Headlines proclaim the end of human civilization: What sad reminiscences! What quaint anachronism! Human civilization ended way back. We can only conclude that these headlines conceal a deeper fear that human civilization might begin.
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Consider the viral video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGJ2jMZ-gaI. Notice the progression: Each ant added its bits of dirt to the pile then burrowed into it, spit-shit cementing the corridors behind it. An enormous, unthinkable monster comes and pours molten metal into this branch-on-branch of antways. Yes, the old order is preserved: Not a single corridor is allowed to fall. But at what cost? For the few surviving ants, can we claim that removing this hunk of aluminum is a “catastrophe”?
The invasive metal must be extracted if the remaining ants are to have space to burrow a new future.
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Industrial technology--and its resultant forms of capitalism, population ordering, interconnectivity, etc.--is planetary ebola in its final stages: It knows that its last shot at survival is to be spit onto another planet as its current host bleeds out.
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Industry itself is the new and improved Kaczynski: Watch as an earth-sized pipe bomb detonates itself before your very eyes! Gold reverts to its weight, returns to malleability, and all presidents are usurped by the best supermarket looter in their respective jurisdictions.
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Afterlife, legacy, pension, tomorrow: Only so many levels of the Big Con. Fuck a heaven, an enduring name, carefree old age, a “better tomorrow”: The Elysian Fields are out there. They used to run through New Orleans between Frenchmen Street and Marigny, but they had to pick up and scramble in 2005. Now they pop up wherever they’re evoked. King Tut said you could do it with blue lotus, but we have a hunch there are other ways.
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There’s a grand psychological movement in the phrase, “human civilization is going to collapse.” The word, “human,” has clearly come to mean something esoteric and overarching: Our rumbly gut says Kant. We may translate the common slogan of panic thus: “The universal history with cosmopolitan intent is going to collapse.” Well, let it come down. Though it pains us to use the word in any way other than affectionately, the pun is simply too alluring: Kant was always a cunt anyway.
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Visions of the future--Afterlife, social security payout, clean safe sustainable happy, paradise for your great-greats--Let’s dispense for the moment with the old talk of libido, chi, animal spirits, humours, sekhu, mystic hydraulics, orgones: Mr. Martin, if that is his real name, is stealing your future. Well, Mr. Martin can go jump in a coal-fired power plant: The space of possibility opens only after the aluminum has been withdrawn from the anthill.
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Without the necessity of preparing the way for our children, we are free to see collapse as an unprecedented moment of liberation: Much more than drones can be said to “queer traditional masculinities,” we can anticipate collapse as a planetary queering, opening space for the dissolution of traditions and hegemonies, but only if the certain decline in population is not taken as an invitation to strengthen compulsory heterosexuality: The human population will fall, huh? Humans may go extinct, huh? Let it come down. Party with your buds; dance like no CCTV operators are watching, fucking finally; the planetary film has been cut and anything can be spliced in.
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The preeminent thinker of industrial collapse, Jacobi, should, in our reserved opinion, be read-over with the finest of combs, then once more, out loud, recording technology in hand. This recording should then be played back as one sleeps, so that it will penetrate both conscious and subconscious. Dream about him. He’s cute.
Nevertheless, we’ve got a couple ounces of grain-fed, RBST-loaded beef to hash out with him:
1.Though human rewilding--especially of the psychological variety--is self-evidently necessary, we must assert serious precautions against nostalgia: Better to look to populations in industrial-era famine conditions for advice than to primitive hunter-gatherers. It takes quite a long time for wilderness conditions to return in an area that has been contaminated by civilized development. By the estimate given in that last link, the notoriously conservative UN’s recent climatological study places “climate catastrophe” about 70 years before even a small section of land could rewild. Yes, these numbers are all very nebulous and meh, but they still argue moderately well that a hunter-gatherer style of human rewilding may only be available to an extremely small number of humans; Jacobi himself claims that “even back-to-the-landers cannot fulfill their visions without the restoration of great tracts of nature.” Human rewilding must therefore come to mean several things, each of which is more or less demonic by the standards of contemporary bourgeois morality:
(A) One must learn how to shrink one’s moral circle in practice. Certain people and things simply lie outside your sphere of ethical consideration, and whatever you do to those people and things, it is not “wrong.” Morality simply does not apply. This mindset cannot be thought into action. It must be practiced, dark as that may sound, in a way similar to the old Spartan theft-education. And to any but the most nihilist modern observer, it will look like sociopathy. Michael Haneke’s movie Funny Games is a good example: Notice how only the two torturers turn to the camera. By their union they have moved into a different world from that of the tortured family, who, in typical Western/European fashion, are literally walled-off from all others--take special note of the scene in which the mother runs from gate to locked gate of her neighbors, screaming into the Cartesian forcefield. We see clearly that the torturers’ separation from their victims places them beyond good and evil: If they feel any guilt, they clearly enjoy it, grinning mildly as they maim and joke. Now, of course we do not suggest that anyone commit crimes, much less torture. We simply look on this movie as one instructive iteration of an abstract principle.
