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To be civilized is to conduct your life in such a way that it should make you go insane, but you make it through okay somehow.

Imagine a traffic jam. You are sitting inside a big, expensive metal box with your hands on a circle in front of you and you are getting a little angry. There's a panel of buttons and switches below the windshield like a spacecraft cockpit. Just a few feet in front of you there's a continuous series of tiny explosions that are made possible by a substance that may or may not have caused a few wars. Turn on the radio to lift your spirits. There's an entire industry devoted to manufacturing and delivering music to your ears. However, since it is an industry, the product usually feels cold and inhuman by the time it gets to you.

The traffic jam is going on for miles ahead of you. Inside each car, there's at least one person sitting and staring forward. This situation somehow seems reasonable. Imagining the same scene with wooden chairs instead of cars would turn this traffic jam into a absurd performance art piece.

Eventually you make it to work. You'd rather be gardening, fishing, woodworking, sewing, or whatever. These used to be the activities people took part in to sustain their lives. We've put together a much more complicated system, however, which enables us to do something completely unrelated to being a human animal in exchange for the opportunity to have some manufactured items that will keep us alive (but not TOO alive). This system, complicated though it might be, enables us to grow our population incredibly fast, as it does not depend on any geographic area's ability to sustain human life.

This is insanity and everyone knows it, but we can't do anything about it so we just keep going without complaining too much. That's what it means to be civilized. Even if we wanted to get out of it, we couldn't. Unless you have control over at least two acres of land, you'll have to find some money to exchange for food, shelter, and clothing. This system is imposed on you at birth and it was imposed on our parents at birth. Who's running this thing, anyway? I suppose it would have to be someone who's at least a few hundred years old. If there isn't at least one person running this whole "civilization" nonsense, that would mean that we keep it going all on our own. If that's the case, somebody should really say something. I mean, if we're the ones running the thing, we could try to make it less difficult for everyone to pretend it makes sense.

Learn more about this author, John Rixey.
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