Re: Guests checking us out more than we check us. Anyone notice that?

Visions of the Rewilding Renaissance Rewilding Mind & Heart
#1

Hi Rix. I’ve been enjoying all your wikki articles. You’re making a real contribution here. Keep up the good work!
anywho,

This is something I’ve wondered about- the sustainability of a paleolithic exsistance. Even, as stone age hunter-gatheres, weren’t we bringing species to extinction? Like what happened to the mammoths and all those other delicious giant game animals?
And about surviving for generations. The seminole indians are a group of refuges from other tribes that never gave into the US government and survived by hiding in the everglades. They are awesome. They never signed a treaty. They “walked away”. However, I’m not confident that groups of primitivists are the best suited to survive the generations. It’s not hard to wipe out a tribe, just ask the mohicans :).
I’m not saying this to debunk the rewild movement. I suggest a training regime and a body of knowledge for the survival of a tribe. This would be something based on proven elements that have allowed the worlds oldest cultural groups to endure. It would not be based on the lofty ideals of a political activist. The body of knowledge would be something like ninjitsu meets woods-gypsy and would certainly involve training in nature lore, seed keeping, food caching, evasion, infiltration, and the use of deadly force. More of a recipe for personal development and self-reliance, than a political manifesto that readers hope will effect global change through a utopian vision of the rebirth of the human race.
(I am finding lots of holes in Mr. Jensens’ plan. Like no one has been able to explain to me how anarchy, without violence, is sustainable.)

#2

Luddite-

This is something I've wondered about- the sustainability of a paleolithic exsistance. Even, as stone age hunter-gatheres, weren't we bringing species to extinction? Like what happened to the mammoths and all those other delicious giant game animals?
Like no one has been able to explain to me how anarchy, without violence, is sustainable.
a political manifesto that readers hope will effect global change through a utopian vision of the rebirth of the human race.

I’ve noticed several questions you’ve asked on this board so far, that may indicate that you haven’t looked into some “unofficial” FAQ’s of rewilding. As you can imagine, if examples like the above represented either actual rewilding paradigms, or the evidence of history, rewilders would indeed have a lot of major introspection to do! However, neither did humans singlehandedly drive paleolithic animals to extinciton, nor does Jensen advocate anarchy (exactly), nor do most rewilders here look forward to a utopian vision of global human rebirth.

Hopefully some one this board will address your questions/misunderstandings about rewilding philosophy, but since we partially have this board for those already up to speed, to have those conversations you can only have with colleagues who “get it”, you might not get as much feedback as you’d like.

In that case, I recommend starting with some research into Jason Godesky’s Thirty Theses. And then reading them again. And again. :slight_smile: They pretty much answer every “but…!” response that exists. If you think you haven’t found a concern of yours addressed in his Thirty Theses, I would read them yet again, and then if you still haven’t, I would consider asking him how he’d respond to your concerns.

Take advantage of the rich and well documented corpus of argument offered up by the primitivism and rewilding movement.

Thanks for speaking up, and good luck!

-Willem

#3

Willem. Thanks for the link. I hate civilization, and that attracted me to this forum, but I find the political material adolescently idealistic. I have a suspicion that many of the writers have never lived outside the host of industrial civilization.

I’ve just read the 30. And I’ve read most of the books Jason is quoting. Everything is related to the out-of-control growth of human population sapping the worlds resources (fertilizer, ore, and fuel), and causing and economic and/or climate disaster that will inhibit mankind from building another civilization for more than ten million years. Eight of the theses explain why this is a good thing. Jason’s predictions of the future seem like his learned wishful thinking, and not derived from an objective review of the past and present. Unfortunately, the reading has not cleared up my misgivings.

I prefer The Doors- “the future’s uncertain and the end is always near, a- alright”

I prefer action to philosophy. Unless someone can appeal to my ever suspicious truth-seeking intellect I’m going to save my energies for the discussion of practical ways to live close to the earth.

No hard feelings
-The Luddite

#4
Unless someone can appeal to my ever suspicious truth-seeking intellect I'm going to save my energies for the discussion of practical ways to live close to the earth.

I have no problem with that route. :slight_smile:

I personally don’t care about anarcho-primitivism. I can’t really call myself an anarchist or a primitivist. But a rewilder–I can call myself that. Rewilding involves a process of learning and trying and changing.

