The Domesticated Breath

Note: The following post also appears on Communiques of the Suburban Liberation Front's original post on the topic of "spirit". As this topic is of particular interest to me and to Chinese philosophy, medicine, art, and culture in general, I have reproduced my comment below. Please read the original post here.

"I found this to be an interesting post in light of what I think I have detected from reading your blog to be at least a partial respect for Cartesian philosophy, as I think the current associations people make to the word “spirit” mostly derive from having to rearrange definitions around the Cartesian dualistic framework. Spirit went from being something like a vital motive substance to a far less tangible essence, ghost, or permeation due to the fact that, upon vivisecting a dog, for example, no such material matching the notion of spirit was found. Spirit, then, in order to be salvaged, was recast as an intangible quality whose existence became highly questionable, unlike blood, bile, etc. So you didn’t find the spirit upon cutting open a live animal? That’s okay! We’ll just say it’s invisible/intangible from now on! Of course, in the wake of the scientific revolution of Descartes and Bacon, belief in spirit became less and less respectable.

I personally believe that a major reason why European civilization, and not just any/all other types of civilization, became dominant and rapidly started to destabilize the biosphere and other societies, is because of the conscientious rejection of intuitive and received knowledge that has been so characteristic of Western civilization since the Enlightenment. As Jared Diamond points out, during the 15th century you had (at least) four loci of civilization that were comparably developed: the Far East (China, Japan), Southern Asia (India), the Middle East, and Medieval Europe (Diamond doesn’t count the civilizations of North and South America, but I think you arguably could include some of them in this example). If you think about it, none but the last really seemed to even have an ambition to spread across the oceans the way that the Europeans eventually did, and certainly not for lack of ability, at least in the case of China. It was more like a lack of desire that seems almost incomprehensible to the Westernized mind. I believe that the non-Western civilizations could never have produced a Descartes, and, prior to Christianity’s institutionalization in Europe, neither could Western civilization (this argument needs to unfold in its own post on Wilderness Before the Dawn, and I promise it will). As it happens, I believe that looking at the terms for “spirit” and “breath” in any given culture gives a reliable reading of that culture’s level of connection with the natural world. In addition to the examples you’ve mentioned above, I would add the Eastern terms qi/ki and prana and the Polynesian concept of ha. Qi is the Chinese word for “air” or “breath”. You may know it from the term Qigong, which essentially means “breath training”. Ki is the Japanese pronunciation of the same word. Qi is a common word, spoken every day in Chinese, in various compounds. It literally refers to the air that fills up your lungs, but also to the air (oxygen) that circulates inside the bodies’ channels to give you life, and also to a person’s spirit or mood, as well as the same qualities in non-human entities as well. Thus, the term for weather is tianqi, which translates to “sky’s air, sky’s mood”, similar to the way “air” is sometimes used in English to describe an attitude or other intangible quality: an air of superiority, a mischievous air. This English usage in itself either derives from or makes reference to a time when the word meant essentially the same thing in English and Chinese–the spirit that animates you was as mundane as the air everyone breathes, and the breath in your lungs was as numinous as your spirit–they were one in the same. The definitions become problematic today only because we have to artificially separate the ‘physical’ meaning of air as the substance in our atmosphere from the originally related, almost synonymous meaning of air as an intangible aura or permeation. As a result, you’ll see a lot of crazy, mystical, abstruse, or absurd definitions for qi in English, when one could simply define it as “air/breath, the way we used to mean it in English before Science”. Interestingly, the very first instance of the word qi in writing is in the Mencius, a 4th century BC Confucian text, in which qi is described as sort of a viscous, almost sludgy substance that courses through the body during exertion. Prana is the sanskrit term for vital force, and in Indian traditions of healing and tantric practices, it is considered the primary vayu (wind/air) that gives rise to the other life-supporting functions of the body. As in the concept of qi, prana is thought to enter the body as breath and gets sent to every part of the body via the circulatory system. It’s noteworthy to remember that the speakers of Sanskrit derived from speakers of Indo-European, strongly suggesting an ancient underlying tradition common to both Hindi speakers and speakers of most European languages regarding the connection or even identicality between breath and spirit. The Polynesian concept of ha also corresponds to both the prosaic notion of breathing as well as the idea of spirit in the metaphysical sense that modern English commonly denotes, e.g., foreigners are known as ha’ole in Hawaiian–those without spirit."

I would add to my original comment that the splitting of meanings for the terms that originally meant both spirit and breath that occurred in English and other European languages seems to precisely mirror the dualism that came to infect Western thought after Descartes. In other words, our extraction of two terms, breath and spirit, from an original whole concept, reflects the mental delusion and cultural sickness that characterizes Western civilization. We lack a fundamental connection with the rest of the world that we no longer even recognize as missing not just linguistically, but conceptually. Civilized breath is now stifled, halting, constrained, tense, nervous, and paltry compared to the breathing one can readily witness in non-domesticated peoples, and Westernized cultures have the most breathing problems of all, and not simply from air pollution. If the breath is also the spirit, then the spirit of the West is diseased indeed.

