In this offering, permaculture elder David Holmgren is our guest in discussion with Patrick speaking about this next phase of global energy transition, and thus societal transformation in the local context.
Here’s the audio version (1hr 52mins).
David and Patrick’s hour-long conversation is followed by a compost of goodly questions from community participants who gathered and shared food together for this event. We hope that this long-form drop will aid in your preparations for the coming months.
This event recently took place at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Tree Elbow University in Djaara Mother Country.
Huge, hug-filled thanks to Jordan Osmond from Folklore Pictures (formally Happen Films) for both the sound and vision.
We’d love to hear from you about your preparations, priorities and musings at this time.
Listen to the audio version of this post (18mins), or read below.
Industrial progress is our civilisational spell. It is the spell of the modern, of comfort, of innovation-anxiety, of hyper-domestication, of estrangement and separation, of unashamed pollution. The collective name we call this spell is hypertechnocivility.
From birth we are conditioned to conform to this story. Early on daycare separates us from our most significant protectors, leaving us vulnerable and often emotionally wounded. As wounded fledglings industrial schooling grooms us to become compliant cogs in the narrative of progress. Technical colleges or universities finish the hardening process, equipping us with trades or degrees to serve industrial capital, rewarding us materially, as long as we are compliant, dutiful and stay under the spell, or in our lanes. By our mid twenties we become modern serfs in service to the Financial Industrial Complex. The key to success is to do as you are told, become upwardly mobile, and not look at what’s really going on around you.
Every industry larger than cottage is subordinate to the Financial Industrial Complex, which controls all the other global raiding parties – Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Military, Big Ag, et al. Big Finance is the apex predator of this greater mob of morally depraved elites because it controls the capital for all other industries, including government.
It was the Luddites (1811-1812) who mounted the first and only serious rebellion against the spell casters of industrial progress. This happened in the midlands and north of England, where a number of our family’s ancestors hail. Initially the resistance focussed on ‘machine breaking’, smashing the frames of early industrial textile machines that were reducing the capacity of cottage weavers and hosiers to earn a proper income through their fine crafts.
A new power class was emerging in England at this time. The early industrial manufacturers established the first chapter of mass production. They had in turn derived from a revolutionary political theology designed by Adam Smith and others who gave spark to modern predatory capitalism, and lobbied parliament to bring in draconian laws that further prevented common folk from self-provisioning. The classical political economists knew that capitalism could only work if The Common – land that could once be used for people to produce or gather food – was enclosed, and townsfolk, artisans and peasants could no longer easily create non-monetary economies of community-sufficiency.
The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelman is a comprehensive resource for examining the dark and mostly untold story of Classical Political Economy.
While the enclosures began in feudal England centuries earlier, Smith and co conspired with the church and state to make sure people were economically fragile and thus exploit-ready for manufacturers and other industrialists. This in turn created unbound poverty and suffering, which would eventually force people to move into the growing manufacturing centres to look for work, kickstarting a de-ruralisation process that continues today:
Displaced populations leave the land and make their way, uselessly, to the cities; urban ghettos swell and fester; families without skills recognisable in the cities compete for the few available jobs or go on the public dole, using food stamps to buy what they once knew how to grow. –– Kirkpatrick Sale (1995)
The wretchedness caused by enclosure and through dispossession of ancestral commons led to mass poverty. This created widespread crime that in turn led to the advent of populations being policed for the first time, as well as the establishment of faraway colonial jails like Australia. Industrial progress is also the story of made-man mass suffering, exported from England to across the world.
The history of the Luddites’ powerful though short lived uprising to save their autonomous economic-technological-cultural relations is told in Kirkpatrick Sale’s detailed Rebels against the Future: Lessons for the Computer Age. Sale’s social history brings greater awareness of the mass exploitation of labour that occurred at this time, which was required to catapult industrial capitalism into existence.