I personally don’t find any feasibility in trying to take violent acts against civilization. Someone, (Urban Scout, maybe) once likened the Civ to a Hurricane: You can’t stop it, but you can prepare for it, and you can prepare to live on after it.

I like that you look for the holes in the philosophies. Nothing strengthens a viewpoint like having to defend it.

Your point about the Seminoles encourages me. Like I pointed out in a reply to your comment on the introductions board, the opening up of the map will prove a powerful ally to the rewilder.

#5

When did Anarcho-Primitvist suddenly involve violence?
Anarchy is not Anarchism, simply put.
I’m not quite sure where the confusion comes in…

Anarchy:
–noun

  1. a state of society without government or law.
  2. political and social disorder due to the absence of governmental control: The death of the king was followed by a year of anarchy.
  3. a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.
  4. confusion; chaos; disorder: Intellectual and moral anarchy followed his loss of faith.

Anarchism:
–noun

  1. a doctrine urging the abolition of government or governmental restraint as the indispensable condition for full social and political liberty.
  2. the methods or practices of anarchists, as the use of violence to undermine government.
  3. anarchy.
    [Origin: 1635–45; anarch(y) + -ism]

I can see how one [i]could[i] be inclined to gravitate towards the more sensationalist definition which does include an element of violence, but if you look at the actual political usage,such as by Chomsky, it seems to me to regard a form of structure which is based on more of a self-organizing principle, and regards the larger heirachy of the state as not needed.
To me Anarcho=Primitvism is a doctrine,albeit vague,that applies the ideas of anarchism to the possible modes of organization that could exist in primitive life.

But I agree with Rix that I am more closely aligned with the idea of Rewilding.
I guess I just mention it because I see the mis-definition happen more than it should.
Many a thought, theory or feeling about the world had brought us to ‘this’.and I can say that Primitvist/Anarchist thought helped get me here.
But to quote Rix, it only truly matters that we’re here, not where we’ve been.

#6

it’s from something I said earlier
“Violence and industrialism go hand-in-hand. But why should violence falter in the absence of an industrial civilization? Take away the infrastructure of civilization, take away authority, take away SADAM, and you get TERRIBLE violence. Or is that different?”

I’ve always understood anarchy as an absence of authority and hierarchy.— D.J. paints a picture of a world without authority or violence.— but I think it has been demonstrated that when there is a lack of authority you get more violence.

#7
I think it has been demonstrated that when there is a lack of authority you get more violence.

I think that where you have a lack of authority you get different violence.

A lot of the “violence inherent in the system” (to quote the good folks at Monty Python) lies beneath the surface. I may not experience the violence right now, but if I stop paying my rent and still expect to live in my house, I will. Or if I try to take the food someone else expects to make money off of. I think Jensen’s points about violence and civilization rely on the fact that hierarchy depends on violence as a means to leverage the actions that it wants. What’s to keep me from taking the apples growing in my neighbor’s yard? Not the rules. Rules are just words. They need a fear of violence behind them in order to enforce a following.

I have always seen indigenous life as full of violence, but the violence has different qualities. Instead of being coerced into living a certain way, the feral man can use violence just like any other tool in order to live–to kill game, to forage plants, to raid neighbors and establish boundaries. The world is full of violence, but only the civ uses it to enforce arbitrary rules of conduct.

#8

Here’s a YouTube video of Derrick Jensen discussing the violence inherent in the system.

Modern-Day Slavery

#9

I have to be honest, I share many of the same concerns as The Luddite. Say you manage to rewild and intergrate into a functional tribe before the Collapse. When the Collapse comes, suddenly your existence is turned to chaos by a mass exodus of sheeple from the cities looking to find food. Most will probably die off but that could be months or even years later. In the mean time you have to deal with armed scavnegers, Rambo wannabes, and hardcore survivlists guarding their caches of food and ammo. No one has yet dealt with this scenerio to my satisfaction. Most of the stuff I’ve read doesn’t deal with it in detail. Civilization is here one moment, gone the next. There has to be some sort of transition from order to chaos back to order again.

These types of things bother me. I’m a survivalist, I like to atleast be mentally prepared so I’m not caught off guard. I think to rewild properly you need a peaceful enviroment. I daydream of finding a nice big boned Bush Hippie Chick or two and settle down raising little woodrunners. I don’t want to be distrubed and I doubt I’d be very merciful to anyone who did bother or molest my clan.

#10
No one has yet dealt with this scenerio to my satisfaction.

First, welcome Art/SuburbanCowboy!

You’ll find the foundation of primitivist/rewilding thought lies in an in-depth analysis of collapse scenarios. Civilizations have collapsed pretty much since the moment they emerged, as they each individually experienced a diminishing return in an investment into complexity (i.e. hierarchy). All projections offered up by folks like Jason Godesky (http://www.anthropik.com/thirty), Jeff Vail (www.jeffvail.net), and so on, rely on the history and science of collapse to predict future scenarios. As you know, this defines science: creating models that we can use to predict possible futures. If you haven’t read Godesky’s many writings on collapse, I highly recommend them. Principally in them, you’ll find the answer to your primary concern: the movement of people away from urban areas, into the country, to flee collapse.

The evidence suggests that this simply does not happen. Though a popular motif of apocalypic cinema and science fiction, the history of collapse suggests that people condense into urban areas. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the urban culture of civilization simply doesn’t see security or opportunity in the “wastes of the wilderness”. Primitivists see a garden of eden, and we can too easily project this insightful vision onto everybody else – “why don’t they see it?”.

Also, “collapse” does not mean “crash”. In terms of civilizations, it describes a process whereby societies become more economical, by abandoning levels of complexity. This occurs over a period of time, perhaps a hundred or more years. Godesky suggests that the collapse of civ in the US in fact began about a hundred years ago.

Now, I’d like to suggest that what seems “obvious” to modern folks about collapse scenarios, we inherited from a culture bent on dominating the world. Hence it has a bit of blindness to this part of its own demise. It likes to play up the unpleasantness of such eventualities so we tend to fear abandoning civilization. Obviously the drug dealer doesn’t want you start attending AA and kick your addiction.

So I recommend reading the collapse literature offered up by Godesky and others with an open mind. We’ve come here exactly because the myths of our culture no longer satisfy us. Let’s abandon as many of those mythologies and stories as possible, so we can look at things afresh. Again, I’d say the “common sense” held on how we modern people view the apocalypse just consists of more mythologies fed to us by the artists and imagineers of civilization. Let’s junk that “common sense”.

#11

Thanks for the kind welcome.

I’ve enjoyed reading through some of Josh’s work and while I don’t agree 100%, I do find it thought provovking.

As you said, evidence “suggests” that people will remain in or around urban centers. This isn’t a fact but rather a theory based on probablity, am I right? I’m willing to believe a majority will stay put, but not all. Some people dismiss modern survivalists but I think some will do alright while others will become desperate after running out of stored food and scaring all the game out of the region. Maybe some will be open minded enough that a tribe might consider absorbing them. I’m sure others won’t be.

You do put some intresting stuff on the table to think about. I’ll read more of Josh’s work and dwell on it for awhile.

#12

Absolutely! :slight_smile:

As you said, evidence "suggests" that people will remain in or around urban centers. This isn't a fact but rather a theory based on probablity, am I right?

Well, in my experience, we seem to observe everything in terms of probabilities, not facts. The word ‘theory’ simply means the best explanation for the evidence that we currently have. ‘Evidence’ simply means those observations which we feel confident in. So yes, I don’t worry about the facts, I just rely on theories. :slight_smile: Don’t mistake me as quibbling - I actually think this constitutes a substantial piece of rewilding, as also expressed in the observer-reality of e-prime.

So why even bring that up? Well, I want to invest the most energy in preparing for the most likely scenario ( as we currently understand things), and apportion my energy accordingly less and less to the other less likely outcomes. So, when I see you say (if I understand you right) “what about the raiding parties”, I see that as one of the last things we may have to worry about. Yet this notion of “raiding parties” comes up first, quite often, when folks new to collapse prediction talk about future concerns.

You see what I mean? In addition, I don’t think we should necessarily not talk about it, I just think we need to contextualize our concern.

For example, if the collapse model predicts accurately that people do condense into urban areas, then could we say that the farther away from urban areas we place ourselves, during collapse, the more we improve our chances of avoiding the conflict and social misery of collapse?

The collapse models available to us I think allow all kinds of insightful thinking and questions that we just couldn’t otherwise conceive of.

I feel glad that you got some out of (Jason) Godesky’s stuff - I don’t necessarily want you to ‘agree’ with it, but I want to see if we can put it to work for us. ‘Scientific’ models allows us to see around corners, see into our blindspots, and the counter-intuitive nature of collapse, as shown by history, actually excites me more, because it means we have so much more to see than we currently do. It means we can ask much better questions, and plan in much more ingenious ways, than if all our current hollywood models of collapse held true.