Anarcho-Primitivism's Elephant in the Room

To enhance life is ominous; to force the breath is to strain it; to exert strength is to promote aging. All this contradicts the Dao, and whatsoever contradicts the Dao soon ceases to exist.--Dao De Jing Chapter 55 (my translation)

Anarcho-primitivism seems to have always struggled with the accusation of being inherently "genocidist". More recently, it has become fashionable to furthermore dismiss it as "ableist", another scarlet letter to which we "primmies" seem frantic and, very frankly, dismally unprepared to adequately respond. I suspect the reason for our terrible track record in defending against these criticisms is mainly due to a reluctance to fully accept the actual implications of anarcho-primitivist philosophy--a lot of us haven't been honest with ourselves. I think it's time for a little honesty.

I've written here and here about the necessity of completely aligning our will with nature's, or what is known in Daoist terms as the Dao. For all the customary mysticism that people tend to attribute to the philosophy, Daoism is really pretty simple at base. The core tenet may be summarized: the only way to thrive in a world completely determined by natural principles is to live in accordance with them. Industrial humans seem to have forgotten that the world, not to mention the rest of the universe, is indeed completely determined by the Dao; instead, they fantasize that technology allows you to escape or transcend such natural limits and permits you control over your own fate, and the fates of those who are "less evolved". Science and technology embody the mentality that nature can actually be improved upon if understood well enough. I would argue that there is actually nothing that gives people the ability to flout nature's laws with impunity--after all, even technology must obey natural principles like physical laws and chemical realities--and, therefore, the only way to maintain the possibility of life on Earth is to learn from nature's lead. In my very first post, I cited the example of an oak tree's acorns: for the health of the forest as a whole, while it is extremely important that each individual acorn will strive to grow into a full-sized oak tree, it is equally just as important that most acorns will never have a chance to sprout due to being consumed by squirrels or rotting away in water, etc. Nature does not favor the oaks over the squirrels, nor the squirrels over the acorns. The oak tree wants a stable environment first and foremost, and allows nature to calibrate how many acorns it produces, how many become trees, and how many serve as squirrel food, all toward the goal of maintaining stability in the ecosystem. One single organism or species is incapable of correctly assessing the infinite variables and feedback loops that comprise a complex ecosystem, and if the oaks were to somehow over- or under-produce their acorn crops in defiance of nature's carefully wrought calibrations, the impact would be felt on all levels of life throughout that ecosystem, possibly for years. There is compelling research that forests behave as an integrated emergent organism, much like how individual cells from different types of tissue constitute a human being:

For example, during spruce budworm infestations, spruce forests always contain trees that do not produce alterations in terpene chemistry. Researchers examining the trees have found that they can increase their production, they simply do not. In other words, these are not "weaker" trees that are simply succumbing to a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest dynamic, but strongly healthy trees that are intentionally not increasing chemistry production. The long-range benefits of this are clear: By not raising antifeedant actions in all the trees, the forest makes sure that resistance does not develop in spruce budworms as it does in crop insects exposed to pesticides. Plant communities literally set aside plants for the insects to consume so as to not force genetic rearrangement and the development of resistance.--Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Lost Language of Plants

Thus, if an individual oak naturally gets sick and dies, we would not mourn for it from a Daoist perspective just as we do not mourn the death of a white blood cell when it sacrifices itself for the sake of homeostasis when it engulfs a pathogen in the body--the white blood cell was part of something bigger, and so are we, not just in some mystical, new age, metaphorical sense, but in actual, functional reality. Humans can be considered a type of constituent cell meant to function in harmony with other cells that together comprise the planet, itself a part of a larger entity we call the solar system, and so on. An anti-technology stance is by definition one that rejects artifice and the manipulation of nature; it is a philosophical position that inherently champions the way of nature, and yet, when it comes down to nature understandably itching to reduce the overblown human population for the sake of the health of the entire biosphere by means of disease, genetic degradation, or simply letting us choke on our own refuse, etc., why is it that we primitivists suddenly become gun shy about allowing nature to do to humans what a functioning immune system in an animal does to a malignant growth or bacterial infection? I suspect it has to do with lingering leftist sentiments that confer ultimate value to human life above all other considerations, including detriment to the planet's ecology. We may try to deflect away from discussing the elephant in the room, we may try to avoid the issue or change subjects, whatever it takes to not admit that anarcho-primitivist philosophy, if taken literally, demands a massive die off in human population (as well as bovine, porcine, grain, and all other associated domesticated animal and crop populations). It is a knee jerk response inherited from deeply entrenched liberal idealism to deny the slightest whiff of misanthropy, and too often this self-consciousness has undermined primitivist arguments. From the Daoist perspective, since humans and all other aspects of life depend on nature/Dao for their existence, not the other way around, it only makes sense to align with nature, even at the temporary expense of humans, because in the long run abiding by natural principles, including those that govern population size and the health of gene pools, ultimately ensures that all other living things may also thrive in proper proportion relative to the rest of the biosphere. Does nature behave genocidally, or have ableist biases? Of course. If it didn't avail itself of these tendencies when appropriate, the result would be dangerous for all life. If humans are a cell type that forms part of the whole planet, then right now I think it's safe to say we're behaving like a cancer. Cancer cells, of course, die along with the host when the host expires, so the cancer doesn't gain anything by spreading--the cancer is ultimately malignant to itself, as well. It spreads because it is out of balance--something isn't working correctly. Nature wants to bring things back into balance so that life can continue to thrive. 

