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Title: Essays from Species Traitor
Author: Kevin Tucker
Language: en
Topics: alienation, anti-civ, economics, green, history, practice, Species Traitor, technology
Source: Retrieved on February 20th, 2009 from http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk

Kevin Tucker

Essays from Species Traitor

Towards Autonomy

Our culture suffers from an extreme personality disorder. It seems that

it is wearing so much armor, that it forgets it’s even connected to its’

body. The face is so preoccupied with make up that it forgets to look

down.

We’re built ourselves up so high that we forget that we need our

foundations to stay afloat. We just say, “Here we are, now let’s deal

with it.” Nowhere else can this be clearer than in our ‘race for the

cure’ approach to life.

It surrounds us. It is BP selling stuffed ‘endangered animals’ toys with

fill ups. IT is Phillip Morris out to find the cure for cancer. It is

Weyerhauser protecting the wilderness, and Police protecting urban youth

from violence. It is Monsanto feeding the staring ‘third world’

children, and Channel One teaching ‘first world’ children.

This is it, the dichotomy of good and evil (life and survival, damnation

and salvation, dictator and leader, take your pick), which underlies the

conquests of ‘progress’, comes down to public relations.

Sink or swim, has been changed to float with us and you’ll worry no

more. We plunge into “It”, the undying, righteous, creator/sustainer.

You can live forever, but the fine print is getting harder to read as we

drag on and lose our vision to the luminescent glow of TVs, in-store

track lighting, computers, and streetlights.

We want more than anything to never die. This constant search for limbo

permeates our lust for life, since pure freedom doesn’t have the catchy

jingles that its’ zombie replacements willingly offer.

The dying desperately grasp to the life they’ve never had.

Obsessions with the progression into a future of such technological

magnitude that we need never even breathe for ourselves, compressed with

an over-reluctant ness to push the ‘past’ further behind (onto

‘e-history bookshelves’), has placed us into a ‘might is right’ corner

where ‘the Ends’ (progress and growth) have presumptuously justified any

‘means’ which may arise (bio-devastation or avoidable diseases,

perhaps).

And where does a cure fit it?

The search for cures is a part of the unquestioning ideology of

civilization. To search for a cure is to ‘level the playing field’, so

to speak. A cure presumes one is needed, that the problem is naturally

occurring. This turns cancer, retardation, and stupidity into a natural

genetic ‘mishap’, rather than what they are, results of the ‘means’ to a

non-existent ‘end’. The search for such is digging our own graves. The

cure for one problem is the cause for the next, and as long as we

isolate each problem, the cycle is self-perpetuating.

What we need is solutions. We can’t turn a blind eye to the foundations

of civilization, and we must ask ourselves if this is really what should

be occurring. The reasoning for the entire social order must be brought

into question.

Only when this is done can we stop sacrificing for the future, and start

living now.

Case Studies on the Dualistic Nature of the Totality: Technology. The

Allegory of the Accident.

At 2:15 A.M., a miracle occurs in the emergency room of Kennedy Memorial

Hospital.

It played out like this:

11:23 P.M.- Dan and friends are finishing off their weekly ritual of

getting plastered in celebration of another week of work down the drain.

Working for the past 13 years in a fast-paced assembly line, Dan and

friends now require excessive alcohol consumption at least 2 nights a

week to help pass away the time till retirement. 11:31 P.M.- Amy, who is

7 and a half months pregnant and a soon-to-be single mother, departs

from her parents house. She is constantly bothered by fears of not being

able to provide for her child and is plagued by worries over how to care

for her child.

11:52 P.M.- Both within ten miles of their respective dwellings, Amy and

Dan become soothed at the thought of being almost home and fade into

thoughts of relaxation. This thought, combined with excessive amounts of

alcohol, make it harder for Dan to focus on the red light at the quickly

nearing intersection. Amy, in her downtrodden state, is also less aware

of Dan’s vehicle rapidly approaching.

11:52:41 P.M.- Amy’s Ford Escort traveling at 42 MPH is now plowed in

the driver’s side by Dan’s Dodge Ram. Which mildly slowed by a last

minute slam on the breaks is still charging at 32 MPH.

11:53:24 P.M.- A nearby driver, Charles, sees the collision and

immediately alerts Emergency Operator Suzanne by means of his Nokia

cellular phone. Suzanne has 2 ambulances dispatched immediately to the

intersection, where Charles is “afraid he can’t tell exactly what is

going on.”

11:55 P.M.- The emergency crew, consisting of 2 ambulances, 1 fire

truck, and 3 police squad cars, arrives at the scene. Charles rushes to

Officer Daniels to give his mildly coherent account of the ‘real life

emergency’. Officer Daniels follows procedure by calming Charles and

attempting to get an accurate account of the ‘event’. Still in awe of

the unfolding adventure, Charles mutters, “thank god I had my Nokia

handy.”

11:52:26 P.M.- Amy’s door is completely crushed, leaving her arm now

intertwined with the ‘Shatter Resistant Glass’ of her window.

Fire/Rescue Engine No. 8 member Jeff is able to pry open the passenger

side door and extract Amy. Upon noticing her critical condition, Jeff

brings her to the ‘safety’ of the ambulance. He constantly reassures the

comatose Amy, “you’ll be fine, just hang in there.”

Dan’s Dodge Ram is luckily equipped with Dual Side Airbags. He is

extracted by Fire/Rescue Engine No. 8 member Frank, who brings the dazed

Dan to an ambulance.

The fire truck now hoses down both vehicles to assure the surrounding

residents that the situation is “under control”. The dramatic effects

are accentuated to reaffirm the heroism of the emergency crew. One

hundred and three onlookers will now disperse to flood the news of their

encounters with the scene of a near death encounter.

11:58 P.M.- Jeff’s ambulance arrives at Kennedy Memorial Hospital. He

proceeds to cart Amy into the Emergency Room and alerts the critical

condition to Doctor Robertson, who immediately shouts orders to his

lackeys. His qualifications to do so lie in the prefix of Doctor, the

nurses must act upon his decisions. He, however, is calm as can be, he

has “seen this sort of thing a million times.”

11:59 P.M.- Dan arrives at Kennedy Memorial Hospital Emergency Room. He

is taken in, but it is quickly noted that he is n20.7ot in critical

condition. He will sit in the hall awaiting care for 18 minutes until a

certified doctor stops by and prescribes his ailments.

A large contingency of ‘populists’ and ‘progressives’ will find this

aspect to be particularly disturbing. They feel there is a dire need to

extend the entire medicinal institution to better deal with this

painstakingly bureaucratic detail. The blindness to the social contexts

surrounding this institution is another symptom of the success of the

totality to separate problems with the Problem (the totality itself: the

existence of civilization). The functionalism of leftism within that

framework can be seen as it’s strong point of overall failure.

12:05 A.M.- As the textbook procedures are coming and going, so is Amy’s

desperate grasp onto life. One is forced to wonder if her pre-accident

dilemmas may weigh heavily upon the strength of that grasp.

Chemicals are now flowing through her blood stream via the IV injected

into her veins. That very blood is pumping because of the ‘Life Saving’

machines that are mechanically replicating the functions of her vital

organs in order to preserve her hollowing shell of a body.

The forced vital activities are not able to provide the same service for

her brain. As the consciousness fades into oblivion, hopeful Nurse Becky

wishes there was a way to ‘save’ the mind in a manner such as that being

implored upon Amy’s ironing lungs. The brain reduced to a purely

mechanistic component; the soul has lost its’ place in light of Modern

Times.

A decision is passed o20.n from the Expert to now focus attention on the

unborn child inside Amy. The decision is upheld by an instantaneous

change of pace by the flock of lackeys surrounding Amy’s dying body.

It will later be explained by Dr. Robertson that it is a miracle and

trophy to Progress that a premature baby can now be ‘extracted’ and

placed in a replica womb where it can go onto live a ‘normal’ life.

This brief analysis is to be picked up by every bit of alert media who

will later fight for the most dramatic reenactment of the situation for

their sponsors to pat them on the wallet for. The best rendition will be

rewarded with a ‘based on a true story’ made-for-TV movie, whereas the

runner ups will be rewarded with a spot of a ‘real life’ drama show

exalting the miracles of modern medicine and technology of the glory of

life in the gory ER. This is the spectacle of our society in work.

The viewers wait at the edge of their couches and clench for closure as

they await success though intervals of cleverly placed, 30 second,

lifestyle enhancement, product pitches (In groups of 3 to 5 depending on

the ability of the show to unknowingly lure consumers .). They all know

the way the story ends, but the happy ending needs constant

reimbursement for those partaking in the ‘most exciting age in history.’

Necessary detail: 12:11:32 A.M.- Amy has let go. A brief moment of inner

contemplation at the gaping void of emotion on the part of the lackeys.

Recovery begins, the show must go on.

12:14 A.M.- An emergency Caesarian Section is done on Amy’s corpse, the

blood pours out of her deceased body and the fetus is removed from the

womb. The Surgery Room is now in a state of panic as they race the clock

to assure the baby is ‘alive’. The next couple hours will be the most

strenuous the child will ever have. It goes back and forth on the level

of criticalness. A swarm of nurses surrounds the mechanical womb, a

machine is there to perform every function the baby needs to ‘live’. It

is a battle of testing the child’s reactions to the technicalities of

the mechanical womb. Only time will determine the fate of the baby.

12:15 A.M.- The evidence of disaster is now towed away; traffic patterns

resume to regularity.

12:17 A.M.- Dan is finally visited by Doctor Smith. Upon quick

examination the professional verdict is handed down. The verdict: the

impact of the airbag with the inertia of the collision has resulted in a

broken nose and jaw, on top of this, the seatbelt Dan wore broke his

left collar bone. He had some serious bruises and scrapes, but nothing

really bad, only appearing worse since the alcohol thinned the blood out

and gave the impression of more serious bleeding.20.

The doctor hands down his decree and the lackeys pick up the mess. The

word of manslaughter charges floats through ER walls and the doctor

wishes for a second that the technology to so easily help Dan wasn’t

available so he could suffer more for his folly. The thought quickly

passes away as the good Doctor recalls that it is incidents such as this

that “keep the medical establishment running”.

It seems that the new technologies nor only cure more effectively, but

too quickly. Now it is the Business of Curing, and it needs more

clients. This incident is business as usual to the medicinal

establishment.

2:15 A.M.- After the long process of trying to replace the womb for the

child, it is declared that the child will live. Excitement fills the ER

staff for a moment before they move onto the next set of patients and

unfolding dramatic moments.

The baby will be left electronically supervised until it can exist on

it’s own. From there legal battles will ensue over ‘rights’ to the

motherless child. As it is raised in a synthetic environment (more than

likely with numerous new diseases) on synthetic ‘life sources’, it will

rejoice in the knowledge that it was because of technology that it

survived the disaster it’s mother didn’t.

The viewer rejoices in a daily affirmation of the privilege of being a

sacrifice to the coming techno-utopia.

God bless Progress.

Refusal to Become History

The situation just explained was a made up story. That is a ‘based on a

true story’ story, while specifics may differentiate, the situation is

hardly a rare one in our society. More important than the story,

however, is the tone.

Throughout the many Progress affirming stories our society loves to tell

itself, is a constant theme, that of shortsightedness.

The totality exists by stagnating our daily life into a series of

events. For each event there is development, climax and conclusion. All

conflicts unfold and are dealt with and put away into storybooks for

further lessons next time around. For a culture as obsessed with history

and past experience as ours, the past is doomed to repeat itself. This

becomes our ideology.

It is through our ideological looking glass that we can feel thankful

for something that ‘gives back’ a little from what it takes.

In the situation laid out in the previous pages, the emphasis lies not

on technology for creating the position in the first place, but for

prevailing in the end (and for those who feel I have set up a straw

person, you would need to look only at a newspaper or watch a few hours

of ‘real life TV’ to find quite a few stories mirroring this one). We

would sooner praise the artificial ‘life giving’ machines than question

the role of the life taking ones. The situation builds to the throne of

Progress instead of hacking at its roots.

There is also a clearly intentional overshoot of the amount of lives

taken in the production of the ‘life saving’ machines. The majority of

the high tech products are made in sweatshops which put known

carcinogens into the air, water and soil. The unspoken cost can20. be

seen in the development of such ‘plagues’ as Sudden Infant Death

Syndrome, which has taken a much higher toll upon those forced to live

and work in these areas. SIDS, however, is never given a name until it

begins to enter the lives of those in the ‘first world’ populations. At

this point millions of dollars are turned into research for a more

synthetic approach to ‘deterring’ the problem. More medicines and

technologies are seen as the solution to all problems. This is the

dualistic reality inherent in the civilized mindset.

In the case of Dan and Amy, the totality allows for criticism only as

far as to extend the limitations elsewhere. One group could see the

situation as evidence for stricter legislations on drinking and driving

laws (which could result in more clients for the Corrections and

Enforcement Establishments). Another group could see it as grounds for

more safety in vehicles (perhaps side mount airbags, added security

equals added comfort equals added sales). The cell phone companies would

be quick to point out their role in assistance (it’s worth the money if

it saves lives [even if it gives you tumors]). It goes on and on, but it

goes on in circles.

To isolate the situation is to enforce the power of the totality. The

lesson learned should never accept the situation as it is, it should be

grounds to reevaluate the entire circumstance. Why were the cars even

there? Why was Dan drunk? Why was Amy so preoccupied? Anything short of

a complete reworking of the society which allows such incidents will

only find more problems in the end.

An example a little closer to home is the attitude that the success of

recent confrontations, such as Seattle, Nov. 99, was based primarily on

the organization that took place over the internet. True or not,

granting to success to the technology is completely overlooking the

factor that that very technology had in the success for the globalizing

state powers. This case especially brings out this duality since those

who profit from the sale and manufacturing of technologies had such a

heavy hand in the first place. If a doctor says your intestines are

bleeding you wouldn’t thank him for aspirin. This is exactly how the

system was built to work.

It is because of this that we should never accept these situations as

another lesson to be packed away in story books. Every time this

happens, more validity is granted to the totality. It is a system of

give and take, as long as it serves the same goal. The extra links on

your chain come from the closing in of the fence that surrounds you.

Any action which seeks to reform the system will merely end up as the

basis for more exploitation and constraint in another area/time. We must

refuse to separate the past and future of our society, for it is all the

same. We are the product of one ideology with many faces, and until the

whole is taken on, we will find ourselves at arms with a new face.

Against Cities

City n., pl -ies. 1. A large or important town. 2. An incorporated

municipality, usually governed by a Mayor or Council. 3. A physical

manifestation of humankinds? war on nature.

Every year, states pour more and more money into “fixing things up.”

There are always people fixing cracks in sidewalks, streets, highways,

etc. But it’s all still there. Pouring more and more money and resources

into cracks, and yet they never go away.

Every year, building owners pour more and more money into “fixing things

up.” Foundations shift and crack, windows need replaced, walls tear

apart, roofs leak, it goes on and on. More money goes into the hole that

magically appears again years later.

Every year, more and more money goes into therapy to try to “fix things

up.” There are new mental diseases being found all the time. Billions of

dollars of pharmaceuticals sold, suicide goes up, escapism is at an all

time high, and people just aren’t happy. Year after year money goes in

and the people loose out.

Every year, more and more money goes into waste disposal to “fix things

up.” Population rises, people eat, people defecate, and people throw

things away. It begins to add up. Sewage drains flood, pipes bust,

landfills stink, and our trash covers the earth. More and more money

goes in, as do chemicals go into our body, back out, then in the air,

water and soil again.

Every year, more and more money goes into the crime industry. Prisons

are built, no one talks to strangers, more cops, more laws, more

security systems, more people willing to kill for and to protect

possessions. More and more money goes in, less people go out, and more

and more people are incarcerated.

And cities get bigger, people get scarred and move further away, and

take the roads out with them. More roads, more houses, more pollution,

more domination, more domestication, and less and less nature.

It all goes back to one thing, a tumor that appeared about 10,000 years

ago. Big tumor, little name: stability. Not the kind of stability that

“goes with the flow of things,” but the literal stability. It extends

more to the dependence on stability. It works like this: some people

thought, “why have only a few foods we really like when we can grow as

much as we want.” This kind of thinking had intertwined with

hunter-gatherer lifestyles, until some one decided to do it full time.

The greatest change this brought about was that this lifestyle required

patterns and cycles that must be followed in order to survive. This is

in contrast to previous societies, which could up and go if needed.

Obviously, earlier tribes who took this up could easily fall back into

previous lifestyles (as many surely did), but as generations grew up in

this way, they lost their abilities to leave. On top of this,

agriculture based societies needed more land (Increase in food supply

mixed with settlements equal increase in population.) and workers (The

more complex the cycles, the greater the divisions of labor, the more

workers needed.). So the agriculture lifestyles were generally not

peaceful and easy to live by. They took what they needed, reduced

options of lifestyles, created slavery, classism, sexism, casteism, and

so on. This is all further explained elsewhere and is not the main idea

of this essay.

The smaller, closer to nature tribes were more able to adapt to the

landscapes. But the larger the society gets, the more space required.

The more space meant planning. The population needed a constant and

definite food supply this requires manipulation. Nature is chaos. There

is no order in the way things are, which is entirely spontaneous. It is

never constant, and depends on unpredictability to keep things working.

To step out of this order is to step out of the natural world. For 3

million years, humans were a part of this natural order (and some still

are). Because it was perfect? No, perfection doesn’t even exist. It

lasted because it works. Anything that has felt otherwise has become

extinct (Save the 200 species that are pushed into extinction in the

process of humankinds’ own journey there.).

So what does this mean? Essentially stepping into mass agriculture was

the first step in the path to extinction.

And what does this have to do with cities?

Cities and agriculture are products of the short-sightedness thought of

“why have a little when you can have it all?” Cities are further down

the path to extinction. Their foundations for existing are going against

the way of the natural world. Cities are built upon stability. This is

why millions and billions of dollars are spent yearly, to try to keep

things “up and going.” It defies the life source of Mother Earth and its

permanence is quite frankly, impossible.

When highways and strip malls are built, it goes without saying that the

intent is to be there forever. Nature’s spontaneity is only taken into

account in high-risk areas of earthquakes. This defies the root of

nature, which says that things must go through cycles to maintain life.

Cities and the roads, farms, etc., that allow their existence say, “we

are taking this as it is now and not giving cycles a chance as long as

it goes against our interests!” This is what cuts down the forests, dam

rivers, make irrigation canals, paves, and so on. The civilizations that

build cities are saying that they determine what Mother Nature needs in

order to allow us life.

To put it softly, we aren’t smart enough to figure in all the factors.

We aren’t supposed to be and we never will be. Mother Nature is a great

mystery that cannot be revealed. If it were, there would be no reason

left to live. (Humankind’s defiance can be seen in their overwhelming

search for the answer to this puzzle. In fact, searching too hard may be

responsible for all devastation, since it looks right past all the

answers we need, and takes a bulldozer down the wrong path.). This is

the simple fact of life that we’ve denied, that denial has come back and

hit us in the face every time, yet we still don’t learn our lessons.

For years DDT was used since the factors of mass-produced food included

increased populations of weeds and insects. Without knowing the full

role these things played in nature’s life cycles, the farmers saw them

as enemies of productivity. Enter the world of pesticides. People from

the war industry largely produced these chemicals. (If they can kill

countries, why not pests?) And so they sought out to destroy every last

one of them. DDT was just one of these. It did what it was designed to

do and did it well. There was one little problem though it was giving

people cancer. The problem was and is getting bigger though. Now it’s

not just DDT and lead paint, it’s almost all the pesticides and

microwaves and more. Is there a lesson being learned? Of course not!

They can’t “turn back on progress!” So instead more corporations have to

spend more and more money to keep us in the dark. But they raised the

stakes (Of course, that’s how technological innovation works, right?

“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”) Now instead of

pouring on pesticides, they’re splicing its DNA with animals, our food

and us. This is how dependency works. “If at first you don’t succeed,

try and try again!” “GO FOR THE GOLD!”

So chemicals are poured into our foods and us, inside and out. It goes

from there to our toilets, through a series of pipes (still getting rid

of the lead ones), till it ends up in sewage pipes, in ditches, in

purification tanks (to get out all of the bad stuff, that we know of.),

and back into human made and supervised water holding systems. During

this it mixes with other chemicals and gets “processed” through other

animals, evaporates and gets rained back down on us. (Have we forgotten

about acid rain?) All of this so a group of humans can perform the basic

necessities of eating (And this is without even mentioning the

horrendous acts involved in domesticating and “processing” animals. On

top of all the other brutish acts involved in getting and maintaining

transportation for all of this), and processing the both.

In nature-based societies, these actions required little thought and

action. They could be easily achieved, and if not, the people would pick

up and go to a place where it could be done. But out society is the

opposite. If its needs can’t be met in one aspect, the others are all

sure to feel the blow. So when nature acts in a natural cycle, it may

throw this all off. A tornado, hurricane or earthquake would have

massive implications, but these things just happen. Our society cannot

deal with this basic fact. And incorporating it is not possible. Cities

cannot be rebuilt when the foundations were made all wrong. A mountain

flattened off for a Wal-Mart, will still be susceptible to erosion, like

all other concrete structures built hoping the earth will freeze its

cycles, will be left in ruins.

Where are the humans in all of this? Humans are animals as much as any

other species. Our only difference is that we think we deserve better

than the rest of the world. Why? That I don’t really know. But it’s not

all humans that think this way. Only a small portion did, and they felt

sickened that we would still live as other creatures. So they started

making up stories. Stories that involved every aspect that could be seen

in daily life that they could contort so that it fit their interests: to

prove that they’d be given the short end of the stick. They created a

higher power that granted them not just with creation, but superiority.

They had to be the best, so they “fixed things up” to meet their

demands. Animals weren’t animals anymore; they were cats, dogs, birds,

and all kinds of different species, genetically different. Then came the

most important part: humans. We weren’t animals anymore; we were made by

gods to be gods. We deserved to be the rulers of everything and that is

just what we did. Language was created and put into use so that it

reaffirmed this superiority. We set up all kinds of new ideals of good

and bad, strong and weak. What humans were best at became the new

standard ideal of greatness. If another animal could do it, we had to

too. Birds can fly, so we built planes, fish can swim, so we built boats

and submarines, and if we couldn’t do it, it’s cause we didn’t want to.

Those other animals became filthy, and humans that still lived like that

were below us. Missionaries tried to make them civilized, and if they

didn’t work, it’s because they’re inferior and we had the right to push

them under our dominion as well. This went on and on, and now we are in

the center of the ever-higher reaching climax. We went a far way up and

we’re finding more and more problems with being this far up. Some more

possibilities went overlooked, and now some of us are starting to

realize maybe there was something down there that we needed. But “you

can’t turn back,” and this has been the way things go. So we just keep

digging further and further down into isolation and depression.

Our cities are run on technology and electricity. These things require

complex set ups to go. You can’t just plug a stereo into a socket; you

need electricity to that socket, which is powered by a series of wires

and pipes that come from generators, which make lots of noise to turn a

“natural resource” into energy. And taking that energy around requires

more transportation. Which means more gas and more gas stations, or

trains, planes, etc. All plentiful, all very noisy, and all taking

whatever they need from the earth and leaving things the earth doesn’t

need behind.

Cities are built on property, which is central to the ideas of

civilization. Nature provides life sources, we can control the amount

that we get though by partaking in a hierarchal society that gives us

more of the things we want and less of what we don’t. We, of course,

have to make some sacrifices, but we get more of the stuff we want, and

the stuff we don’t want is spread out more. So through the long process,

we loose our long term interests and needs, but get some of our

manufactured needs gratified immediately (or at least, after working to

save up the money need to buy them, on top of the money needed to pay

for living the life style which accommodates working for that money, on

top of all the time it takes to fulfill these activities, etc.). So what

to do with all this stuff? What if some people don’t want to put in all

the time and effort that you did? Well, you need to protect it. You need

to put it in a place that’s for you. You can’t really do that out in the

forest, at least not for this many people. You need housing, you need

security systems for your housing, you need housing that keeps other

non-human “thieves” away, and you need something that is comfortable

enough to contain you with all your stuff. Our current cities are the

highest technology on the line in keeping people’s stuff, and more and

more, keeping the people who own the stuff tied up with it. So in order

to have more of the things we like the best, we’re all tied up in our

little sections of the world that we work too long to borrow for high

prices off someone who claimed it as theirs. It gets pretty lonely up

here. We’ve got more crap than we ever needed, computers and TVs to keep

us company, faceless and emotionless music to give us an outlet, hollow

relationships, videos of the relationships we wish we had that are

filled with drama, hot sex, and a happy ending. Everyone is saying that

“we’ve never had it better!” The rate of suicide, mental illness,

overwork, debt, depression, and just outright disgust seem to say

different.

