From Awe to Responsibility

By Greg -
Civilization claims as its own all that culture has produced. Culture, as I'm beginning to conceive it, is all that a single person can hold in their minds and carry with them. Culture is language, it is all the deep metaphors, named things, organizing principles, and conceptual models that make us uniquely human. Culture is science, which in its pure and uncorrupted state, is conceptual; that is, all of its complexity can be derived from conceptual models and relationships any human mind can comprehend. Civilization is intentionally incomprehensible. It is an unnecessarily complex and inefficient collection of estranged parts that must be choreographed through a hierarchy of authority. It is designed to elicit awe and to make the individual feel powerless. Its perceived power is achieved through the tactics common to all ideologies: the disintegration of culture through expertise, classification, categorization, division, and compartmentalization.

I, like most people who have been given the freedom to think for themselves, resisted the seductions of professionalism, of expertise, resisted the lure of all the accolades that civilization bestows on rank. Its motivations didn't move me because they were all artificial. The privileges were contrived, the admiration was enforced, and the influence went only as far as the system allowed. I knew intuitively that for all of civilization's achievements my awe was undeserved. Its incomprehensible complexity is only the unleashed madness of psychopaths. Even its power is false. Comprehensive design-science engineers, writers, poets, artists, hunters, builders, gatherers, thinkers, and doers know this. To reclaim culture we only need to disregard the divisions which civilization is so intent on preserving. And by reclaiming culture we come closer to comprehending civilization, turning awe into responsibility.

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