CAR CULTURE

Every culture has rites of passage, especially passage from childhood to adulthood. This has been much written about not only as a cultural necessity, but a biological one. (see E Erikson, Childhood and Society; V. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre; P. Shepard Nature and Madness, D.F. Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood…)

Apart from the ‘First-Copulative-Act’, the Driving-Test-Passed and the First-Car-Owned or Set-of-Wheels Owned, is the main rite of passage from childhood to adulthood in our times.

This embeds very deeply, inserts into our deep selves, the idea that Cars, Trucks, Hard Roads, Car Parks, etc. are natural, inevitable and crucially important to our Identity, our Being-for-Ourselves, and Our Being-for-Others, and maybe even for our souls in some cases.

This further embeds us into what Lewis Mumford called, many years ago before Star Trek’s Cyborg, the Megamachine. The Megamachine is a society that is dominated by the ideology of the machine as a model for everything, including society, economic production and warfare. Humans are indoctrinated into accepting their status as virtual cogs in machine-like social, political, religious, and economic organisations. Military organisations and bureaucracies demonstrate the characteristics of the Megamachine with the greatest clarity, but this ideology has infected us at a deep level, infected our very souls some would argue. And this means we accept the Megamachine in its many forms as good and natural.

Car culture, along with modern medicine, the mass media, and even formal education are some of the key ways in which this indoctrination takes place. But the authors of this indoctrination are hard to identify, as they are also the victims of it, and so do not need explicitly to set out to defend it, except when the occasional word is raised against it as in Reclaim the Streets.

Those who want to go completely off-grid are justifiably seen as pie in the sky idealists, as most in the modern age have no hope of becoming independent of the Megamachine on a practical level. That would be to make everything we need ourselves. Every tool, every bit of clothing, every part of a dwelling, every bit of food, every medicine, every cultural entertainment, every art object, all music and dance… from scratch, from the natural source.

Illich would have approved of the ideal, but even he recognised that this was not possible.

The Megamachine seemingly benefits the power-elites and their train of sycophants, followers and useless children who act like the Eloi in the Time Machine, but worse.

But it benefits no one. We are all victims. Our privilege and opportunity is to see as clearly as possible the ugliness in the universe created by the Megamachine, and break our minds, and any others we can, free of believing in the ideology of the Megamachine. We must not cease from “mental fight”.