After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down.

— Fight Club

Primitivism, in the popular imagination, is a subspecies of terrorism. Your average American can tell you that a primitivist is not quite the same as Abu Musab al Zarqawi or Khalid Sheik Muhammed—perhaps they’re using terrorism for a different end—but in their mind, in the same way that all of Islam can be summed up in the figure of Usamah bin Ladin, all primitivists are cut in the mold of Theodore Kaczynski—better known as “the Unabomber,” a brilliant, deranged terrorist responsible for the deaths of three innocent people, and the wounding of 29 others. This perception is no more accurate for primitivism than it is for Muslims, but we do ourselves little favor with violent rhetoric.

And yet, who can deny the importance of the present moment? At risk is not just the wealth of some legal fiction called a “country,” nor even some ephemeral abstraction like “freedom,” but the very real threat of the extinction of the human species in the sixth mass extinction in the history of the world. Our civilization’s impact on the planet is comparable to an enormous meteor smashing into the planet and kicking up enough dust to blot out the sun for weeks—as happened with the last mass extinction, 65 million years ago. If ever there was a cause worth fighting for, would it not be this? What cause could we possibly concieve of, that does not immediately pale in comparison to this? This is not just a struggle for the survival of the human species, but very possibly of multicellular life on Earth.

Part of our civilization’s twisted view of the world is its inability to come to terms with violence in a healthy way. There is an inherent violence to animal life—a fact that philosophers have often commented upon. The chopstick has its origins in Confuscius’ notice that stabbing food with a knife is a violent act, and his desire to move away from that. Buddhist desire to do no harm finds its apex in some monks who were shoes like short stilts, to minimize the possibility of stepping on a bug. Ethical vegetarians often eschew the eating of meat because they do not want to kill anything; instead, they kill vegetables. Whenever and wherever we try to eliminate the harm we do, we find ourselves running into the essentially violent nature of animal life: we live because others die.

Shamanism is a hunter’s religion. The forager life does not afford the luxury of such self-deceit: it requires the predatory to make his peace with his animal nature, including the inherent, inescapable fact of violence. No animal lives, except by the deaths of others. The mediation of life and death in a universe carefully balanced between them is at the heart of everything the shaman does. At the heart of agricultural philosophy, however, is a desire to escape this system: to have life, and never death; growth, and never decay; health, and never sickness. In the end, it is a fool’s dream doomed to failure, but the longer it goes on, the more death, decay, and sickness is needed to balance out the folly. Normally, the forager’s life balances these in small, manageable portions. When civilization collapses, the arrears accumulated over long centuries of delay come crashing down with a terrible vengeance.

Because of this, civilization cannot tolerate ambiguity. We demonize our Tricksters, rather than countenance their ambivalence. The world must be divided between black and white, good and evil—with good defined in ever more narrow terms, and no deviation from it tolerated.

The foundation of civilization, the cornerstone of the state, is an idea first formalized by Max Weber in a 1918 speech, Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation), when he said:

“Every state is founded on force,” said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of “state” would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as “anarchy,” in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state–nobody says that–but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions–beginning with the sib–have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that “territory” is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the “right” to use violence. Hence, “politics” for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.

Fundamental to the existence of the state is the myth that peace requires the members of a society to relinquish their natural born right as animals to use violence, and instead invest that right with the state. The idea is that by allowing the state this monopoly of force, it may control and meter the use of force, resulting in less violence overall.

If I kill someone, it is “murder”—a killing that is considered unjustified. If a policeman or a soldier kills someone, it is usually justified. The criteria for justified and unjustified violence are left for the state to decide, and part of what makes it a state is that the only legitimate uses of violence are by, and for, the state, as with the military, or a para-military group, like the police. Under pressure after especially egregious abuses of this power, the state may make some uses of force that were previously justified, unjustified, and may institute various review procedures for police, soldiers, or other state-approved killers, but this is ultimately an elaboration on the state’s prerogative to determine arbitrarily what constitutes justified and unjustified violence.

We have been trained to think of violence as “wrong” since birth, because it is essential for the state’s continued existence that we accept the myth of its legitimacy, and the founding premise of that so-called legitimacy, the monopoly of force. Only by turning violence into an “evil” thing in the same way we demonize the Trickster can we willingly shed ourselves of such a natural function of animal life. Only then can we believe in the monopoly of force—and only then are we willing to accept its dominance over us, and the mythology of “legitimacy,” whereby our natural born freedom is relegated to “rights” for the state to arbitrarily grant or deny, seems not only reasonable, but the way things should be. Without accepting first that violence is “wrong,” none of the systems of control and domination follow. Yet, we can hardly find any reason why it should be so. Even if we do accept the perverse notion that violence is “wrong,” rather than simply an ambivalent and ever-present feature of animal life, is there any evidence that the state has succeeded in reducing violence through its monopoly of force?

