Iron Cage

IRON CAGE

REPRINTED FROM THE ILLUSTRATED PAPER, MENDICINO, CAL. (UPS)

...IS HERE. Whether we want it or not, whether we know it or not, it's where we are right now. It's the machine world, a place made of iron, steel, formica and smog, held together by epoxy glue, sheet metal screws and the combined efforts of several billion people.

lts creation lies somewhere in the dim past when man first saw himself as a being set apart from the plants and animals around him, when his ever-growing ego told him that he was no longer a part of but something greater than the natural environment. Then the forest no longer clothed, sheltered or protected him and he became aware that he could create his own environment, an artificial; manmade one. His cave, with a fire at its entrance became the first survival machine, designed to protect him from the wind, the rain, the sabre-toothed tiger, the mystery of the universe and finally from direct contact with the land.

Through the centuries since then, each generation has modified, added to and built into this survival machine a little more protection, until now the substitute concrete jungle is more meaningful and real to us than the natural one. The cave with its fire has grown into a gadget-laden fortress with an ICBM at the door. It has grown into a place where work has become more or less routine and meaningless, where the rewards are paper and gadgets, where we labor full time to produce laborsaving devices and satisfaction, where fulfilment comes from the sound of those small bits of paper piling up and up...

Here in this man-made place we are not allow to be human, for man is a creative animal and the machine world denies us more and more the right to be creative in our personal lives, demanding that our creativity be directed only to improving the machine. While it supplies us with the tools to explore different ways of life, it demands that we conform to a machine-made world image.

This is a world of the store and the gas station. The store supplies us with the necessities of life and when we are lost, we go to a gas station to find out where we're at and where to go. Tomorrow if the store should close, we would die. We have forgotten how to feed ourselves. We are fast forgetting how to find our own way, and it is making us into cripples.

Occasionally we peer out into the forest marvel at it, but only for a moment. When night approaches we hurry back to the machine, disappear into its warm stomach where we are slowly being digested.

This thing threatens not only to make us into something that is less than human, but to destroy itself as well. lts technology is being used for producing more bullets than books, more rules than rights, more napalm than poems. More and more it is being used for killling people. Our survival machine is becoming more of a threat to our existence than the natural world was or ever could be.

We dropped out of the natural world a long time ago and created this iron cage. Now we must drop out of the cage. We haven' t dropped out by wearing beads, long hair and leather boots. We've still got the fillings in our teeth, the smog in our lungs, the vaccine in our blood and the traffic signal in our heads.

We must really drop out. Stop depending totally on the store and the gas station and start depending on ourselves, and on what's inside of us, not what's inside a can. We must begin living out of ourselves and not off welfare or government programs or hand-outs of the garbage cans of the machine world.

If we are going to drop out, we must have something to drop into and we have to create it ourselves. This, friends, takes a lot of work and imagination. First to free ourselves from our present dependent state, ween ourselves from this iron breast, and then more work and imagination and involvement to create another environment, both inside ourselves and outside.

We say we want involvement, real involvement. Well, creating this environment demands involvement, deep involvement and commitment. It is the only way it is going to happen. It's not going to happen by itself and no one is going to do it for us.

Now commitment means giving up some freedom and to many of us are afraid of losing this freedom. Frankly, this is bullshit, because this fear will only lead us into the brave new world of 1984. The most uncommitted thing in the world is an amoeba floating in a pool of slime, committed only to the random push and pull of his environment.

But the reward for committment is involvement and the opportunity to create an environment that satisfies our human needs and also allows us to live like human beings -- like what we are -- like people.

For me, the beginning of this environment is a return to the land -- perhaps a sort of farm -- but not the machine kind of farm with a quarter-million dollar implement investment which kills more than it creates -- raising soybeans, subsidies and artificial scarcities and surpluses, but a new kind of place, a doorway into the natural world, a place of beauty that flows into the real environment, is a function of it, a part of it, a place that is authentically satisfying enough so we don't have to take a vacation from it, a place where we can discover, where we grow plants, a animals and, most of all, people.

Here for instance, we can become creative in establishing a relationship with the animals that is not the sick situation cf immobilization and force-feeding which turns the animal into an extension of the machine or the sicker situation of making them pets, taking away function to make them slaves to us, as perhaps we are becoming to the machine.

Rather, we would have a positive building-growing situation that contains an honest give and take relationship -- not only with the physical environment of plants and animals but also with the people, a place that would allow those involved to produce goods and services for each other at something less than the 400% or more producer-to-consumer mark up. Here we can create products to satisfy a real need rather than an artificial one created by the grey flannel machine. We can redefine the product, the package the format to both reduce costs and open new areas of awareness and involvement for both the producer and the consumer. Here we can produce a creative leadership situation that leads somewhere as opposed to the static situation that exists, in which one person says do this and this and this, holding a carrot in front of our noses -- to motivate us.

We must demand that leadership come from each individual to produce a dynamic situation. The resulting total involvement will produce both great mistakes and great ideas -- and lead us not onto the merry-go-round of gadget superseding gadget, planned obsolescence and finally the machine superseding people, but into one where we cooperate to produce a way of life that is an extension of our real needs. We can become free to be involved -- creative and independent in an environment made for people to live in, not a machine for people to die in. Wells