We've acknowledged anarcho-primitivism's elephant in the room, but what about civilization's? It is true that high technology is what makes it possible for seven billion people to exist on this planet. Technology produces more food than could ever naturally occur, prevents more deaths through medical and safety interventions, provides the infrastructure necessary to manage and control the potentially problematic behavior of vast numbers of life forms (human and non-human alike), and enables the transport and trade of all manner of products throughout the globe, just to name a few of the obvious ones on the list. I would pause here to point out that technology, of course, isn't magic, though some seem to treat it as though the above boons were basically free lunches made possible thanks to our species' grand intellect. In fact, to consider the effects of technology as net gains for humans, one would have to be almost willfully ignoring the corollary questions of, for example, if technology produces more food than would naturally occur (by definition exceeding sustainability, since nature already generated life in a balanced way at the maximum possible sustainable rate at the time of agriculture's adoption), then what are the short and long term consequences of imposing an unnaturally high demand on the environment, favoring a few species we like to eat at the expense of many others we don't like to eat, and, by extension, what might be the pragmatic and moral issues associated with allowing a population wholly dependent on this unnatural (read: unsustainable) scheme for its survival to continue reproducing be over time? After all, the ratio of caloric expenditure to caloric recovery in conventional agriculture went from 1:2 in the 1940s to an absurd 10:1 today. Or, just how many deaths of and injuries and insults to other life forms (again, human and non-human alike) must routinely occur by means of habitat loss, carbon emissions, pollution from drug factories, persistent drug compounds entering the soil and water from patient bodily waste, radiographic waste, countless disposable latex and plastic gloves, tools, and packaging, etc., to sustain the life of one privileged boy or girl with a genetic defect or disability from an accident? Obviously, I could repeat examples almost endlessly, all with the same glaring point: whatever the vaunted benefits of any given technology, the drawbacks thereof invariably negate and outweigh them. 

For a group of people whose core principle consists of rejecting high technology, anarcho-primitivists are embarrassingly coy about the very obvious consequences of taking away the high-tech systems that enable the feeding of our seven billion sapiens or the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of all our life-saving medications and devices. While there might be the slimmest chance that jettisoning technology would occur in a systematic stepping-down process over many decades to allow for a relatively less traumatic shift worldwide to a non-industrial lifestyle, it seems clear that in most scenarios, the removal of high technology will lead to massive death tolls, disease, catastrophic meltdowns of currently active nuclear plants, and a lot of despair, desperation, and violence. In the future, people will almost certainly be increasingly reliant on technology to ward off any number of possible apocalypses, and this dependence will continue to generate more potential disaster. The image that comes to mind is that of the buffoon who, after imprudently generating a large mess in another person's home, hastily tidies up a messy room by stuffing all the piles of clutter higher and higher into a tiny closet, and as he attempts to shut the flimsy door on the bulging tower of clutter, it all comes crashing down on top of him, leaving him buried under the avalanche of his own shortsightedness. Addressing the problems we currently face that were generated by our prior use of technology (this includes the vast majority of congenital and non-congenital health issues) with more technology is like fending off the effects of withdrawal from alcohol addiction by imbibing more alcohol--as I've stated before, stealing from the future to pay for today. Every time we examine the present, we find that we are actually more embattled, more imperiled, by increasingly complex, nigh-impossible to solve problems--the consequences of previous technological (thus, counter-natural) solutions. It makes little difference whether a contemporary problem has its roots in a technology adopted ten thousand years ago or ten weeks ago--throwing more technology at it will just wind up compounding the overall problem. Therefore, the sooner technology is abandoned, the lighter the consequences we will have to suffer. If we feel that the death of the majority of people on the planet and the radioactive poisoning of the biosphere for centuries to come following the abandoning of technology now are intolerable, then how much more terrifying, how much more irresponsible would it be, to keep on going using technology to fix technology, until it all inevitably collapses anyway? The definition of an unsustainable system is that it will eventually collapse. The way things are looking, this collapse is likely coming very, very soon. Therefore, the people who believe that staying the course with technology means avoiding unnecessary calamity are deluding themselves. They have absolutely no concept of where all these threats to life on Earth come from, but they are taught, and they have faith, that no matter what, technology will offer a solution. As anarcho-primitivists, we should probably aspire to be a little better than such blind faith and face up to reality. Many, many people will suffer in the coming years, but this has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not we forgo industrial technology.

