I Traditionally the primitivists have asked us to go backwards, but a smarter primitivism would implore us to go forward. II A friend of mine calls catchy songs “earbugs,” and would engage in what she called “situationist terrorism” by singing earbugs as she walked down the street. This would leave others with little choice but […]
Contradictions in the Reasoning Ted Kaczynski (TK) suggests a nomadic hunter/gatherer (NHG) ideal, because, he claims, a movement needs a positive ideal as much as it needs an enemy. On the other hand, he says that it would be impossible to control post-collapse conditions and in fact imagines that agriculture will inevitably arise where the […]
The following is taken from Ted Kaczynski’s 2010 book Technological Slavery. You write, “Watching a documentary on a tribe of Amazon Indians, I found that their life was as ordered as any modern man’s … their day seemed as regimented as an office worker’s.” You reached this conclusion on the basis of one documentary that you […]
Source Most environmentalists tacitly assume that primitive people lived in ecological harmony with their surroundings, and had little impact on their habitat. Implicit in this assumption is the idea that the environmental ravages of Western civilization are the result of a fall from the primitive earthly paradise, and western European cultural roots are to blame […]
Source Kaczynski’s story represents a parable: “Once upon a time there was a continent covered with beautiful pristine wilderness, where giant trees towered over lush mountainsides and rivers ran wild and free through deserts, where raptors soared and beavers labored at their pursuits and people lived in harmony with wild nature, accomplishing every task they […]
1. As the Industrial Revolution proceeded, modern society created for itself a self-congratulatory myth, the myth of “progress”: From the time of our remote, ape-like ancestors, human history had been an unremitting march toward a better and brighter future, with everyone joyously welcoming each new technological advance: animal husbandry, agriculture, the wheel, the construction of […]
Reprinted from Ritual Magazine. Every good idea needs a selling point. The selling point of the all-encompassing ideology that can go by any name from “anarcho-primitivism” to “anti-civilization thinking” is that modern techno-industrial civilization is destroying the human race, and if we want to stop this destruction, we have to destroy civilization. It’s a matter […]
Among the weak arguments against Progress, there is the peculiar case of dominant ideologies hosting factions that reject it in the name of dominant values. The so-called “regressive left” is an example of this from humanism. The regressive left argues that Western civilization embodies power structures that prevent it from living up to humanist or post-humanist […]