On Cities and Civilization

I think that Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he argued that American society should be built around the yeoman farmer.

It is no surprise to me that cities have long "enjoyed" a very mixed reputation, one entirely and wholly deserved as well as justified, as being both centers of power and cesspools of degeneracy.

The phenomenon I call "Empire", today manifest in both literal and Cultural Marxist forms, requires centralization to achieve its control. This means that cities (and towns, etc.) are key to its schemes. There is a reason for this requirement, and it is because cities have a quality that any entity seeking to create a cult must possess: the power to isolate and sever from reality those it preys upon.

Those who live on the land, such as farmers and ranchers, live in the real world. Nomads do also. You rarely, if ever, see the sort of nonsense commonplace to Empire's cult fronts (such as today's Social Justice cult) where people grow their own food or hunt routinely to get it. You don't see obsessions with pointless and superfluous things (such as fashion) when you are concerned with keeping your sheep alive long enough to sheer them for their wool so you can make cloth with it.

In short, cities are cesspools of degeneracy because they are divorced from reality. When you are not confronted with the necessities of life on a direct and immediate basis (i.e. daily), and you have no experience or memory of what they are, it is very easy to become convinced of unreal delusions because you are insulated from the consequences of those delusions.

I do NOT adhere to the insistence that cities are civilization. Cities are technologies, and when strictly confined to lawful uses they are a good thing to have, much like one uses fire for various things but only under strict control. When you allow a city to outside of the specific functions that it is good at doing, you open the door to insanity and degeneracy of a culture and thus of nations.

I say that Civilization comes from being in accord with reality. Locking oneself away in a city run amok, as Social Justice cultists lock themselves away in their "safe spaces", does nothing more than create echo chambers that produce insanity and self-destruction. Empire wants to consume that which is real, so such things are pleasing to it; reality, however, is sovereign and inevitably destroys that which is unreal.

Civilization, therefore, is best served when cities are reduced to the absolute number required, and then confined only to those functions that only a city can fulfill, and then only allowing mission-critical personnel to reside indefinitely- everyone else commutes, and only admitting those with lawful business within. Cities, quite frankly, should be treated like nuclear reactors- and when no longer required, shut down and dismantled.

You don't have Social Justice when the population is spread out and living in reality in rural communities. You don't have Marxism. You don't have many other manifestations of Empire, and what does come up is easily put down by right-thinking neighbors. Civilization, therefore, doesn't need urbanization; urbanization needs Civilization to justify its existence.

Empire and the City: A Tool for Centralization

The city is a technology unto itself. As such, it has inherent qualities that compel certain applications and dissuade or forbid others. The primary quality, which it uses as a foundation for all of the rest, is centralization.

The city centralizes all that it can. It centralizes population, food supplies, water supplies, economic functions, political power, cultural production and diffusion, religious influence- any and all means to establish, maintain and exercise domination over others. This is what makes the city so vital to Empire.

The city exerts this centralizing influence through an expression of convenience that, after a time, feels like the pull of gravity itself upon those so much smaller than it. There is a dense core at its center, from which that pull comes and to which all it attracts goes, and into orbit around it are an increasing array and number of bodies that settle around that core. These rings, and the bodies within them, enter into relationships of push and pull with the core and each other. When these ties are stable, their cumulative power strengthens that pull and accelerates the process; when unstable, they threaten to disrupt and destroy the city altogether, rending it asunder in the hope of starting over as the core of a new city.

The city's hunger, like that of a rapacious vampire, only grows as it does. It consumes the produce of the productive countryside, first its surplus and then its produce. It consumes the people of the countryside, first its excess and then its entirety. Then it installs thralls (who are often Thralls) to transform the countryside into a meek reflection of itself, making inhuman changes to achieve inhumane ends to create farms run by automata--zombies or robots, take your pick; the result is the same--and not by Mankind for human (and humane) ends. It creates a miasmic illusion that the city is all that matters, when the city is actually superfluous and expendable, and it does this through the increasing of the perception of time in those that dwell within its clutches. Meanwhile, the city cannot feed itself, clean itself, keep itself hydrated or otherwise do what is required of any lifeform without the aid--willing or not--of the productive countryside and the natural world that it is lawfully and harmoniously based upon, yet often disdains and abuses without pity or remorse.

