Post #3038471

"Superficially the meaning of homeless is simple enough. It indicates a denial of that irrational sense of entitlement we have, as human beings, to the possession of a home. This is a feeling that runs deep, arguably all the way back to our evolutionary roots: Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. One of Jesus’ sayings, but also a vivid and thoroughly poetic evocation of homelessness. What if however, for the sake of argument, we assume a general collapse of civilisation as being not just inevitable but already underway? Year by year it seems ever more likely, as the various disasters (meteorological, ecological, political) accumulate. In that case a future looms in which the very idea of home will have begun to lose its meaning; the qualities of stability, security and definitive reliability it connotes will no longer have the slightest foothold in the real world. To the inhabitants of such a future, daring even to think of home might well appear not just problematic, but thoroughly disturbing. And therefore conversely the idea of being without a home would have lost something of its power to startle. For homelessness (literal or otherwise) would have become normative rather than exceptional; in that sense it could well be that the entire human species faces a ‘homeless’ future. Likewise in the future the meaning of mad may turn out to be up for grabs. In other words, our collective difficulties might drive us en masse into a psychological state so utterly removed from anything passing for sanity in today’s society as to wholly blur the distinction between mad and sane. My point is this. I know, from personal experience, what it’s like to find myself beyond the margins of civilisation; I know this thanks to homelessness and madness – categories whose otherness we take so much for granted that, if we encounter homeless people behaving crazily on the streets, we hardly even notice ourselves ignoring them (I find the same mechanism in myself, notwithstanding I was previously one of their number). Give the matter sufficient thought however, and anyone might be led to conclude that both homelessness and madness – apparently so marginal – are, on the contrary, central to the human condition and may yet come to define us all." - John Wetherell https://dark-mountain.net/boundary-what-boundary/