The Y2K problem we all face and the uncertain outcomes it represents are
anticipated in Philip Slater's book clearly in 1974.
Continuation of excerpt from Earthwalk:
"I observed that control means putting a bit of ourselves in the environment.
But which bit? Something good or something bad? Something known or something
unknown? Of what is our man made environment composed? From what parts of
ourselves do these choices come?
Norman Brown summarizes psychological thought on this question, and it is not
reassuring. "The self...is maintained by constantly absorbing good parts...
from the outside world and expelling bad parts from the inner world."
If this is true, then pollution is not merely and accident -- a function of
carlesssness or old-fashioned industrialism. Pollution is an inescapable part
of humanity's relationship with the environment -- our very identity rests
upon psychic pollution, just as our physical integrity rests upon expelling
organic wastes.
But the environment can absorb a man's organic wastes, and even turn them to
good use; and as to this psychic pollution, what difference to fantasies make?
Let him project his evil-heartedness wherever he likes -- what does it matter?
The danger arises when a man's psychic excretions are given material form --
when his projections appear as physical objects. We cannot ignore his fantasies
of superpotency when they are represented by overpowered automobiles that claim
a thousand lives a week; his paranoid fears when they are expressed in bugging
devices and security data banks; his hatreds when they appear in the form of a
nuclear arsenal capable of eliminating vertebrate life on our planet.
Our psychic excretions, in other words, show an annoying tendency to become part
of our real environment, so that we are forced to consume our own psychic wastes
in physical form. Instead of being recycled, as they are in emotional exchanges
between people -- thus keeping the level of psychic poison relatively constant --
their materialization leads to increasing poison accumulation. People have known
for centuries that any place inhabited by large numbers by humans is not healthy.
Recycling requires an acceptance of the mortality of individual structures, and
the technological impulse -- that is, the tendency to give material rather than
interpersonal form to psychic impulses -- is strongly influenced by the need to
deny human mortality.
A science-fiction film some years ago dramatized the problem of psychic waste
materialization in the following way: Space explorers discovered a planet that
had once boasted a civilization of the highest order, the inhabitants of which
had found a way to materialize thoughts directly. The explorers could not
understand why this civilization had vanished utterly, until gigantic monsters
began to appear. They then realized that the planet's inhabitants had neglected
to consider that unconscious wishes and fantasies would materialize along with
their consciously purposed thoughts, and had been destroyed by this lack of
perspicacity.
This drama is a parable for our time. Our own reality differs from the space
fantasy primarily in that (1) thought materialization takes a longer time, and
(2) there is no separation between conscious and unconscious products. Every
technological advance contains within itself a monster, for each one expresses
in one form or another man's monstrous narcissism as well as the simple desires
of which it appears superficially to be an expression." |