I'll liken civilization to an out-of-control train. The wheels of the coming train crash were set in motion quite a few millennia ago, and there simply aren't any brakes. People feel that making the train go faster should get us all to safety, but they are ignoring all warning signs that speak to the contrary. We primitivists are advocating cutting our losses and jumping off, risking bumps, bruises, broken limbs, even death--but the alternative is even greater suffering when this train finally does crash. Not everyone is able-bodied enough to make the jump off the train--but primitivists didn't want those folks to have to be on the train, nor did they want a train in the first place. The longer this train is kept running through the efforts of the civilized world, the more vulnerable and dependent people will be born on it, the more hostages the train can boast. If the critics of anarcho-primitivism are so concerned with solving the problems of the world, why, then, do they fervently embrace the use of technology, a tactic that historically has only ever escalated all our crises over the long term? This irrational behavior parallels that of animals infected with rabies--infected animals, of course, are dangerous, threaten the rest of the population, and can never be reformed or cured, but can only be isolated or put down. Because primitivists recognize that there can be no resolution to the many crises of civilization by technical means, only a conscious decision to not exacerbate and further perpetuate them, we are denounced for supposedly advocating genocide. We absolutely should not be cowed by these asinine accusations, but instead point out the glaring hypocrisy and irony of such glib and weak critiques. How should one respond to the indignant wheel-chair bound, the diabetics, the hypertensive, the genetically predisposed, the premature births, and the rest when they accuse us of ableism? It's very simple: ask them how they justify bringing others down via the greater intensity of resource consumption, exploitation of habitat, pollution from industrial processes, and general infliction of very real harm, most egregiously to the poor, rural, and non-domesticated (once again, human and non-human alike) inhabitants of the rest of the world, who seem to be to them utterly invisible, to maintain their own lifestyles, effectively sacrificing many to support their few. How do they justify risking the ruin of the entire biosphere and the possibility for any life on this planet just so that they can personally exist? I am sure they will feel offended and shocked, but what about the victims of their industrial needs, whose voices are almost never heard as their lives, cultures, and histories are torn apart at an ever increasing rate in order to make our insular societies more accommodating to the privileged disabled and ill? If it comes down to a response of, "Well, better them than me", "Who gives a shit about some aborigines or Bangladeshis", or something of that nature, I'm sure we would find our sympathy for their indignant victimhood quickly evaporating. The only way to resolve any of the crises facing the world is to let things run their natural course. The truth is, almost none of us coming out of civilization are "able-bodied" enough to make it in a totally wild environment. Where are our tribes, where are our elders who can teach us the ways of survival and pass on important knowledge about the world? We've been left stranded inside civilization, cut off from the Dao, already watching our current way of life implode. Let's be honest. If you consider yourself disabled, then civilization is your enemy, not anarcho-primitivism. If you take the side of your enemy, you are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Our one and only hope of surviving the consequences of our own past indiscretions is to step back and allow nature to reassert dominance in whatever way, be it "genocidal" or "ableist", she deems fit. Nature--Dao--is the final arbiter in deciding what is appropriate for all life.

The Spider Eaters

"Many historic lessons were obtained through tremendous sacrifice. Such as eating food – if something is poisonous, we all seem to know it. It is common sense. But in the past many people must have eaten this food and died so that now we know better. Therefore I think the first person who ate crabs was admirable. If not a hero, who would dare eat such creatures? Since someone ate crabs, others must have eaten spiders as well. However, they were not tasty. So afterwards people stopped eating them. These people also deserve our heartfelt gratitude."--Lu Xun

Can people learn from the mistakes of the past, avoid repeating them, even if they have no direct experience of the negative consequences that had originally resulted? Apparently, there are some who would say, "no". In particular, I refer to those who argue that the goal of abolishing high technology is futile, that the pursuit of high technology is an inborn human quality, inseparable from our natural curiosity, and that the advent of high technology (and civilization) has always been, and will always be, inevitable. Even should technology be somehow banished, it would just start back up again sooner or later, because that's supposedly what people do. Even Ted Kaczynski conceded that, even should his goal of abolishing organization-dependent technology succeed, the possibility of people one day resurrecting old or innovating new technology cannot be prevented. Many go so far as to state that this technological drive is precisely what defines us as human, distinguishes us from the lower animals, and separates us from nature. To these people, to arrest progress is to arrest our humanity. However, even some of those who see the fatal nature of our current technological trajectories believe that such destruction is inevitable. Humans may be destroying themselves and their planet with technology, but we simply can't help it, it's hardwired in, we're just too damn good with technology, and the planet is just too damn fragile to accommodate our highly evolved ways, and no matter how many chances you give people to start over, we will inevitably take up the pursuit of progress, again and again--so their thinking goes. One wonders if this line of thought is an effort at self-delusion, an attempt to abscond from responsibility, or merely resignation to the planet's seeming fate. Whatever it is, it is demonstrably absurd. 

All of our ancestors, including all our non-human kin, have had to learn from mistakes in order to persist. To take Lu Xun's example, some of our ancestors tried to eat crabs and were lucky, and to this day we eat crabs, not because each one of us has had to discover the edibility of these creatures on our own, but because that knowledge became part of our inherited culture, and everyone just knows that crabs are good eating. Likewise, there must have been some who attempted to eat spiders, but without the same degree of success; nevertheless, the discovery that spiders are not edible and should be avoided became an equally important piece of knowledge that contributed to human cultures and, as Lu Xun rightly points out, the unfortunate spider eaters should also be acknowledged for their contribution to our collective cultural legacies as much as the crab eaters--and in traditional myths and stories, they are, albeit in symbolic characterization. Because there were spider eaters hundreds of thousands of years ago, there don't have to be any today, thanks to cultural knowledge. We don't have to keep experiencing mistakes firsthand, but rather, we have the very human ability to benefit from received wisdom, coded in our cultures, regarding all aspects of life: food--its acquisition, preparation, distribution, consumption; relationships--to your family, your band, the water, the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, the plants, the myriad life forms, and the spirits; appearance--coif, bodily decoration, clothing, posture, and facial expressions; manufacturing tools and other items; and, just as importantly, taboos--the things you should not say, think, do, consume, touch, or feel. Of course, this information is not simply presented as a set of rules to people, who are expected to abide by them unquestioningly. At the same time, it is impractical to explain your entire culture by citing specific past events that illustrate why it is okay to eat crabs and not spiders, why you can sleep with someone from a different family but not your cousin, and so on. As one might expect, people developed storytelling to lend context to their customs, giving reasons for their particular culture's codes of behavior in a way that was simultaneously compact, digestible, memorizable, and, perhaps most importantly, entertaining. 

