The Fear Factor

Sometimes I have the opportunity to have conversations with students here in the Library, usually across one of the Information Desks, occasionally over coffee. At times I sense a openness to talk about what they think is really going on on this planet and what they think (or feel) we could be in store for...beyond what the voice of Mother Culture (see Ishmael by Daniel Quinn) and the voices of the 'powerful' tell us is going on.

As I get into it, sowing my seeds of doubt (doubt-mongering a friend calls it), I try to be very attentive to how the conversation seems to be going--from the other person's perspective. I'm watching the face, especially the eyes. Generally there's some interest as I speak of the assumptions we all make about being human, relative to other living beings on the planet; the dominant human monoculture on the planet now; our assumptions about history and time. Then as my doubt-mongering proceeds and deepens, when I begin to question our fetish with technology and our personal assumptions about our futures and what we can reasonably hope for, when I begin to press the idea that culturally and sustainably we are already plummeting over the edge of the abyss, that there cannot truly be any political or technological solution for any of the problems we've wrought, I watch as the veil slowly drops over their eyes. I watch as their attention pulls inward, protective; and I know they've reached their personal limit.

I respectfully stop the course of the conversation as I've been directing it and allow them to extricate themselves or shift the topic in some way.

I've seen this happen often enough that I've tried to come to some understanding of what this behavior represents. I know that I need to be respectful of it. I know that the person is doing what they absolutely need to, ...but what is it exactly they are attempting to protect by this closing down?

In my earlier posting about Pandora's box, I rail away at hope. I think what I'm experiencing with these students is the not so subtle way in which our culture is completely reliant on hope (read the future) to continue to function as it does, as it has, as a momentum with a life of its own that wants to continue its existence. Without hope for a better future, the now becomes intolerable for most of us. Without all the noise and distractions that keep the present drowned out, without the hope of something better to come (some brighter future here in this life or an idyllic future beyond this life), the now feels unbearable.

Why? Why is the present of our lives so intolerable that we seem to be willing to do almost anything to avoid being aware of it?

For one, we've created such unsupportable inequities in our culture that most of us are living lives that barely keep us alive (not so much in the industrialized countries but still most of us on this planet) or that allow us just enough things to keep us mollified as we work ridiculously long hours at jobs that usually have no intrinsic worth to us, to pay the 'powerful' and the 'wealthy' for the basics we need to sustain our lives or to sustain what we think we need for our lives.

Secondly, if we cease the distractions for only a moment, if we stop hoping for something better-to-come--for even just a moment--we will feel what our very genes tell us to be true: we are not something separate from the rest of life on this planet; we are this planet, and this planet is us. We breathe in what the plants breathe out and they breathe in what we breathe out. The vapor that makes the clouds in the sky and the moisture we feel in the rain and mist and ocean spray is partly from us, from our breath. At that moment, completely unawares to us, we also feel in our bodies, in our deepest beings, the pain and suffering our culture's existence has wrought on all living things, INCLUDING OURSELVES!

This is what we are trying to so hard to avoid. This is what, if we felt, would either motivate us to end our personal lives or do something to end our personal participation in the continuation of this juggernaut to extinction.

I deeply respect the amount of avoidance and denial that is required on a continuous basis to keep from directly experiencing our own personal share of the madness in which we live and in which we participate everyday. I can only imagine what it must be like to be young in the so called 'affluent west' and to know (perhaps without even knowing that they know) that the very device (hope) which allows them to continue living the illusion they've been taught IS life, and that this vision of a future which cannot ever be has become thin, very, very thin. It simply takes more noise, more distraction, more denial to keep going.

What we were all taught to believe long ago was 'flying' is actually plummeting over the ledge, and the bottom is looming...and it's simply too late to start knitting parachutes. (My apologies to Daniel Quinn for borrowing his illustration.)