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Title: Egocide
Author: Kevin Tucker
Date: 2005
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, anti-egoist, Green Anarchy, Green Anarchy #20, nihilism, primitivist, spirituality
Source: From Green Anarchy, #20 Summer 2005

Kevin Tucker

Egocide

The primal war is a spiritual war.

It began as the spirit of wildness was buried beneath the interests of

domesticators: within history and within ourselves.

At its core lies the spiritual connection, the wordless sense of being

that flows through the world. It is not about fighting for ‘Nature’ or

about individual desire. It is about egocide: killing the self/Other

split that underpins all civilized relationships.

There is no ‘Nature’, alone and isolated outside of our grasp. There is

only the life that is in and of us. This is something that cannot be

taught, written about or described. It’s not filling in space for god/s,

nothingness, economics or science. It is not a cognitive force that

hears every prayer.

I can’t say what it is that I feel. I can’t objectively prove its

existence. But without my soul, I am as good as dead.

The domesticators have known this for a long time.

I can say that I feel something. It’s something that I know is real.

It’s something worth fighting for.

That’s something that wild peoples and places have been telling us for

ten thousand years.

Humans, like all beings, are intrinsically spiritual. Not in the sense

of elaborate ritual or religious beliefs or anything of that sort, but

spiritual in a much different way: a lived spirituality.

There is a flowing, organic nature to the world. It’s something you can

feel as you follow tracks through the new snowfall. Something felt in a

handful of wild berries or the smell of roots. It’s something you see in

the eyes of an animal as their pupils dilate for the last time. The

sting of a thorn, the protests of squirrels, and the ambience of rain on

leaves, the sound of rushing water: there is life in all of these

things. An essence that simply living brings you into.

The world of the nomadic gatherer/hunter knows no ‘Other’. There is no

concept of nature. But there is a greater connectivity. There is no

survival, no smallness or grandiose feeling. There is only life and

death, interwoven and honestly laid out before you.

An individual exists as a part of this. Not in the manufactured sense of

communistic groupthink, but in the spiritualistic sense. Life is

inseparable. There is no dependency. There is no fear of a Future. No

path of Progress. You can say there is an implicit sense of trust and

honesty, but neither word does it justice. No word does it justice. Life

simply is.

That needs to be restated: for most of us, life simply is an ideal. It’s

a utopian desire or an irretrievable past. We simply can get closer to

it or we can’t. But life can simply be life. It always has and always

will be there. But we don’t think of it like that. We can’t think of it

like that. We’ve been trained to see it differently. Life is simply

something ‘Other’: either as a religious/anti-religious ideal or as a

deadened scientific definition.

It must always be distant.

How do you turn someone against themselves? Against those around them?

How do you tame the spirit? These are the issues that domesticators have

always had to answer. The necessary response is what makes up our

everyday lives: to domesticate, you must break someone mentally,

physically, and spiritually.

Simply put, you must disconnect.

That disconnection, that mediation, has always been the primary goal of

domesticators. The reason why is simple: domestication is about

dependency. But that dependency is not about necessity, it’s about

perceived dependency. It comes down to belief.

Most people believe that the state and civilization are necessary now

because we know nothing else. We are raised in a manufactured reality. A

sterile, planned world complete with heated seats, air conditioning, and

power locks. Food is the processed side note to our consumption. Work is

something you must do and the boss is someone you must obey.

The idea of living without civilization, and even more so, living well,

is about as alien to us as the idea of living in this reality would be

to anyone who lives without it. These are intrinsically different ways

of viewing and being in reality. One is about the vital freedom to

choose between the lesser of two evils and the better of two brands. The

other is about the difficult choice about which direction you feel like

roaming in today and which leaf looks most tempting.

How did we get from the latter to the former? How did we come to accept

so little from life? How did we become so dependent?

How did food in storehouses become more important than the world

outside? Filling those storehouses with large amounts of wild grains or

dried meat or fish is an easy enough thing to do. For the most part, it

may take a few days for a huge amount of food for the societies willing

to do so. Becoming the person to ration the surplus isn’t that

complicated either. Making people listen to that person, however, is.

The issue is about control. Power flows from control. But control

requires physical and mental force. You can force someone in a cage, but

it’s another thing to get them to accept it.

To successfully gain control over another being, that cage must be

internalized.

