GB No. 2, summer 1990
Ideas are ruling the world. What ideas are ruling us? What beliefs and images set up the frames of our thoughts and direct our behaviour?
STOP! Look around. Look into yourself. Do not run blindly forward if you do not know the goal of this race. Before you make the next step, look what you will crush under your foot.
What do we consider ourselves as? We - the chosen species, the highest stage of evolution, the kings of the Planet. We reverse the rivers, dry seas, we move mountains around. We manipulate the Earth as our property - scientifically examined machinery. The whole space exists only for us, it waits to serve the man. Everything that has not been humanized yet - sunk with concrete and put behind glass - is strange and hostile for us. It's primitive and filthy. Nature has no value for us apart from utilitarian. Everything that is not a means of production should be eliminated as useless. We do not know the limits of our expansion. Our religion - Science, and our Queen - Technology will solve all problems. We will build artificial atomic suns, we will create synthetic resources, and if the Earth appears to be too narrow we will conquer other planets as we conquered other continents. We can be independent from the stupid, cruel Nature. We rule it. That is what we consider ourselves as.
And who are we? We are living creatures. Our existence depends on the thin living shell covering a hard, rocky planet. The planet is just a piece of dust in the cosmic space. For the Cosmos it is like nothing. For us it is everything.
It is naive to presume that we are species separated from the rest of living creation. The whole of this creation - animals, plants, rivers, forests and oceans - weaves the delicate net of life. Humans are just one of its threads. If driven by stupidity or pride, they begin to tear down the net - if they unsettle the fluent balance in the biosphere, Nature will return the balance, but yet without people. There are tough, but just rules of evolution. Restive species are shifted to the rubbish heap of the biological history. The new different life forms grow up on their corpse.
Today humans face such a future. The narrow ecological crisis is not the essence of the grimmy situation humans threw themselves to. Is it enough to employ some sensitivity and imagination to notice degenerations everywhere: in politics, economics, in arts, schools, families and factories.
All those degenerations are just symptoms. Seldom do we pay attention to the connections between them. Almost never do we try to get to their common roots. It is not easy. Those roots form patterns of concepts and values by which we feel and perceive the world. Those concepts and values are outdated now. We have to free our minds and souls from their grip if we want to understand the nature of today's crisis and if we do not want to be one of the last generations crowning the short history of humans on our small planet. We need a new - holistic metaphysics, a new - ecological consciousness, a new biocentric morality and a new - alternative politics.
What we especially need is to set our coexistence with the Planet - our mother and our house - on a new ground. Instead of living on the cost of the Earth we have to learn again to live with it. We have to remember, that every wound given to the planet, to the trees, birds, lakes or other people is a wound on our own body, because each of us is fused together with the whole bioworld into one living organism.
Exploitation, destruction, violence and power became our obsession. They create a universal pattern penetrating everything that has been created by the urban-industrial civilization conquering today the whole world. The power of humans over non-humans, men over women, reach over poor, armed over weaponless. The power of organizations over individuals, and majorities over minorities. Even in our private, everyday microcosmos we tend to divide people into those who can give orders and those who have to obey. Husbands give orders to their wives, teachers to the pupils, corporals to private soldiers, and private soldiers to civilians. Politicians are ruling citizens, experts-outsiders and chiefs - ordinary members. We live in communities that are hierarchically ordered, where each higher level of hierarchy uses violence against the lower one. All those human pyramids use violence against the Nature.
The most grimmy thing is, that most of us consider this situation if not as good, at least as normal. We usually measure the meaning of our life by the number of things that us power over the social and natural environment. The place in the pyramid of power is a source of prestige.
For us it is not only a stupidity
and shortsighting. IT IS FILTHY!!!
That is why we are coming with the
theatre action-provocation. A provocation of the filthiness which is inside
us, a filthiness we feel inside you.
We want to throw it away from ourselves. Maybe you can do it together
with us.
Free our thoughts from aggression, hearts from hatred
and behaviour from violence!!!
Free the world from the violence embodied in the institutions:
states, police, armies, schools, ministries
of devouring the Earth,
factories of killing forests,
ZOO-gardens
and mental hospitals ! ! !
"Ecology and Peace"
- the Cracovian group
of the Green Federation
"All Power to the Whalr" is a piece of a street theatre that was performed a few times in some Polish towns. No one remembers what was first - the text of the leaflet or the happening. Both were the ways to experiecnce nonviolence an identitiy with all living beings. One way using the language of mind, the other - the language of body.