Dom Alhambra

Globally, per-capita income rises with national energy use, meaning that cheap energy is critical to reducing poverty. “It’s hard to be productive if you don’t have lights to read by,” Bill Gates writes in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

Connecting rising incomes with the reduction of poverty means that one has successfully impoverished a community’s skills and resources where they are now dependent on nationalized income. Where skills to naturally thrive die out, national currency seeps in so people can survive on “income”.

Bill Gates writes that he became aware of energy poverty while traveling at night in Lagos and seeing the city in relative darkness.

The world’s moral values are surely upside-down when there exists “energy poverty”—have we destroyed the earth so much that the only way to escape a terrible life is through “energy wealth”?

We hear time and time again how city lights hurt the inner physiologies and psychologies of people, and downright destroy the natural habitats of birds and city-adjacent animals. Yet we invent the concept of “energy poverty” when we see a city that has more potential to minimize impact on the world than any in the West?

It won’t be long before a halogen-drenched city will soon be considered as representing “energy poverty”—a moral and mental poverty beset by an over-reliance on technology. Where is the wealth here? In the city people who long to move to the countryside? The countryside people who long to be free from the daily toil of managing machinery to scar the land?

Show me a place filled with “energy wealth” and I’ll show you a people who wish they were anywhere else.

Joseph Irrante and Zachary Student described American life as spatially and internally transformed by the interstate highway system (Irrante) (Student). Irrante’s efforts expanded upon the cultural outcomes produced by highway systems. As the automobile allowed users to commute to more distant locations, highways provided efficient means for laborers to commute to cities separate from their own residences. Companies and manufacturers began to move their production outside of city centers and started forming smaller industrial towns. Similarly, pre-existing townships near highways economically flourished. As such, communities developed around the highway system (Irrante). Irrante’s spatial argument to cultural-technological research adds value to the idea of Hughes’ deterministic argument.

Zachary Student’s own contribution has sentiments similar to Irrante and Hughes, but an important issue that Student raises is the civil activism that occurred in reaction to suburban sprawl and its resulting urban decay. As Student says, interstates “intended to solve urban problems and generate urban renewal, [but] they accomplished the opposite” (Student 17). Metropolis highways were built for the function of decongesting city streets, but instead instigated worse congestion and diminished nearby residences with noise, air, and water pollution, resulting in these areas turning into slums.

The environmental movement in the 60s and 70s found that highways were detrimental to environmental resources, in particular regards to air quality and natural resource conservation. As such, U.S. legislatures developed policies to relocate highways in an attempt to mitigate harmful effects on people and the environment. Feenberg’s argument of “democratic rationalization” comes into view again, as people contextualize interstate infrastructure to fit their views of urban and eco-friendliness, and use political institutions to transform the highway system into one that fits the contemporary cultural climate. Is technology as truly implacable as determinists want to believe?

The internet, or more technically referred to as Information Technology, has been intensely discussed as a colonizing force upon indigenous cultures (Iseke-Barnes & Danard), viewed as a vehicle for misrepresenting indigenous people or forcing global culture upon them. As Judy Iseke-Barnes and Deborah Danard state: “As visitors to the Web site [about native Canadian ‘story robes’], we can read about these Story Robes, but we cannot enter the community of origin. We cannot know the ways that this history continues to live in the lives of the present generations and those of the future” (Iseke-Barnes & Danard). This becomes a warning to historians and researchers using web sites to represent indigenous cultures as images and text can reduce a modern population to its historical creative expressions. For Iseke-Barnes and Danard, internet technology is seen as an extension of Western colonial power, moving into indigenous groups for active and passive ‘modernization’.

Other researchers have argued for the opposite: the internet as a tool utilized by the indigenous for the indigenous. Juan Francisco Salazar asserts that information technology can be utilized “according to traditional knowledge and systems of law” (Salazar). Salazar recommends that researchers should move their focus from the social impact of information technology upon indigenous people and toward understanding their cultural constructions of new communication technologies. This connects Zachary Student’s political shaping of highway infrastructure and again with Feenberg’s drive for contextualizing technology.

If technology were the hegemonic force that Hughes, Irrante, and Iseke-Barnes and Danard believe that it is, there would be a more unified interpretation of technology and infrastructure in regards to societal development. However, it is seen that there are disagreements in the academic community and local communities about how technology has shaped people, and in fact hint at people having shaped technologies in their own image and otherwise the amplificatory nature of culture via technology.

