Amerika is devouring its children

Absent appropriate flexibility, the fusion of quantum physics, deep ecology, “prophetic pragmatism,” and any number of other sources of deep and abiding wisdom one might care to mention which might help to create a new sense of the spiritual, a new sense of community with nature, and a new sense of social justice, will be that much harder to bring about. Absent this new conceptual framework for the coming paradigm shift, the extraordinarily painful and convulsive transition we are entering will be even more painful and convulsive. But perhaps there is no escape. Like all junkies, this junky civilization of the first world will probably have to hit bottom before it can begin to mend its ways. Unfortunately, this will cause suffering and death on an almost unfathomable scale.

As Nietzsche says, “the objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one's thoughts to cease to be aware of life." Nowhere is this more true than in America. America does not often inspire the moral courage needed to:

"desire the opposite - to be aware precisely of life, that is to say to suffer from life - so strongly? Because he realizes that he is in danger of being cheated out of himself, and that a kind of agreement exists to kidnap him out of his own cave. Then he bestirs himself, pricks up his ears, and resolves: 'I will remain my own!'"

Instead, America (and much of the rest of the world) use technology in such a way as to have no meaningful interaction with nature.

America and the first world’s last hope for survival is to create a cadre of people with transformed ways of being in the world who can 1) create the liberated territory of a new society, islands of alternative culture that grow into each other like a reef displacing the sea, 2) speak truth to power and isolate how evil is done, and 3) walk the long march through the primary institutions of society, emplacing righteous people in strategic positions of responsibility in the courts, media, think tanks, schools, and elsewhere.

This might be possible through education; it might not be. After all, as Nietzsche states, “to educate educators! But the first ones must educate themselves! And for these I write."

We must facilitate the immediate emergence and implementation of a philosophy of education for peace, social justice and sustainability, with domain content areas rectified accordingly to make visible the repression of the hidden curriculum. We must also reimagine the education encounter in a way that does not reiterate the existing social relations of domination, subordination, extrinsic motivation, and credentialing.

By waiving their obligation to provide informed consent as the governed in exchange for overconsumption and “protection” from fears manufactured by the powers that be themselves, the American people have grown accustomed to using material goods to satisfy non-material needs. They have become mired in a suspended state of preadolescence.

The same diagnosis goes for much of the rest of the “first world” as well. Education will have to play a central role in returning these polities to mental health, eventually. As the aphorism commonly attributed to Victor Hugo goes: “education is a race between history and catastrophe.” If education succeeds, then the world may stop tolerating economic and political systems that rob us of our natural joy, freedom, dignity, curiosity, and the full development of our faculties. Only then will we stop profaning the miracle of our ability to think, imagine, love, and use tools.

To regain our natural propensity to love, be creative, and live in harmonious connection with the earth blossom will require a major shift in character and a wholesale healing of perception. As Edward Dowling has said, “The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first the widespread delusion among the poor that we have it, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it."