I tumbled, after getting back from vacation and editing and posting my video of East Jesus, reading Spin's relatively new early 2024 story about East Jesus and Slab City, and grokking other videos (I'm not looking at a full 140 minutes on one video, oy) that what we were talking about was in the second half of this piece's title, specifically yes ....
Freud's book "Civilization and Its Discontents" (Wikipedia), with a summary moderately longer than Wiki here. I understand the discontents. I'm not sure this is the best place or the living here is the best way to address them. I know it wouldn't be for me, whether at my age today, or 20 years younger.
And, beyond personal observations, there's a larger flip side to that, and, I had already posted that to one of those other videos.
It's Hobbes' "Warre of all against all," and when you read about people burning each other out, or one relatively long-time denizen talking in this video about how "some crazies shouldn't mix with others," but neither she nor the videographer offer insight as to which crazies are "better" and which are "worse," especially with no functioning public law, you're at Hobbes.
Like Freud, or maybe like a quasi-Marxian anarchist (don't forget that Marx himself was nowhere near anarchism and hated the likes of Proudhon), I see the discontents. I feel them.
But, I don't want to give up civilization's comforts. Nor its safety and security.
And, per another commenter on that same video, one can abandon, or at least lessen, the desire to "get ahead" and yet live in a life with the physical comforts and amenities of some degree of civilization. Buddhism? Or monastic orders in it or Christianity? Or the various dervish orders of Sufism? Note that in all three of these traditions, it's "orders." Individual ascetics have been frowned on in all three and beyond.
To move from Freud, and Proudhon, and more than 2,000 years earlier? Aristotle was right when he said "Man is a civilizational animal." (That's much better than the old-time common translation of "Man is a political animal." It's more informative than "Man is an urban animal," or even "Man is a civic animal," which gets close to the πόλις in Greek behind the πολιτικὸν, translated by Latin by "civis." It's also more accurate, or definitely more informative, than "Man is a social animal." In all cases I'm using that first word for "humanity," of course.)
And, that all said. Freud's ideas on the origins of civilization, which presume to involve a social contract type conscious "leap" into being civilized, are themselves problematic. In reality, the development of civilization was incremental, more organic, and with various swirls and eddies similar to the development of agriculture.
As part of this, I add that Freud probably was not that close to correct on the origins and developmental history of religion. That is a complex field, and some metaphysical aspects of what developed into "religion" surely arose long before modern civilization did.
As for Slab City and East Jesus? A fair chunk of this is NOT freedom when you're addicted. The Kinks got it right:
Paranoia WILL destroy ya, especially when you're strung out on meth.
As for those who aren't tweakers? More power to you ... if you want to live off solar panels for A/C and either spend bigly on bottled water or else ration yourself and filter irrigation canal runoff while avoiding the eyes of the Imperial Irrigation District, and in either case, per some videos, using some sort of runoff water for bathing.
In addition, whether its agrichemicals or something else, the respiratory infections along the Salton Sea, especially at its southeast corner, don't help things.
