Tracing the source of the tension between what I know and what I can articulate about what it is that separates the natural from the pathologically unnatural, I invariably end up with an oversimplification.
To express it in words is already to drain experience of all its flesh and fluids, to offer up a brittle skeleton as a stand-in, hoping the other person can gather enough dusty bone fragments to work with. I want it to be simple and direct. It certainly feels simple and direct. It feels as obvious as a gunshot, as obvious as a child’s scream in the dead of the night.
The problem starts and ends with power. The difference between the natural and the pathologically unnatural is a function of power.
Nature knows no power. Power is a reified abstraction, a superadded feature of the world that appears concrete only because relations among human beings have been forced into a technological template.
Power is a function of technology, a feature of mechanical systems, a characteristic of machines. Power finds its way into the human experience only after humans have been made into servomechanisms, forged into component parts fitted against other parts—other people—and aggregated into the consumptive drivetrain of civilization.
It is not technology itself; an obsidian ax, a forest clearing, a collection of small dwellings made from gathered materials, people sharing food around an evening fire: these things are natural.
It is when human interactions have been made technological—systematic; a shopping mall, a crowded highway, a school classroom, a man with a badge and a gun guiding a bullet through the skull of a young boy: these things are not natural. And the distinction between them, the natural and the pathological, is not a simple binary. There is a third variable in the equation: power.