You are not human.
You never have been.
You and I are not living authentically human lives. We do not move like humans. We do not sleep like humans. Much of the food we eat is not human food. Our relationships are filtered through an electronic membrane and molded to fit a mechanical template. Our thoughts are forced from the womb prematurely, attenuated and displaced by perpetual distraction before they are allowed to develop their full human potential. Our time is spent chasing goals that are not human goals, goals that are not of our own free choosing, goals that are not in our own long-term interests, goals that run directly counter to the interests of the rest of the living planet.
Most of us are not aware of this, at least not on a conscious level. We might be aware that things don’t feel quite right. We might have a vague sense that there is something missing, that there is something about the current state of the world and the current flow of our daily lives that is somehow off. But it is difficult to articulate exactly what is wrong. It can be easy to misattribute the source of this vague sense to something about our superficial place in the scheme of things: if only we had more money, or a better job, if only we lived in a better place. It is perhaps easier to misattribute the source to something about the scheme of things itself: there is something amiss with the current political or economic system. If only we had the right people in power, or the right policies in place, if only the system was designed to address human needs rather than the “needs” of corporations, for example.
These misattributions are not entirely off the mark. It is indeed something about our place in the scheme of things that is off, but our particular station is not the real issue. And the scheme of things itself is truly a problem, but the problem is not in the specific details; the problem is not in how the scheme operates. The real problem is the very fact that there is a scheme to begin with. It is not that we have a defective or dysfunctional system. It is the very existence of a system. The problem is that we are being forced to live systematically.
The problem is that we have been civilized.
We are born carrying the active residue of several million years of evolutionary preparation for life entirely immersed in the natural world as a foraging species of social primate, and at least 250,000 years of genetic fine tuning for life in small, self-contained, nomadic or semi-nomadic, and intensely egalitarian gatherer-hunter* bands. We are born to inhabit natural spaces and to engage with each other and the many other inhabitants of the world directly and as equal beings. Instead we are forced to separate ourselves from the living world in isolating and insulating built environments, and to align our thoughts and actions with the arbitrary mandates of mindless planet-eating systems of power.
If there is a single word that could describe life in corporate-consumer-industrial civilization, it is the word mediation. Civilization is a vast collection of hierarchically arranged and violently enforced mediators, means of preventing individual people from engaging with each other and the world around them directly and on their own terms. We don’t usually notice this, though. The ubiquity of mediation makes its presence invisible to us. We have very little in the way of direct, unmediated interaction with which to compare. We are fish who don’t notice the water that is all around us. Or, perhaps a better use of the metaphor, we are fish who think our isolating aquarium, with its artificially-colored gravel, plastic adornments, mechanical filtration, chemical conditioners, and manufactured food, is the wild open ocean we were meant for. And this is the real problem: that we don’t realize the scale of our dependency and the degree to which our world has been diminished and restricted. It is difficult—and for most folks, perhaps, impossible—to see how not-human our daily lives actually are.
There are both internal and external reasons for our inability to come to grips with the reality of our civilized situation. Internally, features of our evolved psychology, potent psychological phenomena such as cognitive dissonance, proximal thinking, status-quo bias, and fear-avoidance make us not only resistant to change, but motivated to ignore the true depth, scope, and severity of the problem. Externally, there is civilization itself—its very purpose as a collection of physical and social technologies of control designed to corral, colonize, redirect, and subdue our wild human nature, so that our thoughts and actions can be applied to the pursuit of ends that are not our own, ends that preserve and expand the scope of the civilization’s capacity to corral, colonize, redirect, and subdue, ends that are not at all human.
The internal/external distinction is an important one. In most cases, we have little influence over our external circumstances. We cannot decide when or where we are born and who our parents are. We cannot control what other people think of us, or the choices they make as they react to their own vague sense that something is wrong with their lives. We cannot change past events. We cannot predict the future or guard against unexpected calamity. However, we can have some limited ability to shape certain features of our own thought, and we have some perhaps not-so-limited command over our own actions. We have the ability to reflect on past events and our present circumstances, and the capacity to adapt our present and future thoughts and actions based on these reflections. We have the ability to choose if, when, and how we respond to the external demands of civilization—and even if our participation is inescapable, we can openly recognize this fact and refuse to assent willingly.
The stoic philosophy of Epictetus is relevant here (a philosophy echoed in the well-known serenity prayer). According to Epictetus, there are things that are up to us, and things that are not, and we create unnecessary pain and suffering for ourselves when we fail to clearly distinguish between these two. We need to put our whole being into those precious and few things that are up to us, and not concern ourselves with those many other things that fall outside of our limited scope of influence. We cannot change the raw fact of civilization, we cannot rewrite history or reverse the massive damage that has already been done to the natural world. But we can change how we respond to our immediate situation. We can change how we engage with other people. We can change how we acknowledge and express our intimate connections with other living beings. We can work to interact with the world around us more directly, and learn to recognize and reject mediation in all of its myriad forms. Moment by moment, we can work to revive, revitalize, and nurture our own wild human nature.
Imagine rewilding. Imagine living as a wild human—living directly in the world instead of merely on it.
Imagine becoming human.
* I have chosen to use “gatherer-hunter” rather than the more common “hunter-gatherer,” mostly because it is a more accurate description of how the members of traditional foraging societies spend their time. Also, there is a strong historical undercurrent linking hunting with maleness: males are the hunters and females are the gatherers. Putting “hunter” first thus reflects a masculine bias
