(no subject)
Industrialism is the process by which people cease producing things directly for their own immediate needs. Instead, things are produced through specialized and centralized institutions. The producing institutions can be quite varied (for example, factories, universities, governments) depending on the things produced (automobiles, knowledge, law and order). In any given society, there are degrees to which such specialized and centralized institutions control production. Among the American Indians, for example, there were practically no such institutions. In modern America, on the other hand, nearly every aspect of life has been industrialized. When most of a society's production (of whatever nature) is controlled by specialized institutions, I call that society industrialized.
There is no recorded instance in history where a highly industrialized system of life was voluntarily chosen by a non-industrial society. In every case, industrialism has been imposed on the people by the violence of the institutions themselves. In Europe, industrialism was an edifice built on the blood and gore of centuries of Christian violence. In America, it came to power through the annihilation of the Indians and the enslavement of the Blacks. In Russia, it was the fruit of Stalin's grim war of terror against the peasants. In the modern Third World, it is everywhere coming to power through the conflicting imperial ambitions of America, Russia, and China. In every case, militarism has been the means by which industrialism has triumphed. Industrialism, therefore, is not just a system of production. It is also a system of power.
Industrialism, by its very nature, destroys the magic of human existence. Consider the way we, as industrialized people, relate to our environment. Everywhere we see huge cities, highways, factories, universities, airports. Everywhere the trees, the plants, the animals have been slaughtered. In 1969, the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center reported that there was no longer any uncontaminated air anywhere in North America. In 1970, Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Atlantic in a handmade boat. He reported that he could not find one oil-free stretch of water during the entire crossing. What kind of people are we that we do this to the environment? "Only those who have broken off their silent inner dialogue with man and nature, only those who experience the world as dead, stupid, or alien and therefore without a claim to reverence, could ever turn upon their environment and their fellows with the cool and meticulously calculated rapacity of industrial society." (Roszak)
Nature people everywhere believe that the earth, the trees, the moon are living personalities who talk to us and with whom we can communicate. We laugh at them and call them savages. Could they be right, after all? If so, when they talk to us about these things they must feel like people with vision trying to explain color to someone who is blind.
"Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out on fields. See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by over-population in a twelve-by-twelve closet opening out on an anonymous world of city streets" (Ellul).
Industrialism continues to teach that humans are superior to animals and that "civilization" consists in getting as far away as possible from our animal nature. Wilhelm Reich correctly believed that the rise of fascism in industrialized countries was dependent on the repression of our animal nature within the bourgeois family. "The theory of the German superman has its origins in man's efforts to disassociate himself from the animal" (Reich). When alienated from their animal nature, people come to view it as evil, and then look for an outside authority-figure to keep it repressed. "The Leader," whether political or religious, suppresses from without what is feared from within. The Nazis associated homosexuality with animal behavior (which, like all sexuality, it is). They violently purged their own party of known Gay people, destroyed the early antecedents of the Gay Liberation Movement, and sent masses of Gay people to the gas chambers.
The industrial system has made us forget how to live. Nature people know how to make their own houses, food, medicine, clothes, religious rites, humor, and entertainment. These skills keep them from becoming enslaved by money. Since people always retain the skills of survival, it's very difficult for an aristocracy of money to get control of their lives. The people don't need money to survive. In an industrial society, however, we are never taught the skills of how to live. We become totally dependent on money for meeting our every need. If the money runs out, we have nothing to eat, nothing to wear, nowhere to sleep. As a result, we become totally dependent on those who control money. In capitalist countries, these are the huge business monopolies. In communist countries, it is the state.
Industrialism has degraded both labor and leisure. Most people in industrial societies are in fact wage slaves, working forty hours a week or more at monotonous, hateful "jobs" for the sole purpose of making enough money to live and enjoy life. When they come home debilitated from such alienated labor, they have nothing left to their souls except alienated leisure: television, movies, newspapers, all of which indoctrinate with industrial values. Like schools and universities, these media are part of the general anesthesia.
Industrialism has devastated our sexual lives. We complain that we treat each other's bodies unfeelingly, as so many objects, to use and dispose of. Yet we fail to realize that we treat everything (including ourselves) as so many objects to use and dispose of. We fail to see that the total objectification of our environment and of nature is a direct effect of the power system of industrialization. If we have been conditioned throughout our lives to objectify everything, how can we fail to objectify those who excite us sexually?