The field of eco-psychology has done wonders to open up the obvious

thing missing here: nature. If you go into the woods: you feel it, when

you spend time in the desert: you feel it, when animals surround you:

you feel it. There is something there in nature that we’re not getting

here. We’re loosing contact with the earth and with each other. We’re

pouring out to people that we’ve never seen or met, over the

“information superhighway,” built by the US military in order to never

have to actually send real people into combat to blow away an enemy

nation (who are after our stuff, of course). We’ve never had more stuff,

but we’ve never been so emotionally dead. We stare at screens flashing

ads, dead people and images to over-sex our sexual repression,

stimulating our brains so much that we don’t even notice anymore. The

machinery that runs our lives for us constantly makes so much noise that

we don’t even notice that we’re going deaf and loosing our sanity to the

constant ringing. We notice once we’re born that we are taken into

existence for someone else’s reasons, and for this we almost never

become whole. Our lives are so full of crap that we have no meaning

anymore. All this to try to fulfill the impossible idea that we need to

attain perfection, all this so we can live in the filth holes of the

world, and kill what remains of the wild so we never have to do anything

for ourselves. We march off to school to be detained, to work so we can

push ourselves over the limit to get more stuff in the end, into

retirement, if we don’t die first, so we can dwindle off our last years

and dollars. We’re setting up an impossible goal for ourselves. There’s

a high point that we will never achieve, but are willing to die, and in

some cases, kill for, and what for? The rest of the planet, ourselves

included, was happy and working for more time than we could imagine. We

weren’t perfect, but we got what we wanted and didn’t destroy it all for

others in trying to do so. So why keep the towers that push us into

spending eternity trying to hold them up? There was something there that

worked, and it kept things going because it was right.

So where to now? Do we keep going on as we’ve done before and hope the

next technology, the next “fix it all” pill, will work and undo

everything else, without any negative side effects? Why don’t we look

back and say, “this was a mistake from the start and we can’t go on like

this.” It’s not some big loss on our part, everything we need is still

in nature, less accessible obviously, but nature will heal itself. We

give up our crap to live lives without the great void lingering over our

pathetic existence. We have to take back our lives from those who profit

from us being in this hollowed state and not let them get the chance to

take it back. We have to abandon our empire as those in the past had. It

is flawed and unsalvageable, so we need to find a way back into step one

and stay there. The only thing between here and there is the thought

that what we are doing is right, and that we can’t turn back. So we’re

at a crucial point now, do we keep going and let extinction tell us the

right answer, or do we step out of our hole and into life. The boat is

sinking, are you going to drown with it?

Pacifism as a Deterrent to Peace

Nowadays, the banner of ‘Peace’ covers the sheer cowardice of the

‘movement’. The pacifistic mindsets which confuse ought with is could

serve to be the greatest detriment to the actual achievement of peace.

It seems the ‘progressive communities’ (and even some self proclaimed

‘radicals’), have confused peace, as a time in which no war is

occurring, with the system’s official definitions of peace, as a period

in which no war is officially declared (which tends to be more narrowed

in even more by pertaining to only that systems’ involvement). The

result ends in a complete exemption from conflict as opposed to fighting

for the end goal of peace. This isn’t to say the entire ‘peace movement’

disregards unofficial warring acts (strategic military offenses) as a

state of peace, but to critique the ‘movements’ armor of pacifism.

The long held catchphrase that violence begets more violence has become

a clearer indication at the level of self removal that the ‘peace

movement’ currently holds. The fact that those involved can refrain from

health or life threatening confrontation does not question the warring

ideology of civilization, it merely mirrors the very stratification

which makes allowances for such ideologies.

As long as there is civilization, there is always war. There will always

be a continuous effort on the part of the civilization to control every

aspect of life and to wipe out all alternate ways of being. This is

inherently a thorough assault on nature and it’s communities since

civilization spreads from anthropocentrism. This separation put into

practice is a declaration of war, it is saying this is how we will exist

at all costs. The abolition of this ideology and practice will be the

only true peace.

The ‘peace movement’ also suffers mass delusion in confusing violence

with war. ‘Violence’ has been redefined as any action which inflicts

pain on others. This is something that will always be inherent in life.

The community of life requires this kind of ‘violence’ in order to

sustain and enrich itself. It is perfectly natural for these things to

happen. The violence that is problematic is the systematic violence that

is required by civilization. The violence that flows from the ideologies

of the totality are the physical acts that constitute war. Individual

acts of pain and death for the community of life should never be

confused with this.

It is with this that the ‘peace movement’ should stay out of the hollow

shell of pacifism nad be willing to defend the community of life which

is peace. It is personal and it is universal.

We can no longer separate from the war of civilization and its

systematic violence and seep into the comforts that it provided. We

should embrace the rage and passions that connects to the community of

life. It is from this that we can reemerge to fight for what it is in

our hearts to do.

We must break the ideological taboos placed before us by civilization

and fight by whatever means necessary for the sake of our lives, our

future, and our community of life.

The Witch and the Wildness

The mainstay of our global civilization is the energy that flows through

outlets into our walls. The fact that our global civilization exists is

primarily because we keep plugging in. So why do it? When we turn on a

light switch do we think about leaks in nuclear power plants, mountains

stripped of their peaks with nothing but steel tracks and dead canaries

left inside, do we think about 6 million birds who die yearly in the

U.S. alone because they flew into microwave towers high above the tree

lines, do we think about the wildness that constantly tries to seep

through cracks in the concrete? Do we think about the wildness within us

that turns into boiling rage because we compromise life for survival? Of

course not, because if we did, we would be out there bashing everything

that stands in the way of autonomy. Spiritually speaking, we are dead.

Domestication is the destruction of the soul. It takes a wild being and

turns it into a piece of the global machinery: we become a part of the

machine, mentally and physically. It is no easy process, but it is one

we are all familiar with. A process we all feel with deep agony when we

say ‘thanks’ for being handed a paycheck. But in the eyes of the

civilizers, it is a necessary process. It’s necessary because we aren’t

born thinking that power is necessary or justified anymore now than we

did ten thousand or a million years ago. We have to be tricked into

believing in it.

The key to holding power is a good justification. A good justification

doesn’t need to be true; it just needs to be believable. This is as true

for chiefs on the Trobriand Islands as it is for Bush Jr. The best

reason for having standing armies then seems to be the age old fear of

‘barbarians at the gate’: the fear of the chaos and wildness that lurks

just beyond the walls, borders, fences, or clearing. Bush Juniors’

‘terrorists’ are really just filling the slot of the ‘Other’. For

McCarthy and Reagan it was ‘communists’, Nazis had ‘Jews’, Colonialists

had ‘Savages’, and as Clyde Kluckhohn writes, the Navaho, like so many

other (stateless and statist) societies had ‘witches’ (1944, 89–90).

The antagonistic split between the self and the ‘Other’ then lies at the

heart of domestication. To defend ‘territory’ or to turn a wild plant or

animal into your ‘property’ requires that you not only see it as

different, but inferior (Duerr 1985, Tucker 2002). This isn’t to say

that ‘true primitives’ don’t recognize that they aren’t plants or

animals, but the relationship with the ‘Other’ isn’t antagonistic or

necessarily important: that comes with domestication.

James Woodburn made the important observation that societies can be

split into two primary groups: based either on immediate or delayed

return/gratification (Woodburn 1982). Put simply, there are egalitarian

(meaning all people have equal access to necessities) and

non-egalitarian societies (where there is a ranked system of access)

respectively. In immediate return societies, there are no barriers to

getting what you need when you need it. There is no mediating system and

all people have the skills necessary to meet their ‘needs’.

This is more than economics; it is about a way of living that is a

constant reminder of the community of life. The separation with the

other is contextual: humans are a part of life, not aside from it. There

are neither barbarians nor gates; wildness is not feared, but relished.

That these societies lack a belief in witchcraft should hardly be

surprising, but is widely noted (Brain 2001: 211–2, Lee and DeVore 1968:

91–2, 341). As Colin Turnbull noticed among the BaMbuti: “[they] roam

the forest at will, in small isolated bands or hunting groups. They have

no fear, because for them there is no danger. For them there is little

hardship, so they have no need for belief in evil spirits.” (Turnbull

1962: 14) But the absence of witches is not only lack of imagination. It

is not uncommon for IR gatherer-hunters to acknowledge witchcraft among

sedentary neighbors, but they take no interest in it for their own uses

(Woodburn 1988: 40).

Delayed return societies are a different story. The loss of

egalitarianism is directly linked to three primary factors; surplus,

sedentism, and domestication. Some societies have one of these, while

others may have all three. These can be gatherer-hunters, but in the

case of all three are typically horticultural societies. However

insignificant any of these things may seem to be, they are all very

important. When a society becomes dependent on surplus, it is no longer

an option for people to just take freely, because for the first time

something is produced. The ‘fruits of labor’ are pooled together and

positions emerge for people to distribute food. This is where positions

of power emerge: in small steps, access to life is removed from our

hands (something so engrained in our own lives that the thought of being

truly self-sufficient can be shocking).

Sedentism, or settled societies, not only counter the anti-power

tendencies of mobility and flexibility (Barnard and Woodburn 1988: 28,

Brain 2001: 211–2), but also challenge the ecological relationship

formed over millions of years. The ‘contraceptive on the hip’ has been a

powerful way of keeping populations within the ‘carrying capacity’. But

when people settle down, it becomes easier to raise multiple children at

one time. This settling further allows for more elaborate domestic

situations. Domestication in its literal sense (accustom to the

household), becomes an issue. The erosion of egalitarian relations

begins to be seen in village life and architecture (Wilson 1988).

Furthermore, domestication of plants and animals solidifies the

superiority of the self/Other split, not only between humans and

non-humans, but between ‘tribes’ and kin.

The picture here is the emergence of power and the degradation of

egalitarianism. This is the context where witches, werewolves,

sorcerers, and ‘things that go bump in the night’ emerge. Just as misery

loves company, power mongers need a common enemy. The role of a chief is

more fragile than the role of a king or president. While strict taboos

can arise in their benefit, they are still accessible. When a king or

president loses their credibility, they still have access to power

(also, in our case, ludicrously high paid public relations experts).

When a chief loses their credibility, they are often killed or exiled.

So a scapegoat is needed. We have terrorists, many others have witches.

Domestication is dependency. A bad growing season, drought or plight

means starvation to agriculturalists whereas gatherer-hunter mobility

means they have to carry on and look for food elsewhere. For many

agricultural states, droughts and floods have meant collapse (Fagan

1999), in others; it’s meant that witches and sorcerers are to blame.

Not only are bad harvests and hunts at stake, but personal failures, ill

health, and most often, death, are all caused by witches.

For agricultural societies, witchcraft is a common plight. Among the

Azande, it’s recognized that the witches are always active, but they

only become a problem when a person falls victim to witching. That

doesn’t mean people aren’t always cautious, especially because a witch

may not know they have bewitched you. As we stock up on canned foods and

seal our windows with plastic and tape, we bear many similarities to

witch fearers burying and securing possessions, excrement, nail

clippings, hair, and so on, so they don’t become tools of the witches

trade.

Witch accusations are a regular occurrence. Most often, a guilty witch

can repay the damage of their malign substances without being killed,

but this isn’t always the case. Needless to say, members of the princely

class are very rarely accused of being witches, at least publicly

(Evans-Pritchard 1976: 9). So are witches a catch all category for

disorder? In many ways, apparently so, but it’s easy to see why. When

things start to fall apart, it’s always more beneficial for those with

power to keep people looking everywhere but the social system. Of all

people, we should be rather familiar with this.

The witch, then, is the threat of decay and opposition to the social

order. Among the Lele, sorcerers “turn their back on their own kind and

run with the hunted, fight against the hunters, work against diviners to

achieve death instead of healing.” (Douglas 2002: 207) Again this should

sound familiar. Werewolves, vampires, and ‘wild men’ have long haunted

civilized societies, lurking in the forests outside of the empire and

creeping in at night (Duerr 1985, Anonymous 2003, Kennedy 2004). They

steal or eat our children and souls, they threaten to carry us beyond

the barriers between civilization and savagery and destroy us (turn us

loose or kill us, the former seemingly being the more frightening to

most).

Despite this, witches are not always used only to justify or strengthen

power. The role of witchcraft is typically relative to the amount of

egalitarianism that remains within a society. However, increased stress

can always make it more dominant. European influence meant a surge in

witchcraft accusations for the Yanomami (Ferguson 1995: 58) and the

Navaho (Kluckhohn 1944), as it likely has for others. But among

stateless societies, witchcraft accusations are used against further

centralization of power.

Most often, the witch in stateless, non-chiefdom societies takes the

role of the Trickster. It passes on justification for taboo and lays out

‘etiquette’ by exemplifying what is socially destructive behavior.

Witches break taboo and take on the character of a ‘poor neighbor’

embodying such qualities as; “unsociability, isolation, stinginess,

unfriendliness, and moroseness”. (Lehmann and Myers 2001: 205) Among the

Navaho witches primarily take part in “all secret and malevolent

activities against the health, property and lives of fellow tribesmen”

(Kluckhohn: 110). While at the same time offering a means of expressing

these thoughts/behaviors (ibid: 85).

The witch or trickster character then is an important aspect of social

cohesion (something to keep in mind when thinking about

anti-authoritarian social organization as well). As a society becomes

more dependent upon a division of labor and predictable circumstances,

it is vital that the health of the state is seen as the health of the

individual. Even in microform, nationalism is the lifeblood of forced

societies. Keeping social stratification to a minimum is an important

task, one where witch accusations can come in handy.

In these societies, witch accusations can be a means of social leveling.

When people become more and more powerful at the expense of others,

social unrest shoots up. As Kluckhohn noticed among the Navaho: “the

threat of an accusation of witchcraft acts as a brake upon the power and

influence of ceremonial practitioners” to keep “their capacity for

influencing the course of events supernatural techniques must be used

only to accomplish socially desirable ends” (111). In keeping with the

“anarchistic tendencies of Navaho society” (ibid: 113), the rise to

power is extinguished early.

This usage can be further seen among Shawnee nativists, who, during

their revolt against Christianity and colonization in the 1750-70s,

would accuse the rich and powerful of being witches (Dowd 1992: 136).

Although we can clearly draw similarities between witches among the

Navaho and the Azande and terrorists in the age of globalization, it is

important to look at witches in our own ‘his-story’. It has often been

easy for social Darwinist and apologists for Progress to point towards

fear of witches as reasons why primitives were less evolved or childish

and in need of civilizing (in the form of a rain of bullets or reign of

colonization). But a look into our own closet shows the European

Witchcraze taking place within the birth of our beloved scientific

rationality from the early 14^(th) century to the late 17^(th) century.

In America, the Salem witch trials stand strong in historical memory,

but the 25 lives burned at the stake are little compared to other cases;

in the Diocese of Como, 1,000 witches were burnt in 1523, 1585 left two

villages reduced to one female inhabitant each, 1581–1591 saw 900

witches burnt in Lorraine (Griffin 1978: 15). The list goes on and on.

Burnt remains are the legacy of fear. The witch as disorder and wildness

was never so feared. Only now the disorder became a more obvious target.

As patriarchy became even more enmeshed in civilization, enemies became

more obvious. For the first time, the witch became gendered and classed.

The social deviants were the dispossessed, those whose very existence

served as a constant reminder of the frailty of power. During this

period, those being burnt were most likely women, the poor, homosexuals

and radicals (Evans 1978, Griffin 1978, Merchant 1990). As women were

further subjugated and increasingly seen as relics of nature, they would

rise to 82% of supposed witches between 1562 and 1684 (Harris 1989:

238).

This period was a time of increasing unrest. As social stratification

soared to new levels, the totalistic disempowerment was hardly an

abstract concept. The established order was being threatened by the very

backs it was built upon. Marvin Harris writes: “The principle result of

the witch-hunt system (aside from charred bodies) was that the poor came

to believe that they were being victimized by witches and devils instead

of princes and popes.” (237) Burnt bodies gave validity to the state.

Social ills had a source and, most importantly, the state was doing

something about it.

Today whites fear non-whites because they are a tangible threat. Our

chances of being killed in a car wreck make the chances of being killed

by terrorists (Bush’s ‘evil people’ not governments of course) look

ridiculous. Someone is more likely to die by having a vending machine

fall on them than be attacked by sharks. But what are we afraid of?

Anything but the entire system; the whole of civilization that stands

before us daily, the anxiety of a machine paced world, the nagging urges

to resist domestication, the microwaves that pierce our bodies in the

lurking wildness. The wealth of production is our health: that is the

message domestication puts into our minds. That is our burden, our

crutch. Wildness, disorder, chaos, anarchy, these are the witches of

civilization.

But the message here is not only a problem, but an option. By drawing on

the Navaho heritage we can turn towards the persecuted witches during

the Christian ritual purifications and take the cue that is being

offered. Among the Navaho, Azande, Lele, Europe, and so on, when times

got hard, where does one turn? If all your life, you hear of this power

that lurks and exceeds the human body, why wouldn’t you try to use it?

We know that this is what many did during the European Witchcraze

(Duerr, Evans) and there seems little reason to doubt things were much

different among ‘primitives’.

When the patriarchs of Puritanism began to preach of the evils of the

lurking wildness of witches and beings that stride the fence between

civilization and savagery, the dispossessed sought this out. In

searching for a way out, they identified with the antithesis of state

power. This is what we have to learn. In seeking to eliminate the

threats of the state, those in power show their weaknesses. They

unwittingly show what has always lied before us: underneath the veneer

of absolute power lies a frail and fragile corpse maintained by the

sweat and blood of those who are trained to see through its eyes, the

vision of domestication.

Civilization becomes us; chains on the mind, scars on the body, piles of

charred corpses, the yearning of an enslaved animal to smash the barrier

between it and true freedom. The witches, shamans, and sorcerers brought

themselves to the brink of death to remind themselves of the frailty of

life and the joys of being. Drug induced trances were temporary breaks

from the pain of survival sickness. They sought bewilderment, having

“surrendered their individuality, renounced personal volition to the

will-of-the-land, and merged individuated desire within the expansive

needs of the wild.” (Moore 1988: 21)

This isn’t to say that delving into new age programs, drug induced

escapes or forced rewilding will break our domestication; this is

actually far from my point. Rewilding is a process and active resistance

is a necessary part of that. What I am saying is that the key to the

destruction of civilization lies in understanding its witches, its

fears. Not only looking at the external system, but domestication

itself, the internalized system: the cop, missionary, politician,

economist, and worker in our heads. When we look within and outside, the

target before us becomes most apparent. It becomes possible to see that

the plug can be pulled on this technological civilization and it will

all come crashing down before us. If only we would listen.

The witch is wildness. The witch is very much alive for the witch is

life itself. It smashes machines at work. It burns construction

equipment under the cover of night. It stirs within us and it seeks to

overtake us if only we would let it.

The civilizers fear this wildness. They lock it up. They paint it as a

brutish beast that would go on a violent rampage if released. They push

it in our heads. They stand strong with an iron fist, but they are weak.

They know they are weak. They know, in time, the wildness will eat their

monuments and swallow their pride. The witch runs rampant. And when the

lights go out, beyond the reach of the state, beyond the dependency,

beyond the imposed system, we will be free to let the witching

substance, the wildness, become us.

Bibliography:

• Anonymous. 2003. ‘The Perennial Wild Men’. Green Anarchist. 70: 10–11.

• Barnard, Alan and Woodburn, James. 1988. ‘Property, power, and

ideology in hunter-gathering societies’ in Hunters and Gatherers: Volume

2, Property, Power and Ideology. Ingold, Riches, and Woodburn (eds).

Oxford: Berg, 4–31.

• Brain, James. 2001. ‘An Anthropological Perspective on the Witchcraze’

in Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion. In Lehmann and Myers (eds). Mountain

View: Mayfield, 208–214.

• Douglas, Mary. 2002 [1966]. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge.

• Dowd, Gregory Evans. 1992. A Spirited Resistance. Baltimore: John

Hopkins UP.

• Duerr, Hans Peter. 1985. Dreamtime. New York: Basil Blackwell.

• Evans, Arthur. 1978. Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. Boston:

Fag Rag.

• Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the

Azande: Abridged. London: Oxford UP.

• Fagan, Brian. 1999. Floods, Famines and Emperors: el Nino and the Fate

of Civilizations. New York: Basic.

• Ferguson, R. Brian. 1995. Yanomami Warfare. Santa Fe: SAR.

• Griffin, Susan. 1978. Woman and Nature. New York: Harper and Row.

• Harris, Marvin. 1989. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches. New York:

Vintage.

• Kennedy, Joseph. 2004. ‘The Wild Man of Samoa’. Natural History. 2/04:

22–25, 66.

• Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1944. Navaho Witchcraft. Boston: Beacon.

• Lee, Richard B. and DeVore, Irven (eds). 1968. Man the Hunter. New

York: Aldine de Gruyter.

• Lehmann, Arthur and Myers, James (eds). 2001. Magic, Witchcraft and

Religion. Mountain View: Mayfield.

• Merchant, Carolyn. 1990. The Death of Nature. New York: Harper

Collins.

• Moore, John. 1988. Anarchy and Ecstasy. London: Aporia.

• Tucker, Kevin. 2002. ‘Spectacle of the Symbolic’, Species Traitor 3:

15–21.

• Turnbull, Colin. 1962. The Forest People. New York: Touchstone.

• Wilson, Peter. 1988. The Domestication of the Human Species. New

Haven: Yale UP.

• Woodburn, James. 1982. ‘Egalitarian Societies’, Man 17 (3): 431–451.

• Woodburn, James. 1988. ‘African hunter-gatherer social organization’

in Hunters and Gatherers: Volume 1, History, Evolution and Social

Change. Ingold, Riches and Woodburn (eds). Oxford: Berg, 31–64.

Taken from Green Anarchy #16

Discontents in the State of Inequality: Noble Dependents

O wo/man, whatever country you may come from, whatever your opinions may

be, listen: Here is your story as I have seen it. For there exists a

type of person who seeks life beyond his/her social context! Those who

know the dirty lies of the great stories of oppressors, yet while

feeling urges to flee the physical manifestations of such stories are

compelled to remain within its bounds. Those who see the beauty of life

in the hands of nature, and seek to fight the might grip of civilization

from within. Oh let me tell you, it is a life of great compromise and

many aren’t surprised to see it end with little satisfaction, but within

it holds the noble lust for the life free of fear, pressure and

destruction. They hold a view so complex and important it demands

immediate description.

This group of people stem from a tradition of variants, such as

anthropology, radical anarchism, feminism, environmentalism, psychology,

and more. They recognize that the past movements against oppression held

loopholes and weak points, which would prove to be fatal to the

revolutionary potential. Further examination of such issues and there

historical developments brought about discoveries of utter importance:

it isn’t just capitalism or feudalism that brought about lives of

drudgery and discontent, but the whole of civilized/reason existence!

Quite an astonishing finding indeed! This led to a complete overhauling

to the ideologies of inequality. It found that the origins of reason lie

in the development and force of mass agricultural existence! It dug

through a history of lies and deceit to uncover the realities of life

previous to full time farming and stewardship of nature and all its

inhabitants. It found the existence of Homo Sapiens was set up as tribes

living in harmony with each other, animals and nature. They ranged from

hunter-gatherers to part-time farmers. It was by no means perfect (The

concept of perfection itself refuted by this group!), but it worked!

Further studies have proven that this worked for around three million

years! These people lived free of the burdens of civilization. They knew

nothing of the world of work. The closest they came to anything similar

was gathering and hunting, something that was joyous and ritualistic and

occupied maybe three to fours hours of a day. These people knew nothing

of property (or poverty, being the product of property), so while they

didn’t posses all the ‘stuff’ modern life has provided, they don’t

posses its burdens either! The ills of modern society are almost

completely unknown. The plagues of our world (AIDS, cancer, suicide,

war, insanity, alcoholism, drug abuse, and so on) don’t show themselves

in this world. Brutishness is not non-existent, but there are no forms

of violence, as our society knows of it. There are fights, but no wars.

There are little of grudges, and it is hardly uncommon for competitors

to live as friends. Its inhabitants live life as a whole, seeking joy in

each moment versus a life of seeking only ends. An overall happier life

indeed!

These peoples see that the occurrence of moving from this life to our

modern world was by no means of natural evolution or free choice, but of

coercion and deceit. The human conquering of nature required

thoroughness and the totality of thought and life. It wasn’t enough to

set up a society of complex hierarchies and divisions of labor. It

required stability and a constant surplus of labor. Its greatest task at

hand was to control the necessities of life for its inhabitants (and

those it seeks to push under its thumb). It’s hard to restrain and

involve a large quantity of peoples when the option of leaving is on

hand. So this meant the domesticators needed more land and less

competition. This requires extermination or assimilation for all

societies within reach of that society which is imposing itself. Quite

the horrendous situation!