Back in industrial civilization, we have made for ourselves a veritable buffet of different cultures from which we are more or less free to pick: we can have our Yoga classes, Zen meditation, African dancing, Brazilian martial arts, Sichuanese cuisine, and whiskey from Scotland, consuming as much "culture" as we'd like--and yet, we are unable to incorporate very much of our samplings into anything resembling a cohesive, stable culture of our own. We are just vampires, hungry for the blood of living cultures. Western societies more or less consciously abandoned their ties to ancestral knowledge during the Great Enlightenment, when Europeans intentionally rejected what they considered superstition in favor of new, rational knowledge. In essence, they doubted the stories of the past and decided to try eating spiders for themselves. So it has gone, for over half a millennium, that we have stubbornly tried to eat spiders in contradiction with received knowledge, ignoring all the poison that has been building up as a result, just to prove to ourselves that we do not have to be bound by the ignorant traditions of our embarrassingly basic progenitors. We have become so estranged from culture in the true sense, have worked so conscientiously to jettison it, that we no longer understand what its original purpose was: to spare people, out of love for one's own future generations, the difficult sacrifices, risks, mistakes, and regrets that our predecessors had to make before their culture held the guidance needed to help them make better choices. For our own future generations, would it not be possible to teach them, as a part of their culture, as a part of their identity, that technology was a grave mistake not to ever be repeated, and to have this traditional knowledge passed on to their children, grandchildren, and so on, the same exact way that humans have done since time immemorial? Can our future cultures not proclaim boldly, "We are the people. We do not eat spiders. That is not our way."?

 

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

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The Tragedy of Achievement

Civilization is powered by insecurity. The key to the system's control is its manipulation not only of scarce resources, but of the very notion of scarcity itself. Our access to food, clean air and water, other people including family members, safety, physical spaces, and a dignified life in general is mediated in civilization by a system that leverages resource scarcity in order to generate a highly effective form of control based on people's desire for things that can now only be practically obtained by satisfying the system's demands, as unpalatable as they are. This is essentially the project of domestication: a brokering of once-free access to once-plentiful resources in order to master the behavior of once-wild dimensions for the sake of harnessing their power.

In addition to the physical restrictions we suffer borne out of our collective veneration of the scarce and rare, we also endure extensive psychological deprivations that begin in childhood schooling and that can persist until death. From childhood, we are taught that it is important to be the best, to stand out, to be a success. As a means to evaluate and assess children's performance and behavior, report cards and test scores supplant a child and her parents' ability to form opinions about the child's education and development independently--that is, based on their own feelings of personal contentment, interest, goals, and so on--by instead judging the child's performance according to a value system that is alien to a child's way of thinking against other children who likewise would normally take no interest in the performance of their "peers", who initially are really just strangers of the same age that just happen to be in the same room together. These classmates might become potential playmates, though, as mentioned previously, young children tend to be instinctively wary and shy of unfamiliar faces; therefore, a classroom full of new children can often stir up feelings of deep insecurity and discomfort that nevertheless, through mandatory attendance at the school, can be surmounted by enough children to make the practice somewhat feasible, though things are certainly going downhill quickly. However, the notion that the other children in a classroom, school, and eventually the country or world are to be competed against and ideally outperformed is completely foreign, has no antecedent in our ancestral forager roots toward which our biology still strongly cleaves, and must be instilled in our youth rather forcefully in order to produce the sort of competitive, self-interested personality that is our society's preferred fuel source. Children quickly realize that their own opinions about themselves based on the things they naturally value, like having fun, exploring the world, and being around family, are relatively worthless, and that even things like play or learning must be done in a certain way in order to gain the approval of adults and thus be valuable. Unable to comprehend the meaning, the logic underlying this arbitrary system of evaluating their actions and thoughts, children grow up deeply insecure about their standing in society, having to rely on external praise or criticism in order to form an identity and sense of self. Children lose the ability to see themselves as inherently good or valuable because they are explicitly taught, and treated accordingly, that goodness and value are actually pegged to their capacity to perform tasks according to a standard that can often be counter-intuitive or downright arbitrary. For example, a child's coloring outside the lines of a picture will only be tolerated up to a certain early age in school, after which point she is expected to color neatly and appropriately under penalty of a bad grade or some such demerit. Even though the child might have thoroughly enjoyed coloring the way she did, with wild colors streaking all across the page, she learns that her enjoyment means very little to the world, and that she must adapt her behavior and even her preferences to a standard that never truly existed in her own heart if she wants adults, often including her parents, to value her. What should be plentiful self-confidence based on an inborn capacity to simply enjoy coloring becomes a source of confusion, anxiety, shame, and frustration--incentives for the child to betray her own preferences for the sake of seeking approval, which now can only come from others, never herself.

Civilization celebrates and worships its rarest individuals as celebrities and heroes, exploiting the yen for external approval we acquire in childhood by reserving attention and accolade for only a fraction of the population, effectively turning self-esteem into a scarce and desired psychological resource for which we all vie, compromise, and sacrifice in a deeply misguided attempt to correct that early childhood deficiency. Even though it might have absolutely no impact on our actual daily lives, we accord great respect to the winners of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, presidential medals of freedom, Purple Hearts, Oscars, Grammies, Tonies, Olympic medals, Tours de France, various sports cups and derbies, valedictorian ranking, down to spelling bees, science fairs, county fairs, even adult video awards and blind taste tests for vodka--virtually all aspects of civilized life is routinely turned into a competition, which means that every single dimension of life demands assessment and comparison against others before one knows where she stands with respect to the rest of the world and, to a disturbingly large degree, her own sense of worth.

