The Natural beats the Artificial.

Nature is exuberantly creative, inventive and expansive but always, well, natural. The artificial is a human invention. Only humans can and want to escape the natural. Humans pursue the artificial relentlessly. The artificial seems to make us feel secure.

Germs are fought with drugs and poisons, food feels more safe out of a box, and bugs are eradicated with chemicals. There is no logic to this, because our bodies can fight germs easily if nourished with real, fresh foods and if our minds are rested and calm. Microorganisms, germs and bugs are part of our bodies, food chain and essential to our ecosystem. So, what is the reason? Is nature too overwhelming? Do we feel more comfortable in an environment we have created? By humans for humans?

The artificial lives now inside us, or so it seems. We live in mega cities far from meadows, animals and nature. Animals in cities are held in cages or on leaches. Our perception of beauty excludes the natural and photoshop enhancement has taught us to strive for unnatural aging with lifted faces. It seems that nobody has wrinkles anymore and especially former film star beauties (like Isabel Adjani and Catherine Deneuve and even more natural beauties like Goldie Hawn and Meg Ryan) are unrecognizably disfigured by multiple attempts to stop aging. In the Terry Gilliam’s 1980’s movie ‘Brazil’ a woman underwent so many operations, that she looked like a ventriloquist puppet. This satire was dead on and foreshadowed a society, in which upper lips don’t move and eyes stay wide open as if in a permanent surprise.

I never understood the beauty concept that favors the young over the mature and the pretty over the interesting. Individuality was always more interesting to me. I adored the natural charisma reflected in extraordinary faces. Even harder for me to understand was, that people want to be popular. The majority of people, I found, were as shallow as their taste.

Nature, in contrast, celebrates uniqueness and diversity. No flower, no leaf is the same. There are thousand shades of colors in nature. Just like us humans. We are all unique. And instead of celebrating our uniqueness, we try to clone ourselves, run in groups that resemble us, choose the familiar over the unfamiliar. As if we want to morph into the group, to become invisible. In groups we feel protected. There is protection in numbers, but what do we give up to fit in? How far are we willing to go and loose ourselves?

It is true, that it is a very difficult process to individuate without encouragement and guidance. I saw once a mother kneeling down to her crying child’s level and asked eye to eye how she could help. ‘Who are you and how can I best help you to become the person you are?’ was in essence this mother’s parenting style. Most of us are not that lucky and were brought up with the sink-or-swim method. Not encouraged to individuate themselves, most parents hope, that their kids will fit in into society somehow, will surrender their longings and dreams, not live their individuality. And so, most of us have learned to repress our desires, fit somewhat into the norm chosen for us and never really exhale until our last breath.

I have envied the gay community, naturally not for the centuries of oppression, but for the opportunity of coming out. Straight people face the same inner struggles and need to come out as a person, to show the world who they are inside. Most of us stay in the closet of expectations all our lives, terrified of everyone around them and especially by those, who flaunt their inner-self confidently and openly in public. No wonder, those suppressed selves get angry and bash the non-conform or what the society labels as the other, the outsider, the misfit.

The artificial binds of society are so strong, that we are stunned, when we do encounter nature. Watching a leopard run, a dolphin sprint through water, a calf being born, riding out a storm in a boat, and reaching a summit are events we never forget. Few of us are true outdoor types and able to survive in nature. Most of us live on asphalt, surrounded by concrete, rarely touch soil and are in essence civilization wusses (like me, more here). On vacation we might walk barefooted on sand, we might hike or camp in the wild. But what do we take back home apart from sea shells and sunset memories? How can we keep the humble feeling of awe of the wild long enough to want to preserve nature?

We need nature for our survival on this planet, but the planet doesn’t need us. It will unapologetically do away with us after we will have done away with our life-supporting eco systems. Cleansed of humans, earth will reinvent itself. Nature will win over the artificial, because it developed, shaped and proved itself over millions of years, not like us over a meager few millennia. The planet will survive.

We cannot even grasp the complexity of a self-supporting system, let alone know the consequences and long term effects of what we humans are inventing. Now we know that micro plastics are now everywhere, in our food, skin and bodies, that they create cancer and will kill us. Decades ago it was asbestos and radiation. In the future decades it will be lithium or something else, if humans will survive this long. Essentially we have no idea what we’re doing and we’re too far in it to turn around or change course.

The artificial is on its swan song and we are dancing to this tune until nature will stop the music*. All we will be able to do is look stunned, with our surgically altered faces, into the abyss of our own making like the protagonist of Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, who was made to watch his crimes with clamps holding his eyelids open.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

*Note: This was written on 12 MAY 2019, well before the Covid-19 pandemic.