Orang Rimba - Happiness Lies in the Forest

In 1992 James Hillman and Michael Ventura published a book, “We've had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and The World's Getting Worse.” To date, our patient's prognosis is stable, and dismal, and its medical care remains neolithic.

It was assumed decades before this century that Technocracy would bring with it increased sensitivity to how best to make everything work together, efficiently, harmoniously. Why wouldn't it? With so many of the Best and Brightest's brain cells firing!

Surely as adults grew out of the arrogant frat boy mentality enough people in authority would recognize how stupid it was to wreck one's own living space. What greater incentive could there be than a safe comfortable survivable environment resulting from brilliant technological innovation ushering in a user-friendly life?

Lots, apparently. We grossly underestimated corruption then, and still do.

Historically, corruption replicates like a contagious virus, and was more than sufficient to help bring down empires. In fact, to topple all empires. For those left no escape within it, pragmatism provided one logical choice – don't fight it – join it.

Why should corruption be different now than it was 2000 years ago? Because we're smarter?

When the Romans made lead cooking utensils it was done in perfect ignorance of the consequences. We're different. We leave “acceptable” levels of toxins in tins of baby food and do so perversely – in defiance of a science trumped by obedience to economic dogma. Daily we witness new evidence of gross stupidity in direct conflict with knowledge. Worse, it is ignorance which possesses and intends to use all technological means to perpetuate itself by force.

Thus the absurd stalemate. People who should know better than to wreck their homeland are enfolded in a corrupted system which dictates for them acceptable thought and action. You want a job building cars, but get on the cluster bombs line? You build what they tell you to build, or you're out.

Deviation from high dogma is becoming as dangerous now as it was in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia. By attempting to prevent, or at most, interfere with the collapse of the state, you may qualify as an Enemy of The State.

Thus, decades after their book, it isn't that CEO's never visit the psychiatrist's office for therapy, but that no one has figured out how to return sanity to corrupted corporations before their manifest incompetence permanently tanks the planet's systems of life support. The Age of Dilbert.

Yet a way forward seems to have presented itself as 'consumer choice.' Millions of people have had enough of Detroit's polluted offerings. In combination with the financial carnage this fact makes manufacturers vulnerable. If foreigners insist on making better, safer, more fuel efficient, and higher tech vehicles, and Detroit only offers resource pigs, Detroit is toast. The same market logic applies to the rest of western commerce.

Formal boycotts of products and processes are unnecessary – economic results speak for themselves. It merely requires a net address somewhere with a listing of certified planet un-friendly vendors and enough of a financial shortfall to put them in jeopardy. It's the same way the immune system works - feedback. It was also the reason we regulated industries and yet somehow – they still prospered. .