Sharing & Caring | Choosing to Live in Community

Peter Lamborn Wilson
AKA Hakim Bey

Technology, the triumph of capital, what I call the technopathocracy, the rule of sick machinery, what looked like the absolute triumph of neo-conservative / neo-liberal global capitalism that suddenly, it was no longer possible to even criticize capitalism, suddenly this was just like water or air, now it's to be a given in our society. And the internet, and other forms of modern communication technology, although most people seem to think that this increases community, in my view, it destroys it. Because community, to me, is based on physical reality, not on communication devices. And when I hear things about the internet community, it just makes me want to puke! It's like talking about the law enforcement community, which is another favourite phrase of American journalism, as if these are all kindly neighbours lending cups of sugar to each other. This is a fucking armed occupation force! That we pay out of our own pockets -- help the police, beat yourself up! And of course, America is at the forefront of this. We started the whole television-automobile-suburban culture, which its alienation, and the fact that you don't know who you're living next to. This is not society! This is the breakdown of society. This is atomization.

These are not original ideas. Let's even refer to some of Baudrillard's earlier ideas. People have been thinking about this for a long time! And the thought becomes more and more tragic as it becomes clear that these are not just imaginations about some distant future, some science-fictional thing, but this actually impact on your daily life.

So there was a book that came out a few years ago called "Bowling Alone" which I thought was clever, because of the idea, in other words, that there's no social life left in America. Where do you go that's neither family nor work? Where is the third place, as we call it in sociology? Where is that third place? If you go back to the 19th century, third placed were legion! Not only were there these communities, these communes, these intentional communities, much more elaborated and sophisticated than what we have now; there were also all the fraternal and sororal organizations, the Freemasons, the Elks, the Farmers' Alliance, the Grange, the Athenaeums in every town. Every little burgh in America used to have an Athenaeum, where people would come together and discuss ideas.

Why did they do that? Because there was no television, that's why! That was their entertainment! You can't depend on people's goodwill for these things, the whole of society has to be structured in such a way that it reinforces, that it reproduces itself. And what was broken in 1989, in, I think, a major historical, almost end-of-the-world kind of way, was the idea that there was something natural about community. Now we have the idea that whatever it was, it's not important and it can be replaced by technology anyway. So who cares?

And for the last 8 years in this country, we've been suffering under an exaggerated caricature of these ideas. So it's been really painful, intellectually, to see what's happening to the social fabric in America. I've always been an outsider, a rebel, and an individualist kind of person, ever since the 60's. And you'd think that I would not be the first person to get upset about the demise of the social, as it had its negative, too, just like everything. It had it's enforced conformity, it's negative aspects. But the positive aspects that we've lost along with that seem to me to far outweigh. And there's something desperate now -- this is why figures are contradictory, but some people say over half of Americans are on seratonin uptake inhibitors, anti-depressants. First of all, we have the medicalization of sadness to thank for that, to a certain extent. But really, people are genuinely depressed. Why are they depressed? They don't know. It's because all they have in their life is what I call their family of divorce. Probably they have a family, but they're divorced, because that would describe maybe 50, 60, 70% of the population. And they have their work, their job, their wage slave situation.

I'll tell you an anecdote this woman told me once. She said that she had been quarreling with her mother for years, they didn't get along. Finally, after a long phone conversation, they decided to try to get together again and renew their mother-daughter relation. So she travels 1000 miles to her mother's home. And they're sitting down, and they're about to start having their heart-to-heart talk when the mother says, "Oh, wait a minute, there's a TV show I have to watch." It's like, Hollywood Squares. And the daughter's stunned! And the mother goes and turns on the TV and starts to watch the show. And she says, "Mom! I came 1000 miles to reconcile with you! And now you're sitting and watching Hollywood Squares?" And she says, "You don't understand. The only people I have in my life, the only people I know in my life are the people I work with. And they all watch this program. And if I come to work on Monday morning and I haven't seen this program, I have nothing to talk to my friends about." That was the basis of her human relations. So the daughter just wept. There was nothing to do about that. And that to me was a very, very telling anecdote. I felt the whole of American society in that one anecdote.