Reframing technology as a tool of cultural amplification should not be mistaken as an effort to make technology a completely benign concept. Technologies like the internet, weapons, and transportation have been the primary means for our Global Economic Society to actively impose itself on others. Technology is thus a means for cultural hegemony rather than the originators of hegemony. I often criticize our technological culture as a people that lost sight of its ability to function without technology. Do we blame the existence of the vehicle or the culture that made vehicles a mandatory appliance in our daily lives?

The development of culture in relation to technology can be summarized like this: Generation A develops observations, theories and scientific revelations. Generation B uses these scientific developments on their material culture, giving way to paradigm-shifting inventions; however, the scale of production and accessibility is not enough for mass adoption. Generation C is raised on the slow adoption of these inventions and their integration into the cultural consciousness. Generation D gis raised on the belief that the cultural consciousness is founded upon these inventions, turning a paradigm shift into a daily habit. Generation E, viewing these technologies as just another part of culture, start to ask why some have better access to it, and others don’t; by this generation, the most groundbreaking technologies appear almost like a public utility—people develop policies to institutionalize the technology as a permanent part of the cultural consciousness.

In five generations, earth shattering technologies transform into daily givens. This occurs with each successive generation normalizing a technology into culture, thus a lack of access to these technologies appears like a lack of culture, which is unacceptable for hegemonic societies who want all people to be “cultured”.

It is the cultural spirit of our Global Economic System to view communities as groups of people that just haven’t yet gotten with the program. When those who enact the story of the Global Economic Dream see a group of people that do not use a piece of culturally-ingrained technology, they perceive lacking rather than an alternative mode of living.

You’ve probably run into this situation before: You profess your interest in a particular topic, and someone tries to test you on how much you really know about it. This reaction is both an act of initiation and exclusion: Pass, and you are truly on the same plane as this examiner; fail, and you are just a casual. The examiner proceeds to speak to you based on the context of your success or failure.

Growing up as a video gamer, I could find both explicit and hidden lines drawn in the sand: During the days of “hardcore” gaming, there was the visible ideological conflict between PC users and console users. PC users, who had spent the time and money to build a powerful machine for gaming, looked down on the casual console gamer, because PC users consider themselves to earned the right to game, while console users bought a pre-furbished appliance without the rites of technological initiation found in PC-building.

Though unenjoyable to read about, this is one of the most benign forms of gatekeeping I could think of. During the age of #MeToo and #GamerGate, we’ve seen that gatekeeping is found in violent and hidden ways.

In any form, gatekeeping occurs in communities that do not share the same story as to why the community exists—or should exist—in the first place. The “PC master race” video gamer enacts a story in which gaming is most substantial when all parts of the machine were hand built. This story is not picked up by console or smartphone gamers, who may have many other stories for themselves to enact. When the stories clash, followers of each are unable to comprehend the other, thus developing a sense of us-versus-them and perpetual conflict.

Communities are built on an anchor point—a story, if you will. From afar, a non-video gamer is confounded by what they see of video gamer conflicts; to this observer, they’re all just playing video gamers. So they utter the usual non-solution: “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Arguments that try to combat phenomena like gatekeeping through a generalized narrative like “We’re all human beings...”, “Prick me, do I not bleed…”, etc. fall on deaf ears because they are not practicable narratives, but utopian ones. To command everyone to have respect for one another just because they are human beings is to command how people should be rather than thinking about humans as they are.

Gatekeeping at its most basic level is the reassurance that a particular community is in fact particular, rather than a quick lifestyle change. Say you lived in a twenty-person tribe along the Yukon River, which had developed a culture for dozens of generations. A stranger comes up and says, “I am one of you!” How could this stranger know all the nuances of your culture when they haven’t gone through the same local experiences as you? You’re cautiously open-minded; you want to welcome newcomers as guests, but you must figure out whether they are truly one of you. If they aren’t, why are they doing this? Why couldn’t this person go back to where they truly belong? It is not that you think your culture is superior, but that it works for those who have grown up for it, and you don’t have the time and patience to teach every random newcomer the ropes to become one of you.

Gatekeeping in its modern state is one that has been institutionalized by media, hierarchical social relations, and normalized prejudices, which is why people can be okay with a community calling itself the “PC master race”. Nowadays, gatekeeping can be the difference between you being able to access a part of the modern human experience or not—whether it’s getting a job, interacting with people, or entering shared activities. If you are not accepted by gatekeepers, you may not even be able to participate in their cultural realm.

