- 7 weeks ago
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00:00Please tell us about yourself.
00:03Well, I'm an old anarchist writer who lives in Eugene.
00:07I've been here since 81.
00:09Spent a lot of time in California.
00:12I mainly write and do a weekly radio show, Anarchy Radio.
00:20I like the Pacific Northwest.
00:27How did you first get involved with anarchism?
00:32I first got involved with anarchism in the 60s.
00:37I was in the Bay Area in San Francisco and Berkeley back in the 60s.
00:42Well placed.
00:43I was the lucky place to be and just gotten out of college.
00:48In Ashbury, Berkeley, those exciting days.
00:52Although it wasn't, in the U.S. here, anarchism wasn't very much a part of the situation explicitly.
01:00I think it was really, even among the sort of communist groups who were more,
01:05somewhat more anarchist because America's more individualist plants, I guess, one thing.
01:13And I was more, I was influenced a lot by the situations back then in the 60s, early 70s,
01:20which by then was over, pretty much, when we started getting all of that on the West Coast.
01:25Anyway, that was my first experience with that sort of thing.
01:31What has been your involvement in anarchism over the years?
01:34And what is your part?
01:38I think my original involvement with anarchism was with an independent do-it-yourself union in San Francisco.
01:47It was a white-collar public employees union.
01:51Some welfare workers, clerks, hospital workers.
01:53And we didn't use the word anarchist, but it was, it was very anti-hierarchical, no-paid people.
02:02We didn't, we didn't ever, we were not attracted to signing a contract.
02:09It was sort of wobbly-like.
02:11It was sort of IWW-like.
02:14Probably more chaotic than that.
02:16Maybe, I don't know, it was the late 60s.
02:19And that was, that was a huge experience, a learning experience.
02:24It wasn't, it really wasn't reading the anarchist classics that brought me into that.
02:29It was, it was a kind of hands-on thing.
02:32What do you see when you start something that's outside of the accepted thing?
02:37We were outside of organized labor, more specifically.
02:41And were attacked more perhaps by the big unions, the official unions than city hall or other, you know, business
02:51interests.
02:52And that was pretty, that was pretty informative.
02:57It made me think that you can't be independent of the totality.
03:01Anything independent is just, is going to be attacked on all sides.
03:06The media, for example, we'd get these really excited journalists.
03:11What an amazing experiment we have here.
03:14This is really something that, the way you're doing it is really, oh, this is going to be a big
03:19story.
03:19And we'd always say, it's not going to be a big story.
03:22It will never be published, you know.
03:23We weren't conspiratorial, but we'd seen it a bunch of times.
03:27They'd write these lovely stories and never saw the light of day.
03:31Because in San Francisco, the unions are powerful and they don't want to hear this because it might give people
03:40ideas.
03:40So in other words, it wasn't the anarchist canon or anarchist groups.
03:44I looked around for them in the 60s and only found the Wambas.
03:48They're not really anarchists, they're cynicalists.
03:51And they were doing their union thing.
03:53They kind of slept right through the big adventure of the movement of the 60s.
03:59They played no part in it.
04:01So we never found any anarchists, but we were anarchists, you know, without using the circle A, I think.
04:12Well, my current, I'm certainly still an anarchist.
04:15And I think that anarchy means getting rid of domination, identifying what domination consists of.
04:23And the green anarchy thing, or anarcho-primitivism, called a variety of names, anti-siv, roughly speaking the same thing,
04:34is, I think, mainly adding to the list of what is domination.
04:39And certainly there are still quite a few anarchists who don't want the list lengthened.
04:45They don't see the factories, they don't see globalized, standardized life as domination.
04:53We do. We want to get rid of it.
04:55And that's, that is split, I guess, in the anarchy situation around the world.
05:03And I think what's coming on is the green thing.
05:06I think there are more kids that are way more turned on by that than self-managing the mass society.
05:18Anarcho-primitivism, that's kind of a mouthful.
05:21And again, these labels, they quickly solidify it to ideologies.
