Civilization, alienation and the Integral way

The culture is dead because culture thrives on connection.

When connection dies, so does culture.

The dominant technology of post-industrial societies has become expert at one thing – enabling the atomization of the individual. This enabling has become their undoing.

The culture has come apart. It has crumbled into brokenness. It has died, if only a few see that.

The heart of every civilization is the city. The city is created in opposition to nature and uncivilized societies. Tribal societies are embedded in and subject to nature. The first directive of the city as an organizational unit is to separate human from natural – to protect and levitate culture by shielding it from the humbling vagaries of nature.

Humans build cities as a human alternative to nature because humans find nature too uncomfortable and dangerous. The city seeks to control and standardize, to make regulated and predictable, to render safe, to liberate humanity from the arbitrary diktat of unbridled natural forces.

It’s like a greenhouse for people, with its own dome of air pollution.

But it is not geography that sets the city apart and elevates civilization out of the whims of untamed nature. Civilization rises on the legs of technology. The city is just an ultimate expression of this upward thrust.

The original goal of the civilization of the city is benign – to make more room for risk-taking and creativity by reducing the ‘random’ risk inherent in the natural environment. Civilization becomes its own undoing when it substitutes the hubristic autopilot of mindless technocracy for the deliberate creation of high culture.

As technology becomes more and more intricate, as it refines and proliferates the little keyholes that separate humanity from nature, the dialectic kicks in with a vengeance. More and more intellect becomes necessary to manage a unit of technology. The machines that were supposed to be humanity’s liberation from the chaos of nature become prisons, first for society at large, then gradually for every individual subject to society and ensnared by them.

Every next unnecessary upgrade for your pocket dumbphone is made possible by ever greater specialization – of engineers, technologists, designers, marketers, banksters etc. The logistics networks supporting the production cycle for this pointless complication span the globe. With them, the interdependence and specialization only escalates, making it impossible to live on one’s own without becoming a survivalist in the deep jungle or the far-off tundra.

The individual, having aspired to become liberated and elevated through self-creation, is instead trapped by technology through interdependence and specialization.

As unexamined technology metastasizes all around, nature itself becomes consumed and ensnared by human systems. To the point where it cannot sustain itself without them. Whole species and habitats revolve and evolve around regularized human activity – from agriculture to fishing to garbage disposal.

Ultimately, no corner of the planet remains untouched by human reengineering. Everything becomes disrupted by and dependent on it. The individual has literally no place to escape – physically, not just from the digital and chemical addictions of corporate technology.

People are cornered into their dumbphones because technocracy has destroyed everything worth living. Mass addiction is just the symptom of having no alternative.

Specialization numbs you to everything outside of your immediate survival needs and your particular caste of wage slaves. Digitization makes it necessary to become ever more dependent on it just to survive. You interface ever more with screens and ever less with people. The result is apathy, depression and abject surrender – no will to escape captivity and live.

Thriving culture grows out of connected individuals. Dead culture is a collection of atomized zombies.

The business model of corporatist technology is based on eliminating organic connection and then charging you for the privilege of getting an inferior digital substitute. Everything you consume is pre-packaged, pre-processed and pre-destined to convert you into a broken shadow of a human being and a digital database entry to be sold and resold to corporate marketing departments in perpetuity.

But there is a way to decommoditize yourself.

You can choose not to be another input in the corporate production cycle.

You can choose to reclaim your agency and grow as an Integral individual instead of a human termite.

Integrity takes concerted effort – to detach from corporate logistics and inoculate yourself to their relentless pull towards the digitized swarm of the lo-awarenes mass.

What does it mean to develop in an Integral way?

You have to stop viewing yourself as a bag of unrelated traits and metrics to be micromanaged by corporate algos downloaded through the next scheduling app.

Everything you do, own, consume, produce, think, feel, emote affects You.

The people you invest time into, the place you live, the business you work – all of it is reflected in your Character.

Your attitudes towards all those things affect You.

They become You – if you let them.

The more you escape into unconsciousness of your own feelings, the more you become another brick in the wall, another cog in the machinery of corporatist banksterism and cultural decay.

Deliberate decision is an act of Creation. Your every deliberate decision becomes woven into your Character.

Every time you outsource your decisions to your corporate overlords, you substitute cheap one-size-fits-all plastic components designed by a half-brained techtard for the organic craftsmanship of authentic self-authorship.

Don’t act surprised by the results if you do this.

Don’t act surprised that you end up looking like a blob of fat if you eat corporate frankenfoods.

Don’t act surprised that you’re emotionally unstable if you download your worldview from disneyfied media narratives.

Don’t act surprised that you’re depressed and miserable if everything and anything you do and feel is cued by electronic notification and digital consensus.

Don’t act surprised that you’re disoriented and disconnected because you chose to unchoose and became another substitutable data entry to be edited, updated and resold to the lowliest bidder.

When you surrender your self-authorship for the Fakehood of cheap comforts and corporate authority, you can be owned by every techtard with a food-stained shirt.

When you take ownership of Yourself, you own the world.

Understand.

Your world is merely a reflection of your Character. When you make your own Character, you make your own world. Each is Integral to the other.

To grow as an Integral individual, you must take responsibility for everything in your life.

To excise the corporatist tumours from your life, you must become intolerant to what doesn’t serve you.

To know what serves you, you must stop running away from how you feel about your condition.

Escapism makes you easy prey.

You have to stop drifting and ordering automatic lattes every time you’re bored. You have to stop defaulting to whatever mind-numbing drugs mainstream murdercine recommends. You have to cultivate a reflex to start laughing when you hear the words ‘science says’.

You have to get into the habit of making deliberate choices for yourself. Not once a month or once a year, but every day and for everything.

This requires elevated Awareness and focus on what matters to you.

To know what matters, you will have to do the inner work.

As within, so without. The Integral cannot be compartmentalized.

Eating healthy – real healthy – and working out regularly isn’t enough. You must always look for ways to step outside of your habits and routines to explore and become more of Yourself. Risk-taking is the only way not to get sucked back into the technocratic meat grinder.

You have to pay attention to how you’re developing as an individual and frequently take stock of where you fall short of your ascent trajectory.

You have to take ultimate responsibility for everything, no matter how absurd and overwhelming that may seem.

This is the Integral way.

We connect with each other when we take a risk on each other. We belong together when we evolve together. It’s not the embroidery of rockets.

Taking a risk on yourself is the only way to reconnect with your organic self and avoid the fate of an industrial commodity.

The choice is yours. It always has been.

This article was originally a missive to subscribers of my email list. Go here to subscribe for FREE: http://startupdaemon.net. Read the reviews before you sign up – it’s not for everyone.

If you want to support my work on Patreon, you can become a contributor here: https://www.patreon.com/join/startupdaemon.

If you want to contribute in bitcoin, you can send it to: 19qmFVMQw4PqMXXJXPYYjrmW1Y8Dge4HDP

See also:

Saint-Saëns, Charles-Camille. Symphony №3.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West, Vol. I.

Spengler, Oswald. Man and Technics.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.