The great irony and tragedy in all this is that this insecurity does not usually dissipate even after superlatives have been achieved. Often, the expectations placed on the individual who has achieved a high distinction are overwhelming, the resultant anxiety crippling, and the constant fear of falling from grace in the public eye can be intensely destructive. Chef Bernard Loiseau achieved his life goal of three Michelin stars with his restaurant, La Côte d'Or, only to fatally shoot himself in the head with a hunting rifle twelve years later when he learned that the Michelin Guide was preparing to take away one of his stars. Other top chefs choose to surrender their stars or even close their restaurants rather than endure the nerve-wracking pressure that being the best of the best entails. Nor is this kind of pressure unique to the world of haute cuisine, but can be found in the realms of corporate business ("In a cutthroat industry staffed by many of the world's sharpest minds, recruited from hypercompetitive business schools, it seems no surprise that the shame of failure is hard to take when an individual’s whole identity is built around success"), professional and non-professional sports ("Striving to please a parent, fearing a coach's wrath, chasing a college scholarship can make athletes uniquely vulnerable"), and, of course, higher education ("I just don't understand what's happening to these high-achieving kids...How did we get to this spot? The whole thing, for me, will never make any sense"), to name only a few specific categories, though civilization in any configuration, expressed in whatever variation it has been able to assume throughout history, takes it as standard operating procedure to torment all those it raises up in praise as cruelly as those who languish below its standards in ignominy. Taught to find meaning in life by striving for success, the domesticated individual comes to find that the impetus for a large majority of her life decisions arises from a nagging sense of insecurity, secret, desperate, and nihilistic to the core...

...Meanwhile, in Bolivia, among the remaining uncontacted Yuqui, one of the few remaining uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers on the planet, young children play, imitating the adults, while the older boys start catching small game and fish and the girls begin to learn the fine skill of gathering the food, fibers, dyes, and medicines around them. Skills are passed on to each generation virtually unchanged. These skills are inherently scaled for human beings, and everyone can learn how to do them, and do them well, even without direct teaching. The goals that the Yuqui pursue are finite, attainable, and satisfying to both attempt and achieve. They are goals that are inherently valuable independent of any external assessment--they result in full bellies, engaged intellects, healthy bodies, and harmonious lives. The families are sustained by the combined efforts of all the people, and by coordinating efforts, they increase the success of their hunts and foraging. When a boy catches a fish, or when a girl digs a root, he or she is not concerned with ranking the fish or root against the rest of the boys' or girls' efforts, because he or she does not gain or lose any status as a result of doing so. So long as the fish is good to eat, so long as the root treats the illness, it is good, and the young boy and the young girl gain confidence and in their hearts they have peace with themselves and the universe...

Response to Chris's comment from July 16th, 2014

 Note: My original response to Chris's comment wound up being too long to post as a reply, so I'm posting it as a separate entry here, starting with Chris's question.

chris July 16, 2014 at 3:06 AM

"On the other side of the drug spectrum, I've recently been going through some health problems and have relied on them to make it through in a relatively comfortable way, though if modern medicine hadn't been available I would currently be in severe pain and my quality of life would be so poor as I might even prefer death. So while realizing the underlying goals of the medicine machine, I'm at times grateful for it, and of course leaving this gap between idea and practice. What do you think personally about abandoning modern medicine?"

I've actually worked on a farm raising chickens--just a couple hundred, nowhere near the numbers on an industrial farm, but with more or less the same deformed breed of chicken that large-scale farmers raise. The chickens stayed in a barn their whole lives surrounded by other chickens that were far too numerous and therefore anonymous for any bird to form a normal social relationship with. They were too heavy to take more than a few stumbling steps before faltering. They spent so much time sitting down that their breasts were actually bare from touching the ground so much. This did make it easier to pluck them later, I confess. The environment was stressful and utterly devoid of stimulus except when I or someone else went in to catch some birds to slaughter. But here's the thing--even when their lives were so shitty (and you know chickens are smart enough to know that that life was shitty), they still panicked when I took them, and they still struggled when I cut their throats. Did they really cherish their alienated lives sitting in poop inside a crowded dirty barn that much? The birds didn't want to die. So, if you were a chicken in a chicken factory, would you be grateful for the protection that the antibiotics in your feed afforded you from the potential of infection that arises from being forcibly crowded together in a shed in the first place? It's the same power forcing you into confinement and forcing you to eat incessantly and that will eventually kill you in a potentially painful and most certainly horrifying way that gives you the antibiotics. If you take the antibiotics willingly, you are enabling your crowding, because if all the chickens refused to take the antibiotics, the crowding would not be possible. If you are grateful for the benefit of their medicine, it really is a Stockholm Syndrome situation--essentially, it's like someone breaks your legs but you only feel gratitude that they gave you a wheelchair in the end. I'm in no way trivializing pain, yours or anyone else's; all I'm trying to convey is that our gratitude for the relief that modern medicine brings becomes a weapon, a point of leverage to use against us. It's also a mistake to believe that only modern medicine can bring us actual relief from pain--I'm pretty sure the case can easily be made that the opposite is true if you consider the role of technology in general in causing suffering and disease throughout history. To believe that only modern medicine can save us from infectious disease or back pain is akin to believing that only television can alleviate boredom or only the internet can remedy isolation. I'm pretty sure that these supposed solutions are really part of the cause of the problems they claim to solve. The problem is that the connection is not immediately obvious--it's not a causal relationship that most humans will naturally grasp, not because most humans are stupid, but because the chains of cause and effect generated by technology have transcended what might constitute a human-scale reality. As I wrote before, in a techno-scale reality, all our adaptations, evolved over millions of years, begin to constantly work against us, not for us. We begin to consistently make the wrong choices without it being immediately obvious. As humans, it still feels good and right to eat lots of sugar, use disposable paper plates, drive instead of walk when it's hot outside, etc. Even littering has an evolutionary rationale. So it should be expected that everyone loves the relief that modern medicine can provide. The system exploits our human desire to not feel pain or be ill, because the novel way in which the system provides relief is difficult for a human mind conditioned to a different way of life to grasp. To most people, it's very simple: take the medicine and feel better. It's hard to comprehend that the existence of industrial medicine has only ever worsened environmental degradation and negatively impacted health in the long run. We steal from the future every time we leverage economics through technology to meet our needs in ways that ensure that the maximum number of intermediaries (=inefficiencies, waste) are involved in order to generate profit at as many junctures as possible. When the next time we look we notice that our past actions have left us poorer in the present, we are ever more motivated to steal from the future, extolling promising new technologies, digging up resources that can never be replaced. The poorer you get, the more desperate to steal you become. So, every time we rely on the system to meet our needs, whether they be medical or otherwise, we charge to a credit card that we can never pay off. Somewhere we will have to stop doing this, the question is whether we stop on our own terms and take our time, or just keep going full throttle until reality stops us for us.

