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DIY Primitivism
A while ago I found a tutorial online about how you could take plastic shopping bags and use them to crochet yourself a pair of sandals. I mean, the idea is freakin’ ridiculous but at the same time has this weird edge of like, “Wow, what a weird concept!”
It’s sort of a strange attractor which I think fits somewhere between the philosophy of primitivism (anti-civilization, back to nature and tribal organization) and the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement (see also: do it together). I think I actually originally found that link by way of a site on the edges of primitivist thought. And it has that nice post-apocalyptic fantasy feeling of imagining how you could make useful objects out of the trash left by the collapse of civilization.
The element to primitivism that I actually love is this more DIY side of it. Whether it’s Ran Prieur’s landblog or the new Cryptogon venture describing his self-sufficient New Zealand farm, it’s fascinating to tear yourself away from the consumerist temptation of instant gratification. What do you get when you actually do things yourself? You get smarter, less complacent. You start looking at how things work naturally and how to use that to make them work how you want them to work. It’s no coincidence that the word “crafty” means both cleverness and references creating things with your hands. Because the two are closely linked.
But this element of DIY is hard to express to people who are thoroughly enmeshed in the idea that you could just go buy everything you need. That is, the do-it-yourself movement lacks moral imperative. We can say it’s better to do things yourself, but we can’t necessarily articulate why. And this is why primitivism as a philosophy plugs so neatly into the DIY movement on a meta-level. Because it provides that missing moral imperative. It says: we must learn how to do things ourselves, because pretty soon that is all we will have. No one else is going to do them for you. Instant consumerist gratification is going to fall apart. It is a reversion to the sort of Ayn Rand-ian radical pulling yourself up by your bootstraps argument.
At the same time though, I feel like the moral imperative that primitivism is founded on may be one of fantasy. It hypothesizes, based on current trends, that our current system is unsustainable. And therefore it predicts (happily or passively accepting) its collapse. But what it ignores is that we actually have the power to choose to change it, to prevent it from collapsing. It says that we must follow strictly the extrapolated events on its timeline, but ignores our ability to create new timelines that branch off from or totally revise it.
You’ll see this again and again among even the brightest of primitivist thinkers: a constant and unerring assertion that the system will collapse, that it’s not just a possibility, but an inevitability. But this is not based on fact so much as it is based upon an interpretation of facts, and one which rewards them emotionally by allowing them to create a moral imperative which liberates them (DIY) from the current system, which they see as being emotionally punitive. To remove the “factual” certainty of collapse then is to remove the construct which allows them to immediately perceive the value of why they should do a bunch of work that is often difficult and boring - work which most of our culture jettisoned long ago in favor of a culture of constant entertainment and instant material gratification.
Without the inevitability of collapse, tanning hides, brewing your own beer, tending a garden, crocheting sandals out of plastic shopping bags (!?) become only valuable in and of themselves. They become hobbies, curiousities and fads, rather than imperative survival activities which stand for your protest against the prevailing order. Maybe what we need though is not a philosophical platform like primitivism which teaches us why we should value things, but simply that we can connect with the pleasure of simple acts, of doing things for ourselves because it feels good and makes us smarter. But then we wash right back onto the shores of the consumerist machine which when threatened by the DIY practitioner modulates and begins selling the raw materials (and instruction manuals) to create products, rather than finished products.
So maybe we need primitivism after all in some sense. Even though part of it may be founded on a fantasy, the truth is that it’s a different fantasy than the one we’re used to. But is flight from fantasy into fantasy really the same as freedom? Does it bring us closer to truth or just keep us at the mercy of those individuals who are the most adept at spinning out fantasies for the rest of us to live by?
- Heat Death
- “This Means War!”
