THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER candidly responds:

A Reader Describes

NOWHERE LAND IN NOWHERE LAND

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 17, 2016

A READER WRITES:

Your current work is really describing the social “system” called “dystopia.” Its attributes and characteristics come as a set (he provides the set).


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

It is interesting how this series -- NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- is being perceived by readers.

Over the past several years, I have been reading rather extensively from the inconceivable rise of Rome from but a fledgling little city-state to the world's most dominant empire, through the improbable rise of Christianity to the most dominant religion, indeed, culture in the Western world, to how it has seeded modern civilization if unconsciously through the Protestant Reformation and American/French Revolutions into the corporate society that dominates the planet now, a domination that is the antithesis of the Laws of Nature.

The subtext of this advance, over time, going back even earlier to the rise of the chieftain and the shaman in prehistoric times, is that conscious man is mainly unconscious as he puts one foot in front of another going forward into the next space and place, unaware and uncomprehending the consequences of his actions.

Some twenty years or so ago in reading Christian scholars -- and always Dostoyevsky -- I sensed, but not very clearly, the duality of our nature as man, and that includes utopia/dystopia.

Although hardly qualified to exploit this ambivalence, I have made the attempt for my own satisfaction. Call it my entertainment.

The theme kept reappearing as I read, distilling my particular sense of things, then capturing these thoughts in an occasional "Fragments of a Philosophy." My works are peppered with these fragments.

Over several months, I knocked off a complete manuscript (never published) "Near Journey's End? Can Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man?"

One day I picked this manuscript up again and reread it -- I have that tendency -- and saw how harsh I can be. Call it anger or disgust, or whatever, it gets the juices flowing.

Truthfully, I've never been too concerned about readers. I don't expect them to agree, but if they are thinking at all beyond existing I suspect they might find something of value in my writings that connects. I am not into the proselytizing business.

It is an amazing what freedom a writer enjoys when he can write to his heart’s content without a deadline, an agent, or a publisher.

After reading a series of dystopian novels, and rereading T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland," I got a sense that man has always been "nowhere," lost in space and place, and that he operates mainly but cleverly on automatic pilot.

Man is constantly inventing and reinventing "mind toys" that give him a sense that he is in charge, when he is not, which drives him ever deeper into "nowhere land," as I see evident every day.

Take Shanghai, China. It just opened the most gigantic Disney World ever with buildings skyscraper high too boost tourism. It is a $5.5 million investment. Meanwhile, millions of Chinese are starving or without adequate housing or jobs.

What China is doing the West has been doing for centuries. It is called capitalism.

We are an imitative society, a compare and compete society, a corporate society, and now a global society that doesn't seem to realize that our unconscious tendencies represent our collective deathknell as we destroy our guest place on this planet, but we cannot help ourselves. We are not in charge, but we have never been in charge. We go from one crisis to another, mainly self-invented, but nonetheless devastating.

Am I mad? Perhaps. Unhinged? That could be true, too, but one attribute that I have always believed I possess and that is conceptual skills. I can pile one idea/event/happening/situation on top of another over time, and they provide me with something resembling a picture. That is the case with the current project, being provided to readers in tiny segments for mastication.

That said several times I have thought of stopping this nonsense, this NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND but something just keeps pulling me forward.

All our inventions -- morality, ethics, humanity, science and philosophy -- fail to understand that we don't belong here, that we are guests of a planet that has no conscience, that doesn't believe in good and evil, right and wrong, happiness and sadness, it just "is," and its "isness" is that finds us increasingly corrupting its hospitality for our insane purposes.

*  *  *  *  *