Through the many stages and processes of industrial progress we have more or less become an estranged species of anthropocentric urbanites who no longer yearn to be in relationship with earth-honouring technologies, or living within processes of regeneration. We fabricate stories of progress such as efficient electric homes powered by lithium-ion batteries, without reporting on the millions of fires these batteries start each year and the horrific costs to environments and people that the mining of this one particular metal creates.
In every new technology manufactured by the story of industrial progress, harm proliferates. Look behind the curtains of any new product, any new drug, every new digital tool or means of production, and someone or something is sick or dying. Electric technologies requiring rare earth minerals or metals won’t save us, but these technologies just might:
So, given what we now know about industrial progress, is there anything we can learn from the original Luddites? Is there anything to learn from their gallant failure, which took an English army, larger than any that fought against Napoleon, to crush their resistance?
The first lesson for us from the Luddites is violence only begets more violence, and the state is designed to ultimately protect capital before workers. As we have seen for decades, governments will use excessive force against any uprising, and Big Tech is almost fully capable now of silencing any form of dissent or using dissenting subgroups to create ideological silos in a bid to continue the colonial practice of divide and rule.
Before they resorted to violence, however, the Luddite’s political strategy was to petition the political class.
Lord Byron made his maiden parliamentary speech speaking up for subjugated artisans who were being rapidly turned into impoverished subjects of capital. But shortly afterwards Byron became famous for his writings, and his attention in support of the Luddites disappeared. And then no one in the political class championed the traditional textile artisans whose industry was the first to be subject to the moral depravity of early industrial capitalists. Such powerlessness, especially felt by weavers, led to greater acts of violence against textile manufacturers’ machine parts (thousands of weaving frames were smashed), then against the factories (some were burnt to the ground), then manufacturers themselves (some were murdered).
Secondly, Luddite resistance didn’t pivot towards alternative self-organising economies. Luddites wanted to maintain life as it was, where cottagers would raise their children to take on the craft or trade of the household with their future generations engaged in meaningful, self-organising labour that was rewarded by money. Luddites and their kin perhaps could not imagine alternative economic lifeways as some of us are crafting now. Rapid onset poverty has a way of destroying creativity and thus diminishing the scope to problem solve because the sole concern of destitution is sheltering and feeding oneself and family.
Today, time-poverty, including among the wealthy, similarly destroys the ability to problem solve because responding to a predicament intelligently requires a mind not over-filled with stresses and distraction. To respond to the predicaments of our time, however we are reading them and which ever ones jump out at us and call for our attention, our minds need to be connected to the universal creativity of the living of the world.
The lack of pivot of the Luddites was probably also due to the demotion of subsistence (or non-monetary) economies, again due to prior enclosure laws. While Luddite cottagers, at night, focussed on organising secret militia attacks in numbers that are astounding to consider right across the industrialising midlands and north of England, they could have alternatively spent this time covertly growing crops on marginal or hidden lands, keeping pigs and chickens in simple enclosures, poaching the game and stock of the landed gentry, and generally setting up underground food networks, which also distributed other basic needs to people. This form of covert economic resistance may have resulted in the manufacturers having much less of a population to draw on for labour, and therefore lessening their ability to exploit workers with wages that barely enabled people to survive.
Thirdly, life is not worth living when we are enslaved or owned by others and we cannot augment our own economic forms with kindred souls. Many Luddites had nothing to lose but to gather, swear oaths (a crime considered worthy of hanging or transporting to Australia), and form secret militia groups that would conspire to attack the new masters.
The political classes learned from the political violence the Luddites escalated between 1811 and 1812. After the Luddites were eventually smashed, the new rich manufacturers, the established political elites and the financial class gradually conspired to produce more subtle ways to placate and incarcerate working peoples and turn them into docile factory slaves. Industrial schooling, drugs, alcohol and mass entertainment became important tools of capital that worked on placating and making soporific the rebellious spirit the Luddites possessed. As we know, these are still some of the tools used for compliance today.
