Hypnotized (By The Cult Of Enviro-Mentalism)

"Sometimes a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with 'Ecotopia,' a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known."

 

The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.

White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called 'recycle bins' sit on trains, along with 'hanging ferns and small plants.'

A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.

“ ‘Ecotopia’ became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,” said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. 

'You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.'

...Its characters are flat; its prose — well, call it utilitarian. 

 

And the plot, in which the narrator drops his skepticism and settles into Ecotopian life, thanks in part to a love interest, lacks sophistication. 

...'Ecotopia' has its critics. Feminists attacked it for its ritual war games, in which men don spears to work off their 'natural' aggression, dragging women into the woods to celebrate. (Mr. Callenbach said he was influenced by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her idea that the sexes express aggression differently.)

 Some were made uncomfortable by the way black people were excluded from Ecotopian society: 

 

Most live in Soul City, which is less affluent and green than the rest of Mr. Callenbach’s world.

Over the years, Mr. Callenbach’s readership has changed, as hippies and New Agers have been joined by churchgoers. The author often visits St. Mary’s College of California, a Catholic school near Oakland. 'Ecotopia' is required freshman reading at the Presbyterian-affiliated Muskingum College in rural Ohio. And it’s part of the curriculum at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution.

Mr. Callenbach hopes the book will resonate among the greening edges of an evangelical movement. But the novel’s relatively free sex and liberal politics may limit that readership. 

Susanna Hecht, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, sees it as a counterpoint to Thoreau’s more austere 'Walden.'

“ ‘Walden’ is very Protestant,” she said. 'This is pagan, with a Zen relationship to nature.'

But to Mr. Callenbach and many of his fans, 'Ecotopia' is a blueprint for the future.

'It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now,' he said. 'But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.'

'And we’d better get ready,' he added. 'We need to know where we’d like to go.'"

-- Scott Timberg, on the '70s cult novel that has been discovered as a cultishly philosophical blueprint for American society's current manipulation, in The New York Times.

Stop Monkeying Around (With Human Nature)

"Reveries about human perfection do not exist solely in the enthusiastic systems confected by Karl Marx, or in the REM sleep of Hugo Chávez, or through the utopian certainties of millenarians. There has been a persistent belief through countless societies that life is better, much better, somewhere else. In some yet-unfound reality there is an expression of our best natures -- our loving, peaceful, lyrically fair human core.

Anthropologists have been at the center of this quest, its practitioners sailing off to find that elusive core of perfection everywhere else corrupted by civilization. In the 1920s, Margaret Mead found it in Samoa, where the people, she said, enjoyed untroubled lives. Adolescents in particular were not bothered by the sexual hang-ups that plague our repressive society. Decades later an Australian researcher, Derek Freeman, retraced her work and successfully challenged its validity. Still, Mead's work and that of others reinforced the notion that our way of life was artificial, inauthentic, just plain wrong.

Enter primatology, which provided yet more questions about essential hominid nature -- and from which species we could, perhaps, derive guidance about our inner core. First studied in the wild were the baboons, which turned out to have harsh power politics and sexual inequity. Then Jane Goodall brought back heartwarming film of African chimps who were loving, loyal, fine mothers, with none of the militarism of the big bad baboons. But her subjects were well fed, and didn't need to scratch for a living in their traditional way. Later it became clear that chimps in fact formed hunting posses. They tore baby baboons they captured limb from limb, and seemed to enjoy it."

-- Lionel Tiger, on the silliness of pacifism as a human desire, in The Los Angeles Times.

The Holistic World Of Hillary & Houston

"Clinton's problem may be that Obama embodies a female, while Clinton has become mired in emulating the male.”

-- Robin Abcarian, in an article on Jean Houston, in the Los Angeles Times

In other words: we may get our first female president no matter what happens! (I'd love to hear Obama's take on that shit,...)

Before Hillary Clinton gets kicked to the curb, let's pin down some of this NewAge advisor business. The Clinton's have many - including the cult leader, Ken "suck my dick" Wilber - but I'm going to focus on Houston. According to this article - and my own super-fast research on Google and Wikipedia:

-- Jean Houston is the founder and chief teacher of the so-called Mystery School.

No mystery there. All future presidents need that. It's a foreign policy requirement.

-- Jean Houston is a leader in the "Human Potential Movement" which "researchers in psychology, medicine, and science dismiss as being grounded in pseudoscience and psycho-babble, and whose efficacy can be explained entirely by placebo."