They recognize the staples of modern society to be imperative to the

power of the state apparatus. They see the overwhelming replacement of

the natural world with synthetic society as the prime means of

dependency on the state. This dependency would become the totality of

state power. The people involved in it would learn to love their master,

because they feared life without it! This is the ultimate success of the

state. For the most part people really think that food isn’t free, you

can’t live without money, and possessions are a symbol of ones success.

They feel that technology will help them as it guides them further into

the world that is built around it. The common sentiment is that the

strong points of their oppression (work, money and technology) are

neutral and can be used to free them as much as it causes misery.

History has shown this to be incorrect, and that giving the impression

that these things are neutral is the key to pushing the totality further

and further into the human psyche, turning it’s followers into self

imposed slaves.

From birth we are set through a series of deprivations, which wedge us

into the totality further and further. We are born from parents who are

themselves part of this system which denies us the ability to develop

fully and freely. They seek children in hopes that this will fill their

own voids, and see the children not as a part of themselves and the

entire world, but another possession, which can further assert their own

power and worth (and this is the case primarily with the constantly

shrinking amount of people who even really want the children they have

birthed). This scenario is not unknown to the child, and the continuing

of this cycle of deprivation and obligatory care stars making more voids

in its life than it fills.

The entire culture is separated in emotional and physical senses. It

does take a tribe to raise a child, but that doesn’t exist here. Instead

there remains the wholesale method of child raising. Rules are set as to

what is right and wrong: what foods, diapers, toys, animals, people,

etc. should be around the child. There are institutions that have the

capability of removing children into the state’s ‘care’ if these rules

aren’t followed. Quite a barbaric matter of dealing with the situation!

Other institutions take on the painstaking task of watching the children

for the parents and socializing them into firmly set standards, via the

department of education. Here children learn everything that their

parents might not have quite so high in their curriculum. A major

problem here is, when you leave it up to a few trained professionals,

how do they deal with all the kids? How do they take into matters, the

fact that the parents are always cautious of what they do, and are

willing to follow anything they deem unfit with lawsuits? There’s only

one way that can be done: make a strict and solid criteria that does the

tasks at hand while causing the least amount of interaction outside

those realms (medicines are available for those who can’t seem to quite

fit into it all with the others). As the noble dependents will commonly

point out, this is far from the way that nature-based societies

function. The children in those societies come out fully capable of

taking on all responsibilities and functions needed to survive. In fact,

it’s not uncommon for the teens to go off and test their skills by

isolating themselves for however long is needed. This occurrence goes

without question or doubt, and the child is surely never bickered about

why they would want to do it. The parent understands that this is

something the child needs to help place themselves in the context of the

entirety of nature. Such an act in our society isn’t just looked down

upon: it’s illegal. A child found wandering to the dependents of

civilization is a fright. Either their parents obviously don’t care

about them and they may be in a gang or the like, or the child is lost

and needs an adult to help it finds its way. As the children get older,

it’s more important to discipline them to these rules. That is why it is

illegal for anyone under 16 to drop out of high school in most states.

If they do not complete a preset minimum years of schooling, they will

not have received the whole process of socialization from the school.

Aside from this, they would flood the job market, creating numerous

other problems for the society to deal with. So in the mean time they

are rendered useless by being forced into mandatory socialization.

Wandering is by no means a possibility either; it’s a sign of possible

deviants. A curfew is set to insure that any such deviants will be put

away for such an anti-social act. To further keep them under the eye of

the big brother, they are forced in most states to remain under their

parents care until 18 years of age (despite the situation the child

faces at home).

The entire system puts a lot of power in the child’s parents. They are

legally responsible for their ‘property,’ so they have the rights to

ensure that their rule is effective. This has been known to fill quite a

few heads. A child becomes the burden of the parent and is treated with

likely contempt. The process of becoming an adult is extended to 21

years (when the child gains full legal rights, however, this has been

expanding to 23 to 25 years of age.), whereas it is almost complete at

the point of puberty in nature-based societies. A child who is obviously

an adult in thinking and capabilities is still seen as ‘just a child.’

Their autonomy is fully taken in by this and they are helpless to the

situation. The parents have full legal rights to inflict whatever it is

they see should be done on their child. This power shows its face most

commonly in the form of constant belittling and in some cases (more and

more not uncommon either) physical abuse. These years of helplessness

develop a full sense of spite, distrust, and hardening to the world that

should be supportive to the child’s need. The realization that the world

is actually against them by this point is almost totally developed.

Meanwhile, in nature-based societies, the child has fully developed its

love for the world and found that its place lies within it. Mother Earth

provides and the now adult respectfully participates in it. The

civilized child finds contempt and more likely than ever is willing to

cry for help with a machine gun on fellow students. A sickening result

of 10,000 years of deprivation and groundlessness!

The world created isn’t a small portion of nature, but it is the entire

view and knowledge of how the civilized person sees nature and all its

inhabitants. The people involved are by no means able to get up and

leave upon the realization that the mass of culture is a leech on every

bit of life that exists. Aside from the physical forces that keep them

from being able to fulfill such a given right, they are completely

buried in thought that denies them abilities to exist as they had for

millions of years. The basic necessities of life, food, water and air,

are no longer things that exist in plenty and freely, but are products

of the culture that allows them to be. Food doesn’t grow on trees, it

exists in cans that come from factories that can be received in exchange

for paper representations of a natural substance that has been given

value for unknown reasons, that one receives through fulfilling the

amount of hours of work according to the cash value that is placed on

their time. Water comes from pipes, which come from plants, which come

from a source that weren’t not sure of, but we know must of it is

cleaned up. It is free in some places through dispensing units that are

occasionally filled with things that may be hazardous to our health and

attached to walls in some institutions. Otherwise it can be purchased in

small amounts in plastic bottles from grocery stores or vending

machines. Commonly it comes from large pipes that go to places that

you’re not supposed to drink from, and to get them to function in your

shelter, you must pay a monthly fee. Air isn’t a life source; it is a

complex series of letters and numbers interchanging in scientific

formulas. It’s real components can be located on a chart of things that

can not be seen to the naked eye, called a periodic table of elements

(Here you will also find that water is not your life source, but 2 parts

hydrogen to one part oxygen.). Whether or not it is pure is of mild

importance really, since the facts can be manipulated on either ends,

but it is there and you can use it.

This is just a small fracture of civilizations ability to splice things

up into little bits of information that cloud existence. Things aren’t

just because they aren’t; they aren’t for a series of scientific

explanations. This mode of thought is the primary bit of information

that is worked into you from day one. It changes the way you think of

everything and makes everything a product. Nothing is sacred except

power. Certain things posses natural power, because they are responsible

for creating and maintaining you, i.e., your parents, god, governments,

science, etc. This slice and dice mentality is saying one thing loud and

clear, “the world is too complex for you, live in our hands and we will

make sure you get what you need as long as you go with the flow.” This

creates dependence, which can be otherwise referred to as the totality

of civilized thought. It solidifies everything that you know into one

mass that watches itself whenever its credentials are put into question.

It never makes mistakes, but accidents happen, and rest assured, it will

make sure that those same ones don’t happen again. But sometimes

sacrifice is also necessary. The state of dependence is almost

completely thorough throughout civilized nations. It has taken from us

from birth, and it places objects in our way to ensure that we don’t

find out what they are and how to get around them. To rid ourselves of

this entirety is extremely possible, but it’s not easy to do alone. The

setup of this totality is well planned so that people will try as much

as possible to refrain from having to put effort into doing things. Some

people see problems with the way it works, but are so lost that they are

not willing to make any effort to do so.

However, there are some people who realize the entire system is what is

killing the planet and all its inhabitants. They also realize that the

totality has and will do everything in its power to keep these people

from being heard, but this is seen as an obstacle that must be overrun.

Most feel that they are capable of living free of the totality, but

realize that this would still leave the whole order in place and it

would continue to destroy as it does from day to day. So they feel an

obligation and desire to stay within its bounds (against their own

desires to be free of it) and try to tear apart the foundations of the

totality. These are who we see as ‘noble dependents,’ for they are aware

of the bounds placed on them as dependents, but will not free themselves

until all others are free. This requires the sacrifice to the

mega-machine of themselves and their integrity in the hopes that they

will be able to bring about civil-collapse. Most feel grim in the

possibilities of this happening, but realize that maybe in the next

generations it will be more viable, if for any reason, that the system

has come too close to the edge and is pulling itself apart. None the

less, these ‘noble dependents’ feel that their goal is to tear at the

social order, and try and wake up the mass of dependents of the

oppression that exists beyond their socialized realm of thought. The

reality of the situation is frighteningly grim on their side, but the

groups are constantly growing as the contempt for mass society becomes

undeniably apparent. They will speak regardless of their own dependence

on the system (which is in a constant state of being weaned off of), and

in the hopes that their efforts will deter the destruction of the planet

and it’s inhabitants at the hands of civilization and it’s progress.

Sticks, Stones and Nursery Homes

“I wonder what it would feel like to kill mommy.”

This came from the mouth of a four year old child. Not something I

pulled from the newspaper, but the child of a friend’s friend. Your

completely average four year old American child. Smiling pictures, piles

of toys, and loves fast food. A child I’ve seen off and on since he was

born.

And he’s hardly alone.

The same day I heard about that line (which I later found out wasn’t a

single thought or bad mood but an everyday topic), I heard about another

friend of a friend’s child. This one is nine years old and duct taped a

butcher knife to his hand and ran around trying to slash everyone. His

parents hide food and drinks because he shits and pisses in them.

Another otherwise average American kid.

True enough thoughts alone don’t kill. But the line between thought and

action is becoming easier to cross. It’s becoming easier to kill. But

the issue isn’t about being more psychologically prepared to kill. It’s

about being psychologically separated from life and reality.

If these four and nine year olds aren’t convincing, you probably don’t

have to look very far for much more of the same. Two years ago, in this

area, a sixteen year old boy killed his brother with a hammer and went

to a school dance. Now he’s a child in an adult prison who is considered

hopeless.

If those stories make the local news anymore it can be surprising.

Let’s face it this sort of thing is hardly shocking anymore. Everyone

wonders what’s wrong with kids these days. Most people have their

theories: lack of strong morals, weak education system, or hell bent

right wing parents, bleeding heart liberal parents, not enough good ol’

fashioned ass whippin’, not enough therapy, lack of attention, too much

T.V., too spoiled, and so on.

It’s become an all too familiar topic and rarely do people have enough

time or attention to actually try to change things (short of violence or

anger). Opinions, of course, don’t always have a lot of meaning.

Unfortunately sedatives do, and they’re much easier to come by. But no

matter how the problem is or is not dealt with, we all know that there’s

a problem. But it’s always ‘their kids’ or ‘those kids’. We all know how

to look the other way.

We all know how miserable modern life can be. Knowing this is a full

time job, literally. We can talk about the problems of civilized, highly

technological living and safely fall back into the passive nihilism that

things aren’t going to get better so we just have to make the best of

it. We could always improve things for ourselves if we really tried. Or

we could win the lottery.

But when we look at ourselves, it can be really easy to just stop

thinking about it all. Life’s just too short and it’s easier to go with

the flow. Young adult to middle age, we just deal with what we’re given.

Let’s step outside of that for a moment and think about the other parts

of life where we’re not just out to get ‘what’s ours’: being young and

being old.

All of us have been young. Most of us will probably be old. As Future

obsessed as our rationally defined reality is, its just as much about

eternally living in that mid-range of twenties and thirties. Or at least

looking like it. Not many of us look forward to going ‘over the hill’.

We spend billions of dollars and thousands of hours to keep ourselves

looking ‘young and sexy’. We become very high maintenance.

But part of the dream of a better tomorrow is that we’ll be there to

live it. Happy, healthy, synthetically balanced us. We’ll be slaves to

the technological Future so long as it’s to our benefit. We can ignore

the consequences of Progress and the wonders of chemistry when it gives

us stuff. We don’t want to die, but we certainly don’t want to grow

older.

Either way, we’re happy to report that modern technology allows us to

live longer than ever before. This much may very well be true. More

often than not though, a long life is really just a very slow death.

Alzheimer’s may be less of a physical condition than a psychological

escape from the reality that things didn’t get better.

In the First World, one of the fastest growing areas of population is

the percentage of elderly people: a major selling point for Progress.

But in a society that changes as quickly as ours, the elderly are

quickly outdated. We keep them around for sentimental value and they’re

stored in tall, cheaply built filing cabinets called nursing homes where

they receive the best babying and prolonged misery that money and social

security can buy. Or is that tender loving care?

Once upon a time, people lived in egalitarian societies. There wasn’t

equality in the sense that we know it, but in the sense that there was

no system of rank or worth. People were just people, young, old or in

between. That can be hard to imagine. Damn hard really.

But for those of us basking in the wonders of modernity, it’s hard

because Progress and evolution make it unthinkable. We’ve naturalized

hierarchy so much that we can’t think of anything without it. An infant

is without strength and knowledge and has no leverage or economic

viability. An elderly person has knowledge but less strength. Might

makes right and the strong and knowledgeable take control and determine

all the rest. Any reality based off of this kind of thinking can’t help

but apply it everywhere. Our bosses make us feel inferior, our parents

establish authority and we learn to trust experts rather than ourselves.

Somewhere something went horribly wrong.

The complete depravity of modernity is only the most obvious proof of

that.

Economies breed economic thinking. We learn what is utilitarian or

useful to carrying civilization forward. It’s all about efficiency. When

our lives are run like machines it should be no wonder that they must

start and end that way, from sonograms to oxygen tanks.

All animals are born with a will to survive. Humans are no exception.

Most infants will not crawl off a cliff unless everyone is convinced

(and has convinced them) that they don’t know better. Likewise, a baby

isn’t likely to cry unless it needs something. That something is not

‘tough love’; it is a cry for attention. This is something most people

know, but civilization teaches us differently.

This is something Jean Liedloff learned when she lived among the Yequana

and Sanema, indigenous societies in the Amazon. Children were always

touched and always treated with complete confidence, but were never

pampered. They got what they needed without ever being told what to do

and parents never expressed anger towards them. Every step children took

was of their own will and motivation. She refers to this as instinctual

parenting. That is something primal. Her realizations are rather

universal. Should it be any surprise that few children raised this way

ever thought about killing their mothers?

But civilized living is anti-primal. Children must be broken and must

learn to obey orders from the start or they may never be of use. To

become a part of the machine, we must start from birth. We must learn

very early the need for efficiency. And what’s more efficient than

complete standardization?

Liedloff saw that a baby is taken immediately from the womb into the

arms of its mother. She’s the first thing the child will see. It hears

the familiar heart beat and feels the heat of bodies. She saw births in

the hospital where children are taken in sterile hands, measured,

weighed, and set alone to learn the most central message of

civilization: infinite need. What it eventually gets is a pathetic

substitute for being held: bottles of formula, mechanical love, noise,

and the loneliness and boredom of the crib. It cries for distant parents

who are eager to ensure their independence and gets more attention from

soft fabric than warm skin. It learns the importance of compromise.

Confident and fulfilled children are not efficient machines. Everything

must be done to undermine them.

But the psychological pain goes deeper than this. It begins at

conception. It takes in the anger, hate, love and fear of its mother in

a world of compromise and the misery of not being efficient enough. We

are assured that children are not thinking even if the religious say

that they are full beings crafted by god. They’re just lower on the

social ladder.

We are told not to listen to the senses. Words are more important.

Science can prove it.

With this divine knowledge, we can continue to inflict the original

trauma without consequence. And even better, we can take no fault for

children with homicidal and suicidal tendencies.

Chemical imbalances, chemical solutions. We breed the killers and they

are increasingly efficient.

We stock pile the elderly because it is our badge of success. We hide

them because then we don’t have to see how miserable life is when you

can no longer control your body. We don’t have to think about what it

would be like to feel physically numb (we’re actually experts at numbing

our minds), to have someone help you to the bathroom, to be completely

frail and not be able to do anything about it.

We visit. We bring sedatives. We do our good deed.

We think that will never be us.

Senility becomes a retreat for the elderly left with nothing. The Future

that they spent their lives building leaves them in a cookie-cutter room

and with a TV they often can’t see or hear: another pathetic substitute.

The original trauma comes full circle.

A life lived for the machine is not a life lived at all. Threats of

going to hell for not working or threats of poverty were enough to make

someone sell their days rather than live them. When that realization

starts to set in and you’re left alone to think about it, you can become

bitter, sentimental, or your mind can shut down. There’s not too much

you can do about it at that point and when we can shove that reality

away, it’s something we don’t have to think about either.

The problem with confident children is that they won’t allow themselves

to be sold. They can live in horribly inefficient ways and they can be

happy. They don’t need stuff. The purpose of life is something known and

enacted rather than an interesting philosophical question. Or a basis

for dissecting, measuring and weighing the world.

Someone raised to be confident and happy doesn’t wait for the Future.

They won’t make that compromise. When they feel their life can no longer

be lived to its fullest, they don’t fear death. They know that living in

fear of death is not living at all. They know that they have lived well.

They are ready to move on.

In our wonderful modernity, suicide is a crime. It cuts a wonderful,

mechanically reproduced life short of the bounty of Progress. It’s

called a pathetic and desperate act. Morality tells us that life is

sacred because our bodies are the property of god. Dependent,

domesticated people aren’t even allowed control over themselves.

But elderly suicide is an act of confidence. It is faced with glory and

seals a live well lived.

By civilized values, this is unthinkable. Death cannot be accepted any

more than life can be lived. We can never give up our faith and our

blind hope that technology will make us young and vibrant again. We can

never give up on the Future. When our last days are drawn out by the

iron lung, we have nothing but incomplete lives to think about and we

aren’t able to give up.

As we listen to our heartbeats mechanical reproduced and amplified, all

we can do is hope for a miracle. A cybernetic fountain of youth and

another day to fight off the reality that we are animals and like all

living beings we will die.

But this is not the suicide of our modernity. Everyday suicides are

tragic. They are tragic because the passive nihilism of our reality

allows only for confidence to mean an end to a life not lived, rather

than the confidence to refuse compromise and fight. It is the last and

boldest act of defeat. And sadly, it is often seen as the only

possibility.

Our efficiency is destroying the earth just as it turns beings into

dependents. Our hope for the Future relies on ghost resources, of

finding more fuel for the machine. We will kill to maintain this

civilization rather than ask if its end wouldn’t be the best thing for

us and for the earth.

Carrying capacity, human impact analysis, and human ecological

footprint, all names for studies that show us this reality is running on

finite sources: that maintaining the great escape from death is running

the planet dry. We’ve been warned that the search is running out of fuel

and its end is a matter of time. As William Catton pointed out, the

inevitable ‘tomorrow’ was yesterday. We’ve peaked and the bright Future

of hope is fading, and quickly. If we have anything to learn about

collapse from past civilizations it is that no crash landing is a good

one. And most of us won’t even notice till it all comes crashing down.

And all of this is for a way of existing that cannot be fulfilling. A

way of being that always looks to the Future and never just is. A way of

life that we create, maintain and reproduce daily.

We have to play dumb when kids talk about killing.

We say they are desensitized.

What they are is efficient.

Most often we look towards technology. That’s a search in the right

direction, but rarely does it go all the way. TV and video games are

efficient ways of keeping kids from thinking. It makes them passive

while causing sensory overload and fills in for sensory deprivation.

It’s a cheap and constant thrill, a fast paced adventure without any

involvement.

System overload, system crash.

Children have almost always known how to kill. In gatherer/hunter

societies, this is something they start at early. But they learn how

about the connectivity of life: about the link between us all and the

importance of not abusing it.

Zygmunt Bauman writes: “It has been perhaps the unique achievement of

modern civilization to enable ordinary folks, “just good workers,” to

contribute to the killing — and to make that killing cleaner, morally

antiseptic and efficient as never before.” It is true that video games

have been a virtual target practice and glamorized killing has numbed

children. But these efficient killers are not full of blood lust. In

fact, they have no lust, no passion, no being. They are becoming more

mechanical daily.

This is not science and technology gone wrong. This is where Progress

must go. This is how the Future must be. The end product of

domestication is efficient dependents. As our technology becomes more

advanced and creeps into every bit of life, this is how it looks.

This is the Future.

We hide animality and nature from the children. We hide everything that

makes us human. We deny touch from birth. We deny confidence.

For millions of years people lived closely and without secrets. People

would have sex by the fire at night and children knew and accepted it.

Sexuality and curiosity were never sins nor outlawed. Children could

play and experiment. They could be confident about their bodies and

desires.

There was respect: the kind that exists between beings, the kind that

comes together for mutual desire and not violent rage. The kind that is

cooperative and not competitive.

No might, no right. No rape, murdering rampages, and death came with

dignity. Life was lived and there was no compromise.

This is how things were and can be.

What separates this reality and ours is the willingness to compromise. A

compromise that means our complicity to efficiency and blind faith in

the Future that is killing our home and our being. A complicity that

makes us do onto our children what has been done to us.

Chellis Glendinning wrote that the original trauma is domestication. It

creates rage within us, but is given no safe outlet in society. It ends

in battered children, relationships based on domination, dead

classmates, and children born knowing that they are not wanted.

The reality that we reproduce daily is inflicted upon the planet. And

each child that is born is given this burden. Part of ending this cycle

of domination and submission means not inflicting that original trauma:

it means refusing domestication for ourselves and refusing complacency.

Most of all, it means breaking a blind faith in the Future. Breaking the

morality that denies what our bodies tell us and what the earth tells

us.

It means being confident. It means no compromise. It means passionate

love and hate instead of an emotionless, efficient void.

The hallmarks of modernity and Progress are the nursery where babies

learn the harsh lessons of civilized life: that nothing comes easily and

infinite want. It ends in the nursing home where lives of devotion to

blind faith drag out our last days and ensure that we never stand on our

own. When we are finally ready to do so, we are no longer physically or

mentally capable.

We are told that this must be better than where we were: a savage place

with only sticks and stones. Where we didn’t have a greater purpose in

life and children and elderly were killed madly.

We think this as the empire of Progress takes over the planet, predators

feeding off life so that they may one day live forever. Our fear of

death is pathological. It breeds an efficient world without love. It

creates morality that says we have no right to end a life that we can

not give the most absolute care for in the world. A choice that carries

the promise that no child will exist unless it can be given everything

it needs to be confident and live fully. Or that we can end our life

when we are satisfied and know that things cannot go on forever. That we

can leave this world with dignity and pride.

The only thing 6 billion predatory people can do is die slowly and take

the planet with them. It was announced recently that the world

population will be 9 billion by 2050. The inevitability of the Future

goes unquestioned. We have faith in our illusion. But our illusion has

no reality.

A child recently asked me if I would kill someone if it would save the

planet. He is eleven years old.

I thought, “if only it was that easy”, but you can never know how an

answer might be taken anymore.

I’ve thought about that a lot though. I found myself asking if I really

care enough that I might kill an infant that I could not offer

everything they needed to be full. If I could break the morality, the

little god in my head that said all life is gods’ property and only

she/he/they could make that choice.

I was reminded of the supposed glory of Progress. Of the long life we’ve

been given.

I had to wonder if I loved an elderly person enough to help them die

with dignity or if I could leave them behind when they asked for it.

I think of the love these ‘savage acts’ must take. The love of the world

and the love of life.

And, most of all, the confidence and passion behind them.

The Future of Progress need not be inevitable.

The original trauma, once confronted, can be challenged. We need not be

victims. We can be survivors. We can be active. We can live on our own

terms.

But it requires a lot from us. It requires us to stop compromising.

It requires us to stop being efficient.

We’ve seen a glimpse of where this is heading and what the consequences

are beyond the daily reality that we can chose to confront or to ignore.

The question I’m left wondering is whether I would destroy the machine

(the engine and lifeblood of civilization) that is killing, dominating

and subjugating life.

What I’ve discovered is that I still have a whole lot of very

inefficient passion and an unspeakable will to live without compromise.

The Reproduction of Production: Class, Modernity and Identity

Class is a social relationship. Stripped to its base, it is about

economics. It’s about being a producer, distributor or an owner of the

means and fruits of production. No matter what category any person is,

it’s about identity.

Who do you identify with? Or better yet, what do you identify with?

Every one of us can be put into any number of socio-economic categories.

But that isn’t the question. Is your job your identity? Is your

economical niche?

Let’s take a step back. What are economics? My dictionary defines it as:

“the science of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and

services.” Fair enough. Economies do exist. In any society where there

is unequal access to the necessities of life, where people are dependent

upon one another (and more importantly, institutions) there is economy.

The goal of revolutionaries and reformists has almost always been about

reorganizing the economy. Wealth must be redistributed. Capitalist,

communist, socialist, syndicalist, what have you, it’s all about

economics. Why? Because production has been naturalized, science can

always distinguish economy, and work is just a necessary evil.

It’s back to the fall from Eden where Adam was punished to till the soil

for disobeying god. It’s the Protestant work ethic and warnings of the

sin of ‘idle hands’. Work becomes the basis for humanity. That’s the

inherent message of economics.