- That Slimy Underbelly
- DIY Funerals, Green Coffins & Woodland Burials
- Primitivist Terrorism
- Prev: “The least relaxation of his vigilance”
- Next: Heat Death
September 20th, 2006 at 8:58 am
There is the social, emotional aspect of DIY that I think Hakim Bey pushed in his ‘Immediatism’ concept. Unmediated, hands-on communal activities - which may result in “craft” objects, art, or possibly just experience. (”Just” experience, hah!).
You say that without the fantasy of collapse, DIY activities become “only valuable in and of themselves” - but we should always be suspicious of the words “only” and “just”! Isn’t the “in and of themselves” value exactly what’s most important, with or without collapse? The shift of the focus of our values back from deferred or mediated pleasures to immediate sensory connection with our bodies, friends and family?
The fact that this ethic stands in a certain kind of opposition to the ethic demanded by consumer society obviously makes it easy to slot it straight into “post-collapse” ideologies. But, like many ecological ethics, this seems to be one that has great value for any and every projection into the future.
September 20th, 2006 at 9:36 am
First of all, those sandals are so freakin’ cute! I’m shocked that you’d call the idea “ridiculous” or “weird” rather than “inventive.” But maybe that’s just because men don’t appreciate a good, cute pair of sandals.
I would argue that DIY very much has a moral imperative: those grocery-bag sandals are a perfect example of “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Those bags could have been thrown out; instead they were creatively reused in a way that also did away with the need to buy something completely unrelated. It allows you to avoid giving money to a company whose sandals are made in sweatshops by 6-year-olds, and made of materials damaging to the environment. You don’t have to be a primitivist to appreciate that. As Will Smith might say if he were a pair of grocery-bag sandals, “I make environmentalism look good.”
Second of all… if we’re not allowed to interpret facts, how are we going to come to any conclusions? Are we to gather fact after fact and never conclude anything because that would somehow make us logically unpure?
Third of all… Jason was a fundamentalist Catholic when he first read Ishmael. He prayed desperately that Quinn wasn’t right, because he did not want to abandon his view of the world - and, by extention, his comfy place in civilization. So he devoted the whole of his college years to trying every way he could to disprove Quinn’s ideas. He couldn’t, so he finally just accepted it. In the years since then, he’s come to see that it’s not just a philosophy that fits all the facts: it’s also a positive, life-affirming one.
That’s a nine-year story. Collapse has been part of it for about two years now. The moral imperative behind Jason’s primitivism has always been his intellectual honesty: if it was true, it didn’t matter whether or not he wanted it to be true. And that’s why he had to make sure it wasn’t true. And that’s why he had to follow the path when he discovered that it was true.
For me, my moral imperative has been my liberal guilt. As you say:
“Most of our culture” did not jettison difficult and boring work. “Most of our culture” is laboring in sweatshops, agricultural fields, injesting our pollution and climbing through our garbage right now so that WE - the wealthiest people in the world - can enjoy “constant entertainment and instant material gratification.” Where do you think our “constant entertainment” comes from? We’re not making it ourselves, otherwise it wouldn’t be constant and immediate. Thai women get cancer from putting together the computers we’re both using right now. People all over the world life lives of endless suffering so we can have what we want, when we want, and not have to do a damn thing to get it. The people of the Third World grossly outnumber us; they have to, else we wouldn’t be able to live like this.
That’s why I’m a primitivist. Because I don’t want to walk on the blood of a small child. I don’t want to have to make the choice, as a consumer, between “ecologically and socially devastating” and “slightly less ecologically and socially devastating.” That, to me, is what primitivism is all about. I’ll make my own damn sandals and give the kids a break.
September 20th, 2006 at 9:44 am
The great ideas brought up in this post remind me of my favorite Joseph Campbell quote:
What is more important for that DYI sandal innovator — the fact that this technique might one day be necessary for all? or, the utterly meaningful immersion the individual found in the experience of making that sandal? I have to think the latter.
I sense the same with all of the great pioneering work done by the civ-crash crowd — is their work useless as long as civilization stands on its two feet? Of course not. The individual act of going through the process is ultimately what matters (it seems to me).
