I used to regard the Anarcho-Primitivist movement with good-natured amusement. The mental picture of John Zerzan bounding across the Serengeti plains wearing nothing but a loincloth and his TV-sized glasses would be aspectacle if ever there was one. I’ve sometimes toyed with the idea of sending Chellis Glendinning an e-get well card. My basic attitude toward them was: If you wanna bungle in the jungle, well, that’s all right with me - so long as you don’t encroach on my hi-tech Anarcho-Communist utopia, which is the *only* setting in which I can attain my much-coveted two-hour work day; I might even go camping with you when I’m on vacation. And besides, if you do try to encroach, we won’t have any trouble deflecting your boomerangs and spears. As for poison darts, we Anarchists have become immune to them after so many years of diatribe. Then this weekend I read what they have to say in earnest. I’m still reeling from it, having been shaken, not stirred. While I am not at all sure that I agree with their conclusions as to how to solve the problems, no one has plumbed their depths more profoundly or articulated them more trenchantly. I mentioned the Serengeti plains tongue-in-cheek above. Now, no longer in a flippant frame of mind; I recall reading many years ago that children in various cultures when asked to draw what paradise looks like draw savannas.

 

The closely-related schools of Anarcho-Primitivists go far, far beyond the critique of other Anarchists. They don’t critique societies, or given societies or societal structures. They critique civilization itself. Before reading them, I thought my criticism of society was radical. I now realize that in assuming that society, any form of society, should be held intact, albeit reformed; I was being just that – a reformist. They make a very convincing argument for the position that the problems we experience in our various societies are endemic incivilization itself – any civilization. Although I have read and considered how language forces us into asymbolic representation of reality and tisked eating packaged bread and meat treated with chemicals that keep it red sold in plastic wrappings so that I don’t have to deal with the mess of hunting, I’ve read E.M. Forster’s "The Machine Stops" and have often experienced myself progressively weakening and my body and faculties atrophying inresponse to living in an advanced technological society; I never really, I mean really, gorked just how deep it goes.I never realized that living in a technological world has caused me to live in my head, in a virtual reality.

 

I never realized that the occasional feelings of unreality that I experienced, especially as a teenager, are not the result of some pathology in my mind or neural circuitry, by the response to very real alienation from reality. I don’t touch anything directly, most especially my truest, most natural self. I suddenly realized that I don’t know myself at all. Who would I be, what would reality look like if I retained the ability to discern one monkey face from another, an ability I possessed when I was six months old, inter alia? Who would I be and what would my relationship to my food be if I ate with my hands? Who would I be if I did not consult with the washing machine oracle, the water faucet oracle, the electric switch oracle to supply my needs and wants? Who would I be if I could still connect with my feral fury? What would happen if I were to respond appropriately, i.e., tooth and claw and all adrenaline rage unmitigated to the threat of impending destruction that the governments threaten me and everyone I love with? Why does that not come naturally to me? Why can’t I reach that in the event that I don’t react normally and naturally? Why can’t I access that? Why can’t you? Why are we not even able to override the programming manually if we have to? Why have we become so abstracted from reality that we regard our very existence as something that we can be philosophical about and discuss rationally? I’ll provide a link to an article that is a very perfunctory treatment of the concerns and aims of Anarcho-Primitivism, but I do not wish to impose more than a 12-page introduction upon you. It is intended to be aprimer. I’ll also provide a link to the homepage of Dr. Steve Best, philosopher, writer and activist.

He’s one of the foremostspokespersons and champions of this movement. It is interesting that hehas been banned from UK. Maybe some of you in UK can better understand why he has than I can.I am left with the wholly unsettling feeling that I’ve accessed the files in my consciousness that, which when I try to delete them, tell me that they cannot be deleted as they are integral to the functioning of my OS. What would happen, who would I be if I did manage to delete them? Should I? Everything that I took for granted now seems odd, unwanted, intervening and, most of all inescapable. I realize that everything I do is by wayof a technological mediator and most of my activities are for the sakeof and in order to procure more of this artifice. Tomorrow, for instanceI plan to go for an outing with my husband. The outing is built around my main purpose for having to get out to another town – we, as subscribers to five megabits of internet connection are entitled to afree router from the phone company.

 

We also need a new phone cord, asthe insulation on the one we have is cracked, exposing the wires. I amsuddenly exquisitely aware of how much of my activity is centered ontechnology – virtually all of it. I am completely in its thrall anddependent upon it. It not only determines most of my behavior, itdetermines most of who I am.It suddenly feels very odd having to consult with the computer oracle in order to reach out you. Would that I could tap directly into yourconsciousness and emotions in order to impress upon you the moment ofwhat I understood and engage your empathy with me so that you wouldexperience it to. But that is precisely what we have been obviated from being able to do by all of the mediating and intermediary layers of notonly societal norms which have tamed us, but also centuries of technology that shield us from one another - as well as us from our natural selves.

 

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel