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Anarcho-Primitivism?
I'm a member on another forum which is pretty much the polar opposite of this one. I wont name it, but the people there are far from Buddhists.
There's a running theme there about civilization and if its good for us or getting worse. Scientific advancement is getting more and more amazing, yet our daily lives are becoming more and more miserable and monotonous. In a time where we have blank cells that act as hardware ready to grow whatever programming we give them, we're less and less stimulated. The most common thing people do every day is sit at a computer and watch television. This is one amazing post made on the forum:
Indeed. It's not a question of shunning technology, its more or less how to live without relying totally and helplessly on it. There is no sense of adventure, or pride in forking over two weeks of labor for rent and utilities every month. In fact, I personally feel like a tool to participate in such a process. But, given the current structure of society, there is no choice in the mainstream life.
It occurs to me that perhaps, most people subconsciously want a simpler, more natural life. We read books about it, we emulate it in design, we decorate our homes with little bits of it, we carefully select it in the store, we are really craving nature itself.
A beautiful morning fog over a lake, waving grassy meadows, wildlife teeming and spawning all about, the smell of fresh cedar and pine, food straight off the plant and onto the plate, cool nights cuddled under a blanket stargazing... this is just a fraction of what we have lost as a society.
Why trade that beautiful sort of life of for a prepackaged, soul-crushing, chemically contaminated people-herd lifestyle, in cookie-cutter homes, jobs, divorces, cars, and ballgames. Where is the peace in that? We wonder why our children cut themselves and turn into thugs, emulate Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, drink, drug and suicide themselves into oblivion?
Because deep down they know. It's hard to even articulate as an adult, but a growing child has this 6th sense that tells them they were sold a false bill of goods. They were lied to. Doctors do not heal, the courts kill justice, freedom is slavery, food malnourishes, schools misinform, jobs dehumanize and people are vicious animals.
And how can we have the heart to tell them they should suck it up and continue this hideous broken lifestyle? They should have to build the grid out and pave the stone and answer the phones and retail the stores? Where is their say in this? Where was MY say?
Why does everyone I know have enough bullsh*t in their ballsacks to tell me I am OBLIGATED to sweat and bleed contributing to this hideous farce?!
Why haven't we had our Moses? Why hasn't God punished the pharoahs of today?
Because there will be no God or Moses to help us, we must help ourselves. Ask the Jews, the North Koreans, The Russian Gulags, The Native Americans, or just about any other people who ever lived under the sun. People deserve exactly what they tolerate.
And this is already far too intolerable.
My children will be free and live in beauty. I will do anything, everything in my power to make this happen. If its a log shack in a remote region, so be it. There has been too much lost, and there is too much of a future at stake for me to stupidly selfishly sit comfortably here and watch football until I die a senile old man, having lived a useless life.
There's much more to life than this.
What are your views on Anarcho-Primitivism?
There's a running theme there about civilization and if its good for us or getting worse. Scientific advancement is getting more and more amazing, yet our daily lives are becoming more and more miserable and monotonous. In a time where we have blank cells that act as hardware ready to grow whatever programming we give them, we're less and less stimulated. The most common thing people do every day is sit at a computer and watch television. This is one amazing post made on the forum:
Indeed. It's not a question of shunning technology, its more or less how to live without relying totally and helplessly on it. There is no sense of adventure, or pride in forking over two weeks of labor for rent and utilities every month. In fact, I personally feel like a tool to participate in such a process. But, given the current structure of society, there is no choice in the mainstream life.
It occurs to me that perhaps, most people subconsciously want a simpler, more natural life. We read books about it, we emulate it in design, we decorate our homes with little bits of it, we carefully select it in the store, we are really craving nature itself.
A beautiful morning fog over a lake, waving grassy meadows, wildlife teeming and spawning all about, the smell of fresh cedar and pine, food straight off the plant and onto the plate, cool nights cuddled under a blanket stargazing... this is just a fraction of what we have lost as a society.
Why trade that beautiful sort of life of for a prepackaged, soul-crushing, chemically contaminated people-herd lifestyle, in cookie-cutter homes, jobs, divorces, cars, and ballgames. Where is the peace in that? We wonder why our children cut themselves and turn into thugs, emulate Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, drink, drug and suicide themselves into oblivion?
