310 - 26.8.26 - 10: Tapu and Franksenstein's Island

In many cultures, before the advent of colonialism, the idea of tapu was a very important part of the rites and rituals of everyday life. A common one which still exists today is that Muslims and Jewish people do not eat pork and Hindus do not eat beef. But there were other tapus. Certain places were sacred. Places where our ancestors would inhabit. Where the faery lived and protected. In Ireland, till today, farmers will not cut down fairy trees and holy wells are still revered and recognised with rags, often tied on faery trees. I will never forget the subprime collapse of the Irish economy taking place after the government went ahead and built a highway through the ancient land of Tara. It took Ireland seven years to recover from it. It is still recovering from it today.

Tapus exist for a reason. That reason may be lost in the mists of time and then rebranded by those who think they know better as 'superstition'. But we should think of tapus as boundaries - sacred boundaries which should not be crossed. There are boundaries all the time in our lives. Boundaries of civility, hospitality, consumption. One could say the seven deadly sins are the manifestation of those boundaries - greed, lust, envy, etc. They are red lights telling us that we are skirting close to danger, to our limits. Beyond these limits, there be monsters.

The violation of nature, which has gone hand in hand with the violation of people and places, dignities and lives, is in gross violation of tapu. There is so few of these wild natural places left and I hesitate to define them in terms of their utility. to say that nature is worth trillions of dollars in what it does for us. To say that we need beauty in our lives. That the extinction of every species is a profound loss to US. We cannot define nature in relation to us.  This is a kind of poverty which can then be batted away to say, well ACTUALLY, it will create MORE JOBS. Well actually, it will increase our GDP. Well ACTUALLY, it will ensure our overconsumption. This is where tapu comes in - tapu has nothing to do with us - ok, beyond those in violation to it will be cursed. 

If you are limited by the cloth that you have, is the solution then to go out and rob and kill your neighbour to get more cloth? Yes say some. And they have. And so this is what we do to the wild things around us. Just because the people who make the decisions do not value bird song, the sight of a nudibranch dancing in the waters, a turtle coming to lay its eggs, it does not mean that these things aren't valuable to us. It does not mean you are not violating a tapu.

The worst thing for me is that, sure destroy all these things because what are the superrich who are going to benefit from all this going to do with that money? Buy a private jet? Go for another holiday in a resort which has trashed its local environment and enslaved the local people which it has displaced? Buy some hideous tat from a shop which has oversold them on a brand? Like what? Nothing I have seen about the decisions made by the superrich with their money has said to me, ah these people know what they are doing? Creating an apocalyptic bunker, really? Buying hair plugs? Skin lotion? Cures for death? Pretensions to immortality? Genocide? These people are so far removed from humanity it is an terrible indictment of how easily we are able to be turned from being centred in the heart to being delusional psychopaths. 

These people no longer understand tapu. They have fallen off the edge, they have transgressed boundaries and they are dragging us along with them. There is a small section of society who is saying, actually we have had enough. We don't want to be caught up in your madness. We think that enough is enough. But they are deaf to our words. It does not matter how many Mad Max films are made, how many dystopian stories are told, how many warnings come from the past and the present and future to them, they trudge on regardless, deaf and blind and stupid to all warnings and boundaries and tapu.

The thing is though, is that if they just want to fall off the edge by themselves, that is their lookout - but the thing is though, we are also being corralled along with them. We are being shoved at gunpoint to go along with this idiotic agenda. Many of these people seem to talk out on both sides of their mouths as well - on the one hand they say oh population isn't enough give birth more, and then say we have too much population and therefore need to destroy what little natural treasure we have left. Make up your mind. Either we live within the limits of what we have population wise and keep the natural treasure, or we expand and have to do this. The population is falling, this means we can take a beat and think about how our population policies from the 70s have succeeded. We now live within our means. Is there no world in which the government has prepared for the success of its birth control and education policy, none whatsoever?

It makes me so so sad to see the doubling down on a mistake. It was a mistake to destroy the forests and the reefs and the coasts and the cultures of Singapore in the name of a kind of progress. Back then we were told we didn't even think about it. Back then the rainforests and the shorelines were still plentiful. But now we know better. We know that we do not have to continue down that road. We can be better. But I don't see us turning back. One of the most corrosive things in Asia, is not just the culture of corruption, but this idea of face. Saving face is the excuse people give for not speaking out, for not changing your mind, for punishing others who do speak the truth. Face.

I don't know what is going to happen here - I can't even do anything. It is just pure pain. I did not think that this was going to be the next step - the horrors. Frankenstein's Island. A barren desert replacing and destroying ancient coral reefs, waiting for the development of yet another concrete jungle. 

Here there be monsters.