ran prieur beyond civilized and primitive a4

8/3/2019 Ran Prieur Beyond Civilized and Primitive a4

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Ran Prieur

Beyond Civilized and Primitive

2008


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Western industrial society tells a story about itself that goes like this:A long time ago, our ancestors were primitive. ey lived in caves,were stupid, hit each other with clubs, and had short, stressful livesin which they were constantly on the verge ofstarving or being eaten

by saber-toothed cats. en we invented civilization, in which westarted growing food, being nice to each other, geing smarter, inventingmarvelous technologies, and everywhere replacing chaos with order. Itsgeing beer all the time and will continue forever.

Western industrial society is now in decline, and in declining societiesits normal for people to feel that their whole existence is empty andmeaningless, that the system is roen to its roots and should all be tornup and thrown out. Its also normal for people to frame this rejection

in whatever terms their society has given them. So we reason: isworld is hell, this world is civilization, so civilization is hell, so maybeprimitive life was heaven. Maybe the whole story is upside-down!

We examine the dominant story and find that although it containssome truth, it depends on assumptions and distortions and omissions,and it was not designed to reveal truth, but to influence the values andbehaviors of the people who heard it. Seeking balance, we create aperfect mirror image:

A long time ago, our ancestors were primitive. ey were just assmart as we would be ifwe didnt watch television, and they lived incozy hand-made shelters, were generally peaceful and egalitarian, andhad long healthy lives in which food was plentiful because they kepttheir populations well below the carrying capacity of their landbase.en someone invented civilization, in which we monopolized the landand grew our population by eating grain. Grain is high in calories butlow in other nutrients, so we got sick, and we also began starving when

the population outgrew the landbase, so the farmers conquered landfrom neighboring foragers and enslaved them to cut down more forestsand grow more grain, and to build sterile monuments while the elitedeveloped technologies of repression and disconnection and gluonousconsumption, and everywhere life was replaced with control. Its beengeing worse and worse, and soon we will abandon it and live the waywe did before.


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Again, this story contains truth, but it depends on assumptions anddistortions and omissions, and it is designed to influence the values andbehaviors of the people who hear it. Certainly its extremely compelling.As a guiding ideology, as a utopian vision, primitivism can destroy Marx-

ism or libertarianism because it digs deeper and overthrows their founda-tions. It defeats the old religions on evidence. And best of all, it presentsa utopia that is not in the realm of imagination or metaphysics, but hasactually happened. We can look at archaeology and anthropology andhistory and say: Heres a forager-hunter society where people werestrong and long-lived. Heres a tribe where the work is so enjoyablethat they dont even have the concept of freeloading. Here are Euro-pean explorers writing that certain tribes showed no trace of violence

or meanness.But this strength is also a weakness, because reality cuts both ways.As soon as you say, We should live like these actual people, everycompeting ideologue will jump up with examples of those people livingdreadfully: Heres a tribe with murderous warfare, and one with ritualabuse, and one with chronic disease from malnutrition, and one wherepeople are just mean and unhappy, and here are a bunch of speciesextinctions right when primitive humans appeared.

Most primitivists accept this evidence, and have worked out severalways to deal with it. One move is to postulate something that has notbeen observed yet, but that if it were observed, would make the factsfit your theory. Specifically, they say e nasty tribes must have allbeen corrupted by exposure to civilization. Another move is to defendabsolutely everything on the grounds ofcultural relativism: Who arewe to say its wrong to hit another person in the head with an axe?Another move is to say, Okay, some of that stuff is bad, but if you add

up all the bad and good, primitive life is still preferable to civilization.is is hardly inspiring, and it still has to be constantly defended, andnot from a strong position, because we know very lile about prehistoriclife. We know what tools people used, and what they ate, but we dontknow how many tribes were peaceful or warlike, how many were permis-sive or repressive, how many were egalitarian or authoritarian, and wehave no idea what was going on in their heads. One of the assumptionsI mentioned above, made by both primitivism and the dominant story, is


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that stone age people were the same as tribal forager-hungers observedin historical times. Aer all, we call them both primitive. But in termsof culture, and even consciousness, they might be profoundly different.

A more reasonable move is to abandon primitive life as an ideal, or a

goal, and instead just set it up as a perspective: Hey, if I stand here, I cansee that my own world, which I thought was normal, is totally insane!Or we can set it up as a source of learning: Look at this one thing thesepeople did, so lets see ifwe can do it too. en it doesnt maer howmany flaws they had. And once we give up the framework that showsa right way and a wrong way, and a clear line between them, we canuse perspectives and ideas from people formerly on the wrong side:Ancient Greeks went barefoot everywhere and treated their slaves with

more humanity than Wal-Mart treats its workers. Medieval serfs workedfewer hours than modern Americans, and thought it was degrading towork for wages. Slum-dwellers in Mumbai spend less time and effortgeing around on foot than Americans spend geing around in cars. eonline file sharing community is building a gi economy.

