I’m in thought. The streets of New York City flicker by as my M15 rumbles along 1st Avenue. There’s a sense of disconnect between the images I’m seeing and the thoughts that accompany them. I’m thinking about the cars as they pass by, the buildings as they escape my view, and the clouds as they float overhead. But on some level, I’m thinking more about how small and insignificant I am. Here I am, living my life, in face of what seems like a world untouchable by my actions. I could do whatever environmental harm one uncaring man could feasibly muster and the world would just shrug me off without so much as a care. It wouldn’t feel like I’m doing something unethical necessarily—just that it’s not so bad in the grand scheme of things.
But it’s scary to imagine that other people might be thinking those same impossibly harmless thoughts. Because then it doesn’t feel so harmless. Or ethical. There is just an overwhelming number of people out there; it’s impossible to coneptualize. And the problem stems from this fundamental flaw in human nature. While I’m not sure of the exact statistic, I do know that there is some limit to the greatest number of people and objects that our brain could reasonably handle. Unfortunately, I also know that in the context of interpreting our present interconnected society, that number is way too low. The enormity of everything and everyone else is overpowering in comparison. In fact, it’s so overwhelming to even contemplate that it spills over into disregard. It’s not that it’s best for us to ignore the other 7 billion people in the world; we simply can’t.
I’ll be honest and say that I started watching Koyaanisqatsi expecting a lot more of a compelling storyline. The first five minutes was essentially me waiting for the movie to begin. When I realized that what I was seeing was going to be the general flow of the rest of the movie, I trudged through the next 25 minutes before finally stopping. I wasn’t expecting what I saw and I wasn’t in the right mindset to appreciate it. After about a month of not watching Koyaanisqatsi, I finally sat down to watch it again—this time being aware of the style of movie before me. I was ready to take it all in at once. It’s not as if I hadn’t noticed certain compelling themes the first time around, but I figured the movie was nearly an hour and a half for a reason, rather than just the 30 minutes I watched.
That time around, I felt like I saw exactly what Koyaanisqatsi was trying to paint a picture of. I went through the first quarter of the film appreciating nature as it was—its beauty, its independence, its enormity. The sad juxtaposition came when it showed human ambition and technology, and their encroaching tendencies. But what really struck me was that humankind was beginning to parallel nature in its enormity. By far, this was the scariest thought of all.
Seeing myself as one perpetrator among many is one thing, but witnessing the sheer magnitude of what humans have accomplished is inconceivable in its own rite. Infinite dilution may have once been the answer to justifying our environmental impact, but I daresay that before industrialization, technology didn’t have the same mass-production of waste that it does now. Nature is taking part in a war against the machines. Literally. The machine of what is has come up against the machine of what is created. Koyaanisqatsi merely reiterated what I always knew, but couldn’t fathom with my individual five senses. Watching the film, I could feel the enormity of two powers colliding. I feel convinced that now, more than ever before, the growing mass of humankind has the power to change this seemingly gargantuan world. Even throughout this course, such a thought might have occurred to me only vaguely; statistics, pictures, and historical records can only go so far to prove a point. Knowing myself, I need a fully engrossing experience that captures human interference at its worst to get me to fight for something. It’s horrible that human sympathy is only as truly strong as empathy. We need to feel for ourselves those very things that seem to us horrible. Problems on paper become much more real when they are seen or experienced firsthand. Until all of us can genuinely develop such an emotional attachment, humans now and in the future are bound to suffer heavily because of the mistakes we’ve made.
On some level, I’ve always just assumed that humankind as we know it wouldn’t last past the year 2100. Call it pessimism. Call it reactionary existentialism. But it’s not a thought that I ever regarded as strange or depressing (unless, maybe, if I thought about it for too long). It’s just something that always entered freely into my mindset. This thought process probably coincided with when I first learned to reason scientifically; the little evidence I had before me indicated that human society was headed towards a point of destructive inevitability. Nothing in my intellectual proximity seemed to indicate otherwise as time went on. The mentality must have stuck with me ever since.
At the beginning of the arc of this course, I can’t say that my mindset was changing in any respect. It seemed depressing on the surface and then hopeless after more discussion. It all seemed to flow back to the issue of intrinsic vs. instrumental value. This central flaw is what needed to be addressed. It seemed like all the problems caused by corporations and people could be reversed with such a paradigm shift. This absolutely has to bring us back to the issue of sustainability. Koyaanisqatsi doesn’t refer very much to this because it sticks to painting its massive picture of rising technology in face of nature. We must be willing to admit that the closer we get to the future, the more our environmental situation becomes unstable. We need to invest in sustainable development now before the subject of the second half of the movie becomes the whole of our reality. Sustainability should be an absolute social and legal must. It needs to become an idea that captures our society at the very core of its mistakes; humankind will simply continue to cause harm to the environment and to the future without the necessary consideration that they both deserve.
The end of Koyaanisqatsi was what really drove home the message. The slow-moving men and women at the end really reminded me why we should all be doing this. It’s for life. Each scene in the movie presents a life or a way of life that not only deserves to live in its own way, but that fundamentally has that desire to live. The end of the movie showed me how capable we are of sowing the seeds of our own destruction. We can build to the greatest pinnacle of our mind’s power, but that reality has led us to a state of life that is begging for change—not just for ourselves, but for all those things and people who become affected. It really is a crazy life. A life in turmoil and out of balance. It’s a life that is disintegrating. But most of all, it’s a life that begs for another way of living.