The Ongoing Zombie Apocalypse, part 2

Perhaps the closest real world analog to the fictional zombie virus is rabies. Rabies is a viral disease well-known to affect mainly warm-blooded animals. Pet owners are often legally required to have their dogs and cats vaccinated against the virus, as infection can cause animals to turn vicious and usually results in the death of the infected animal. Probably the aspect of rabies that is most striking is the change in behavior of the animal that is effected through infection. A normally docile dog or cat may start acting aggressively, scratching or biting anyone who comes near it. This change in behavior is understood to be the way the virus propagates itself. Since rabies is found in high concentrations in the saliva of infected animals, the virus alters the behavior of the animal to increase the chances of it biting another host, thus spreading the infection.

What is striking here are the parallels between the mechanism of transmission of the rabies virus on the one hand and of technology on the other. When an animal is rabid, it seeks to roam and bite other hosts. It is crucial to note that the animal is unable to distinguish the motivations of the virus from its own motivations, even though from an outside perspective, behaving in an erratic, violent way does not benefit the animal in getting it food or sexual mates. The behavior, though embraced by the animal, only benefits the virus by increasing the chances of propagation. If given the chance, the virus would presumably try to infect as many hosts as possible, though the underlying motivation for this phenomenon, if there is one, is, as for all viruses, still unclear. It is a mistake to interpret the animal's new, post-infection behavior as stemming from the animal's inherent nature or personality--the disease is distinct from the diseased. Nevertheless, the animal will feel compelled to act in ways that it should otherwise understand to be self-detrimental, picking fights and risking injuries that are actually unnecessary. Likewise, technology, specifically high technology that depends on the subjugation of people, seems to only benefit itself at the expense of not only its host species but also the environment. Of course, those who are infected with the technology "virus" believe that technology, and the actions that it requires, benefits themselves--like the rabid animal, they are unable to distinguish the motivations of their infection from their own motivations, for their own motivations have been subsumed by technology, and they sacrifice and toil for technology willingly, aggressively spreading it with absolute conviction. Like rabies, once a population acquires high-technology, that population tends to spread it to surrounding populations, but it is not possible for the uninfected populations to disinfect an already-infected population. The trend is usually toward increasing infection until the virus, running out of new hosts, dies out on its own. When a population acquires technology, its behavior begins to radically change, and its priorities shift dramatically in favor of propagating technology, even at the expense of the population's own interests. Increased aggression is observable, along with a host of previously unknown symptoms like meanness, deceit, greed, and misery. When an animal becomes rabid, it is impossible to reform its aggressive behavior through any amount of incentives or punishments--the virus precludes the possibility of lucid thought, just like a zombie. A rabid animal, like a zombified neighbor, can only be put down. Leaving the animal alive out of pity risks more bites and more infections.

The question is, how accurate is this parallel between rabies and technology? If the comparison is absolute, then the prospects of ridding ourselves of the technology infection seem dire, like the third act of a zombie film. There certainly does seem to be a relentless, too-late-to-turn-back quality to the current pandemic of techno-dependence. We would just have to wait until the fire of infection runs out of kindling, annihilating most of the current biosphere. Or can we realize in time that this infection has to be quarantined as quickly as possible to protect what nature is left? Can we see the current situation for what it truly is: an ongoing zombie apocalypse, as mindless, relentless, and merciless as anything we've watched on the movie screen?