Identifying with stone age people is like taking a big stretch. en ifwe relax, we find that a lot ofsmaller stretches are effortless, that we caneasily take all kinds of perspectives outside the assumptions of our lile

bubble. We could even re-invent primitivism to ignore stone age peopleand include only recent tribes who we have good information about, andwho still stack up prey well against our own society. We could call thishistorical primitivism, and a few primitivists have taken this position.e reason most dont is, first, our lack ofknowledge about prehistoryforms a convenient blank screen on which anyone can project visions toback up their ideology. And second, stone age primitivism comes withan extremely powerful idea, which I call the timeline argument.

e timeline argument convinces us that a beer way of life is thehuman default, that all the things we hate are like scratches in the sandthat will be washed away when the tide comes in. Oen its phrasedas 99% of human history has been that, and only 1% has been this.Sometimes its illustrated with a basketball court metaphor: Its 94 feetlong, and if you call each foot ten thousand years, then we had fire andstone tools for 93 feet, agriculture for one foot, and industrial society foraround a quarter of an inch.


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e key word in this argument is we. Where do you draw the linebetween us and not us? Why not go back a billion years, and say thatwe were cell colonies in the primordial oceans? Call a billion years afootball field, and the age of agriculture can dance on the head of a pin!

is would seem to be a much stronger argument, and yet Ive neverseen a primitivist draw the line even as far back as Homo habilis twomillion years ago or as recently as Homo sapiens sapiens130,000 yearsago. Why not?

is is a difficult and important question, and it took me days topuzzle it out. I think weve been confusing two separate issues. One is afact, that the present way we live is a deviation from the way ofotherbiological life. If this is our point, then a million year timeline is much

too short we should go back at least a thousand times farther!e other issue is a question: Who are we? When you get below thelevel of culture, down to the level of biology or spirit, what is normal forus to do? What is possible? What is right?

If youre talking about who we are, then the million year timeline ismuch too long. e mistake happens like this: We are human, and wecan plausibly call Homo erectushuman. erefore our nature is to livelike Homo erectus, and the way we live now is not our tendency, not our

normal behavior, but some kind of bizarre accident. What a relief! Wecan just bring down civilization, and well naturally go back to livinglike Homo erectus, but since we dont know exactly how they lived, wellassume its like the very best recent forager-hunter tribes.

Now, Im not disputing that many societies have lived close to theEarth with a quality of life that we cant imagine. Richard Sorensonmentions several, and explores one in depth, in his essay on PreconquestConsciousness.1 What Im disputing is: 1) that we have any evidence that

prehistoric people had that consciousness; 2) that that consciousness isour default state; 3) that it is simple for us to get back there; and 4) thatlarge-scale technologically complex societies are a deviation from whowe are.

1 http://www.danbartlett.co.uk/writings/sorenson.php
http://www.danbartlett.co.uk/writings/sorenson.phphttp://www.danbartlett.co.uk/writings/sorenson.php


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Who we are is changing all the time, and new genetic research hasrevealed shockingly fast change in just the last few thousand years, in-cludingmalaria resistance, adult milk digestion, andblue eyes. Accordingto anthropologist John Hawks, We are more different genetically from

people living 5000 years ago than they were from Neanderthals.

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Now, you could argue that some of these changes are not really whowe are, because they were caused by civilization: without domesticatingcows and goats, we would not have evolved milk digestion. By the samelogic, without inventing clothing, we would not have evolved hairlessbodies. Without crawling onto dry land, we would not have evolvedlegs.

My point is, there is no place you can stick a pin and say this is our

nature, because our nature is not a location it is a journey. We crawledonto dry land; we became warm-blooded and grew hair; we moved fromthe forests to the plains; we walked upright; we tamed fire and begancooking food; we invented language; our brains got bigger; our tools gotmore complex; we invented grain agriculture and empires and airplanesand ice cream and nuclear weapons.

Primitivists want to say that all the steps up to the last few are whowe are, and the last few are not who we are. But its a difficult argument

because we really did those things! So they say that the last few things,although we did them, were extremely unlikely. e word they usuallyuse is fluke. We would have lived in balance until the sun burned out,except that some wild grain seeds happened to fall in the mud at theedge of one camp during a food shortage, and someone noticed that theysprouted into new plants, and had a clever idea.

