The culture I live in, the culture that surrounds me, is slowly slipping further away from me. How does that happen? I am not sure if others are having the same experience. Or maybe they are but they would talk about it differently. What do you think? More and more, while I continue to be in the culture I am no longer of the culture. Almost every day there are more indications, reminders, that I am becoming alien in and to the culture. I have broken apart from the drift of the culture even while I am contained inside of it. Perhaps I should be frightened by this, or at least anxious. To the contrary I frequently feel relief that I, at least for the time being, can exist apart from the culture as it reproduces itself and dominates, or at least appears to dominate, the majority of the population. My growing isolation can, from time to time, disturb me. I even have telltale dreams that collide with my sense of self-assurance as my own personal culture diverges from the culture at large. How has this occurred and why do I remain less than willing to rejoin the culture? And why do I have this pervasive sense that the culture I perceive slipping further and further away may be less real, less anchored in any concrete experience tried and true believers in it profess to have of the culture and how it relates to their own inner lives? I’ve the feeling that, somehow, the culture as it evolves is becoming more distantly informed by what anyone really knows about themselves in the deeper recesses of self that must be navigated constantly in order to maintain a superficial idea of belonging, a hold, in the culture. Perhaps my own feeling that I am slipping away from the culture (or it is slipping away from me?) is just a result of my insistence, my utter lack of facility, skill, in functioning on a day-to-day basis in any way divorced from my deeper self. That damned inner being refuses to shut the fuck up. I lack understanding of how this can be so, how others, even many, many, others, can cultivate and sustain life so separated from that deeper self… even if the culture demands it in one way or another and more and more. How is it done? What kind of artificiality must be constructed and maintained around the real self in order to function in the cultural drift?
* As I say this I am immediately called to reflect upon the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery. How odd it seems to me that such a phenomenon has come to be constantly regaled through a media increasingly filled by faces that have clearly been surgically altered to fit into a rather bizarre and transparent cultural ideal that is moving further and further away from any attainable physical reality as it concerns the human form, especially the human face, human aging, and the increasing cultural disinvestment in the perfectly natural and normal, even beautiful, nature of human individuation. The physical anomalies of these facial reconstructions in particular seem so readily detected and, well, to me at least, from this perch on the slow tectonic drift of my personal cultural preferences, unattractive, too similar to one another, too… well… plastic. Even when considered to be well done they remain masklike, even robotic. What has happened that the culture demands we all must have the same features? Or at least desire the same physical dimensions? What does the widespread phenomenology of this mean in the deeper scheme of the collective being? How many overly sculpted, virtually identical male abdomens and female breasts are required of us and why? The more I think about it I think I’d prefer not to know… if only because it seems something of an impossibility to me, a disguise with quantum layers of rationale from inside a way of living I have so little interest in. This is not so much about my passionate attachment to the expression of deeper self as it is utter lack of interest in constructing and living in any kind of artificialized reality. How has this become a norm in the culture and who has sold it to us as the way we must wish to be? I am sure there is a shallow profit motive involved, but I am less sure, more puzzled, by how easily it has been accepted… bought… by the culture as a whole; this idea of some semblance of perfect bodies and masked and line-ess faces in a culture that is otherwise increasingly obese. Is it yet another indicator of the class divide? Much like wide lawns once were… when the rich could afford to have unproductive fields of mown grass as opposed to every square foot of yard being dedicated to food production or livestock? Still, lawns and the other ornate non-food producing gardens, at least, could be seen as somewhat attractive. I’m not sure aging faces clipped and stretched across the facial structure into marionette-like features (kind of like the faces on those old Saturday morning animated puppet shows, remember the Thunderbirds? Or Fireball XL5?) or idealized and virtually identical abdomens, breasts, chests, and buttocks can be.
