survivalism philosophy

SURVIVALISM PHILOSOPHY

I’ve never really understood others fascination with philosophy.  What do you mean, what is the meaning of life?  It’s to replicate our DNA.  I don’t know why we have to throw religion into it, or study paintings with titles “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”.  Why read Voltaire or Enlightenment writers?  It all just seems like flailing about in the dark, and the dark was a hood we pulled over our own head.  A replacement for religion?  Religion, and I mean religious institutions, not religious belief, gave us nothing but trouble and now it seems like finding its replacement isn’t doing much for us either.  My Book Swap Buddy at work, a retired guy who has leftist leanings so our conversations are pretty interesting ( I don’t lean left, but I despise the right ), gave me a hideously overpriced book ( $38, in 2001!!! ) “Grasping For The Wind” by John Whitehead.  Subtitled “the search for meaning in the 20^th century”, the thing makes you a bit dizzy as it “examines the progressive, unfolding, interweaving of religion, philosophy, politics, the arts, psychology, and sociology”.  I mean, it’s interesting ( although I’d be pissed if I had paid for it- the best part so far is new to me information that Jim Morrison was a big fan of Nietzsche which seems obvious in retrospect but I’d never really pondered his background search for his poetry ), but I’m over half way through it and one can’t help but get the sense he should have come to the point by now.  Something tells me it is going to be convoluted and high-faluten ( there was a video series the book is based or-or visa versa- so it might even be on U-Tube by now ), if I even manage to read it all the way through.  It seems to me it is as simple as the modern Industrial Age threw us all for a loop with its continual destruction of culture up to the present day.  I say, why look further than a wish to return to tradition as a cause for all this pointless philosophizing ( of course, one could then get philosophical about what era of tradition we are even talking about.  Immediate pre-Industrial?  Pre-nation state?  Traditional West, or East?  Traditional Iron Age?  Sooner? )?

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Nothing is going to replace what we lost, be it Sadism or Feminism or different religions such as exotic Eastern ones where little fat statues with man boobs are chocked in a cloud of incense.  I wish we could return to a hunter-gather future, but something tells me that that can never happen again.  With seven billion people and more every hour, even a 99% die-off is still going to leave far too many people on a denuded planet to practice our true ancestral occupation.  The good news is that there can always be nomadic or pastoral ways of life.  Let the asparagus growers fight over the few well watered fertile areas ( and by the by, for you good old Southern boys thinking a yeoman farmer future is possible, the Mississippi delta region was home to a centralized indigenous civilization once before.  Geography can be a bitch ), and the rest of us can get by as herders which offers a much freer life ( if more prone to violence ).  But regardless, however your area eats, tradition gives a solid satisfactory background to life.  We become, once again, preoccupied with protecting, providing and nurturing.  The shrinking of the group to the tribe.  What other meaning do you need out of life?  Companionship, a meaningful existence, security. 

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All this other mental masturbation is unnecessary.  We miss what we no longer have, traditional lifestyles, and survivalism is a belief system that intoxicates us into believing we can have that again if we survive.  We don’t prepare just because we believe we are too important to die, but because after the upheaval we think we’ll have something worth living for.  So, if you are looking for a philosophy to explain our present, how about instead one that celebrates the future as the past?  Some damn fool charging you a full days pay to wax philosophically about philosophy and the search for meaning, of course using fully the tools of the Industrial Oil Age to give you a whopping dose of glossy eye candy, just contributes to the problem.

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