05:26And that's a vexing problem in itself, the formation, the ideology formation dilemma.
05:34I mean, it's okay as a shorthand, but I think one of the things it is, is stressing the anarchy
05:42part,
05:43trying to stress the questioning and the openness, keeping it fluid instead of hardening it into a set of answers.
05:51Because I think we're just, I think we're trying to contribute in the sense of raising new questions.
05:59And in terms of the anarchist lineage, there are people now that don't seem to see that we're in the
06:07second decade of the 21st century.
06:09This isn't 1870 anymore.
06:12You know, Kropotkin and so forth.
06:15There, it's almost unavoidable that we'd have different questions or some added questions.
06:25People in the 1800s weren't quite so in a position to see where all this was leading.
06:35environmentally and psychologically even, although there was already a lot of evidence there.
06:41And some people did see it a long while ago.
06:44But the primitivist part, I think one way to say it is, there won't be a future unless it's primitive
06:51in some way or another.
06:52We simply cannot continue to assume that the industrializing, modernizing, massifying tendency is, can be assumed, can be taken for
07:09granted,
07:10can be left outside of what should be problematized.
07:14And that certainly includes technology.
07:17I think most, that's one of the most clear aspects of it.
07:22What is technology?
07:24It's not neutral.
07:25It's always, it's never value free.
07:29It's, you can read what society is in the technology.
07:33And if you come to that conclusion, then you open up a whole different, a whole new dimension, I think,
07:42to what anarchy is.
07:45It isn't just sailing along, well, we have to have all this.
07:48Oh, we've got to have technology.
07:50We have to have domestication.
07:52We have to have mass society.
07:54We have to have civilization.
07:55Well, why are we in this, this terrible crisis, this totalizing crisis that's, that everyone can see now?
08:06If we just keep sailing along, how are we really different from the dominant culture, the dominant values that, that
08:12certainly wants to preserve all this and keep going forward?
08:19Well, the problems we face now are, I mean nothing is new.
08:24We could, we could safely say that nothing is totally novel.
08:29And a lot of this has been developing for the longest time, actually.
08:33But now we're seeing, to some extent, unprecedented phenomena that are, that are systematic.
08:41And I think it's not only the, the unfolding, the catastrophic unfolding of what's happening to the physical world, but
08:52it's also,
08:53it's also what's happening to inner nature, the interpersonal, the social, the personal.
09:01I mean, one of the things I bring up a lot on my weekly radio broadcast is the shootings.
09:08These, these, uh, now this sort of chronic, uh, thing where you've got these out of the blue, supposedly out
09:18of the blue mass shootings.
09:20Uh, multiple homicides usually ending in suicide.
09:25So often appended with the description, this person never was a problem, never missed work, never got in an argument,
09:32never, uh, had a mental health issue, just killed fifteen people.
09:37What is that saying about, uh, the nature of the civilization?
09:42Uh, nobody seems to want to look at that.
09:45I've never seen anyone on the left go near that question.
09:49And yet, how horrific does it have to get before you can see the thing unfolding, and maybe even unraveled?
10:14Uh, what, what often hits me, uh, and it's kind of dismaying, is not only that people who are radical
10:25have something to offer in terms of,
10:28what explains all this, are missing the most obvious things.
10:32I mean, where, where is the, uh, this doesn't count?
10:36The, these shootings, for example, these, uh, these pathological, uh, things that are unfolding.
10:43Uh, and of course, along the same lines, at the same time, the, the unfolding of the industrial disasters.
10:51It's just so clear.
10:53It's just, you know, reality pounding on the door.
10:56In other words, what's happened in the past, well, say, since last summer, summer 2010,
11:03not only the, uh, five billion, five million barrels of oil gushing from the Gulf of Mexico floor,
11:12but then the, uh, toxic, uh, the toxic geyser in Hungary, the, the sludge flowing into the Danube and into
11:23the Black Sea.
11:23The, uh, the neighborhoods engulfed in natural gas leak explosions.
11:30I mean, it just goes on and on.