* At the same time I feel I am being set adrift from this ever swelling dominant culture, whether I have cut my mooring lines loose from it or it has cut me loose out of its own disinterest and lack of attachment, a kind of passive letting go of anything that could be perceived to be in league with its heterogeneity, I have become more and more comfortable with my status as an outsider navigating the features of the day-to-day world around me. I have become more familiar with aspects of my world, its patterns and the nature of its stases and perpetual upwellings, that I have come to value most and rely upon to give me a feeling of satisfaction, belonging and even my own upwellings of happiness. There seems to be a proportional relationship between my increasing dissociation from the culture and my growing comfort, my feelings of being “at home”, in my own little world. When I think about this there is also an opposing disequilibrium in that very construct. As I speak of this it even starts to sound a little out of balance, a little thought disordered. Perhaps it is… or perhaps the great and only partially defined and visible “sales team” for the current direction of the predominant culture is most interested in inculcating a feeling of imbalance in those who reject it, those who do not accept it as the only way the world can go. That we, as participants in the evolution of all life forms and epochs of the planet and its occupants, must accept this currently prevalent design, this ever more widespread global plastic surgery and its designers/promoters as superior and unavoidable scions of what must be. If we don’t (or can’t?) we must be seen as insane or soon be determined to be insane regardless of any wisdom or abiding, deep, knowledge of the nature of sustainability we might possess. Regardless of how satisfied we are with our inner world and how it projects itself around us, protects us; regardless of how it facilitates the separation, the drift, we feel propelling us and our self-created perception of the world that divorces us from the dominant cultural dynamic and the narrow discourse allowed about that dynamic. Of course, that narrowing global dialogue is clearly all bullshit. That we may, and are free to, choose other ways to think about and be in the world is possibly the only reason the human species has been as successful as it has been. Our choices, regardless of how much of an outlier they may render us in our own time and culture, do not generally make us insane. Or at least no more insane that those who have the power to make choices that render entire cultures moot, ruined, fields of mass graves and ships full of kidnapped, designated “others”, who are rendered less than human by our chosen cultural predilections and turned into just another profit and investment center. No. To think apart, to drift away from a culture that is drifting, always moving, toward certain self-defeating dystopia, self-defeat, is certainly not insane unless its choices only accentuate the very attributes of the dominant culture that make the dominant culture untenable, an unsustainable failure. We are built to choose, to succeed through choice. More and more archeologists, historians, socio biologists and specialists in other overlapping fields are finding that the choice to be different than a dominant or nearby culture is a kind of birthright, and that choice to be different assures our potential for success on the planet… as long as it is not squelched or defined and repressed by the dominant culture as insane or at the very least implausible, only worth suppression or destruction. My little world is drifting away, encapsulating itself in itself in order to survive, succeed, and go forward to its eventual end. As this happens to me, as I find over time that I have been constructing some alternate reality apart from the dominant reality (and even as I choose to participate in certain aspects of the dominant reality that may be overwhelmingly demanding and unavoidable) I have become more confident in my ability to succeed in my attempts to live in a world that is more amenable, more self-reinforcing, more in tune with the music, the voice, of my own livelihood and participation in the world around me. I find that I have prepared myself for this eventuality without even being aware of it. My little garden, my ability to know the names of birds and plants, my rejection of the preponderance of a world dominated by the roar and buzz of the newest technologies, my appreciation and reverence toward the very things the dominant culture disdains by action if not by discourse, my refusal to participate or only participate minimally in the redundant faddishness of the current technological “advances”, all represent the wisdom of my inner voice, my preeminent selfhood that is denied, suppressed, ignored, in the dominant culture.
* One of the things we might consider, in this exploration of personal culture’s divestiture from dominant culture, is the nature and expression of the collective voice and its wisdom or lack of it. How much of it is sacred and how much shadow? What is the dominant culture saying to us? What is it saying to itself? How is it exposing and expressing its potentially and irrevocably destructive fault lines and its deep unresolved pains? How is that collective self-hood suffering? It doesn’t take long to arrive at certain all too evident conclusions about how the current cultural direction is in direct opposition to the deep nature and needs of the collective self. The climate catastrophe that is upon us, how it is disordering and will continue to disorder the entire arrangement of how the collective perceives and expresses its Self is the most obvious indication of the erroneous nature of the direction of the culture. What does this climate catastrophe want us to know? And when that is clear (how could it be any clearer?), how can we afford to refuse to make the choices necessary? Are we capable of making those choices? Even if I and others like me make choices that represent a clear departure in full or in part from the dominant culture’s errant direction, does that do enough other that grant us some frame of perspective that rescues us from entering with our eyes closed the portal of that "direction"? Its assuredly, unavoidably, devastating consequences? My movement toward opting out of much of preeminent cultural expression may or may not be sufficient enough to move any even small portion of the evolving cultural paradigm away from its own destruction… if that is, in fact, the prime objective of choosing to drift away from a culture that has become more and more alien, more and more self-destructive. Was it even a choice? This abandoning of many of the major attributes of culture as it lands on and discards, over and over, its masks, its markets, its socio-politics, its icons and its disposable wisdoms, its constantly revolving but rarely truly transforming technologies (however much each “new” technological tool claims to be transformative, the most any have ever accomplished is to facilitate the same task, the same progression, in a new and possibly faster way), this refusal of majority culture as it is sold and resold to the mass of the sentient beings on the planet may in fact not even be a choice.