This phenomenon has also become important to local communities: Because finances are the primary medium for geographical mobility, a person with enough money can move anywhere, despite their cultural incompatibilities with the local community. Corporations are people as well, and they are able to utilize their vast financial resources to move into communities in spite of the natives’ wishes, and can even destroy the local area, as permitted by the government. Gatekeeping is a natural reminder to passersby that a community was built off an anchor that may be contrary to the values and objectives of newcomers.

A story remains true so long as it works for all of its participants, and isn’t effectively challenged by non-participants. The stories of Native Americans held for thousands of years because it worked up until Western civilization actively suppressed and wiped out the full adoption of these stories, undermining Native American stories until they were fictions rather than realities. Now, our global culture has been attempting a reconciliation of a single story: That, despite the naysayers’ thoughts, all human action has been leading up to this moment, and that there is only one way to live. Because there is only one way to live, we are transforming our culture, our government, and ourselves to maximize one’s access to this single way to live: Free from the constraints of Nature, dependent on a global economic system.

This story rang true for civilizational peoples around the world for more than two thousand years. This is why China’s story focuses on the uniting of all its people under one flag. This is why America’s story focuses on uniting all of its people under one flag. This is why the European Union prides itself on uniting all of its people under one organization: The unite more people under one story. With globalization, we are attempting to undermine the stories of nations in order to enact a narrative that applies to all people under the sun. The “citizen of the world” appeals to the story that borders don’t matter anymore. What matters is the assumption that makes all these nations exist because of a greater idea: That there is only one way to live, and that is globally, without the constraints of Nature, and dependent on a global economic system.

The participants of our global story have been trying for decades to reconcile the distant qualities of a “global community” with the traditionally local one. A portmanteau was invented: “glocalization”, or the ability to still have local community in a global economic system. The challenge of the “world citizen” and the “glocalized” community is that they assume that this story truly works for every single person in the world. Unfortunately, I believe that the story of globalization has been a repeated failure that turns people into “human capital”, hides waste in poorer nations, and demands obligations beyond the scope a single person or community can handle. In other words, I believe that globalization is not conducive to a healthy community because it can only work based on the demand on how people should be, not as they are.

The story to enact for the global economic system is the striving to be an agent perfected for the system. This results in all the edge cases—and more accurately, a majority of people—to be alienated for they can’t adapt themselves to the moral framework of the global economic system.

Another fascinating aspect about the Pando aspen tree is that every tree that shares the same root system will simultaneously change to its gold, orange and green colors as the seasons change. While every tree looks a little bit different, they are all in sync with each other because of shared roots.

For millions of years, it was natural for a people’s story to develop from the earth on which they stood. Legends and myths were borne from the rivers and lakes and mountains and grasslands and the wildlife that were scattered throughout the land. People’s symbolic language rested on the land and animals around them. In the past, a people’s story didn’t typically envision the future, but approached the realities of Nature and life through the lens of familiar symbols. To our global culture, these stories appear superstitious and limited in scope: They were, because these past stories of people were developed for a reality in which it worked; they could not be reconciled with the story of modern society, which does not derive itself from Nature but solely from culture.

Community requires a story, because the story is the moral framework in which all actions are judged. A people’s story is developed from the necessities of their location, and answers why their location preserves these necessities. For example, if fish is the primary food for a community, their story will most likely include the mythology of fish and its relationship to the world and to its people. If the canyons and mountains are essential to the identity of a community, they will include the canyons and the mountains in its mythology as either moral or supernatural authorities.

Whereas the human experience is mortal, the wildlife and the natural environment appears to a community as immortal forces rather than static objects. Moral character is applied to Nature because even as generations pass and people return back to the earth, Nature appears immovable and providing. Nature is thus afforded the properties of godliness that children ascribe to their parents until they realize that their parents are as mortal as the rest of us.

The Fishlake National Forest in Utah contains the world’s most largest living organism: A 107-acre plot of 47,000 genetically identical Pando aspen trees. All part of a single root system, the Pando trees are estimated to weigh 13 million pounds in total. I started to appreciate this fact more and more when thinking about community. Despite our culture’s effort to hide our birthing process from Nature with sterile maternity wards, humans spring forth from the earth like these trees. And up until the past century, humans typically were raised on the earth they were borne upon.

