Caged In

By living in a globalised world, which more or less exists entirely under one or another guise of “capitalism”, and in which all land is owned or “managed”, we are trapped. We are embodied creatures who necessarily live and move through space, and naturally (presumably) much of that space would have been wild, and within it we’d have a sense of our own bodily freedom. The world, as it is, has very little (at least in the “developed” world) wild and free space, and so we always exist in owned spaces, within which there are rules, laws and customs we must follow—or otherwise break and risk some kind of punishment, including imprisonment and death. Even where space is “wild” in the modern world, it is often protected and guarded, and within it we are, conversely and despite its “natural” state, even less free than in more “developed” land. Some of the wildest places on earth have opening hours, entry fees and strict rules and prohibitions within—what wildness is this?

So, as living, wild animals, we have no freedom in spatial terms. We must, in most cases, pay to live in spaces which are predetermined by others, and which exist within states and societies bound by many rules. To remove ourselves from these spaces is incredibly difficult, and to freely relocate ourselves to wild spaces and set up lives free from the chains of existing societies is illegal, as there are no free spaces left—existing wildernesses are illusions, as they all fall within the boundaries of state control, and so we cannot act as free animals in them. To be homeless in most societies is usually illegal (or at least requires one to commit illegal acts), frowned upon and and a miserable state to in which to live. Most of us therefore choose to submit ourselves to the fact that all land is owned and controlled, and choose to live by the rules of one land or another, most often depending on where we happen to be born.

Whilst most humans have probably sought to stay with the peoples and cultures they were born into, and even very ancient societies had state boundaries and some of which would prevent the inhabitants from leaving, it can be presumed that older humans would at least have had some sense of being able to wander off into the forests, savannahs, mountains, marshes and wilderness and begin some new life—extracting themselves from existing societies and potentially beginning new ones. At the very least, they would have had the choice—even if just conceptual—to live in nature on nature’s terms. In this way, earlier humans had either one foot in, or could at least probably envisage living themselves as animals (that is in the state of nature—a state free from human structures). These days, for most if not all of us, this is impossible. And where there is still enough nature to sneak away and eek out a life, it must be done illicitly and in stealth, and runs the ironic risk of being imprisoned if we are caught and do not relent our primitive ways.

As such, we are all imprisoned, or caged in, primarily through the total ownership of land on earth. This bars exceptions which I will discover more about.