And leaping. Always a lot of leaping.

-- Jean Houston lives in a "double geodesic dome".

Because that house you live in is just so, you know, passe. All those square corners block the spiritual energy,...or something.

-- Jean Houston, as a child, spent time talking to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin whose work is described by some as "pure mysticism".

And, as we all know, talking to French mystics is a damn good start for any American child. "It takes a village,..."

-- Jean Houston's forbears include the Confederates (and unrepentant slave owners) Sam Houston, and Robert E. Lee, while her father was a comedy writer.

I get the joke: The Clintons are closet racists. Both they, and Houston, want slaves. Houston lives in Ashland, Oregon, which is 90% white.

It's like when the great drunken Buddhist master, Chögyam "crazy wisdom" Trungpa (above) crashed his sports car into a joke shop before choosing his "dharma heir" who, knowingly, gave his followers AIDS.

"Cosmic" humor. Don't strain yourself.

-- Jean Houston lives in a "town of theater lovers and spiritual seekers."

Which sounds like a gay community ("47.5% are non-families"). Not only that but women outnumber the men, and Ashland's residents think the water is "curative". (Sadly, I couldn't find the homeopathy sales figures for Ashland.)

Also, older residents are leaving this spiritual paradise and - no surprise here - the schools are closing. Kids don't need an education in a town filled with "spiritual seekers", right?

-- Jean Houston is "a prolific author of books, her PBS Special 'A Passion for the Possible' has been widely viewed."

And, of course, this is more of that NewAge programming supported by the money of "the Queen of the NewAge" Louise Hay.

-- Jean Houston was perhaps formerly best known for her involvement with Margaret Mead, who "was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life," and was "usually wearing a distinctive cape and carrying a tall, forked walking stick."

Because a broom was too obvious.

-- Jean Houston, was "something of a secret emotional life raft" to Hillary Clinton.

Secret = Hidden = Occult = Jean Houston = Hillary Clinton. Who, during this campaign, tried to sell us on the idea she was a life-long Methodist. You bought that shit, didn't you?

-- Jean Houston thinks Hillary Clinton is a "priestess".

See last reference.

-- Jean Houston says she "was not Clinton's spiritualist," though she's "giving seminars on,...'spirituality'".

Circular thinking and/or lying. According to Wikipedia, Houston is "a leading figure in the cross-cultural study of spirituality and ritual processes."

-- Jean Houston "had helped,...Hillary Clinton in imaginary conversations with,...Eleanor Roosevelt."

Talking to the dead (occult) about "imaginary" things - like becoming president.

-- Jean Houston's "imaginary conversations" with Hillary Clinton "had been taped".

Just to clear things up: let's hear that tape!

--Jean Houston "can see how" Clinton would lie about Bosnia because Clinton's "been under sniper fire for 20 years".

And - since there's no "right" and "wrong" in occult thinking - lying isn't a problem to Jean Houston. As the piece on Louise Hay said, NewAgers have "an ambivalence about what most of us would call truth."

--Jean Houston was asked by the White House "to stop talking."

But Jean Houston, the good citizen, is still talking.

Jean Houston found "there was not much support" from Hillary Clinton after the media found out she was helping her.

No surprise there: according to the Law of Quantum Failure, Houston's therapy worked exactly as planned.

Oh, what a wonderful world,...

The S.F. Bay Area Liberal's Friend

"I mean: Obama is a racist. I mean, with an African father--he wasn't much of an African father, but was an African father of Kenya. He was part of a British operation, which took over Kenya, through MI5's operation. But this guy was away from Kenya, and he married a Margaret Mead type, a woman who had a number of successive husbands, like Margaret Mead did. Went out to the poor, brown people, in Asia, and had sex with them! It was called "Coming in Samoa." [groans, laughter] And she wore through a number of successive husbands, and by them, had various children. And therefore, you'll find Obama's ancestry, if you chase his family tree, everybody's climbing and swinging from the branches there--from all over the world! All parts of the world! This guy is the universal man. Every monkey in every tree, from every part of the world, has participated in the sexual act of producing him. And he works for organized crime--which is a branch of British intelligence."

-- Lyndon LaRouche, the political cult leader, whose followers can be found recruiting all over the San Francisco Bay Area - in places like the Haight/Ashbury, Berkeley, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe's - just doing what comes naturally.