Because deep down they know. It's hard to even articulate as an adult, but a growing child has this 6th sense that tells them they were sold a false bill of goods. They were lied to. Doctors do not heal, the courts kill justice, freedom is slavery, food malnourishes, schools misinform, jobs dehumanize and people are vicious animals.
And how can we have the heart to tell them they should suck it up and continue this hideous broken lifestyle? They should have to build the grid out and pave the stone and answer the phones and retail the stores? Where is their say in this? Where was MY say?
Why does everyone I know have enough bullsh*t in their ballsacks to tell me I am OBLIGATED to sweat and bleed contributing to this hideous farce?!
Why haven't we had our Moses? Why hasn't God punished the pharoahs of today?
Because there will be no God or Moses to help us, we must help ourselves. Ask the Jews, the North Koreans, The Russian Gulags, The Native Americans, or just about any other people who ever lived under the sun. People deserve exactly what they tolerate.
And this is already far too intolerable.
My children will be free and live in beauty. I will do anything, everything in my power to make this happen. If its a log shack in a remote region, so be it. There has been too much lost, and there is too much of a future at stake for me to stupidly selfishly sit comfortably here and watch football until I die a senile old man, having lived a useless life.
There's much more to life than this.
What are your views on Anarcho-Primitivism?
0
Comments
It's easy to romanticize the past. People died of diseases much younger in the Stone Age, Bronze Age, etc. than they do now. In some ways, we're healthier. But look what the Industrial Revolution did to the average citizen. A lot of people got stuck working 12 hour days in insufferable conditions, 6 days a week. Was that an improvement over a hunter-gatherer life? I'll leave that for others to answer.
Before there were courts, people took justice into their own hands. That could develop into multi-generational blood feuds. The feuding and eye-for-an-eye payback could involve entire nations against each other, as we saw when Yugoslavia pulled apart. The criminal justice system isn't perfect. Nothing man-made ever is.
"The Russian Gulags" are not an ethnicity or a people. "People deserve what they tolerate"??! Is this guy serious? Could we narrow down the focus of this topic a little, or break it up into 2 or 3 topics? If life is so bleak, why is this guy considering having kids? :scratch:
Each of us could personally make the decision to live a life away from it all but there's far too many people in the world and we're way to interconnected for it to be a society level behavior.
There are definately many negatives to our current way of life, but for me I like a life expectency of 75 instead of 30 and the leisure time to contemplate the mysteries of life that modernity can provide if you're willing to simplify.
I don't think it's a case of being healthier. I think its more about being able to cure all the illnesses that modern living creates. My grandad survived a heart attack and then died from his second because of stress. If cancer rates go down, it isn't a decrease in cancer, its our ability to cure it.
I don't think we're mentally healthy. I'm a prime example. I don't have a mental illness or any mental disabilities. Before I was one of millions of people in the world who's extremely depressed. Now I'm just a cynic, but my cynicism is just a result of the life that I lead in western society. The fact that my labor is the bidding of somebody else who throws me as little money as legally possible (NMW) so I can afford to live in my overpriced room in a bad neighborhood and eat unhealthy food because anything not full of chemicals is out of my price range... Gets me kinda pissed off... ya know.
I'm not sure if we should be living longer. Let it happen and let natural selection take its course.
Why save everybody. That's a bit nit-picky dude. I suppose that simply writing "The Russian Gulags" was an easier way of writing "The Russuan people who tolerated the Soviet government putting people into Gulags."
I don't think he's planning on having kids. The whole forum backs the VHEM.
Sorry, I had no idea how to read the Gulag comment. This shows an outrageous lack of understanding of how Stalin's regime worked, to say that the people "tolerated it". It was precisely those who dared to speak out about it or to infiltrate his circle who got shipped off. Along with a lot of innocent people. And does this mean the Jews deserved to be herded onto cattle cars and sent to ovens? Because they "tolerated it"?? The only alternative to being herded into camps, for those who weren't able to hide, was to kick up a huge fuss and make enough noise that the army noticed you and shot you on the spot. Protest and resistance in police states and fascist regimes only gets you dead or "disappeared". Better hope you don't have the opportunity to find out how it works from firsthand experience.
