking
time to be alive. Look at all the “progress” we’re making. We “live” longer. Look at
our elevated living standards. Everything is improving. We are safer and more
secure than ever before and we carry little supercomputers in our pockets. We’re
all going to space soon. You can buy things and have them delivered to your front
door in a matter of hours. Even the poor among us live better than yesterday’s
kings. You’re lucky you weren’t born somewhere else in some other time where
you wouldn’t be allowed such grievances.”
Perhaps…

If you can divorce yourself from the status quo and its wretched gatekeepers and
refuse to become just another one-dimensional marionette in this absurd
spectacle, then hell yeah, it’s a strange and beautiful time to be alive. It is. But
many of us are unable to detach ourselves from the nonsense. Instead, we’ve
evolved into unthinking and relentless consumers who readily conform to the
social scheme of things, the “normal cultural man” as Kierkegaard put it, who
sheds his or her authenticity for a cultural role.

Today, we are people who value comfort over freedom, servility over sovereignty,
groupthink over creativity, having over being, security over LIFE.

In other words, because we are afraid to face, head-on, the realities of the human
condition, we’re easily susceptible to the mindfuckery of the outside world. We
become passive and obedient folks who barricade ourselves behind feel-good
illusions and lies and are easily won over by the dubious narratives and fear
campaigns whipped up by the thick-witted demagogues among us.

With the erosion of common sense and our instinctual wisdom, the modern world
is vastly inhabited by incompetent citizens who easily fall prey to the illusory
fantasies of the managerial and political elite.

As Erich Fromm put it, “Most people are not even aware of their need to
conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and
inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions
as the result of their own thinking — and that it just happens that their ideas are
the same as those of the majority.”
Carl Jung, one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, understood that
the further we rescinded from our instincts the sicklier and weaker we were
inevitably going to become as a species.

For humans to develop consciousness — a state of awakeness — a split from the

instinctive base of our animal nature was needed. But Jung believed that the
separation from the ancient wisdom of our instincts had gone too far.

Humans had become too domesticated, too civilized.

“Civilized man,” Jung writes, “is in danger of losing all contact with the world of
instinct — a danger that is still further increased by his living an urban existence
in what seems to be a purely manmade environment. This loss of instinct is
largely responsible for the pathological condition of contemporary culture.”

Jung reminded us that too much civilization begets meaninglessness, “and the
lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age
has not yet begun to comprehend.” He goes on to say that the “upheaval of our
world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same.”

With our @erce impulse toward conformity, our synthetic appetites for material
possessions, and our relentless obsessions with speed, conquest, success,
machines, and gadgets — Jung saw these things as the antithesis to a healthy
society.

Jung goes on to write these prophetic words:

“All time-saving devices, amongst which we must count easier means of

communication and other conveniences, do not, paradoxically enough, save us time
but merely cram our time so full that we have no time for anything.

Hense the breathless haste, super?ciality, and nervous exhaustion with all the
concomitant symptoms — craving for stimulation, impatience, irritability,
vacillation, etc. Such a state may lead to all sorts of other things, but never to any
increased culture of the mind and heart…

The delusion of steady social improvement has been dinned into them so long that
they want to forget the past as quickly as possible so as not to miss the brave new
world that is constantly being dangled before their eyes by unreformable world-
reformers.”

As civilization continues to Jing itself to pieces, perhaps the only wise thing to do
is STAND BACK.

Stay far away from the corporate media and the momentary popular imbecilities
that permeate modern culture.

Disconnect regularly from the digital madness that has so many of us spiritually
benumbed. Unplug and get outside, get healthy, get out of debt, learn a craft or a
skill, romp like a madman in nature, @nd solace in the silence of the in@nite, slow
down, experiment with plant medicine, read old books, deeply, and learn to grow
stronger with less.

There are no political remedies or economic solutions to the dilemma we @nd

ourselves in. No leaders are coming to set things right. Their allegiances are
elsewhere. It’s on us, you and I, to alter our attitudes towards life, to revolutionize
our hearts and minds, and lean into the sublime.

Let go and BE. “Being is burning, in the truest sense,” Henry Miller tells us, “and if
there is to be any peace it will come about through being, not having.”
There’s an unimaginable world out there beyond our man-made spectacle,
beyond the petty dramas of our domesticated lives — a world of “endless
inhuman beauty.” We must learn to “uncenter our minds from ourselves,” in the
words of the poet, “unhumanize our views a little” and learn to identify ourselves
with the whole divine nature of things — the earth, the night sky, the sun and
stars, the mountain forest and the running streams.

Step away from the endless parade of Jickering images and reclaim your life. Out
of the ashes, we must prepare to rebuild a new world rooted in the life-enhancing
values of community, cooperation, beauty, love, and poetry — a world
integrated with rather than in opposition to the natural world we came out of.

I‘ll end with a little poem from one of America’s @nest 20th-century poets, an
artist who’s been largely forgotten in a nation that’d greatly bene@t from a
renewed attention of his works — the great Robinson Je\ers (1887–1962).

The Answer

Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.

To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be ful?lled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history… for contemplation or in fact…
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.

Thanks so much for reading. You can Vnd me around the internet at the
following:

Blog: https://erikrittenberry.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/erik.rittenberry
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/erik_rittenberry/