Adaptation before panic has been a message we and countless others have been singing for some time now. Collapse now and avoid the rush, as John Michael Greer famously wrote in 2012, precisely two hundred years after the last Luddite was publicly hanged.
The Luddites had no such prior story to inform them. No story of pivoting or reclaiming. Nothing before them had so utterly transformed human life and economy, as rapidly. Today, it’s hard to see anything that the three industrial revolutions haven’t already shat on, so an argument for economic alternatives, village rebuilding and reclaiming a ceremonial species approach should, you would think, have greater agency. So what are the road blocks?
Fear is central to killing off the creative agency needed to spell a new story of economy and culture making. The spell of Industrial progress is bound by fear. What will my parents think? What will my partner think? What will my peers think, if I take off the chains and leave the cave of industrial progress?
The Luddites wanted to preserve pre-industrial life where handmade tools aided cottage productions of beautiful and useful things, and contributed to a village logic that was not centred on extraction and pyramidal hierarchy, but rather was rooted in relationship with local, bioregional, land-accountable practices of life making. Yes, manorial lords stood over village folk to lesser and greater degrees, however, this powering-over was relatively benign by comparison with the misery of early factory servitude. As the spell of industrial progress spread like a plague throughout the world, the word Luddite naturally became a pejorative term employed by hypertechnocivility to shame-label critics.
Although all three of our wheelbarrows have derived from industrial mines, factories and markets – two salvaged from the local tip shop and one purchased new and given to us as a gift – they represent technology that can be replicated by materials walked for and harvested respectfully in nearby common land, which we help care for. Our wheelbarrows are low-impact transportation technologies that enable us to take large amounts of fodder to our goats and collect our winter fuel. We do not take for granted their simplicity or their meaning in recrafting ecological economies of place.
While we currently have access to a car, and we hold a small title of land that belongs to the great industrial legal lie terra nullius, we give no money to Big Finance, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Military or any other industrial complex. We have crafted a cottager, community sufficient lifeway based on ancestral relations to local economy making, brought forward into the context of today and the Mother Country we live within. We don’t dress in period costumes or romanticise what was. Instead we find kinship with our ancestors and community in reclaiming and re-skilling, while recognising the greatest threat to life is the romanticisation of industrial progress.
Rather than violence as our response to the sickly spell of industrial progress, we choose defunding its power. This, for us, is the most rich and rewarding form of resistance, which is steeped in relationships that the Financial Industrial Complex or its challenger, Big Tech, can never have jurisdiction over. Sharing our story, linking with like minds, revillaging, and teaching our lifeways and learnings at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, is all we can do alongside the primary concern of actually crafting economy that refuses to participate in industrial progress. This scale is human and local, and soon to come back offline. Living the change. Living life outside the chains of the cave. Sharing our learnings with others. Dancing in the face of industrial progress without fear. This is our power.
Our wealth is time and relationships and knowledges and skills almost entirely found outside the vast drag net of the Financial Industrial Complex. We generate so little money that we don’t pay tax, therefore we don’t support the war machine or participate in government welfare given to corporates to promote earth- and health-wrecking technologies, such as gain-of-function synthetic medicines or drone warfare or more toxic biotech farming practices.
Yes, we are neoluddites. Yes, we are conspiracists. Yes, we are anti-vaxxers. Yes, dirty hippies. Yes, witches. Yes, op-shoppers. Yes, radical homemakers. Yes, neopeasants. Yes, some of us are quite toothless, repair things and practice self-suturing.
Some readers may be offended by the graphic nature this post. Discretion is required.
This week the ‘home theatre’ took on new meaning in the School of Applied Neopeasantry’s outdoor kitchen.
It became a site of needlework poetics and self-doctoring after Patrick took a blow from a cricket ball, bowled by Woody.
What a grand opportunity for this grubby neopeasant to practice the craft of self-suturing, and for us to share the story.
Earlier, at the ground where the sport took place, Woody and friend Fab scattered to find plantain (rib wort) as blood spewed forth onto the pitch. This useful, sometimes scruffy common medicine is found in almost all places where wounds commonly take place.