If civilization began with a fluke, we would expect to see it beginonly once, and spread from there. But instead we see grain farming and

explosions of human social complexity in several places at about thesame time: along the Tigris and Euphrates, and also in Africa, India, andChina. You could still argue that those changes spread by travel, thatthere was one accident and then some far-flung colonies unless wefound an early civilization so remote that travel was out of the question.

2 http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/evolution-getting-faster-by-the-millennium/2007

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at civilization has been found. Archaeologists call it the Norte Chico,in present-day Peru. From 30001800 BC, they built at least 25 cities,and they had giant stone monuments earlier than anyone except theMesopotamians. Even more shocking, their system was not based on

grain! All previous models of civilization have put grain agricultureat the very root: once you had grain farming, you had a denser, moreseled population, which led to a more complex society, and also youhad a storable commodity that enabled hierarchy.

e Norte Chicans ate only small amounts of grain, but they did have astorable commoditythat enabled hierarchy, something that allowed smalldifferences in wealth to feed back into large differences, and ultimatelyentrenched elites commanding slaves to build monolithic architcture. It

was coon! So we have people on opposite sides of the world, in differentgeographies, using different materials, falling into the same paern, butthat paern is not about food. It seems to be about economics, or moreprecisely, about human cognition. Aer thousands of generations ofslow change, human intelligence reached a tipping point that permiedlarge complex societies to appear in radically different circumstances.

Now its tempting to call civilization the new human default, butof course, in many places, these societies did not appear. Also, they all

collapsed! And then new ones appeared, and those collapsed. I dontthink it even makes sense to talk about a human default, any more thanit makes sense to talk about a default state for the weather. But the rangein which we move has widened.

My information on the Norte Chico comes from Charles C. Mannsbook 1491, a survey of recent findings about the Americas before theEuropean conquest. Mann is neither a primitivist nor an advocate forwestern civilization, but an advocate for, well, farwestern civilization,

which was a lot more like western civilization than we thought. Atits peak, the Inca empire was the largest in the world, with exploitedcolonies, massive forced reseling ofworkers, and bloody power strug-gles among the elite just like in Europe and Asia. e Maya deforestedthe Yucatan and depleted its topsoil only a few centuries aer the Ro-mans did the same thing around the Mediterranean. Aztec humansacrifice was surprisingly similar to English public execution that washappening at exactly the same time. Even North America had a city,


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Cahokia, that in 1250 was roughly the size of London. In 1523, Giovannida Verrazzano recorded that the whole Atlantic coast from the Carolinasup was densely populated. In the 1540s, De Soto passed through whatis now eastern Arkansas and found it thickly set with great towns. Of

course, that population density is possible only with intensive agricul-ture. Mann writes, A traveler in 1669 reported that six square miles ofmaize typically encircled Haudenosaunee villages.

By the time the conquest really got going, all these societies had beenwiped out by smallpox and other diseases introduced by the first Euro-peans. Explorers and conquerors found small tribes of forager-huntersin an untamed wilderness, and assumed it had been that way forever.In a blow to both primitivism and progress, it turns out that most of

these people were not living in the timeless ways of their ancestors the Indians of American myth were post-crash societies!e incredible biological abundance of North America was also a post-

crash phenomenon. Weve heard about the flocks of passenger pigeonsdarkening the sky for days, the tens ofmillions ofbison trampling thegreat plains, the rivers so thick with spawning salmon that you couldbarely row a boat, the seashores teeming with life, the deep forests onwhich a squirrel could go from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without

touching the ground. We dont know what North America would havelooked like with no humans at all, but we do know it didnt look like thatunder the Indians. Bone excavations show that passenger pigeons werenot even common in the 1400s. Indians specifically targeted pregnantdeer, and wild turkeys before they laid eggs, to eliminate competitionfor maize and tree nuts. ey routinely burned forests to keep themconvenient for human use. And they kept salmon and shellfish popula-tions down by eating them, and thereby suppressed populations of other

creatures that ate them. When human populations crashed, nonhumanpopulations exploded.is fact drives a wedge between two value systems that are supposed

to be synonymous: love ofnature and love of primitive humans. Weseem to have only two options. One is to say that native North Americanswent too far ofcourse they werent nearly as bad as Europeans, butwe need to return to even lower levels ofpopulation and domestication.I respect this position morally, but strategically its absurd. How can


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the future inhabitants ofNorth America be held to a way of life that theoriginal inhabitants abandoned at least a thousand years ago?

