Zoo Life In Modernity: the Rage of Declawed Cats.

"A pig, in a cage, on antibiotics."

What more to speak of progress than wildness behind bars, crumpling into it's own confusion, and losing instinct in place of chow lines? We have, for long enough, seen the crippling effect of society, no matter the scale, in the loss of freedom so necessary for our  experience of living that what would be screaming at us, is now only a whisper. Drug dependence is a norm, and for every qualm our bodies have with the comfort of social existence, there is a Procrustean prescription shoved into our throats, beginning with children before their first year.  Half of Amerikkkans are now on a daily dose of prescribed drugs, mimicking with great tenacity A Brave New World-like society; where a gram a day keeps the blues away. We have perfected the prison bars, and all that we know now resides within them. Debord's spectacle has unmasked from the margins, showing it's wicked teeth, as we stand in front of this great beast, snapping pictures on our smart phones.At what point do we stop watching? At what point is there an awakening of instinct that never dies, but struggles behind the walls of morality and conditioning? The ingrowth of our imprisonment bulges at the seems of anxiety, anger, confusion and has boiled into the rage of violent life, dependent upon the subjugation of others and self for it's own survival. But when? How? Who will bring this reckoning about? What answer, of the millions we see offered in the political scree that decorates the landscape of the spectacle, will be the one? None. There will be no "one" answer, and there cannot. The singularity mindset of the civilized rests on the notion of the saving grace. Technology points to this for it's own means as well.  The social contract of mass society requires our total submission to the whims of machine. Changes within the mass society have no intent of breaking this contract.

The turning point is not one that is orchestrated, or even welcomed, but one that is spontaneous and requires, possibly for the first time for many, the use of our animal instincts. The fight or flight is not a binary, but a flowing river, and for too long our domesticated mind has hidden from us that we are fleeing. So, as the social constructs which reinforce the controlled mind dissipate, the control itself slips. The flight ebbs towards fight, with a fierceness that is at once alien and more natural than anything we have felt. It is within these moments that we come alive. It is upon making a stand that we begin the breaking down of the borders of what is wild, and what is domesticate. We are not what we have made, but what we will destroy. It is a series of choices that we participate in daily, and nightly, to submit or refuse that creates for us a space of confinement, where-in perceived comfort and false security is the soup du jour, or wildness, where we see ourselves cast off the yokes of society and break towards freedom. The kettling of the herd of cats is weakened with every scratch at it's fake plastic net, likewise, it is strengthened by heeding the warnings of consequence. Will the jails we built hold us all? This jail could be our cemetery, if we wait for the walls to crumble. This brings out the question of collapse.


Many circles today are in bright discussion on the collapse of this civilization. We have a notion that the worsening of life equates to the fall of the empire, that these pains are the death throes of the body of civilized life, and the awakening of the masses is imminent, sure to rise up when discomfort overtakes their lives, and the pain will be the breaking point towards all out war against the masters. We have, for so long, lived in such great pain that it is only rivaled in scope by the amount of distraction we use to numb it away. This pain has great outpouring in the daily insanities we encounter in ourselves and in others. Workplace homicide is so frequent that most corporations have insurance policies sheltering them from lawsuits in the aftermath. Workplace homicide is the number one threat to US businessmen two years running. (Sorry anarchists, we'd be lucky to be in the top twenty threats at this rate) Some point to these incidents as aberrations from civilization, where-as others show these elements as the failure of the experiment. The idea is that it does not work, has not worked, and will not ever work. Perhaps the definition must follow the question: For whom? Whom does it work for? What we know of class analysis is that capitalism does work, socialism does work, communism does work, all economy works for the benefit of those on top, at the massive cost of the lives of the rest of the planet. But it works. Most of the world will feel great pain and loss, but that does not bring about the collapse of economies. That is economics. A series of strategic losses for the gain of those in control. Civilization is the birthing place of massive scale economics, and will surely not flounder at the mere discomfort of it's servants. Collapse is not evident in the pains of the many, but civilization is. Civilization requires the subjugation of wildness to propel itself into total domination. This is a painful process, on any scale, but imagine the pain of loss you experience, on a global scale, and you will not see the collapse of civilization, but the process of it's growth. There are, of course, stages of loss and levels of oppression suffered. Some will never know the promise of civilized comfort, and can not, for this promise is only kept through the diminishing of external beings, beings outside of the construct of the civilized experience. It must have a feeding source from which to pool it's massive amount of reserves. This is not going away with the technological information explosion, as was promised, but a revived form of vulgar voyeurism replaces the spectacle of fiction, just in time for the news feeds to buzz with controlled outrage. This is not collapse happening. This pain is domestication deepening it's grasp.

Waiting through what we see as collapse may not prove to be the best strategy, as I am certain that the fall of empire has been prophesied since the beginning of empire, and the world has not seen break from it yet. Whether the wrath of a vengeful god, or the collapse of economy, the end has been near since the beginning. Doomsday is not what comes to slit the throat of the leviathan, doomsday is everyday in the grasp of it. Some part may collapse, some cog come loose, but the machine, left to it's own, will devour with haste, and will not crumble in it's own time. This is not to say that the machine is all powerful. No. It is very open to dismantling. The only thing that has slowed society in it's conquest has been resistance to it. If not for resistance, be it federations of tribes of Celts or tribes of Indigenous of the Americas, fire bombings by the E.L.F. or sabots thrown to the gears, resistance has been the force against civilization. Simply waiting for collapse is a symptom of our domestication, but also a point of reference for the wildness within that rages below the surface. Our bodies know they are in great pain, our minds are confused and bombarded with distraction, and our spirit is stifled, but not dead. We must take cue from our bodies, who rage mercilessly against the diseases which are wrought upon them, many times losing, but never passively allowing for the disease to take over. Resistance is biological though not merely material. Our spirit is in constant revulsion of the chains of enslavement as well. You must temper and tame it to create domicile creatures, hence the term "breaking" of a beast. You break a wild horse, take away it will to fight back, replace it's instinct with comforts, but lying under the surface, the wild animal exists. It may have grown too faint to hear, or too weak to fight, but the spirit is there. You can see the devastation in the eyes. We are not so far off. Consider two million years, and look at our timeline of control, and you will see that wildness is not out of reach, but may be lying in repose, waiting for it's opportunity to spring forth and destroy the chains.  Collapse will not happen to us or around us, but within us and because of us.