topographies of a human world
I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
〰 Rainer Maria Rilke 〰
photo © Florian Pinkert on Unsplash
From Nowhere to a Bad Place or Worse
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
〰 Edward Abbey 〰
The word utopia was coined by Thomas More in 1516 when he wrote a novel about an imaginary island enjoying the utmost perfection in legal, social, and political systems. The novel is based on a fictive seafarer called Hythloday, given credibility through the account of travelling with Amerigo Vespucci (Italian explorer 1451-1512).
“Hythloday’s strange appearance suggests how his experiences abroad have transformed him into something of a sage or prophet. He resembles Odysseus in that he has been everywhere in his quest for knowledge, and he resembles Plato in the sense that he not only has broad practical knowledge but also has high theoretical knowledge about the world.”
Hythloday tells More about a far away island he visited with Vespucci, called Utopia. The island has several cities, all identical to one another. The citizens of Utopia own nothing individually, but all have a share in the collective resources, including land, housing, bread and wine.
The Utopians don’t use money and despise gold as a useless metal. Families are organised in patriarchal groups with 10-16 adult members, plus children. Individuals work about six hours a day.
Most notably, “lawyers are banned from the commonwealth for being too cunning in their interpretations of the law.” ~ a particularly interesting detail, given that Thomas More was a lawyer.
The name Utopia [from Greek ou = not + topos = place] literally means nowhere.
In the 1610s the name was interpreted as a composition of eu = good + topos = place, and used in the sense of perfect place.
In the 1960s a new interpretation suggested a connection between ‘ou’ and ‘aiōn’ ~ the Greek word for age, vital force, lifetime etc. which has given us the English word eon.
In this sense, utopia would refer to a place where people live (and thrive) for a long time. Thrown into one pot with ‘eutopia’ ~ the imaginary good place for a good life gave rise to its polar opposite.
According to Merriam Webster, the word dystopia was first used in 1919 to describe an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanised, fearful lives.
101 years earlier, Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher, had suggested cacotopia [from Greek kakos = bad, wicked] as an antonym for ‘utopia’. He used cacotopia as a description for ‘worst government’ and utopia for best government.
In the end dystopia won the competition for ‘best word for worst place’, despite the fact that Anthony Burgess, famous for his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange (published 1962), thought that cacotopia was a better word because "it sounds worse than dystopia.”
UTOPIA ~ photo © Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
The Dualistic Trap
If we throw mother nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork.
〰 Masanobu Fukuoka 〰
Isn’t it incredible that Western civilised humans have spent over 500 years living in the illusion that utopia ~ a dreamplace that is too good to be true ~ and dystopia ~ a nightmarish place or worse ~ are the only two options available to us?
As if life was either perfectly good or totally evil...
Despite the fact that utopia and dystopia have fooled us into believing that they are genuine alternatives ~ an ideal place on one side, and a terrible one on the other ~ they actually live in the same isotope called non-reality.
Utopia is unrealistic in the imaginary positive realm. Dystopia can’t be real because it is so bad it doesn’t sustain life.
Dystopia is an Anthropocentric dream ~ or nightmare, as the case may be ~ which squeezes humans out of their own natural habitat. The word has been used in the sense of an ‘imaginary bad place’ since 1952. Since 1844, it had been a medical term, meaning the displacement of an organ. In other words, being in an unhealthy place.
After the publication of George Orwell’s novel 1984 (published 1949), dystopian has become synonymous with the sinister futuristic world depicted by the author. “Orwellian has become a word itself,” Harvey A. Daniels, author of Famous Last Words, pointed out “an adjective denoting a dystopic world where language is cut adrift from meaning.”
photo © André Benz on Unsplash
The only real alternative is a place that does sustain life ~ a human world where verbionts carry authentic meaning and language is a means of constructive explicit and implicit communication, rather than being weaponised as a tool for propaganda, manipulation, and human destruction.
Such a place is called Syntopia.
photo © Oppo Find on Unsplash
A Topography for the Symbiocene
The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.
〰 Nancy Wynne Newhall 〰
Syntopia is not just an external place where humans live together in collaborative, synergistic, constructive communities. It is not an external environment, which some might hope to find on another planet, when (according to dystopian predictions) 'the ecosystem of Mother Earth will have become too toxic for humans'.
