Who Draws the Lines?

The state of Arizona just passed a draconian illegal immigration enforcement law in which cops are required to stop and question anyone who even looks like they might be illegal.  The controversy surrounding the law has elicited the usual complaints about the need to control US borders.  I am afraid to enter into conversation about this issue with any but my closest friends and colleagues because to do so would “out” me as an anarchist (the only group hated as much or more than atheists—and I am a card-carrying member of both!). 

My contribution to the conversation would be: what’s a border? Who decides which people can go where?  The idea that countries are the possession of the people who live within the lines drawn on a map is ludicrous.  It is not supported by any sort of natural law.  Rather, it is supported and enforced through violence and the direct threat of violence.  Why can’t somebody simply move into my back yard and call it their home?  Because I have access to professionals with guns who will in fact kill them if they don’t acknowledge and fully comply with laws based on the unnatural idea of property ownership.  It's all about who is capable of the most violence, who can be most lethal, who has access to the most weapons.  Of course, this ugly fact is obscured by a thin veneer of “patriotism” and buried under lies of entitlement.  The truth is the dirt under my feet no more belongs to me than it does a thirteen year old Guatemalan factory worker. 

A Kinder Gentler Anarcho-primitivism

Sending mail bombs has its place, I’m sure, but I’m not sure where that place is.  I have to admit that there is a certain satisfaction in imagining the brains of powerful heads of industry splattered across the interior of their designer office spaces.  It plays into a delicious sense of karma, a small bit of retribution for the victims of world wide corporate oppression.

The problem with blowing up corporate CEOs and other evil corporate scum is that for every one you pop there are 500 clawing up the rungs of the corporate ladder to take his or her place.  I suppose with unlimited pyrotechnic resources, you could eventually start to make a difference.  If you continually pick the leaves off a weed, the roots will eventually run out of reserve and the plant will die.  But wouldn’t it make more sense to target the roots to begin with?

The Real Holocaust?

Nazis researchers collected an enormous amount of human data in their extermination camps, most of which has never been utilized.  It is unthinkable to many people that we should make use of data that was collected through such horrific means.  The fact that it might help us to treat or cure the suffering of existing persons is not sufficient justification for mining the Nazis’ experimental results.  What the Nazis did in terms of the sheer magnitude of human exploitation and torture renders any potential positive outcome null and void.

Curious.  We don’t have a problem using cell phones or automobiles or flat screen digital televisions or any other product of modern industrial civilization. 

You don’t get cell phones (or cars or television, etc.) without the support of a global corporate infrastructure that immiserates a billion people.  You don’t get cell phones without bloody wars for oil and drone attacks on children.  You don’t get cell phones without an environment laced with toxins that kill millions in slow and torturous ways.  You don’t get cell phones without the industrial revolution which impoverished half the world and consigned millions to premature death and a life of quiet anguish as wage slaves—and the industrial revolution itself is historically seated on thousands of years of the blood of uncountable actual slaves.

Cell phones derive from a history of exploitation and torture on a level incomparably more horrendous than the holocaust, and their use is supported by an existing global infrastructure that, in terms of its raw human impact, eclipses the holocaust many thousands of times over.

Fuel for the Machine

I’m not a Luddite.  Nor am I a technophobe.   Nor do I harbor any romantic notions about some mythical time in the past when life was simpler and more meaningful. 

OK. So, maybe I am a romantic to some extent. 

At some point we crossed a line with our technology.  Maybe it was more of a blurred gray interface than an actual line, a transition zone between two mutually exclusive conditions—like the boundary between plant hardiness zones: on one side, the plant thrives and on the other it fails, but in the area along the border its fate becomes a matter of varying probability.  Whatever the case, we are no longer in the borderlands, and are clearly beyond any probabilistic considerations: humans are technology-dependent animals.  That is perhaps our only clear distinction in the animal world.  Other animals use tools, but we humans cannot survive without them.  That in itself is not a problem; it’s just a fact, a fundamental truth about our condition.  The problem is that our relationship with our technology has changed.  Our tools are no longer employed in the service of our freely chosen ends.  Instead, the natural order of things has been inverted.  We are now operating in service of our tools.  We, our daily activity, our lives, are designed to satisfy the “goals” and requirements of our technology.  We are “tools” in service of our own technology.

