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The physical body is all there is. Our mistake is in thinking that it ends with our skin.

And maybe that is the biggest mistake of all, that we see our skin as a boundary, as the limiting surface of a container rather than as a porous membrane of connectivity.

In the end, this is technology’s doing.

Human thought borrows heavily from technology. This makes sense, given that humans have always been tool-dependent creatures. Since technology elicits very specific forms of action, it only stands to reason that the technological forms that shape our overt behavior also condition the behavior of thought.  

Consider the simple container, an ancient but groundbreaking technology. Containment has become such a ubiquitous feature of human life that it is difficult to name any activity that does not make use of it in some form or another.  

So we mistakenly see our body as a container, a vessel of isolation, rather than as an open conduit to the entire universe.    

It is important to know what it is you are resisting. But when it comes to resisting the power structures of civilization, it is especially important to understand how the very things you are resisting have played a role in shaping your knowledge. Sun Tzu tells us “Know your enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated.” This is no easy task when the enemy is postmodern techno-industrial civilization, however, because the technological framing of civilized life sets the parameters of the knowable.

The mythical fairy tales that Mother Culture manufactures for us are offered up as obvious truth, and installed when our psyche is young and malleable. Whether civilization should be allowed to continue is an entirely unformable question for most people because both the moral and rational justification for civilization are grounded in myths that for most people are unquestionable facts: the myths of social and technological progress, for example, and the myth that civilized life is superior to all other potential options—with the possible exception of (always new and improved) future civilized life, of course.

When it comes to resisting civilization, the thing that makes it difficult to live up to Sun Tzu’s dictum with respect to knowing the enemy also makes it difficult for us to know ourselves, to understand the nature of our own motives and how they originate in the systematizing and technological structuring of our lived moment-by-moment experience.

But this very awareness is itself perhaps the beginning of knowing both the enemy and ourselves, the awareness that you and I have been groomed from a young age to think in mechanistic terms, the awareness that you and I have been conditioned to entrain our motives and actions to the systematic logic of the technology in which our lives are embedded, as if we too were machines.

To be able to act on this awareness is perhaps the beginning of true resistance.   

I am a member of the least marginalize group of people on the planet—white, male, cisgender, heterosexual—so my ability to understand the experience of marginalized people is entirely limited to vicarious exposure and imagination. But even that is enough to know that something drastic has to be done about inequity and discrimination. It is obvious that sweeping change is needed. More than obvious.  

And while we’re at it, while we are searching for ways to rectify glaring inequities and socioeconomic inequality, it would be a good idea to take a really close look at the actual source of these things. What is it that is causing inequality? How does the potential for inequity even come about?

It has been clear for quite some time that inequity and discrimination are not (just) the result of the actions of racists and bigots and homophobes and transphobes and other assholes, but that they are systemic, literally hardwired into the gears of the socioeconomic machine. Systemic change is what is needed. Rewiring the system to make things more equitable, then, seems the obvious path toward a solution.

Recent attempts along these lines, however, have produced results that are trivial at best. And they are being eclipsed by reactionary anti-trans laws, book bans, and legal restrictions in public schools on any discussion of the history of racism or the mere mention of sexual orientation. It is almost as if the system is trying to defend—and even expand—its support for discrimination and its capacity to produce inequity.    

When we talk about “the system,” what we are really talking about is a massive collection of mechanisms for distributing and allocating power and control within society. Power and control require something (somebodies) to have power and control over. This means that the system, by its very nature, requires inequity and inequality. Its very existence is grounded in the unequal distribution of access to resources. That is the fuel that powers the machine. That is both the foundation and the fabric of modern consumer society. If you remove that part of it, if everyone suddenly had equal and unrestricted access to life’s necessities, the system—modern global civilization—would vanish in a puff of fairy dust.

So, while we are working to change the system to lessen the pain and expand the opportunities for members of marginalized groups, we should understand that it is the presence of the system itself that creates the potential for the unequal treatment of people. While we work on “leveling the playing field,” or whatever metaphor you want to use, let’s also work to weaken our dependence on the mechanisms of power and control that create the possibility for inequity to begin with. Because as long as the system—regardless of its particular “wiring”—continues to exist, inequity will continue to exist. It has to.

Our continued participation signals tacit approval. But more than that. More than tacit: overt, explicit, blatant. And more than mere approval. With continued participation we are not just accessories to murder, we are the killers; and we are not exonerated by the fact that we didn’t want to hold the gun or by the fact that we didn’t volunteer to pull the trigger. Participation is complicity. 

Each of us is made to choose a role in a play where the cast consists entirely of villains and victims. But it is a Hobson’s choice because all the victims are villains too. We do what we are asked and follow where we are directed, and like Eichmann our crimes are still unforgivable. We are made to sit beneath a post-Neolithic sword of Damocles; on the table is a feast that we have no stomach for while we wait for gravity to restore the balance that was lost more than eight millennia ago.

Opossums are legendary for “playing dead” when threatened or attacked. They are not alone in this. Thanatosis, or tonic immobility, as it is technically known, is an evolved antipredator strategy drawn from a continuum of potential behavioral responses to threat that opossums share with a wide variety of animals.

