Paul Cudenec

Human minds are all too often distracted and polluted by phobias, fears so entrenched and exaggerated that they take the form of outright hatred.

These fears are mostly of the Other, the not-Me whose very existence risks puncturing all the certainties and assumptions through which the insecure Me manages to keep afloat in the murky and turbulent waters of contemporary life.

Inner doubts and insecurities are thrown outwards, their dark beam alighting on whatever surface is most readily available, and a fellow living subject is treated as nothing but a dead object, a scape-screen on to which our own deepest anxieties can be projected, externalised, neutralised.

Here already we are in the realm of separation, a lost awareness of our shared belonging with all that lives outside our personal experience, a psychological retreat into the narrowest and shallowest levels of identity which are defined in terms of what, and who, they are not.

But another kind of phobia is emerging today which takes this separation still further, which blindly turns the projected hatred back on itself and finds itself fearing the underlying essence which it is not even able to recognise as its own.


It is the violence of vitaphobia which is flattening our forests, choking our oceans with plastic, wiping out species after species, poisoning our soil, contaminating our rivers, polluting our air, radiating disease.

Smash vitaphobia!

Because vitaphobia is a state of mind, its toxic effects go much deeper than these deadly physical realities. Vitaphobia is the mindset which justifies this violence, which denies this violence, which will never stop inflicting this violence even when it reassures us of its good intentions.

Vitaphobia leads people, for example, to frame the untold damage it has wreaked in the most limited of terms, as a mere “problem” or ephemeral “crisis” for which the only “solution” is yet more vitaphobic violence.

It is also the soul-sickness of vitaphobia that leads other people to deliberately (if not necessarily consciously) suppress their own critical faculties so as to be able to buy into the comforting lies that vitaphobia spins in order to protect its own ongoing control of the human spirit.

It leads them to swallow the absurd idea, for example, that life consists merely of objects, like the mass-produced products of a vitaphobic manufactory, which can be neatly classified, organised, assigned monetary value and traded for profit.

Vitaphobia blinds people to the very existence of vitaphobia and they see simply a contemporary reality that cannot be challenged, a permanent state of affairs from which there is no possibility of escaping.

Vitaphobia is not just the physical reality of its violence, and the mindset which spawns such violence, but the defensive mechanisms which deny what is happening and work to conceal the vitaphobic illness.

In short, it makes people very angry with anyone who points out that the deceit and violence of vitaphobia will not end until vitaphobic culture has been destroyed.

Smash vitaphobia!

In order to maintain its control over people’s minds, and head off the possibility that its role will be challenged, vitaphobia has carefully constructed a philosophical system which justifies its insanity and which disallows the possibility of dissenting opinions.

That is to say, of course, that human beings suffering from vitaphobia have constructed this system. Vitaphobia is an abstract entity and not capable of doing anything at all without its physical hosts…

The origins of the vitaphobic madness lie, as with other phobias, in a false sense of separation – but separation, here, on an unimaginable scale!

In one fell swoop the high priests of vitaphobia tried to slice off human consciousness from all that surrounds it.

On the one hand they flattered humankind by telling it that it was special, not a part of filthy, brutal nature but a higher entity born to rule over it.

On the other hand they denigrated humankind by telling it that it was base, sinful, unworthy and that it was born to be ruled over by a much higher entity.

Conveniently for the vitaphobia-promoting elites, their “divine authority” extended downwards into human society, presenting certain human beings (such as themselves!) as possessing unchallengeable power over the majority.

Vitaphobics seek to deny the truth that we are all part of nature and part of the living cosmos and that the only divinity is the spirit of life which illuminates us and the organic world around us.

Their mental disease wipes out our awareness of a horizontal connection with life as a whole, leaving us only with a vertical connection to “authorities” to whom we are supposed to surrender our free will.

As part of this attack on our freedom and autonomy, vitaphobia makes us think that we are incapable of living without dependence on its “authorities”.

It does so by denying that human societies are living entities, arising organically from our very natures, which allow us to organise ourselves according to our own collective desires.

It extends its claim that we are not part of nature by insisting that nature is not part of us, or that if it is part of us, it is a “bad” part that needs to be overcome and repressed.

Smash vitaphobia!

Allowing the nature within us to flower and flourish and to guide us through our lives is anathema to the vitaphobes.

Who can tell which came first – their fear of freedom or their fear of life? In any case, vitaphobes are always keen to warn of the dire consequences of allowing freedom and natural inclinations to lead humankind.

For them, the dead hand of control, authority and obedience is always needed to impose the sterile, lifeless, grey world which their mental illness makes them crave.

As the grip of vitaphobia on humanity increased, so the terms it used to justify its insanity began to sound like common sense. “Oh yes”, its deluded victims parrot in unison, “of course our world needs to be built on law and property, on policing and punishment, on reason and science, on work and money, on progress and growth!”

Behind it all was always the same desire to control and subdue, the same twisted craving, in the minds of living creatures, to destroy the very force that brought them into being.

Today, in our midst, are some pitiful characters whose mental faculties have been entirely destroyed by the vitaphobic disease.

There are those who actually believe that human beings have no innate biological reality and that any such notion is merely a label, imposed from the outside.

There are those who actually think there is no essential difference between real living fruit and “fruit of the future” manufactured by a 3-D printer.

There are those who actually think that there is no essential difference between real living human beings and robots and who welcome the idea of our bodies being replaced by machinery and our minds “uploaded” on to a computer.

There are those who worship the empty sterility of artifice and despise the abundance and energy of nature.

They sometimes go so far as to designate the very idea of nature as their enemy, a “reactionary” force which oppresses or confines them, while they imagine their liberation will come from everything which is gloriously and “progressively” fake.

They fear the pulsating, breathing, sweating, self-renewing flesh of Gaia and welcome its replacement with a hygienically shrink-wrapped replica world, a safer space for their dead-eyed dead-end delusions of plastic purity.

Smash vitaphobia!

Historically, we can recognise the vitaphobic tendencies of the religious fanatics who burned wise-women as witches, who destroyed the sacred groves of our pagan ancestors, who spread out across the world, crushing autonomous living cultures under the boot of their life-hating imperial dogma.

Today, we can see vitaphobia in the attitudes and actions of others who seek to impose, control and dictate, others who want to stifle the expression of human freedom with rules, commandments and holy laws.

The language may have changed since the days of the witch-finders or the Inquisition, but the same life-denying authoritarianism still paints victims as offenders, still treats nature as heresy, a threat to the truth as defined by its death-cult dogma.

Vitaphobia is a creed of power, of destruction, of domination, and anyone who succumbs to its psychological sterility is not only playing into the hands of those forces, but will inevitably end up being subsumed by those forces and adding to vitaphobia’s morbid momentum.

Those few of us those who worship nature rather than artifice, freedom rather than obedience, life rather than death, have a duty to stop this happening.

Because we know that we are not separate individuals, but part of humanity, of nature and of the cosmos, we must allow humanity, nature and the cosmos to emerge within us and override our individual fears.

We need to allow the forces of life to surge through every vein in our body, ring out in every word we speak, become real through every action we make!

We need to break through the word-shield of lies with which vitaphobia hides the murderous and suicidal insanity it is imposing on humankind.

We need to shake off the self-doubt and confusion with which vitaphobia has infected us and stand firm with courage and resolution.

And then we need to start swinging the mighty sledgehammers of truth at everything that vitaphobia has built around us, until it has been reduced to dust and all that is green and living can grow back in our hearts and in our world.

Smash vitaphobia!

Leave a Reply
