Green myths : We have to get back to a natural life.

Posted by Pointman on November 4, 2011 · 19 Comments 

We live under this pervasive avalanche of propaganda that’s telling us we’re the single fly in the ointment that’s killing an Earth that was somehow an Eden before we appeared to spoil the whole thing; if only we could change.

Yes, if only we could change.

If only we could stand to watch a person die from appendicitis rather than do nasty things like steal bodies and cut them open to find out why they’d died, so we could cut them open when they were still alive, take out their septic appendix and save their lives. As all those right thinking defenders of the Earth know, conventional medicine is somehow not natural so therefore it’s evil; we should be doing that psychic surgery as pioneered by those enterprising individuals in the Philippines or some other stylish nonsense like Aromatherapy, because it’s more natural.

Of course the scalpels we use for such operations are made from steel which we’ve smelted from ores dug out of the Earth and that’s a double no no. Digging into the bowels of Mother Earth and then polluting the environment by manufacturing things? Shame on us, shame on us all. Perhaps we should go back to using knapped shards of flint.

It gets worse though. That doctor doing the cutting isn’t a real healer. The fool had to study for five years before they’d even let him specialise! Everyone knows that healers are just born; it’s natural, they don’t have to study at all, just proclaim themselves to be healers and then get on with the Aromatherapy, Reflexology, Codology or whatever Ology the Guardian is currently waxing lyrical about. Strangely enough though, when one of these great believers in natural cures is diagnosed with something serious like the big C, they can somehow overcome their revulsion of conventional medicine and take full advantage of it.

As for the drugs, don’t get them started. When we’re some African parents, watching the life being squirted out of our baby because they’re dying from chronic diarrhea, which could be cured by a 1 cent chalk tablet, we should be proud we’re not handing a victory to big Pharma by using their evil drugs. Then again, people in that situation are living a very natural life and so can’t afford medicines anyway. Occasionally, it’s nice to live in the developed world, innit?

Even the food we eat isn’t natural. Instead of just going to the local supermarket and buying it, we should at least switch to organic produce, preferably locally sourced of course, so we can pay a 30% premium and run a higher risk of food poisoning from it. There’s nothing more natural than fertilising a crop with untreated excrement, as an unfortunate bunch of Germans found out this year.

But how far back do they want us to go with the foodie fetish bit? Should we just sashay down to the local non-existent market every day with a wicker basket and wander around leisurely for a few hours buying freshly baked bread, freshly caught fish, organic veggies but definitely no meat; it’s murder we’re told.

Perhaps they want to take it back even further. Are the men supposed to go out every morning with a club to brain some quadruped while the wives spend the day picking berries or digging out roots for food? Newsflash for you Greenies, it isn’t ever going to happen; we much prefer to spend our lives doing useful and fulfilling jobs rather than spending all our waking hours grubbing for food. If you want to live like that, then move to some poverty-stricken hell hole in the developing world and let’s see how long you last. You’ll very quickly find out that there’s not much nobility in poverty but there’s certainly big helpings of misery to make up for it.

That’s another hangup of the back to nature brigade; little villages are seen as good but big cities are somehow bad. I suppose it springs from their fears of us multiplying like the malignant virus they think humanity is.

In the space of a single century, the population of western Europe went from a demographic of 95% living in the countryside and 5% living in cities to exactly the reverse. That demographic cannot be changed; the last people who tried to reverse it were your old ideological pals the Khmer Rouge and in the end, the only thing they succeeded in doing was killing over 2 million of their own people. I suppose that’s why their ideas about getting back to the land and complete self-sufficiency aren’t talked about so much these days in the circles of the chic left.

All those brave self-appointed spokesmen for the people are always popular with you, aren’t they? But it’s not as if your learnt the lesson with Pol Pot or Stalin or any of the ones before them, is it? All that fulsome coverage of Robert Mugabe you used to do is looking pretty stupid these days, considering the biblically dreadful state he’s reduced Zimbabwe to and his body count is still rising. Zimbabwe went from being “the breadbasket of Africa” to famine under his guidance.

You were all happy to support and campaign for him in the years gone by but in the light of the monster he’s turned out to be, I note your deafening silence rather than any condemnation of him. Perhaps you’re biding your time for his successor, the next great liberating champion of the common people; he won’t turn out to be just another brutal dictator who knows exactly how to play your liberal sentiments.

Any time I see a political movement or a demonstration consisting in the main of nothing more than a few holier-than-thou political academics and the spoilt and professionally feckless brats of the middle classes, I know what I’m looking at is a fashion statement and nothing more. When it’s a bunch of blue-collar people like labourers, bricklayers, cooks, waitresses and the employed but generally poorly paid, I know it’s about real politics.

The acid test of finding out how relevant a political movement is, is to ask people like them but you don’t even have to do that; their total non-participation in it tells you all you need to know. In that sense, their instincts are always right on the money. They live in the real world and simply can’t afford the delusional fantasies of the financially secure. As this recession bites down hard, we’ll be seeing the return of some real politics.

If you really want to get back to nature then you better be prepared to lose a few things such as; electricity, metals, drugs, light bulbs, doctors, engineers, dentists, your teeth, Facebook, hospitals, manufacturers, roads, twitter, bridges, factory goods, your books, your mobile phone, your internet, your spectacles, your television, your Playstation, the artificial dwelling you live in, the very clothes you wear, your bicycle, the shoes you’re walking around in and knowing what new ideas are prevalent at a distance beyond the next village, but only as long as it’s within walking distance.

On the plus side, if you really want to get back to nature then you better be prepared to gain a few things; death from appendicitis, the death of babies to things like ectopic pregnancies, death from diabetes, death from starvation when the crops fail, death from cold because it’s hard to heat a cave and death from predation by wild animals since you’ve got no weapon better than a hand axe.

Your world is touchy feely mysticism, stupidity and a cosseted decadence that would not survive your first real encounter with nature in the raw. Eight out of ten people on this planet live the reality of the sort of shite you’re peddling and you’re helping to pile up their body count every day. It’s up to us fortunate few to fight their corner and it can be done.

Putting the notion of “back to nature” back into the dustbin of history, yet again, is a good place to start.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman :

Green Myths : Polar bears going extinct, yawn …

The steady-state environment delusion.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Extremism, Green myths series, Propaganda