The answer to that question depends entirely on what you use as your baseline. As Lawrence Keeley shows in War Before Civilization, while the absolute numbers of violent fatalities and woundings have become astronomically larger since the advent of the state, per capita, they have gone down. This might be seen as proof that the monopoly of force delivers on its promise, were it not for the fact that Keeley’s sole example of a forager society with such violence comes from the Inuit.

Another objection to Keeley’s work is its anecdotal nature. A total of 201 references are made to 46 cultures. Of these, 6 New Guinea cultures take up 34 of those—roughly 16% of the total. The most oft-cited culture in the book is the Mae Enga. This New Guinea group are pastoralists—and therefore, would be classified as agriculturalists in this paper. However, Keeley cites them as a “primitive” group. A further 31 citations (15%) comes from various Plains Indians who, according to Peter Farb (Farb, 1968), did not exist prior to European contact. Therefore, at least 31%—nearly one third—of the citations which Keeley refers to do not, in fact, refer to the behaviors of actual “primitive” groups.

Keeley focuses on the prevalence of war among non-agriculture societies as a sign of their bellicosity, but Eckhardt rightly points out that, even so, the shorter, less often wars of civilizations produce far more destruction than all of the primitive wars, both absolutely and proportionally. (Eckhardt, W. 1992) These two studies by Keeley and Eckhardt, Keeley relying mainly on anecdotal and Eckhardt mainly on statistical and mathematical evidence, counterbalance each other and together produce the conclusion that “primitive warfare” is constant, but of a very low intensity. All the causes of primitive war can be expressed as asserting the group’s rights, as a deterrent from annihilation. (Godesky, 2000; PDF)

Foragers were not peaceful “Noble Savages.” Forager groups constantly tested their boundaries with one another in skirmishes. In extremely marginal ecologies, like the Arctic, foragers are even extremely violent, with long-lasting blood feuds. But, as Raymond Kelly discusses in Warless Societies & the Origins of War, marginal societies tend not to have the resources to go to war, and affluent societies (like most foragers) have no reason to go to war. So, like agriculture (see thesis #10), warfare develops not from strict scarcity or abundance, but the nerve-wracking, extreme fluctuations between them, with periods of scarcity priming a population’s fears, and following abundance providing them the resources to act on those fears.

When compared to horticulturalists, pre-state farmers, and even the most marginal foragers, the promise of the monopoly of force seems fulfilled. But if we take as our baseline the only sensible baseline for comparison—the mode of existence which dominates our evolution until only the most recent past—then we find that there is far more violence, astronomically more, both absolutely and per capita, under the state than there was before the state. The justification of the state—the monopoly of violence—reduces violence only when you are already faced with a society based primarily on cultivation. For foragers, it can almost be seen as the very introduction of violence, or at least, violence of a type and scale previously unknown.

Any intelligible discussion of violence and primitivism must begin with those two points:

1. Violence is an ambivalent, inherent feature of animal life.
2. Our aversion to violence is a trained response, instilled by an oppressive, hierarchical system in order to make us obedient.

From the foregoing, it may be surprising that I do not believe that violence is justifiable as a primitivist strategy. It is important to have clear, good reasons for that, apart from the fallacious reasoning based on the monopoly of force or any of the ethical or theological devices concieved by apologists of domination systems to keep us enthralled. Violence, as noted above, is an ambivalent part of animal life that every animal must make its peace with. There are times when violence is a useful, and even a laudable strategy—such may be the single most widespread theme in all of Western literature. The question of violence and primitivism, then, is certainly not an ethical one. As mentioned above, no cause in the history of the world has ever provided greater ethical justification than this. The question is whether it makes sense as a strategy.