There is one tool in particular, more so than any other, that has usurped our position as its master.  It is a simple tool designed to organize our economic world, originally designed to facilitate the temporary concentration of wealth for the achievement of large-scale tasks that would be beyond the means of a single individual.  We call this tool the corporation.   

People no longer use corporations—and haven’t for many decades.   Rather, corporations use people.  It has gotten to the point now where flesh and blood human beings have meaning only with respect to their relationship to corporations.  To be an American citizen means to be living in the service of USA, Inc.  The gold standard has been replaced with a human-labor standard.  Our currency is now based on the future labor of US citizens, reflecting the speculative value of their labor in the form of income tax revenue (and revenue from other less obvious forms of taxation).

         

We are, in a non-metaphorical sense, fuel for the machine.

But it doesn’t have to be this way…

New End Civ Video

Here's the latest (absolutely outstanding) End Civ installment:  Premise 3

The Reified Universe

I just read about a new theory of gravity.  Gravity is an emergent property of the second law of thermodynamics (a.k.a. the law of entropy), a kind of space-time wake created as the unevenly distributed parts of the universe move to lower energy states.   The basic theory has a real intuitive flavor to it.  Think of an uncountable number of bathtub drains distributed throughout the cosmos—the more matter, the more drains; less matter, fewer drains.  The planet Jupiter: lots of drains; the feathery centipede currently undulating across my floor: not so many.  Or maybe a balloon analogy would be better.  Think of a constantly shrinking balloon.  Gravity is akin to the air around the balloon moving in the direction of the constantly retracting balloon surface.  In this sense, gravity is not a force in itself, it’s just something that happens as a result of the balloon shrinking.

But wait.  It’s not the fabric of space-time, it’s the information in the universe that is affected.  Information.  No metaphor here; information is the stuff of which the universe is composed.  According to a couple of Korean theorists, information is continually being erased at the event horizon at the edge of black holes.  Yes, that’s right, erased. This continual deletion process means that some parts of the universe will contain more information than will others.  Gravity is simply the transmission of information from information-dense regions to the more backward countries.

I suppose that we have always created the universe in our own image.  We are told that this is the information age (who is it, I wonder, who has told us this).  And now even the stars are to be understood as only so much data.

Depression

Depression is a product of industrial civilization.  And I mean “product” in a very literal sense.  Depression is processed, manufactured, and distributed much like any other product. 

OK, so I’m guilty of a bit of reification here.  But consider for a moment what depression is, what its functional role is in the survival of the species, and then how that function has been co-opted and redirected by the corporate industrial complex. 

Depression, or the collection of psychological states that we associate with that term, is something that happens as a result of goal frustration.  It is a very expensive use of energy for an organism to continue to pursue a goal in the face of insurmountable obstacles.  The depressive state is a means of getting the organism to stop, to disengage from all goals temporarily until it is able to realign its goal pursuit.  The shallow and unnatural goals generated by industrial civilization establish the preconditions for chronic goal frustration. 

Enter corporate marketing.

On Primitives and Progress

The meme of cultural progress surfaced during a casual conversation I was having with a biologist the other day.  The biologists made a disparaging comment about primitive lifestyles, specifically referring to them as “non-advanced”.  I responded by suggesting that it depends on how you define advancement, and that to say that tens of thousands of years in relative harmonious symbiosis with the environment seems quite advanced compared to the approach taken by modern industrial civilization.  His retort—attack, actually—honed in on the idea of symbiosis and harmony.  He made reference to the mass extinctions that accompanied the appearance of humans in the Americas as evidence that humans have always exploited their environment in ways that caused problems. 

I wonder whether I can adequately articulate all of the ways his response bothered me.  First, it is still an open issue whether the large mammal extinctions seen about the time that humans crossed the Bering land bridge were caused by humans or merely coincidental.  Let’s allow for the sake of argument that there was in fact a causal relationship.  If so, then you have a clear example of what can happen when an invasive species is introduced into an ecosystem.  This has no relevance to the question of whether Paleolithic lifestyles were superior lifestyles to ours.  What about Africa?  There have been hunter-gatherer peoples living in Africa since the beginning of people, right up to the present day—hundreds of thousands of years of unflinching environmental support for the tribal lifestyle.  It was only with the advent of agrarian lifestyles that the interaction with regional environments became unsustainable.  What about tribal Native Americans?  In areas where agrarianism was limited, harmonious sustainable lifestyles were maintained until the arrival of Europeans.

