The City

Photo by Derek Jensen (Tysto), 2004-April-10

This blog is intended as a journal of sorts of my transition from suburban to rural life.

It has been brought home to me however that I cannot talk about my plans for a fortunate escape from the city, without saying what is wrong with it. What is wrong with the city. And I do feel that there are things very much wrong with it.

When the books of the Tanakh were written, the largest city on Earth probably only had 100,000 people in it. That's less than the population of Killeen, TX or Green Bay, Wisconsin.

In 700 b.c. that city would be Babylon, infamous Babylon, whore Babylon.

And the Tanakh has unkind words for cities, for Babylon, Nineveh, Sodom and Gomorrah, even for Jerusalem which was barely even a city by our standards. But theirs wasn't a world of cities, and theirs wasn't a world of cities with millions of inhabitants each. Some of our problems, are uniquely ours.

And the problem with cities in a nutshell is this: in cities human life is devalued. That's the TL:DR synopsis.

This statement requires unpacking, because I am not saying that cities are more violent or more oppressive than previous forms of organization or forms of settlement in the past. I am saying that it is more dehumanizing.


PART 1: PEOPLE WHO KNOW MY NAME
Even on the plantation, with slaves, at least the master has to SEE the slaves typically. He at least knows their names. This may not make them one iota less oppressed or brutalized. They may be brutalized in ways that modern Western people would find horrifying and incomprehensible. This only means that at least, they are recognized. They are somebody. If the slaves drop dead, the POS massa will at least jot it down as a loss of operating production capacity. The people who worked alongside him, whether they liked him or hated him, they did know him. They may have worked with him for years or decades. And his death will be noted, whether or not he is missed.

We are familiar with the concept of the Stockholm Syndrome. At the core of this, is the idea that to your captor or oppressor, you are at least a SOMEBODY. You're not a nobody. To some people, to be A SOMEBODY to someone else is the next best thing to being loved.

Of course in modern cities, we may have all sorts of people who love us. We may not. But we are immersed in a world of people we do not know and do not love and pass in and out of our lives unheralded and unknown. I drove down a highway to a Whataburger. The people in that Whataburger, I may never see again. This is my one appearance in their lives, and mine in theirs. I drove down a highway with anonymous people in anonymizing cars, I did not even see their faces. That might be the only time in my life that I am ever in close proximity to those individuals, or they to me. The people who love you, are generally with you a minority of the time (excepting sleep,) and the people who are with you, do not love you, know you or acknowledge you except in the most shallow and cursory way.

This is the first form of devaluation: they don't know or love me, and I don't know or love them. I don't even feel enough towards them to hate them. They may not even come from the same place or speak the same language. I have no particular ill-will towards them, but they also do not matter. They are not YOUR people, you are not THEIR people, you are merely bodies in proximity. Community in cities is really a bad joke. You cannot have community with people you don't know and never will.

PART 2: DEHUMANIZING WORK
It should go without saying that you usually don't get to choose who you work with. You're not the boss, you don't get to decide, you take the work that you can. So you don't generally work with those you love. You may indeed come to love them, or you may not. What happens when you stop working for that company, or retire? Like them or not, most likely you will never see them again.

But this is not my main point with dehumanizing work. What is most dehumanizing about it is that you have no control over it. It is not YOUR work, you are EMPLOYED in most cases.

For the majority of the time human beings have existed, people may have had dire needs pressing upon them, more dire than most modern city residents will ever experience. But you were essentially in control of your own time. If you hunted that day, or farmed, that was your concern. You may well die if you don't chop the wood today or bring down a deer, but you are still in control of that and the advantages to you of a certain course of action could not be more clear or direct. Prehistoric man did not need goading to hunt when he was hungry or drink when he was thirsty. It was immediately and self-evidently meaningful. Every man was in charge in some sense of his own narrative, he was not a cog in someone else's machine. As the computer in Colossus: The Forbin Project says, it is not oppressive circumstances that are a problem as much as it is oppression by other men. Difficulty, discomfort, pain, are not evil or unjust in themselves: it is when someone does it to you that it is evil and unjust. And the vast majority of us in cities are done unto, even if our physical circumstances are much easier. We don't own the means of our production, nor would we under communism either. In primitive capitalism people did have some control over their own production, their own work, but not everyone even then. And this kind of eighteenth-century capitalism is long gone in the age of virtually omnipotent and omnipresent corporations.

Let me make overt what many of us are only willing to admit covertly: to the corporation we are tools, we are raw materials, that is all we are. The corporate propaganda about "our company family" only heightens the nausea among those willing to see clearly. The corporation is a mere machine that has gained power and a kind of sentience, and to it we are also only a mere machine. A tool for a use, a tool for their profit.

So we are required to serve something we ought to hate with every fiber of our being. An anti-family, anti-community, anti-holy, anti-human world order.

And I do hate it. With every particle of my existence. I completely honestly utterly transparently hate it.

PART 3: DEHUMANIZING RECREATION
What we seek in recreation is a reflection of our atomized, despiritualized existence, which the city did not invent but which is accelerated in every possible way by the city. Our recreation is often the slow suicide of an unhealthy zoo animal who only wants out of its cage and will beat its head into the bars if this gives it even the illusion of escape. We drink, we do drugs. Our movies and video games are violent, or seek to give us experiences that our physical condition and prudence forbid us in real life. Our entertainment is the medium of our spiritual destruction and often our physical destruction as well.

Our illness is not in the physical condition of our bodies, it is in the condition of our lives and souls. A tiger in a cage may be given means to fulfil every physical need, but it is still a sick pathological creature deprived of the one thing it truly needs: physical and spiritual freedom. The tiger may at least want to leave its cage, but in our modern urban analogy, most of the animals in our urban cage are unable to formulate the truth of their condition. They are unable to reach the internal freedom that I have.

THIS CITY IS A CAGE

I AM ITS PRISONER

I HATE MY CAGE AND DEMAND TO BE FREE WHATEVER THE COST.

If every single person in the cities were to embrace this knowledge, things would change. Maybe we wouldn't solve our problems, but things would change forever. But we cannot, because that would require a courage that has been trained and bred out of us.

So we take the course of least resistance. We won't resist the whole insane world. We'll just escape, into drugs, into alcohol, into games, into movies, into whatever thing it is that makes our truthful reality go away for a bit. Our entertainment falls in line with this, ultimately self-destructive, ambition.

This is our condition.

I am convinced that it is impossible to obtain freedom from that condition without G-d. He frees us, as He did the Israelites from Egypt. But then we must walk out onto the Sinai in faith, and not pine for the waters of Egypt. There is no good reason why I should be in a position to set my foot outside Egypt. I am nobody and have done nothing. The only things I have are an understanding mind and a resolute will to hate everything that G-d hates. And He does, he hates this. I believe He hates this more than I could ever understand.

But He won't free us from Egypt if we want to be Egyptians.