Treebeard's comment

I spend way too much time reading stuff on the internet.  As a vice, it's only marginally better than watching television.  But I did come across this eloquent and fiery comment by "treebeard" as a response to an interview with some very earnest folks building an intentional tribe/community:


A Sign...

of cultural disintegration. It was good hear about a group of people in a committed community, and very important work that is being done, but very sad in a way that we have come to this. That we have had to completely reinvent our cultural structures, invoking tribe as a means to create community that has all but disappeared.

We are just starting to understand the violence that we have done to ourselves based on our current set of beliefs that currently masquerade as "facts", but are still clueless to the cause. I have railed against our current paradigm so often here that I am being to dislike the sound of my own voice. But alas, I cannot stop myself. Survival of the fittest, competition, monetization, all products of a twisted psyche, that projects our own disorder into the world and calls them natural, part of evolution, ecology, economics, and psychology. All facts, "markets are self regulating, therefore corruption is impossible".

We are not immoral but amoral. We have chosen the "rational" over the good, we are all Nazi experimenters on our future generations, fretting over our retirement savings and who did what to whom as the planet burns. So our souls starve as we fill our bank accounts and become more insane. Are we intimate with anything anymore, a friend, our own bodies, the earth beneath our feet, the wind on our face, the blue sky in the morning, a bumble bee resting in a flower as the sun sets, our own hunger, emptiness.

How far into the dark night have we come, have we lost our way altogether. In the darkness, even without sight we can feel the vast emptiness of the abyss yawning open before us. We wake in a sweat in the morning before we drop off the cliff, but we lead the same life, day after day, as if we had all the time in the world. The ultimate illusion.

Strangely, this is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read, minor typos and all.

the interview that this is a comment to