For all we know, maybe climate change actually has nothing to do with human activity. But would this take away all the worth of the progressive social memes that have grown out of our broadening consciousness? Is it a bad thing that many people are becoming more aware and concerned about their inter-connectedness with the natural world, even if the motives aren’t ultimately grounded in that which can be known? My fiance and I are getting rid of one of our two cars next month — and whether or not it makes a quantifiable difference in the long run, the qualitative aspect of the experience (even at these early stages) is enough to make the whole thing “worth” it.
September 20th, 2006 at 11:01 am
First, I’d like to address the argument that collapse is not certain. I think your logic here is somewhat superficial. What makes collapse certain is not simply an extrapolation of current trends, but the very definition of civilization itself. Let’s say we do choose to live some other way, and on the global scale that would be needed for such a choice to be effective (an unprecedented event, and for very clear reasons, but let’s grant the premise of the miraculous occurring). This new way of doing things will, whatever else it accomplishes, fall into one and only one of two possibilities: it will either continue to grow, or it will not continue to grow. This should be self-evident; for any logical statement, everything must belong to either P or not P. What does this leave us with? If it belong to P (it continues to grow), then whatever changes it makes, it is not fundamentally any different from our current situation. Nothing can grow forever in our finite universe. It, too, will reach limits to its growth, and collapse. If it belongs to not P (it will not continue to grow), then it is either steady-state or contracting. This causes collapse. So no matter what changes we make, whether our scheme puts us into P or not P, we still collapse. This is what makes it certain: nothing can grow forever in a finite universe, and anything other than growth causes collapse.
But to address the real meat of your post, there is a more fundamental and more basic reason for the “DIY” stuff in primitivism. It’s not simply to survive, but to thrive. The essence of all control is withholding things we need. We are compelled to obey a hierarchical regime because if we do not, the things we need are withheld. We must work in order to buy food, shelter, etc. This is what Daniel Quinn was talking about when he wrote about “locking up the food.” Self-sufficiency is the starting point of freedom. Without it, we are always at another’s mercy.
As we’ve often discussed at Anthropik, the Rubicon for division of labor flows between emphasis and exclusion. If I find bow-making tedious, I may well prefer to leave that to Bowyer, who loves making bows. He’ll be much better at making bows, as a consequence. But if Bowyer says I have to do obey him or he won’t make my bow, I can always tell him off and go make my own bow. This changes with exclusivity, wherein Bowyer is the only one that can make a bow. Now, we all have to do what he tells us to if we want bows.
Now, instead of bows, make it something more fundamental, like food. Do as I say, or you’ll starve. This is the foundation of every government and -ocracy that has ever been developed. Agriculture, and the cultural construction of “food” as only farmed crops and livestock, is how we “lock up the food.” As the title character told his student in Daniel Quinn’s My Ishmael, “There’s only one way you can force people to accept an intolerable lifestyle. … You have to lock up the food.”
So, even if you’re right, and we manage to create a society based on the logical impossibility of neither P nor not P, there would still be a much greater value in this DIY stuff: it’s the cornerstone of freedom. Without it, you can never be free. With it, no one can ever take your freedom away from you.
September 20th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
this childish obesession with closed systems and rigid tautologies is getting tiresome.
collapse is implict in civilisation because of a defintion of civilsation that you provide? that’s a logical fallacy called begging the question. you start with the conclusion you want and proceed to prove it. it’s like choosing to sit in front of a brick wall and saying that all you can see is bricks. no kidding.
and all this pathos about a finite universe! good grief. how do you know it’s finite? and what does it matter anyway? at least be clear enough to say that our world is finite. fine. that makes no difference.
what you’re really talking about are open and closed systems and all your arguements are predicated on the idea that earth is a closed system. for all these things like entropy, jevons paradox and diminshing returns etc etc, all these scientific models you lean so hard on, only function in closed systems. and truly closed systems only exist as mathematical abstractions.