Syntopia [from Greek syn = together + topos = place] means not only being together in the same place. It implies living and thriving together.
Syntopia is the place where the Symbiocene finds its natural home. Such a place must be grown and cultivated from a symbiocentric mindset.
Some decades ago I read books in the personal development genre by authors suggesting ‘reprogramming’ the mind to achieve ‘greater wellbeing in health and wealth’ ~ occasionally with ‘spiritual enlightenment’ thrown in as a bonus.
What I have since learned is this: The human mind is neither an operating system nor a computer program. If you try to ‘reprogram’ your mind with anything you already firmly believe to be true, chances are that such beliefs are firmly rooted in your existing ‘old mental program’.
Another metaphor used for ‘self-improvement’ and ‘mental hygiene’ has been gleaned from gardening. The idea was that ‘negative elements’ in the mind could be ‘uprooted like weeds’. Although this proposal sounds more ‘eco’ and ‘organic’ it also turns out to be flawed, aggressive, and ultimately counter-productive.
The reason is simple. Both metaphors ~ the ‘operating-system-mind’ and the ‘veg-patch-mind’ are products of the Anthropocene. They presuppose that we, the owners of our minds, already know what’s right and wrong, and therefore we can put certain bits right when things go wrong.
The trouble is, the whole anthropocentric mindset is flawed. To paraphrase Einstein, or whoever said this first, “you can’t fix a flawed mindset with the same mindset that has produced the error.”
If it was that simple, we would’ve long since done it. The human world would look much healthier as a result. We would live in harmony with all our human and non-human relations. Well-being would be such a ‘normal condition’ ~ we’d be busy thinking and writing about other creative topics…
The good news is, there is another way. A viable solution out of the dilemma is to grow a new and healthy mindset, one belief and layer at a time. This approach uses another metaphor, also from gardening. It’s what we do here at Symbiopædia.
In the Wild-Word-Woods we don’t reject any words which have been abused, distorted, or corrupted. We compost them. They can be kept in a hidden place for a while, somewhere in the dark, where they are protected and warm. They may need a little time to recover.
In the comfort of our wild-word-compost, a verbiont which has suffered verboklepsy (= identity theft) or even verbicide will heal itself sooner or later. The life forces of the beneficial composting environment help any word to recover its own true identity.
The same principle can be applied to the larger symbiotope, in which our words live. We can apply it to our own mindset and its contents.
Any unhealthy, or painful, or damaged element we might stumble over in everyday life can be composted. Left to its own devices, our inner compost heap may not be very active, initially. That’s because many life giving microorganisms have been killed off by the Anthropocene.
With a little input of symbiocentric microbiodynamics, however, it can be revived. The best part is, we don’t need to know the result in advance. We don’t need to ‘create a new and better program’ for our mind. We don’t need to worry about continuously ‘weeding the veg-patch of our mind’ either.
What we do need to do is learn to work with the inner wilderness, which has been neglected and suppressed and threatened with extinction, by the Anthropocentric paradigm.
Fortunately, the inner wilderness is incredibly resilient. And the inner compost heap of the mind, safely hidden in the inner undergrowth, is already impregnated with all the information of a living symbiogenetic system.
From that secret inner place, in the dark wilderness of our own minds, we can nurture and cultivate and grow Syntopia, our world, from the inside out.
Is Syntopia real? ~ you might ask.
Does it really exist?
Is it really the perfect place for us?
Syntopia is as real as our perception of it within our inner world. Seeing that humans have been capable of conjuring up Dystopia(!) ~ in many variations ~ virtually out of nowhere, and despite best intentions ~ bringing Syntopia into reality is a walk in the park by comparison.
Syntopia is as beautiful and imperfect as we are, waiting to be discovered and unfolded ~ by us. It’s neither an illusory Utopia, nor a soul-destroying Dystopia.
Syntopia is our natural habitat, a place where we can be ourselves and live our imperfect lives ~ each of us in their own symbiotope, like cells in a living body.
We can practice being Syntopians, using the principles of the Symbiocene as guidance, and the place we call home will grow around us.
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