Coconut Trees
Civilization, Economics, Vitalism, Modern Life
Farmer trades a plow for a tractor, worker trades candlelight for electricity, family trades a horse for an automobile. Steel rises into skylines, electricity lights up cities, science transforms the impossible into the ordinary. We like building, inventing, discovering, and expanding. This is WHO WE ARE! But… has this ever answered the question of how we should live…
There is of course the material world of production, engineering, agriculture, medicine, infrastructure, technology, and then there is the human world of meaning, beauty, character, love, purpose. Modernity has become good at answering the first question while abandoning the second. A nation can become richer while its soul degenerates, it can produce entertainment while starving the imagination… Every technological creation solves a practical problem but none can tell us what is worth loving or sacrificing for.
You read this quote from Dostoyevsky… “The world says: ‘You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.’ This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
What is Dostoyevsky telling us here… He is describing a worldview where the individual is a consumer of wants and needs and freedom is the ability to get what you want. He is aware that our desires are endless and it easy for us to become ruled by them. The real freedom is in virtue and self mastery and seeking higher ideals. I like Dostoyevsky. He wrote Brothers Karamazov and other good books about human experience, and psychology, and deep spiritual questions about life. And from reading him and getting to know him and listen to and channel his thoughts, I feel that he understood the irrationality of human creatures, the good and evil we are capable of, the contradictions we are able to hold simultaneously. He knew that we are spiritual beings capable of self destruction, sacrifice, and love, and I know he would want the best for us.
Nowadays it’s easy for people look around and they no longer feel they inhabit the same world as one another. Everyone walks the same streets while living inside different realities, different moral universes, different visions of what is beautiful, true, and worth defending. You are surrounded by millions of people, yet feel increasingly like a stranger. You wake up, walk out into city, nobody sees you.
You know life is meant for more than this, for real struggle and victory and reward, but you don’t know how to achieve it or change anything, because you are such a small part of the bigger picture. You are not all knowing or all powerful but you know that you need to escape, FAST!
You think of time not so long ago when a whole life used to exist out there for the average person, when men lined up to run with the bulls in Spain for example. Ordinary townspeople, butchers, commoners, farmers, drovers, farmers, and then more from the town started joining the run for excitement and to demonstrate courage. They ran through the streets of Pamplona alongside one another. This was feeling alive! And they bled together and in a way felt as if they were brothers with one another. Even when they fought and betrayed one another it was like your own blood turning on you. This is just one example. There are so many worlds with so many lives living and dying and breathing real air just like this.
Imagine after a long day walking into some lively Shakespearean theatre or grabbing a loaf of bread and some cheese and walking along the river, navigate the park, head into museum and look up at the walls covered in art, gaze up at the marble statues celebrating the human form. If the basilicas and cathedrals that are hundreds of years old today still manage to inspire us and fill us with a sense of awe, can you believe what it was like when they were actually NEW…
Obviously nothing was never perfect and there has always been misery, and death, and poverty, and war, and plagues, and famine, but the artifacts and buildings and aesthetics and art that we are left with was made to inspire and pull us out of the mud into the stars. The best art never appealed to the lowest common denominator out of fear that someone might get “left out.”
Now you have folx spending their time arguing with one another in TikTok comments over which influencer “served” the best and slurp on a 45g of sugar iced coffy and scarf down a “pulled pork sangwich.” Head home bloated sit in bumper to bumper traffic on Houston Texas interchange listening to CHD podcast. I’d honestly probably rather sit in subway car, get accosted by air droplets from some guy coughing all over the place while schizophrenic person yells out into the oblivion, than live around this monotony. HAH. Our age will be REMEMBERED by democratization of every last fragment of public life, which was a movement driven by the PEOPLE for the PEOPLE, made everything worse for the PEOPLE…
Either way the old worlds are lost to us and the portals are closed. The gods have moved onto new frontiers. They live in the South Pacific, deep underwater and in the jungles and volcanoes and amongst the coconut palms, camping out on the cliffs of Bali, waiting to be reawakened once more.