for a philosophical movement based on loathing of alienation, division of labour and lifeless abstractions, you sure seem eager to put your faith in the mathematical priesthood.
the earth is not a closed system and neither are human beings. Look at the earth. once it was a lifeless ball of rock. and by your logic it should still be a lifeless ball of rock. the chemistry that supports life is not sustainable in a finite universe right? we are one unsustainable process built on top of another. the hopeless science you embrace so dearly has no answer for that. never has.
nothing is ever truly sustainable except death. everything that lives eventually dies. does that mean we shun life and growth to embrace some simple minded notion that we must avoid the shock of death and collapse at all costs? Life without death is pure fantasy, pure idealism, and it’s not even a hopefull fantasy. it’s a retreat into the delusion of stability. there is none. accept it.
if you transplanted that mentality into the paleolithic era it would be the same. eventually your population would grow to the point you either can’t forage enough on a finite world, and people die, or you find a way to produce more food. your answer is no answer at all, unless you convince people to quit having babies.
the earth is not a closed system primarily because of the sun. with that ongoing supply of energy the earth has moved through a whole series of self refining transformations, and continues to do so. eventually we’ll be able to tap into various electromagnetic or subquantum forces and go even farther. It seems unlikely from certain perspective, but the whole fucking enterpirse has been a bit a of a miracle from the word go hasn’t it?
put down the catastrophic, childish math problems and look at the real world. it’s a miracle. one after another. there is no answer for that. there is no philosophy to dismiss it.
September 20th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
It’s hardly just a definition I’ve come up with. What makes civilizations unique among cultures is their foundation on infinite growth.
Well, it’s true that if the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy were repealed, civilization might have a shot. But so long as they hold true, the universe is finite, and that means that everything in it will either find a dynamic equilibrium with the rest of existence, or crash. It’s really as simple as natural selection.
Really? So, what are the inputs coming into our universe? Because according to the physicists, the unvierse is a pretty closed system.
That’s right. But the universe is. We need to live with the laws of physics, first and foremost, the law of conservation of mass-energy. That means there will always be limits to growth. They needn’t be the exhaustion of all energy in the universe, and almost certainly won’t be, but it does mean that we can’t grow forever. That means we eventually have to strike some kind of equilibrium. That means that any system predicated on always growing will eventually find that it cannot grow any longer. That means that civilization was doomed to fail from its very beginning, by its very nature.
Sure it is. It can perpetuate itself in a dynamic equilibrium. It’s entirely capable of striking a balance. Nothing lasts forever, but there’s a difference between sustainability and immortality–the same way there’s a difference between a healthy man who’s shot dead, and a corpulent glutton who dies of a heart attack. Everything ends; that’s the way of the universe. But only unsustainable systems are self-defeating. Sustainable systems are eventually defeated by something else.
Frankly, I see that attitude as precisely the underlying, foundational tenet of civilization. Civilized people are terrified of death. We see it all around us. We expect to live forever. We fantasize about how our science will grant us immortality. We embrace agriculture thinking it will save us from the give-and-take, the ebb-and-flow of dynamic equilibrium: to always feast, and never have lean times. Of course, the bitter irony is, it’s only with that strategy that we learn what “want” really means–only then that our times become so lean that we actually starve. But it’s agriculture that’s terrified of death. It’s agricultural societies that makes death an absolute evil, and life an absolute good.
Hunter-gatherer societies are animist, and shamanistic. They know that there is no life without death, or death without life. They’re much more comfortable with that concept. They know they only live by the lives they take, and they know that one day their life will be taken in turn. Animism and shamanism stress the balance–the dynamic equilibrium–between the human community, and what David Abram called the “more-than-human community.” Primitivists are not the ones that need to learn to accept the essential mortality of the universe; they’re the only ones who really have. Rather, it’s agriculturalists who need to accept it, because their blind terror of it has led them to create far, far more death than the natural order can sustain, and in their quest for an immortal, eternal, godlike aloofness from the world, they’ve created a system that destroys itself.
