Evading Society

            Chris wanted to escape.  He wanted to escape the fallacy of his childhood and the pretentious rigors and hypocrisy of society.  The expected linear life progression was essentially strangling him and depriving him of real truth.  Chris yearned for truth.  He needed to flee from society – from family – from expectations - and find candor within the wild.  Human civilization was simply too much. 

            In Into the Wild, Chris viewed human society as something that obscured, contorted, or hid the truth which is housed in nature.  In Chris’s eyes, the belief that man is superior to the natural world was stifling and false notion.  He was very much a deep ecologist and was incredibly adept at “the art of evading society.”  However, this evasion of society, from the perspective of Bookchin, is just as sinister.  Bookchin asserts that deep ecology reduces rich histories and traditions to their simplest denominator.  It ignores the social aspect of humans and reduces them to a simple, biological species.  Chris disregarded his social self in exchange for a more biological approach.  He wanted to be another member of the greater biological community, not a Harvard Law student.

Bookchin insists that deep ecology completely overlooks human social history thereby also overlooking the very roots of ecological destruction.  It fails to consider the social and ideological developments, such as social hierarchy, which Bookchin states are the roots of the ecological destruction (PP 169).  Essentially, by fleeing society, Chris not only escaped from the demands of society but also from the very roots of the problem he tried to evade.  By going into the wild, Chris ignored the truth of his problem - the truth of society’s ecological mess.  While he searched for the wild’s truth, he turned from the very problem masking it.