Friday, May 03, 2019

Gigantification and the Enstupidment: Why "easier" isn't better


It's my favourite meme. Be like Grandma. My own Grandma cooked and sewed, kept a garden, painted and made pots in her own studio.

I started writing the following here and then decided it would do for the Remnant's blog. I guess it's more or less a manifesto. Get out of the city. Or at least learn to do things for yourself. Anything. Learn to change your own oil in your car. Learn to knit, or at least sew on a button.

Stop being dependent on the government or Giant-corp for every single thing in life. The government and Monsanto don't love you, don't want you to be happy, healthy or independent.



The Gigantification of life, the doing of everything on a massive and unimaginably distant scale, is all said to be in aid of "saving us labour." But what have we saved all this labour for? So we can live in suburbs and drive cars to go work at a desk doing something that has nothing whatever to do with our own life. So we can forget how do to anything ourselves? It may have saved us all labour but it has also left us with nothing Real to do. What are we saving our labour for? What do most of us do with the time we don't spend weeding a kitchen garden or making beer or milking cows? Have we separated ourselves from the sources of our life only so we can spend more time watching TV? Scrolling Facebook? Arguing for hours over nothing on Twitter? Are we holier? More learned? More enlightened? Do we write poetry and play music? Do we even know any poetry?

My landlady, Annamaria, is a contadina with deep, deep roots in this place. She has been teaching me all the contadina things. She’s taught me what time to plant what, and how the phases of the moon can guide your planting and harvesting. When and how to prune grape vines, fig, plum and pear trees. What kind of carrots you can grow in clay soil (short stubby ones). Today I wanted to clip my grass but discovered my hedge trimmers were busted. She took one look, took them into her big magical garage-of-all-things and ten minutes later handed me my trimmers back in full working order.

But it seems that since the advent of mechanised farming (mass-production of food on the huge scale you see in North America) we've straight-up forgotten the small intimate details of how to do anything. All that about soil management and all the little things that made medieval agriculture work is all gone. Who needs to think about replenishing natural soil nutrients or maintaining the substructure if you've got machines and bags of fertiliser, amirite?
~

There are good reasons why the referendum on abortion in Ireland went the way it did. The Yes votes all came from the cities - Dublin mostly, while the rest of the country said No. A major task of the Freemasonic take-over of the western world has been to herd people by all means fair or foul out of the countryside and small towns and villages and into the massive conurbations.

In a big city you immediately lose personal control over much of your life, you accept "services" that come from "the government" instead of doing things yourself, living within your means, being self-reliant, "making do and mending". You relinquish control over the intimate things of life while at the same time isolating yourself. You live now far away from your family and the people you grew up around. You don't know your immediate neighbours except to bang on the connecting wall between your flats when he's noisy.

Eventually every aspect of your existence comes under external control, including your interior. Your ideas no longer come from your family or your upbringing or your church but from advertising and government-controlled news. You believe what you are told, you do what the people in charge want you do do, you eat what they deign to give you, you wear what the fashion industry tells you to wear, you want the things they tell you to want. City life is slavery, and in such a complete way that the Romans would have found it shocking. Slavery of the mind, the will, the intentions, the desires.

The artificiality of Gigantified city life, its loneliness and pointlessness, the forcible wresting away of agency, the hopelessness of any thought of escape (false, btw) is literally killing us. Reject it.

You don't have to move to Umbria to escape Gigantification (though I do recommend it most emphatically). You just have to start by rejecting it interiorly. All other stages will come naturally after that. It's like repentance; reject Gigantification the way you reject Stan and all his empty promises. Stop letting Mega-Corp and Monster-Govt do everything for you. Become involved in your own life. You'll be amazed how much more fun it is.

~

2 comments:

Childermass said...

One good way to begin if you are out in the “work force” and don’t have a lot of time to make your own stuff is to buy your stuff from people who make the stuff, thus allowing them to make a living making that stuff.

This is something any of us can do, in any Western country. And it’s important...the hypermarkets and fast food chains are on the march everywhere, both in cities and the countryside.

Matt said...

Where I live, $30 buys enough materials to start making wine (a syphon hose, some airlocks with stoppers, yeast, and some bottles of grape juice). You can make decent stuff for $2 per 750 ml bottle or less over and over and over... You can also make a lot of bread with $5 worth of ingredients. So, for less than $40 (plus, some time and effort) you have the two foods that are essential for civilization. One simply needs to get started.