But this is something utterly different from sustainability. Many things are sustainable. Sustainability is a different thing from immortality. The difference between sustainability and mortality is the difference between dying of old age, and suicide.
Birth rates don’t just happen. Human population is a function of food supply. Babies are made of proteins, not happy thoughts. Birth rates grow in response to the economic reality. In an agricultural society, the food supply can always be raised, and so, it’s always growing. As a result, people are always having more babies. In forager societies, birth rates are maintained at sustainable levels. Birth and death rates and roughly equal, and exactly equal over the long term (as opposed to agricultural societies, where birth rate is always higher than death rate). That’s because you can’t make more deer just because you want more food. Population is held to a sustainable carrying capacity. This doesn’t need to be held in place through starvation; that’s only the most extreme mechanism. Simply spending more time hunting and gathering leaves less time for copulation and raising children. Foragers develop different ideas about childbirth: they not only accept abortion, but full-blown infanticide. Our moral blocks against these measures are the artifacts of agrarian life. We’re taught these things are wrong as part of our civilization’s imperative to grow at all costs.
It absolutely is. Which is what makes it so tragic that such an obviously self-destructive aberration as civilization has done so much to destroy it all.
September 20th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
Jason, put the concept to practice. Throw away your civilized job, put down the computer, and go forage in the wilderness. Gather your whole crew of primitivists and have a go at it. Why wait for the “imminent collapse”? Do it now!
September 20th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
I’m a bit of ahead of you. The forager life may be what we’re evolved for, and thus what we pick up naturally, but there’s still little avoiding the fact that we weren’t raised by foragers, we never learned how to hunt, or how to make our own clothes, or how to gather wild edibles. They may come naturally to us, but not so naturally that we don’t have to learn them first. That makes the “why are you here talking instead of out in the woods, huh?” a common, but ill-concieved, rejoinder. The fact of the matter is that the Tribe of Anthropik’s exodus is well under way. We’re learning how to do all those things, and slowly making our way out more and more.
September 20th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
More power to ya. Looking forward to your tribe’s appearance in a future issue of National Geographic.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
If National Geographic is still publishing when we’re that far along, we’ll be in trouble. That will mean we’re still surrounded by civilization, and civilization does not allow things that are not itself. It will destroy us, just like it destroys all indigenous cultures. The only reason this is possible is because civilization is dying; otherwise, we’d just be painting big, bright targets on our backs and lining up to be eaten.
September 20th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
on the contrary, it is more vibrant than it has ever been.
September 20th, 2006 at 6:55 pm
In what possible metric of vibrancy is that possible? We are well past the point of diminishing returns, and well into collapse.
September 20th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
people have been saying that since, like, the dawn of civilization!
September 20th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
well, complexity and rate of change seem to be some valid ones.
September 20th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
Well, since the Second Temple period, and largely based on the exegesis of Bronze Age prophecies. I wouldn’t call that a very reliable data set.
I’d agree–that’s why the two links I provided showed civilization’s decline in terms of those two criteria, primarily. We passed the point of diminishing returns for our complexity quite some time ago, and it seems that we’ve been in the process of collapse since World War I or so.
September 21st, 2006 at 6:02 am
I agree with Jason that this raft and all of us live-aboards are experiencing “collapse”. However, since I do not know what it feels like to experience bonafide collapse, I can say with some sense of certainty that I do not know whether anything of any import is actually collapsing, but rather, due to our rightly blinkered and finite conceptions of ourselves and the civilization we inhabit, what we now detect is change and nothing more. It is perhaps our agriculturalized, Bronze-age steeped sensibilities which registers such change as none other than the oft fantasized great collapse of civilization.