11:31And, at the same time, though, we're always told that technology is the answer.
11:36It will provide the solution.
11:39We'll have the breakthrough.
11:41You know, what we really have is a record of disaster.
11:44And the disaster is deepening.
11:46The disaster is, is all part of, uh, of the massive assault on, uh, not only the natural world, but
11:53all the rest of it, on the built world.
11:55It's, it hasn't worked out.
11:57What, what promise has been fulfilled?
12:00And we could look at the alienation, not just something as spectacular as the shootings, that sort of thing.
12:07But, but the isolation, the, the lack of connection, the disembodied, uh, what passes for connection among people.
12:14It's, uh, it's machine connection.
12:20It's, it's people living a more synthetic existence all the time.
12:24A more separate, dispersed existence.
12:27There's no, community itself is almost vanished.
12:30And direct experience is almost vanished.
12:32These are, these are epical developments.
12:34And yet you could, you could spend your lifetime looking at leftist writings.
12:38I mean, you wouldn't get a hint.
12:40You'd still think, you could close your eyes and think,
12:42Oh, I bet this was written in maybe 1951 or something, not 2011.
12:48You know, people are just not even, uh, you think, well, that, that, uh, that's something to ponder, isn't it?
12:54It gets your attention.
12:55No, it doesn't.
12:57I mean, that's the, that's the danger of ideology again, to put it another way.
13:01If you're so locked into the 19th century that you can't see the, the, uh, the disastrous course of, of
13:08life now,
13:09and look at the way it's spreading, the, the avaricious pace of the technological change.
13:16It's just phenomenal how fast it's moving.
13:18And yet that too seems to be of no interest to, uh, what passes for radical theory.
13:26You've got the big stars of philosophy now, Badiou, Zizek, uh, two Stalinists, two Maoists.
13:34That's unbelievable.
13:35Why not two Nazis?
13:36I mean, it's, it's just a scandal that this passes for thinking, thought, in this condition that we're in.
13:42It's just, uh, it's just a very bitter joke.
13:50What accounts for the situation we're in, what, what brought it about, is, uh, the answers to that are lacking.
14:00And, uh, and I think the answers, the answer to why it's lacking is interesting itself.
14:08In other words, if you implicate the whole, all of civilization, then, uh, you know, that's not going to be
14:16welcome.
14:17That's, uh, for various reasons.
14:19What do you do with it?
14:20And besides the fact that it's too radical to pose it that way.
14:24But that's what you have to do.
14:26In other words, the question of civilization, I think, is basically the question of domestication.
14:32And I often go back to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontent, which really is about domestication.
14:39Uh, more precisely, he's talking about what happens when people are domesticated.
14:45And he, he concluded that you get neurotic people.
14:48You get people that are, that have this psychic wound that never heals.
14:54Because you don't get over domestication.
14:56It's a condition that is, that is unhealthy.
14:59That has banished instinctual freedom and eros.
15:03So, how could people be happy?
15:05I mean, it's, it was a very radical, uh, insight that he had.
15:09And that's, it's, civilization comes on the heels of this move of taming people,
15:17and starting with taming or domesticating animals and then plants.
15:21In other words, agriculture.
15:23And various people have said, it was the biggest mistake of human beings to,
15:30that shift to domestication away from the foraging existence,
15:34the hunter-gatherer taking freely from nature.
15:38Uh, what, what is provided by nature, rather than engineering it,
15:43and, uh, capturing it in, in, in terms of private property and, uh, farming.
15:51So, in fact, you can go further back.
15:54An even more basic social institution, which in turn sets up the domestication,
15:59which sets up civilization, is specialization, is division of labor.
16:03Which seems to have labored very, very slowly along for thousands of generations.
16:11Which is probably why it wasn't so much resisted.
16:14It was, because all of society is incorporated, or goes along with something that primary,
16:21as, as slowly emerging specialization.
16:24But that slowly emerging specialization sets up tensions and inequalities.
16:31And one can see it, if we flash back to the present,
16:35we see ourselves as completely under the effective control of specialists.