As fleshy extensions of the earth below one’s feet, we are raised not just by parents but by Nature, whose natural properties remind us that we are not above it by recognizing the inescapability of gravity, shitting, and death. Thus, when we give up the pretensions of being sheltered from Nature, we can be more open to the fact that, just as we are what we eat, we are where we live. For millions of years, we embodied our location: If there was fish in the river, you ate fish and developed a culture around its nutritional preparation and spiritual symbology. If bears were nearby, you internalized the hazards of predatorial beasts, but also the magnificence of Nature’s larger-than-life creations. Live next to a mountain, and you know you are part of a mountain people, but also know that the mountain is an extension of yourself.

While I mentioned that the story is the most important ingredient for community, a community’s story used to be solely birthed from location. Now, our global society can defeat all the bears, eat fish from thousands of miles away, and visit mountains on a whim. Thus location in these days functions more like a fashion statement than a fundamental part of your existence. However, as I said before: While our global culture considers location to be choice-driven, we are still a product of location, because location breeds necessity.

For example, even though the city has the means to gobble up anything from around the world, economies of geography still apply: In the Midwest, crab will be less available, so people won’t develop a particular food culture around it. In the suburbs of California, water is increasingly rationed out, so your house and lifestyle must adapt accordingly. Cities absorb a lot more heat from the sun, creating a weather system unique to surrounding areas, so people may wear different clothes from those just twenty miles away. As our society attempts to homogenize the human experience, these geographically-derived cultural differences look to be more and more, but they do indeed exist because of the realities of Nature. Community can exist despite our attempted turns from Nature because it still breeds the necessity of difference: The Californian suburbanite is having a different urban experience than the New Yorker and the Chicagoan because their interactions with Nature subtly but effectively different.

Whether human-made or natural, our physical location has been the primary means toward the grouping of people who often develop and share a story to enact.

#Belonging to History

At 12 years of age I told my friend that I would burn if I ever entered a church. Of course, this was just a dramatic gesture for a child who felt uncomfortable in religious spaces, especially those of Protestant background—the symbology of Catholicism was more familiar, but did not entirely remove my trepidations. When I entered the churches—which was common, as southeastern Iowa predicates its community upon them—I did not burn, but my heart sank and my stomach went aflutter. I felt like a beast in a lab, the clinical setting of the church opposed to what little personality I had at that age. I shared these feelings for military offices, which my dad frequented during his last years in the Army as a career counselors, where all was silent and empty, but functional for the infrequent passersby. The cork board ceiling deadened the sound, and the white walls and office chairs willed anyone to stay for long.

The traditions of the church and military offices stayed strong, kept alive by humans seeking connection with each other, but austere enough to remind its inhabitants that their duty is not to each other, but to God and Country. It was the tradition of history that kept these buildings and rooms intact—one wrong move and all would be lost to the stray desires of men and their wanting of connection and belonging.

I could never stay comfortable in churches and military bases: Their history was too strong, with expectations of the future deeply rooted in the ancient and near-past. The inhabitants were one of historical making, those who wished to repeat the accomplishments of others by way of lifting—too repackage achievements and present as new and innovative. Did I, as a 12 year-old, know this? Absolutely not. But what I felt were the stakes of religion and military. Symbols of honor, duty, piety, devotion, faith, were all strewn about these rooms and halls, in pictures and ornaments and trophies. Knowing that I could never uphold the march of history, shied away from the opportunities of religion and warfare. My ambitions were too low, at least for this crowd: I sought freedom from history, not its contribution. Thus, I excluded myself from the march of soldiers and evangelists, and all the tertiary benefits conferred upon both: Belongingness, brotherhood, tradition, stability, etc.

Is it cowardice? These occupations belong to core tenets of civilization—was I too cowardly to commit myself to the annals? That once I revealed myself as an agent, I would be found out for what I am: An imposter? Over and over again I try to find a path within civilization that is Good and Useful, yet over and over again I default to the ways that were thrown out in disgust: Wavering, unsure, conflicted, seeking a way out. Why do I want a way out when the path to belongingness, brotherhood, tradition, stability is one or two simple steps away?