Maybe his response can be understood in terms of differences in our definition of “harmonious.”  When I think of harmoniousness or symbiosis with the natural environment, I don’t mean to infer that life was all peaches and cream.  When a local human population decimated the local sources of food (as many surely did), they suffered starvation and death, and bloody conflict with neighboring tribes over depleted resources.  Eventually balance was restored.  The general lifestyle was sustainable and maintained in check by a natural give and take—that’s what I mean by harmonious.  Such a lifestyle can exist indefinitely.  The shift from tribal subsistence to agriculture is not an advancement when you consider it brings with it (1) a linear exploitation of the environment that is ultimately unsustainable, (2) division of labor accompanied by the hierarchical distribution of power (read: access to the resources necessary for survival), (3) a three- or four-fold increase in the amount of work for the majority of the population (defined as time devoted to the provision of necessities—hunter-gatherers spend roughly three to four hours a day “working,” and rarely if ever make a clear distinction between work and other kinds of activities).   I’m not sure I could even begin to elaborate all of the specific ways that industrial society represents an additional (exponential) deterioration of the human state of affairs on top of that seen with the shift to agrarian lifestyles. 

The entire (absurd) notion of progress is itself merely a by-product of industrial civilization.

Pseudo Arguments against the Primitivist Agenda

Countering typical arguments against the anarcho-primitivist posture (based on those found here):

1. Anarcho-primitivists want to abolish technology.  But doing so would have dire consequences for (a) the environment in terms of nuclear waste leakage, etc., (b) individuals with medical problems requiring technological intervention, and (c) the general quality of life.

(a) The continued existence of the status quo has dire consequences for the environment.   Nuclear waste leakage is guaranteed to occur regardless.  We are screwed either way.  We can hope for some future solution to each of the individual problems industrial civilization has produced while we continue to generate additional problems, themselves requiring some future technological solution.  That’s conceptually analogous to ripping the leaky board out of the bottom of the lifeboat to use it as a paddle.  It is ridiculous to think that adding more of what caused the problem in the first place is any kind of solution.  To think that technology is going to save us from the mass destruction caused by our technological system is pure arrogance.  And worse, it’s delusional.

(b) Right now there are millions of individuals with medical problems that require technological intervention who will die because they do not have access to the technology.  And the number of people whose lives existing technology will be able to extend does not begin to offset the number of people currently dying from medical conditions caused directly or indirectly by life in industrial society.

(c) The general quality of life argument is probably the most difficult to counter.  Not because it has any merit, but because it doesn’t make any logical sense.  Two issues need to be clarified right up front.  First, what do you mean by quality of life?  And second, whose lives are we talking about?  If you are talking about quality as a matter of convenience, or how technology provides us with labor-saving devices, then the argument doesn’t hold water.  Most of our so called conveniences (e.g., automobiles) are convenient only with respect to the behavioral requirements of living in a technological society.  Rain-forest dwelling tribesmen have absolutely no use for automobiles.  And, they spend considerably less time “working” than the denizens of our technologically enlightened world.  The extremely rich among us, of course, live very well.  But for them to do so requires a society supported by literal hoards of wage slaves who live far more austere lives.   And if we use the median as our measure of average, then there is every indication that the average quality of life will continue to deteriorate as global population increases and the chasm between the very rich and the very poor continues to expand. 

2. The planet will not support 6-7+ billion people living pre-civilization lifestyles.  Thus the end of civilization will require a dramatic reduction in global population.  Primitivists are not clear on how this will come about.  Who decides who gets to stick around?