At least we have the comfort of the growth of the economy to save us from the vacuum of our cultural emptiness… Chat jipiti says that the jidipi is going up… There is Lunchly, online gambling, buy a couple virtual trading cards, kids can watch some influencers travel laugh and have fun while they sit in the darkness of their room alone. Or crack open a “cold one” and turn on TV to “kick back” and watch some reality show full of the bottom 20% of America's high school graduates debasing themselves on an island while childless 40 year old host cackles and claps like a seal.
But you know what, despite all that, despite all the surplus, the economy as a whole is a genuine miracle. In some ways the economy is probably the last truly awe inspiring thing we have left. The hard work that built those big beautiful devices, the medicine, clean water, surgery and MRI machines, antibiotics, the expansion of instantaneous knowledge, advanced science and discoveries that keep us healthy and safe, which ALLOWS us to be decadent and self indulgent, we have to be grateful for. But still, something strange is going on... So many people are seriously sick on an unprecedented scale, you can sense it. Where is it coming from? How do we fix this? I think it’s one of most important questions of our time. Maybe more so than computer, more so than electric car, but maybe not as much as rocket ship. Rocket ship will take us far far away from here…
Sometimes I find myself just standing there, staring at the water pouring from the shower head, amazed that I don't have to understand where it comes from or how it reached me. Hot, perfect, and instant the moment I turned the handle. I look around and watch cities rise out of empty fields, words travel across oceans in an instant, failing organs get replaced with healthy ones, and machines fly out towards the edge of the atmosphere. This is survival, making life longer, safer, and more comfortable. It all deserves admiration and it deserves builders. But there will also always be the world of meaning, of love, of loyalty, courage, memory, that tells us what all the bridges, engines, and hospitals are for.
There is restlessness, and nature, and love, and hatred, and life, and death, and the feeling you want to be living when you’re not, and there is the feeling like you need to know things, the feeling that there is nothing left worth dying for, and deciding to live, and go on living, and figuring out how to do so, and letting go, and creation, and writing a single word, just one and then another. And there is restlessness.
So I look into the sun and take in its energy and look at the river and take in its rushing vitality, its wild freedom and authentic nature. And I watch those horses surging across the plains and the birds erupting into joyful acrobatics beneath the waterfall and I see the same untamed timeless instinctive freedom that has endured through every rise and fall of human civilization. The sunlight turns mist into rainbows and I feel the muscles around my ribs tightening and getting stronger and my posture strengthening as I become more rooted to the ground beneath my feet and my energy increases and I breathe in and feel myself growing and shrinking and expanding and contracting like a beating heart.
I have never been equal to my past or future self. I am constantly in a state of change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. And in times when I find myself shrinking and going backwards, I fight against this, I and in that moment I become beauty and become energy itself, a life force radiating light, connected to the stars and the waves charging through the universe as a symphony.
The best life is lived and the best things are created by an ABUNDANCE and excess of ENERGY. Contrary to the idea you hear that asceticism and renunciation of worldly pleasures “motivates” people, it’s in fact the direct OPPOSITE! The exploration of the world and settling of new continents occurred due to a surplus of vital essence and creativity. The best art made by those exploding with life and spirit. The best books were not written by forcing pen to paper but because the author could not stop themselves from overflowing with ideas and struggle to channel them into words.
The reason I love Dostoyevsky is because he loves humanity with all his heart, you can feel it in each his words. He never lets “society” become the villain. He doesn’t blame “technology" or “capitalism” or any of these vague abstractions that jaded people so often tend to do. He is hopeful, he is endlessly optimistic, even after exploring the darkest depths of the human psyche and traveling through the most deranged, evil acts that mankind is capable of to one another, he never lets us forget that the battle between good and evil is fought first within ourselves. "The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man,” he wrote. We can describe the sickness of the age, but we first must ask ourselves, where in my own heart, does that sickness live?