e other option is to say that native North Americans did not go toofar. e subtext is usually something like this: Moralistic ecologists

think its wrong that my society holds nature down and milks it for itsown benefit, but if the NativeAmericansdid it, it must be okay! isconclusion is nearly universal in popular writing. Plenty of respectableauthors would never be caught idealizing simple foragers, but when theyfind out these primitives hunted competitors like neolithic Micrososand cleared forests to plant grain, out comes the wise Indian card.

ere is a third option, but it requires abandoning the whole civilized-primitive framework. Suppose we say, We can regrow the spectacular

fecundity that North America had in the 1700s, not as a temporary stagebetween the fall ofone Earth-monopolizing society and the rise ofan-other, but as a permanent condition and we will protect this conditionnot by duplicating any way our ancestors lived, but by inventing newways. We can do this because human nature continues to evolve. Just asthe old model of civilization became available to us as we changed, weare changing again and new doors are opening.

Well, theyre only open a crack. To grow biological abundance for

its own sake, and not for human utility, is still a fringe position. Butmy point is that the civilized-primitive framework forces us to dividethings a certain way: On one side are complexity, change, invention,unstable growth, taking, control, and the future. On the other sideare simplicity, stasis, tradition, stability, giving, freedom, and the past.Once we abandon that framework, which is itself an artifact of westernindustrial society, we can integrate evidence that the framework excludes,and we can try to match things up differently.

e combination that Im suggesting is: complexity, change, invention,stability, giving, freedom, and both the past and the future. is isnt theonly combination that could be suggested, and I doubt its the easiest toput into practice, but its surprisingly noncontroversial. Al Gore wouldprobably agree with every point. e catch is that Gore is playing toa public consciousness in which freedom means a nice paint job oncontrol, and in which no one has any idea whats really necessary forstability.


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Americans think freedom means no restraint. So Im free to start abig company and rule ten thousand wage laborers, and if they dont likeit theyre free to go on strike, and Im free to hire thugs to crack theirheads, and theyre free to quit, and Im free to buy politicans to cut off

support for the unemployed, so now theyre free to either starve anddie, or accept the job on my terms and use their freedom ofspeech toimpotently complain.

A beer definition of freedom is no coercion. I define restraint aspreventing someone from doing something, and coercion as forcingsomeone to do something, usually by punishing them for notdoing it.Primitive societies tend to be very good at avoiding coercion. In TeContinuum Concept, Jean Liedloffwrites that among the Yequana, it is

forbidden to even askanother person to do something. It seems strangeto us, but to have a society where no one is forced to do what they dontwant to do, you actually need a lot of restraints.

So theres one place where we can learn more from looking backwardthan looking forward. But there is more than one way for coercion toappear its like a disease with multiple vectors. Primitive cultures haveextraordinary resistance to the way coercion must have appeared overand over in their history among a group of people who all know each

other, an arrogant charismatic leader arises. But they have lile or noresistance to another way its been appearing more and more oen overthe last few thousand years: as a hidden partner with seductive newphysical and social tools.

To understand whats necessary for both freedom and stability, weneed to go deep into a close ally of the critique of civilization: the critiqueof technology. Now, as soon as you say youre against technology, somenit-picker points out that even a stone axe is a technology. We know

what we mean, but we have trouble puing it into words. Our firstinstinct is to try to draw a line, and say that technologies on one sideare bad, and on the other side are good. And at this point, primitivismcomes into the picture as a convenience.

It reminds me of the debate over abortion, which is ultimately aboutdrawing a line between when the potential child is part of the mothersbody, and when its a separate person with full rights. Drawing the lineat the first breath would make the most sense on biblical grounds, but


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no one wants to do that, and almost no one wants to draw it at passagethrough the birth canal. But if you go farther back than that, you get anunbroken grey area all the way to conception! Fundamentalists love todraw the line at conception, not only because it gives them more control

over women, but because they hate grey areas.In the same way, primitivism enters the debate over good technologywith a sharply drawn line a long way back. We dont have to wrestlewith how to manufacture bicycles without exploitation, or how to makecities sustainable, or what uses are appropriate for water wheels, orhow to avoid the atrocities ofancient empires, ifwe just draw the linebetween seled grain farmers and nomadic forager-hunters.

