As for your dismissal about “a century or so ago about ‘peak’ coal,” I’d love to see some sources for that, but your grasp of the geological situation is obviously as faulty as most people’s. I’d recommend thesis #18 for starters, and our special series, “Dei ex Machinis,” on why none of the “alternatives” on the table today can suffice to make up for oil’s loss.

I’ll read the rest of your excellent thirty-thesis, but if you’re only depending on Peak-Oil, or Global Warming to trigger a complexity down fall, then I would think that you’re setting yourself up for a disappointment.

I address both with a “may.” As I explain in the Thirty Theses, complexity fundamentally creates a crisis of diminishing returns. It’s what’s destroyed every preceding civilization, and we’re showing all the signs now. When that happens, predicting what will be the “final straw” is very difficult to predict; peak oil and global warming both present significant candidates, though in actuality, it will almost certainly be the combination. Diminishing returns on complexity means civilization faces more and more lethal crises, while its means to answer such crises becomes less and less. The probability of civilization’s survival approaches zero, though of course, predicting which event will finally do it is next to impossible.

The media was never a real part of us and never really shared the magic of our existential experiences.

My wife grew up a few miles from Woodstock, born and raised among hippies. I’ve known a number of hippies, too. I’m not getting my information from media portrayals. In my own conversations with hippies, they’ve never mentioned foraging, and have generally balked at my own suggestion of it. The communes they’ve described to me have been universally agrarian.

But never mind, because you’re right, the counter-culture was steam-rolled.

If you’re right (and you’re the first person I’ve ever heard describe the hippie movement as having any kind of foraging element, including a wide range of long-standing hippies), then I’d say it merely points to the same phenomenon that crushed the old-growth cultures that preceded that experimentation: when civilization is still in anabolic growth, it crushes everything in its path. When it goes into catabolic collapse, though, the rules reverse themselves.

Definitely not if the complexity and its increased security and surveilance continues to grow.

Definitely not … but growth isn’t an independent variable. Growth is a function of energy, and if you take more and more energy to get the same amount out, then your energy is dropping, and your capacity for growth is diminishing. If your economy is predicated on paying off your debts with a guaranteee of future growth, even standing still will cause a catastrophic, cascading breakdown of that entire system.

It can’t happen soon enough!

Because it’s the continuing sophistication of our complexity that will be used to control each and every one of us.

I’ll read the rest of your excellent thirty-thesis, but if you’re only depending on Peak-Oil, or Global Warming to trigger a complexity down fall, then I would think that you’re setting yourself up for a disappointment.

But like you said, even the best scenario is going to be a struggle.

So I’m going to keep cutting timber for my sailboat.

Oh, and never forget, Pittsburg is on the Ohio that flows to the Gulf and the open sea.

—–

I understand that what I said about the ’60s and ’70s counter-culture sounds unbelievable, but never forget, it’s the victors who write the history.

The media was never a real part of us and never really shared the magic of our existential experiences.

Their descriptions don’t even come close, and even the music was never more than a pale impersonation of the real spririt.

What you will nearly always read, here and see today of the counter-culture is a deliberate misinterpretation by the envious and resentful, who compulsively dismiss the experience they were too afraid to share.

No, you won’t find much evidence about foragers, because the media rarely left its “Green Zone”, and those crazy forager types were sly, and left few visible tracks across the social landscape.

Though there were some books published at the time that gives a hint about about foragers.

For example, I remember when “Survival into the 21st Century” was first published in ‘75, and, even though its ideas were no longer new material to us, it was still very inspiring to see it in print.

I tell you the truth, there were thousand of haaaaard-core forager types.

Not all of them were Americans.

Some of the most serious and militant were Europeans.

There was some serious adventuring going on.

In those days, being wild was a badge of distinction.

Living on the edge was a badge of distinction.

It meant you had courage to live a unique and magical existence.

Women were magnetically drawn towards the wildest ones, and the wildest were always the first to get laid.

Even a goofy runt like Charlie Manson could get laid any hour of the day just for being different.