16:40We're de-skilled, we're totally reliant on different experts.
16:44Well, this, this began somewhere.
16:47Again, maybe almost imperceptibly, but you have these, uh, differentials.
16:53And perhaps the shaman was the first full-blown specialist with power over others.
17:00Uh, not that that's always, uh, so malignant, but it's, but it's a condition that was not there before that.
17:08So, with the movement of, uh, division of labor, uh, that sets the stage, I think it's probably fair to
17:16say,
17:17for the advent of domestication.
17:20That's another takeoff point.
17:22But there wouldn't be the takeoff basis without the, without the specialization coming along.
17:28And then the next move, the pivotal, uh, move of alienation is to, uh, domesticated life.
17:37And that's exactly what we have now, right?
17:39It's genetic engineering and cloning and, uh, nanotech and, and all the rest of it.
17:46It started with, uh, with farming.
17:49And this is the logical fruition, the extension.
17:54It's just another step of control.
17:56It's just, it's an inner logic, to use Adorno's phrase.
18:00And, uh, unless it's cut off, it continues.
18:05You just have more and more control.
18:06You have more domination of nature.
18:08And, uh, you know, with more resources to, to, uh, flesh it out.
18:15Flesh it out is the wrong way to put it, I guess.
18:17But to, to, uh, to bring it along to further heights of, uh, of control.
18:25So what's it gonna take to bring it down?
18:28Well, to bring all this down, to break out of it, I think requires that we become less tolerant of,
18:36of some of the things that holds it all together.
18:39For example, the left, uh, if anarchy is still gonna be a flavor of the left, then we're not really
18:47gonna get anywhere.
18:48That's, that has to be ended.
18:50That, there has to be a complete break with that.
18:53And by the left, I mean the historical, uh, left, including, uh, traditional classical leftist anarchism.
19:02That's, that doesn't break with the, uh, with the mainstream of the, of the dominant culture, uh, at all.
19:11And so, there, there's a real chasm.
19:15And they're really, it's not a sectarian divide.
19:18I mean, there's really some pivotal stuff, uh, at issue.
19:23And that's just the way it is.
19:24If people, again, they want mass production society, mass culture, mass consumption, uh, then they do.
19:34And some of these people aren't willing to, uh, in terms of the anarchist left, they're not willing to admit
19:41that.
19:42That they, they want to preserve all this.
19:44They, they want, they really want more of it.
19:46They, they have a very different orientation than, than anarcho-primitivist.
19:50For example, one thing that's telling, I think, and has to do with the breakout, has to do with the
19:56solution,
19:56is how little respect they give the indigenous dimension, the indigenous reality.
20:03They really, uh, the people that are leftists essentially want native people to become, uh, uh, workers and consumers and
20:13voters.
20:13They didn't, they, they have no, they don't see the integrity or the, uh, the value of, uh, of those
20:22life ways.
20:24Uh, the, I'm, and I'm referring back to, you know, it goes all the way back to, uh, non-domesticated
20:32people, hunter-gatherer people,
20:33dramatic hunter-gatherers or others, uh, even, uh, horticulturals, often, who have, uh, been outside of the, uh, force field
20:44of civilization.
20:45They don't want that. They never have.
20:48And, uh, sometimes you see people kind of flirting with that, but, you know, uh, we have to look at
20:56the consistent points of view.
20:58And I think this starts for anarchists. If we're talking about getting somewhere, uh, did I just reiterate?
21:04We, we won't get anywhere if we're, if we're part of the left.
21:07That's dead. And, uh, it should be dead. And it should be, we should just be dumping the dirt on
21:14its corpse and moving on.
21:15Otherwise, we don't move on. That's the first thing. And all the rest of it, if we can't, if we
21:21can't deal with that,
21:22then, uh, I just don't see. Because there's so much, there's, there's so much of the rest of it to
21:28tackle.
21:29But, uh, if you're hamstrung at the start by your own, uh, almost definition, if that's what your definition of
21:37energy is,
21:37then how can you expect some kind of solution, something, how can you expect a different vision or a different
21:44paradigm or a different model?