Labor “is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to

such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labor created man

himself.” That’s not Adam Smith or God talking (at least this time),

that’s Frederick Engels.

But something’s very wrong here. What about the Others beyond the walls

of Eden? What about the savages who farmers and conquistadors (for all

they can be separated) could only see as lazy for not working?

Are economics universal?

Let’s look back at our definition.

The crux of economy is production. So if production is not universal,

then economy cannot be. We’re in luck, it’s not. The savage Others

beyond the walls of Eden, the walls of Babylon, and the gardens: nomadic

gatherer/hunters, produced nothing. A hunter does not produce wild

animals. A gatherer does not produce wild plants. They simply hunt and

gather. Their existence is give and take, but this is ecology, not

economy.

Every one in a nomadic gatherer/hunter society is capable of getting

what they need on their own. That they don’t is a matter of mutual aid

and social cohesiveness, not force. If they don’t like their situation,

they change it. They are capable of this and encouraged to do so. Their

form of exchange is anti-economy: generalized reciprocity. This means

simply that people give anything to anyone whenever. There are no

records, no tabs, no tax and no running system of measurement or worth.

Share with others and they share in return.

These societies are intrinsically anti-production, anti-wealth,

anti-power, anti-economics. They are simply egalitarian to the core:

organic, primal anarchy.

But that doesn’t tell how we became economic people. How work became

identity.

Looking at the origins of civilization does.

Civilization is based off production. The first instance of production

is surplus production. Nomadic gatherer/hunters got what they needed

when they needed it. They ate animals, insects, and plants. When a

number of gatherer/hunters settled, they still hunted animals and

gathered plants, but not to eat.

At least not immediately.

In Mesopotamia, the cradle of our now global civilization, vast fields

of wild grains could be harvested. Grain, unlike meat and most wild

plants, can be stored without any intensive technology. It was put in

huge granaries. But grain is harvested seasonally. As populations

expand, they become dependent upon granaries rather than what is freely

available.

Enter distribution. The granaries were owned by elites or family elders

who were in charge of rationing and distributing to the people who

filled their lot. Dependency means compromise: that’s the central

element of domestication. Grain must be stored. Granary owners store and

ration the grain in exchange for increased social status. Social status

means coercive power. This is how the State arose.

In other areas, such as what is now the northwest coast of the United

States into Canada, store houses were filled with dried fish rather than

grain. Kingdoms and intense chiefdoms were established. The subjects of

the arising power were those who filled the storehouses. This should

sound familiar. Expansive trade networks were formed and the

domestication of plants and then animals followed the expansion of

populations. The need for more grain turned gatherers into farmers. The

farmers would need more land and wars were waged. Soldiers were

conscripted. Slaves were captured. Nomadic gatherer/hunters and

horticulturalists were pushed away and killed.

The people did all of this not because the chiefs and kings said so, but

because their created gods did. The priest is as important to the

emergence of states as chiefs and kings. At some points they were the

same position, sometimes not. But they fed off each other. Economics,

politics and religion have always been one system. Nowadays science

takes the place of religion. That’s why Engels could say that labor is

what made humans from apes. Scientifically this is could easily be true.

God punished the descendants of Adam and Eve to work the land. Both are

just a matter of faith.

But faith comes easily when it comes from the hand that feeds. So long

as we are dependent on the economy, we’ll compromise what the plants and

animals tells us, what our bodies tell us. No one wants to work, but

that’s just the way it is.

So we see in the tunnel vision of civilization. The economy needs

reformed or revolutionized. The fruit of production needs redistributed.

Enter class struggle.

Class is one of many relationships offered by civilization. It has often

been asserted that the history of civilization is the history of class

struggle. But I would argue differently. The relationship between the

peasant and the king and between chief and commoner cannot be reduced to

one set of categories. When we do this, we ignore the differences that

accompany various aspects of civilization. Simplification is nice and

easy, but if we’re trying to understand how civilization arose so that

we can destroy it, we must be willing to understand subtle and

significant differences.

What could be more significant than how power is created, maintained and

asserted? This isn’t done to cheapen the very real resistance that the

‘underclass’ had against elites, far from it. But to say that class or

class consciousness are universal ignores important particulars.

Class is about capitalism. It’s about a globalizing system based on

absolute mediation and specialization. It emerged from feudal

relationships through mercantile capitalism into industrial capitalism

and now modernity.

Proletarian, bourgeoisie, peasant, petite bourgeoisie, these are all

social classes about our relationship to production and distribution.

Particularly in capitalist society, this is everything. All of this

couldn’t have been more apparent than during the major periods of

industrialization. You worked in a factory, owned it or sold what came

out of it. This was the heyday of class consciousness because there was

no question about it. Proletarians were in the same conditions and for

the most part they knew that is where they would always be. They spent

their days and nights in factories while the ‘high society’ of the

bourgeoisie was always close enough to smell, but not taste.

If you believed God, Smith or Engels, labor was your essence. It made

you human. To have your labor stolen from you must have been the worst

of all crimes. The workers ran the machine and it was within their grasp

to take it over. They could get rid of the boss and put in a new one or

a worker’s council.

If you believed production was necessary, this was revolutionary. And

even more so because it was entirely possible. Some people tried it.

Some of them were successful. A lot of them were not. Most revolutions

were accused of failing the ideals of those who created them. But in no

place did the proletariat resistance end relationships of domination.

The reason is simple: they were barking up the wrong tree. Capitalism is

a form of domination, not its source. Production and industrialism are

parts of civilization, a heritage much older and far more rooted than

capitalism.

But the question is really about identity. The class strugglers accepted

their fate as producers, but sought to make the most of a bad situation.

That’s a faith that civilization requires. That’s a fate that I won’t

accept. That’s a fate the earth won’t accept.

The inevitable conclusion of the class struggle is limited because it is

rooted in economics. Class is a social relationship, but it is tied to

capitalist economics. Proletarians are identified as people who sell

their labor. Proletarian revolution is about taking back your labor. But

I’m not buying the myths of God, Smith, or Engels. Work and production

are not universal and civilization is the problem.

What we have to learn is that link between our own class relationships

and those of the earlier civilizations is not about who is selling labor

and who is buying, but between about the existence of production itself.

About how we came to believe that spending our lives building power that

is wielded against us is justified. About how compromising our lives as

free beings to become workers and soldiers became a compromise we were

willing to take.

It is about the material conditions of civilization and the

justifications for them, because that is how we will come to understand

civilization. So we can understand what the costs of domestication are,

for ourselves and the earth. So that we can destroy it once and for all.

This is what the anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization attempts

to do. It’s about understanding civilization, how it is created and

maintained. Capitalism is a late stage of civilization and class

struggle as the resistance to that order is all extremely important to

both our understanding of civilization and how to attack it.

There is a rich heritage of resistance against capitalism. It is another

part of the history of resistance against power that goes back to its

origins. But we should be wary to not take any stage as the only stage.

Anti-capitalist approaches are just that, anti-capitalist. It is not

anti-civilization. It is concerned with a certain type of economics, not

economics, production or industrialism itself. An understanding of

capitalism is only useful so far as it is historically and ecologically

rooted.

But capitalism has been the major target of the past centuries of

resistance. As such, the grasp of class struggle is apparently not easy

to move on from. Global capitalism was well rooted by 1500 AD and

continued through the technological, industrial and green revolutions of

the last 500 years. With a rise in technology it has spread throughout

the planet to the point where there is now only one global civilization.

But capitalism is still not universal. If we see the world as a stage

for class struggle, we are ignoring the many fronts of resistance that

are explicitly resisting civilization. This is something that class

struggle advocates typically ignore, but in some ways only one of two

major problems. The other problem is the denial of modernity.

Modernity is the face of late capitalism. It’s the face that has been

primarily spreading over the last 50 years through a series of

technological expansions that have made the global economy as we know it

now possible. It is identified by hyper-technology and

hyper-specialization.

Let’s face it; the capitalists know what they are doing. In the period

leading up to World War I and through World War II the threat of

proletariat revolution was probably never so strongly felt. Both wars

were fought in part to break this revolutionary spirit.

But it didn’t end there. In the post war periods the capitalists knew

that any kind of major restructuring would have to work against that

level of class consciousness. Breaking the ability to organize was

central. Our global economy made sense not only in economic terms, but

in social terms. The concrete realities of class cohesion were shaken.

Most importantly, with global production, a proletarian revolution

couldn’t feed and provide for itself. This is one of the primary causes

for the ‘failure’ of the socialist revolutions in Russia, China,

Nicaragua and Cuba to name just a few.

The structure of modernity is anti-class consciousness. In

industrialized nations, most of the work force is service oriented.

People could very easily take over any number of stores and Wal-Marts,

but where would this get us? The periphery and core of modern capitalism

are spread across the world. A revolution would have to be global, but

would it look any different in the end? Would it be any more desirable?

In industrializing nations which provide almost everything that the core

needs, the reality of class consciousness is very real. But the

situation is much the same. We have police and fall in line; they have

an everyday reality of military intervention. The threat of state

retaliation is much more real and the force of core states to keep those

people in line is something most of us probably can’t imagine. But even

should revolt be successful, what good are mono-cropped fields and

sweatshops? The problem runs much deeper than what can be achieved by

restructuring production.

But, in terms of the industrial nations, the problem runs even deeper.

The spirit of modernity is extremely individualistic. Even though that

alone is destroying everything it means to be human, that’s what we’re

up against. It’s like lottery capitalism: we believe that it is possible

for each of us to strike it rich. We’re just looking out for number one.

We’ll more than happily get rich or die trying.

The post-modern ethos that defines our reality tells us that we have no

roots. It feeds our passive nihilism that reminds us that we’re fucked,

but there’s nothing we can do about it. God, Smith and Engels said so,

now movies, music, and markets remind us.

The truth is that in this context proletarian identity has little

meaning. Classes still exist, but not in any revolutionary context.

Study after study shows that most Americans consider them middle class.

We judge by what we own rather than what we owe on credit cards.

Borrowed and imagined money feeds an identity, a compromise, that we’re

willing to sell our souls for more stuff.

Our reality runs deeper than proletarian identity can answer. The

anti-civilization critique points towards a much more primal source of

our condition. It doesn’t accept myths of necessary production or work,

but looks to a way of life where these things weren’t just absent, but

where they were intentionally pushed away.

It channels something that can be increasingly felt as modernity

automates life. As development tears at the remaining ecosystems. As

production breeds a completely synthetic life. As life loses meaning. As

the earth is being killed.

I advocate primal war. But this is not an anti-civilization form of

class war. It’s not a tool for organizing, but a term for rage. A kind

of rage felt at every step of the domestication process. A kind of rage

that cannot be put into words. The rage of the primal self subdued by

production and coercion. The kind of rage that will not be compromised.

The kind of rage that can destroy civilization.

It’s a question of identity.

Are you a producer, distributor, owner, or a human being?

Most importantly, do you want to reorganize civilization and its

economics or will you settle for nothing less than their complete

destruction?

Taken from Green Anarchy #18

Collapse

For mike

The needle moves inside the vein,

piercing the skin, sliding into the artery.

The blood flows around it,

and is extracted into the tube

filled with the boiled down mixture:

part escapism, part desperation,

the mixture of misery

and loneliness,

the search.

The finger pushes down,

releasing full force into the lifeblood

what takes the place of

broken dreams.

His eyes roll back,

the relief is moving through her body,

the lust for life subsides

this is the death of dreams.

• * *

Around this body,

this frightened and confused soul,

is a box:

four walls, a ceiling and a floor.

The box is a box within a box.

The whole world of this soul

is enslaved: without bars,

without knowing.

But the soul knows something is there.

Bars surround, and the soul knows.

The box within a box within a box

is a distraction: a contortion.

This is what the soul knows

without knowing.

The soul searches for a way out,

But is misguided by what

it is told,

buried in the Future

of the box builders.

• * *

I can’t say I know

what he felt,

as she injected

a syringe full of lost hope

into the desperate veins,

of the tattered soul.

I know the box,

I know the builders,

I know what the soul

was told,

for the message is

everywhere.

It seeks to destroy

dreams, hopes:

possibilities.

The boiled down

mixture of crying,

fear, confusion, lust,

desire, angst, and love,

is just what

happens to those who

don’t share the

(implanted)

“Future”

— in the eyes of the builders.

• * *

The message is built into

our minds,

from birth

to death.

To the builders,

death is to be eliminated.

The builders build

so that they will exist

forever.

It pushes down

the dreamers,

so that they will

build for the builders.

It destroys the dreamers

by creating “Forever”.

• * *

The builders think

only of “Futures.”

They fear life,

because life has

beauty in the moment,

and all moments end.

The dreamers dream,

but the dream is not

separate. It is

lived.

The dreamers find a

world of possibilities,

and exist as is.

The builders have

lost their ability

to dream, and so

they search the

“Universe” for

“Answers”.

The search does not

end at thought, but

is carried out.

It builds space ships,

satellites, pyramids,

Twin Towers.

• * *

He is in another

world now, searching

through a field of

pills, sitcoms,

ten-point programs, school,

excess...

She is hoping

to find something,

anything,

to believe in,

because, to them, there is

nothing left in

this world.

(now covered

with concrete,

towers, steel,

plastic....)

The escape flows

through the veins,

the sacred body,

soul,

has been violated.

The eyes roll back,

the body convulses,

desperately

seeking

something.

• * *

The stories

he was once told, moved

through healthy forests,

(thicker than imaginable)

under a sky full of passenger pigeons,

surrounded by thick herds of bison,

air that never hurt to breathe,

water that didn’t destroy your

insides as you drank it.

To her, this world

is only a tale,

a Disney movie at best.

He was never that hunter

and she never that gatherer.

Their world is much smaller

than that.

The world they had

heard of, read about,

dreamed of:

that place of

possibilities and life

is not here for them.

The builders have

convinced them

that there is no place for

dreams in “real life.”

• * *

The builders buried their chance,

long ago.

They started building by

pushing tools into the soil

(the flesh of the earth)

manipulating, altering,

taming...

The builders came from

millions of years

of being an evolutionary,

ecological being:

a part of the community of life

(dreamers).

It’s hard to say

why they began digging,

pushing, developing,

owning,

enslaving...

but we are left with

this, their legacy,

their Future.

• * *

The search for life, dreams,

ends in tragedy,

only to be mocked

by the professional destroyers.

They make movies, sitcoms,

internets, entertainment.

Our pain, our death,

is all potential profit.

We bond to share an

experience, this experience.

We desperately seek

each other,

and with all the high tech gadgets,

we grab nothing but emptiness

with the mild sense of hope...

• * *

The eyes roll back,

the fists move,

the anger is unleashed,

the stranger has just left

the scene, leaving only a

body count...

the professionals are left

to piece together

the ‘real life’ tragedy.

they are only a part of the problem

• * *

The builders start a new thing:

work.

They are now engineers, leaders,

politicians, bosses, owners.

To build an efficient Future,

they must dedicate themselves full time.

They start thinking further ahead,

“If not now, when?”

anything is possible, so they will do

anything

to ensure that they aren’t effected:

removed, secluded, untouchable: Immortal.

What they build are pyramids,

monuments to themselves.

And they crown themselves

and each other, craft

Ideologies, Empires, Philosophy.

All things, all distractions.

The dreamers are a

potential for labor.

There’s no benefit in

“allowing”

them to carry on as they were.

They create slavery,

they create slaves,

they justify slavery,

they convince us that it is good,

except this time they call it:

individualism, freedom, quality of life,

they call this dreams.

• * *

The builders did more than just plant instead of forage.

They created a new being, they tried to stop the world in its tracks and

create a new thing. hierarchies form, property is created, linear is

emerging, life is being pushed aside for Future.

Lines are put across the planet, and militaries are created to enforce

them. we stop being one, and the world is against us. we fear, we make

laws, we enforce them, we go to war, we make steel tools, weapons, and

we don’t stop. we don’t learn, we tear apart this planet, our home. it

starts here.

It continues:

Nations are drawn up and invaded, peoples trying to live are buried up

to their head in the sand, and a game is made of kicking them off. whole

tribes are torn from each other and their home, they are overcrowded on

ships and sent over to be cheaper slaves, auctioned off, legalized,

illegalized (read: renamed), and sacrificed.

Cities are built, people pushed together so close that they have nothing

left of them-selves anymore. it drives a dreamer crazy, but the

craziness is actually considered sanity and all the “loose ends” are

tidied up. it is gift wrapped and sold and exchanged and taught to say

“thank you” and “appreciate” when something “good” is done.

Morals, manners, lessons, ethics: all fancy names for obedience, law and

order.

Never mind millions of years,

Never mind the millions of years humans have:

Co-existed and dreamed and embraced chaos without annihilating each

other, or enslaving, or oppressing, or creating systems, governments,

cities, agriculture, fences, schools, roads, railroads, bikes, jobs,

factories, and all that other “greatness” that comes with civilization.

Nevermind the dreams...

• * *

He injects the hope,

she snorts her dreams,

he stops eating

because he thinks he looks fat,

she is suffering from liver damage,

he collapsed coming home from work,

she has breast cancer,

he can’t sleep anymore,

she can’t take it,

and he beat her

because he can’t take it either.

She is locked up

because her searching wasn’t

the right option

...in the eyes of the builders.

She knows he is dying,

and she doesn’t know what to do about it.

He is confident that her options

are the best.

They are convinced that they

are happy.

So they roll their joy

up and burn it into their lungs,

while their dream world is

burned into their brain,

through their eyes, ears, veins...

He doesn’t even hear

the hum of machines any more,

and she plays music full blast

because it’s too quiet.

they grasp on and ride full speed,

searching....

• * *

The fate of the builders’ Future

is not hard to imagine.

They can erode our

dreams, and push us into History,

but we can see where their

story (the anti-myth) ends.

It has happened before,

and it will happen again,

because the builders

aren’t capable of stopping,

or wondering, or being,

they push along,

pushing all of us along.

There is an inherent flaw in civilization, and that has brought it down

before and will again. the builders think that they can remove

themselves from wildness, our true being. they think because they are

capable of manipulation, that it will last.

They put up fences, maintain roads, rake leaves, mow laws, put up

buildings, pull out weeds...but wildness does not stop. it knows no

Time, no Future, no Boundaries, and it will continue to seep through the

cracks and destroy the monuments and empires.

the silt that brought life to

the (once) Fertile Crescent

(cradle of civilization)

sustained in ways that

no Science or ‘Management’

could ever reproduce.

the Mesopotamians thought

it could last forever,

and so they built, dammed,

ordered and directed

the flow of the tributaries of the great Nile,

just as the hundreds of dams

infecting the veins of the earth do now.

Their empires grew and fell,

and the soil gave way.

It seems Science and Reason

can never replicate ‘Nature,’

because it has lost the

sacred

understanding of life.

The domesticated animals

inject their hooves

onto depraved and overgrazed fields.

Their diseases

multiply through their confinement,

carrying on throughout the water

and infect all of us.

(depraved of all immunity

by eating chemicals and

antibiotics, wiping out

our ability to cleanse

and balance)

The cancer spreads rampantly

and blindly,

Destroying anything in

its path.

The forests are cleared

for more grazing land,

the water is destroyed,

the soil no longer produces,

the people starve and revolt,

power changes hands,

tightens the leash, and

eventually crumbles.

This fate is inherent in

Civilization,

in the attempt to move from wildness.

The collapse is coming

through the ecological excess

through the depravation

and destruction.

• * *

I have felt their

loss and confusion,

been on their search,

seen through their Future.

I have been there

as the search for dreams

has ended in another box,

the coffin.

I have seen the dreamers

crushed,

for they are around

me, and I am of them,

and I too still search.

I am among

generations of potential dreamers,

lost to the grinding noise

of civilizations’ death.

And those who are injecting,

watching, masturbating,

plugging in, shooting off,

drinking and eating it,

are my brother, my sister, my friend,

family, lover, stranger,

our planet, our love:

my dreams : my life.

I breathe the toxins

of (union, eco-friendly)

factories,

I drink the (piss and shit) water

of industry,

I eat the (organic) filth

of agriculture,

I live the death

of civilization,

while it devours itself

around and of me.

This world, this burden

pushed upon me,

is eating me alive.

Killing the dreams of

children.

Sucking the hope of

all of us.

• * *

This world,

which has taken my birthright,

my dreams, my life,

and the community my

true being once knew.

I see the slaves

themselves trying to

fix it,

while it can never

be fixed, only

eliminated.

• * *

I see a world of dreams,

possibilities,

that await outside its

gates.

I see millions of

dreamers, waiting:

dying,

for just that one chance

to live.

I see this world

crumbling

and I am told to maintain it,

it is my inheritance.

(it : Future, Legacy, Progress, Civilization).

I feel the chance (again) to be

the human-animal,

to open the gates,

and I say to the builders,

to their slow, painful death,

to their nightmare:

burn motherfucker, burn.

Taken from Green Anarchy #12

The Message and the Messenger: FC, Ted Kaczynski, and the Resisting

the Technological System

It’s been a decade since ‘FC’ sent what would be the last bomb of a

seventeen year bombing campaign. These bombs, aimed at airlines,

technocrats and computer engineers, were all part of a larger message:

the technological system is killing the earth and we will no longer

allow this. That message was driven home when two national American

papers were forced into printing ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’.

This is what would be called the Unabomber Manifesto.

A year later in 1996, Harvard graduate and mathematician turned hermit

Theodore Kaczynski was turned in by his brother as a Unabom suspect to

be later convicted and given two life sentences. In every aspect of his

life, Ted was demonized by the media as a deranged and meticulous serial

killer. His life was torn apart and recreated by his brother and mother

to fit the media profile.

Every step was taken to shoot the messenger.

But the message would inevitably slip through the cracks. It found

solace among anti-civilization anarchists, neo-Luddites, ecologists, and

those chewed up and left behind by the dehumanizing technological

system. For some it was a confirmation that something was very wrong

about our way of living. Even more so, it was a message that something

drastic needed to happen to change that.

It was a message that something drastic could happen.

For those within the technological system, that is a frightening

message. That is why it is buried far beneath an obsession with the

messenger. Buried to a place where most are not interested or willing to

dig. Buried to a place where many would-be sympathizers have little

interest in digging.

The technocrats and its media sympathizers know this. They know that the

public loves a good spectacle. They love a face, even if it’s a face

that they love to hate. In the case of FC, that face is Ted Kaczynski.

The mad mathematician turned hermit-bomber. They say he molested his

bombs. They say that he bombed because of his mental instabilities and

his failure to connect with other people. They say anything that will

sell their story. And that is the story that sells. But it is not just

their story: the corporate media has and needs no monopoly. Many

would-be sympathizers are just as eager to push FC aside.

Of course that’s understandable, it’s easier to play along and stay on

the safe side. FC was, in fact, a terrorist group. Bombing is a violent

act. For those eager to sell their own ideology and prove their moral

purity, these are tough issues. They think that only lunatics kill, that

violence is never justified while they ignore the violence that is

inseparable from everyday life within the technological system, within

civilization. They stick to the drama surrounding Ted, who still has

never willingly claimed to be FC. As they see it, FC remains the product

of a warped mind and we can move along.

And the reverse happens as well: Ted becomes romanticized. He becomes an

icon of resistance to the technological system. A Ned Ludd for the

Twentieth Century. Like any other icon, martyr or media star, the

messenger becomes the message. They can do no wrong.

I know this from experience. I was drawn to Ted for apparent reasons:

both of us wish to destroy the technological system and are open to any

method for achieving that goal. I know I was never searching for a

martyr, but even as a friend, Ted remained something of a media star.

When I began writing Ted in early 2001, it was with a combination of

eagerness and curiosity about who this person was and what they were

trying to say. Our correspondence grew heavily, ending rather abruptly

in 2004.

Through that period, my idea of who Ted is changed greatly, but took

with it my whole understanding of what it means to be critical and the

limits of solidarity. I’ve come to a greater understanding of the

significance of the Unabom campaign, the subsequent trial, Ted Kaczynski

and resisting civilization. The entire Unabomber ordeal is extremely

important. Far too important to not give it a more critical and complex

approach than the simple characterized look at the Unabomber as Ted

Kaczynski: demon or saint.

The message and the messenger need to be understood in their own right

and the link between the two needs to be contextualized. Whether we

agree or not with the tactics, we have to recognize that FC raised the

bar for the momentum against the technological system. This is what I’m

interested in looking at. I’m not interested in the ridiculous debate

over violence and non-violence. To me it is just another philosophical

abstraction to keep us mediated from action and bound to rigid

moralistic thinking: another barrier to action. This is a critical

evaluation for those who are open to ‘all the tools in the toolbox’ to

beat a cliché senseless.

