463 - Addiction to Control (Ascent of Humanity 3)

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Episode #463 - Addiction to Control
(Ascent of Humanity #3)

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⌚ Mon 18 May 2009 ☻Charles Eisenstein (reading)

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Download Hour1 Download Hour2This week the entire show is dedicated to reading from Charles Eisenstein's tour de force, the Ascent of Humanity, on humanity's addiction to control. Eisenstein believes we are the cusp of a new era in the history of humanity when we have reached the limits of a very long process of what he calls separation, and that it is now to reunite with an identity long abandoned, not as a a going backwards, but as a sort of, my words, coming full circle.....

Crises are swirling around us, events are unfolding and policies and programs are being hotly debated. The topics such as whether people shall have universal care, or torturers be brought to account, or institutions of an economic system rescued and and what , or wars be continued or ended, and what to do about the destruction of natural world, all these are of the utmost importance. Yet I am frustrated with the nature of the debate, because it is not addressing the way these things are connected, and they are. There is even now in our society more broadly a parallel contest between science and religion, and these are seen as opposites fighting for supremacy, modernity versus morality as characterized by the Abrahamic world view. But Charles Eisenstein the author of the the ascent humanity has illuminated the illusory nature of even that difference. Underlying all these things is a world view and program of domination and control, of viewing the human being as separate and and antagonistic to mature in a struggle for survival, cast out of the Garden of Eden. Eisenstein began his book by defining that world view of domination and control that is the central project of what we call civilization. And if we are to devise solutions that truly solve anything, I believe we must go that deep.

What drives our addiction to technology? Underneath all addictions there is an authentic need that the addiction promises to meet. The narcotic says, "I will kill the pain." But of course, the promise is a lie that leaves the true need unmet. The same goes for technology, driven by the imperative to control nature, which itself comes as well from an unmet need. It is a need that we all feel in different ways: as an anxiety endemic to modern life, as a near-universal feeling of meaninglessness, as a relentless ennui from which we can only ever be temporarily distracted, as a pervasive superficiality and phoniness. It is a feeling that something is missing. Some people call it a hole in the soul. What we are seeking in our technological addiction is nothing less than our lost wholeness, and its recovery is what lies on the other side of the imminent collapse of the regime of separation.