Think about that.

Even materialists got laid. Alot!

Marxists and Socialists could be found everywhere amongst us, and were amongst the most egalitarian of us.

And yes, even followers of Behavioralism, especially communes based on Skinner’s “Walden II”; several of which continue to this very day.

Consider this, there was so much more freedom and room for experimentation.

Land was so cheap that wild experimentation was happening in nooks and cranies all over the place.

You must remember that, because nuclear weapons were new, they loomed large in our collective psyche, and etched deep within us a profound distrust in civilization.

And a profound feeling that life had to lived in the present moment to the fullest, because tomorrow was sketchy.

But never mind, because you’re right, the counter-culture was steam-rolled.

Wether the next counter-culture will have any better luck anytime in the next 50 years is problematic.

Definitely not if the complexity and its increased security and surveilance continues to grow.

And amongst the most militant of the “Back to the Land-ers� were thousands of highly motivated foragers.

I don’t see any evidence for that at all. In fact, “back to the land” has largely been a rallying cry that precludes foraging. The hippies tended to be vegetarian, after all; hard to be a hunter-gatherer, whose diets consisted mostly of meat, when you’ll only eat plants, eh? Historically, only agriculturalists have had plant-dominated diets, much less full-blown vegetarianism. “Back to the land” movements have always pointed us back to an agrarian ideal, and the hippie movement was cut of much the same cloth. Communes were agrarian communities.

Moreover, they didn’t make the case that we’re suffering the psychological impact of an inhuman way of life, but rather, that we suffer an inhuman way of life because of our psychological problems. How many times have you heard hippies talk about corporate greed, or how peace and love can free us? Comparatively, how many times have you heard hippies talk about materialists formations of behavioral patterns? All I’ve heard of the latter fall under categorial denials and appeals to our free will, while the former is positively cliche.

Like your essay suggests, it wasn’t for lack of foraging skills, and you’re right, it was about a lack of a positive feed-back loop.

I do think that there’s another element at play, yes, that you need to strike when the moment is right. In the positive feedback loop, it doesn’t matter how much effort, or even if you get everything exactly right. People who tried living primitively up until now just got steamrolled over. Now, things are changing. The positive feedback loop is breaking down, like all positive feedback loops do. When it begins to collapse, then civilization moves in the opposite direction, and the rules of relating to it reverse themselves. Instead of being doomed, foraging becomes the best guarantee of outliving it.

You believe that foraging will once again satisfy a positive feed-back loop by 2012-2015.

Is that because you believe in a major break-down that will threaten the very survival of non-foragers?

Not quite. Foraging places constraints on production outside of humans, so it won’t allow for a positive feedback loop. Instead, foraging forces you to move into a dynamic equilibrium. I think you’re generally right about the psychological traits that civilization trains us for, and even requires of us to function inside of it, and humans being adaptable creatures, we take that and run with it. But when you change the context, that same adaptability means that we change again, rapidly, in a very different direction.

But yes, I foresee a breakdown that will threaten the survival of non-foragers, and I’ve described the reasoning for that in detail in the Thirty Theses. To summarize as briefly as possible, complexity is subject to diminishing returns, so any way of life that depends on constantly increasing complexity will run itself into the ground. We’re seeing this in several concurrent phenomena, such as peak oil and global warming. I’ve predicted that in hindsight, we’l recognize 2012-2015 as the significant inflection point.

Now, if we concern ourselves with the fate of most of the world’s 6.5 billion (or, as the UN projects, 9 billion by the time this may all be said and done), I think you’re correct that most will react by intensifying their civilized behaviors, which will simply serve to accelerate an already accelerating collapse. Just as our current positive feedback loop means that we grow faster the more that we grow, so, too, I expect collapse to snowball, and accelerate on its own momentum. But, the majority of people who follow this course will be damning themselves to die with the rest of civilization. What we face is natural selection in all its cruelty and simplicity. They’re not the ones who will have a chance to have an impact on the future of the human species. Instead, however few have the imagination to try something else as things become more difficult, will become the ancestors of the new, feral humanity. I don’t think they’ll all be primitivists, and I think the primitivist penchant to shrug off the importance of community might lead more than a few to fail as well, but I do believe that it will be the imagination to try, rather than the resources available, that will constitute the limiting factor of human survival.