21:46How can you expect something that inspires people with the same old shit that nobody wants anymore?
21:53Nobody cares about the Spanish Civil War 80 years ago. It is nowhere. Why wouldn't they?
21:58I mean, it's interesting to some of us, but what does it have to do with right now?
22:03I mean, the part that sticks out to me, unfortunately, is keeping production going.
22:08I don't want to keep production going. I want to see the end of that.
22:12So, it's a, it's an orientation that has to take itself seriously and fight for the conclusions and, uh, and,
22:22uh,
22:23and push on from there instead of just saying, well, we have this point of view now and we're comfortable
22:29with that.
22:29You can't be comfortable in this world with anything that counts.
22:38Oh yeah, it's sometimes said that, uh, the anarchist point of view is, is utopian in the sense that it
22:44goes against human nature.
22:46But as, uh, I like to think of the way Kevin Tucker puts it, uh, we, there were human species
22:53for about two million years.
22:56We were hunter-gatherers, in other words, for that period of time.
23:02So wouldn't it be, uh, a more reasonable assumption to think that that's our human nature?
23:07And we see now, and this has been a huge, probably the key, maybe the key inspirational thing for anarcho
23:17-primitivism,
23:18is the revision of what is now the orthodox view of what that life was like.
23:26In other words, the life of sharing.
23:28There's absolutely no question about it in the literature if you're looking at anthropology, ethnology, uh, all that.
23:34The egalitarianism was the cardinal, uh, point of the ethos of hunter-gatherer life.
23:42And, uh, then the rest of it filled in by so many people.
23:46Uh, Marshall Solins being one of my favorites in terms of how little people had to work.
23:52Uh, I think all this has to do with human nature.
23:55In fact, actually the term work is a modern term.
23:59Uh, probably doesn't apply as a separate activity.
24:02As part of, uh, existence, social existence.
24:07Maybe not even a totally regular word.
24:09But the amount of time spent somewhere or another on subsistence, um, very often, um, a fraction of what we
24:19spent at modern or wage labor.
24:23Uh, and Solomon's also pointed out, as culture moves along, people work more and more.
24:30And that's kind of interesting.
24:32Technology has promised we'd work less and less.
24:35But, uh, just as with war.
24:37I mean, civilization is chronic war.
24:40It's certainly chronic work.
24:41And so, these things are imposed, it seems like.
24:45So, what is the human nature part?
24:47If people, before, uh, they were defeated in their basic orientation to each other in the world,
24:56and, uh, domesticated before private property and social classes, which really start with domestication,
25:04uh, that human nature, uh, seems to be the, uh, the a priori one.
25:10I mean, that seems to be the one that obtained.
25:13So, in other words, for example, people, you also hear people say,
25:16well, it's human nature to always, uh, be changing things.
25:20Always trying to improve things.
25:22You gotta keep transforming stuff.
25:24Well, it wasn't really transformed for about two million years.
25:27In fact, that's what's always vexed the archaeologists.
25:30How did the stone tool, uh, technology, if you want to call it that,
25:36be so unchanging, and yet they knew how to take care of things?
25:41Uh, they had about the same IQ as ours a million years ago, at least.
25:47Uh, so, if it's human nature to change things, and they didn't change things,
25:51then probably there's something wrong with that conception of human nature.
25:57And I would say to that, why change it if we've got a good thing going on?
26:01Um, it was very workable.
26:03It wasn't destroying nature.
26:04It wasn't causing immorality.
26:06It wasn't causing stratification or hierarchy.
26:09All the things that, as anarchists, we supposedly revere and strive toward,
26:16that was the original anarchist society, not only the original affluent society,
26:21as Sollins puts it, but the original one and the only one.
26:25So that kind of, that human nature was very, very stable and workable.
26:31It was the original adaptation to the Earth.
26:35In fact, the only one.
26:36There hasn't been any successful adaptation.
26:40Quite the, uh, disastrous opposite of that since civilization.