The first and often most effective strategy, for mild or distant threats, is simple avoidance: either walk away or just don’t go there. For threats that are closer or potentially more serious, attentive immobility (freezing) allows the animal to better assess the situation. Running away is the next response option on the continuum. If running away is not possible or unlikely to be successful—opossums, for example, are not very good runners—the animal will likely engage in some form of aggressive defense. Opossums have sharp teeth that they can bare with a menacing hiss to frighten a potential assailant, but when push comes to actual shove, they are not really fighters. Some animals will engage in appeasement behavior if an opponent has an overwhelming physical advantage. But rather than attempt to appease their aggressor, opossums employ thanatosis at this point, and fall into a state of involuntary unresponsiveness. Although physical contact is not necessary for it to occur, tonic immobility typically happens only after the animal has been pinned down or restrained.

Several years ago, I published a somewhat whimsical essay about a spate of unusual experiences I had with opossums, and explored the possibility of considering the opossum to be my personal animal guide, not in a spiritual sense, but symbolically, as an allegorical tool for organizing my thinking about myself. Comparative self-reflection revealed that I possess several opossum-like characteristics, most notably a tendency to freeze-up mentally and fall into an uncomfortable and sometimes protracted state of cognitive immobility—a psychological thanatosis—in situations in which I feel overwhelmed and unsure how to respond.

I have been experiencing this uncomfortable state, or something like it, with accelerating frequency lately. And I am doing so for very opossum-like reasons, in response to serious and recurring threat from an aggressor with an overwhelming advantage.

My opponent is not the opossum-equivalent of a coyote or a bobcat, but something far more massive and far more dangerous and far more persistent. It is not something that I can avoid. It follows me everywhere I go, and is part of everything I do. It is not something that I can outrun or frighten or fight against. It is not something that can be negotiated with. It can be appeased, but only for a time, and not without surrendering what remains of my freedom and autonomy. And, perhaps the most disturbing part, it is not actually a thing at all; it does not possess a physical body or a coherent structure that might contain targetable points of vulnerability.

The assailant that has me repeatedly pinned down and restrained into a state of involuntary unresponsiveness is civilized life itself.

I was in an undergraduate anthropology class several decades ago, and the professor was going on and on about how natural selection is a dumb process that operates entirely outside any sort of preexisting plan or intentional design. A student in the class asked a question about the possibility of intentional evolution. This notion, a variation on eugenics, is a central component of modern transhumanist thought: why not intentionally select for characteristics that would improve the human species and increase its future fitness? 

The professor quickly shot down the idea by pointing out that natural selection is a population’s response to specific environmental conditions. You can’t select characteristics in advance because there is no way of knowing what specific demands and opportunities might be present in future environments. He said that for all we know, susceptibility to diabetes might be the thing that prevents the extinction of the human species, and then went on to offer up sickle cell anemia as an example. Sickle cell anemia is a genetic mutation that is deadly if you inherit a gene from both parents, but that offers protection from malaria if you inherit only one. 

This logic applies to the idea, prevalent in primitivist circles, that humans will need to learn specific hunting and foraging skills in order to survive in a post-civilized world. Many primitivists look to archaeological evidence and hunter-gatherer ethnography as sources for what post-civilized society should look like. I think that this might be a mistake. It is definitely not a mistake to use this information diagnostically, as a way of identifying the many points of disconnect between civilization and authentically human ways of living. But it is probably a mistake to use it prescriptively. And the reason is that a post-civilization world is guaranteed to be very different from the pre-civilization one. At least for the first few millennia.

Preserving indigenous nature-based practices and acquiring competence with traditional methods of foraging and hunting are worthwhile activities in their own right. But these skills and practices will not necessarily be relevant for future generations trying to navigate the specific opportunities and demands of post-civilization conditions. Knowing what worked in the past may only offer broad generalities about the what will be needed in the future. 

Assuming that there is a future.

Even the notion that future humans will be hunters is not a sure thing. Very few animals may survive the current mass extinction. Also, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the animals that manage to survive the collapse of civilization will be toxic. Even now, prion diseases related to mad cow disease are showing up in deer, elk, and moose. And the oceans’ fish may be inedible too. There is enough radioactive material sitting in already leaking containers on the banks of the Columbia River at the Hanford nuclear site to kill the world’s oceans multiple times over.

It may be a vegan future for humans. Or perhaps an insectivorous one.

Science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick said that, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, still exists.”

This aphorism can work as a good rubric for sifting through the noise of modern symbolic culture. Civilization demands that we inhabit symbolic worlds, that we embed our lives inside abstract ideas and surround ourselves with imaginary beings that have no material existence. That in and of itself wouldn’t be a problem if it were not for the fact that this causes us to act in ways that have real consequences.  

What would happen if everyone suddenly recognized the truth—the untruth—of these beings that populate our symbolic menagerie? What would happen if everyone suddenly saw these things as the imaginary entities they are, entities with no abiding reality behind them? Consider corporations as a case in point. Corporations are abstract legal fictions. They are not real things in the world, and should everyone simply stop acknowledging them, they would immediately cease to exist.