So, what do we have to fight against this? There's all sorts of possibilities. Everything from the kind of middle-class intentional community land trust ideas that you were talking about, which people get drawn to because of their great thirst for community, even though they are, in fact, middle class car-driving, TV-watching people. There's still something missing in their life, and they have enough money to rectify it. So from that, all the way to the most intense community of resistance, Black Muslim Nationalists, or the Anarchist Commune, those kinds of models. And these are the only things we have left in America. I won't try to speak for Europe, although I think that this is largely true there, as well. I'll get to that in a minute, the differences between America and Europe. But the intentional community since 1989-90, to me, has taken on a new importance. I was always interested in it, now I think it's absolutely vital. Because it is the thin edge of the wedge of resistance.


Now why is Europe different from America in this respect, I asked many Europeans to explain it to me. The conundrum is, in America, you've got 50-60% of the people attend church. In Europe, it's like 2%. Why this huge difference? So I asked, every time I had a chance to meet an intelligent European, I would ask them, and I finally got some interesting answers, which were not what I expected. I asked this French person once, I said, "Is it the cafe? Is that your social glue?" "No, not anymore, not really." I said, "Well, what is it?" And he said, "Well, first of all, all European countries are small and they speak different languages. So if you move to a new job, you don't move 5000 miles away like you do in America. You move 200 miles away, you can still come and see the parents on the weekend, or the cousins, whatever. So the extended family still means a lot more in Europe than it does here. In America, the extended family was broken up long ago, largely by the forces of capital. It's easy, as someone who grew up in the academic world I know this very well, you get a job offer in North Dakota with tenure track, you go! And if you never see your family, your parents or your cousins again, pffft! That's life. There's always e-mail, to stay in touch with e-mail.

There was an ad that came out for the telephone company back in the 80s, "Reach out and touch someone." And I always got a good laugh out of that. Because that's exactly what you don't do with a telephone, you don't reach out and touch someone, you reach out and distance, you long-distance them, so you don't have to touch them, you don't have to breathe the same air in the same room as these sons-of-bitches. They're far away, and you can have some kind of nonsense about telephone communities or internet communities, or something, and pretend that you've got a social existence.

When I say these things in front of audiences, there's always one person who says, "Well that's not true! I met my boyfriend through the internet! It's a very social thing! I wouldn't have any friends if it weren't for the internet!" Oh God, I feel so sorry for you! I mean, this is like saying, "I wouldn't have a wife if it weren't for those send-away-for-a-Filipino-bride kind of thing." Well that's not a defense, I'm afraid. This is not convincing me of your philosophical soundness when you say something like that. It's making me sad, that's all. You know what I'm saying?

So the importance of the intentional community now, like the importance of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, which is, let's say, a temporary communitas, to me, that has become even more important than when I first started thinking about these ideas back in the early 80s. Because then you could assume that the TAZ, or the community, was a third way, that you just opt out of the spectacle: a plague on both their houses. We're going off into the countryside, and we're going to have our own life. But now, it's not a third way; it's the only other way! So if there's a dialectic of resistance left in America, it would be, in my mind, only possible through intentional community. And I'm desperate to see more consciousness of this. That's why I continue to write on these subjects. There's nothing I can do, I'm not a practical person, I'm not a farmer, I'm not an architect, I'm not a builder. I'm not a very well-organized person, in any case. So I don't feel that I can be the prophet leading people with them out into the actual wilderness. But at least I can point this out, that we have a history of intentional community, of communities of resistance in America it would be good to be inspired by, because we really need that information now. We really need to think about the possibility of disengaging from the technopathocracy. It's like dropping out, as we used to say in the 60s, it's not that different. I don't like the turn on, tune in part, because it makes you sound like a radio, I don't want to be a machine. But the drop out part, I'm all for that.

I look at, for example, the Anabaptist communities, like the Amish. And I see that they're leading a comfortable life in community, because they're refused certain forms of technology. They don't have telephones in the house, because they feel that that would get in the way of the physical aspect of their community. And every piece of technology that they've thought about -- I studied the history -- they've thought about not because "God said that telephone were evil", it's because with telephones, their community would start to fall apart. They saw that very clearly in 1907, when they decided not to use telephones. If they had cars, this would mean that they could live apart from each other, instead of next to each other. So they decided not to have cars. Because their prime value was community, and the chance to lie what they considered an authentic life. Now, for them, that means some kind of Protestant fanaticism I'm not terribly attracted to! But I do admire them because they're the only true Luddites that I see. They're the only people who have realized the connection between the social and technology, and done something about it. So, that's the gist of my answer about the importance of these communities.