Why Nihilism feels like an essay borne out of a confusion of language that appears to make people at odds with one another even though they are on the same page. The first contended word is “hope”, which author Flower Bomb previously detailed in their essay “No Hope, No Future: Let the Adventures Begin!”; Flower Bomb finds criticism of a certain brand of hope, one that “activist leaders and liberalism utilize in order to mobilize mass movements.” Per Flower Bomb:

Similar to how religion offers a heaven at the end of a life of misery, I have seen how leftism offers the same “heaven” in the form of “coming” insurrections or the traditional “Proletarian Revolution.” 
Flower Bomb suggests that one should drop such hope for promises of mass movements, and to rely on individual action to achieve one’s sense of anarchy in the world. The primary issue with this essay is that Flower Bomb thinks this runs counter to Zerzan’s version of hope. Repeatedly in his books, Zerzan pointed out that certain brands of progress and revolution have more capability to pacify participants rather than engage and make them active in any kind of action. Flower Bomb shares this criticism, yet they are stuck on the fact that Zerzan said “Yes Hope” rather than “No Hope”. They go on to summarize an argument for anarcho-nihilism:

I’m pointing out that some discover freedom in the total abandonment of positive politics – including the “utopian future” tied to it like a carrot. For some, nihilism is the pursuit of creating moments of bliss here and now with the rubble of burned down slaughterhouses, the cartloads of retail theft, the spontaneous attacks against fascism and so on.

This confuses me because Zerzan’s anthology “Against Civilization” includes Feral Faun’s “Feral Revolution”, which is just a more flowery version of Flower Bomb’s words:

There can be no programs or organizations for feral revolution, because wildness cannot spring from a program or organization. Wildness springs from the freeing of our instincts and desires, from the spontaneous expression of our passions. Each of us has experienced the processes of domestication, and this experience can give us the knowledge we need to undermine civilization and transform our lives. (Feral Faun, “Feral Revolution”)

After reading several of Zerzan’s books, I found that, like Flower Bomb, he relies much more on “negative politics” than positive. Zerzan cut his teeth over the years on protracted criticisms and reactions against technology, agriculture and civilization, and is more likely to quote someone else for descriptions of “what happens next”; typically, those descriptions are more poetic and aesthetic descriptions of the future than step-by-step programs that both Flower Bomb and Zerzan fear in the construction of a post-civilization world. Flower Bomb believes that Zerzan’s hope has a carrot built in, yet I have yet to see any evidence of this in his writings.

Nihilism is the second word in contention: For Flower Bomb, nihilism is a freedom to enact individualized anarchy, without the need for promises of collective action. Yet Zerzan approached this idea very similarly:

For postmodernism, the self is just a product, an outcome, nothing more than a surface effect. Nietzsche actually originated this stance (now also known as “the death of the subject”), which can be found in many of his writings. Kaczynski expressed a determinate autonomy and showed that the individual has not been extinguished. One can lament the end of the sovereign individual and lapse into postmodern passivity and cynicism, or diagnose the individual's condition in society and challenge this condition, as Kaczynski did. (John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines)

I’m not too happy that Kaczynski has to be referred to as the spiritual evolution of Nietzsche, but this excerpt goes to show that individual sovereignty is still a priority for Zerzan, and nihilism tends to reduce the individual into a cynical “surface effect” for others (a hair-do, a quirky lifestyle, a diet) rather than the individual human being as its own end. Let’s try to be clear so we don’t talk past each other: I offer lackadaisical and unfinished definitions to the words “hope” and “nihilism”:

• Hope is the belief that something can be done.
• Nihilism is the belief that nothing can be done.

If you approach “*Why Hope” * and the rest of Zerzan’s writings using these two definitions, I think people like Flower Bomb would be much more agreeable to his reactions against nihilism and his resultant rallying cry for the belief that something can be done. Whether by individuals or groups, something can be done—egoism and individualism has nothing to do with hope and nihilism.

Flower Bomb starts their definition of nihilism as “the pursuit…” and what is more hopeful than a pursuit? There are so many cultural entities that seek to end your pursuit for more—your job, your friends, your family, your finances, you religion, your politics, your hobbies—that it’s unfair to say that the self-defeating nihilist is only a stereotype or myth. They are real—anarchists or not, I can’t stop hearing the nihilistic tendencies of our culture in almost everyone I know. In fact, I feel alienated and alone in my belief that something can be done. My friends, my family, my peers, my co-workers, my siblings all need to be reinvigorated to ask more from this society. And we all must muster the courage to throw it out when it doesn’t work for us. They need to be reminded that something can be done.