The industrial system has reduced sex to a procreative activity, just as it reduces all human functions to productive activities. Under industrialism, the purpose of sex has become purely economic: to breed consumers, workers, and soldiers for their proper roles in industrial and military hierarchies. Sexual relations have been reduced to productive relations. The basic unit of people-production is the monogamous heterosexual family.
Sex itself is locked up in secrecy, privacy, darkness, embarrassment, and guilt. That's how the industrial system manages to keep it under control. Among nature peoples, as we have seen, sex is part of the public religion and education of the tribes. It becomes a collective celebration of the powers that hold the universe together. Its purpose is its own pleasure. Any group of people with such practices and values can never be dominated by industrial institutions. That's why the first thing industrial societies do on contact with "primitives" is make them feel guilty about sex and their bodies. The historical tools for doing this have been patriarchal religions.
The whole industrial system is like one great night of the living dead where the entire populace has been reduced emotionally to the level of zombies. It has deadened us to our environment, deprived us of art, sterilized our animal nature, robbed us of the skills of survival, degraded our labor and leisure, and decimated our sexual lives. And so it has made us like the living dead - dead to nature, dead to each other, dead to ourselves.
All the highly industrialized nations of the earth, regardless of whether they are communist or capitalist, show the same effects of the impact of technology: concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a few; increasing regimentation of every aspect of life, including thoughts, emotions, and even fantasies; and devastation of the environment. "In spite of all the men of good will, all the optimists, all the doers of history, the civilizations of the world are being ringed about with a band of steel" (Ellul).
The industrial wasteland has come upon us from our past. It is the gestation of over 2,000 years of patriarchal rule, the last offspring of Christian/industrial institutions. It is vast. It is powerful. It has respected neither culture nor ideology. It has spread like a cancer over the whole face of the earth. It has ruined our work, our art, our environment, and our emotional and sexual lives. It has cost us the magic sense of life. If we are ever to rise up from the dead and regain our rightful place in nature, we will have to do more than put our faith in the state, the party, or technology - all of which are mere props of industrialism. We will have to tap the saving energies that now lie buried in ourselves and in nature. And that means we will have to summon forth powers that have not been known since the days of the shamans.
There is no recorded instance in history where a highly industrialized system of life was voluntarily chosen by a non-industrial society. In every case, industrialism has been imposed on the people by the violence of the institutions themselves. In Europe, industrialism was an edifice built on the blood and gore of centuries of Christian violence. In America, it came to power through the annihilation of the Indians and the enslavement of the Blacks. In Russia, it was the fruit of Stalin's grim war of terror against the peasants. In the modern Third World, it is everywhere coming to power through the conflicting imperial ambitions of America, Russia, and China. In every case, militarism has been the means by which industrialism has triumphed. Industrialism, therefore, is not just a system of production. It is also a system of power.
Industrialism, by its very nature, destroys the magic of human existence. Consider the way we, as industrialized people, relate to our environment. Everywhere we see huge cities, highways, factories, universities, airports. Everywhere the trees, the plants, the animals have been slaughtered. In 1969, the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center reported that there was no longer any uncontaminated air anywhere in North America. In 1970, Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Atlantic in a handmade boat. He reported that he could not find one oil-free stretch of water during the entire crossing. What kind of people are we that we do this to the environment? "Only those who have broken off their silent inner dialogue with man and nature, only those who experience the world as dead, stupid, or alien and therefore without a claim to reverence, could ever turn upon their environment and their fellows with the cool and meticulously calculated rapacity of industrial society." (Roszak)
Nature people everywhere believe that the earth, the trees, the moon are living personalities who talk to us and with whom we can communicate. We laugh at them and call them savages. Could they be right, after all? If so, when they talk to us about these things they must feel like people with vision trying to explain color to someone who is blind.
"Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out on fields. See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by over-population in a twelve-by-twelve closet opening out on an anonymous world of city streets" (Ellul).
