Primitivism
There is a political alternative usually being kept off the table when the future of humanity is being discussed. It’s called Primitivism, and is about seeking our lost or rather displaced past, our long neglected contact with nature, with the very life we have denied during the prolonged disaster called civilization.
A brief disaster and horrible condition so far, though, compared to the time humanity has wandered the Earth.
Civilization is seen as everything that is good in humanity’s existence, but it’s rather the opposite. It’s enhancing all our worst sides, encouraging everything about us so widespread today, like destruction of nature, the ruining of all life on the planet and all the horrible stuff human beings are confronted with on a daily basis. It’s destroying everything making life worth living. Some people claim there is more than one civilization, that here are several ways of organizing civilization, but that is a very misunderstood and counterproductive attitude, in my opinion.
There is only one, and it’s Death, both the spiritual, ruining us, reducing us to machines, to tiny wheels in a vast, oiled machinery, and the physical death, the end of humanity and all life on this little pinprick of eternity.
To embrace primitivism is to seek our origin, what worked for us for millions of years, to re-establish ourselves as nomadic tribes. We are natural nomads. It’s a life that’s right for us, where we are alive and thriving. Hunters and gatherers in the wilderness, where we can Live and not merely exist. To seek this state, this fire inside is to bid farewell to civilization and everything about it. Civilization and wilderness can never coexist, because civilization, by its very existence is feeding off all wilderness, all life. Civilization is monotony and regimentation personified, wilderness is variety incarnated.
So, civilization, that is totally unsustainable and both will be collapsing under its own weight, and buried by us, in a storm of joy will fade from this Earth, like the nightmare it is, and we will teach ourselves to survive and thrive in the wilderness. We will learn to move in stealth, to hunt and to recognize and acknowledge the rhythms of life awakening in us from our long sleep.
This won’t be a perfect society or in any way a paradise. There is no such thing and there never will be, fortunately not. It’s yet another work in progress, like all others, but one where children are encouraged to think and act freely and independently, instead of being crushed to pieces and dust, to nothing, like they are today. One where they grow up as free human beings, as creative and truly thriving individuals, without the constant presence of dogma and force destroying them from the cradle and to old life, without any limitation, except those put there by nature itself.
Every single individual and/or group will be able to survive on its own merit, without having to trust what’s happening far away, beyond any form for control. No one will claim they own the Earth or even a piece of it anymore, because the very thought will reduce the chance of survival. True common sense will once again take «a front seat». We won’t shit in our own nest anymore. No one is doing that, no one with what with any stretch of the imagination can be called common sense.
Many of today’s walking dead will point at everything we will lose when civilization is crashing into the bottomless, stinking pit it belongs, but that’s just more civilized bullshit, propaganda. We won’t be losing anything significant, anything not present in a considerable improved version in nature. Our «life» today is merely a pale version of what we are born to live.
Point by point the wilderness is a superior way of life. We will be in better health, dramatically better. Medicine will cure, not poison, like it does today. We will thrive, instead of dying bit by bit. We will live in a diverse society, where the very word hierarchy will be alien to us, will be seen as the insanity it is. Between two or three hours on average a day will be used to survive. The rest may be used to think, consider, create and live. Every new day, every new horizon will be an experience. This isn’t wishful thinking, but thoroughly considered realities that millions of people have tried on and long to experience in full, without the constant presence of a society praising death and suffering like a malignant tumor in our life. The world will be big again, will be endless again, and a lot more will be right in the world.
Humanity is, roughly speaking facing two options today, two paths, one breaking us down physically and mentally, with Earth ending up as a burned-out, lifeless rock in Space, or one where we won’t merely survive, but also live and thrive.
Continued civilization isn’t very likely, as it will always carry the seed of its own destruction, but if humanity’s destructive tendencies should manage to strangle the planet, to force it under our heel, and thereby continue the current society of death at the cost of our last remaining humanity then the lifeless rock is the likely and inevitable end product.
Or civilization will simply collapse by itself. The human-created Climate Breakdown, the ever worsened social relations, and the upcoming pandemic will occur pretty much simultaneously and hasten the inevitable collapse.
But the best alternative is certainly that we choose to leave this living death, this tombstone, this monument to destruction and poison, and all its insane ways of thinking as soon as possible, not just because we have to, but because it’s the right thing to do, and return to the life we so obviously are born to live.