However, from a purely personal perspective I completely reject the idea that “civilization will collapse, is collapsing as we speak and there is nothing we can do about any of it”. Here is why: I know that I am small and yet I feel very big. Both, the being small and feeling big I know to be fundamentally wrong. Yet something within my psyche believes otherwise. It is a paradox. Much like civilization is. Which is why civilization is NOT COLLAPSING! What is happening to this thing, civilization, is that it is being probed by the self-proclaimed highest intellectually functioning species that we know of beyond shadow of a doubt. A species which has “risen up” from the rudiments of forraging and early agri-survival and now culminates into each and everyone of us today. The paradox emerges into your psyche once you quit taking yourself so fucking seriously. And that too is a paradox.
You see, it’s turtles all the way down. Hence it is a hybrid of both collapse and innovation we are dealing with. Equally both primitive and civilizedly distilled. Your job is to decide where your heart lies. When you die you die and all of this is basically bullshit.
Make the world the place you would like to see those you love live in. If you don’t have love, you indeed have nowhere to live.
DE-COLLAPSE!
September 21st, 2006 at 8:23 am
I agree with John Michael Greer sometimes less and sometmes more depending on the issue, but even where I disagree with him, he’s always good for a brilliant retort. One of the things I agree with him more is his conclusion in “How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse.” (PDF)
Collapse is change–of course, it’s a specific type of change, the rapid change from complexity to simplicity. And what you propose is exactly the way to deal with that kind of change:
The Tribe of Anthropik isn’t about some doom-and-gloom predictions. It’s about making a better world, recapturing our species’ birthright–about forming the kind of community that won’t just survive that kind of change, but flourish in it.
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:48 am
I don’t understand how Anthropik can be considered as an actual “tribe”. By all appearances it is but a graphically intensive listserv. I really mean no insult Jason, but your site as well as Tim’s wouldn’t have been able to be displayed on far more primitive and thus less complex computers back in the day. But back in the day is when things were necessarily less complex. Yet nevertheless, those old monochromed displays were representations of the most complex there was. I’ve never thought of it before, but isn’t it possible that this generation’s wired prediliction to believe in collapse is nothing more than our ever so rare opportunity to sense the quaintness of a time so very temporally close?
Were it not for this “quaintness” and the relative trendiness of “tribal” life, we wouldn’t even be sensing any of this in the first place. The problem with anything we do anymore is that we cannot see the forest for the trees and the procession of the chicken and the egg are undefined — in other words we are stuck in a pit of intellectual mud. Cliches are the sluices and snowshoes which allow us to wade through this crap. Yet who ever said we must allow the existence of said crap? Why cannot we wade without the cliches? Because we can’t. Because we allow the primitive we shall also allow the complex and vice versa.
No offense and the deep intellectual wellspring that is anthropik notwithstanding, but this “tribe” is nothing more than a “safari” one goes on at Rainforest Cafe. We will not know what we are until the time comes. That time has not yet come. Thus, a tribe does not yet exist. It is still nothing more than a listserv comprised of distant likeminded thinkers.
I’m sorry to sound so critical Jason, as I do enjoy and am often rapt by your and your “tribe’s” essays. But dude, primitivism is but a passing fad.
What is it they say about the south? You cant take the south out of the boy, but you can take the boy out of the south. Well I think the same goes with “complexity”.
My approximation is that “primitivism” will be best applied as a “hybrid” approach. Which of course takes all the mystique out of primitivism. But there you go. Personally, I think it makes it even cooler.
September 22nd, 2006 at 9:16 am
Are you that comment above? No, I didn’t think so. Neither is the Tribe of Anthropik a website. It’s a small community–a family. That community produces a website. That’s a crucial difference.
#1
Tribalism is a two million year old “trend.” It’s the most basic yearning of the human soul, etched into our hearts by two million years of evolution. It’s not the kind of thing I’d dismiss as a mere “trend.” Everything good in civilization has come from those moments when we were least civilized, and most in pursuit of tribal life. This is something Jack Weatherford discusses at length in Savages and Civilization. Or consider the words of the medieval Arabic scholar Ibn Khaldun:
So, this isn’t just some “trend.” It’s the most basic expression of human nature.