26:44The, uh, always forwarding of the, of the, uh, attack on the unbuilt world.
26:53The, uh, attack on, uh, the natural world.
26:56And so, I, I don't know, this, it's a very modern take on what is human nature.
27:01And of course, that's the ideology of civilization.
27:04We're supposed to make those assumptions.
27:07We're supposed to just accept them and honor them.
27:09But, uh, well, it's human nature to do X, Y, and Z.
27:13Uh, well, it wasn't for 99% of our existence.
27:17So, that's just, uh, something that if we swallow, we keep it going.
27:22But if you, if you rethink that, then it looks quite different to think.
27:28How optimistic are you?
27:31Oh, I am incurably optimistic.
27:33And I've always mocked for that, too.
27:35I, I, I guess it's probably because I sort of came of age in the sixties.
27:40When it seemed like things were really turning.
27:45Uh, it seemed like the winds were turning, as they say.
27:47And, uh, I don't know.
27:49I've never lost that feeling that, that, uh, a lot is possible.
27:54And I think, and maybe this is just because of that, uh,
27:59uh, predisposition to see things, uh, in a better light somehow.
28:05I tend to emphasize, uh, how, how weak the system really has become.
28:12I think it's, it doesn't have, it has very little ideological base left.
28:17In the U.S. you have over two million people in prisons.
28:21Uh, when, when a, uh, I'm just using that as an example.
28:25But I think, if you don't have any greater allegiance than that.
28:29And you have to fall back on coercion.
28:32If you have to fall back on brute force.
28:34You've kind of already lost the battle.
28:38And, and, you know, in terms of the whole, uh, speaking of ideology.
28:43I remember, uh, at my age.
28:46I certainly remember the American dream stuff.
28:48You know, the, your kids will have it better than you.
28:51That's just an assumption.
28:52You know, it's getting better.
28:53There's just all these wonderful new developments.
28:57Nobody believes that anymore.
28:58And the system doesn't even bother trying to say it.
29:01It would just be, it's too laughable to say it.
29:04So, I mean, it just doesn't have any answers.
29:07It doesn't have any, any solutions that are cogent.
29:12I mean, you just look around and you can see that.
29:14So, now, I think it's somewhat akin to locking people up now.
29:19It's more, this is where it's at.
29:22You better, better get on board or you're, you lose.
29:25You're screwed.
29:26You just don't have a choice.
29:27It isn't that it's so attractive that you rush to join.
29:30You just, I think more and more people feel just trapped.
29:34And, um, without a choice in the matter.
29:38And so that, when you get that kind of erosion of faith in, in the, the future of the system
29:47or the goodness of the system, uh, it shows a fragility there that we should ponder a little more.
29:54Sometimes we seem to feel so overpowered.
29:58And we are overpowered, obviously, but, but our enemy is, is weakening, I think.
30:03It's, it's really, it's showing itself to be nothing but bad news.
30:08And so, I think what has taken the place of the ideology of the dominant culture is technology.
30:17It, it now relies so much on technology.
30:22And even in terms of the social type questions, everything will somehow, someday, soon,
30:29magically be, uh, healed and solved and taken care of by technology.
30:36That's the last part of the ideological, uh, armory.
30:41And it works to some degree.
30:43We're all held hostage, hostage to it.
30:45We, we surely are.
30:46So, it's not an illusion.
30:49But it's not the same as people actually believing in the different components of what is, uh, entrapping us.
30:58And that's what we have to get past.
31:00And that's as old as civilization, by the way.
31:04You know, from the, from the first cities, which were walled cities, uh, you can't go out there.
31:11That's, it's very hazardous.
31:13It's dangerous, nature.
31:15It's, uh, you'll get killed out there.
31:18It's a good thing you're safe in the city.
31:19We have the army.
31:20We have the temple.
31:21We have all this stuff.
31:22And you're secure here.
31:24It's still saying the same thing.
31:26Except, it isn't secure here.
31:28It's, it's anything but secure.
31:30And, and really everybody knows it.