* The possibility has occurred to me that I was prepared from a very early age to stand apart from the culture. To be an observer. And from that standpoint I would form my own unique and sometimes faulty perspective on what the culture was intent on and how I could and could not participate in it. I did this out of a sense of survival, an intuition. Surely, without that sense that I had choices clearly outside of the parameters dictated to me by the culture, I probably would not have survived. I am hardly alone in this. And now, if it isn’t clear, it should be: we are faced with a turning of events that confront us with the absolute necessity that the dominant culture itself must make choices completely outside any of its predominant or even allowable choices. The outliers may indeed possess answers, alternate direction, but by the very nature of being outliers, the dominant culture cannot or will not hear them. We see this dynamic played out daily in relationship to how current armed conflicts and genocides are being conducted and spoken about in relationship to the predominant elite class’s utter inaction, in fact we see added emphasis on keeping the current systems of energy and transportation and cross border socio-political interaction intact. We witness the increasingly horrific consequences of the major figures and preeminent socio-political structures being unable to hear voices from collective outliers that are essential in coming to terms with this conundrum, this double bind, of self-destruction. We are ordered to measure everything, all response and result, in terms of the measurement tools that are themselves dictated by and benefit the collective’s ruling elite. Not because they are willfully disinclined to approach these intransigent cataclysmic processes in ways that might subdue or even defeat them, but because they have never allowed themselves to be challenged or willing to learn the alternate outlier languages necessary to integrate into their own vernaculars the potential movement toward a true solution. They cannot, they lack the capacity, to envision any outcome beyond the ones that will reward them in vast incongruencies to how the cataclysms will impact the entire system of societal reward. If anything, we might feel a little sorry for such a decidedly ignorant brain dysfunction… so, then again, those who are able to formulate their own cultural drift away from the dominant one hold the key, they have invented the language/s that might reset our way forward… but because the cultural elite have deprived themselves of a way to understand that language, those outliers will be relegated to the backwaters of any discourse. They will speak amongst themselves, they will understand, see, what is upon us all, but they will be, in effect, silenced and we will go forward into our predictable doom.
* Only huge and global outcries will push back at this outcome with any modicum of success. How such movements arise is mysterious and powerful… but, alarmingly enough, the global elite have even proceeded to make their response to any seeds of such movements an algorithm of response that is capable of stopping them in their tracks. We have seen this played out in the most recent decades, to sabotage the Arab Spring, to intervene against the great movements against global oil and gas hegemony, the pipelines and the ridiculous idea that electric cars will save the day when it is the cars themselves, not their way of propulsion, that are the primary issue. The protests at the beginning of the century against the ongoing utter destruction of the historical fertile crescent were rendered a footnote in a rarely told history, all in service to dictatorial international governance by fossil fuel cartels. * The culture I live in, the culture that surrounds me, is slowly slipping further away from me. I am not sure if others are having the same experience. Perhaps others speak of this feeling, this sense of detachment, in different terms. I feel more connected to the ailing earth and less connected to the preeminent species, my species, and its cultural demands and norms. That is disturbing. I used to think this was largely a phenomenon of aging. And it might be, in part. But even that seems far-fetched and like received rationale as opposed to anything based in reality. When the major candidates for most of the premier political offices in my country and indeed in the world are well within my generation, and when the two candidates for president are both ten years older than I am, I guess I cannot afford to think that the reason I feel unheard, invisible, excised, is because of my age. It could be class. It could be how much money I have access to. I hate bringing class into this, but it can hardly be avoided. As we are constantly regaled with promotion, constantly sold to (we are hardly even aware of it, but sometime just make it a project: how often and how much of the popular discourse in the country has to do with selling and promoting selling? Pay attention...) we can hardly escape becoming products ourselves. And we are, aren’t we? Look at our integration into the algorithms of attention, devised and sold to us as we are being sold to each other by social media! Our dating aps, our sex links, and our job resumes… all about attributes and collections of data determined by surveillance of every digitalized interaction we attend to! Nothing about soul. About how lonely everyone is becoming because of this phenomenon. How separated we feel from one another. How these superficial compilations of attributes decline to observe, are unable to observe, any of our deeper, more meaningful motives and searches for meaning. How our children get fat sitting inside being products-in-training instead of playing outside learning and feeling the world around them. Is any of this a good thing? And how is it related to the advent of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that made money equal to speech? This perpetual selling, the rise of a ridiculous fly-by-night traveling scam artist to the office of the president, this devaluation of each one of us to product potential. Perhaps one of the things that have been pushing my personal cultural drift further and further from the predominant culture's norms and dictates is that so much of what is being sold is completely outside of my reach financially as well as being largely devoid of interest to me. I don’t get the feeling that many people feel that way when confronted by the bizarre dystopian nature of the ad culture we are forced to swim in. I think I was lucky in a way. I stopped watching network TV way back in the 70s. It just wasn’t as interesting as the other things I wanted to do. Pretty soon when I did see a show, things like laugh tracks completely alienated me. I admit I liked to watch Saturday Night Live, but even then, I generally went to a local bar that featured one of the early big video screens. It was a social event in the larger culture, not so much an indoctrination to being bought and sold.