The planet would not long support 6-7 billion people living Western consumer lifestyles.  Civilization is unsustainable.  What part of the word unsustainable do you not understand?  There is a limit to what the planet can support.  We may have already surpassed global carrying capacity.  Whenever a species exceeds carrying capacity, there is an inevitable—and usually very dramatic—reduction in population.  Our increasing global population is a direct result of technological advances in food production.  Historically, for every advance in food production, there has been a subsequent proportionate increase in population.  It is our technology that has pushed us to the brink of carrying capacity and can therefore be blamed for the inevitable massive die-off that looms in our future.  The proximal cause of the die-off may be war or a global pandemic or starvation or something else or a combination of these things.  But our advanced technology is what got us to this point.

There are of course intelligent ways of reducing population to the point of sustainability—ways that do not require any existing person to die.  We could, for example, take steps to make birth control a widespread global norm, take steps to ensure women everywhere have control over their reproductive rights, etc.   Substantial negative population growth could get us within striking distance of sustainability in just a few generations.         

Who decides who gets to stick around now?  Who decides it’s OK to incinerate innocent men, women, and children in Afghanistan?  Who decides whose attempts at genocide are worthy of military intervention and whose are allowed to proceed?  Who decides which inner city infants deserve medical attention and at what level?   

  

3. Related to number 2:  even allowing for some massive pandemic or environmentally-generated reduction in human population, it will be the poor and powerless who die off; the rich and powerful will still be able to exploit their power and we will still have a class society.

Right.  That’s where the anarcho- part of anarcho-primitivism comes in.  That’s why it is the machine of civilization itself that needs to be the target, not just its technological accoutrements.  The powerful in society are powerful only because of their position within the hierarchical structure.  Where are the rich and powerful going to get their food when transportations systems are no longer operating?  Where are they going to get the energy to heat their mansions when power plants no longer have access to coal?  Without the artificial hierarchy imposed by civilization, the playing field becomes remarkably flat.

4. It is not civilization itself, or industrial technology that is the problem.  It is the particular way we do civilization, our political system, consumerism, or corporate capitalism that is the problem.  We can solve our problems by fixing the existing system.

This is the progressive delusion.  History provides plenty of evidence against this theory.  Every previous civilization has eventually disintegrated.  Civilization involves the unidirectional concentration of resources and the exploitation of (the vast majority of) people.  The problems are structural, systemic.  Our system isn’t broken.  It simply doesn’t work.  Actually, I should say that it works very well for an exceedingly small and powerful minority—but even then only for a finite period of time.

   

Hope is a Virus

The April 5^th edition of NewScientist included a piece by Debora Mackenzie entitled The End of Civilization.  Mackenzie suggests that the increasing complexity of our global civilization makes it increasingly vulnerable, and that a temporary work-force reduction similar to that caused by the flu pandemic of 1918 could terminally derail the system.  The problem, she says, is one of interdependency and a complete lack of redundancy.  Specialization is important for our global network to function efficiently.  But a high degree of specialization leaves the entire network at the mercy of its weakest nodes. 

The tone of the article is one of ominous warning.  We need to build redundancy into the system to avoid catastrophic failure.  And, of course, the driving assumption is that we should work to preserve civilization at all cost.  Interestingly, the article ends by pointing out that subsistence farmers would be least affected by civilization’s collapse; and the author couldn’t resist throwing a disparaging barb their direction, saying that “Perhaps the meek really will inherit the Earth.”  Subsistence farmers meek?  Comments like that cut right to the heart of Western arrogance.  I know, let’s have a reality survivor show where a subsistence farmer and a Wall Street banker spend a year on an island.  Smart money is on the farmer.  The truth is the meek have already inherited the Earth, and it’s time we reclaim our birthright from these meek quasi-humans.

Back on point: two things about this article are relevant for the current discussion.  First, the machine of civilization is becoming increasingly fragile, which should give some hope to those of us searching for ways to pull it apart.  Second, because interdependency and specialization are the very things that give the global machine its power, by heeding Mackenzie’s warning, increasing redundancy and decreasing specialization, we will be essentially starving the beast—and doing so in a way that eases us into a post-civilization lifestyle.    A post civilization future—if there is to be one for us—will include an extremely high degree of redundancy from one local community to another, a bare minimum of interdependency, and specialization limited to local expertise. 

Unfortunately, I can’t see any of the global corporate monsters acquiescing to policies aimed either at increasing redundancy or reducing specialization. 

So I guess we tend our gardens and wait for the next pandemic.