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Person/Planet
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The greater the amount or intensity of mystification, the greater the violation of our personhood. For mystification is, essentially, an imposition of false identity. It is the act of maneuvering people into somebody else's conception of who they are, what they are, the roles they are expected to play, the feelings they must feel, the limits of ability, allegiance, personal worth they must respect. Mystification is aggression upon the spiritual autonomy of others; it is inevitably a depersonalizing assertion of hierarchical status based on the assumption that there is an authority somewhere in the world that has the right to assign and to enforce identities.
Person/Planet |
…if there is any hope of saving the rights of the
person and planet in the years ahead, we—by which I mean
the ordinary, chronically powerless people who
live in the belly of the urban-industrial
leviathan—we are
going to have to find our way back to a comparable
sense of mutual aid, a comparable capacity to live self-reliantly
within more local and domestic economies, a comparable appreciation
of the wealth that lies in modest means and simplicity of need. We
are going to have to rethink some of our most firmly held assumptions
about property and privacy, security and success, recognizing that
there is simply no livable future for the competitive, self-regarding,
high-consumption, middle-class way of life which we have been taught
to regard as the culmination of industrial progress. And we are going
to have to undertake that reappraisal from the bottom up, expecting
no encouragement from leaders and experts who are the chief products
and principal beneficiaries of our high industrial compulsions. It
will be up to us to begin coming together, talking together, working
together. We are going to have to stop keeping our cares and material
goods, our troubles and our talents, our wealth and our psychic wounds
to ourselves and begin sharing our lives like mature, convivial animals.
Person/Planet |