What would happen if everyone suddenly stopped recognizing Walmart, for instance, as a real entity? There are buildings all over the place with Walmart signs on them that are filled with material goods. But since Walmart is not anything real, since corporations have no real agency, there is no one with any actual claim to the items on the shelves inside these buildings. If everyone suddenly recognized the unreality of Walmart, then there would be nothing preventing people from just going inside and taking what they wanted and walking out. And, no doubt, that is exactly what would happen.

Of course, if it was only a handful of people who recognized Walmart’s unreality, they would be arrested. And, ironically, this very fact is indisputable evidence that Walmart is not real. It is necessary to enforce actions that comport with belief in civilization’s fictions. You are entirely free to acknowledge the truth that Walmart is not real, but you are not allowed to act on that truth. Notice that it is not necessary to enforce actions consistent with actual reality, with actual features of the real world. There are no gravity police, for example. If you want to stop believing in gravity, that’s absolutely fine, go ahead and walk off the roof of that Walmart building and see what happens. But it is necessary to manufacture consequences in order to enforce the “reality” of Walmart and the deeply tangled mass of blatant lies in which the idea of Walmart is embedded. 

It has been called many things. Quinn’s gorilla called it “mother culture.” But culture is a thoroughly reified abstraction, an entity with no actual potency in the living world. And it is a grotesque affront to our first and most important relationship to grant any sort of maternal status to an abstraction meant to embody something as brutally inhuman as civilized life. But Quinn’s purpose is clear and well-taken: the messages we have been weaned on and made to internalize are not merely false, they are specifically designed to keep us entirely ignorant of our true situation.

Fredy Perlman’s approach was to add an insatiable appetite to Hobbes’ monstrous leviathan, molding it into a creature driven by a single purpose: to consume everything there is to consume. In addition to underscoring the persistent and horrific accumulation of death and carnage, Perlman’s beast highlights the uncontrollable, unyielding, self-directed, and single-minded nature of the civilizing process. There is a sense of inevitability in this that makes me uncomfortable. The genie has been loosed from the bottle, and it appears there is nothing anyone can do to coax it back inside. Perhaps at some distant point in the past the beast was unformed enough to kill, but the weapons presently in our arsenal are not at all sufficient—they are leviathan’s own weapons, after all—and the civilizing process will cease only after everything has been scoured clean and nothing remains to consume.   

Lewis Mumford called it a magamachine, and I feel the most affinity toward Mumford’s appellation. Embedded in the machine metaphor is the notion that it is an artificial thing, not just unnatural, but designed with intention, ultimately a kind of technology—an impossibly complex kind of technology, but a mere device nonetheless. As a complex technological device, its many parts require continued servicing and maintenance. For the time being (despite all the hype and hysteria around AI) it still requires human participation for its continued existence. And this is a potentially exploitable weakness—perhaps its only real weakness: it requires the effort and involvement of biological humans who have authentic human needs that the machine will never be able to fully satisfy. 

Mother culture, leviathan, magamachine, it is all these things. It is none of these things. I prefer just to call it civilization. But it is not really that either—another slippery abstraction. I am increasingly convinced that what we are dealing with is not a dangerous fairytale or a ravenous genocidal beast or a planet-grinding machine, that what we are dealing with is really nothing at all, that its true power emerges only because we feel compelled to name it, to objectify its many parts and functions, and that there is something in this objectification itself that gives it power over us.

If my intuition about this is even remotely valid, then there is a clear and present pathway to back to ourselves, and we are standing on it right now because we have never really left it. Fredy Perlman said it well, the wilderness is right here:

The cycle has come round again. America is where Anatolia was. It is a place where human beings, just to stay alive, have to jump and dance, and by dancing revive the rhythms, recover cyclical time. An-archic and pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice, and its linear His-story as All, but merely as one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left the Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises.[i]

May the sun rise soon!

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[i] Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, p. 302.

Consider the family potluck dinner as an analogy. Or maybe something more than just analogy.

I grew up in a large extended family who regularly got together for potluck dinners. Although there was some communication beforehand in terms of who was thinking of bringing what and what sorts of items might be needed (Grandma Ginna definitely needs to make her famous huckleberry pie!) each person was free to bring whatever they thought was best. There was no one in charge of organizing the menu. And some people brought very little or nothing at all.

Despite all this, somehow there was always more than enough to go around, all food groups were well represented, and even the folks who didn’t bring food themselves went home with leftovers. Actually, especially them.

An unorganized family potluck is in many ways the antithesis of efficiency. But it is also a paradigmatic example of anarchist community action. No top-down directives, no systematic structure, just autonomous individuals with a clear purpose and a sense of commitment to the community experience. 

The way of domestication is to alter the nature of the thing for another’s purposes. The way of the wild human is to understand the nature of the thing itself, to feel out its contours, to find where its forms and yours align so that you can engage with it on mutual terms.

The former engenders an obsessive quest for absolute control—a fever dream of all-encompassing domination that renders experience hollow for all parties and turns life into a tool, a disposable implement, a mere means to something else.

The latter is a form of communion.