For us, unfortunately, that cage has been internalized. This is the

domestication process at work.

No one gives up their autonomy freely. The spirit of wildness which

flows through all life must be broken.

To break the spirit, you must first isolate it. This is both the hardest

and most important thing that must be done. We are born physically and

mentally for a life of nomadic gathering and hunting. Like wildness/life

everywhere, our spirit is inseparable from the world around us.

This needs some clarification.

I’m not talking about some new age ‘oneness’ anymore than I’m pushing

for some kind of universal ‘indigenous perspective’. I’m talking about

an unmediated relationship with the world. I’m talking about something

that is felt and known without words. Nearly all human societies to have

existed have lived with this spirit in their being. I’m talking about

the same spirit that must be killed so that we can become who we are

now. The spirit must be killed so that we can turn against ourselves and

the earth.

Killing that spirit is impossible. It exists in all life. But at some

point people began burying it: began accepting cheap substitutes. It was

a long, hard and isolated problem, but the original trauma of

domestication is a deep wound. One that spreads quickly and destroys

anything in its path: always moving and searching for some kind of

meaning. What that meaning is will always change shape and form, but the

seekers are trained to look everywhere and destroy anything that stands

in the way.

We are trained to look everywhere but our own damaged souls. We are

trained to look for something, but never to feel. That, of course, is

intentional.

No matter how we view the world, be it egocentric, anthropocentric,

biocentric, etc.: we must always see the world (read: ‘Nature’) as

someplace wholly separate. Certain people are/were a part of that (read:

‘Indigenous’), but that is gone, at least as far as we’re supposed to be

concerned. The earth is a place, life is an ideal: you have only

yourself.

Disconnected, lonely and desperate, we sink or swim in their reality.

This is domestication. This is us occupying land that we have little

sense of and alone in an environment flooded with billions of others.

This is your soul on Prozac.

The self/Other split begins with domestication. You can’t take control

over a world that you are a part of. According to the monotheists, Adam

and Eve took the first step by naming the animals in Eden. They may very

well be right to a certain degree: life dissected and categorized is far

more of an experiment than a community.

But the greatest damage was the one that turned life into property. It

turned the spirit into wild grains, fish and large mammals into surplus:

into wealth. The world of the gardener turns the world of the

gatherer/hunter into a world of weeds, crops, gardens-in-use, fallowing

gardens, and the village. The farmer dissects that even more into rows

of crops in fields, animals-as-food or animals-as-workers, thinkers and

doers. The capitalist sees consumers, distributors, managers, producers,

and guards.

The world of wildness becomes processed and refined. The spirit of all

things becomes the spirit of all things ‘useful’. The divide continues:

we are no longer mere apes or wild beasts. We are the stewards of the

earth, the bringers of the Future. Subject, object.

The soul must be isolated to be re-contextualized.

This is done subtly at first. As people in some places did settle and

did start taking stored food, the initial roles for power began to

emerge. But that power needed to be implicit even for the power of

suggestion that Big Men would wield. This meant tinkering with the

spirit. That became the job of shamans: the first specialists.

The role of the shaman spreads from the healer. A shaman is usually

still a healer, but there is rarely a shortage of healers. For nearly

all nomadic gatherer/hunters, healing is a communal activity. Healers

deal with their reality through that communal spirit. Everyone is

involved. The shaman, on the other hand, interprets that reality. That

is extremely important.

Many shamans only slightly inserted their message into their

interpretations of the spirit. The most important idea was implicit in

their existence: the soul of the world is more open to certain

individuals. Their position was as mediator between the individual and

the rest of the world. And through this, the seeds for a self/Other

split are born.

The message of the shaman, like the message of the preacher and the

pundit, validates the social and political reality. As society becomes

increasingly dependent on certain foods, the gods become specialized to

ensure their growth (sun, water, earth/soil, and seed). As the political

realm becomes more hierarchical, so does the cosmic one. As settlements

become more permanent and spread into villages, the once unified world

turns into the village, the gardens, and the forest. The dead become

ancestors to fear as witches, werewolves, and sorcerers become the all

seeing eye of morality.

The interpretation of the world around us becomes subject to the

ancestors, to gods, then to god and science. But at the base of this is

the self/Other split. The world of the nomadic gatherer/hunter based on

cooperation and openness is replaced by competition and fear. People

follow the hand that feeds as it substitutes their unmediated connection

with the world through its vision.