The Tribe of Anthropik is very closely knit. Actually, we’re all related to each other. I think that’s an advantage, myself. The farthest of us lives a few miles away, and we see each other several times a week. So, it’s not a listserv, and we’re not distant.
But you raise some concerns that we ourselves have tackled. Please see our “About the Tribe” page, which includes links to essays we’ve written dealing with precisely this issue.
If it is, then so is our species.
Have you seen the Fifth World?
September 22nd, 2006 at 9:28 am
There’s a lot to respond to in JK’s post, but I’m only going to say one thing:
2 million years of human evolution is a passing fad?
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:31 pm
YES!! That’s exactly what I mean. I think you mistook how I was using the word “only” there. Apologies!
Yes, I think they are stupid and ugly!
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Yes, I saw the post Jason made wherein he said that since he changed his worldview three times, and that he changed it to one that he originally thought was worse that this disproves that people see what they want to see. But that is a viewpoint which allows no room for any notion of the Jungian “Self” (capital “s”) or perhaps for the Thelemic Holy Guardian Angel. If Jason did indeed pray in his Catholic days about whether or not Quinn was right, then couldn’t he have been guided by a force greater than himself into this position?
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:37 pm
So then, that means you must have made your own computer then too, right? And the internet? And your house, and the streets, and ….
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:46 pm
WHOA… so you’re saying you support the forager lifestyle. And you’re saying that foragers support infanticide. So that means that you support infanticide?
Oh cool, I had no idea!
September 22nd, 2006 at 7:45 pm
That’s just because you have no taste.
I don’t see how; you’re going to have to explain your reasoning.
Are you suggesting that God is a primitivist or something…? He was praying for Quinn to not be correct.
No, that means I’m learning the skills I need to survive without computers, internet, Western-style houses, and paved streets. That means I’m desperately trying to escape all that stuff, because there is no way to be civilized and not rely on the suffering and deaths of millions every day. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting there. What are YOU doing?
That logic couldn’t get any more tortured if we threw it in Abu Ghraib.
September 22nd, 2006 at 8:46 pm
And yet you still fail to see how claiming to know the fundamental moral truths of the universe–”the ‘in and of themselves’ value”–is just a wee bit hubristic?
September 22nd, 2006 at 9:01 pm
Well, Jung believed that we had our essential or “true” self which was a sort of higher guiding principle that existed at the core of us, and that our lives were a slow gradual process (of much turmoil) of shedding off the layers of false identification which we have built up, and coming closer and closer to this bigger, more powerful, more awesome Self. And all along the process, we are guided essentially “back to ourselves” through signs and signals, helping us steer the choices we make in order to get back home to a fuller, more realized life.
No, I am saying that God wants us to be challenged. Or rather, God (or the Self, or Nature) recognizes that in order to be more fully united with it, we need to go through a period of casting off our old notions. And of course he was praying for Quinn not to be correct, because his small fragile self was scared of losing, of giving itself up in order to take up the greater quest of aligning with the True Self, or Crowley’s True Will, or the Tao or whatever…
September 22nd, 2006 at 9:10 pm
I’m actually a big fan of Jung. Maybe I was denying my true Self, preferring to hide in the civilized comforts and the safety of the routine that is the refuge of the Ego. Regardless, the fact remains that I became a primitivist despite my desires. If you’d like to argue that I had a subconscious desire to nearly destroy every meaningful relationship in my life and turn everything I’d accomplished to nothing, you certainly can–but then, by that same argument, you could argue that anyone believes something “merely” because it suits them. This is why I don’t bother with the reasons people believe things on that kind of emotional level. Ideas can stand or fall as ideas, quite independent of who believes them.
Well, it would explain why the Eden he made for us was a primitive one … and why the worst punishment he could come up with for original sin was agriculture (explicitly–Genesis 3:17)