Whereas Zerzan called for the belief that something can be done, Flower Bomb heard a call for “obsessive positivity”. Where Zerzan criticized solipsism brought on by forms of egoism, Flower Bomb heard criticisms of self-worth. Yet they arrive at the same doorstep, critical of civilization and ready for individuals and groups to make their moves for a better future. Damn the semantics, we are closer to each other than you think!

Lastly, Flower Bomb introduces a very important idea which I believe defines the current state of relativism and the general trend to move from the questioning of authority to the questioning of all shared knowledge:

Is it unreasonable to be desperate for freedom – for the reclaiming of one’s life from the civilizing institutions that steals individual livelihood? Even if one feels it is hopeless?

I cannot speak to the reasonableness of the desperation of freedom, but I can describe an effect I’ve seen when the hopeless express their desperation without movements toward actual freedom. Between people involved in QAnon, flat earthers, Joe Rogen-amplified theories, 9/11 conspiracies, I’ve observed a core of desperation for individuality that appears unlocked by habitual contrarianism. This core of desperation heightens the validity of any “alternative fact” that may exist in this world, and paired with a disdain for traditional media and popular shared knowledge, these people construct their individual identities on the contrariness of their belief systems. These people hold on to their beliefs in flat earth and QAnon and UFO sightings and 9/11 conspiracies, not because it gives them hope, but because it helps to channel their nihilism in unique ways.

Their hopelessness is also self-defeating—even if they truly believe these potential earth-shattering revelations, they do nothing but espouse these beliefs during parties and car trips, because these contrary beliefs do not serve anything but an aesthetic identity. Listen to their excuses about why the aliens would not want to interact with us but would still like to study us; listen to the QAnon followers who would rather stay behind their computer rather than take to the streets; listen to the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, who appear to be reading a script rather than constructing the event themselves. These hopeless people have been rendered inert in their desperation of freedom at all costs of intellectual dignity for the passing individualisms that occur when it triggers the ill-fated “normie”.

Hope—the belief that something can be done—is a more powerful antidote to today’s nihilisms than one may think. The nihilism of progress has repeatedly tells us that some government program or scientist is already working on fixing the problems of the world, yet by the end of each year we appear with new and growing issues. This is not where are hope lies—our hope lies in the fact that it was not always like this, and doesn’t have to continue as such. I see little difference in positions between Flower Bomb and Zerzan—except that I can never let the hopeless off the hook, as they are the most detrimental to any individual or group cause, stuck on spirals of cultish behavior for charismatic digital storytellers.

As the 20th century lurched toward the 21st, Eustace Conway tried shepherding us instead into the seventeenth. In 1987, he founded Turtle Island Preserve—now over 1,000 acres of mostly pristine Southern Appalachian wilderness, serving as a preindustrial farm and education center.

[Conway] took up that elusive mantle that so many have before him: teaching humanity again how to live with nature rather than kill it. Lessons in squirrel-snaring, food-foraging, and fire-building were taught right alongside those in honor, frugality, and humility. Elizabeth Gilbert chronicled this mission in her 1998 GQ article and 2002 biography on Eustace, each christening him “the Last American Man.” The title stuck, and Eustace garnered something of a folk hero status. He spurred the many who flocked to his year-round programming to create islands of their own: pockets of moral and ecological refuge in an ocean of vice and sprawl. [(GQ, “Eustace Conway Wants to Retire. Can ‘The Last American Man’ Find His Replacement?”)]

This article’s author, Will Bahr, likened the life of Eustace Conway to that of tragic hero Christopher McCandless from the book Into the Wild. McCandless hitchhiked to Alaska, where he would die alone, detailing his regret for isolating himself so much. Conway himself kayaked across Alaska, cycled across Germany, and canoed across America. Truly, Conway is an archetypical Frontier American: Enterprising, ambitious, lonely, domineering, and unable to conceive that he is a product of our modernity, not an antidote.

As the oft-quoted John Donne poem goes: No man is an island. The adventurous modern spirit forgets this; Conway did as well, making a name for himself as an individual Mountain Man who could push himself to live as if it was the “seventeenth century” rather than accept the reality that we live in right now. He made escapes from our urban, industrial world to play in the small sections of woods that America has kept around. Feeling above the rest of us, Conway concluded that his way of living is the right way to live: pre-industrially, directly off the land.