Industrialism continues to teach that humans are superior to animals and that "civilization" consists in getting as far away as possible from our animal nature. Wilhelm Reich correctly believed that the rise of fascism in industrialized countries was dependent on the repression of our animal nature within the bourgeois family. "The theory of the German superman has its origins in man's efforts to disassociate himself from the animal" (Reich). When alienated from their animal nature, people come to view it as evil, and then look for an outside authority-figure to keep it repressed. "The Leader," whether political or religious, suppresses from without what is feared from within. The Nazis associated homosexuality with animal behavior (which, like all sexuality, it is). They violently purged their own party of known Gay people, destroyed the early antecedents of the Gay Liberation Movement, and sent masses of Gay people to the gas chambers.
The industrial system has made us forget how to live. Nature people know how to make their own houses, food, medicine, clothes, religious rites, humor, and entertainment. These skills keep them from becoming enslaved by money. Since people always retain the skills of survival, it's very difficult for an aristocracy of money to get control of their lives. The people don't need money to survive. In an industrial society, however, we are never taught the skills of how to live. We become totally dependent on money for meeting our every need. If the money runs out, we have nothing to eat, nothing to wear, nowhere to sleep. As a result, we become totally dependent on those who control money. In capitalist countries, these are the huge business monopolies. In communist countries, it is the state.
Industrialism has degraded both labor and leisure. Most people in industrial societies are in fact wage slaves, working forty hours a week or more at monotonous, hateful "jobs" for the sole purpose of making enough money to live and enjoy life. When they come home debilitated from such alienated labor, they have nothing left to their souls except alienated leisure: television, movies, newspapers, all of which indoctrinate with industrial values. Like schools and universities, these media are part of the general anesthesia.
Industrialism has devastated our sexual lives. We complain that we treat each other's bodies unfeelingly, as so many objects, to use and dispose of. Yet we fail to realize that we treat everything (including ourselves) as so many objects to use and dispose of. We fail to see that the total objectification of our environment and of nature is a direct effect of the power system of industrialization. If we have been conditioned throughout our lives to objectify everything, how can we fail to objectify those who excite us sexually?
The industrial system has reduced sex to a procreative activity, just as it reduces all human functions to productive activities. Under industrialism, the purpose of sex has become purely economic: to breed consumers, workers, and soldiers for their proper roles in industrial and military hierarchies. Sexual relations have been reduced to productive relations. The basic unit of people-production is the monogamous heterosexual family.
Sex itself is locked up in secrecy, privacy, darkness, embarrassment, and guilt. That's how the industrial system manages to keep it under control. Among nature peoples, as we have seen, sex is part of the public religion and education of the tribes. It becomes a collective celebration of the powers that hold the universe together. Its purpose is its own pleasure. Any group of people with such practices and values can never be dominated by industrial institutions. That's why the first thing industrial societies do on contact with "primitives" is make them feel guilty about sex and their bodies. The historical tools for doing this have been patriarchal religions.
The whole industrial system is like one great night of the living dead where the entire populace has been reduced emotionally to the level of zombies. It has deadened us to our environment, deprived us of art, sterilized our animal nature, robbed us of the skills of survival, degraded our labor and leisure, and decimated our sexual lives. And so it has made us like the living dead - dead to nature, dead to each other, dead to ourselves.
All the highly industrialized nations of the earth, regardless of whether they are communist or capitalist, show the same effects of the impact of technology: concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a few; increasing regimentation of every aspect of life, including thoughts, emotions, and even fantasies; and devastation of the environment. "In spite of all the men of good will, all the optimists, all the doers of history, the civilizations of the world are being ringed about with a band of steel" (Ellul).
The industrial wasteland has come upon us from our past. It is the gestation of over 2,000 years of patriarchal rule, the last offspring of Christian/industrial institutions. It is vast. It is powerful. It has respected neither culture nor ideology. It has spread like a cancer over the whole face of the earth. It has ruined our work, our art, our environment, and our emotional and sexual lives. It has cost us the magic sense of life. If we are ever to rise up from the dead and regain our rightful place in nature, we will have to do more than put our faith in the state, the party, or technology - all of which are mere props of industrialism. We will have to tap the saving energies that now lie buried in ourselves and in nature. And that means we will have to summon forth powers that have not been known since the days of the shamans.