Years before, playing soccer, Zephyr had run to find his old man the same herb after Patrick sustained a head injury that required a number of stitches. Both times, then and now, Patrick masticated the coagulating, antimicrobial leaves in his mouth,
and quelled the blood of the head wound by placing the green mush onto the cut. A medical doctor friend, whom he played soccer with 12 years ago, stitched Patrick on the side of the field, and remarked how well the plantain had stopped the flow of blood. This time, after dabbling with self-suturing a little since the soccer head collision, Patrick felt ready for the next stage of creating the home emergency ward.
Sooted stretched sheep skins gave wall to the surgery, and blood-stained hands and dirt under the fingernails spoke of no violence of purity, often claimed by those who say they want to keep us safe. A sewing needle was fetched and so too the workshop’s old diamond stone to sharpen it by.
Then some modicum of cleanliness followed with the sharpened patchwork needle being dropped in a small dish of Brother Eucalyptus oil.
And the thread on hand, a piece of dental floss, was threaded through the needle and lowered into the oil as well.
So far we had all that we needed for the surgery. A kettle of boiling mountain rain water was poured into a bowl, then some previously boiled, now cooled water added, and then a splash of the cleaning oil.
This made a wash solution for inside the wound and around it.
Courage was mustered by this doctor of poetics, though the natural shock at the cut after the ball struck, was anaesthetic enough not to warrant worry for the procedure. Breath was breathed. Trust was trusted. A stable hand placed the needle. Some more youthful eyes would have been good, but not on offer, so in it went.
Relief! The first stitch holes punctured as though a through line in the series, Collapse of the cult of safetyism.
After puncturing the skin in two places in the middle of the wound, and pulling the threaded needle through, Patrick tied a double knot.
He cut off the remains of the dental floss thread and did the same for another two stitches. “This is fun!” He exclaimed to Meg. “The home theatre of deep adaptation.”
Patrick laboured gently just as he had done countless times sewing up our torn or worn clothes over the years. He was mightily chuffed with himself by the end of the third stitch. Self doctoring (and dentistry) in a time of collapse is more exhilarating than you would think. It’s empowering.
After the stitching was complete, he smeared our garden bee’s honey across the wound, as an external antiseptic and wound healing salve.
The whole procedure took around twenty minutes, and a few hours later (after a deep sleep) the bruising appeared.
48 hours later, after two days of deep rest and goodly sleep – the best medicine life has on offer (which hospitals disallow) – including nine hours of listening to the mass catalogue of woundings and killings in a telling of The Iliad, Patrick’s wound looked like this.
A cricket ball weighs 156 grams and Woody bowls at around 100 km/hr. So effectively this cricket ball is a punch in the face at high velocity. It is the order of things when a son, fairly, beats his dad. Another 48 hours on, the wound looked like this.
The following day was Saturday, and Patrick captained the senior cricket team, scored 60 runs alongside Zeph’s 57 and Woody took a wicket to each contribute to a mighty win. Initially Patrick batted in a helmet (a first for him), but took it off because he couldn’t quite see the ball. On Sunday, day six, he took the stitches out,
which was actually the most difficult bit, and where much of the learning took place.
The dental floss had began to fall apart, and we didn’t want any of it to be left inside in case it caused an infection. Dosing up on zinc, vitamin C, sugar-free food, plantain salve, mineral water pumped from down in the forest, and significant rest assisted Patrick’s immune system, so he could more quickly recover, fight off infection, and get back to the cricket. However, on day six, he was concerned that the poor integrity of the thread could send all the good doctoring backwards.
After the removal was complete and the wound site cleaned, it looked like this.
Then, on day seven of Patrick’s healing, Zeph called us from work. A large pane of glass had fallen and shattered across his arm, cutting it in several places. The nearby Maldon clinic doctor refused to even look under the bandage and told him to go to Bendigo Hospital emergency ward.
