The “elephant in the room” is failing civilization. Who denies it’s there? But how many confront this reality? Every previous civilization has gone under; now there’s only one left. A totalizing, global machine based on capital and technology, with almost no-one outside it. Civilization has become ruinous at every level, in all spheres. Inner reality is besieged by despair as outer, physical reality is more and more completely imperiled. Failure seems built in. The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter documents the innate tendency of increasing social complexity to outrun its carrying capacity, its ability to sustain itself.In 2001 American environmentalist Ed Ayres provided this insight: “We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming.” In 2024 the evidence is palpable, irresistible. It’s in the air we breathe, not just heat- and pollution-wise, but as the zeitgeist, the threatening, enveloping temper of the times.Michel Houllebecq’s powerful The Elementary Particles (2001) expresses the sense of this all-encompassing menace with prescience. The novel’s two main characters, both physicists, arrive at a void, an end-of-the-road sense of things. There’s no juice left; modernity has run out of gas. It’s the end, full stop. Houllebecq’s Submission (2015) has a similar theme or message.In a quite radical late essay, Sigmund Freud argued that it’s not only at its end that civilization becomes intolerable, shows its true colors. It’s insufferable from the beginning; based fundamentally on domestication, civilization traps us in an unnatural, unfree condition. Some animals adjust to domestication; the human animal does not. For us, civilization is a wound that doesn’t heal, the cause of our unhappiness, our neurosis.For some of us, the cure for this sickness is unmistakably obvious. If domestication/ civilization equals unhappiness (and far worse), it needs to go. De-domestication is the answer; rewilding is the first step. Pandemics are anything but new to civilization, but here is a 2022 reference to the Covid pandemic that will shed light on my reference to rewilding, from a friend of mine in Alaska: “I honestly feel like this virus is providing us an opportunity to reanalyze our priorities. Do we really need to travel as much or consume products that come from halfway around the world or fail to consider where our food comes from or what nutrition and metabolic health are or work ourselves to death? “If the virus does reemerge like the 1918 flu did, I hope, you my friends, will have the fortitude and resiliency to make it through. It’s sad and shocking to realize that Alaska imports 95% of our food. One broken link in this supply chain could be devastating.2 / 3″Remembering how to grow food, raise food, share food, kill food, preserve food, support local food producers and to remember what actual nutrition is, is what I am being reminded of. I am being reminded of the importance of strong community, strong friendships and networks based on trust and mutual respect. I am also hyper reminded of the fact that Alaska still has intact ecosystems that support abundant, renewable food resources like salmon, caribou, moose, etc., which in turn reminds me that it’s more important than ever to fend off myopic, greed-fueled developments that destroy these life-giving resources. Projects like the Pebble Mine, Donlin Mind, ambler Mine, and the myriad oil and gas developments each work against productive and intact ecological systems.”In the meantime, I will do everything in my power this summer to keep my family, friends, and community safe by wearing a mask and observing good social distancing practices…. I don’t want us to return to normal when this threat is past. Normal is killing us and millions of fascinating, unique species we share the planet with. Coronavirus is providing an opportunity. I hope we don’t miss it.”When Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents, the respectable, world-renowned psychoanalyst could not afford to condemn civilization. He had too much to lose. We have everything to lose! We must aim for an end to civilization or it will kill the planet and us with it. It goes without saying that ending domestication/civilization will be a mammoth undertaking. The alternative: continue on a suicidal course of devastation and disease, worldwide. Not long before Freud published his essay, historian Oswald Spengler ambitiously outlined the several stages that every culture/civilization passes through before expiring in its final phase. Written just over 100 years ago, The Decline of the West describes the final stage of civilization, which Spengler labeled Faustian. His research into world history showed that civilization always emphasizes the technological as it moves toward its end. Spengler’s prediction is proving to be quite accurate, when applied to the global civilization of today. Stanley Diamond’s important study In Search of the Primitive corrects a common misconception that we all learn in school. Domestication did not arrive as a freely chosen natural development, improving human life by leaps and bounds. Instead, it was imposed by force, over millennia. Hunter-gatherer existence, the norm among humans for at least two million years, was a life of relative freedom that people preferred to sedentary toil, new systems of private property and taxation, inequality and domination that came with pastoralism and its companion, agriculture. Diamond describes a “titanic struggle” as domesticators sought control of land and lives, driving hunter-gatherers to the margins, where they tenaciously survive today. In the face of overwhelming odds, indigenous people fight to preserve the knowledge and wisdom of countless generations of elders. Their experience and outlook offer the best possible guide to restoring the health of our world. 3 / 3Do you recall the Sirens in Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey? Come ashore and party with us, they sing to Odysseus and his crew as they sail for home after the Trojan war. But Odysseus has his sailors’ ears plugged with wax and himself tied to the mast in order to resist temptation. Homer depicts the Sirens as representing death, and our hero’s escape as a victory. But Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer saw this encounter entirely differently, as expressed in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). In their view it is freedom and eros that are on offer from the beckoning Sirens, whereas Odysseus sails past them toward work, repression, and unfreedom––toward domestication/civilization.Onward to disaster…or set out on a different path?