Oh boy, if there's one thing that depresses me about the American left, it's how we have to re-invent all the wheels every 10 years. "Oh! You mean that there were people who felt like this in the 19th century? What a surprise!" Well, this is because neither in high school nor in college are Americans taught anything about this. You have to be an independent scholar -- which, to my sorrow, I am -- in order that when you begin to drift into this research, you don't have the head of the department saying "Tsk-tsk-tsk. Remember? Tenure? You might not get tenure if you get involved in all this communist anarchist shit." Those controls are very real. And the upshot of it is that nobody knows anything anyways, so they don't care. They don't realize that they're being deprived of the chance to study. Of course, since the 60s, there's been a change in this, of course. In the 60s, there was a certain radicalization of the academy. We still have some tenured Marxists around. And some of them did pay attention to some of these ideas, and some of them were quite inspirational for me. I was thinking, I just finally, after years and years I met Jesse Lemisch, who did some radical papers back in the 60s on radical sailors in the American Revolution, and how it wasn't the educated bourgeouise who were out there punching people, punching British soldiers in the nose, it was drunken sailors. He has a wonderful essay called Jack Tar, which is what they called the average sailor in those days, as a radical figure in the American Revolution. Those kinds of scholars from the 60s did some wonderful work, and inspired me to go farther.

One example, we were talking about Pirates, and my Pirate book earlier, the Pirate communities that I was interested in, what I called the Pirate Utopias. Not so much the ships themselves, as the islands where they would set up their, as it turned out, temporary autonomous zones. None of them lasted more than a few years. But the pirate ship itself can also be seen as a -- I forget who coined the phrase -- floating republic. Because each of the chips had no law, other than the articles that the sailors had signed amongst themselves. Who was going to tell them what to do except themselves? So basically, what you're looking at there was a little anarchist floating commune. And in fact, in a lot of cases, even the position of the captain was not sure, if the crew felt that the captain wasn't good enough, or his luck was bad -- that was very important -- they would depose him, and choose somebody else, usually the quartermaster, who was in fact often more important a figure than the captain, anyway. But the captains in pirate boats usually only got a very small, their share was only a little bit larger than the share of the average crewman. For example, if the average crew member was getting a single share, the captain would often get no more than two, sometimes even one-and-a-half shares. Whereas, in the privateer ships, which were commissioned by governments, the captain would get 40 shares to the crewman's single share. So this is the difference between piracy and privateering.

So the Buccaneers on Hispaniola, or the Captain Mission on Madagascar, these figures were of interest already to some radical and anarchist historians, notably Christopher Hill, who in the 1970s already began to talk about pirates as radical communities, for which he was roundly criticized by more orthodox Marxist historians, who denied that the pirates were anything more than crude proto-capitalists. "Well, they're out there seizing gold, that's all they're doing, and they might as well be capitalists." And Hill had a much subtler and more sophisticated reading of the situation, in which he saw that all kinds of forms of social resistance could be included within this strange category. And so I believe it was he who coined the term "radical pirates", if I'm not mistaken. He's dead now, Rest In Peace, and I was really, really pleased when he gave me a quote for the back of my book, because he was the 'Dean' of Radical Pirate Studies. There's Marcus Redicker, Peter Linebaugh, Jesse Lemisch, who as I say, was one of the first to be interested in the Atlantic world of the ship as a focus locus for resistance. So there's a little school of us radical piratologists. But most people don't see it that way at all. Even now they don't see it that way.

Or, for example, the so-called tri-racial isolate communities and Maroon communities that we studied in Gone to Croatan. So James Koehnline, and Ron Sakolsky, and those people as anarchists entered into this study and found ourselves very enthusiastic about some of these isolated groups as being kind of 'natural drop-outs'. With continuity! That's something that's interesting about them, is that unlike many intentional communities, these dropout communities actually sometimes persist. Very few intentional communities have persisted, and usually only the religious fanatics. This is a problem. We could get back to that. What can we, the secular radical types, possibly find is a substitute for that level of fanaticism that allows you to forego the advantages of civilization and progress, in order to have something that you considered to be more valuable, but much more difficult, which is community. So, those kinds of examples.