Patrick collected him in our friend Bei’s car, spoke with Zeph about potentially home suturing, attempted to get hold of a suture kit from some medical friends, talked about the possibility of laceration to a tendon or a nerve, and then decided it best to head to Bendigo. They arrived at 4pm, got triaged (that ugly word), had the cuts looked at, and then took a seat in that hot, stuffy place.
While waiting Patrick was thinking about our friend who lost a finger in this same emergency ward, due to having to wait seven hours to be looked at. When he was finally seen, the doctor said, oops, we needed to have seen you hours ago to have saved your finger. At the three and a half hour mark Patrick asked Administration Clerk 1 politely whether he could take home a suture kit and do the job himself.
The nurse looked confused and said, “No… I don’t think so, I’d have to ask.”
Patrick responded with a smile, in his wife-beater singlet: “I am a doctor you know.”
“Are you?” she said unsurely.
“Yes, a doctor of literature,” he replied smiling. “I stitched up my own face last Monday.”
She glanced at the wound above his eye.
“Let me look in the system… Oh, your son is next in line, shouldn’t be long now.”
“Thanks nurse, appreciate it.”
They were having fun. Or, at least Patrick was. Then, miraculously, Zeph’s name was called and we were ushered into a fairly dirty little clinic by a lovely Sri Lankan doctor. Patrick asked if he could watch the procedure because, as he said, he loves to learn. The doctor was obliging. Zeph was mightily relieved that at 8pm (the incident having taken place around 1pm) someone was finally going to take a look at his arm and assess whether there was tendon or nerve damage.
By comparison, in the home emergency ward last week Patrick stitched himself up within an hour of his accident. Because of his old man’s keen student-like attention and questioning, the doctor was very accommodating and taught as though giving a workshop. Patrick repaid the favour by schooling her on toxic adjuvants in vaccines and the over-prescribing of them, after she offered Zeph a tetanus shot. Naturally, due to her education in western medicine, adjuvants (the largely untold shadow side of vaccinology) were things she had never heard of. She was refreshingly open to learning. Her first job was to ascertain whether there was glass in the wound and whether a tendon or nerve had been damaged. She washed the wound under a bright light.
She used a syringe of salty water to irrigate out any broken pieces, and then showed her impromptu student how to open the wound and look down into it after flushing away the blood, to search for any white regions. White, Patrick discovered, means nerve or tendon. After the clean out, the lacerations looked quite trivial. It pays to thoroughly investigate the situation first, thought Patrick. “Observe first. That’s what I should have done when I first picked up Zeph,” he later reflected to Meg.
Patrick noted the way the doctor cut away the dead skin, and how she applied the nylon thread and the fishhook needle to suture Zeph’s wounds. As a fellow sewer, Patrick was impressed.
While a makeshift emergency ward suited Patrick’s purposes to self-suture last week, it’s a little different doctoring someone else without the right gear or missing knowledge. However, after last night’s free tutorial, it’s actually all pretty straight forward. Suturing skin is really low-skilled labour, and we have no idea why nurses are not trained to do this work, especially when small regional hospitals and clinics are now refusing to do it. This morning we heard from our medical friends saying they have saved for us some unused suture kits whose expiry date has passed, and instead of burning them as medical waste, and contributing to the great waste pollution stream of the industrial medical complex, they’re going to give them to us.
“I could have done this myself,” said Patrick to Zeph on the late, long drive home last night, “but I’m glad for the extra schooling.” It certainly has been a week of gold in terms of learning for a future with an ever greater reduction of services in regional Australia.
What are your self-doctoring lessons and stories? We’d love to hear how you are responding to the decline of affluence and the real, everyday need to skill up at home to take the pressure off a broken health system, made even more bankrupt by the ridiculous and excessive Covid response.
Onwards and upwards! Thanks for reading all the way and stomaching some of the more gory images.
On the weekend we held two online Q&A sessions, each for an hour and a half. Here we share an edited version of that three hours.