The Significance of FC

To me, the most important issue raised by FC is a tactical question: how

effective is terrorism as a tactic. Since the September 11, 2001

attacks, even the word terrorism can be terrorizing. Due to a worsened

political climate, it’s become the norm to step as far away from the

term and what it stands for. To a degree, this is understandable. But

let’s not blur facts. The Unabom campaign was terrorism: certain

individuals were targeted because of their positions. They weren’t

necessarily targeted because their deaths would have ended the

technological system, but because they were replaceable technocrats.

I want to emphasize this point. In terms of directly ending or

threatening the technological system, FC would be a complete failure. 3

deaths and 29 injuries will not break the system, no matter who those

targets are. The individuals were chosen carefully (though not always

the victims), but what they represented to the system was a huge part of

the message: engineers of the technological system will be held

personally accountable for their contributions.

FC was, of course, not doing anything new or original. Campaigns of

political assassinations, another form of terrorism, do the same thing.

A technocrat is no different from a politician: though symbolic they are

easily replaceable. It is the position, not the individual, which is

targeted. Terrorism of this sort is as old as dissent. And it can be

very effective. History shows us as much. It is a tactic of guerrillas

and of empires. Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike have

always used it. What usually determines the effect is the scale. During

revolutionary periods throughout Latin America, it would be a norm to

see hundreds or even thousands of bureaucrats assassinated between

regimes. The US government uses it as much throughout the world as it

has on radical groups like the American Indian Movement and the Black

Panthers.

But it doesn’t always have to be about murder. It is a tactical

approach. One example a little closer to home is the animal liberation

campaign Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). Over the past few years,

SHAC has grown to an international campaign with one goal: shut down

Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), one of the largest vivisectors in the

world. The idea is simple: you start with the largest operation and shut

them down, shaking the whole field up in the process and then picking

off the others. In concrete terms, this means raiding and torching HLS

labs, protesting and otherwise disrupting financial backers, and holding

the individual vivisectors and corporate bureaucrats accountable by

holding protests outside their homes.

A large portion of the animal liberation contingency has distanced

themselves from those involved with SHAC. They are constrained by

moralistic blinders and a fear of losing their mass appeal. In doing so,

they overlook that this tactic is effective. HLS is being cut off and is

well on the way to shutting down. Those involved are learning a lesson

about accountability. And they are learning this without direct

violence.

I’m not saying that the SHAC campaign is perfect or such tactics will

end vivisection. Neither is true, but this is the same tactic at work on

another level. A level that Industrial Society and its Future reminds us

will not end animal exploitation any more than the FC campaign would

have ended the technological system. HLS can be shut down, but

vivisection will not be stopped. This kind of tactic is only applicable

on a small enough scale or with a massive momentum. Unfortunately, the

anti-civilization and anti-technological momentums lack the latter.

But what FC lacked in quantity was compensated for in quality.

Revolutionary violence is largely a thing of the past in the US. While

there is an excess of surveillance and security technology, there’s not

a whole lot of violence directed at technocrats and politicians to

really justify it. Their security is preemptive and it gives the

impression of being untouchable. In the US climate, this comfort level

becomes pathological: the ultra specialized bureaucracy becomes

anonymous. Had the reason for the targets been given more attention, the

FC campaign could have been far more effective in shaking things up. The

engineers of the technological system could have been exposed as the

Eichmann’s of the late Twentieth Century. FC offered a mail-order

Nuremburg.

Because of the media, this didn’t happen. Accountability may have found

its way into the larger psychological landscape, but coming right at the

beginning of a massive growth in technocratic positions, the message was

saturated.

And it’s doubtful that this could have happened. The technological

system is strong enough to have endured the loss of 3 technocrats and

could take the loss of many more. While I have no real sympathy for

technocrats and politicians, I have serious doubts about how effective

this approach really is or could be. Fortunately, I think the weaknesses

of the technological system are far easier to attack. And those targets

are not human, which we’ll return to.

But no matter what we think about these kinds of attacks, we have to

realize that this has happened. FC has taken lives and the idea is out

there.

Like it or not, the bar is raised.

The primary contribution of FC remains the essay Industrial Society and

its Future. I think the essay really speaks for itself, so I won’t give

it as much attention here. But I do want to emphasize a few points.

From my reading, the manifesto really drives home two major points: the

technological system must be destroyed and that any anti-technological

movement must sharply break from the left. Tactically I agree completely

with the first and I agree as much with the second point, but what that

means for me differs greatly from what Ted has in mind and likely FC had

intended. Perhaps this is the area where Ted has become inseparable from

FC because of his steadfast grasp on the idea of a movement dedicated

solely to the destruction of the technological system.

And this is the area where I split from Ted the most. That is because of

two primary differences: 1) I don’t see a revolution against technology

or civilization as being any more likely than preferable and 2) that

stems from a distrust of mass movements and the kind of organizations

that revolutions require. A revolution, especially the kind that Ted and

FC envision, needs a mass ideology and program. A revolution against the

technological system will not look like a couple hundred FC’s mailing

bombs, but like any other revolution. That is a certain structure and

pattern that has always failed.

Perhaps it is because I’m interested in destroying civilization in a

totalistic sense rather than just the concrete technological

infrastructure that I have such sharp differences with Ted and FC. It is

in terms of tactics and targets that we are largely on the same level,

but where I’m interested in going, revolution cannot go.

This all comes back to what Ted has written since his arrest. I see what

Ted has written as extremely important, but at the same time, somewhat

distinguishable from what FC put on the table. Perhaps this is where

words and action split. But I see those actions made by FC alone as

something worthy in their own right. Though they are within the greater

context of Ted Kaczynski and the media, I hope that guilt by association

will never result in such a significant campaign being tossed entirely

aside.

We have FC to thank for not only reminding us that reform is worthless,

but that the system is vulnerable. FC reminds us that behind the machine

are human names and faces. FC reminds them that they are not

untouchable.

Most importantly, FC reminds us that we can do something about the

destruction of life.

The Significance of Ted Kaczynski

Over the years that I wrote Ted, I got a much clearer idea of who Ted is

and what he wants. I don’t think that anyone can question his absolute

conviction and devotion to the cause of destroying the technological

system. He has certainly gained my respect, but he has not earned my

trust.

Ted is a revolutionary. If he indeed is FC, then that campaign, like his

post-arrest writings, are a contribution to that movement. A movement

which Ted seems to see himself as at least partial engineer: he’s

somewhat of a self-appointed vanguard. Like any vanguard, they must

recruit followers for their ultimate cause. Though not necessarily

lying, they aren’t afraid to bend the truth to suit their needs, use

things like flattery and deceit to brew their following and create

like-minded engineers. I was always conscious of this and could see it

in action. Ted no doubt has his agenda and will do what it takes to push

it. This much is expected of a revolutionary.

He has said the same about me. But a central part of our break was his

inability to sell me on his agenda.

I do want to be fair to Ted. I’m not interested in trashing him and

certainly not in discounting what he has done. I raise these issues

because I think Ted has put something significant on the table, even if

he is not FC, and that it deserves respectful attention, but must be

approached critically. Far too many folks involved in the momentum

against civilization would too easily toss aside the work of anyone they

found questionable.

There are a few major points that I found most significant in our

letters and in Ted’s writing in general. All of those points and

discussions ultimately surrounded what it will take to destroy the

technological system. Here Ted and I were largely in agreement, but

there are differences.

As far as central agreements go, Ted does claim to be

“anti-civilization”:

“I fully agree that civilization is an evil to be eliminated if

possible. But the problem of civilization is part of the technology

problem. Civilization, in fact, resulted from a technological advance,

namely, the development of agricultural techniques that made

large-scale, sedentary, intensive agriculture possible. ... So the

problem of getting rid of civilization is essentially identical with the

problem of getting rid of a certain body of agricultural technology.”

However, that certain body of agricultural technology, Ted claims, is

not a feasible target. And in concrete terms he’s right. You can’t blow

up cultural knowledge unless you destroy the people carrying it. Neither

Ted nor I is really interested in that. I argue that the possibility for

the survival of a large-scale agricultural society is highly unlikely

after the collapse of our global civilization because of a severe loss

in both knowledge and craft required and the erosion of lands that would

have otherwise been farmed. If we can barely survive on a global system

of monocropping, I have doubts about that system being resurrected on a

large scale. I’m sure that it will happen on a micro-scale, but that’s

far beyond any reach I would or should have.

But there’s something more here.

Ted and I share the same target: the modern technological

infrastructure. It’s a practical target. As Ted puts it, “I concentrate

on industrial-age technology simply from considerations of feasibility.

Once the System has broken down people will have to give up most

industrial-age technology, because that technology can’t be used without

the aid of the System.”

But for me, that target is a feasible concrete aspect of civilization,

but it is not the only one. I’m interested in taking on the totality of

civilization which surpasses that infrastructure. That is why I talk

about rewilding and resisting as two parts of the same thing. I think

resistance against civilization must reach into all the places that

civilization does. That goes deeper than the technological system to the

domestication process itself. That is a significant difference between

Ted and I. Though we both agree on the face of things about this, it

turns out to be different in practice.

I am interested in talking about tearing apart civilized concepts of

community, but also looking at what anarchistic, post-civilization

societies may look like. I’m interested in talking about how people have

lived and how we can live. Not to form a blue print for the

consolidation of the anti-civilization revolution, but as something to

put out there, to get people thinking: to unleash the primal war of body

and soul.

That means having a deeper understanding of the origins of civilization.

A deeper understanding of how the domestication process works. It

entails discussion, action and unmediated connection. But the room for

this kind of thing in Ted’s revolution is minimal. There is one target,

one focus: destroy the technological infrastructure.

Ted’s conviction and devotion to this point has been a major point of

contention between Ted and other anti-civilization anarchists. In ‘Ship

of Fools’, one of Ted’s most infamous and perhaps his best essay, Ted

was offering a glimpse of this, but I’m not sure the extent of what he

envisioned really came out. That message, like the message of ISAIF, is

the need “to build a movement that will be intensively and exclusively

focused on the goal of eliminating technology and civilization.” “But”

he continues,

“we can’t build such a movement unless we steer clear of the people

(let’s call them “victimization activists”) who are obsessed with

victimization issues. (That is, racism, sexism, homophobia, animal

abuse, etc., etc.) These people are extremely numerous in our society,

and they come swarming to any rebel movement that is halfway congenial

to them.”

To a large degree, he’s right. Any battle against racism, sexism,

homophobia, animal abuse, and, he mentions in another letter,

colonialism and imperialism , in and of itself will not destroy

civilization. Even more so, the vast majority of folks involved in any

of those battles are not interested in destroying civilization. Those

fighting for ‘right’s issues’ are indeed fighting for civilization, as

Ted rightly puts it: “The concept of ‘rights’ presupposes an organized

social structure that has the power to tell people what they have a

right to and what they do not have a right to. In other words, the

concepts of ‘rights’ presupposes civilization.” Furthermore, we “need a

movement that will be completely independent of the leftists, the

reformers, the pacifists, the ‘rights’ people, and that whole bucket of

shit.”

Though I’m not interested in a revolutionary movement, I completely

agree with Ted about the need for anti-civilization folks to make a

clear break with the left, reformists, and that “whole bucket of shit”.

But what that entails for Ted is different than how I see it.

Considering that Ted has put friends of mine and fellow unabashedly

anti-civilization anarchists such as John Zerzan, John Connor, and

Derrick Jensen in that category, I had to ask if our definitions of

leftism and reformists was really the same. To which Ted replied:

“Actually we may not be too far apart in our understanding of what

leftists and reformists are. Our disagreements may revolve more around a

point that I have not yet clearly expressed: that certain viewpoints

that are not in themselves leftist may attract large numbers of leftists

to movements that hold those viewpoints.”

So by merely raising issues like racism, sexism, homophobia, animal

enslavement, colonialism, imperialism, and all the other ‘isms’, we are

guilty by association. These are deviations from our focus: destroying

the technological system or civilization as the case may be. For those

of us who have fallen under severe criticism from Ted for being leftist

by association to certain causes see this as a significant difference.

All of these ‘isms’ are products of civilization and clearly are worth

bringing up. Ted is wary of attracting leftists and their baggage, which

certainly does happen, but this is no reason to shy away from the

issues. Actually it works to the opposite: it contextualizes these

struggles. Leftists and reformists will take note and most will prove

that they are in fact the enemies that Ted considers them. But I can

never understand why that’s a reason for not bringing up what I see as

completely relevant issues. I don’t think there is any hierarchy of

causes, but I know that all ‘isms’ are an intrinsic part of

civilization: they cannot and will not go away until civilization does.

But if our resistance is going to be as totalistic as civilization, then

these are issues that we need to be aware of.

But the revolutionary movement Ted sees has no room for this. Perhaps

the greatest reason why is that he does not see all of these ‘isms’ as

part of civilization, but as a part of humanity. Ted and I have argued

these points to the ground, but at base, Ted views homophobia, sexism,

and the like as being something nearly all human societies have

tendencies towards. Some societies, he claims, are far more egalitarian,

and definitely emphasizes that he would prefer societies would be, but

insists that no societies are egalitarian despite what many of us see as

mounds of evidence to the contrary.

His naturalization of homophobia and sexism have rightfully put some

pressure on him. I don’t intend on really laboring the point here any

further. But with this in mind, it becomes a bit more understandable why

Ted would see these issues as intrinsically reformist/leftist leaning.

And, even more so, it becomes a bit more understandable why Ted’s

revolution isn’t picking up a lot of constituents among

anti-civilization anarchists.

It is important to understand that part of the reason that Ted seems

hell bent on pointing out the lack of ‘true’ egalitarianism among other

human societies is to avoid over idealizing them. In this sense, he puts

the problem of over idealization in the same context of his concerns

about talking of the inevitability of collapse. He fears, and rather

rightfully, that if someone believed what was said, but later found a

counterpoint, they would reject everything they’ve realized through

anti-technological or anti-civilization viewpoints. Or if they think the

collapse is inevitable people will “be tempted to relax, sit on our

hands, and just wait for the collapse.”

His concerns are valid. But what I draw from this is not what Ted draws.

I see it as reason to not only be honest in our critique, action and

motivations, but to not fear complexity. Too often revolutionaries are

afraid that their audience understands critique better as rhetoric than

those who could draw on something much larger and not always the most

accessible. In this case, people will drop revolutionary thinking as

quickly as they picked it up: because it was never internalized, their

interactions and opinions are never given room. There’s a difference

between presenting your critique and opinions and presenting the right

party line. Revolutionaries stick to party lines, but that’s no reason

why any one else should.

There’s a difference between understanding how other societies work and

making them into utopias. Just as there’s a difference between the

conviction that civilization will collapse and the understanding that we

are active agents in that process, one way or another, and that role is

extremely important which Ted argues as well. What Ted is saying is far

from new: his framework is the framework is revolutionary thinking.

As far as I can see it, revolution will never be able to overcome

civilization. We need something different. We need something that can

handle more complexity and move beyond rhetoric and party lines. For me,

that is primal war: a physical, spiritual and psychological war waged

against civilization and the domestication process itself. It is about

the world we live in and the world we want to live in.

This is something Ted knows about, but would never have made a part of

his manifesto. In the interview with Theresa Kintz and through our

letters, Ted talked about the relationships that he developed with the

region where he lived, the animals he hunted and watched. He talked

about how he was pushed over the edge when the place he had come to love

was being threatened by developers. When he realized that you cannot

escape the technological system. That is what drove him to action.

It is that spiritual connection that inspires me and demands some

respect. It was that spiritual connection that threw aside any

philosophical quibbles about what would be the best action was needed

and what morality limits certain types of action. Ted knew that

something needed to be done and did something. Was it the most efficient

or best action? Hardly, but it was significant (assuming again that Ted

and FC are the same). But hindsight is always best. And with that

hindsight, Ted offered one of his most important and controversial

essays, ‘Hit Where it Hurts’.

The article has its setbacks, but too often those have stood in the way

of seeing what Ted put on the table: an open discussion about what the

most efficient targets might be for any group seeking to destroy the

technological infrastructure. And again, his rather hard-line stance on

a strictly anti-technological movement comes through. He mentions that

acts like smashing up chain stores and liberating animals are not

revolutionary activities since they aren’t threatening to the existence

of the system. That much is true. Smashing chain stores and liberating

animals won’t bring about the collapse of civilization, but I would

hardly consider them “pointless”. I elaborated on this in another essay

, but these are valid acts of rage and resistance. I don’t think anyone

would say that they would destroy civilization in and of themselves, but

they do undermine the grasp of the domesticators and the order that they

have imposed upon us. They are significant.

And, of anyone, Ted should be aware of this. If we only consider actions

that seriously threaten the technological system to be revolutionary

then FC’s bombs and manifesto wouldn’t be considered revolutionary

either. I don’t know if FC thought that the technological system would

have come to its knees through that bombing campaign from the start but

clearly ‘they’ realized that wouldn’t happen in 1995 when the manifesto

was sent out as an end to the bombing. The action was more powerful in

what it represented than what it accomplished. It brought the message

that something can be done.

And ‘Hit Where it Hurts’ carries that message further. Five primary

targets are proposed: the electric-power grid, the communications

industry, the computer industry, the propaganda industry, and the

biotechnology industry. Without these, we are told, the system will

collapse. For the first three, that is absolutely correct. The system

cannot survive without electricity, and with disruptions in the

communications and computer industry, it can be assured that the system

will not be able to get back online in the relatively short time span

between civilization and a post-civilized world.

The propaganda industry and biotechnology industry need a bit more

attention. I can understand the grudge Ted would hold towards the

propaganda industry, but fighting it has always been an excessively

uphill battle. As its own target, it is far too large. Granted, I wish

it would be destroyed, but I don’t see it as a more viable target than

the other ones mentioned in the article. Without electricity, the

propaganda industry will be done, but I see little reason to believe it

will happen before hand.

The biotechnology industry makes much more sense. Biotechnology and

nanotechnology are both vital frontiers to the advancement and continued

existence of civilization. That makes them rather clear targets. But it

makes sense as a frontier of civilization. In the same article, Ted

considers the timber industry to be a “side issue”, and logically not a

primary target. No doubt, most anti-civilization leaning folks involved

one way or another with the timber industry are well aware that they are

not gaining ground.

But gaining ground is not necessarily the point. Maintaining ground is.

The timber industry and a number of animal enslavers, like the

biotechnology industry, all stand at the frontier between civilization

and remaining wildness. If one is a viable target, why is action

directed towards the others not part of that revolution? It comes back

to the single track attack and the difference between what an

anti-technological movement and an anti-civilization momentum may look

like. Desires will always determine action.

I think that is the essential difference between Ted and I, which is why

I keep pointing it out. He wants a strictly anti-technological

revolution and I want to see the destruction of civilization coming

through an aware and active momentum. More to the point, I’d like to see

a revolt against domestication in the sense of a primal war.

That is definitely reflected in our different views and critiques. But

that doesn’t mean there aren’t major points of agreement and solidarity.

In his personal views, the world Ted wants to live in isn’t all that

different from the world I envision. But I can’t see his revolution, or

any revolution for that matter, taking us there.

I wouldn’t question for a second that Ted’s revolution is an anarchist

revolution. He is wary of all the issues I’ve mentioned because he’s

rightly concerned that attempts to completely eliminate them would lead

to another system where equality is the only enforceable law. He is

ultimately concerned with the elimination of overarching systems of

domination. But, again, I don’t think a strictly destructive front is

necessarily the only one available. Critique and action can coexist.

We do have much in common. As I see it, what Ted and FC have put on the

table is extremely important and far too important to lose it to

differences with Ted’s perspectives. Taking on civilization is a

tremendous task. Along the way we’re going to have to learn what it

means to be critical and we’re going to have to look everywhere for

something to help us along the way.

And for raising the bar and bringing important tactical issues up, we

owe FC and Ted enough credit to take what is most relevant from their

contributions seriously and act on it.

April 2005.

Artifacts and Anarchy: the Implications of Pre-History

An Interview with Anarcho-Primitivist Archaeologist, Theresa Kintz

(from Species traitor #3)

In the last issue of Species Traitor, we opened up some questions about

the role and importance of anthropology and archaeology to a critique

that opposes the scientific worldview that backs civilization.

Ironically, the same field that originated to justify the subordination

of ‘primitives’ has been turned on its head over the last few decades

and only recently contributed to a critique of civilization.

Theresa Kintz has been run through the archaeologist mill. Since the mid

80’s she has been working in the field as a digger coming from an

‘eco-anarchist’ perspective and gaining acknowledgment from other

archaeologists through her radical archaeologist publication The

Underground. In 1998 she became a long-term editor at the Earth First!

Journal where her editorial in support of the Vail arson (the first

major ELF hit in the U.S.) generated more mail than anything ever

appearing in the EF!J, including hate mail from Julia Butterfly. While

at the EF! J she conducted the first interview with Ted Kaczynski

(published jointly by Anarchy: a Journal of Desire Armed #48 and Green

Anarchist No. 57–58) and pied the notorious mayor of Eugene, Oregon, Jim

Torrey. Theresa has been extremely active with international green

anarchist publications, wrote the introduction for John Zerzan’s latest

anthology, Running on Emptiness: the Pathology of Civilization, and is

currently finishing up her dissertation on ‘Radical Archaeology and the

De(con)struction of Civilization’.

She agreed to respond to some of the questions that we hope to explore

more in Species Traitor. Her view is unique as a dissident

archaeologist, facing scrutiny from fellow anarchists and

archaeologists, and her responses here are more than welcomed to this

debate.

How did you become involved with anthropology and archaeology?

Academically speaking, by chance. Like most people, when I arrived at

university I didn’t know what anthropology was. After reading the course

offerings I signed up for two anthropology classes and they turned out

to be my favorites, along with my philosophy classes. (I think

anthropology is the new philosophy in terms of its subject matter and

the social role it now plays i.e. anthropology and archaeology seek

answers to those grand questions about the nature of human experience).

I remember the first day of my first anthropology class. The professor

asked all of us to write down a definition of the word ‘primitive’. She

collected and read them aloud and we had a fascinating discussion about

what the word meant. I guess ever since I have basically been trying to

define the primitive and define civilization, and compare and contrast

the two. I do this now in all the classes I teach, to clarify what we

are discussing when we call something ‘primitive’.

My own working definition of the word ‘primitive’ would be primary,

relating to an earliest stage or state; original, first, the thing

(whatever the subject you are modifying by the term ‘primitive’) in its

earliest incarnation. That way it is an almost infinite regression that

necessitates addressing the biography of the object, descriptive

shorthand used to extract the complex history of a thing. When speaking

of primitive peoples, what the anthropologists and archaeologists have

meant are peoples whose lifestyles most closely resemble the lifestyles

of those hunter gatherers arbitrarily assigned the designation of ‘first

humans’. There are also primitive boats, primitive alphabets, primitive

weapons, primitive computers...of course the term needs clarification

since what deserves the designation ‘the first’ is always going to be

debatable. But I don’t see the term primitive as being pejorative,

primitive does not necessarily mean simple, less complex, crude or

naive. I see the use of the term primitive as an invitation to explore

and discuss history.

Professionally speaking, I became an archaeologist for the most

practical of reasons, I was offered a job. It was in the early days of

CRM (Cultural Resources Management) and I began working in the field for

a local archaeological firm just before I finished my BA. I loved the

work itself — spending my days working outside, engaging in hard

physical labor with a small group of people with a shared sense of

purpose, the way I think humans are supposed to live. The combination of

intellectual stimulation and physical exertion makes archaeology a very

satisfying daily preoccupation. If one has to work, being a shovel bum

is as good as it gets, I think. Over the past sixteen years I’ve worked

on well-over one hundred sites, in 14 different states and three

countries. The average dig lasts around six weeks (the longest was 7

months, some jobs would take only 2 or 3 days), so for years I lived as

a nomad. The sites themselves are usually in very remote rural areas,

often in forested, mountainous terrain; less often in urban areas

colonized early in US history.

The archaeologist observes much about the world we live in. The

essential focus understands the history of the relationship between the

land and the people, trying to figure out what has happened for the last

20,000 years or so wherever we are. Because of my work as an

archaeologist I have come to understand something about the chain of

events that have taken us from the Stone Age to the Space Age. Now when

I look at a landscape I see the history of the place, the evolution of

architectural styles, the comings and goings of industries, the rise and

fall of political powers, changes in technology, the fads of society,

etc.

As far as why I might have found the subject matter of anthropology so

interesting...I suppose that’s more complicated. In hindsight I would

say it was an ever present, intense curiosity about the world I live in

and about ‘the other’. I had been around people from ‘other’ cultures a

lot growing up in AZ. I remember going to the homes of my Native and

Hispanic friends and being fascinated by how different their lives were,

the kinds of foods they ate, the languages their parents spoke, the ways

they celebrated holidays, etc. And when I began studying I was living

with an Algerian and surrounded by Arab culture. I began realizing that

all my views were a product of the distinct temporal and geographical

cultural manifestation I was raised in and it gave me a new perspective.

Essentially I discovered the concept of cultural relativism and began

wondering if there were any universals in terms of human experience, and

since that is a big aspect of the subject matter of anthropology, I

think I was drawn to it.