“Where Have All the Savages Gone?� is a powerfully insightful essay.

I will no longer mistake you for a strict material-determinist.

Yet it would be a mistake not to realize that the ‘60s and ‘70s Counter-Culture was famously about “Life Style�, even militantly about “Life Style�.

And amongst the most militant of the “Back to the Land-ers� were thousands of highly motivated foragers.

I would say that they were the most highly motivated amongst us, and amongst the ones who inspired me the most.

You could find them deep in the Hawaiian bush, in Central American jungles; hunting carnivores, fruitarians, raw-food nudists, island foraging seafarers, and there were communes based on just about every food combination experiment you can think of.

Compared to today, the movement was vast.

What happened to it?

Like your essay suggests, it wasn’t for lack of foraging skills, and you’re right, it was about a lack of a positive feed-back loop.

Unfortunately, our excessive consumption of food, our grasping and controlling of things and each other, as well as the patriarchal conformist character of our hierarchy, all fulfill a positive feed-back loop by fulfilling our compulsive oral and anal preoccupations.

Foraging doesn’t fulfill any of that.

Neither did organic gardening, but anal civilization does.

You believe that foraging will once again satisfy a positive feed-back loop by 2012-2015.

Is that because you believe in a major break-down that will threaten the very survival of non-foragers?

Personally, I suspect that being threatened by a break-down will trigger more desperate and oppressive oral and anal reactions against any foragers, and towards a more all consuming, conformist, anal-society determining the fate of dwindling resources.

Anal civilization feeds off break-downs.

.

Fragile in that; even in the ‘60s and ‘70s amongst a vast counter-culture seeking richer meaning in our relationship with both food and each other, we largely failed to overcome the constant gravitational pull of powerful compulsive behaviors already aquired by the age of five.

Firstly, the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s wasn’t particularly “vast,” not on the scale of social change. They were significantly outnumbered. Secondly, their failure illustrates my point wonderfully, because they weren’t terribly interested in finding new means of subsistence. The communes were agrarian. They thought, like you do, that the root of our problems were psychological, that you had to change people’s “consciousness” and attitudes. It never occurred to them that such consciousness arose from a particular way of life.

So I don’t share your optimism about the power of a new foraging behavioral model.

Yes, the vast foraging communes of the 1960’s … oh wait, they farmed wheat and milked cows, and told us how the ills of civilization were primarily psychological fixations.

The reason that so many other movements have failed is precisely because this is a matter of how psychology arises from the material, rather than vice versa. We’re in an escalation, and the window only opens when the positive feedback loop begins to break down. See my older article, “Where Have All the Savages Gone?”

The fearful man will needlessly, compulsively and continuously regress to a dualistic fight or flight fear response to many everyday situations.

Yes, but these two are still related, the same way that a healthy stream is related to a flood. This is simply the overloaded version. And what happens when people learn primitive skills, and the genuine sense of freedom that comes with that? You see so much of that fear wash away. Some amount of it is drilled into us from our upbringing. I don’t think we’ll rewild so much as go feral. But it’s a start, and our children will enjoy a much better start than we did, as will their children. Will we be perfect hunter-gatherers? No. But it’s a start, nonetheless, and from where we stand now, it looks like most of the way.

Fragile in that; even in the ‘60s and ‘70s amongst a vast counter-culture seeking richer meaning in our relationship with both food and each other, we largely failed to overcome the constant gravitational pull of powerful compulsive behaviors already aquired by the age of five.

Naively, we didn’t know of our fragility, so we were filled with a bright optimistic idealism that we thought would transform the world.

But instead, we’ve been largely reduced to this scattered remnant, tenuously cyber-connected in a virtual-tribe.