We hope you enjoy this offering as much as we did co-creating it. A big hearty thank you to all who participated, and especially to those who asked such timely, goodly questions.
Listen to the audio version (1:19mins),
or watch the video.
A reminder we will be travelling with The New Peasants to Stanley, Merimbula, Canberra and Sydney in Gadigal Country, where Gadigal born elder and dear friend, Uncle Charles Davison, will be welcoming us all at the Dendy Cinema in Newtown.
If you are just coming to these excerpts now – welcome! We spent a year journalling every day and currently we are spending a year releasing excerpts as we combine our journals into one manuscript. If you would like to read the previous five, please start here, then go to two, three, four and five. If you’d like to give to our labours and writing in one of four ways, please visit our Support page. Your comments and questions are always welcome. We’re open to all forms of generative feedback – critical, loving and all that is.
November 28
Meg
Our neighbour Andrew brings around a box of dusty jars. He is cleaning out his shed and thinks we might like them. Blackwood and I are cooking our respective dinners when Andrew drops by. He also offers some insulation bats, so I tell him I’ll message our friend Leif who’s building a tiny house to see if he wants them.
After dinner in the tree house, Blackwood and I put on our hiking packs and head torches and walk up the street to go hunting. We are on the lookout for newspaper; a precious resource in our home economy that we wouldn’t waste our money on buying.
We know which recycling bins always have newspaper, but we inspect them all anyway. I take one side of the road and Blackwood takes the other. We turn our head torches off as we run between the bins, and then on again as we open each lid. It’s like lifting up river stones when we hunt yabbies.
After a successful session of collecting and filling our backpacks with newspapers, and some 2-litre plastic bottles, (which we are going to clean, fill with water and put in our chest freezer for Blackwood and Patrick to take next time they go fishing), we drop some newspapers at Andrew’s as he said he’d like some too. Like us, Andrew heats his home with wood, and like us, he doesn’t read newspapers.
There are some huge eucalypts outside Andrew’s house, and while Blackwood tells him about our night of hunting, I collect an armload of kindling from his nature strip. We farewell Andrew then walk home with our heavy backpacks. My arms are full of kindling, while Blackwood is carrying a box he found in someone’s bin containing an internet modem and a whole bunch of cables that he and his friend Django are going to make something with tomorrow.
Patrick
The men saw me off last night. I left the warmth of the firecircle and my soft-hearted brothers and walked into the forest without any light except for a fine crescent moon. I didn’t know where I was going or where I was going to sleep. I just headed southwest; everywhere else was town. It was already late.
After some walking towards what I’ve come to call Fear Country, which is mostly country within me, I arrive at a creek but find the water too high over the stepping stones to cross. Without thinking, I’d started on a course to the part of the forest where all my big visions and happenings have occurred over the years. Where a wave of blue wrens had saved me from an abyss of evil and permanent dying, and the place where white serpent revealed himself, writhing elegantly from out of the forest and across the sky, covering me in peace and belonging. All revelations and visions had occurred once I’d gathered up the courage to let go of the fear I held in my body and open to the grace and immensity of Mother Country’s spirit world.
But I turned back. I was spent and did not have the wherewithal or the light to negotiate the creek. My tiredness and growing fear of the dark turned me back towards my goats. To sleep beside them. Something I’ve always wanted to do. I felt shame for turning back and novelty, all mixed up in my fatigue.
Alice, our oldest nanny, was intrigued as I set up a crude bed, and she stayed close to me with her kid Daphne throughout the night. I fell asleep wondering if I’d botched my first challenge on this outing and how that would play its part.
~
I wake with both the dawn and the goats beside me, pack up my dew-sodden gear, wish the horned ones a goodly day, and walk an alternative route to the creek to explore a part of the forest I’ve never camped in.
At Sutton Spring I take a breakfast of mineral water, cross the creek and head off through the brambles, sweet bursaria and broom and on and up to a woodland hill. I sit for a while before I speak my two intentions for coming: to open to the oneness of the worlds of the world, and to fully accept everything. Acceptance and oneness.