And just for that writer's info, the Native Americans did resist, they did not tolerate anything. There were huge Indian wars. Ever heard of General Custer? That's one battle against the US army that the Natives won. And Geronimo? They spent a decade or more chasing him and his men. Get the DVD they made of his life and watch it. Native Americans fought so hard, that when all the men were dead, the women would dress as men and ride out and surprise the army, renewing the battle all over again. The soldiers were blown away when they found out they'd been fighting women, and women had succeeded in taking out a fair amount of the army troops.
I agree, though, that until recently there hasn't been enough protest about economic policy and politics. Not enough protest about stolen elections. About co-opted governments. About WTO policies, or the very existence of the WTO. About a lot of things. And I don't disagree that civilization as we know it is headed for collapse.
Eating foods with high fructose corn syrup and other junk food is a choice. If you don't like the effect it has on your body, don't eat it. Who convinced you to eat it in the first place?
That "golden age" was filled with brutal, backbreaking dawn to dark work and a constant struggle to stay alive. Anyone who has actually had to live on only what they grow and catch (and remember, no electricity or machines or grocery stores) would laugh at the thought of civilization as something bad.
Then we have infant mortality and how the most common cause of a woman's death was due to childbirth. And any common infection or cold was life threatening. Look at a picture of an entire hospital full of iron lungs keeping polio victims alive and tell me again about how useless modern medicine is.
But, yearning for a simpler life without the problems of modern society is normal. Complaining about the problems while taking advantage of the benefits is also normal.
No idea why... :shake: It's a crap paragraph. If you want to point out that he doesn't have a good grasp on history then fine, but it has little to do with the subject. I know it's stupid, but I think his point is more noticeable than his failure as a history student.
We all know about 'Cowboys and Indians'.
Informative paragraph about the Native Americans though. I enjoyed reading it.
I have a feeling this is going to turn out like my monastery thread. I want to know how to move to a monastery and people are too busy talking about China, when China was never the point. To me though its a bit more about protest.
What has a protest ever accomplished? Because a box of cereal is all I can afford for breakfast. It lasts me a week or so. We're told about balanced breakfasts, but they're no good if I can't afford them.
Same with all the processed crap I eat. I can't afford anything else.
I thought this was an interesting comment:
Anarchism is the belief that you cannot be free and ruled - propaganda and indoctrination are the methods used to convince society that you
can be free and ruled.
A law is a rule - lawed is ruled
Anarchy ; society without law - society without being ruled
If you are not an Anarchist you are a statist - a statist is a person that wants to be ruled and a person that will argue that you can be
free and ruled
I've seen trees growing out of rocky mountains. Luckily they don't invest energy complaining of the lack of environmental support, and simply grow to find the proper nourishment. You can do the same, or not, but its your choice... not the "opressive world."
Most folks I've spoken with who share a similar view as you describe, feel much more alive when they roll up their sleeves and get to work bringing their actions into alignment with their view on what is skillful. Perhaps the complaining is a thin veil masking laziness for not doing what is known to be skillful.
An apple is more expensive than "processed crap"? Ok, if you say so. When I was first starting out on my own, I'd have simple meals of beans, rice and corn tortillas. Like home-made Mexican food. You can't get cheaper than beans and rice, and with onions and garlic it's pretty good. Think outside the box the corporations have stuffed you into. They have you where they want you, but you can liberate yourself from their grip. This is why I asked in the beginning if the OP could be narrowed down to one main topic. It looks to me like several topics rolled into one. Protest ended legal segregation in the South in the US. Protest brought the racist South African regime to its knees. Protest played a role in ending the Vietnam War. Peaceful protest toppled the mighty British Empire's hold on India. But protest takes time to work. Time, organizing, strategizing, networking for support, discipline and dedication. A global Occupy Wall Street movement isn't going to change anything in just a few weeks or months.
What's worrisome is what looks like a corporate stanglehold on the international economy. I don't know if any amount of protest could change that, but maybe I (we) shouldn't be so pessimistic.
What do you all think, is it realistic to expect that we could get the economy and humane values back on track, or is protest (and voting) pointless? (Bumping the thread a little.)
Happy Thanksgiving, Sagat, and gang.