I’ll get to Diana and how her worshippers did her in - in a minute.  First, I want to recast our whole purpose as a company.  Many of my posts have tried to get people to see the real problem on Earth - is negligent human behavior.  To make a better Earth, we must become better people.  I do not sit atop a moral lectern.  My only agenda is to protect, preserve, and expand wilderness.  By extension I’m also interested in back country and park areas - since they too suffer from the same negligent human behavior as wilderness.  And how people behave in back country and parks is how they behave in wilderness.

That we live in bleak times is no longer an argument.  The question is what must man do about it - if he wants to continue to exist as a specie.  It will NOT be solved politically!  It can only be solved socially through totally new conventions.

“On your average DAY,” (caps mine) Paul Hawken writes in Blessed Unrest, “we suck 85 million barrels of petroleum from the Earth,” then promptly burn it up, and “spew the waste of 27 billion pounds of coal into the atmosphere.”  Is this not MADNESS?  ONE HUNDRED MILLION people on this planet are homeless.  ONE BILLION are unemployed.  They drink.  They make babies.  They fight and kill one another.  They become guerilla fighters in forests and jungles.   

And every WEEK, another 1.4 million people disappear into the villa miseria (house of misery) in Buenos Aires, the kampongs of Jakarta (see the movie The Year of Living Dangerously), and of course the slums of America see many new faces daily.

I’ve read Hawkens for years.  He’s somewhat left-leaning, but he’s also conservative and pragmatic (staying either totally liberal or conservative doesn't help solve problems.  What is demanded is rational, genuinely rational, discourse).  The world’s population is growing so dramatically that “babies born within the next 30-hours of your reading this sentence will have replaced the 250,000 people lost in the tragic tsunami of 26 Dec 04."  Almost a quarter of a million NEW people seeking Earth’s resources EVERY DAY simply boggles the mind.  You see, every living thing on planet Earth is a parasite.  A parasite is an organism that lives off a host organism.  The Earth is the host organism for all life.  Just look down at the people below from a sky scrapper and you’ll see the human parasites streaming by.  Each one a taker of Earth’s finite resources.

Optimism in a Time of Despair

Like Hawkens, I too am an optimist.  Why?  For one thing, he and I are doing something about changing human behavior.  And we're each having our own measure of success.  EVERY HUMAN is either part of the problem or part of the solution?  Are you involved in one or more of the solutions to Earth's steady problems?  If so, congratulations.  You might be interested to now that you’re not in such a small minority as you might think.  Hawkens says, “What if there is already in place a large-scale spiritual awakening and we are simply not recognizing it?”  Hawkens isn’t talking about the quest for 'god' or 'goddess,' but about the efforts of thousands upon thousands of small communities interested in creating a better world.  These are people who are working to make themselves aware that the only way that can happen is through the creation of totally NEW rational conventions.

Thousands of non-profit organizations have and are springing up across North America.  There are watch orgs and keeper orgs and protection orgs (such as Ultralight Wilderness Toilet Co) and trusts and reformers and rebels of every description, and writers by the thousands who try to reach people with new ideas for making a better world.  As Steve Duin of the Oregonian writes, what is needed is “Resolve.  Intention.  The choices that connect Emerson to Thoreau, Thoreau to Gandhi and King, and all of them to the advice of poet Mary Oliver, who wrote, “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice.”

Diana, the World’s Home Coming Queen

In just a few hours after Diana, the late Princess of Wales, was killed, she was catapulted by the media onto Mount Olympus - to be forever in the presence of the other 'gods' and 'goddesses.'   Consider the images of an abandoned tiny girl or an adolescent pretending to be smaller and dumber than she is, or a seductress who dallies around near the horse shed, or a betrayed wife of a possible future king, a rebel with a cause, a dedicated mother of two very spoiled sons, a benefactor to the world.  Imagine a single person morphing into all these personas.  Boggles the mind, right?

Marion Woodman, Jungian psychologist/author, writes that if the world had a home coming queen, Diana would have been it.  In Kensington Gardens, circles of candles burned around every tree as a memorial arose.  Every flower from miles around was purchased and when they were gone they picked them from the fields to lie as a sign of deep ritual outpouring.  Thousands upon thousands of love poems blessed her trip to the beyond - the paradise that surely awaited her.  In short, grief appeared on a scale never before seen in the streets of London or Paris or New York or even Dallas with the death of JFK, the last god-king of America.  

All over the world people simply stopped what they were doing and balled like a young child.  Woodman writes that even “Muslim and Masai women wept.  Men everywhere were still and quiet."

Woodman says, “Diana, huntress and hunted, died in what became almost a ritual killing, a sacrifice made for the public.  The imperfect little rich girl became an icon: a new myth for the ages: a golden swan buried near a private lake.  Even the literalists were powerless to stop the transforming power of her demise...Like a princess in a fairy tale, the imperfect human being took on divine attributes - which all celebrities must carry.”  

Projecting Our Very Existences on Celebrities

When numberless millions all over the world project their very existences, their very hopes and dreams, their unfulfilled lives, onto celebrities - much like a motion picture projector in a theater projects images on a screen - on an unconscious level they annihilate themselves.  Thus Frankl’s “existential vacuum” - that deep sense of emptiness, of non-existence, is caused by our own involvement in the convention.  Woodman writes, “the voltage of repressed energy that was instantly released back into the world’s individuals who had projected their existences, the entire well-being, was much like a nuclear implosion (the opposite of explosion).” (italics mine)  Many scholars have written that the world has yet to recover from the assassinations of JFK, RFK, King, and the death of Diana.

Robert Bly, the poet/author, believes that Marilyn Monroe, a similar tragic figure, was so weakened by the burden of all the lives projected on her and all the sexual longing projected onto her, that she finally succumbed to the sheer weight of bearing it.  In celebrity there’s a sense of invincibility.  Much like the power that goes with elected office, people tend to exaggerate their behavior.  Woodman says “People who had never quite understood ritual and pageantry, especially as it is presented by the English, saw in Diana’s funeral how it acts as a transformer to shift energy from one dimension to another. “  At the end of the day, everyone is completely exhausted, even those who tried to care less.  All those millions of people either had to "get a life" or kick start their own existences in some way - or find another celebrity to project the remains of the life Diana left them when she died.

The average person lives an unexamined life.  Something Socrates said wasn’t worth living.  They do not educate themselves.  In fact, they willfully ignore any opportunity to do so.  Even most college grads stop educating themselves after graduation.  They just grab the rung of the ladder and wait for promotions.  So there’s always a dread in the air; the dread of being let go, of losing one’s imagined mooring.

In my next post, I’ll finish this piece on Diana, which I think shows the fallacy and irrationality of this form of ritual convention, and begin to show how rational conventions can only come into existence as more and more people take responsibility for their own existences.  I will argue that we must stop creating mobs of consumers and celebrity worshippers, and start creating individuals who can create their own jobs, their own existences, their own futures.  I will argue that it’s in the self-interest and rational discourse of nations to do so.  What is at stake is the survival of man himself.

As more and more people work to educate themselves about how to survive on this planet through their own efforts and not the efforts of corporate America, a new culture will arise.  That I can now see direct evidence of such a culture makes me optimistic about the future.