(B) The old mind-body/me-you distinctions must erode--not necessarily completely, but enough to make contact--among those who have adhered to one another. The Eunuch is, in part, an abstract experiment in this direction: Are we the same plural author who wrote The Manifesto? Who wrote Climbing a High Mountain? William S. Burroughs claims, in his old Naropa lectures, that until the advent of written language, humans had no distinct consciousnesses but maintained direct contact with their gods or oversoul through their right brain hemispheres. “When Homer’s heroes in the Iliad talk to the gods, it’s not a figure of speech.” What we’re talking about is beyond metaphor: It is a process venerated in older societies (think of the Islamic umma, the Kabbalistic tikkun olam, the early Christian church-body equivalence) but largely ousted from our own. The Holy Spirit, in the Book of Acts, directly projects a divine linguistics into the Apostles, and it debatably continues to do so in various Pentecostal sects of the rural American South. We understand this interconnectivity to be the psychological basis of tribalism, of The Eunuch, of a social model that is able to withstand the breakdown of mass communication technologies and global economics. More abstract, diffuse identifications--ethno-nationalism, ideological affinities, etc.--tend rather to efface those who adhere to them: In a situation in which people are guided not by regional/national/global economic pressures, such self-effacement seems a clear threat to the survival of the effacer. Now,
(C): While Jacobi has done a great job outlining the necessities of gaining traditional wilderness skills, such skills do not conform to nature as it would be if, say, industrial civilization ground to its predicted halt around 2050. At such a point, defunct cities, roads, and factories become parts of indifferent nature and are no longer conducted by human powers. Learning the locations of grocery warehouses, the relative pollution levels of various water sources, and the general artificial environment become at least as important in the short- to mid-term as plant identification, hunting, and trapping skills, as do interlinked considerations of physical and social health. In this sense, the nostalgia often espoused by primitivists simply harms aspiring “rewilders.”
2.The idea of war, influenced by the aforementioned nostalgia, does not correspond well with the current scaffolding of industrial civilization. This is likely the result of the Wild Will Project’s infatuation with Ted Kaczynski, whose essay “Hit Where it Hurts,” despite nominally allowing for other-than-violent forms of war, does not expand widely on what these might be and is largely taken to be a delineation of the most strategic targets for typical ecoterrorist attacks. This implicit leaning, in addition to some obvious residue of democratic modes of thinking, leads Kaczynski to recommend the attack of biotechnology infrastructure. Economic and political systems, however, have at this point in history globalized to such an extent that any foreseeable systemic collapse is likely to be triggered by a rupture of financial flows. In this we echo, albeit in a different direction, the assertions frequently made by Maurizio Lazzarato that (A) Finance is the underpinning of capital itself and (B) Debt relations--the driving conflicts of finance--are literally, not figuratively, civil war. The focus on primitive war, then, in Jacobi’s article, and on biotechnology attacks in Kaczynski’s, appear anachronistic and/or simply misleading. It is quite literally guerrilla warfare, to various extents, to practice small-scale gift economies, to grow/make your own X and Y and Z, to hack financial systems; and these practices prepare us for the (potentially impending) collapse of capital infrastructure. This point may be seen as premature, as the ideas have only just been published and remain in a nascent stage, but we are reasonably certain that Jacobi and the Wild Will Project will find this critique via pingbacks from links, and that the critique may aid them in further formulation of their work.
3.The Blowback Effect: People are likely to defend their beliefs even more aggressively when those beliefs are challenged. Scale it up: The surest sign that civilization is on the decline will be that it stamps out, more and more viciously, any attempt to move outside of it. Do we really believe that all recent “cults” have been homicidal, suicidal? All the more reason to adopt a new model: Diffuse, acephalic, strewn across space. To attempt any revolutionary activity through traditional exercises of political power-gathering is confusingly useless if we believe that collapse will come in the relatively near future. Coherence is the last thing to try and foster. Nihilism is only a starting point, to be tossed away once de-individuating connections--tribalisms, Eunuch--have been established, to be replaced by actively created meaning, which implies that there can be no coherence, and in any case, coherence on a macro-political level, as argued in 1.B only serves to subordinate the human-scale people/cohorts/Eunuch involved. Ideology cannot drive resistance: The will to resist, the revolutionary impulse, the enactments of these, are fundamentally physiological, contingent upon the material conditions of specific actors in specific circumstances. We must remember, even if we speak of “industrial civilization” or “capital,” we use those blanket terms out of convenience: Neither of these things is any more coherent than the Eunuch ourself, and their various instantiations at different time and space coordinates allow and require vastly different modes of revolt and/or exit.
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