A Precept

Each day, do at least one thing to enfeeble an institution and at least one thing to strengthen an individual.

The Message

I recently sat in on a lecture in which an ABD in philosophy told the students that their generation was different than all others because of their intimacy with technology.  They communicate in ways that are quantitatively and qualitatively different than the ways that previous generations communicated.

Superficially, this appears an obvious truth.  But dig beneath the surface, and the veracity of the claim starts to dissolve.  This generation is no different than any other.  Communication, to the extent that any such thing is truly possible, has not changed since Broca’s area first appeared.  What has changed is our repertory of communicative behaviors.  The message is the same.  The essence of the message has become diluted by the range and rapidity of its delivery, but it is one and the same message that has been sent countless times by countless souls across countless years: “I am here!  I exist!  And I need you in order for that fact to mean something.”           

Anarchy ≠ Chaos

In Ishmal, Daniel Quinn’s gorilla talks about the voice of mother culture, by which he means the memes and narratives of civilization that we have incorporated so deeply into our worldview that we are blind to their organizing and biasing presence.  One of the most prevalent unspoken and unquestioned truths of civilization is the need for organizational hierarchy.  Civilization is built on division of labor, specialization, expertise, and the unequal access to resources and the power differentials that emerge as a result.  It would not be hyperbole to equate civilization with these things.  The need for unequal distribution of power and control is a cornerstone of the civilized worldview.  The understanding that decision making needs to be grounded in hierarchy is woven into the very fiber of our “democratic” system of government.  Anarchy, one half of the anarcho-primitivist formula, is the barefaced denial of the legitimacy of hierarchy.  

The term anarchy is frequently used as a synonym for chaos.  The conflation of anarchy with chaos comes right out of mother culture’s insistence that power must be unequally distributed, and that without top-down control all would be confusion.  Anarchy in this sense reflects the assumed state of disorder that would result from a lack of control over the masses.  But who or what it is that should have this control in the first place, and what makes the exercise of this control legitimate, is rarely mentioned; and when it is, it is through the use of abstract and reified terms such as the social contract, the government, the rule of law.

 

In addition to chaos, anarchy is frequently coupled with violence: the caricature of the anarchist as a bomb-carrying thug.  Violence, unfortunately, is an unavoidable element of the anarchy equation.  But anarchy is not the source of the violence.  Violence is built into our hierarchical system.  The only way to maintain a system with such dramatic disparities in power and access to resources is through violence.  And the more extreme the disparities, the more violent the methods of maintenance need to be.  Because violence is the mortar that holds the bricks of the hierarchical system in place, any meaningful attempt to dismantle the system will elicit violence.  Also, because anarchists are usually people who want to overthrow the existing power structure, it makes some sense to think that they would probably employ violent means to do so.  How could it be otherwise?  You need to fight fire with fire.  But here we need to distinguish between the ends and the means, between anarchy as a goal-state, and the methods for bringing that state about.  And it is important to keep in mind that when it comes to means there is no necessary relationship between violence and effectiveness.  It may be possible to bring our corporate consumer system down in a relatively non violent fashion simply by finding a way for enough of us to avoid playing the corporate consumer game.  

Then again, we may have to blowup a few things.

Worth Reading

An article in Anarchy Magazine:

WHY I AM NOT AN ANTI-PRIMITIVIST by Lawrence Jarach

Shouting Down the Techno Cheerleaders

Those who would argue in support of the status quo frequently cite a standard laundry list of the amazing benefits that modern technology has provided, suggesting (usually stating outright) that our lives are far better off than they would have been otherwise. 

Okay, let’s start with the idea that modern industrial technology is beneficial, and leave the question of whether we are any better off for another time.  To begin with, the very idea that technology imparts “benefits” is part of a conceptual perspective embedded within the efficiency calculus of a technoindustrial world view.  For example, cell phones provide us with the benefit of rapid and convenient communication.  But to claim this as a benefit is circular reasoning.  Rapid and convenient communication is useful only because of the specific demands of life in a modern technoindustrial society that includes cell phones.  Likewise, the benefits imparted by industrial agriculture emerge only when you have large numbers of people displaced from their family farms (as a result of industrial agriculture) and living in cities. 

What about medical technology?  Modern medical technology provides us with the inarguable benefit of extending the population’s average life span.  But average population life span has no meaning whatsoever outside of an industrial assembly-line world view that reduces all meaningful information to statistical data.  The upper end of human life expectancy has probably not changed in the last 50,000 years.

We have been trained to think in “production efficiency” terms that make no sense from a truly human perspective.  Take the often touted reduction in infant mortality that has occurred (at least in wealthy industrial nations) as a direct result of advances in medical technology in the last century: the reduction in infant mortality (along with industrial agricultural practices) is partially responsible for a dramatic increase in the global human population, so the number of individual infants who die each year—actual human deaths—is orders of magnitude larger than it was in, say, the middle ages.  Where’s the benefit of having more babies live if it means that more will have to die?  

Outside of a hollow, strictly quantitative, more-bigger-quicker industrial production perspective, the technology = benefits argument has no teeth.

Don't Target the Fist

I just finished reading Ted Kaczinski’s collected writings.  Some pretty powerful stuff.  I think his critique of modern technology is spot on.  I found particular resonance with his “fist” metaphor.  As anti-civ warriors, we need to be clear about what our true target is.  We should avoid aiming for the fist and find ways to get to the vulnerable organs behind the fist.   