To be fair to primitivists, they still have to wrestle with the grey areas

from foraging to horticulture to agriculture, and from camps to villages totowns, and with arguments that we should go back even farther. e realfundamentalists on this issue are the techno-utopians. ey say tech-nology is neutral, which really means ou shalt not ascribe built-innegative effects to any technology, but ofcourse they ascribe built-inpositive effects to technologies all the time. So it ends up being not astatement of fact but a command to action: Any technology you canthink of, do it! is is like solving the abortion debate by legalizing

murder.We must apply intelligent selection to technology, but we arent reallyworried that the neighboring village will reinvent metalworking andmassacre our children with swords. We just want bulldozers to stopturning grassy fields into dreadful suburbs, and we want urban spacesto be made for people not cars, and we want to turn off the TV, andtake down the surveillance cameras, and do meaningful work instead ofsiing in windowless office dungeons rearranging abstractions to pay

off loans incurred geing our spirits broken.We like hot baths and sailing ships and recorded music and the internet,but we worry that we cant have them without exterminating half thespecies on Earth, or exploiting Asian sweatshop workers, or dumpingso many toxins that we all get cancer, or overextending our system sofar that it crashes and we get eaten by roving gangs.

But notice: primitive people dont think this way! Ofcourse, if youput them on an assembly line or on the side ofa freeway or in a modern


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war, they would know they were in hell. But if you offered them an LEDlantern made on an assembly line, or a truck ride to their hunting ground,or a gun, most of them would accept it without hesitation. Primitivepeople tend to adopt any tool they find useful not because theyre wise,

but because theyre ignorant, because their cultures have not evolveddefenses against tools that will lead them astray.I think the root ofcivilization, and a major source ofhuman evil, is

simply that we became clever enough to extend our power beyond ourempathy. Its like the famous Twilight Zone episode where theres a boxwith a buon, and if you push it, you get a million dollars and someoneyou dont know dies. We have countless boxes that do basically thesame thing. Some of them are physical, like cruise missiles or ocean-

killing fertilizers, or even junk food where your mouth gets a milliondollars and your heart dies. Others are social, like subsidies that makejunk food affordable, or the corporation, which by definition does anyharm it can get away with that will bring profit to the shareholders. Imguessing it all started when our mental and physical tools combined toenable positive feedback in personal wealth. Anyway, as soon as youhave something that does more harm than good, but that appears to thedecision makers to do more good than harm, the decision makers will

decide to do more and more of it, and before long you have a wholesociety built around obvious benefits that do hidden harm.e kicker is, once we gain from extending our power beyond our

seeing and feeling, we have an incentive to repress our seeing and feeling.Ifchild slaves are making your clothing, and you want to keep geingclothing, you either have to not know about them, or know about themand feel good about it. You have to make yourself ignorant or evil.

But gradually were learning. Every time it comes out that some

product is made with sweatshop labor, a few people stop buying it. Everyday, someone is in a supermarket deciding whether to spend extra moneyto buy shade-grown coffee or fair trade chocolate. Its not making a bigdifference, but all mass changes have to start with a few people, and mypoint is that we are stretching the human conscience farther than itsever gone, making sacrifices to help forests we will never see and peoplewe will never meet. is is not simple-minded or idealistic, but rational,


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highly sophisticated moral behavior. And you find it not at the trailingedge of civilization but at the leading edge, among educated urbanites.

ere are also growing movements to reduce energy consumption, toeat locally-produced food, to give up high-paying jobs for beer quality

of life, and to trade industrial-scale for human-scale tools. I would prefernot to own a car, but my motivation is not to save the world its thatthe continuing costs of owning a car put me in a different economicniche, where I am more connected to the impersonal world ofmoney,and less connected to friends and family. On my land I dont use powertools, except for a chainsaw when I have a huge amount ofwood to cut.In general Id rather do work in a way that excercises my body, allows meto hear birds, and does not make me dependent on an industrial system

that gives me no participation in power.When I look at the discourse around this kind of choice, its positivelysatanic. People whose position is basically undersaw cut fast, me feellike god present themselves as agents ofenlightenment and progress,while people with intelligent reasons for doing something completelynew choosing weaker, slower tools when high-energy tools are avail-able are seen as lizard-brained throwbacks. Whats even more tragicis when they see themselves that way.

is movement is oen called voluntary simplicity, but we shoulddistinguish between tenologicalsimplicity and mentalsimplicity. Prim-itive people, even when they have complex cultures, use simple toolsfor a simple reason those are the only tools they have. In so-calledcivilization, weve just been using more and more complex technolo-gies for simple-minded reasons they give us brute power and shallowpleasures. But as we learn to be more sophisticated in our thinking abouttechnology, we will be able to use complex tools for complex reasons

or simple tools for complex reasons.Primitivists, understandably, are impatient. ey want us to go backto using simple tools and they dont care why we do it. Its like ourwhole species is an addict, and seductive advanced technologies are thedrug, and primitivism is the urge to throw our whole supply ofdrugs inthe garbage. Any experienced addict will tell you that doesnt work. enext day you dig it out of the garbage or the next week you buy more.