So despite the unforgettable magic moments we found in a more spiritual relationship with both our food and with each other in that then new tribal communalism, these magic moments instead remained but moments, or for the luck few, weeks, perhaps months, but, because of the counter-power of our compulsive behavior, rarely more.

Of course it was worth it; the disciplined strength of non-materialistic simplicity, the communal intimacy, the gatherings, the months in the woods, the midnight forest drum-circles, these all helped to generate a new behavioral model.

But our new model was rarely enough in the end to overcome the compulsive oral and anal behavior of our failed childhood personality development.

So I don’t share your optimism about the power of a new foraging behavioral model.

Don’t expect lasting significant transformations, but keep and enjoy those precious meaningful moments, because those remembered moments may have to quench your soul’s thirst through long droughts.

Let’s remember how Noam Chomsky launched the revolution of today’s cognitive science when he demonstrated the limitations of behavioral modification against primal patterns of cognition.

Likewise, one will come up against severe limitations when trying to modify behavior rooted in compulsive neurotic preoccupations with our deep seated inner-conflicts.

Especially conflicts with gender archetypes that symbolize fearlessness.

Fear results in inner-conflicts that can, if unchecked, become neurotic preoccupations.

NOT the once useful momentary fight or flight fear of the little hunted mammal that we once were, and whose brain still lingers in the frontal-cortex like our vestigial tail-limb, but rather a neurotic paralyzing fear.

The fearful man will needlessly, compulsively and continuously regress to a dualistic fight or flight fear response to many everyday situations.

Fear that saps our energy, our confidence, our manhood, and our ability to strike with cool, spontaneous action.

Fear that turns the confident fearless hunter into the doomed fearful hunted.

I grew up in the inner-city, where, if you walk with fear, you’re already dead.

The fearless man leaps through the woods like a bounding stag and strikes his prey without hesitation.

The fearless man is whole and confident and wastes no time with un-necessary aggression.

A Wholistic man, balanced, and confident enough to embrace a diversity of relationships and experiences.

The fearless man is the only man free enough from compulsive neurotic fears to realize an existential experience with his own skin.

That’s the true Noble Savage.

That’s not the fearful creature we would have found yoked to an Egyptian plow.

Nor is it any Shaman, who, unable to deliver his people from the yoke, pacifies himself with ceremonious rituals.

No, we seek to recapture the fearless freedom beyond the hierarchical chains of civilization.

We seek to end our alienation, and instead become one with our lost fearless male archetype, and feel what it is to take a single breath as a whole man instead of the frustrated compulsive inadequate anal-male.

To psychologically feel for the first time the fearless spontaneity of nature’s eternal moment.

Healing the psycho-dynamic pathologies at the heart of our neurological control-panel is what drives us here.

Psychologically we are driven towards alternative behavioral models.

Our motives are purely psychological, and only by a slow, step by step, generation by generation, dialectical process can we uncover, expose, and heal the momentum of five-hundred generations our oral and anal fixations.

Then the neurotic inner-conflicts that preoccupy our behavior will cease to be so compulsive, and that will prepare our psyche to embrace, instead of reject, the new behavioral model that has been suggested in this thesis.

Then, we can revisit the near-spontaneous magic of the ‘60s, and continue beyond to the reality that we come here hoping to create.

Our relationship to food has triggered a powerful social dynamic whose scope and momentum has long ago taken on a life of it’s own that can no longer be defined by food.

Well that’s just the thing. Look what happens when people eat a paleo diet, when they learn about wild edibles, when they start tracking. Their relationship to their food–to the whole world around them–changes. And those attitudes change, too. When you learn primitive skills, there’s the rushing thrill of freedom. You get a taste of it, and you learn what freedom means. It changes your outlook profoundly.

Hunting and gathering food was a trigger for an existential intimacy with the entire living world that was so dynamic and profoundly effecting that it far transcended the original hunting and gathering.

“Transcended”? No; I think we’ve simply forgotten how dynamic and profound hunting and gathering is supposed to be.