He also offers a pretty scathing critique of anarcho-primitivism.  However, the anarcho-primitivism he attacks is a version that I don’t quite recognize.  He says the problem with anarcho-primitivists is that they idealize the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, falsely believing that hunter-gatherers engage in little violence, or that that they have little in the way of gender inequality, etc.  There may be a few soft-headed eco-radicals out there who think that when we abandon civilization and re-adopt a primitive lifestyle, we will be stepping back into the biblical Garden of Eden, but OldDog is neither soft-headed nor operating under any delusions regarding the idyllic nature of hunter-gatherer societies.

To me, the essence of anarcho-primitivism is the call to return to modes of living that are more consistent with our evolved predispositions.  Right now there is a dramatic mismatch between the ways people are being forced to live in our global consumer society and the lifestyles our DNA has prepared us to expect, both physically and psychologically.  Anarcho-primitivism is about removing the mismatch.  It is about re-collecting human dignity.  It’s about reclaiming an ancient and more meaningful definition of human freedom.

Consumer: [kuhn-soo-mer] -noun. 1. Domesticated human.

Something happened to a small group of subsistence hunter and gatherers 10,000 years ago.  A mutation?  A tiny congenital malformation of the prefrontal cortex?  Brain damage from exposure to a botanical neurotoxin?  Or maybe it was a chance side-effect of the capacity for symbolic representation, part of our linguistic development, and the fact that it happened 10,000 years ago instead of 100,000 years ago or yesterday is just a statistical detail.  Whatever the initial source, the resulting lifestyle changes spread like a potent contagion, rapidly out-competing all other modes of being in the world, to the point now where the drive to domesticate has become a defining feature of human action.  Human history is a story of the domestication of the world.  The rise of the global technoindustrial complex is very likely the final chapter in human history, threatening the end of wild nature, and the conquest of all that remains wild in the human soul.     

It is to government’s advantage that people think of themselves as citizens.  It is to the corporate world’s advantage that people think of themselves as consumers.  Globalization has led to the corporate assimilation of all world governments, which leaves only consumers.

For those of us who would be revolutionaries against the system, the advanced state of domestication of the human mind can be turned to our advantage.  As consumers, “civilized” people are sheep who are largely controlled by corporate propaganda, a fairly unsophisticated from of psychological manipulation. 

We might start by resurrecting the idea of human dignity.  But the idea of human dignity has leverage only when people think of themselves as human beings.   And there is some considerable volatility in convincing people to see themselves as human beings.

The system has no use for human beings. 

Civil Rights versus Human Freedom

Suppose there was a group of Jews in a concentration camp during the holocaust that became angry and upset because there was another group of Jews in the same camp who were given slightly better access to bread and water.  How would you go about convincing them that their anger was misplaced?

Further suppose that some of the Jews who were experiencing the (very relative) bread-water deprivation, perhaps along with some sympathizers from the group with better access, pooled what little energy and political resources they had to petition the guards for more equitable bread distribution.  If you were a guard, what would you do?

If you were a guard who had to deal directly with the prisoners on a day-to-day basis, you might acquiesce to the prisoners’ demands, and take the steps necessary to ensure more equitable circumstances in order to keep the death machine running smoothly.

Conversely, if you were a particularly savvy guard concerned with keeping the prisoners from actually confronting the reality of their situation, if you wanted to keep them from actively revolting against their loss of freedom and dignity, if you wanted to keep them from directing their energy and intelligence toward the true source of their troubles, you might actually encourage the presence of differential privilege and make use of the ensuing perceptions of inequality as a potent means of distraction.

Modern civilization is a corporate death camp.  Civil rights issues are red herrings.  While we struggle for gay rights, women’s equality, minority access, etc., the gas chambers become increasingly efficient.

Domesticating the Human Mind

You are free to think independently, so long as you can justify your independent thought with historical precedent and the appropriate application of predefined rules of logic.  Think for yourself, but make sure you cite your sources.  The college classroom is just another venue for propaganda, helping to ensure that the machine has the right kind of friction, helping to weed out the outliers that could cause potential damage to the system’s smooth operation. 

And even nonconformity becomes a kind of participation, a service to the system, a lubricant to ensure the gears remain sharp.

  

Drinking the Koolaid

Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide.  It’s an old myth that was popularized by a staged sea-plunge in a Disney movie in the late 1950s.

To my knowledge, humans are the only animal capable of purposely ending its own life—and certainly the only species capable of mass suicide.

Why is that?  What could drive a creature to engage in collective acts of self-destruction? 

I suspect that collectivist social activities such as mass suicide, organized warfare, professional sport spectatorship, and Christmas shopping are not part of our genetic heritage, a manifestation of some evolved primate herd mentality.  Chimpanzees have been observed engaging in cooperative behavior that includes gang killings and small-scale “warfare;” but there is nothing that would suggest that the participants in these events are not acting independently, as individuals.  And we are, after all, 98% chimpanzee.  But maybe there is something in that remaining 2% that makes us prone to mindless acts of self-destructive conformity.

Again, to my knowledge, subsistence hunter-gatherer societies have not been observed engaging in mass activities of this sort.  They have individual suicide (although at a far lower frequency than occurs in our “civilized” society).  And they have warfare.  But the warfare is not organized in a way that comes close to comparing with the zombie hoard-soldier approaches seen with agrarian and industrial societies.  Modern military combat is predicated on the careful coordination and timing of mass action: an approach reflected in the image of men in identical uniforms marching in lockstep.  And our war narratives are laced with tales of selfless bravery: a soldier who jumps on a live grenade to save his comrades; whereas a Plains Indian warrior in battle is a “free agent” who takes orders from his own intuition and experience.  He is very unlikely to intentionally take an arrow for a fellow warrior—in some circles, such an act would be an insult to the intended target.       

It is difficult to support the idea that mass suicide—or collectivist behavior of any kind beyond that found in the family unit—is part of our DNA.  And if the propensity to engage in mass suicide is not genetic, then what is its source?