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Of course there are arguments that this will be impossible. e mostcommon one goes like this: For civilization, you need agriculture, andfor agriculture, you need topsoil. But the topsoil is gone! Agriculturesurvives only by dumping synthetic fertilizers on dead soil, and those

fertilizers depend on oil, and the easily extracted oil is also gone. If theindustrial system crashes just a lile, well have no oil, no fertilizer, noagriculture, and therefore no choice but foraging and hunting.

Agriculture, whether or not its a good idea, is in no danger. emovement to switch the whole planet to synthetic fertilizers on dead soil(ironically called the Green Revolution) had not even started yet whenanother movement started to switch back: organic farming. Presentorganic farmers are still using oil to run tractors and haul supplies in,

but in terms of geing the soil to produce a crop, organic farming isagriculture without oil, and its the fastest growing segment of the foodeconomy. It is being held back by cultural intertia, by the political powerof industrial agribusiness, and by cheap oil. It is not being held back byany lack of land suitable for conversion to organic methods. No one says,We bought this old farm, but since the soil is dead, were just going toleave it as a wasteland, and go hunt elk. People find a way to bring thesoil back.

e other common argument is that humanity has learned its lesson.I think this is on the right track, but too optimistic about how much wevelearned, and about what kind of learning is necessary. Mere rebellionis as old as the first slave revolt in Ur, and you can find intellectualcritiques of civilization in the Old Testament: From Ecclesiastes 5:11,When goodsincrease, theyareincreasedthateat them: and whatgoodisthere to the owners thereof?And from Isaiah 5:8, Woe unto those who

join houseto house, andfieldtofield, until thereis no place.If this level of

learning were enough, we would have found utopia thousands of yearsago. Instead, people whose understanding was roughly the same as ours,and whose courage was greater, kept making the same mistakes.

In Against His-story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman set out to doc-ument the whole history of resistance to civilization, and inadvertentlyundermined his conclusion, that this Leviathan will be the last, by show-ing again and again that resistance movements become the new domi-nators. e ancient Persian empire started when Cyrus was inspired by


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Zoroastrianism to sweep away the machinery ofprevious empires. eRoman empire started as a peoples movement to eradicate the Etruscans.e modern nation-state began with the Moravians forming a defensivealliance against the Franks, who fell into warlike habits themselves aer

centuries of resisting the Romans. And we all know what happened withChristianity.I fear its going to happen again. Now, the simple desire to go primitive

is harmless and beneficial I wish luck and success to anyone whotries it, and I hope we always have some tribal forager-hunters around,

just to keep the human potential stretched. And I enjoy occasionalminor disasters like blackouts and snowstorms, which serve to stripaway illusions and remind people that theyre alive. I loved the idea in

FightClub (the movie) of destroying the bank records to equalize wealth.ats right in line with the ancient Jubilee tradition, where debts werecanceled every few decades to restabilize the economy and prevent ahard collapse.3

What I fear is that some writers are trying to inspire a movementto actively cause a hard collapse, and if they aract enough followers,they could succeed. is would be a terrible mistake not just a moralmistake but a strategic mistake and the root of it is old-fashioned

authoritarian thinking: that if you force someone to do something, itsthe same as if they do it on their own. In fact its exactly the opposite.e more we are forced to abandon this system, the less we will learn,and the more aggressively we will fight to rebuild something like it. Andthe more we choose to abandon it, the more we will learn, and the lesslikely we will make the same mistakes.

e really frightening thing is when people fantasize about destroy-ing libraries and museums, as if this would prevent a complex society

from ever geing started again just like thousands of years ago, with-out libraries or museums, people didnt start complex societies aboutfiy times. In the addiction metaphor, burning libraries is like not onlythrowing the drugs away, but also erasing all memory of being an addict,and then going back to the same tempting environment with the same

3 http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=532
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=532http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=532


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addictive personality. Its such a perfect mistake that I can only concludethat these people subconsciously want to repeat the whole cycle ofpain.

Ofcoursewewill not have another society based on oil, and per-capitaenergy consumption will drop, but its unlikely that energy or complexity

will fall to preindustrial levels. Hydroelectric and atomic fission plantsare in no immediate danger, and every year there are new innovationsin energy from sun, wind, waves, and ethanol crops. Alternative energywould be growing much faster with good funding, and in any case itsnot necessary to convert the whole global infrastructure in the nexttwenty years. Even in a general collapse, if just one region has a surplusofsustainable energy, they can use it to colonize and re-develop thecollapsed areas at their own pace. Probably this will be happening all

over.I dont think theres any escape from complex high-energy societies,so instead of focusing on avoiding them, we should focus on makingthem tolerable. is means, first, that our system is enjoyable for its par-ticipants that the activities necessary to keep it going are experiencedby the people who do them as meaningful and freely chosen. Second,our system must be ethical toward the world around it. My standardshere are high the totality ofbiological life on Earth must be beer off

with us than without us. And third, our system must not be inherentlyunstable. It might be destroyed by an asteroid or an ice age, but it mustnot destabilize itself internally, by having an economy that has to growor die, or by depleting nonrenewable resources, or by having any trendat all that ratchets, that easily goes one way but cant go the other waywithout a catastrophe.

