Watching Apocalypse

 

For me it can.

 

My first sense of civilization's failing institutions correlates with my very personal experience of one of our very few carefully organized rites of passage.  I'm referring to military boot camp.  If you want an orchestrated ritual that expresses all the deep meanings embedded in modern civilization's institutions, you need go no further than this initiation into military personhood.  It carries with it all the vestigial remnants of a humane rite of passage into adulthood anthropologists found in preconquest indigenous societies, stripped, transformed into precisely the necessary ways needed to match the needs of today's modern institutions with the basic human features we all bring to living in this world. 

 

One of the things I personally discovered was a modern civilization does not need my humanity.  More precisely, it has no "use" for it.  This, of course, one does not know going in.  One is generally not in a state of mind to even think about the fact that one is being initiated into the institutional mind set.

 

Thus, when I speak of failing institutions, I'm speaking on several levels, the most basic is the level at which an institution fails me, personally. If an institution fails us personally, that is one onion layer of failure.  If it fails us at our most basic and deep psychological level, it fails our most fundamental sense of humanity.  It's a level one failure.  Level one is one of many levels, but it is a foundational level, and when we move on ignoring that failure, we are in for all sorts of illusions.  In a world of commodified and marketed illusions, we are headed for disaster.  Conscious apocalypse is recognizing those disasters.

 

This fundamental institutional failure, of course, was already occurring for me during the years of schooling we call primary and secondary education.  Education, a mere description for life's learning process, becomes institutionalized in modern Western societies and it becomes so because by logical necessity it's been systemically related to other institutions.  No one would spend money on education if it wasn't related... isn't that obvious?  Education is as much about preparing each of us for participation in the larger set of institutions that make up society as it is about preparing the individual's mind to think, and not necessarily to think for itself, though that is often the advertised message we are offered to believe.  And that message goes with other messages, like the message that Americans are exceptional in the world, and we have an exceptional way of life other people deserve as well. And so it's our gift to share with them.  And we have institutions designed to help us share our many gifts.

 

Well, education may have been a subtle and relatively unconscious indoctrination for most of us who followed the program and stayed in school through graduation, but for me, my epiphanous moment came during the process of having to face military service during the Vietnam era.  Dreams and fantasy came up against an era that began while I was still in high school; it was an era that included an unseen but closely connected conspirational effort of all the vertically integrated government and industrial institutions involved in that national endeavor: war.

 

What came from this hierarchical conspiracy of institutions, an in place system that is in fact the dominating power structure of our world -- even as we listen to stories that tell us fantasies about how our life is supposed to be another reality we can make from our dreams -- was a kind of Buddhist koan before I knew of such things.  It was the emergence of my first glimpse of Catch 22.  My personal dreams of beginning a life of my own after high school became shrouded in foggy mist when I was faced with the military draft.  It turned out that the draft, which I dodged by joining the Navy, opened a door to an initiation into the true reality of modern institutional life.   A life, I discovered, of many embedded boxes replacing my childish illusions, where I had been imagining an open, pathless wilderness, a mysterious land where I would grow in many dimensions as I found my way.  

 

Well, institutional training does offer its own possibilities for exploration, I've discovered.  Institutions may not be very interesting except to a mechanic of institutional construction, but they do seem to be endlessly connecting with the logic of thought.  Institutions are the creation of thought, they are a form of mechanical, logical, rational and purposeful thought in action.  Which brings up another theme I'll be weaving through this reminiscence.  The problem of thought, rational thought.  The problem of the Age of Reason and how it became -- with all the best intentions of figures like Descartes -- our modern failing institutions.  That's a key formula, or axiom, if you will.  Most folks I know don't recognize it as a problem, which makes that lack of recognition a problem, as well.  It's a systems problem, or an ecological problem, since ecology is a system-creation of mind. How can we share the problem of thought as an ecological problem?... is an ecological problem.  I seem to remember Gregory Bateson saying something revelatory about thought like that in Steps to an Ecology of Mind.  Something to do with thinking about thinking.  He called it deutero-learning and the double bind.

 

But, what if thinking is just a tool?  Only a small and insignificant part of what we really are as a species?  What if we humans are more than thinkers who think?  Those questions as yet unformulated were the first rumblings of an earthquake that would shake this carefully constructed Age of Reason for me.  Shortly after boot camp, while I was in the Vietnam theater, I had an epiphany that would create questions for me that no institutional organization could answer.  Some of those same questions I found posed on the Home page in Dr. Craig Chalquist's presentation: Conscious Apocalypse: Surviving our Ruling institutions.

 

We have the capacity to reimagine ourselves.