Perhaps the important thing to remember is that, just as rabies is not inevitable in an animal population, neither is technology and the negative changes in human behavior it entails destined to crop up among humans. A common argument against anarcho-primitivist ideas is that the current dominance of technological society was inevitable, predetermined by innate human curiosity--"should we somehow succeed in stamping out technology tomorrow, there will sooner or later be a group of humans somewhere that will once again pursue progress with technology". I have written previously about how diseases such as cancer are incorrectly thought of as inevitable aspects of human existence, as cancer is by no means inherent in human aging. Cancer is not inevitable, nor is rabies, and neither is technology. If a dog or cat lives its entire life without contracting rabies, it is not somehow incomplete, and it is not a lesser animal than an animal that does acquire rabies. Neither eventuality is inevitable, though either can be made more or less likely by environmental conditions. The word "inevitable" is used by the system to dispel any hopes for a way out. The word is part of the infection that is trying to overtake your mind, convince you of its rightness despite the obvious degradation happening all around us.

The Ongoing Zombie Apocalypse, part 1

Since at least George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead, which redefined the concept of the zombie mythos to what most Americans know today, the theme of a "zombie apocalypse", in which an ever-growing horde of mindless walking corpses who spread their contagion by feeding on the helpless human population inexorably overrun the neighborhood, city, country, and even world, has remained extraordinarily popular in the mainstream imagination. This sub-genre of horror film provides a particularly rich, if mostly unrecognized, commentary on mass society. For example, recent genre offerings have tended to focus on the spread of a zombie contagion in largely urban areas, where the infection spreads quickly and easily. The dwindling number of survivors increasingly have nowhere to run as the zombies seem to be everywhere. Zombie apocalypse stories continually reprise several notable themes: fear of pandemic contagion (sometimes originating in shady bio-engineering research), ineffectual governments, survivalism, breakdown in social order, and so on. However, it is the ability of the zombie movie to tap into the deep-seated but largely unconscious tension inherent in living within mass society and particularly in the ambivalent confines of the modern urban landscape that represents the genre's greatest subversive potential.

Like other primates, humans have evolved over several million years to spend virtually all their time together with their tribe or band. I think it is fairly obvious that a lone human being, no matter how fit, has little hope of surviving alone in a wild environment. Band society, characterized by cooperation and sharing, enabled humans to live, and live well, for millions of years. Simply from a pragmatic viewpoint, in-group betrayals such as murder, lying, stealing, and so on would have been intrinsically discouraged (though not inconceivable) due to the inherent lack of "hiding places" in such an intimate social environment--in other words, there would have been no wall of anonymity behind which to escape after committing a transgression in a small group of people wherein each member depends on the support of the others, not merely for survival, but company, entertainment, affection, a sense of belonging, and the psychological benefits thence derived. Additionally, I'm hard-pressed to think of very many things in a nomadic band society that could actually be stolen or lied about. In any case, the consequences of unacceptable behavior are immediate and obvious in a closed band society, even if the punishment is simply being ostracized or ignored. Strangers, by contrast, offer none of the aforementioned benefits to a group and would indeed be able to get away with just about any act of deceit or aggression as long as they were able to escape before they were caught. The consequences of harmful behavior virtually disappear once the offending stranger escapes--if the stranger escapes. However, without the presence of other members of one's band, one becomes vulnerable, and there is virtually nothing stopping a stranger from harming you.

Past a certain age, children stop acquiring language at their peak rate--apparently, nature did not deem it worthwhile to prepare us for the possibility of traveling abroad and having to acquire a new language at 25 years of age. At the genetic level, we are all ill-disposed to mass society and engaging with unfamiliar factors. Around the same age that they stop learning language efficiently, children also tend to become wary of strangers. This is not to say that children don't become braver and more willing to explore their surroundings away from the protection of adults, but this wariness of encountering strangers, especially unexpectedly, never disappears, even despite our modern liberal enthusiasm for embracing globalization and reveling in the melting pots that are supposed to be our cities. How can one tell if a stranger means us well or harm? What if the supposedly peaceful inhabitants of our cities turn out to be malevolent? They already surround us, potential threats literally occupying all the space above (skyscrapers), below (subway system), and around us. Through lack of choice, we have adapted to these novel environments, but only imperfectly, as the anxiety and alarm that the fundamental distrust we feel toward the strangers occupying our surroundings evokes must constantly be suppressed in order to function in a city. Unable to affect our own situations, like chickens in our crowded, putrid, windowless sheds, we routinely ignore the motley assortment of passengers sharing our bus or train car. We expect rudeness and perhaps even a degree of danger in some parts of our cities as a given. Some individuals seem unable to cope well enough to function in this environment, and we may term these people agoraphobic, anxious, neurotic, paranoid, or delusional. Still, even those deemed "normal" in the city seem unable to function unless they cloister themselves away from the madness that threatens to encroach from all sides, whether they lock their eyes onto the screens of their smartphones and deafen their ears with streaming music through their ear buds to get through their daily commute without having to interact with unfamiliar people or withdraw into a sudoku puzzle or the day's New York Times at a coffee shop full of obnoxious patrons who, despite your best efforts to isolate yourself, may yet succeed in destroying your solitude through various means, such as the indefensible assault on your nostrils from an obnoxious perfume or a too-loud couple conversing just above your head. Zombie films may be interpreted as a distillation of these suppressed anxieties writ large on the silver screen, like a nightmare derived from our habitually-suppressed stress about strangers in our environment that we can safely (because it's "just a movie") experience consciously but whose source from within our own psyches still remains mostly obscure to the waking mind. Nevertheless, if something of the recurring motif of zombie ascendancy did not resonate deeply with people, we would be hard-pressed to account for the genre's immense popularity.