EGOCENTRIC VS. ECOCENTRIC CULTURE

"In egocentric cultures, like that of mainstream contemporary America, the Muse-Beloved and the Wild Indigenous One are the two facets of our natural human wholeness most actively suppressed, the two facets most dangerous to patho-adolescent societies. In order to function at all, military-industrial society needs at least half of its citizens to occupy the dull and offensive roles of consumer, worker bee, paper pusher, soldier, and tyrant – and to experience this desecration as merely normal, to relabel this travesty as simply what human life is like.

These conformist roles are mind numbing, soul violating, heartbreaking, people harming, and world wasting. In order to have a majority of people willing to sign up for such a colorless flatland, the innately lavish human imagination must be crushed with an array of blunt tools, including patho-adolescent television programming; teach-to-the-test 'educational' methods; fearmongering religious indoctrination; and the widespread hawking of vitality-suppressing and creativity-crushing addictions to TV, computers, smart phones, and other screens, gadgets, shopping, junk food, pornography, insipid entertainment, and the modern human-diminishing pharmacy of alcohol, painkillers, tranquilizers, crack, amphetamines for children, and vastly overprescribed antidepressants for everyone."

Bill Plotkin: Wild Mind – A Field Guide to the Human Psyche