ese three standards seem to be separate. When Orwell wrote thatthe future is a boot stamping on a human face forever, he was

imagining a system thats internally stable but not enjoyable. Techno-utopians fantasize about a system that expands into space and lastsbillions of years while crushing any trace ofbiological wildness. Andsome paranoids fear ecofascism, a system that is stable and servesnature, but that represses most humans.

I think all these visions are impossible, for a reason that is overlookedin our machine-worshipping culture: that collapse oen happens for


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psychological reasons. Erich Fromm said it best, in What Does It Meanto Be Human?

Even if the social order can do everything to man starve him, torturehim, imprison him, or over feed him this cannot be done without

certain consequences which follow from the very conditions of humanexistence. Man, ifuerly deprived ofall stimuli and pleasure, will beincapable ofperforming work, certainly any skilled work. Ifhe is notthat uerly destitute, he will tend to rebel if you make him a slave; he willtend to be violent if life is too boring; he will tend to lose all creativity ifyou make him into a machine. Man in this respect is not different fromanimals or from inanimate maer. You can get certain animals into thezoo, but they will not reproduce, and others will become violent although

they are not violent in freedom. . .

If man were infinitely malleable, therewould have been no revolutions.In 1491, Mann writes that on Pizarros march to conquer the Incas, he

was actively helped by local populations who were sick of the empiresoppression. Fredy Perlmans book goes through the whole history ofwestern civilization arguing for the human dissatisfaction factor in everyfailed society. And its clear to me and many other Americans that ourempire is falling because nobody believes in it not the troops in Iraq,

who quickly learn that the war is bullshit, not the corporate executives,who at best are focused on short term profits and at worst are just thieves,not the politicians, who are cynically violating every supposed Americanprinciple for lobbyist money, and not the people who actually do thework, most of whom are just going through the motions.

Also, America (with other nations close behind) is geing more andmore tightly controlled, and thus more unbearable for its participants.is is a general problem of top-down systems: for both technical and

psychological reasons, its easy to add control mechanisms and hardto remove them, easy to squeeze tighter and hard to let go. As thecontrollers get more selfish and insulated, and the controlled get morefrustrated and depressed, and more energy is wasted on forcing people todo what they wouldnt do without force, the whole system seizes up, andcan only be renewed by a surge of transforming energy from below. istransformation could be peaceful, but oen the ruling interests block ituntil it builds up such pressure that it explodes violently.


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e same way the ruling interests become corrupt through an ex-ploitative relationship with the people, we all become corrupt when weparticipate in a society that exploits the life around it. When we talkabout nature, we dont mean wheat fields or zoo animals we mean

plants that scaer seeds to the wind and animals that roam at will. Wemean freedom, raw aliveness, and we cant repress it outside ourselveswithout also repressing it inside ourselves. e spirit that guides ourshoe when it crushes grass coming through cracks in the driveway, alsoguides us to crush feelings and perceptions coming through cracks inour paved minds, and we need these feelings and perceptions to makegood decisions, to be sane.

If primitive life seems beer to us, its because its easier for smaller

and simpler societies to avoid falling into domination. In the best tribes,the chief just tells people to do what they want to do anyway, anda good chief will channel this energy into a harmonious whole. Butthe bigger a system gets, and the longer a big system lasts, the morechallenging it is to maintain a boom-up energy structure.

I have a wild speculation about the origin ofcomplex societies. eGreat Pyramid ofGiza is superior in every way to the two pyramids nextto it yet the Great Pyramid was the firstof the three to be built. Its

like Egyptian civilization appeared out of nowhere at full strength, andimmediately began declining. My speculation is: the first pyramid wasnot built by slaves! It was built by an explosion ofhuman enthusiasmchanneled into a massive cooperative effort. But then, as weve seen inprey much every large system in history, this paern of human actionhardened, leaders became rulers, inspired actions became chores, andworkers became slaves.