31:32There's so much anxiety in any developed country.
31:36You can cut it with a knife.
31:37And that shows, another way of showing that no one's believing in the promises.
31:44No one feels they're protected.
31:46So, I think, in a way, the road is open.
31:52It's much more open than we'd think to get somewhere against, uh, against the prevailing, uh, still, uh, dominant, uh,
32:00controls.
32:06I think individually what we can do is, is try to see through, uh, our captivity to understand it better
32:17and to share that instead of, too often we, we accept the terms of the dialogue in, uh, any political
32:26culture, which leaves out every important question.
32:31Or issue.
32:32It simply does.
32:33When you look at American politics, for example, it's really nothing but trivial.
32:38There's nothing at issue.
32:39There's, it doesn't question anything important.
32:41And, you know, I'm not saying that, I'm not, I'm not so arrogant to say that, that there are not
32:49issues that affect people, certainly.
32:50But, I mean, nothing fundamental is on the table.
32:54And we have to stop that.
32:56We have to, uh, we have to interrupt that.
33:00And it's harder to do individually, but that's part of it, too, though.
33:04And I think that's just speaking out and just interrupting the false, the, the kind of phony or pseudo, uh,
33:13dialogue that takes place in society and start injecting it with, with, uh, some reality.
33:19And that's, that's, that's all it is.
33:20It's just, it's really that simple.
33:22Um, this is a great, uh, nation of denial.
33:28It's probably the, the most, completely, uh, in denial one of it.
33:32I don't know about that for sure, but, so it's not easy.
33:37I think individually, I don't think it's a positive thing to be told, which the dominant culture does tell us
33:46every day, and I'm sure it's not just in America,
33:49that if you recycle more or take a shorter bath or something like that, you will have some real impact.
33:57You won't.
33:58It's just, uh, that's just, uh, it's just a lie.
34:02I think, I look at recycling as just making room for more production.
34:06All, all, none of this stuff, uh, has any meaningful, uh, reality.
34:11And, and of course, we hear about green and sustainable endlessly.
34:16And I've seen it in India, actually, and not just the U.S., of course, but, uh, and it's easier,
34:22if you want to console people,
34:24they need to have some sense that they can do something.
34:27They can vote, they can be more assiduous in their recycling, or, uh, or whatever it is.
34:35These things that are just a compensation, and actually only strengthen the system.
34:41They're, they're nothing, uh, about the solution.
34:43I'm sorry, but, uh, uh, it's a waste of time.
34:47You have to look at where does the energy and the water go, for example, if you're looking at, uh,
34:54at your personal consumption habits.
34:56That only reinforces the consumerist mentality.
35:01But that's, that's another thing we can each do, is see through that, and, and reject that, and, uh, not
35:07just keep it to ourselves.
35:08We can mock these things that, I think so many people know it's just a joke, but it's socially reinforced
35:15if we just go along with it.
35:17Oh, it's counterintuitive to say that, uh, these things are, are not helpful.
35:23But, insofar as they're not helpful, it's our job, I would say, to point it out.
35:29And then other people can feel encouraged, uh, and emboldened to, we can all go a little further.
35:37If we each, uh, you know, point out the, the lies.
35:41And it's more comfortable to just go along with it, of course, but, uh, that's something we could do.
35:53Well, on the other hand, we know, uh, that anarcho-primitivism certainly means the death of billions of people.
36:02Almost all of the billions of people, let's face it.
36:05Uh, and Professor Noam Chomsky points this out very well.
36:09He's called us genositis.
36:11He's pointed out that it would be not just the unintended consequence of if there was a, somehow a primitive
36:20shift,
36:21but it's the desired consequence.
36:24Of course, this is, uh, this is, uh, this is real deceit.
36:30This is just, uh, it's really hard to believe.
36:34But I think, actually, it's just the opposite.
36:36People, people like Chomsky and lots of other people, um, they're the ones who don't really care about the six
36:44billion people.