Can you describe the divisions within the two fields in regards to the

implications of work done? Can you give a bit of a historical look at

the splits?

In the US, archaeology is taught as one of four sub-discipline of

anthropology, the others are physical anthropology (study of human

evolution), cultural anthropology, (study of living cultures), and

linguistics (study of languages). In the UK these are all taught

separately. I see anthropology and archaeology as having the same

subject matter, the study of humanity in all of its diversity,

throughout all of its history, across the world.

Archaeology is popularly defined by an activity, digging. The focus is

on the recovery of objects and analyzing what they tell us about the

lifestyles of the people who used them. In this sense you could argue

that technically, anthropologists study living cultures, archaeologists

study cultures of the past through the remains those cultures left

behind. But they both approach the subject matter in the same way, by

objectifying the subject, speaking of ‘cultures’ in terms of categorical

constructions, i.e. economics, politics, social organization,

subsistence strategies, technology, etc. Both anthropologists and

archaeologists will look at these same basic elements and attempt to

describe the cultures they are studying, past or present. Anthropology

seems to me to be sort of an exotic sociology, and its relevance is

diminishing at this point in time. Of course, the discipline’s origin is

recent, late 19^(th) century, and it’s directly associated with the Age

of Empire when the Europeans first encountered and wrote about the

‘customs of the natives’. Interesting though, one could argue that

‘primitive’ anthropology goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans

who wrote about the strange customs of those they encountered while

expanding their early empires. Even if they were considered to be travel

journals, their descriptions of the other anticipate anthropological

literature.

In the US, the first anthropologists had the Native Americans as captive

(literally) subjects and here is where the field really came into its

own. The major audience for the anthropologist’s work and their major

financial supporters would be the US government, the Bureau of Indian

Affairs and their work would be used to find the best ways to subjugate

this population. Interestingly, the early anthropologists often lamented

the loss of cultural diversity caused by the march of civilization and

would write quite sympathetically about their subjects, those noble

savages living wild and free in Eden. Still, they really did nothing to

interfere with the cultural genocide they were witnessing. The same goes

for the famous early European anthropologists like Levi Strauss and

Malinowski working in the colonies of Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

Archaeology has a little different history. Even today when I tell

people I am an archaeologist they usually ask me ‘Where do you dig,

Egypt? Rome? Greece?’ Early on classical archaeology focused on

investigating the major civilizations. Many people still think all

archaeology is the investigations of big, sexy ruins like pyramids,

hunting for the ‘treasures’ of gold and silver, rediscovering the art of

the ancients. In the beginning, archaeology was a big treasure hunt

undertaken by private, wealthy, self-proclaimed antiquities scholars and

was more akin to art history than anthropology even. The earliest

museums were these ‘cabinets of curiosities’ where Stone Age axes would

be displayed next to elephant tusks and shrunken heads. Of course, we

have to realize that people have always encountered the artifacts of the

past, always lived around ruins, tombs, found the odd arrowhead they

didn’t recognize and probably had their own explanations of who made

them, when, and why. The first systematic digs came much later, one of

the earliest I have come across in the US is a brief report written by

Thomas Jefferson who ‘excavated’ a Native American burial mound on his

property in Virginia in the late 1700’s.

I would say that it was the widespread acceptance of evolutionary theory

that sent archaeology on a different trajectory. Once it was accepted

that humans had evolved from primate ancestors, the quest for the

chronology of events was on. At that point, humans became just another

animal whose evolution could be understood by scientific research, and

artifacts would be seen as the fossil record of past cultures. From then

on the story of humanity would be told by the physical anthropologists

and the archaeologists.

The implications of the hegemony of the scientific paradigm and the role

of the archaeologist as the teller of the story of humanity looms large.

There is no such thing as the archaeological record there to be

deciphered like some kind of text, a definitive history of the species.

It is all a matter of interpretation. The archaeologists tell stories

about the past, the kinds of questions we ask and the kinds of answers

we get are all influenced by culture in the present. This is one of the

things the anarcho-primitivist perspective on prehistory illustrates so

well. Take the same basic ‘facts’ of human evolution and some will

conclude we live in the best possible world, some will conclude we live

in the worst.

Archaeology and anthropology have naturally grown from the civilization

that we are working to destroy. It has been a part of the sciences, and

like other fields, has been used to justify the exploitation and

destruction on behalf of expanding empires. The fields still produce a

gross amount of information pointing towards the ‘short, nasty, brutish’

look at ‘the state of nature.’

Do you feel that a field with such a history is capable of validly

producing an alternative? Or perhaps, as with any other civilized tool,

the fields produce what the ‘scientist’ wants them to?

No doubt archaeology has been and still is an establishment endeavor,

and the work of most archaeologists will not challenge the

sociopolitical status quo. This is one of the things I have been most

critical of in my archaeological writing. Take the profession of CRM

(Cultural Resources Management). CRM exists as a result of government

legislation. In the early 80’s a law was passed, falling under the

Environmental Protection Act, that says before any construction project

can be undertaken by a federal agency, e.g. Army Corps building dams,

Department of Transportation building roads, or a federally regulated

industry, e.g. utilities — gas pipelines are big business for

archaeologists — the developer must prepare an environmental impact

statement (EIS). Along with addressing the project’s potential impact on

natural resources, they must also address the impact on cultural

‘resources’, i.e. archaeological sites. So now battalions of

archaeologists are sent out ahead of all these development projects to

find, record, and often excavate the sites that will be destroyed by

them. Obviously, archaeologists are agents of the empire, we facilitate

the development projects, clear the way for the developers. We’ve been

bought off, we work for them, our business comes before the bulldozers.

For years I have argued that this state of affairs compromises our

intellectual integrity.

Archaeologists could be very cogent critics of unsustainable

development, John Zerzan does this quite effectively using

archaeological evidence. We could argue that what we are seeing now in

terms of the global expansion of civilization is ultimately harmful to

humans and every other living thing on the planet. We know that, for

example, the over-exploitation of resources surrounding human

habitations, increasing complexity in material culture and technology,

increasing social stratification, etc., are always a bad idea, socially

and environmentally harmful. We study the rise and fall of

civilizations, we understand some of the key features that bring about

suffering, subjugation, environmental destruction, but archaeologists

will not work such analysis into their reports. The archaeologists

themselves will not contradict the aims of the developers, that would be

biting the hand that feeds them. So most are content to do their digging

and write superficial reports comprised mostly of laundry lists of the

artifacts recovered without addressing this big picture.

Archaeology and anthropology are cross-over disciplines, existing as

they do at the intersection of hard science and the humanities.

Archaeology really wants to be a science, and as such will make (false)

claims to objectivity. When the archaeologists describe the phenomenon

of civilization, they are seeking to be merely descriptive, the theories

are supposed to, like all scientific theories, appear value neutral. The

archaeologists say they are writing about ‘what was’, not what ‘ought to

be’. Critical reflection is seen as political and not part of the scope

of archaeological research in most circles. The exception is the kind of

archaeology that I do, ‘radical archaeology’, a relatively recent

development with connections to contemporary feminist and Marxist

archaeological perspectives. The radical archaeologist deliberately

chooses research questions that are designed to demonstrate, for

example, the history of social inequality or the history of the

subjugation of women. Of course, asking these questions of the

archaeological data will result in making political observations and

traditional archaeologists are critical of these trends, arguing that

the radical archaeologists are not being objective, which is of course

bullshit, since no archaeological research is.

It’s funny though, after years of speaking about AP perspectives to my

archaeological colleagues, most will agree with the fundamentals of the

AP arguments. The problem seems to be that people feel powerless to

change anything. They might agree completely with the analysis of

civilization offered by someone like JZ, but when it comes to being able

to do anything to change the trajectory of civilization they will say it

is impossible. That even if the archaeologists were to become more

politically involved and point out the dangers of civilization, no one

really would listen to us anyway. We are just putting ‘the facts’ out

there, it’s not the archaeologist’s place to make value judgments as to

whether civilization is a good thing or a bad thing, just to describe

its evolution. Obviously this is a cop out and makes archaeologists part

of the problem rather than part of the solution. I feel that an

understanding of the past is an important tool for the activist.

Studying anthropology and archaeology opens one’s mind. It makes us

realize that things have not always been the way they are now, and that

there are other alternatives to civilization. It’s not just abstract

political theory, we know that people managed to live perfectly fine for

thousands of years without cars, refrigerators, computers, telephones,

etc. We can compare and contrast the overall costs and benefits of

civilization the more we know about what life was like before and since.

This knowledge does not require a degree, or even attending a class,

people can seek this knowledge on their own. All you need is a

passionate curiosity, a desire to understand the world you live in now

and how it came to be this way. When I went to work at the EF! J I was

not at all surprised to find that among the editorial collective and the

small circle of people around it, the majority of those who did have

college degrees had degrees in anthropology. I tell myself now that

teaching can be subversive, it has revolutionary potential. My students

will read Species Traitor, Jerry Mander, John Zerzan, and other AP

thought and more than you might think are open to these perspectives,

they seriously consider what these authors are saying. I encourage

students to think for themselves, to question authority (mine included),

but to understand that there are lots of different ways to look at the

world, the important thing is to look, not bury your head in the sand

and let the business majors and the lawyers run the world, act on your

own beliefs.

So yes, I do believe the study of the past, through archaeology, has the

potential to enlighten and provoke thought, even action, and I insist

this doesn’t require an academic setting. It is the core idea of

learning as much as one can about the world you live in that’s important

to promote. Of course students will have to wade through lots of

bullshit and attitude in an academic setting, never trust the ‘experts’,

think for yourself, study on your own if you don’t want to do it in an

institution, but it’s just as important for revolutionaries to arm

themselves with knowledge.

As far as what a revolutionary perspective has to offer archaeology,

well, a sense of purpose. It could/should be so much more than elites

satisfying the intellectual curiosity of other elites. Radical

archaeologists are now pushing the discipline to acknowledge the role

our narratives play in society, highlighting the role of the past, the

politics of the past, in the present. I’ve always been at odds with

archaeology over its lack of self-awareness, its reluctance to make our

work relevant in the real world. It’s funny, my fellow archaeologists

see me as a radical green anarchist, someone who comes to do archaeology

with an overtly political agenda, an outsider who has infiltrated the

ivory tower, really. On the other side, because I study and work in the

profession, my comrades the radicals will often see me as part of an

academic establishment that defends the status quo, sort of an outsider

here, too. I try to walk a fine line in order to bring these two camps

together as I do see they can help each other, even if I get bashed from

both sides.

Do you feel that anthropology and archaeology are objective processes?

What is the real weight of the information that comes from these

methodologies?

Archaeology is not an objective process at all. It seeks to objectify,

but is thoroughly subjective. The kinds of answers we get depend on the

kinds of questions we ask. For example, Marxist archaeologists in the

former Soviet Union would incorporate a Marxist agenda into their

archaeological research, i.e. look at the past in order to prove the

communist theory of history was right. The dominant ideology in the US

and Europe is capitalism and our archaeology helps in legitimizing and

justifying it. For example, my academic advisor in the UK recently wrote

an article criticizing one of the most well-known archaeologists in the

world for allowing Shell Oil and Visa to be corporate sponsors of his

dig in Turkey. Cambridge professor Ian Hodder’s field archaeologists

appeared in photos wearing baseball caps with the Visa logo on them, and

Hodder was quoted as saying that ‘obsidian was the first credit card’,

essentially suggesting that capitalism has a long history, was

inevitable, a natural part of the human condition — this is horrible.

All archaeology has politics and sites themselves, the actual physical

remains of the past, are often powerful cultural and political

touchstones. Just think about the event that kicked off the most recent

intifada in Palestine. It was Sharon’s visit to an archaeological site

in Jerusalem. The Taliban blew up the ancient, giant Buddhas because

those objects represented a non-Islamic past the regime felt threatened

by. In England, the dissolution of the monasteries required that all the

old cathedrals and the icons in them be physically destroyed so the

church’s political power could be deconstructed in favor of the power of

the monarchy. Another example is the use of archaeological research in

promoting nationalism. Nations justify their existence and national

identities are created by uniting people using the idea of a shared

history, culture, language, etc... In Nazi Germany the fascists sought

to unite people using this idea of a superior culture and Mussolini did

the same in claiming the superiority of Roman culture. The Zionist

argument for the occupation of Palestine is largely based on an

interpretation of the region’s ancient history.

The concept of people’s shared past is a powerful ideological tool, this

idea of an ‘us’ (who are right) and ‘them’ (who are wrong). The

construction of a national identity is complicated. Some major elements

would be territorial history, language, religion, political and economic

organization, even food preferences. What makes an American and

American, or a Palestinian a Palestinian, what is the East, the West?

Why do we even use these kinds of terms? Defining who is ‘us’ and who is

‘them’ has a lot to do with histories, this is important to understand.

The theoretical perspectives embraced by archaeologists in their

research is constantly changing and differs in Europe and America. In

addition to radical, Marxist, and feminist archaeology there are

processual, post-processual, structuralism, post-structuralism,

hermeneutics, evolutionary, behavioral, all different schools of thought

that frame the archaeologist’s research questions and interpretation of

data. In the US, since the 1970’s, the ‘New’ or ‘Processual’ Archaeology

has dominated the field (Binford et al, J. Steward’s cultural ecology).

Archaeologists here tend to look at humans as just another mammal

occupying a unique ecological niche. The human subject is studied much

the same way you would study the evolution of the species of wolves or

any other social mammal. In a way I think this is a good thing, we have

to keep in mind that we are animals after all. The object of the

research is to understand human’s adaptation to specific environments,

and culture (economics, social organization, technology, etc.) is seen

as a means of adaptation.

Archaeologists are like journalists, they ask who, what, where, when,

why, how? The emphasis is on describing the ‘processes’ by which social

organization and material culture (technology) change over time, what

the catalysts for change are, looking at the appearance, significance

and knock-on effects of watershed events (like the first agriculture,

the invention of the wheel, writing, etc.). The ‘why’ question, e.g. why

did hunting equipment change? Why did people start planting things? Why

did they start constructing boats and traveling long distances? Are

always much more a matter of debate — and much more interesting to

pursue. We will never know for certain why, but hypothesizing, offering

possible answers, even tentative ones, I feel, is crucial communicative

action.

In Europe, where ‘Post-Processual’ (influenced by post-modernist theory)

archaeology dominates there is a great reluctance to pursue the why

questions. In my view they have essentially concluded it’s all too

complicated, of no real consequence, we can never know for sure, so

they’ve just given up and do mostly descriptive work. European

post-processual archaeology has also pushed more for understanding the

limitations of archaeological research and acknowledged the subjective,

political nature of the discipline, which is a good thing. But I’ve

always argued against radical relativist tendencies in archaeology. I do

believe there are some things we can conclude are indeed ‘objective

facts’ based on archaeological research. They are simple, yet profound.

For one thing, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that people managed to

accomplish everything they needed to accomplish on a daily basis using

only stone, bone, and plant tools for the majority of our existence. To

me this is a most salient fact. It proves that everything we think we

need to survive now beyond that is really unnecessary. This is not to

say that life before civilization was a paradise free from care or

worry, without physical hardships. But on the whole, I would argue that

archaeology can prove that civilization has increased suffering, rather

than decreasing it. And I bet if the trees or rivers or bears were

asked, they would say that the world was a lot better place before

civilization. Here is something, too, I wish to touch on. Anthropology

and archaeology are very anthropocentric disciplines, even though we

recognize humans as animals. It would be better if there was a

confluence of anthropology, archaeology and ecology. It is wrong to

separate the history of humans from the history of the rest of the

living things in an ecosystem we occupy. It is important to understand

the interplay between all living things. I try to address this in my

work.

Most of my experience is on prehistoric sites in North America, mostly

in the Appalachian region. And here is another basic fact I have no

doubt about as a result of my own personal experience in archaeology.

People lived here on the land for 14,000 years and left only the legacy

of ephemeral hearth features, scatters of stone flakes and pottery

shreds, and the occasional earth work. But what do I see on the same

landscape now, after only a couple of hundred years of civilization?

Dams, landfills, toxic waste dumps, nuclear power plants, cities like

New York, river poisoned by acid mine drainage, clear cuts. The contrast

is stark, real, unavoidable. Sure, people have always altered their

environments, but the scale of the alteration of matter undertaken in

modern civilization is absolutely unprecedented, what with concrete and

plastic, steel and all the toxic effluent produced by their manufacture,

the rate of the destruction has increased dramatically. It is there for

all of us to see, you don’t have to be an archaeologist.

Back to practicalities of the methodology...While there are several way

to approach archaeological research in terms of theory, the nuts and

bolts of the practice of archaeology is pretty standard everywhere.

Excavate and record — ideally everything. We dig with an eye to site

patterning of course, in addition to the recovery of artifacts. The

ideal is to be able to offer a story about what a site looked like and

how the people functioned there when it was occupied. Where were the

houses, what did they look like and what were they made of, where was

the hearth, where did they throw the garbage, how and where did they

manufacture the stone tools, where did they get the stone from, where

did they make the pottery, where did they keep domesticated animals if

they had them, where did they butcher the animals, what plants were they

eating, did they bury the dead, where, with what?

All these things are investigated using scientific analytical techniques

like radio carbon dating to determine the age of the site, chemical

analysis of the soil to discern activity areas, pollen analysis to

examine plant remains, lithic analysis to reveal stone tool reduction

techniques and sources of raw materials. All of this is description, not

very theoretical or controversial, merely presence or absence of

material, laundry list archaeology. And this makes it the most popular

specialty in archaeological research, it is the least intellectually

demanding, all lab work, measuring and weighing rocks, etc... Most are

content to do archaeology that has no theoretical content whatsoever, to

spend 7 years as a post-grad writing an 80,000 word dissertation

describing the assemblage of stone flakes from a lithic scatter at a

single site, big research conclusion? They got their rocks from a local

source (duh) and the flint knapper was right-handed not left-handed! Who

fucking cares?

What ends up happening in practice, in the real world of archaeology, is

usually less than ideal. We always have the developers breathing down

our necks to finish the job quickly. Keeping 30 archaeologists in the

field for a few months seems expensive to them, especially when they

don’t appreciate what it is exactly they are paying for. Corners get

cut, information gets lost. For example, at the site I worked on in

London the terms of the contract with the developer stipulated that we

would only go after the Roman component of the site, so we dug out

everything else on top of it (2 meters of Dark Ages — Medieval —

Victorian stuff, 1600 years worth) with picks and shovels and chucked it

on the dirt pile without really looking at it. And if there were any

remains of London’s indigenous people (Celts) below the Roman component,

we didn’t look for that either. There seems to be a civilized overtone

in regards to the treatment of ‘prehistory’ and primitive cultures. the

civilized societies, upholding Reason and Science, carry over the

imperialism of ‘Truth’ and ‘Objectivity’ to justify their own

destruction for the sake of ‘Progress,’ and a part of that is pushing

the sanctity of linear time and thought. Things are to be taken

literally, and in a strict order with strict purpose.

By being stuck in this straight ahead mentality, searching for ‘hard

facts,’ we downplay the social-cultural importance of myths, replaced

with the documented history: the game of conquers and colonizers. Our

view of the world has been twisted into one that doesn’t allow for a

cyclical understanding of self and being. It seems that anthropology and

archaeology embody this movement, seeking a past that has been

scientifically confirmed rather than one that has been passed on. For

this reason we have seen numerous accounts of primitive peoples who have

had to deal with cocky anthropologists and archaeologists who ‘know the

truth’. Is there some kind of middle ground to be reached between the

two ways of being, or are there limits on either side?

The scientific paradigm, with roots all the way back to the

Enlightenment, has been replacing all other worldviews in terms of its

truth value since its inception. It is very difficult now to assert that

the earth sits on a turtle’s back, or that humans arose from dream time.

Our civilization now finds the answers to the questions about the nature

of existence in molecules and mathematical equations, in the biology,

physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, engineering and economics

taught in institutions across the world.

Yet, I’m not convinced that traditional mythologies or oral histories

are more resistant to ideological manipulation, and would assume that

people always, if you were to ask them, used ‘reason’. The cosmologies

of the Mesopotamians or the Maya must have appeared ‘reasonable’ to

adherents. And what is ‘primitive’ science? The first Iron Age

metallurgy required an understanding of chemistry and physics, same with

making pottery, astronomy is an ancient preoccupation, and the first

domestication was essentially primitive applied biology, the earliest

genetic manipulation of plants and animals. And just as some of us will

resist harmful changes in society, in technology, in power

relationships, today, I am sure there were those who resisted ‘progress’

throughout human history.

I think you touch on a very important point here. Science provides us

with our modern creation myth in the form of DNA, the Big Bang, etc. —

although most would argue that it is more than a myth, that our

contemporary ideas about the world reflect reality more than at any

other time. This is arrogant and stupid. I’m certain these explanations

will not stand the test of time any better than the ones from a few

hundred years ago, which we now see as ignorant and quaint. I love

reading old books on sociology, psychology, biology, etc. It just

demonstrates that our scientifically proven ‘truths’ will someday look

as odd and out of step with reality as phrenology or the idea that women

are the inferior sex. I can live with the fact that there is no ultimate

truth out there to be discovered, only fluid interpretations of the

realities we face at the moment, this need not prevent one from taking a

stand.

And this is another important point illustrated by anthropology and

archaeology — what does accepting the concept of cultural relativism

really mean in terms of how one lives life? There have been, and still

are, so many different perspectives on some of the most basic elements

of living — on child rearing, on the relationships between the sexes, on

the treatment of animals, and the legitimacy of authority throughout

time. All we need to do is look at the differences of opinion between

cultures, even between individuals within cultures, past and present on

these matters and we see that worldviews are constantly changing — what

appears to be a ‘rational’ belief at one point in time may appear

ludicrous later. Even ‘traditional’ belief systems are evolved,

certainly not static. What I am interested in is what are the catalysts

for these changes and the results they have on our world.

Which traditional belief systems deserve a defense? According to the

traditional belief system in the West a couple of hundred years ago, as

a woman, I wouldn’t even have been able to engage in this discussion

with you. I would not have been able to receive an education and my

philosophical musings would not have found an outlet. As a political

science student I studied the history of political thought from Plato

and Socrates, through Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, to the ‘Founding

Fathers’. Not a woman’s voice among them until the late 19^(th) century

really in terms of what we learn at university. Does that mean that

women in the West thought nothing of politics for the past two-thousand

years? What changed, why can I now engage in this activity? In some

‘traditional’ cultures, women still can’t...is this wrong? How can you

argue that?

This illustrates an interesting dilemma. Is one time period’s or one

culture’s belief system, tradition, mythology, worldview,

weltanschauung, whatever you want to call it, better, truer, more

rational or enlightened than another? What aspects of a tradition are

bad and which are good, on what do you base such a value judgment when

we are all captives of ideological manipulation from which there is no

escape, no objective point of reference? Which features from my

traditional culture do I choose to respect and which do I reject. I have

no problem rejecting the Christian myths I was raised with, the central

tenets seem ridiculous to me now. I read philosopher Bertrand Russel’s

and other’s arguments against Christianity as a youth and promoted such

ideas incessantly in arguments at the dinner table with my Catholic

family. But I have a harder time deconstructing, for example, a Native

American or Taoist traditions where I see proponents as having a right

to believe the world is really quite a different place than science says

it is (and I actually feel more sympathetic to major portions of those

belief systems — a value judgment, where do I get my values?)

It’s best to reject all universalizing tendencies and respect the

diversity of opinion that exists, and therefore I guess I have to argue

the same thing about the Catholics, that they have a right to stick to

their traditional mythology even if it seems irrational, that science

provides evidence they are wrong about a lot of things. But what harm is

done if we don’t contradict the central notions of a tradition that

says, for example, women should obey men, or humans have dominion over

all living things. Perhaps cultures are like individuals, no one is all

good, or all bad. This is one of the other reasons that studying

anthropology can be as confusing as it is enlightening. When it comes to

making value judgments about the merits of cultural practices,

traditions, myths, where is the point at which you start if there is no

objective foundation for critique?

While I do see science is just another worldview among many, I also

think it was somehow inevitable that it arose when it did. Up until only

about the last 10,000 years distinct cultural groups could live in

relative isolation. When cultures came in contact on the peripheries of

territories there could be only a few outcomes. They could merge and

incorporate various beliefs and customs taken from each, or they would

remain apart, possibly warring, and while they might influence each

other, especially in terms of changes in material culture and

technology, belief systems regarding the origins and nature of humanity,

the legitimacy of power, and proper social conduct, though, might remain

markedly different, distinct.

We have come to a time now, unprecedented in human history, when almost

everyone through mass media, TV and so on, (which has by now infiltrated

even the most remote parts of the globe) knows of the existence of

everyone else. We have faced the reality that there have been a myriad

of worldviews held by the people in distinct geographical regions

throughout time, and must now consider the implications of the fact that

there is no ‘one way’ of doing or looking at things. Still, diverse

peoples all over the globe are compelled to merge. This is a recent

development coinciding with the rise of the scientific paradigm.