Having said that, you’ll find a huge permaculture community that believes that the cities can provide a sustainable habitat during collapse for human populations.

I hope you found this useful…I’ve babbled on a bit here. :wink:

#13

[quote=“SuburbanCowboy, post:9, topic:271”]I have to be honest, I share many of the same concerns as The Luddite. Say you manage to rewild and intergrate into a functional tribe before the Collapse. When the Collapse comes, suddenly your existence is turned to chaos by a mass exodus of sheeple from the cities looking to find food. Most will probably die off but that could be months or even years later. In the mean time you have to deal with armed scavnegers, Rambo wannabes, and hardcore survivlists guarding their caches of food and ammo. No one has yet dealt with this scenerio to my satisfaction. Most of the stuff I’ve read doesn’t deal with it in detail. Civilization is here one moment, gone the next. There has to be some sort of transition from order to chaos back to order again.

These types of things bother me. I’m a survivalist, I like to atleast be mentally prepared so I’m not caught off guard. I think to rewild properly you need a peaceful enviroment. I daydream of finding a nice big boned Bush Hippie Chick or two and settle down raising little woodrunners. I don’t want to be distrubed and I doubt I’d be very merciful to anyone who did bother or molest my clan.[/quote]

I take a different view. I tend to believe Godesky’s concept that the masses will move into the cities in the hope of finding the kind of sustenance they’re used to (why did Hovervilles pop up inside of cities in the great depression instead of out in the vast wildernesses?). But I hope to expand my tribe with “sheeple” that might happen to look outside of the city. I hope that if I can find food and show others how to find it, that we can work together as a community. I see Sheeple as people-to-be once they come to enough of a crisis where they can look beyond what they know and think “wait, how did humans survive for so long before cities?”

I may be fooling myself, but I hope I can commute between the hills and the towns to help grow my tribe with people who need help themselves.

#14

Read more of Jason’s 30 theses, seem the collapse models show things going downhill rather gradually. I’m sure some people will still attempt to leave the city and strike for the boondocks, just not in large numbers all at once.

#15

I may be stepping on peoples toes here, and if so, I apologize in advance. Still, I gotta say, this strikes me as wildly optimistic. As individuals we have so much farther to go, and as communities…? I think it’s going to be a while before all that comes together, and some of that time will be during/post collapse, imho.

Some days, the “rampaging hordes from the city” bother me, but we really do have good, strong, historical evidence that that won’t be (an especially) large problem. I say, “be prepared, walk softly, and know how to fight primitively”; but I don’t expect to need to.

As for timing considerations, I still think the shit’s going to hit the fan in a big way around 2012-2015, but I’m looking for ways to stay “flexible” about it.

#16

I have no problem with that route. :slight_smile:

I personally don’t care about anarcho-primitivism. I can’t really call myself an anarchist or a primitivist. But a rewilder–I can call myself that. Rewilding involves a process of learning and trying and changing.

I personally don’t find any feasibility in trying to take violent acts against civilization. Someone, (Urban Scout, maybe) once likened the Civ to a Hurricane: You can’t stop it, but you can prepare for it, and you can prepare to live on after it.

I like that you look for the holes in the philosophies. Nothing strengthens a viewpoint like having to defend it.

Your point about the Seminoles encourages me. Like I pointed out in a reply to your comment on the introductions board, the opening up of the map will prove a powerful ally to the rewilder.[/quote]

My form of Anarcho-Primitivism is the act of seperating oneself away from civilization in a anarchist disposition.

One does not need to act in violence or sabotage to civilization as it does a fine job of self infliction onto itself without the bother. As we speak it is in a constant deterioration.

#17
his is something I've wondered about- the sustainability of a paleolithic exsistance. Even, as stone age hunter-gatheres, weren't we bringing species to extinction? Like what happened to the mammoths and all those other delicious giant game animals?

People keep repeating this as though it were fact, but the Pleisticene Overkill Hypothesis never was more than a hypothesis, and it is a hypothesis full of multiple holes. (It is also mostly discredited in the academic community – see Charles Mann’s book 1491.) When I get time, I will write up something about all the holes in this hypothesis.

#18

Actually, yea. Most people here seem to not put any credit to the Overkill hypothesis, cause we read the Thirty Theses. Its in there somewhere.