The morning holds just enough sun to dry my gear, and with darkening clouds in the afternoon I set up my hammock tent between two trees, the base touching the ground where I’ll sleep. I crawl in and out for the remainder of the day, with a heavy fatigue.
Occasionally I hear bushwalkers, a truck growling up the A300, or an aeroplane going over, though for much of the day I listen to running water, little gusts of wind stirring dry leaves, and continuous bird song and call.
Falling in and out of sleep I dissolve into the thrum of the forest.
Wise and curious Alice has taught us much about oneness and acceptance.
This week we examine our fear, Patrick writes a poem on the subject, and we listen to an elder from the past on the nature of fear, which we offer as critical listening for this present moment and immanent future.
Here’s the audio of Patrick’s poem, I am frightened by the culture I was born into (5 min listen). The text of which (with links) is below:
I am frightened by the culture I was born into
Yeah well my phone’s fucked and they won’t give me a new sim until I get vaxxed so I gave in, just got the first shot. I need the phone to log onto my computer for work. Work also breathing down my neck with a deadline of the 17th for declaring my ‘status’. So whatever. I hope the bastard thing kills me. (Melbourne academic, email to Patrick Jones, 1 December 2021)
I am frightened by the culture I was born into. I am scared of scientific reductionism. I fear the aggregation of poisons from industry and the increasing intransigence to heterodox thinkers by governments and universities. I am worried by what the expert class brings to Country. It distresses me few read global development as an extension of colonialism, and in its currency colonialism is again unseen by mob morality.
I feel ill the educated are uncritical of the State-Pharma nexus. I fear the results when doctors and researchers who raise red flags are demoted, disappeared and censored. I’m terrified by the many who don’t question and who in their shame attack the other others. I’m sickened by the profits of patriarchal medicine and how this profit blooms in biomes and inflames bodies. It distresses me medical journals have become “information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” My gut turns with the lack of consent. Communitarian is bottom up, grassroots consensus not powering over the other from above. I’m dismayed by friends who, having been coerced – having to feed their families – now turn on me parroting, ‘White-supremacist! Conspiracy theorist! Anti-vaxxer!’
Even if I refuse directly what industry brings to Country, the rush now on gene engineering and editing means my family and community are likely not free from the spillovers, mutations and contaminants. Antidepressants are awash in the riparians of Country. Nanoplastics in every cell, every biota, and thus in our food, our bodies. Body and food sovereignty is dying, and how I’m reading it, the single greatest threat to life is the romanticisation of progress leading us all into digital prisons cheered on by the movement I’ve served my whole adult life – the Green-Left – until now. Diversity at all costs, except for Them, the deplorable contagions!
I’m scared that people like us, who will again refuse the coming assault of biotechs, will be further discriminated against. I’m alarmed and shocked at how few want to examine the coercion, intolerance and abuse of the past few years. I’m predicting a future of incarceration for those who resist Pharmacolonisation, and I feel no hope for a society that’s constructed “man-made mass death” as its modus operandi, and this fear is traumatising to me.
I will continue to serve the worlds of the world, and serve the communities of life who stand for life, and in doing so stand against the cult of Scientism, against “patriarchy’s project”. In this continuum of service I will name my fears alongside my shame and grief, and cry out my sacred, old briney waters into the rich, life-bringing humus of Mother Country, for anyone or anything connected to hear. I won’t wield my sword in war-like reaction, even in chains I will dance with it like my old people before me.
We’d like to add to this post a little zooming out. Here is the wisdom of Krishnamurti on the subject of fear, and the possibility of ending it (25 mins):
Your thoughts and feelings at this time are precious to us. What are your current fears? What processes do you employ to face them? And anything related, or not, is most welcome.
Sending spring renewal and warmth to you, or autumnal abundance (if you’re north), Dear Reader.