Science’s claims to objectivity act as a way for diverse peoples to

interact with one another on a sort of common ground, using a common

language, ‘reason’, the scientific method, to come to a agreement about

some very fundamental things. There is now a new global culture, and the

new global worldview is the scientific paradigm.

Science is taught pretty much the same in universities in Zaire, New

Guinea, Guatemala, China, Saudi Arabia — it is a universal language

accepted mostly as a result of its utility. You need to know

engineering, chemistry and physics to build an oil refinery or nuclear

bomb, biology to suppress known diseases, mathematics to run a complex

economy, etc. The fact that any diversity still exists in terms of

explanations of what human beings are, how the world came into existence

is, I fear, to be short lived now. There are no viable alternatives

being offered, except in the case of religious belief systems that are

now centuries old and becoming more untenable to their proponents with

each new generation.

Is the scientific worldview a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t like

the Christian worldview any better. I don’t like the mechanistic

attitude of science, and there is certainly no inherent ethics or

morality to agree or disagree with in it, with the possible exception of

this notion of ‘progress’ that assures that only the backward thinking

will resist its charms, oppose its supposedly value neutral project.

What science does have is an arrogant certainty of its superiority in

providing explanations of reality, to be a final authority. I guess it

deserves to be despised just on that basis. But I still remain confused

in a way, I feel I must pick and choose which elements to incorporate

into my own belief system now from all of the belief systems I have

become familiar with. (Note* don’t read the self-proclaimed

‘intellectual anarchist’ philosopher Feyerabend if this confusion is a

real problem for you, too. I’ll paraphrase his most intriguing

assertion...There is only one response to any statement that has ever

been made that is always ‘true’ — it is “That’s what you think!”)

We are constantly coming up against the problem of trying to rationally

argue against civilization (which I see as an outpour of ‘Reason’). But,

what we find from this archaeological data or connecting with wildness

at any level is a way of life that is beyond the rational/irrational

dichotomy.

Those who benefit from civilization also benefit from us having to play

by their terms. It seems that there are points at which these kinds of

‘rational’ argument don’t really cut it (not that there is either one or

the other). Do you feel that there are certain limits to ‘knowledge’ or

methods? Or that archaeology, as a science, has limits on its

dependability?

I see your point about the limits of rationality. Consider all of the

evidence for widespread environmental destruction as a result of the

project of civilization. The scientists can put ‘the facts’ out there

proving we are basically on a course of planetary self-destruction.

Describing the effects of global warming, air pollution, habitat

destruction, nuclear waste toxicity, over-population, etc., provides

‘rational’ grounds for arguing for changing the cultural practices

producing these effects. But rather than suggesting we rethink the

project of civilization in light of its detrimental impacts on our

relationship with the natural world and make fundamental changes that

would really address these concerns, there is this false hope that more

and more science and technology will be able ‘fix’ any problems science

and technology have created. This illustrates the limits, and the

arrogance, of the scientific paradigm. That even in the face of cogent

arguments that civilization is the sickness, there exists a belief that

in civilization also lies the cure. Is this rational or irrational?

Whether or not ideas are considered rational or irrational seems to have

more to do with power than the logical consistency of the arguments

offered in support of one position or another. Thriving in this system

of oligarchy (rule of the few) that we do requires a pragmatic,

Machiavellian stratagem. Those in power will promote the science that

serves their aims, and attack the science that would erode their power.

It comes down to being less about the elusive, value-neutral and

objective face of science in theory, than the actualities of science in

practice in the hands of the powerful. The resistance is forced, in a

way, to counter-attack on all fronts and one of these fronts is in the

realm of science. I see my work as taking place on this battlefield.

You are right, here we are playing by their rules, but as JZ has pointed

out, as soon as the use of language became our dominant method of social

intercourse we were on the road to symbolic, as opposed to authentic,

association. I believe that there is a constant battle going on in our

minds and bodies between rationality, as epitomized by the constant

intellectualizing of existence that takes place in the realm of

language, and real, authentic, sensual experience of each other and the

world around us. I know I perceive this personally and I sympathize with

your apparent frustration, sometimes the cacophony of voices, of

opinions, is overwhelming, disconcerting, better to just act and ask

questions later. I know that my inspiration for action comes more from

my gut than my mind, I try to make myself trust this facet of my

personality more.

In my more cynical moments I worry that my work, my writing might be so

much blah, blah, blah. That even having this knowledge of the history of

civilization, its costs and consequences, offering cogent arguments

against it, producing archaeological evidence to support my conclusions,

it is all just talk and wonder if words have the power to change things

at all? Like all activist/writers, I imagine, I struggle with trying to

find the best way to say things, not wanting to reproduce an ideology or

sound dogmatic. Certainly the power of rational, scientific arguments

against civilization is limited, the knowledge itself is obviously not

enough to produce the desired effect, i.e. the destruction of

civilization, or else it would have occurred by now. It takes something

more than words, it takes action and part of the way that people arrive

at the decision to take action is to have a logically consistent

(rational) reasoning for doing so. I wouldn’t argue that my desire to

see civilization collapse is irrational, but the rational aspects of my

motives represent only part of my commitment. My study of archaeology is

‘dependable’, inasmuch as my search for understanding is an ongoing

process that I can always depend on to provide more food for thought.

As I said, I do not see archaeology as an exclusively scientific

endeavor. I recognize the political, and even the poetic, aspects of the

project of telling the story of humanity. But I do feel compelled to

engage my colleagues in a debate about what effects our stories produce,

do they support the status quo, the idea that civilization is a ‘good’

thing? Or does the knowledge we produce have within it the most damning

indictment of civilization possible? I keep working because I am

convinced archaeological theory and data do provide a foundation on

which we can construct a profound and compelling critique that may also

be used a basis for action.

It is undeniable that a good deal of archaeological work has been

digging up people’s pasts. A great deal of controversy has arisen when

there is the often occurrence of archaeologists digging up grave sites

and tearing apart sacred areas. At what point should lines be drawn?

I will always side with the wishes of the indigenous people with regard

to the treatment of archaeological sites and remains as a matter of

principle. The politics of the present take precedence in my mind. I

don’t like nationalistic tendencies, but I understand the realities of

the racist past of anthropology and abhor the ongoing political

subjugation and marginalization of indigenous peoples. I can sympathize

with all colonized people’s desires to assert themselves politically in

the present and gain control of their pasts. One interesting exercise I

used to do with my students in the UK is ask them to consider how they

would feel if Britain had lost WWII, the country occupied and university

posts filled by German archaeologists in charge of doing all the

archaeology, writing the prehistory and history of England.

Of course, there is no one voice among the Native Americans on this

matter so it gets even more complicated. Some Native groups and

individuals believe that archaeology shouldn’t be done at all, and some

run their own archaeological services or work closely with hired CRM

archaeologists because they want to know the things archaeology can

discover about ‘their’ past (and this is also an interesting question,

whose past is it? It’s very difficult to say that a living population’s

ancestors were the ones who created a 10,000 year old site, and in one

case I saw the mortal enemies of a group gain possession of their

opponents grave goods because the other culture lost the war and this

modern tribe’s ancestors then took over the site — strange, that).

And I would say that archaeologists and Native Americans would both

agree that sacred sites should be protected and preserved, even though

the archaeologists will go in and dig them up once the preservation

battle has been lost through the government’s exercise of imminent

domain. Even in the legislation regarding archaeological resources it

states that avoidance and preservation should be the first choice, if at

all possible. But it is not a genuine sentiment as the archaeologists

know that if a road or a new prison needs to be built, nothing will stop

it and they will do the dig anyway.

What is the knowledge of artifacts? How does this help us?

Langdon Winner, a philosopher who writes about technology has said, “All

artifacts have politics.” I think this point can’t be stressed enough.

To choose to utilize a particular form of technology is to choose a

particular form of social and political life. Take the technological

adaptation of domestication. It completely changed those societies who

‘chose’ it. Instead of people meeting their daily needs of food,

clothing and shelter by directly interacting with the natural

environment as hunter gatherers do, meeting these needs was now mediated

by social relationships, for the first time giving one real power over

another. The origins of social inequality and the origins of

domestication are directly linked. Look at how things changed once the

wheel or writing was invented. In recent times, the television, the

automobile, the computer — these artifacts have profoundly changed

society. The things are now in the saddle and they ride us.

Knowledge of how changes in material culture influence society adds

another layer of understanding. Artifacts represent the physical remains

of the processes by which cultures change. I remember the first time I

read ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’. I thought it was brilliant on

this issue of how much technology influences society. There are lots of

others who have written about this, Zerzan of course, also Mumford and

the Frankfurt School philosophers Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse.

Archaeologists are acutely aware of how technological changes,

represented in the archaeological record, precipitate changes in social

relationships and human’s relationships with the natural world. They

write now about the social life of things, how the artifacts themselves

are imbued with social meaning.

Mainstream anarchism’s reluctance to acknowledge the role of material

culture in dictating social relationships is its great downfall. On the

road with JZ we’ve noticed how the anarchists will always come to argue

against the AP perspective and in support of the artifacts of

civilization — asserting that we can have our cake (electricity,

automobiles, computers) and eat it too (a free anarchist society). This

is simply not true, the two are mutually exclusive. All the artifacts we

surround ourselves with in civilization require division of labor and

control, the antithesis of anarchy, control of a complex network of

social relationships to manufacture, distribute and maintain them.

Someone has to work on the assembly line, sell things to people, drive

the trucks, clean up the shit, and, most importantly, perhaps, manage

all of this. A free anarchist society is absolutely impossible to

achieve in an industrial society. It seems so obvious to me. As long as

we hold on to this false idea that we need all of these artifacts we

will continue on this socially and environmentally destructive path

called civilization.

So archaeology demonstrates we don’t need civilization, why do people

still cling to it? To me this is perhaps the most important question to

explore. How do people become convinced that we need all of this to

survive, be happy, lead meaningful lives when the exact opposite is

true? My hope is that the work of archaeologists, our knowledge of how

all artifacts have politics, how technology influences society, will

deconstruct this fundamental notion of the benefits of civilization.

Do you feel that there’s a bit of defeatism in archaeology? An

understanding that someone is going to dig these up or plow over them,

maybe we should try and learn from them or ‘preserve’ them? Is there an

alternative to that take on things?

I have real problems with this, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”

mentality. Joining them is the worst thing we can do. What ends up

happening to all this information we are getting paid to preserve? It is

a well-known and oft lamented fact that the vast majority of

archaeological reports produced will just end up filed in the basements

of State Historic Preservation Offices, never seen by anyone again.

Technically, the reports are the property of the client and the

archaeologists can’t release them without the client’s permission. Often

the clients don’t want the fact that they are destroying a community’s

cultural heritage publicized, so it is a vicious circle. Yes, we are

preserving the information, but only a very small portion of the

population will ever have a chance to consider it. Archaeologists tend

to publish highly technical reports that are inaccessible to the public.

All the artifacts will be taken out of the community and put into

storage in the basements with the reports.

The work we do is relevant to the present. People find archaeology

interesting. When we swoop into a small town rural Kentucky we interact

with the locals, check into a motel, go drink in the local bars. Someone

will always ask what we are doing there. “We are archaeologists”. “Wow,

what are you doing here? My grandfather found an arrowhead once down by

the creek....there is an old cabin in the woods by my house...what are

you finding?” We cant say for sure whether or not making someone aware

of the prehistory and history of their community will result in a life

changing experience that prompts them to question authority and join the

revolution, but the more knowledge people have — about the way things

were, and the way things are now, for that matter — the better in my

opinion. It gives a sense of perspective that is missed without an

understanding of history.

I’ve always argued that archaeology needs to be more than elites

satisfying the intellectual curiosity of other elites. I do archaeology

with an overtly political agenda, a radical one. I believe the knowledge

produced by archaeologists has revolutionary potential. I use

archaeological research to support an argument that an anarchist society

is not only possible, but preferable. I use my understanding of the

history of civilization to critique it. So I’ve made a deal with the

devil, I work on archaeological sites ahead of development projects, but

always with an eye to using this knowledge to subvert the dominant

paradigm, to argue for revolutionary social change. I have a very hard

time relating to people who don’t give a shit, including other

archaeologists. I get angry with those who think it is all just about

making a living and finding cool stuff. That’s why I write as much about

the politics of archaeology as I do green anarchism. I think all

archaeologists are potential green anarchists if they would just get

over this feeling of disempowerment. Archaeologists are as apathetic as

most people, and it is worse for them because they know!

Closing comments.

If my study of archaeology is an attempt to better comprehend reality in

order to effect change in the world I live in, so far the results have

been pretty disappointing. The reality that really speaks to me does not

come from intellectual engagement, rather it comes from this place I

always come back to, where I am now. What grounds me, what inspires me

is hearing the sound of this river in the background, seeing the way the

steep, forested mountain looks in sunshine of the fall with the hawk

circling against the blue sky, an occasional interaction with fox, elk,

bear, deer, chipmunk, squirrel, porcupine, raccoon, possum, or skunk,

learning when to plant and harvest my garden, when the blackberries,

chestnuts, mushrooms, apples, pears, and grapes are ready for

collecting. I look for what is real about the world in nature, where I

can connect with what exists beyond the boundaries of civilization. Here

I am one living thing living among other living things. Perhaps in my

study of prehistory I find the world I wished I lived in, and I believe

I share this feeling with others and seek to communicate with them.

I suppose all activists feel they never do enough, are always looking

for more effective ways to fight. What action can I take that would make

a difference? One of the things that antagonistic opponents will always

say when confronted with AP thought is, “Well, if you really believe

people should live that way, why don’t you?” My answer has pretty much

remained the same for the past two decades — I want to, I will, someday.

But for now I feel I have to stay and fight, I feel my own personal

escape would be self-serving at this point in time. So I write, I riot,

I lecture, I study, I argue about philosophy and politics with friends

and enemies, I throw pies at figures of authority and try to support my

comrades. I wait and watch for signs that civilization is collapsing and

hope, in some small way, I can help give it a push.

Anarchy and Anthopology

(from Species Traitor #3)

As Theresa Kintz points out in her interview, anthropology (referring

here to the general field that consists of biological/physical

anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics), like

all sciences, is a tool of the civilized. Radical anthropologist Stanley

Diamond has written: “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and

repression at home.” The role of science has been to justify and perfect

that conquest and repression, and anthropology isn’t an exception.

However, through the work of anthropologists (both unintentionally and

intentional) we’ve come to a greater understanding of the human-animal

and the anarchist state we’ve lived in for over 99% of our existence. We

come against the problem of having to work with such tools of the

civilizers while trying to destroy the entire mental and physical system

that originated it.

Outsiders Looking In and Away

The original anthropologists primarily worked from the accounts of

conquistadors, missionaries and travelers bringing back news of the

‘savages’ beyond the realms of civilization. The two options that the

conquerors saw for the ‘primitives’ was to wipe them out or assimilate

them, though as we have historically seen, both have led to similar

outcomes. The assimilation was spearheaded by missionaries and those who

found these people had more value alive (as labor) than dead, although

the two are hardly separable. The hopes of the missionaries would be to

pave the way for a ‘friendly’ relationship and to ‘civilize’ the

‘savages’ through their God.

The work of the time would predominately be self-serving accounts of the

rise to civilization from ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’. The major turn

would be with Franz Boas who focused on the need for direct field work

around the turn of the century. Boas, a German immigrant to the United

States, saw the natives of this country being slaughtered off and fast.

His concern was that all of this knowledge would die off with these

people and began the turn of anthropological work to recording the

entirety of the knowledge being destroyed.

With Boas came the importance of describing and cataloguing aspects of

people. This kind of approach is work of the scientist. Despite what

good intentions Boas and his followers had, their work was entirely

subjective. By describing everything that one sees, there is no kind of

‘objectivity’. There is only a situation that German philosopher Hans

Peter Duerr calls “riding the fence”, meaning that there is a person

trying to understand one reality to translate it to those in another

reality. That person then is stuck in the middle, always a part of one

culture and is therefore only capable of observing the other culture

through their perceptions. What Duerr points to is that there is no kind

of ‘scientific method’ that can even begin to bring about what it

proposes it will . In this case, that is the field of anthropology

acting as the study of humans, or as Stanley Diamond says, “the study of

men in crisis by men in crisis.”

The process that Boas started was furthered by Polish anthropologist

Bronislaw Malinowski a few decades later after his work with the

Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Malinowski’s initial fieldwork there

ended up lasting longer as he moved onto a remote island to avoid

deportation during World War One. Over this period he became immersed in

Trobriand culture, defining what he would later call

“participant-observation”. Duerr comes to mind as I can see Malinowski

the scientist becoming somewhat emerged into this ‘primitive’ society to

return to Europe. Knowing his situation wasn’t permanent he always had a

foot out the door in some respects.

I don’t feel this wipes all validity from his work, I just feel that

when looking at these cases, these are all things we have to consider.

This kind of ‘observation’ carries with it the scientism of objectivity,

believing that the wholeness of a culture can be observed and understood

from neutrality. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has

recognized that while science is still myth, it carries the possibility

of finding a ‘factual reality’. He states: “Science will never give us

all the answers. What we can try to do is to increase very slowly the

number and the quality of the answers we are able to give, and this, I

think, we can do only through science.” Through even this rather liberal

assessment we are left with the belief in ‘hard facts’, and while

Lévi-Strauss has denied ‘scientism’ he has none-the-less carried its

underpinnings.

Through this, all of the positive outcomes of anthropology must also be

understood in a way that is independent of civilized assertions. What we

have seen from the field of anthropology and understanding the problems

we face now is that “[f]undamentally we are people of the Pleistocene” ,

we are gatherer-hunters. The anarcho-primitivist critique takes this

understanding very seriously, meaning that civilization is a recent

invention and the effects of domestication are just a sign of our urging

to return to the way of life that has shaped our being. With this, there

is little reason why we shouldn’t uphold this kind of information,

because it speaks directly to the repressed gatherer-hunter in all of us

civilized peoples. What we should always be wary of is the dry scientism

that underlies the specific search that anthropology takes on.

Creating Reality

In his book, Red Earth, White Lies, Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. opens

up questions about “the myth of scientific fact”. His drive in this was

to debate the well established theory that Native Americans arrived on

this continent by crossing the Bering Strait within the last 20,000

years (one of the more modestly accepted estimates). In the eyes of

Deloria and other Native Americans (though not all) this theory,

established as ‘fact’, is racist. I’m concerned in certain ways about

validity of some arguments which may be based on ‘land claim’ issues,

which has been an accusation against this particular book. As an

anarchist, I feel that nothing makes any specific ‘land’ someone’s

‘property’, although I understand this kind of legal assertion against

governments. Regardless of this possibility, I find that a lot of the

arguments are worthy of heavy consideration.

What Deloria draws upon in this book are the ways in which anthropology,

as a science, will pick and choose what ‘evidence’ it will bring into

its ‘factual’ reality (although Deloria is guilty of this as well). This

is a serious problem of all scientific understandings, a conception of a

kind of ‘absolute truth’ which underlies all of existence (this

dependency on ‘absolute truth’ is the reason that I would qualify most

religion as science). What happens is that the possibilities for what is

‘real’ are framed only within what is ‘known as fact’ for those who are

observing. A lot of people have a hard time understanding that science

is all just theorizing, in this way it becomes only possible to think of

people coming into this continent through the Bering Strait. I can’t say

I take the ‘science’ side or the ‘indigenous’ side (since neither really

exist), but I think that scientific ‘fact’ has limited our ability to

look to other possibilities.

The problem, as I see it, isn’t in trying to figure out what is ‘right’

or ‘wrong’ but realizing that a system that carries such values and can

impose them upon others is the problem. I, like Theresa, have little

interest in battling myths with others, and as I will point to later,

feel that a mythic, ecological consciousness is important to rewilding

our lives, but I feel that anthropology can be vital only in

deconstructing the universalized and institutionalized myths that

underlie and maintain civilization.

Cataloguing Conquest

The past of archaeology isn’t much different than the rest of

anthropology. The kind of observation that Malinowski brought into the

fieldwork of anthropology could be said to be the basis of

archaeological digs. It wasn’t till after Darwin’s Descent of Man (1859)

that archaeologists would even recognize the past as existing outside

the 6,000 year span that the Church allowed since ‘creation’. In the new

world it wasn’t till Boas criticisms came to reshape the way digs were

done. Archaeological digs, as we know them now, didn’t take their

current form till the 1960’s through the work of Lewis Binford after the

1947 origin of the Carbon-14 dating technique, explicit use of

evolutionary theory, employment of cultural and ecological concepts, and

the use of systems theory.

Archaeology is essentially the study of the past through material

remains. The work of archaeologists can only really be useful when put

into context with how certain remains are used by more recently observed

peoples or common usage of similar materials. What archaeology really

has to work with is finding the exact location of things in the earth.

Their work is to literally dig up the past and theorize on the

implications of their findings. In many ways this is working with a huge

disadvantage and moving into a lot of speculation, but as Theresa points

out, there is a lot that can be learned from this despite the handicap.

Some have taken these findings and added to the critique of

civilization, such as John Zerzan, Jared Diamond, and Clive Ponting to

name only a few.

What I see as problematic here is the actualities of all of this. While

I see no point in discrediting the effects of all the collected

information that points to the inherent problems of civilization, I do

think there may be a point when this becomes self-serving. I’m not

interested in ever saying that we should stop looking, but I’m concerned

that this search has overcome the possibilities that are being opened

up. When I was writing these questions to Theresa, something was

constantly coming into my mind; that we know that civilization is fucked

up and that this is not the way of life that humans have become

ecologically evolved into, but how much do we have to constantly

reassert it before we do something about it. I’m not accusing these

folks of not trying to do something, but I become concerned in general.

Looking into the fields of anthropology, I constantly see people like

Boas who are concerned with constantly recording and cataloguing all the

problems of civilization. What comes to mind is a photograph from the

Vietnam War of three American soldiers raping a Vietnamese woman. The

war photographer (as well as the photographer and journalist in general)

have made it their work to constantly record the destruction that is

occurring, possibly with the hopes that what they have recorded may spur

others to action. How much does it take before we stop just recording

hoping that someone else will come along before we act? In many ways the

anthropologist is just like that war photographer, watching destruction

take place right before their eyes and recording it. Perhaps this is the

success of domestication in disempowering individuals to feel that they

can have no impact on the situation, but my interests remain purely

revolutionary. I again am forced to ask what it will take before we stop

being mere observers as our home and all life is being destroyed before

we do something about it. I feel anthropology can serve as a weapon

against the civilized ‘reality’, but I’m afraid that so long as it

remains within scientific understanding it will seek to only make us all

participant-observers to destruction.

As Theresa has mentioned, the work of the archaeologists is the business

before the bulldozers. This can be a tough situation. Knowing that

developers will completely destroy the land without regard would it be

doing something positive to try and pull out the pieces of human past

that will be plowed away? Can it serve as a kind of deterrent against

developers or is a dig just another method of clearing out the land,

whether developers follow or not? Most importantly, I’m concerned with

finding a way of trying to stop the destruction from the start, and not

trying to make the best of a shitty situation.

Revolutionary Potential

The work of radical anthropologists like Theresa, Pierre Clastres,

Marshall Sahlins, Richard B. Lee, and Stanley Diamond (to name a few) is

vital to moving anarchist critique and action. What is being uncovered

by anthropology is too valuable to be discarded, and it is inspiring to

see people from within these fields realizing the potential influence of

their work. However, it is equally important to use that evidence as not

just ‘findings’ and ‘evidence’. To move beyond civilization we will need

to use this kind of knowledge to reawaken the wildness that sleeps

within us. Anthropology will remain vital only so long as it speaks to

us and we are able to use it without becoming it.

The exact same applies to history and other sciences. I personally feel

that the work of the evolutionary theorists was vital to overthrow the

scientific mythology of the religious conquerors. However, as a

rewilding human, I’m forced to question the potential of this finding.

To what degree is it important that we ‘know’ the specifics of our

entire past? What is important is a mythological

(anti-institutionalized) consciousness that enhances who we are within

the context of the community of life that we are a part of. The success

of civilization exists in reducing our reality to a backdrop of things

that we exist apart from.

What I’m referring to above isn’t a kind of intentional ignorance or

turning the cheek on ‘knowledge’, but to question what is a part of the

human-animal. From my own understanding, a mythic, unwritten view is one

that is able to flow with the world and can achieve what we’d hope to

get from history and science without subjective implications on the

world that we are theorizing about. The problem that is being opened

here is getting to there from here. I’m interested in a reawakening of

primal consciousness that has been repressed by civilized domestication

in order to justify and continue conquest and exploitation. We are

constantly up against questions of how can we use these things that

shape the civilized reality in order to destroy it. Towards this I can

only point to what I think is problematic, in this case being any kind

of complete faith in sciences like anthropology and using what speaks to

my being without disregarding what I just don’t care for.