To achieve stability, and freedom, and ecological responsibility, we

must learn to halt the slide from life into control, to maintain the bot-tom-up energy structure permanently, even in large complex systems.I dont know how were going to do this. Its even hard for individualsto do it look at all the creative people who make one masterpiece andspend the rest of their life making crappy derivative works. e bestplan I can think of is to build our system out of cells of less than 150people,4 roughly the number at which cooperation tends to give way


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to hierarchy, and even then to expect cells to go bad, and have built-inpathways for dead cells to be broken down and new ones to form andindividuals to move from cell to cell. Basically, wed be making a bigsystem thats like a living body, where all past big systems have been

animated corpses.Assuming that our descendants do achieve stability, what technologi-cal level will they be at? I want to leave this one wide open. Its possiblein theory for us to go even farther back than the stone age. I callthis the Land Dolphinsscenario that we evolve into super-intelligentcreatures who dont use any physical tools at all. At the other extreme,Im not ruling out space colonies, although the worst mistake we couldmake would be expanding into space before we have learned stability

on our home planet. I think physical travel to other solar systems is outof the question long before mechanistic science gets that far, we willhave moved to new paradigms that offer much easier ways to get to newworlds.

e singularity theory is also off the mark. Techies think machineswill surpass humans, because the mechanistic model tells them thatwere nothing but machines ourselves, so all we need to do is makebeer machines, which according to the myth of progress is inevitable.

I think if we do get a technological transcendence, its going to involvemachines anging humans. My favorite scenario is time-contractedvirtual reality: suppose you can go into an artificial world, have theexperience of spending a week there, and come back and only a day haspassed, or an hour, or a minute. If we can do that, all bets are off!

e biggest weakness in my vision is that innovation can go withstability, that we can continue exploring and trying new things withoutrepeatedly destabilizing ourselves by extending our power beyond our

understanding. But its equally implausible that we could somehowtransform ourselves out of being a curious and inventive species, or thatwe could drive ourselves to extinction we are by far the most mentallyadaptable species on Earth, and not bad at physical adaptation.

One possibility is that we will diverge into multiple species. It happensall the time in nature, and for most of the history of hominids there were

4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_numberhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number


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several kinds of us walking around. is could happen through biotech,or through ordinary evolution, which we still dont understand. Scien-tists have spent decades bombarding fruit flies with radiation, trying toproduce a random mutation that would lead to a new species, and totally

failed. But in another experiment, fruit flies were put through a mazewith different exits depending on environmental preferences, and theyformed distinct populations that refused to interbreed. Its a good guessthat this is already happening with humans, and that our acceleratingevolution is being driven not by our high population, but by increasingdiversity ofhuman environments, which is likely to continue. Maybe wewill spin offsubspecies that overspecialize themselves into extinction,while a few generalist core species survive.

If I had to guess, were just going to keep making mistakes and fallingdown forever, and in that case the best we can do is minimize the severityof the falls. I think were doing a prey good job even in the presentcollapse, which is shaping up to be a big one. Innovations in efficientfarming and water filtration and small-scale alternative energy are goingto give many regions a so landing. Even in America, which has a longway to fall, we might escape with no more than a severe depression,a mild fall in population, and a much-needed shakeout of technology

and economics. Life will get more painful but also more meaningful, asbillions of human-hours shi from processing paperwork and watchingTV to intensive learning of new skills to keep ourselves alive. eseskills will run the whole range, from tracking deer to growing tomatoesto fixing bicycles to building solar-powered wi-fi networks to newthings we wont even imagine until we have our backs to the wall.

I think we can see the future in popular fiction, but not the fictionwe think. Most science fiction is either stuck in the recent past, in

the industrial ages boundless optimism about machines, or it looks atthe present by exploring the unintended consequences of high tech.Cyberpunk is beer if you put a 1950s Disney version of the year2000 through a cyberpunk filter, you would get very close to the real2000. e key insight of cyberpunk is that more technology doesnt makethings cleaner it makes things dirtier.

Fantasy, while seeming to look at the past, might be seeing the future:elves and wizards could represent the increasing diversity ofhumans


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(or post-humans) aer the breakdown of the industrial monoculture,and magic is clearly a glimpse ofpost-mechanistic scientific paradigms.And I think steampunk does the best ofall, if you factor out the Victorianfrippery. Like cyberpunk, it shows a human-made world thats as messy

and alive as nature, but the technological system is a crazy hybrid ofeverything from stone age to space age thus refuting the very ideathat we are locked into ages.

Primitive people see time as a circle. Civilized people see it as a line.We are about to see it as an open plain where we can wander at will.History is broken. Go!


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The Anarchist Library

Anti-Copyright

March 11, 2011

Ran PrieurBeyond Civilized and Primitive

2008

version 1.2, revised 3 February 2010

Retrieved on 7 March 2011 from http://ranprieur.com/essays/beyondciv.html
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