There is, of course, its utter lack of feasibility. We may understand that the monopoly of force is a pernicious myth, but the immense firepower of the United States government is anything but imaginary. It is not respect for their imaginary and unethical “laws” that keeps me a law-abiding citizen, but fear of their guns. That is a healthy response. The use of violence is utterly, utterly doomed to failure. Primitivists sometimes evidence a paranoid fear of government surveillance through oppressive, quasi-legal programs like THERMCON, COINTELPRO, ECHELON, or even more secret NSA programs. Waco, Ruby Ridge and other, similar events wherein supposed innocents were victimized by the government are pointed to as examples of what the government might one day do to your own peaceful eco-village. These examples are rarely used in good faith. The government programs mentioned, while clandestine, suspicious, and worthy of our indignation, are not nearly as omniscient as we so often fear. As with more recent programs collecting information from phone companies on private conversations, collecting data is a far easier task than usefully analyzing or using it. Neither were the people at Waco and Ruby Ridge blameless innocents; while emphatically not the villains painted in popular media, they were also up to the very typical, pseudo-legal activities one would expect to elicit the attention of law enforcement. As much as personal freedoms have been curtailed by Western governments in recent decades under conservative regimes, at this point in time it remains true that if you do not do anything illegal (or anything that seems illegal), the government will have no interest in you. Rhizome is invisible to hierarchy; building an eco-village, learning primitive skills, and living in the woods are all things that thousands of people do. They are not dangerous in any conventional sense that the government is capable of appreciating. The government does not care.

If, in the unforeseeable future, that changes—if the United States continues its current trajectory for a decade or more to become truly fascist, or the world turns on to a global conflict of hierarchy vs. rhizome—then rhizome also offers the only viable defense strategy against hierarchy. Jeff Vail writes on this topic regularly, most completely in “Defending Pala: Rhizome as a Mode of Military Operations,” and “Rhizome Network Defense Strategies.”

The history of warfare is a history of hierarchy. Rhizome polities, as they have existed in a lesser approximation of fully rhizome form, have never been able to repel the advance of hierarchy. As a result, warfare has been an activity entered into exclusively by hierarchy, against either rhizome or against another hierarchy. It has been a constant evolutionary struggle, with alternating innovations in tactics or politics, offense or defense leading to a perpetual war among human polities instigated by the innovator. Rhizome cannot “make warâ€? in the classical sense, because it has no capacity for offensive warfare—the kind of military operations that I will outline here are structurally limited to defensive and reactionary operations (even if they may use offensive tactics to defensive ends). This is because rhizome is structurally incapable of exerting control beyond itself—the pattern of rhizome can spread, but it is fundamentally incapable of controlling another entity. For this reason, rhizome has no motivation to instigate war—it can only respond to aggression by hierarchy. Therefore, if one accepts that it is possible to develop the theory of rhizome military operations to the extent that it cannot be defeated by hierarchy, then rhizome war equals an end to war, as hierarchy will not instigate a war that it does not think it can win.¹

Ironically, Vail notes that the promise that the monopoly of force could never fulfill—an end to war—may ultimately be fulfilled by rhizome, which is extremely effective at defending itself, but largely incapable of mounting an offensive attack. The Rhizome Army of the Appalachian Confederation is intended to provide such rhizome defense in the event that it is needed—an eventuality that I, personally, do not foresee as terribly likely.

The threat that has turned the primitivist into a kind of terrorist in the civilized imagination does not come from primitivists who want to simply be left alone and are willing to defend their way of life, though. These are dismissed as harmless cranks. Rather, it comes from terrorists like Theodore Kaczynski, “the Unabomber,” who killed three people and wounded 29 others in a perverse publicity campaign for his manifesto.

Kaczynski’s fear was of the potential damage that technology could do the earth and human welfare. To stop that from happening, he mailed bombs. Capt. John Hauser, a Berkeley graduate student, had applied for the astronaut program, but his dream was dashed just a few days before he learned of his acceptance when the Unabomber stole four of his fingers and one of his eyes. His first lethal victim was a California computer store owner, killed by a nail- and splinter-loaded bomb lying in his parking lot in 1985. The second killing was an advertising executive, Thomas J. Mosse. Kaczynski later explained in a letter that advertising manipulates people’s attitudes—so it’s OK to kill anyone in marketing. The last of Kaczynski’s murders, in 1995, was the president of the California Forestry Association, Gilbert B. Murray, in 1995.

John Zerzan’s first notoriety came out of the Kaczynski trial, when the media picked him out as a “confidant” of the Unabomber. Zerzan’s opinions on Kaczynski seem mixed. On the one hand, he has had the sense to point out that Kaczynski’s tactics were unjustified:

…the mailing of explosive devices intended for the agents who are engineering the present catastrophe is too random. Children, mail carriers, and others could easily be killed. Even if one granted the legitimacy of striking at the high-tech horror show by terrorizing its indispensable architects, collateral harm is not justifiable…²

However, he has also written:

The concept of justice should not be overlooked in considering the Unabomber phenomenon. In fact, except for his targets, when have the many little Eichmanns who are preparing the Brave New World ever been called to account?…. Is it unethical to try to stop those whose contributions are bringing an unprecedented assault on life?³

And again, two years later:

Enter the Unabomber and a new line is being drawn. This time the bohemian schiz-fluxers, Green yuppies, hobbyist anarcho-journalists, condescending organizers of the poor, hip nihilo-aesthetes and all the other “anarchists” who thought their pretentious pastimes would go on unchallenged indefinitely - well, it’s time to pick which side you’re on. It may be that here also is a Rubicon from which there will be no turning back.⁴

What did Kaczynski accomplish? Three dead, innocent people—yes, innocent, people without malice, who simply tried to do the same as any of us. They had no dreams of world domination; they were merely trying to get by. The problem we face is not individual sins, but a system. Is it justifiable to target the individual people inside that system, simply because it’s harder to target the system itself? By day, I am employed as a software engineer. My brother has a business degree. Are we Zerzan’s “little Eichmanns”? Is it justifiable, or laudable, if we die in a hail of shrapnel, packaged in a box, sent from a man in the middle of the woods? If we do, in what way have we come even one step closer to the collapse of civilizaton? There is no mistake or ambiguity here. Kaczynski did nothing to hamper civilization—he just killed innocent people, and wounded many more.

We must remember that a violent campaign against civilization is not a war on some vague idea: it would claim human lives, just like you or I. Every war has casualties—that is precisely what makes violence ambivalent. “Collateral damage” is a terrible word. It is always measured in lost, innocent lives. Even the most justified war ever waged, the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany, took a heavy toll in “collateral damage” and the deaths of innocent bystanders. As we’ve already discussed, the crisis of civilization is a far more dangerous threat than the Nazis ever were. The Nazis were but a small subset of civilization; civilization does not threaten one “race,” but the whole species of Homo sapiens, and if we take any regard for other life on the planet, we must also note that it has already claimed a toll that puts Hitler in his proper place as a historical footnote. The difference between ethical and unethical conduct in war is not decided by whether or not collateral damage is incurred, but as a measure of how carefully such innocent suffering is minimized. Kaczynski’s campaign did nothing to minimize such “collateral damage,” and gained nothing. There is nothing defensible in his terror campaign. But what of a hypothetical scenario, aimed towards similar ends, that did avoid collateral damage, and was actually effective?

The Earth Liberation Front, better known as ELF, was classified as the top domestic terrorist threat by the FBI in March, 2001, six months before Muslim extremists killed 3,000 people in New York and Washington, DC. By contrast, to date, no human has ever been killed, or even injured, due to any ELF action. Instead, ELF engages in “ecotage”—the destruction of property that threatens the environment. Usually, this means burning SUV’s or other acts of vandalism and arson. ELF actions are supposed to adhere to three principles:

1. To inflict maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment.
2. To reveal and educate the public about the atrocities committed against the earth and all species that populate it.
3. To take all necessary precautions against harming any animal—human and nonhuman.

To date, while adherence to the third principle has been perhaps laudable (though their current clean record on this score may have as much to do with dumb luck as any planning involved), the first has been ineffective, and the second has been laughable. Far from revealing or educating, ELF actions have typically produced exactly the opposite effect, shutting down any and all environmentalist campaigns for months at a time, as apologies are made and distances reassured. In the same fashion, Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance was dismissed by many with superficial comparisons to the Unabomber Manifesto.

On the surface, ELF’s attacks might seem like they cause damage to civilization, but ultimately, the buildings ELF burns down are simply rebuilt, resulting in even more logging and economic activity. The targets ELF has chosen are small and ultimately meaningless. These acts have proven, time and again, very effective at galvanizing anti-environmentalist sentiment and leading to government crack-downs on environmentalist organizations, but have not resulted in any positive environmental effects. Overall, ELF has achieved far more for its supposed adversaries than it ever has for its supposed allies.

Let us assume the “best case scenario” for the violence strategy, something far beyond the puerile, adolescent pranks pulled off by groups like ELF, or the senseless murders committed by the Unabomber. Let us assume a scenario like that imagined by noted security analyst John Robb in “Green Guerrillas,” wherein eco-terrorists leverage systempunkts to shut down large swaths of complex networks with a single stroke. Robb notes:

Eco-terrorism isn’t new. It is, however, typically ineffective. This report points to another potential scenario. If eco-activists adopt global guerrilla tactics, they could coerce a rapid move to clean energy alternatives. Small but extremely effective (high ROI) attacks on the energy corridors leading to target regions, would quickly increase the costs of conventional energy such that clean power alternatives would become extremely attractive. This would be dictated by a direct economic comparison (costs) as well as indirect factors such as reliability of delivery. This systems sabotage tax would induce a tipping point in energy market equilibria towards green alternatives if it is extended over a long period (longer than one season) and is of a sufficient level.