The point in extending on this discussion is to find a way of using

these kinds of findings without using the system that has produced them.

I feel that a revolt against civilization will require a revolt against

the scientism of civilization (Reason). What Theresa has laid out here

is a view from inside the field about what is going on. I don’t agree

entirely with her view, but I can respect her attempts to overturn from

within without preoccupation or delusions of anthropology as the

‘wonderscience’ (as Lévi-Strauss surely would see it). The path to

anarchy will require calling into question all of the ‘sacred cows’ that

have laid the path for rational dissent so that we can return to our

primal being.

And the Spectacle Goes On

from Species Traitor #2

Beneath the cries for ‘justice’ and ‘sorrow’ for loved ones that we

never even knew existed, the vast field of emptiness which brings us

half-heartedly into the techno-virtual remnants of ‘e-communities’;

herein lies the drive, the need, the feeling of being a part of

something bigger than ourselves.

The truth is that I, and most likely, most, Americans felt little sorrow

for those whose lives were taken in the ‘tragedy’ of September 11, 2001.

The shocking horror of reality: the revulsion of admitting to the sin of

being incapable of living in the globalized, techno-industrialized

State.

The mass, intentional killing of any being (even stripped of conspired,

marketable sentiments) is enough to wretch the drowning ruins of a soul.

The images of humans falling to their deaths from the pyramids they have

lived, and now, died to build and maintain; the scattered bits of bodies

being pulled up from the wreckage; the ‘heroes’ who have tried to hold

together the reality they have worked so hard to keep afloat; anger,

fear, lust, benevolence, greed, revenge, offense, defense, offense;

positives and negatives flowing together in a stream of consciousness

that only a 6 digit salary dreamer could mend. All of this wrapped up in

a neat little package, for you and I to take as you may. Nothing stated,

but everything suggested: there are no accidents in the Spectacle.

We shrink in disgust, overcome by feelings of nausea. First the initial

reaction: the instinctual reaction, then by an uncertainty: chaos. In

this brief instant, everything and anything is possible, nothing is

there to grasp onto and yet we instinctually grasp onto each other: the

dead finding life in death. It is freefall: you know for sure the place

that you were just in, but the anxiety of not knowing where you will be

in the next moment floods over in a field of ecstasy.

We see them, images of THEM, the most precious moment of THEIR lives

paraded before our eyes: even death is mediated. The shocking look on

the eyes of those around them, moisten over. This intermixed with the

professionals mocking the instinctual response. Them, they, us, we...WE

the people, WE the citizens, WE the public, WE the innocent, the

brutalizers, the victims, the instigators, the recipients, the viewers:

THE AUDIENCE.

Every second of an isolated incident, laid out before US, over and over

again. A real life adventure: a tragedy, laid out to unfold itself.

There are scriptors, but they go unseen. We are the unknowing, yet

willing, actors. WE respond to the cues, WE go through the motions; we

strive for a comfort zone, a place to be...we pause for station

identification.

We exist here and now: that is us; YOU and I, autonomous individuals.

There is a time and place for us and that is what is going on while we

exist in the Spectacle: that is then, behind, in front, above, below,

next to; US and WE, historical beings with an agenda, a plan, a path.

You and I are mortals, tangible beings; we are capable of being anything

within our physical and mental binds. You and I posses the ability to

transcend are legacies, WE exist, but not quite: WE are capable of

fulfilling our positions within the larger mechanism. WE and US are the

sands of time: come as fast as we go, only to be buried below the

overbearing importance of the Future. US and WE are immortal in our own

eyes, OUR eyes of history, progress. WE have big plans, WE have manifest

destiny.

You and I don’t exceed our boundaries: when there is only now, thrones

just lose their importance. Happiness is tangible, it is within reach,

it is here, not there. You and I may play, we may fight, we may love, we

may, we can, we can forgive and forget: we are. We can build upon common

wants and desires, enhance happiness now, and liberty, we could care

less about the pursuit of something inherent to our being.

US and WE make boundaries, and WE exist to move them further into the

unknown; to conquer, to claim, to raise flags, to build. Happiness

exists in the pursuit, IT is out there, we don’t know what it is, but we

will THEN. WE can’t, WE may not, WE are regulated. WE and US are

workers, builders, past, time capsules, our own martyrs: US and WE are

sacrifices. WE are the collective consciousness, WE are CULTURE, WE are

EMPIRE, WE will be known; US and WE are nation-states. WE do as WE must

to ensure fluidity and constant progress. WE forget nothing, WE forgive

nothing, WE give nothing. Respect is earned, and worth is rewarded by

the memories and functions left behind. WE build statues, a little bit

of US in each of THEM. WE are civilization, WE are the Spectacle.

The Spectacle is the lot of US and WE; it is our teacher and our mirror.

The mirror is finely tuned by THE teachers, who teach that the only

thing more important than the legacy we see, is the ensuring that that

legacy is carried on, full force, into the future. WE look ahead, WE

spoke when spoken to, WE treat with civilized curiosity. WE re noble, as

our teachers have defined and exemplified. WE have display cases, OUR

museums, to show what WE have come from, how WE have bettered ourselves:

WHAT WE ARE NOT.

The Spectacle requires constant reinforcement, positive and negative we

are told. The fruits of EMPIRE may cause corruption, if not properly

mediated and handled. WE are noble, WE and US are GODS. The Spectacle is

our direction, our aim; it is US and WE, our punishment and our reward.

WE and Us bow and pray to the Spectacle. WE know our roles and realize

that hard work and prosperity in the Spectacle is good. Good is a

retainer for the coming happiness, the Future. WE are inferior, unless

otherwise specified. Training and good breeding are upstanding. The

Spectacle produces many great things; take joy in them, but never forget

about the Big Plans: this is what WE are told; this is what we are

taught.

WE and US know that teaching is best left to Experts. Over the years we

accumulate more knowledge of the Spectacle: the benefit of walking the

railroad of Progress. Experts are chosen in every field of Possibility.

Mediation is more of protection than anything, “it’s in your best

interests”. The Spectacle realizes the vulnerability of the human: the

reoccurrence of our animal nature. IT recognizes that we must not be

animals anymore, WE must tame our instincts: WE call it Reason. In times

of war, the revenge of legacy, the inability to move on, the distancing

of YOU and I, Experts become all the more necessary. IT is only a test,

in case of any actual emergency, further directions will follow. WE have

Order; WE have Control, WE HAVE...

WE are beyond chaos, WE are Civilized, WE are better, we are WE, and WE

must Win.

YOU and I are horrified, we are scared. We don’t know how to react. We

cling, we pack up, we gather, we seek comfort. We follow our instincts,

we trust each other. We, YOU and I, don’t understand, we don’t

understand any of it. Things don’t seem so clear, we begin to wonder, we

begin to worry about Tomorrow, we begin to question the sanctity of the

Future. The actions of YOU and I are understandable, that is what makes

them predictable. Predictability is a Science, that is a tenet of the

Spectacle: a game of Teachers. Predictions are made based on Empirical

Evidence, simulations are done in controlled environments: this is only

a test.

The tests go on constantly, to weed out unnecessary elements: the

Science of eliminating the bad seeds. Situations like this are prepared

for and all possibilities are accounted for. As doped up on over- and

under-the counter drugs, on the screen drugs, 9–5 drugs, the cash drug,

the Simulated experience, the role playing: our instincts pop up a

little bit. Chaos stands out on the Spectacles’ radars, and IT goes into

overdrive. IT reacts by asserting Control, by grabbing out, by

reformulating, redefining, and reasserting CONTROl. WE succumb to what

WE have ‘always’ known.

IT is only a test. YOU and I resort to the instincts we have been taught

to ignore. US and WE aren’t as important for that brief period, and it

is apparent everywhere. The Spectacle dissolves YOU and I back into IT.

IT emphasizes new words; US, WE, PROTECT, REVENGE, this is our HERITAGE,

OUR, WE, US, AMERICA: One Nation, Under GOD, indivisible...

The new lesson is being subtly implanted. WE, glued to the electronic

Teachers; the computers, the televisions, the machinery, sit idly by and

watch. We see it over and over again, a perpetual lope of death and

destruction. We watch the bodies fall, we watch the bodies crush, we see

the abrupt end of lives only half lived: being a society of Dreamers. We

see this, and we see THEM. They are not the conventional Teachers, but

THEY serve the same purpose. The talking heads of the studios give US

the example of how to react, how to feel, how to see the situation: over

and over and over again. This is what WE will see; this is what WE will

remember. They professionally produced emotions and the civilized

interpretation of Death. The mediation of mediation. The words between

the lines read: WE are still here, and WE have not abandoned YOU, seek

solace in OUR ‘arms’. Let this be OUR fight. This is what WE are raised

to know, this is how WE react.

The sad truth is that it happens everyday. The only test here was that

it backfired, if it can even be called that. The whole scenario is a

reaffirmation, a stimulation, a tightening of the leash. WE bow to the

mythical, immortal STATE, the Spectacle. We swallow IT up whole, WE shed

tears, no longer of instinct and care and questioning, but of Fury and

Hate: WE seek REVENGE. The circle is complete.

The continuation of the Spectacle, the laying of LEGACY, the path of

Progress, requires this Control: this level of faith and servitude. The

‘necessary evils’ are more ingrained in OUR being, WE and US, the

Spectacle, WE are on a mission. There is no YOU and I here, only US and

THEM. WE are not free beings brought together, but legacies, and

entities in constant conflict: one Winner takes all. The greatest award

for conquering is that the Winner Controls the merged PAST.

It happens everyday, but it happens THERE. IT never happens to US, but

examples must be made. WE and US must show with vigor that WE are

something, a force to be reckoned with. The truth is You and I would

never let this happen, but the reality is US and WE: EMPIRE, WE do this.

IT makes US, IT defines US, IT lets us be US. It is was we are tuned to

see in our mirror, our museums, OUR past, OUR, OUR, OUR...

YOU and I would have never known IT happened. YOU and I would not

pillage the planet and destroy the greater community of free beings:

autonomous life, to find something that exists in everything, everything

but US and WE, the Spectacle: CIVILIZATION. YOU and I would not create a

global economy, we would not build towers, statues, monuments,

his-story: YOU and I are content with existing. We are the soul of life,

the source of happiness, joy, the reason for living; and we don’t have

to send machines across the universe to discover that. YOU and I are

alive, WE and US are dead, pages to a wilting EMPIRE that will have only

itself to ever see its’ throne. IT will rot, IT won’t last forever, IT

will only ever be IT. IT is a prison that we build and maintain. IT

rewards by selling back broken pieces of YOU and I, the free beings IT

seeks to destroy, to break, to tame.

YOU and I still exist, under the guise of US and WE. IN the ruin of

Progress, we find each other, the YOU and I, find each other. You and I

are capable, we can end US and WE, we can end EMPIRE: CIVILIZATION, we

can do it, together and on our own, can, will, may...

The Spectacle can be turned off, freedom still exists for YOU and I, for

us: all the YOU and I’s of the world. It is that which will know joy,

which will know life. The Spectacle only knows THEN, YOU and I can find

NOW.

Theses on the Fall of Civilization or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

and Embrace the Coming Collapse

from Species Traitor #2

“Civilization, synonym of Capital, Technology and the Modern World,

called Leviathan by Hobbes and Western Spirit by Turner, is as racked by

decomposition as any earlier Leviathan. But Civilization is not one

Leviathan among many. It is The One. Its final decomposition is

Leviathan’s end. After twenty centuries of stony sleep vexed to

nightmare by a rocking cradle, the sleeper is about to wake to the

cadences of a long-forgotten music or to the eternal silence of death

without a morrow.”

— Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan

Revolutionary theory, aimed at dismantling either the State or the whole

of civilization, is plagued by authoritative delusions. The worst and

best case scenarios are played out as absolute truths, while it seems

obvious that we can’t predict the future, only influence it. I hold to

the notion that civilization will inevitably fall, although, I can’t say

when or how, or even for sure. The two possibilities for this seem to be

either external or internal based, although each is a huge range of

potential scenarios. I can’t pretend to know more than a fraction, and

while it can be an interesting mind game, it may never be more than

that.

To me, it seems the most commonly held perceptions towards this notion

are based off; a catastrophic excess spawning disaster (ecological or,

possibly, technological), a conscious revolt or refusal, or a

semi-conscious ‘final shove’ (enacted by a percentage of the

population).

The possibility of collapse from ecological excess is quite compelling.

It becomes hard to envision anything short of catastrophe stopping the

civilized disaster. In some cases, the best we can do is prepare for

this (although the practice should be done regularly). We could dwell on

the ways this may play out, or even project, based on previous

occurrences, but that alone offers little to the extended Society. Even

if it seems pointless or exhausted, or the State may kill itself off, a

desire to live free of civilization should enact response. We have no

obligations, but it seems to make sense that regardless of outcomes, we

should always resist, and at least try to be a cog in the mega-machine.

It seems that optimism in the fall of civilization is increasingly rare

as the State extends its bounds to give the illusion of more control and

more coercive power. It is true, and should never be overlooked, that

the State is very powerful. We are not facing an easy enemy, or despite

misconceptions, one that would flutter away with the ease of a thought

(which seems to be a crucial starting point, but no ends in itself). We

are facing a very brutal and coercive warring State, one that has shown

that it does not take to opposition lightly. This is the reality of our

current context. There should be no candy coating of the fact that we

are, and have always been, in a constant clash with ‘the powers that

be’. This is a war, not one we are waging, but one in which we refuse to

be defeated, where we refuse to be slaves, and our lives are at stake.

This is civilization against everything else on the planet. Such things

as class war, race war, civil war, and so on are merely functions within

it, little blurbs to keep attention away from the real source of all

oppression. This isn’t to say these things don’t exist, it doesn’t take

much to see the effects of the class and race war within westernized

societies, but to ‘wage’ these are to fight on false fronts: futile

battles of the defeated. The fact that thousands of poor, college

educated, and middle class workerists are urging the need for a ‘class

war’ is ignoring the fact that the ruling class has already declared and

won that war from their inception. Exploitation of workers is very real,

but will never gain ground beyond the enemies’ lines as the systems of

work, production and other civilized vices continue.

The reality of this war, and especially methods of attack are not going

to be the center of discussion in this essay (while some points make

arise). These are things that are not set in stone and continually flow

to meet the needs of those who seek to overcome the institutions of

power that enslaves them. However, I will speak of the reasoning behind

my optimism towards the fall of civilization.

Despite what the warring State will propagandize, it seeks to extend its

military and coercive powers, not because it is furthering its ‘absolute

control’, but because it recognizes its futility. It seems that our

current State so boldly wears the armor of ‘its history’ so that it may

grant the illusion that because ‘WE’ (the imaginary collective) have

gotten to this stage of Progress, ‘WE’ posses the ability to reinforce

that progression. The current State would like us to believe that it is

what has brought it here, that it doesn’t wear another State’s armor,

but that its armor is its own, and it has produced it. This simply isn’t

the case, and this only gives more potential strength to the outcome of

a “final shove”.

As with the domesticated within societies which initially moved away

from a self-sufficient mode of gathering and hunting what existed, into

a State dependent on its own products: those in ‘power’ also lost the

ability to become self sufficient. Whereas previous stages were ‘more

able’ to go back to previous lifestyles, those who followed would become

further alienated from that previous way of life, as they were reared

completely in a different mode of substance, and would be more concerned

with progressing their technique than holding onto increasingly

‘useless’ knowledge of past ‘ways’. To put it simply, the State has been

moving on and isn’t looking back. To the continuation of power, this

means more devotion to improving the functioning of the State. This

naturally carries the assumption that things will go as ‘planned’ (or as

the religious would say, ‘pre-determined’).

It should go without saying, that societies of smaller scale and

relatively more easily obtained technology, were more able to pick up

and more on, or basically, rebuild their society. This is where our

State comes into play. We are constantly at a higher point of

‘progression’ and thus alienation; this is the weak spot of the current

condition. Our ability to produce at a level necessary to maintain our

power structure has become reliant upon our technological, globalized

infrastructure. Our over infatuation with the reliance on technology to

help build a coming utopia, has left us more in its hands than our own.

The State is reliant upon that very technological infrastructure to

perform its most basic functions. This can be most easily seen in the

role technological ‘advancement’ has had in globalizing the State. It is

molded to its current condition and business as usual.

If something were to impair that infrastructure to function (such was

the prospect with the millennium bug, a sign that a slight

miscalculation could potentially halt the mega-machine), our

civilization no longer posses the ability and tolerance to rebuild

itself. This is the result of technological advancement and reliance,

especially in the realm of a ‘global economy.’ This is the reason why it

is more important than ever for the State to maintain the illusion of

absolute control, and also my basis for optimism that a severe blow to

the current infrastructure could be the final one to civilization. If

its very basis was to be shaken, we don’t posses the ability to rebuild

it in a timely enough manner to keep up the façade of functioning.

I don’t doubt for a minute that a great many domesticates will hold

dearly to the death trip civilization is. When civilization does fall

there can be telling what may happen. There could be a ‘Mad Max’-esque

period, or may not happen, I don’t really know. I feel many may try to

sustain themselves off the remnants of civilized living (i.e., canned

foods, etc.), there may even be an attempt to maintain current power

structures based on unstable food supplies. In such a case, it seems

power structures would exist as long as the supplies.

After the fall, I don’t doubt that there will be those who refuse to

accept the fate of their excessive lifestyles. In many cases, there are

few options aside from accepting and moving on. For them, such aspects

as mutual aid and permaculture become vital. It seems to take little

imagination to see the ‘karma-tic’ fate the power mongers hold. Some may

try to sustain their ‘way of death’ via alternate power sources, but

what will that be compared to how things are now, and it’s questionable

if there are even any that can hold up on their own. I’m more optimistic

that things will find a balance in time and I refuse any bouts of

‘callousness’ that might be granted towards the possibilities that I

see. I have no authoritarian vision (or desire for one) for ways of

‘redistributing the wealth’ or some other leftist pipe dream. I see the

fall of civilization to be inevitable, and thus, work to both brace for

collapse and push for it, and for doing so I have no apologies.

What is the Totality?

It is the high residues of hazardous and potentially lethal chemicals

inside your fat cells. It is you sitting inside and turning on the

television or computer on a beautiful day. It is you shopping when you

are depressed. It is the feeling you get that something is missing. It

is your worries that a fire may destroy all of your possessions and your

plans to try and take them with you. It is the thought that tells you to

go on a diet. It is the excess fat on your body. It is the headache that

wonít go away. It is the bleeding in your intestines from years of pain

alleviating drug use. It is the birth defects of your children. It is

your killer when you die from a car accident. It is your savior when it

attempts to fill your void for you. It is your carpal tunnel syndrome.

It is your tumor. It is your expensive coffin and burial clothing. It is

the drugs you take when you need an escape. It is the bulldozer that

destroyed the woods you might have known so well. It is the towering

skyscraper that makes you feel forever tiny and powerless. It is your

boss. It is minimum wage, it is maximum wage.

It is your prison, sometimes with bars, sometimes without. It is all

your fears. It is what is keeping you up at night. It is the lock on

your door. It is the bullet in your gun. It is your noose and your tie.

It is that thing that you donít want to do, but you feel that you have

to. It is the turned cheek. It is the cold shoulder. It is the ad that

tells you the internet will provide affection for you. It is the new

appliance that you never knew existed, but you canít live without. It is

poverty. It is inequality. It is the sink or swim economy. It is the

thing that has categorized you. It has stopped you from doing the things

you want. It is what makes you jealous. It is your hate. It is your

love. It is your purgatives that you feel might be somewhat strange. It

is your clenched fist. It is your mace spray. It is the police. It is

the nightstick. It is the protestor and the media which tells you not to

listen to them. It is the corporation which creates a new truth for you

daily, one which provides you with the knowledge to buy what they make

with confidence. It is the gold star you earned in kindergarten. It is

the A you got in high school. It is your college degree. It is your

paycheck. It is your therapist. It is your bill from the medicine you

bought to “fix your brain”.

It is the ache in your back. It is your swollen knees. It is your

worsening eyesight from the incandescent glow of our institutions. It is

your hearing loss. It is the ëwhite noiseí that drives you crazy. It is

your adrenaline. It is the tears that pour down your face after a sad

movie. It is your longing for a dramatic romance with a happy ending. It

is your lust for sex. It is the objectified woman, and the powerless

man. It is the rapist. It is the murderer. It is the thief. It is the

profiteer. It is the worker. It is the dead union organizer.

It is the solider that is willing to kill and die for cheaper oil. It is

the victims of a government enflamed over unwillingness to follow their

way of life. It is the activist hung for saying they donít want to be

killed for profits. It is the rubber bullet. It is pepper spray. It is

the extinct species. It is the dying world. It is polluted air. It is

tainted water. It is the accident at the nuclear power plant. It is the

oil spill. It is the break in the pipeline. It is the brakes that

failed. It is the dwindling biodiversity. It is the patented seed. It is

the farmer killing her/himself with the pesticides that were going to

make life better. It is the seat belt that mangled you, but didnít kill

you entirely. It is the blood dripping from the cut you got at work, but

canít afford to let it heal. It is the concrete beneath your feet. It is

the stairs you fall down. It is the train that went off the tracks. It

is the plane that blew up. It is the boat that sank. It is the drink you

take to just forget it all. It is your misery. It is your world.

It is everything to you. It is civilized existence and the mindset which

maintains it.

It is what makes devastation seem not so shocking. It takes you through

the day. It dulls you out at night. It gives you nightmares, it gives

you dreams. It is your feeling of not having of not having accomplished

enough. It is your desire to have a child to complete yourself. It is

the physical and mental barriers of civilized life. It is civilization

and it has become you. It is a mindset. It is power. It is physically

reinforced to block off the reality of itís powerlessness by mediating

human existence from the natural world. It is the feeling of

superiority, which supplies the reason to destroy all else. It is

unnatural. It will fall, but will you fall with it? It is personal and

it is individual. It is defeatable and itís defeat is needed for our

liberation, as well as for that of all else that human kind has set out

to conquer and overpower. Freedom is only a thought away. Liberate the

mind and the body will follow.

It’s Time to Disorganize!

from Species Traitor

If there’s anything that the failures of the left, particularly the

unions (from the UAW, AFL-CIO, to the IWW), it’s that any

‘revolutionary’ theory that doesn’t question the key elements of

civilization is going to do nothing more than shift the social order to

a slightly ‘modified’ version. That is if they work at all. We can no

longer look to any kind of reform for an end to the death machine that

is civilization. It has long been an embedded idea in ‘revolutionary’

strands that success requires organization. The age-old calls of the

Wobblies, “It’s time to organize!” are ringing hollow as the leftist

milieu grinds them into the pages of dead social movements in radical

history. What has our past of ‘organization’ brought us? We can say that

it has brought us some success because those at the top of the newly

created social hierarchies tell us we have. Organization pushes us back

into the same top-down hierarchies that we are trying to revolt against

and erase. What will this bring us? Goodbye old boss, hello to the new,

any difference? Maybe there’ll be a mild greening (or Redding more

likely), but it’s still the same social order, which generally is

unquestioning of destructive civilized lifestyles. But even in the short

run they offer little more than pushing forward new leaders to tell us

how and when to act out and how and when we’ve won. It’s getting us

nowhere. Little, lefty reformist games comprised of a lot of talk and no

action. ‘Consensus’ meetings held behind closed doors by chosen or

predetermined delegates will layout the guidelines of how much reform

the masses will stand behind. We have no choice in the matter and don’t

realize the two-faced realities of those disposing of empty rhetoric. It

has not and will not get us anywhere.

If we do truly desire an end to the civilized social order, we can only

do so by enacting insurgence and revolt by means that keep no aspect of

the current social order, or push for a system that mirrors this. The

only hope we have is for spontaneous acts of revolt to come from the

passions and rage of individuals. No top down orders or ‘plans for

action’ can wake the insurgent drowned out by the totality of civilized

thought.

The only true and successful revolution will not be brought about by

predetermined games of give, give, borrow, silent marches and banners,

and especially new hierarchies. It will come from the hearts of those

who bear the blows of civilization (which is all of us, including

non-humans). Those whose dreams are shattered, those who will never life

autonomously, unrestrained from the totality of the civilized concrete

cages we are born into. Those who have been shut off at birth from their

birthright to flourish as individuals and a community, and from the

community of Nature that would offer them more love than we can conceive

in our current downtrodden state. The failures of all hierarchies are

becoming clearer daily. The constant collapse of the social order from

it’s overbearing weight will draw more to find their catalyzing points,

and thus to their own revolts. Insurgence is rising, and civilization is

falling. Give it the final shove by using your own words and actions.

Breaking the spell of civilized order is the only way to finish off

Leviathan, and everyday is bringing us closer.