Anarchists and nihilists got nothing on John Zerzan...

[donk]

...I just rediscovered a collection of his essays, got a lot of reading to do but if I remember correctly this guy is so "anti-authoritarian" and against civilization more than anyone--I remember the essay on how political (& anti-"human") music and even vocal communication are (I'm totally misrepresenting that idea, just read him knowing his ideas are EXTREME).

My level of understanding reality was much different when I first came across this, I found the ideas novel and radical at the time. But now it gives me chills to see his level of knowledge (from 20 years ago) and am devouring this:

http://archive.org/stream/FuturePrim...itive_djvu.txt

I think the important step we often miss when jumping on the ancient alien theories is some of the stuff this guy brings up that should have been considered hard science decades ago, that "pre-history" has the biggest disinfo campaign of all, and we should be studying the horribly categorized "hunter-gather" cooperative human cultures that rejected abstract symbolism and division of labor for millions of years, not as Neanderthals and cave men but the true homo sapien (highly intelligent) species that we truly were.

Challenging the ideas of progress and everything we hold to be "good" about society...I ius wanted to share this you all. This is on the back of the book, one of the "reviews":

"'Only a politics that undoes language and time' he has written, 'has any meaning.' Here is absolutist arrogance, based on tenuous and often contradictory speculations, along with occasional insights or references to fundamental problems of existence." -Fifth Estate

[donk]

In particular, the line that inspired me to start this thread is:

Cohen (1974) has discussed symbols as "essential for the development and maintenance of social order." Which implies--as does, more forcefully, a great deal of positive evidence--that before the emergence of symbols there was no condition of did-order requiring them. In a similar vein, Levi-Strauss (1953) pointed out that "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution." So whence the absence of order, the conflicts or 'oppositions'?

[donk]

Reading Zerzan now is like reading Daniel Quinn's Ishmael when I was college kid, I feel like I'm finally at the right level to appreciate the truth about culture/civilization, which has been hell-bent on presenting itself to us as "the only way":

....There is a line between nature and culture, again, and the non-civilized choose the former.

There are many gatherer-hunters who could carry all that they make use of in one hand, who due with pretty much with what they had as they came into the world. Once humans shared everything; with agriculture, ownership becomes paramount and a species presumes to own the world. A deformation the imagination could scarcely equal.

Sahlins (1972) spoke of it eloquently: "the world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all, it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.

I keep hearing John Lennon's Imagine as I read it

[donk]

And if this doesn't resonate, nothing he writes will (the conclusion if that first/title essay Future Primitive):

To 'define' a disalienated world would be impossible and even undesirable, but I think we can and should try to reveal the unworld of today and how it got this way. We have taken a monstrously wrong turn with symbolic culture and division of labor, from a place of enchantment, understanding and wholeness to the absence we find at the heart of the doctrine of progress. Empty and emptying, the logic of domestication, with its demand to control everything, now shows us the ruin of the civilization that ruins the rest. Assuming the inferiority of nature enables a domination of cultural systems that soon will make the very earth unsustainable.

Postmodernism says to us that a society without power relations can only be an abstraction (Foucalt, 1982). This is a lie unless we accept the death of nature and renounce what once was and what we can find again. Turnbull spoke of the intimacy between Mbuti people and the forest, dancing almost as if making love to the forest. In the bosom of a life of equals that is no abstraction, that struggles to endure, they were "dancing with the forest, dancing with the moon."

[donk]

Crazy synchronicity....I haven't looked at this book in probably almost a decade, and I come across it when the second notable news item comes....#1 was when Zerzan made comments on the Unabomber manifesto, now Sandy Hook!! Apparently he has a radio show:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/16/us...dio-interview/

Apparently Lanza called Zerzan's show a couple years previous...I haven't listened yet, but amazingly a thread had popped on the first forum (well, a splinter from my first, llamedos is an offshoot of LATOC--which i never post to anymore and rarely visit), there a poster says Zerzan mentions it:

https://archive.org/details/AnarchyRadio01192014/