Civilisation as an Obstacle
We have, for more than a century, been experiencing the fall of Western Civilisation, i.e., the collapse of the so-called democratic world also known as the W.E.I.R.D. (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic) civilisation. There is systemic ossification: while industry booms, academia and high-culture are undermined by the power of popular cultures driven by vulgar economic motives that pump wealth inexorably upward to the already wealthy; and while hi-tech industry booms thanks to the information revolution, our WEIRD obsession with growth and consumption has created its own systemic disruption, the existential threat of a climate collapse that highlights our dangerous dependence on fossil fuels for energy, creating its own bellicose power struggles to control the wealth and political power generated by energy distribution that is now seriously threatening to boil over into the third world war, which really will be the last world war.
In this state of decadence and corruption, civilisation itself has become, not only an obstacle to the development of human progress, but an actual threat to our existence. In theory civilisations are built for human survival and needs, and are designed to ensure that the fruits accumulated in the construction of a civilised world will perdure by being passed on from one civilisation to another. Nevertheless, this optimistic view of civilisation has one basic flaw: the human element of all civilisations has always been sadly lacking. Whilst it is true that communities of human beings have been formed for the survival and needs of its group members, civilisation in itself is built for the interests of the accumulation of wealth for the Wealthy and its own real aims are in preserving the status of the oligarchies that are shaped by that wealth as well as the aristocratic nature of wealth itself. It is the aristocratic and plutocratic fabric of civilisation that is maintained over the long run and passed on from one civilisation to another. In many ways, if we look at its effects on the majority of individual, human lives, it has never been more than an obstacle. There is a widespread belief that civilisation is essential for creative and cultural progress but in fact it has always limited the capabilities of individual expression and has frustrated the greater part of collective human potential through the design of systems aimed at the accumulation and perpetuity of wealth.
Civilisation is, in fact, an anti-human organisation. Only through authentically human orientation will societies truly function in a liberating, creative, and truly progressive way for the realisation of authentically-human, individual capabilities.
Social institutions, and our duties within them, will only cease to be hindrances on freedom when they can be geared towards human purposiveness rather than the self-interestedness of a civilisation designed exclusively for the needs of the wealthy.