First we split from the world and then we fear it. That’s where

domestication begins. Fear and dependency grow to the point where

anything else is unthinkable and even more so, frightening.

This is the world we are born into. This is our dependency. This is our

inheritance.

We are raised to accept it and continue substituting the spirit of

wildness for the soulless world of domestication and mediation. The only

spirit left is the self.

In a dog-eat-dog world, you sink or swim.

Subject or object. At least that much is supposed to be up to you.

The domesticators have been at their job a long time. For the most part

they are successful at replacing the total world that we know in our

hearts with the totality they have placed around our minds. But their

job can never be complete. They sedate, distract and occupy us, but the

wildness will always slip through the cracks.

For too many the uncontrollable urge to live free is too far beyond

reach. It ends in self destruction or in the splitting of the mind.

The shell cracks only partially.

The totality of civilization in our minds is mirrored by the world it

has created. Concrete, steel, glass, and iron do for the body what the

church and state have done for the mind. Hierarchy and domination become

structural. Our smallness and insignificance is constantly reinforced.

The revolt against civilization means that we must attack both

internally and externally. In reality, there is no separation between

the two. This attack is a response: a response to the totality we’ve

been lulled into that seeks to destroy everything. For some that is

meant literally. Their goal is to eliminate everything from concrete to

Nature so that you are free to do anything or go anywhere. It’s a

nihilistic rage that seeks honesty only where the individual remains

isolated: to remove any and all conceivable chains.

To a degree I can understand this active nihilism. When everything you

know feels tainted, it seems instinctive to deconstruct not only

everything you know but how you think and feel. It makes sense as part

of a process of shedding the totality of civilization, but that is it.

Far too often it is seen as a goal in itself: a methodology towards the

radical purity and free from all constraint. It stands as a deadening

response to the sterile corpse of the city and country.

But nihilism, like its more honest relative, egoism, fails to break free

of that initial grasp of domestication: the self/Other split. Both rely

on that isolation, that Neverland of Self. To the nihilist and egoist

there can be no greater connectivity without morality. The two

oppositions remain: self and Other.

The initial lie of the domesticators comes full circle.

Civilization kills the spirit. It must in order to exist.

We think, build and maintain civilization. It is the reality created for

us and the reality that we recreate daily. It is our addiction. It is

everything we are given so that the soul cannot breathe: all the cheap

replacements for wildness, for spirit. It is what we are given so that

the spirit cannot remember wildness. So that we will no longer desire

wildness.

It has always been this way. It must always be this way for civilization

to exist.

It comes back to domestication.

But domestication is not irreversible any more than it is evolutionary.

It has always been resisted by the spirits that refused to be tamed.

Wild beings, human or not, have always fought against it: if not in mind

and soul than in body.

This is the primal war: the refusal of life to be domesticated. It is

the refusal of wildness to become ordered and civilized. It is the

spirit that refuses to die.

It is not about a certain people, place or time: it is about life. Those

who know that spirit without mediation have always put up the hardest

fight. There was no fight or revolution for abstract ideals, for some

unknown or unknowable place of undefined and questionable freedom as

individuals. The fight was about something felt, something innate. The

fight, then, now and always, is the rage of the spirit of life and

wildness. It knows no isolation or mediation. It grows through the

cracks in the sidewalk and the refusal of toxins in our bodies. It will

stop for nothing and it is extremely deadly.

It is within us, anxiously waiting. It cries for the healing of the

spirit (rewilding) and the healing of the body (resistance). Both are

one in the same. Our deepest wound cries for healing. That is a cry for

action.

For the nihilists and egoists, resistance comes from the immediate need

to destroy what destroys you. Its only construction is in its

destruction. I’m not going to say that is always a bad thing. But I will

say this: I have no question in my being that there is something that I

am fighting for, not just something I’m fighting against. It is not

about morality or about some lofty new age crap: it’s about something

unmediated and present. Something real.

As my ideas of self and Other dissolve, I’ve come to realize that there

is life in this world. I know it is interconnected. It comes through the

spirit that is never dead, but it is channeled and caged by the

domesticators. The end result of ten thousand years of mediation.

I know this like I know civilization must be destroyed. My spirit knows

this. My spirit feels this. The spirit of all life knows this. It has

always known this.

I’ve only begun to listen.