Transcended it to the point that we could never have left hunting and gathering for agriculture without first severing our intimate existential relationship to the life around us.

Obviously not, because the historical record clearly shows that we became farmers first, and only later severed our relationship. The first civilizations, like Egypt or the Moche, maintained a very animistic and shamanistic relationship for a few thousand years after they picked up farming. So obviously we started farming, and then lost that relationship.

We had to change psychologically, and regress to a fear-driven, fight or flight dualistic pattern of cognition before we could conceive of agriculture.

“Regress”? Have you ever hunted or gathered? Fight or flight is part of the basic human experience for a good reason. Hunter-gatherers employ it all the time. I think our adoption of agriculture had a lot to do with fear, but it’s not as if this required some abandonment of an animist world. Fear is part of life, and often times, it’s perfectly healthy to be afraid. Look at the beliefs of the Inuit–fear plays a significant role there. Wikipedia: “As Knud Rasmussen’s Inuit guide told him when asked about Inuit religious beliefs, ‘We don’t believe. We fear!’”

This is why I feel that, not only has our social dynamic transcend definition by food, but that we will never progress out of either agriculture or hierarchical civilization until we begin to regain our mental balance first.

And how does that process begin? By learning primitive skills, by getting that taste of freedom–by changing how you relate to your food!

That’s true of all triggering mechanisms—they set off, not a linear, but a broad net of causal links whose consequences have a far more profound effect upon our lives than the trigger.

Hunting and gathering food was a trigger for an existential intimacy with the entire living world that was so dynamic and profoundly effecting that it far transcended the original hunting and gathering.

Transcended it to the point that we could never have left hunting and gathering for agriculture without first severing our intimate existential relationship to the life around us.

We had to change psychologically, and regress to a fear-driven, fight or flight dualistic pattern of cognition before we could conceive of agriculture.

Fixated by dualistic patterns of cognition, we are separated from all existential relationships by objectifying every relationship, and every experience in a highly effective, dualistic, object-subject separation of the knower from the known.

And remember, regressing to a simple fixation on fight or flight dualistic patterns of cognition is accomplished much faster when threatened with aggression rather than mere famine.

A spreading of organized aggression, more than famine, motivated the neurotic preoccupations that led to the mental state that conceived agriculture and hierarchical civilization.

Moreover, this simple cognitive fixation already transcends any definition by food, because it’s now this fixation that will have to be corrected before we can even conceive of an alternative to agriculture or our hierarchical civilization.

But it gets worse.

Often times food isn’t even a trigger, but simply a vehicle, like a cigarette.

Say I’m a typical chubb, and not long after a heavy diner, I sit on the couch with a big, bag of potato chips.

On the surface that appears to be about food—I mean look, there’s the evidence; a big, bag of potato chips right in my lap, and there I am popping the chips one after the other into my already stuffed stomach.

But here, like all the excess of agriculture, hierarchy and civilization, food is but a vehicle.

A vehicle that allows us to express our compulsive oral fixations.

My excessive compulsive need for food is the result of my failure to negotiate successfully my oral stage of personality development.

That’s right, I was raised by a civilized woman who was made to feel embarrassed by her breasts, and because she was embarrassed to spontaneously breast feed in public, I developed, not only a stiff non-spontaneous, frustrated, untrusting, envious and resentful personality, but also a life-long compulsive oral fixation.

Sound familiar?

But that’s just the beginning, because my failure to successfully negotiate my oral stage of personality, as is nearly always the case, cascades into a momentum of failure that makes certain my failure to successfully negotiate my next anal stage of personality development.

Unfortunately, the consequences of this failure eventually leads us back to my first post of a couple of nights ago.

It leads us to a grasping, controlling, anal-retentive personality, with powerful anal-fixations and latent homo-sexual tendencies that compulsively seeks submission to hierarchical authority, and demands a more controlling and excessive agricultural relationship with our now objectified living world.

This is why I feel that, not only has our social dynamic transcend definition by food, but that we will never progress out of either agriculture or hierarchical civilization until we begin to regain our mental balance first.