For primitivists, this is insufficient. A transition to alternative fuels may even be a nightmare scenario that could potentially give civilization a “second wind,” as with the re-emergence of Western civilization from near collapse at the end of the Bronze Age (see “Peak Wood“), allowing civilization a long enough lifespan to truly threaten the survival of all multicellular life on the planet.

Herein lies the great danger of violent action that must be considered, a theme we’ve already seen in the ramifications of the eco-terrorism of ELF or the Unabomber. As fragile as civilization is, it is not so fragile that it is susceptible to fall from terrorist attacks. The propoganda stating otherwise from the current U.S. government is mere fear-mongering to enlist our support for other agendas. What such attacks can accomplish, however, is to galvanize the civilized response. Like the Bush administration’s own “incompetence”, eco-terrorism blurs perception. Persuaded by purely materialist conceptions of civilization, such eco-terrorists are convinced that once a certain threshold of destruction is reached, civilization collapses. The complexity model of collapse instead posits civilization as an investment. Collapse is akin to a run on a bad stock, as everyone tries to get out first. Primitivist use of violence, like an incompetent politician, obfuscates the long-term trend. The downturn is attributed to the momentary losses of a well-timed attack. A good investor doesn’t pull out at the slightest downturn, because he knows that fluctuation is normal: what’s important is the long-term growth of the stock. It is only when the long-term prospect of the stock begins to go down that a good investor pulls out. The complexity model tells us that collapse occurs when people begin to understand that further investment in complexity will continue to yield diminishing returns, and they opt instead for a lower level of complexity that provides greater return. Material factors ultimately bring people to this point, but collapse itself is always a matter of understanding the pattern.

Well-planned violence may not even require human casualties, and it could result in significant infrastructure damage by leveraging systempunkts. But even in the very best scenario, it has two opposing effects: at the same time that it may make complexity more costly (thus providing greater infrastructural reason for people to question their investments in complexity), it also provides an excuse for a downturn, and obfuscates the “big picture.” It leads people to believe that the downturn is artificial and temporary. Without violent action, the inherently losing proposition of complexity would only continue to become more and more self-evident. In the very best case, I think it would be generous to think that these effects even balance each other to “break even.” More realistically, even in the best case, the psychological effect will be far greater than the infrastructural one, and the net effect of violence will be to increase civilization’s longevity, and the damage it is capable of doing.

This, of course, says nothing of the fact that violence is very much hierarchy’s “game.” Our best hope is to redefine the struggle in our own terms, to put it on “our turf.” Violence is their “turf.” “Beating them at their own game” is an impossible task—and besides the aid it will give to civilization’s longevity, eco-terrorism also marks us as targets that government agencies take notice of. This is precisely the type of action that most certainly will garner government surveillance and violent retaliation, and with good reason. In fact, the violent actions of one primitivist or primitivist group could easily hamper even the majority of nonviolent primitivists. Note how much time has been spent on this subject among primitivists, how much time has been spent disavowing the Unabomber and ELF, and how much fear, uncertainty and doubt yet remains on the part of primitivists afraid that they will be swept up in actions aimed at the likes of Kaczynski, or in retaliation for the latest ELF action. Beyond the aid it gives to civilization, primitivist violence also hurts other primitivists.

This is why we must not pursue violence. The “primitivist leadership” of Zerzan, Jensen and others have provided, at best, mixed signals on this front. Violence for self-defense may become necessary in the future, but an offensive campaign to bring down civilization is a doomed strategy even in its best case—to say nothing of whether or not we can justify the deaths of billions as acceptable “collateral damage.” Violence has a place in healthy animal life, and the repression of violence in civilized society has made it hyper-violent. Trying to answer that violence with violence of our own is doomed to failure. For the time being, violence is something we must emphatically deny. There is no room for ambiguity on this matter. This is not a matter of violence being “wrong,” or submitting to the state’s delusions of grandeur with the monopoly of force. This is about the proper use of violence, the realities of the situation we are in, and the fact that in this system, violence does far more harm than good. If we cannot reclaim primitivism from those who would use it as an excuse for mere terrorism, and if we our “leaders” cannot take a firm stance on this issue—in short, if we can’t take primitivism back from the bankrupt terms of conflict that civilization has given us for all our problems—then primitivism will die. And with it, very likely, our last, best hope for survival.

This is a war that we cannot afford to lose. Are we going to lose it for so petty a reason, that we’re so civilized that we can’t think of a more effective way of waging it than blowing things up?