Alright, I'll try to give a short definition. The term tri-racial isolated is not a nice term. It was invented by eugenicists. But it does actually describe the situation of at least some of these groups. The idea of race-mixing, however, was an obsession with the eugenicists, and they saw race-mixing perhaps where, in fact, it hadn't really occurred to any deep extent. Some of these groups, they may be, in fact, completely Black, or completely White, or completely Indian, but they've acquired a reputation, through the misunderstanding and prejudice of their neighbours and the pseudo-science of eugenics, as tri-racial. So usually it's Black, Indian and White would be the three races here in the New World. And the white people around here (in upstate New York), for example, they were Dutch. And we presume that they were Dutch people without much clout, or caste, maybe they were outsiders. And they went up and lived in the hills, maybe they married Blacks or Indians, that's possible. In some cases, they definitely did. But in any case, they would become a sort of a separate people. A friend of mine grew up in a part of Pennsylvania where there was one of these groups, and she said they had their own language, even. I mean, it was a dialect, and it was hard for other people to understand them when they talked amongst themselves. So very closed in, and sometimes for centuries, they'd kind of vanished. But in the 19th, and then in the 20th century, when everything became known, when there were no more hidden places, these groups would become known, outside their own little area. Usually in the area, they would be looked on as inferior types, weird, hillbillies, incestuous, up in the mountains there, they talk funny, that kind of thing.

And then the eugenicists came along, and said, "Oh, it's much worse than that! These are actual race-mongrels! All the men have to have vasectomies! And laws were passed in America to do this. And guess who liked those laws? Guess who felt those laws were brilliant? The Germans! And the Nazis modeled their race laws on American law. And during the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi scientists, they were going to take these German eugenicists and hang them, when a brilliant defense lawyer -- an American, actually, I forget his name -- got up and said, "But wait! If you prosecute these people on their race laws, you're going to have to arrest a whole lot of Americans, too, because these laws are word for word translations of American laws WHICH ARE STILL ON THE BOOKS! And in many cases, these laws have never been taken off the books. They're not used very much anymore, but they're there, just in case they want to use them. And the idea is that these are degenerate people, there's too many morons -- who was it, a famous Chief Justice of the Supreme Court said something like, I forget the exact quote, "Seven generations of morons is enough!" But although the fact is they have health problems, they're poor, they are a little bit inbred sometimes, and there's some of those genetic things. But they're just folks like other folks.

But what interested us about them, I admit, from a kind of romantic perspective, was precisely the ways in which they threw light on the whole idea of community and intentional community. And we've been very pleased to see that in the 20th century, some of these folks have been able to overcome their own feelings of inferiority which have been drummed into them. There's a beautiful book by a guy who grew up in a family where he thought there was always something they weren't telling him, his parents and his aunts and uncles. There was some mystery. Voices would fall silent when he came in the room, kind of thing. All his life, what is going on? And finally, he pinned down one of his aunts and made her confess. "Well, dear, we're Melungeons, and we don't want anybody to know that, and that's why we've tried to bring you up not even knowing what your own heritage is, so you could be free of this burden." And he said, "What's a Melungeon?" as you were just indicating! And he was from one of these groups. This branch had come down from the hills and tried to become 'normal' folks. And they were trying to lose their past, which they considered to be a disgrace. But he, probably under the influence of 60s hippie-ism, decided that, "Hey! That sounds really cool!" So he went out and started to research the Melungeons, and he eventually published a very interesting little book suggesting, among other things, some Islamic background. His hypothesis was that converted Moors and Moriscos who came over as servants with the Spanish may have run away into the woods and mingled with Indians, as so many people did in early America.

The whole idea of the White Indian. Cotton Mather, do you know who he was? A Puritan minister in New England who was involved in burning witches, not a very nice guy. And he once complained bitterly, he said that "The Indians have stolen hundreds of our people, but we've never been able to convert a single Indian to Christianity." And the idea was that if you were on the bottom of the colonial totem pole, if you were a serf, what was so great about White society and European civilization that would keep you from running away and joining the Indians, who knew where to find food, who had no kings over them telling them what to do, who had different ideas about sexuality and love, who were clearly at home in this New World, where they felt not at home at all. So the temptations to run away and 'become an Indian', is one of the earliest impulses of American resistance. And that archetype keeps reappearing over and over and over again, and even taking apparently ridiculous forms like being make-believe Indians, the way Boy Scouts or some of the fraternal organizations, putting feathers on.

