John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part II

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Will you accept either or both of those definitions?

PLOWBOY: Mmm ... I think so. Yes.

SHUTTLEWORTH: All right. Keep them in mind, then, while I add my own special definition of self-induced insanity: Self-induced insanity very frequently results from allowing the mind to become fixated — at the expense of reason, health, and/or function — on a single thought or idea.

The paranoid, for example, who becomes obsessed with the idea that someone is trying to "get" him can eventually "see" such overwhelming danger in every situation that he loses his ability to function in a meaningful way. His obsession makes him interpret reality in such narrow and such distorted terms that he eventually runs from or fights back against imaginary devils so hard... that he can become a menace to himself and to his surroundings.

PLOWBOY: I'll accept that ... but how does it apply to the societies of the modern world in general?

SHUTTLEWORTH: Maybe it doesn't. But, for at least 20 or 25 years now, I've been getting an increasingly uncomfortable suspicion that all the major nations of the world — capitalist and communist — suffer from the narrow delusion that only people, and people alone, have any rights on this planet. Further ... that human wants, needs, and desires — seemingly the more capricious, the better — should be instantly gratified. And further still ... that this can always be done in a strictly economic frame of reference.

In short, I think that we live in an unbelievably marvelous Garden of Eden. Surrounded by miraculous life-forms almost without number: Kept alive by a mysteriously interwoven, self replenishing support system that — with all our scientific "breakthroughs" — we still do not understand.

And yet, as favored as we are by all this real wealth, we somehow perversely prefer to spend almost all our waking hours interpreting the sum total of this reality — every bite we eat, every stitch we wear, even the air we breathe and the view we either enjoy or ignore from our front porch — in terms of the narrow and distorted, strictly human centered concept of money.

We have collectively become fixated on a single thought a single idea. So fixated and so obsessed that we most certainly have become a menace to ourselves and to our surroundings. "I wanna get rich ... so I'm gonna trap every beaver in this valley." "Our economic system will bury your economic system ... and if it doesn't, we've got enough bombs to blow you off the face of the earth." "What do you mean, nuclear power is unsafe. We need energy, don't we? The oil is drying up, isn't it? We've got to build reactors. They're a good investment."

"Civilization," my dear Plowboy, is just another word for "lunatic asylum."

PLOWBOY: I never thought of it that way. Hell, I don't think anybody thinks of it that way.

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