We never needed to live this way. We certainly don't need to do so now. We should, instead, acknowledge that freedom comes from acknowledgement that being decentralized and distributed is the proven path to autonomy and freedom due to its support for and encouragement of individuality at all levels. Empire is all about centralization, with the domination and control that comes with it; Mankind is at its best when decentralized and distributed, and remaking our world into a Civilization that builds upon this superior model is one big way to make Empire fall.

Empire and the City: A Thing Whose End Must Come

The emergence of the City as an institution marked a sea change in Mankind's history. When they arose, they quickly came to dominate the affairs of those nations that established them. Culture, economics, politics and religion--in those days, closely connected elements--soon centered on the city, and with it those who dwelt there; this perverse effect warped the perceptions of those so effected, devaluing and dehumanizing those still on the land while those in the city came to believe themselves superior to their country cousins despite their state of total dependency upon the country-dwellers for their food and other necessities of life (as well as anything their culture required). This centralization of power and influence, and the warping of perception, is an environment ideal for Empire.

In the ancient world, Empire operated through religion. The sacrifices, the prostitution, the fraudulent claims of divine authority (and the abuses that always come from such lies), the human trafficking (What else do you think slavery, corvee labor, prostitution, etc. are?), the incidents of genocide or similar mass slaughter and so much more--while they existed prior to the City--exploded in scale, scope, frequency and regularity once the City emerged and became a fixture in Man's existence. The City centralizes, and centralization is a vulnerability that psychopaths--and Empire is psychopathy in its raw form as a toxic meme--routinely exploit to wield stolen power (for all political power is stolen from the people) for their own aggrandizement in a manner that today we say is "just business". The City, I postulate, is actually a technology that enables the vampire-like parasitism of Empire and its Thralls against Mankind. Like Empire, the City cannot endure on its own; it is not, never has, and cannot ever be self-sufficient because it has no real substance of its own- what it has is what it steals from others, and it cannot replace what it consumes so it must continue stealing to fulfill its great and unceasing hunger (much like the vampires I liken it to), but when that theft stops it (like vampires) collapses into itself and becomes a ruin within weeks if not days. The City, therefore, is a deathtrap and we common folk would be wise to walk away from it.

The mainstream narrative for the emergence of the City downplays the role of religion in the ancient world, when it was both the economic and political infrastructure that unified a culture in that long-ago era, as surviving records and relics of both living and dead faiths reveal to us. This narrative does not tell the truth about the City. Instead that narrative focuses upon convenience of location, economic (i.e. trade) networks and the general effects of transitioning from a nomadic to an agricultural socio-economic paradigm. While relevant, the narrative ignores the prime place of religion as the load-bearing pillar of Man's existence in the ancient world. Economic, political and cultural activity served religion first and foremost; all other functions were there to ensure that this primary function endured and operated as intended by the cult in control. This has ever since been the function of the City: to centralize power and influence, and then wield that monopoly like a club to subjugate the nation and keep it enslaved to Empire's will. No attempt to use the City in a manner akin to the responsible use of fire, in the thousands of years of known history, has yet succeeded; I therefore conclude that this cannot be done, and therefore alternatives to the City should be made and promulgated that has the same beneficial effects but lacks the flaws that centralization presents as a threat to Mankind.

We now have the means to make this happen, instead of displaying the insanity that repeated usage of the City displays in the historical record, thanks to advances in technology. Far from going the Luddite or Amish route, we should instead take up the Internet and its decentralizing effect upon things as the backbone of our not-City alternative. We should embrace 3d printing and similar manufacturing breakthroughs that allow decentralized creation of goods. Decentralization of knowledge, with plenty of redundancies (e.g. multiple digital backups with multiple power sources, and a print catalog archived in a climate-controlled space), and the earnest spreading-wide of knowledge across the world is key to achieving this replacement of the City and its removal of the environmental effects that putting far, far too many people into far too little space has--and has had--upon Mankind. Eliminate all barriers to information creation, dispersal and application (which means ending the current Intellectual Property regime, which begins with simple and outright refusal to use it). Living as families on self-sufficient homesteads, in rural communities, is actually best for Mankind's development; until then, the City should be scaled down to the barest minimum necessary to fulfill the functions for which they are allowed to exist- and most of the functions should be stripped from them and dispersed across the countryside instead.

This is one viable course of action, a form of walking away from Omelas, that will result in Empire's fall.