36:44They're the ones who want to see them staying in these, uh, cities, megacities especially, in these tower block apartments,
36:54where, uh, when everything fails, they'll be dead in a few days.
36:59Because they have no skills, they have no access to, uh, getting along without, uh, the whole, uh, artificial, uh,
37:10aspects of modernity.
37:12We're talking about re-skilling ourselves and spreading that information.
37:18Uh, and I think there's a great psychological bonus to that, by the way.
37:23I'm not, I don't pretend to be, uh, very far along on that road at all.
37:30But I, one thing I'm struck by, people who have re-skilled in terms of knowing how to start a
37:37fire,
37:38or find edible plants, or make a shelter, or simple tools,
37:43they are much more likely, I think, to be, to be fighters.
37:48Because, if you think that, if you want to pull down civilization,
37:53and you don't know how to live without it,
37:55you probably hesitate, on some level, or other, in your pulling it down,
38:01or your desire to pull it down.
38:03It can't be as full, uh, desire, if you're not ready for what can follow.
38:09If you're not even thinking about it.
38:11So, uh, I think that's, I think that's an important, uh, aspect.
38:19That's, to, to reverse the picture, I think it's, it's not just a,
38:24I'm not just being rhetorical here, but we're the ones that I think are, uh,
38:30thinking about the six billion people far more than those who just blithely, uh,
38:35not only accept, but promote this direction we're going,
38:39and this suicidal, uh, poisonous, pathological, uh, train we're on.
38:46If you don't question that, you don't give a damn about the six billion people,
38:50because you're consigning them to what is already unfolding.
38:54All the major cities of the world, you can't breathe the air.
38:57So, uh, yeah, we've got to keep on industrializing,
39:00we've got to bring factories everywhere.
39:02And that is the opposite of our position.
39:05Again, because we're thinking about life on this earth,
39:09and I don't think, uh, the people who are making these fantastic charges against us, uh,
39:16uh, have the right to say that they're the ones that are concerned about it.
39:23Anarcho-primitivism has, uh, been accused of largely continuing the noble savage myth,
39:32and I plead guilty, uh, because there was a noble savage.
39:37And it's very, it's very hip to scoff at that, to jeer at that, but,
39:43and that doesn't mean that we think there was some perfect Eden or something like that, certainly not.
39:50But, uh, compared to this nightmare now, especially,
39:54and given what we learned from the standard literature,
39:58without having to make up anything, or inflate anything,
40:01or go into rhapsodies about the, uh, absolute perfection of hunter-gatherer life,
40:07uh, we know how workable it was.
40:10And noble or not noble, but, uh, yeah, the savage life was much superior.
40:14It simply was.
40:20Narco-primitivism, so-called, uh, first started getting around.
40:25There was maybe more of a kind of,
40:28I don't know if you could call it kind of purist point of view,
40:31that if it wasn't nomadic hunter-gatherer,
40:35then it wasn't, then it was horrible,
40:37and it wouldn't be worth pursuing.
40:39That would certainly be the goal.
40:42And that, that hasn't been eclipsed, I would say.
40:44Uh, I, I don't think that's been lost sight of.
40:47I think it's, I think it's fairly clear
40:49that's kind of an ideal anti-hierarchical, uh, condition,
40:56the nomadic part, before you get to sadentism.
40:59But on the other hand, I think there are people,
41:03including Kevin Tucker, who have written persuasively
41:07that there are a lot of, uh, small-scale horticultural,
41:13horticulture-based societies that have been, uh, uh, exemplary,
41:20that have not fallen into the, the usual things
41:24that come from domestication.
41:26And, you know, and some of this, again,
41:29the domestication thing is the watershed.
41:32For example, people say, oh, you're all in love with the primitive,
41:35but what about cannibalism, or general mutilation,
41:39or human sacrifice, or, you know, stuff like that.
41:43Well, none of those things existed before domestication.
41:46So, I think it's more important to, to keep that in mind
41:51as a general thing, rather than try to say
41:55that we're gonna have some litmus test, or blueprint,
41:59or something like that, in terms of a return.
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