There's a kind of deep romantic yearning behind even the silliest of those things, which I always think about when our Native American comrades accuse the hippies of appropriation. And I think, well, yes, that's true. As one of the Lakota Sioux medcine men said, "Why don't you White people get a religion of your own?" And there's some truth to that! I'm not going to deny it, and I've learned not to try to act like an appropriator in regards to these cultures. But it seems to me they ought to take a little bit more heart in the idea that, in fact, for generations White people have felt alienated in their own society, and highly admiring of this other model. I mean, 'we' actually think that Indians live better than us! Well, shouldn't that be flattering to the Indians? Anyway, some of them are flattered by it, and they do understand, and they're sympathetic towards white people who , in a respectful way, want to participate on some level in these mysteries, in these nature mysteries. Others are not. There's too much racism and too much bad feelings behind them, and I can't blame them for that. And their critique of appropriation has a lot of strong points to it. But I don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water. And I think it would be too bad if White America decided that we had to ignore our entire Indian Native American heritage because of this problem. It would seem better to me to emphasize cases like some branches of the Cherokee, who have welcomed in the runaways, both Black and White, or the Seminoles, for example, did the same.

And in fact, even in the Iroquois confederation, our local New York tribes, they wrote a constitution inspired by the Hiawatha, some people say he wrote this constitution, verbally created it, and it was later written down. And one whole huge section of that constitution concerns adoption, how to adopt people into the confederation, either by tribe, or as individuals, as a whole tribe or as an individual. And the whole thing was laid out, how to do it. They had no concept that to be an Iroquois meant that you had to have certain genes, or certain bloodline. It was about the way you lived! If you lived like an Indian, you were an Indian, and you could join the confederation. And in fact, as it turned out, in a very naive, charming move, the Iroquois confederation actually invited France to join once, as a seventh nation. They were surprised when they were turned down. Later on they found out that they had been misadvised. But in theory, it could have been done. In theory, the White people of New York could have said, "Well, how about accepting us as the seventh tribe?" Ha! And they would have a very different America now than we do. Pure science fiction, obviously.

But nevertheless, at least as historians, I think we could look back on some of these strange Maroon societies, these so-called 'tri-racial' societies, and find inspiration, rather than just looking on them as the failures, the failure stories of the great American March Towards Progress and Democracy, which is how they have been interpreted in the past


Neo-conservatives, these very people whom you were just quoting, one of the things they love to say is there's no such thing as a pristine hunter-gatherer society that you can't prove that any of the hunter-gatherer societies i the ethnographic present have always been hunter-gatherers. And in fact, the evidence is that they reverted from agricultural to a hunter-gatherer economy because they failed as agriculturalists. And this whole hippie-dippie idea about the purity of hunters and gatherers, that's all nonsense. In fact, they're all failed agriculturalists. And we shouldn't admire hunting and gathering because it just represents failure. That was the more or less unwritten part of the message, but it was very clear.

So, when I first heard this idea about reversion, I was extremely angry. Because I *am* a hippie-dippie. I am a man of the 60s, there's no getting around it: Marshall Sahlins, Man the Hunter, Pierre Clasters, all those people who were coming up in the 60s, they're my men, they're my guys. I still follow them, to a certain extent, some revisionism, but basically, I'm with them. And so, this idea of reversion was anathema to me, I thought it was awful! But hen I began to think about it, and I said, "Well, what if it were true? Then what would that mean? Would it mean that they failed? Or would it mean they tried this way of life and decided it was full of shit?! And they decided to go back to hunting and gathering because they could be free, they could get rid of the chief who was taking their extra wheat and becoming a big powerful leader with it.

You could no longer have to participate in the new form of warfare where you kill everybody or enslave them, and go back to the more primitive form of warfare, which was mostly about having fun, in a violent young man way, and counting coup, for example. As you know, the American Indians just couldn't understand why White people didn't lie down and get out of the battle when they'd been touched by the wand! They're not playing by the rules! And the rule was not to kill too many people, they had small populations. If they ever captured anybody, it was usually women, to replace their population. It was a kind of violent form of Levy-Strauss' women-exchange concept. Primitive war was not anything like what came later. Primitive war had a whole different meaning for society than what I call classical war, which begins basically with civilization in Mesopatamia and Egypt, where you enslave the other people and keep them enslaved forever as second-class people, as felahin, as slaves or serfs.

This is the beginning of civilization, this is the world that we still know, and most of us think always existed. But if you studied anthropology and archaeology, you know that that's not true, that there were anywhere from 40,000 to 1,000,000 years, depending on how you define 'human', there were human societies that did not have authoritarian structures, and they were almost invariably based on hunting and gathering, or primitive agriculture. Where I differ from Marshall Sahlins is I don't have such a critique of domestication. This is also a point with Zerzan, for example. I love Zerzan's work, I've learned a lot from it, we consider ourselves comrades, but there are point that I think he's too extreme about. I mean, if we really wanted to accomplish something in this lifetime, there isn't so much point in criticizing language the way John does, for example, in criticism capitalism, and trying to think of some kind of actual viable alternative that would actually work.