His modern spirit, like L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand, and any other cult of personality built around an individual’s vision, constructed a promised utopia: Blue Turtle Island, 1,000 acres of escapism from reality. A Reality Distortion Field, as Steve Jobs followers would call it, where supposedly one is freed from the vices and failures of modern society. You don’t have to read much of the GQ article to see that the promised land has not yet arrived.

“Welcome to Turtle Island. I am a dictator.”

As Blue Turtle Island opened its doors, Conway quickly figured that accomplishing his objectives about old-style living required the help of others, as he was already overstretched in his duties—seventeenth century folks were quite busy surviving rather than going on media circuits, right? Reality set in for this dogmatic personality: compromises would have to be made to reach the current generations. Someone needs to carry the message beyond Conway’s lifespan, and inevitably they will have their own twists on it. But as long as he lives, Conway wants to micro-manage the heir to the throne of the Last American Man—until they lose their own individuality and simply become a clone of him. It is like the tragedy of the Christian God and Man, who is so powerless that it can only look angrily upon the Earth’s people as they break all of his rules.

Conway’s largest excuse for his failure to have changed the world:

“The young people are less and less capable every year,” he tells me. This isn’t your standard millennial bashing—to Eustace, modern Americans are “the most incapable people that have ever existed on the face of planet Earth in the last three million years of human existence. Period.”

In terms of Conway’s standards for human living, this is objectively true, and applies to more and more of our global society. However, Conway’s pessimistic bent on modern life is itself the curse of modernity: One may be able to construct the ideal self, but every time this self-construction has been forced upon groups or societies, they tend to fracture and become embroiled in what the ideal identity truly means. To serve a narrow and singular vision of the world, people have to constantly navel-gaze and affect their actions to fit the cookie cutter shapes this vision has created. Conway’s challenge isn’t the depletion of knowledge about simple living, but that his particular vision for it provides little value for those truly seeking a way out of modernity.

It wouldn’t take long before the young saw right through the veneer: Why are we forcing ourselves down Conway’s road when we could be doing this better, or differently, or doing something completely different?

The modernists of the world always fear these children, believing them to be signs of cultural decline. Conway already described himself as a benevolent dictator: What use does he have of the anarchic spirit of children? He is creating his utopia, not theirs.

Conway is seeking a simpler, pre-industrial life of local farming, living within Nature, and sustainable exploitation of the land. I enjoy such goals, but wouldn’t touch the dictatorship over Blue Turtle Island with a ten foot stick. I don’t see the results of a better life stemming from the Island, I see people giving up things in order to live an escapist experience, until, just like Conway, they buy a house, a housekeeper, and a smart speaker. That is the danger of modern society: It is always there as a fallback when you fail to transcend it. Always ready to pick you up and ask, “Well, did you shake that energy out, and are you ready to enter the default?” Some exhaustedly whisper “okay,” and enter the modern society with a whimper.

We need a new default. Eustace Conway’s Island could not serve as a default because it is structured as a quasi-dictatorship, an escape from modern society while also borrowing parts of modernity for its benefit. A new default doesn’t pretend for utopia, just as our reality doesn’t pretend that it’s a utopia: In fact, it’s downright ugly, but people fall back on it anyway. A new default accepts people as they are right now, and tries to experiment with any way it can to make our situation better.

A new default rests on partnerships and equal voices in a matter so that hierarchy is diminished and each person has equivalent stake in their adopted way of living. A new default is also not the one way to live: It is the realization that one must tap into the natural instincts of the human being, a being that is group- and band-oriented and that can’t manage hundreds of people at once; thus, the default is cultural decentralization, so small groups of people—communities—can partake in their own cultures and justice systems and economic exchanges and methods of belongingness. The default is realizing a community’s freedom of self-determination—so long as we have a centralized government, it would be the encouragement of support of this self-determination.

Perhaps Eustace Conway is the Last Domineering, Lonely, Rigid, Individualistic American Man—and this could be to everyone’s benefit as we move beyond the American and into the communal spirit that has been so strong for nearly 3 million years. Our spiritual capabilities to develop community and belongingness have not diminished, even if modernity attempts to challenge it with individualistic Mountain Man mythologies and promises of “utopia”. I’d recommend we consider people as they are now rather than what the Conways and the “dictators” of the world want us to be. These domineering personalities want you to build their pyramids, and you should be asking: Why do I need to build a pyramid at all?