Lives Out of Balance

The streets of Philadelphia

Music has a profound capacity to amplify the emotional impact of visual recordings. Happening upon a video on Reddit portraying the horrors of fentanyl addiction in Kensington, Philadelphia, I was struck by the use of the soundtrack from Koyaanisqatsi. This experimental non-narrative film was released in 1982 and beautifully portrays humanity’s relationship with the environment.

It’s not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It’s because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.

Godfrey Reggio, Producer of Koyaanisqatsi

In the Hopi language, the word koyaanisqatsi means crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating or a state of life that calls for another way of living. It’s an apt descriptor for the pronounced imbalance between the built and natural environment.

I wasn’t aware of the film before I saw the video by u/Sigouste. I subsequently watched it on iTunes with my eldest daughter and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Koyaanisqatsi is noted for Ron Fricke’s novel use of aerial time-lapse cinematography. The images are remarkable, but may have lost some of their original impact due to advances in videography and the ubiquitous drone footage we see today. The marrying of the ominous, mood altering notes of Prophecies from the film soundtrack, scored by Philip Glass, with the tragic footage of wasted humans on the streets of Kensington is an excellent match.

Original video by YouTuber Kimgary

The addicts are so utterly consumed by the narcotic effects of fentanyl and heroin that they are completely doubled over, yet somehow remain upright: strung-out, strung-up opioid puppets. Many of the victims of this crippling condition served in the armed forces overseas, and returned home broken by war. Others are driven into prostitution because of it. They are greeted by indifference and the cheap availability of drugs in Kensington, dubbed the ‘Walmart of heroin’, by local pastor Eunice Sanchez.

Dead end street

On the morning of 1 December 2014 I was walking along Kildare Street on my way to work, my mind occupied by trivial matters. I noticed some activity on the street perpendicular to mine, Molesworth Street. A group of medical first responders and Gardai were huddled around the corpse of a homeless man who had died during the night, in view of Leinster House. I since found out that the man was in his 40s (just like me), not some ‘auld fella’— in fact 60% of rough sleepers are aged from 25-40.

In the company of has-beens
And bent-backs and sleeping forms
On pavement steps…
I recognise
Myself, in every stranger’s eyes

5.06 AM (Every Strangers Eyes) from The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking by Roger Waters¹

What sequence of events ended with this man’s untimely death under these conditions? Abuse, rejection, poverty or addiction. The drug problems, and all the other malaises, are of course not restricted to the United States. The social decay of Dublin’s north inner city mirrors that of the Kensington underpass, including a growing fentanyl problem. The issues here may be getting worse due to the housing crisis and rising inequality— or perhaps COVID-19 lockdowns just made them more visible.

Soup and sunflowers

In the developed world our addiction to cars, fast food and cheap consumer goods has transformed our natural desire to persevere into plundering the planet’s resources. However, the greatest of mankind’s endeavours are a low-grade imitation of natural processes we can neither tame nor recreate, wasteful and inefficient. Many are rightly advocating for a rapid deescalation of our growing rates of consumption. However, environmental activists are often prone to oversimplifying complex societal needs and the environmental systems on which they depend. The antics of middle class kids spilling milk on supermarket floors are difficult to reconcile with their comfortable and resource-intense lifestyles. None of us can justify sanctimoniousness over our impact on the environment. The instinctive wish to return to the ‘garden of Eden’ and our paradoxical appetite for highways and cheeseburgers is perfectly encapsulated in the lyrics of a Talking Heads’ song from the 1988 album Naked.

There was a shopping mall
Now it’s all covered with flowers
You’ve got it, you’ve got it
If this is paradise
I wish I had a lawnmower
You’ve got it, you’ve got it

(Nothing But) Flowers by David Byrne

Perhaps we will develop the ability to reverse at least some of the damage, using technology to re-balance the inequalities between developed and developing nations. However, we have learned that technology does not always serve our needs. The advent of agriculture, the first real attempt to dominate the natural world for our benefit, resulted in longer working hours and less affluence according to David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything— in fact we “ran to our chains”. The authors argue there was no true Agricultural Revolution, which is viewed a remnant of Enlightenment thinking. They point to a slow move towards pastoral living set against a mosaic of hierarchical and egalitarianism societies (supported by archaeological evidence). Essentially, no dominant form of society exists as per Hobbesian and Rousseauian dogmas, rather a multitude of forms have emerged, declined and resurfaced at different times in various parts of the world.

In this model, agriculture flourished in areas with greater ecological variation. The lack of diversity in modern agriculture and the frightening pace of habitat destruction is an own-goal of global proportions for our species. The impact of human food production on the environment is enshrined in our legal concepts around the ‘possession’ of land— usus is defined as the right to use, fructus the right to enjoy and abusus the right to destroy. But what about the responsibility of stewardship?

Our relationships with each other are equally fraught. Batesman’s anthropological theory of schismogenesis is founded on the idea that people tend to define themselves against each other. Thus, perceptions of difference can legitimise the persecution of our neighbours for personal gain, whether through royal privilege, government or other forms of societal control. However we’re all in the same boat with regard to our shared home, planet Earth.

The Pale Blue Dot taken by Voyager 1, Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

We must stop ‘othering’ nature as well. Unfortunately, it seems that acting for the greater good is beyond our capacity as a species. We are trapped in a tribal trough, not possessing the escape velocity to ascend to sustainable and humanitarian lives. What hope do we have in combatting catastrophic species loss (caused by us) if we don’t have sufficient empathy for our own kind?

Out of this world

As the repercussions of climate change and the destruction of the natural world become apparent, questions arise as to the likelihood of the worst-case predictions. The same questions are being asked by the mega-rich. They are interested in how their vast wealth could be used to protect them in the event of societal collapse. Presumably money would become quite useless in this scenario. While it may seem like the plot of a Liu Cixin novel or a musty dystopian paperback from the 1970s, this is now where we are at.

The humanist Douglas Rushkoff has written about this in his keynote address to a group of tech billionaires, delivered in a remote desert location ². They wanted suggestions on ways they can ensure survival in a hostile and chaotic world of apocalyptic climate disaster (including options for off-world existence). They asked how best to remain safe in their bunkers, and to prevent their security guards from revolting. Rushkoff’s response is telling: ‘treat those people really well, right now’.

To avoid the the worst effects of climate change we must change our systems in a meaningful and pragmatic way, not according to unrealistic ideals. Graeber and Wengrow propose that regime change is only possible through three means: knowledge, charisma and violence. If the same is true for system change it begs the question, for how long will all three options remain available? Even more importantly- we should start treating the environment really well, right now.

This page was last updated on Nov 5, 2022 15:36

1. I find myself quoting Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd) a lot. I’ve listened to his records for years and enjoy his body of work, even Radio Kaos. However, I feel it necessary to say I strongly disagree with his stance on Russia’s invasion on Ukraine. Nonetheless, his pronouncements on the war in no way diminish his creative output, at least for me. As Ukraine fights against autocracy we must cherish freedom of speech, whether we agree with what is said, or not. ↩

2. Read about it in Rushkoff’s book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, available on Amazon but please buy from a local bookshop if you can. ↩