* It might have been the advent of the iPhone that finally made my thinking about all of this congeal into an understanding of how far my personal culture has diverged from the culture at large. I simply did not, and do not, get it: why is having a camera on your phone such a great thing? The whole idea seems like something out of a Vonnegut story. A Kafkaesque nightmare. John Yossarian* where art thou? It makes absolutely no sense to me. And all those other apps? How absolutely lazy do we plan to become by the end of all this? Exactly what brain skills and neural pathways are we so willing to lose? That’s supposing there will be anything left of the fossil fuel and fake green tech infrastructure that supports the web of the web, the cloud of the cloud, once many of the most highly populated areas on the planet get too hot to live in. Oh, whenever I offer this perspective, someone will exuberantly offer reasons the technology surpasses anything in human history (except for maybe clean water… or undegraded soil and rivers that didn’t run dry) and roll their eyes when I give my reasons for refusing to participate. I am old. I just don’t get it, they will infer. Well... yeah... I am old and I do "just don't get it"! Then I will ask them for directions to a place a few miles away, or even in another city they are familiar with, and they will be totally flummoxed by the idea of being able to verbally describe, step by step, how one might get from point a to point b. Hm. They will want to go to their phones. Yeesh. How do you think that kind of process works in the brain… or stops working in the brain if you don’t exercise that function? What do you think happens when people stop being able to give directions… about anything? Then someone else will offer some equally condescending rationale for how much better and more advanced these tools are from what came before. Sure, there are glitches, they will intone, but it’s better than it used to be. Is it? Okay. Sometimes it works out that way. But have you ever, EVER, tried to get a quick concise answer from any of the digitalized AI automated problem-solving systems that are unavoidable in the current technological culture? Okay. This is starting to devolve into a routine Boomer rant against aspects of the current culture that no one under 35 has any personal firsthand knowledge or experience apart from. And though it is certainly a smallish part, a mere symptom, of how and why my personal culture is shedding its associations with the majority culture, it fails to address the overwhelming depth of the quandaries, both physical and philosophical, that we as a race of beings along with our cohabitors face. * The culture I live in, the culture that surrounds me, is slowly slipping further away from me. I am not sure if others are having the same experience. Perhaps others speak of this feeling, this sense of detachment, in different terms. I feel more connected to the ailing but still superlative earth and less connected to the preeminent species, my species, and its cultural demands and norms. Not that the preeminent culture isn’t ailing, not that the ailing earth and the ailing culture can be separated. In a way, in the best way, that is the best part of all of this. I feel comfortable, even joyous at times, in the world without all the supposedly currently required technological claptrap, as much as I can walk into the woods or dive into a lake without it. And it is true. I am old and getting older. And I am getting no richer. So, I have very little, less each day, to offer a culture that prefers plasticized visages and the other absurd and inescapable outward signs of undeserved and horrendously destructive wealth, prefers the symptoms of its dis-ease to any workable approach to the ease of that dis-ease. I will be dead soon. Very soon in the grand scale of time and human potential. So, I don’t mind being disconnected. To the contrary. I treasure it. I hope I am never forced to own an iPhone (though they are trying very hard to make me give up my land line). I want, until I am completely unable, to be able to walk somewhere where the constant roar of traffic doesn’t blunt out the birds regardless of the fuel used to propel such idiotic destructiveness. Oh… and I do love me a good road trip. Man. That's for certain. But really, if there were some great and comprehensive train routes, I would give up my car in an instant. And swim. I want to swim in relatively unpolluted bodies of water. I can still take gulps of water in many parts of Lake Superior. I hope that lasts until I die. Then you guys, the ones who are left who have never had to function without the curse and periodic blessing of the epidemic of digitalized systems doing your most important thinking for you, you will have to figure out whether you want those things, those gulps of icy lake water, an inhabitable planet, or whether they are worth sacrificing to the next wave of the newest and most allegedly transforming technology. Will it be war? Will the shores be littered with dead birds and people trying to get somewhere inhabitable? You figure it out.
*John Yossarian is the main character in Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" To my email subscribers: As the revision process may continue past initial publication, however minor any changes may be, it is often best to read my prose contributions to Compendium: The Kitchen Sink directly from the website vs the email version. Click on the title of the piece in your email to be sent directly to the website.