So, what I like about their work, about the Paleolithic, about the Old Stone Age, of hunting and gathering, and complete tribal anarchy, we presume, I have tried to carry it into the Neolithic period, and point out that the state doesn't emerge until the *end* of the Neolithic. It clearly is not horticulture, or primitive agriculture, that causes the state to appear. Because for 10,000 years, we have societies based on domestication where the state does not emerge. The state emerges, as far as we can see, because a few more crucial factors came into play: metallurgy being a very important one. In other words, technology in the modern sense. Irrigation: therefore the idea of a permanent surplus, that if you controlled it, you would have political power. So these two things I see as the turning point which allowed what I call the first coup d'etat, which was the emergence of the state. I'm sure that it had been tried before. Because as Pierre Clasters says, primitive societies are not made up of goody-goody people who all love each other all the time. They know the danger of hierarchy. And they organize their society against it! That's the idea of "Society Against the State" by Clasters, which you should read, if you haven't read. And also the book we published by him, Archaeology of Violence, in which explains about primitive war. These are very important books. Too few people have read them.

So I just have this idea, as a luddite, that we can have technology if it's appropriate technology, or we can have technae, if it's appropriate technae. We could be luddites rather than primitivists, at least as a step along the way of getting back to the Stone Age situation, which I'm perfectly willing to admit that sounds like the best idea to me. But failing that, and since we now have zillions of people who need to be fed, we've got to come to some kind of terms with agriculture. What could it be? Permaculture is a very strong possibility. We know there are models out there that are not nearly as destructive as industrial agriculture, what I would call the Babylonian model of agriculture. And we know that what the luddites were talking about was -- this is a phrase right out of a Luddite letter, one of their anonymous letters -- that if machinery hurtful to the commonality, as we would say nowadays, in other words, the commons, machinery that is hurtful to the commons, that's machinery they wanted to smash. Not all machinery! They had their own hand looms they were making their living with. They weren't going to smash those! It was the mechanical looms that took their jobs away and destroyed their society and community, that's what they didn't like! And that's what they were rebelling against.

So I'm proposing this kind of Green Luddite Anarchist Horticulture model, which would mean an intelligent form of domestication, one in which we no longer looked on ourselves as the lords of creation, but the collaborators with nature. And in certain traditional societies, I've noticed, I've seen in my travels certain models that looked attractive from this point of view. Usually they're damaged, they've been damaged by hundreds of years of capitalism and imperialism, but you can still in the outback of India or Afghanistan, or God-knows-where, South America I suppose, but my knowledge is very limited, you can still come across real communities that are not starving to death, that have to a certain extent solved the problem of wealth and what has enabled them to do that is actually their failure to join modern society and to embrace modern technology. So the fact that they're too poor to buy trucks or TVs, and that they're still using bullock carts and horse-drawn plows or whatever it might be, has actually preserved their community and given me as a visitor a real thrill in seeing a group of people who are so unlike what I'm used to, in that they're all together! I was going to say happy together, but that's clearly not true, because happiness is not guaranteed by any social system. And neither is purity of heart, neither is innocence, or any of those things. If the hippies believe in some of those things, well, we were wrong. But we were wrong for a nice reason, not for a nasty reason. But now I would like a more nuanced reading of the past.

Anyway, that's what I told them at Columbia, and they were very glad to hear that I was sort of giving them permission not to be oppressed by the neo-conservative academics that have been in charge for 25 years now, at least, telling these people that "All of these ideas are hippie bullshit, and get over it. It's been a struggle since the beginning, human beings are not good, they must be controlled." These are the unwritten messages that these academics have been giving us. And boy, the young people are sick of them. And I'm beginning to have some hopes that maybe the young, the youth will pull out of this cyber-daze that they're in, and actually begin to resist again.


If we give agriculture a specific definition, then agriculture is a major problem. But if we realize that there are gradations in the technae of agriculture, and that we could talk about horticulture, for example, which I think the modern version would be permaculture. Charles Fourier, who is one of my main guys, was one of the first critics of agriculture. And he realized that civilized agriculture was very destructive of community, and of well-bring, for everybody except the rulers. And so he proposed that we revert, in a sense, to horticulture, so that, for example, only small amounts of grain would be grown, and those would be for special treats, like little pastries that he was so fond of. But they would no longer be the staple, because the kind of agriculture needed to produce that staple was just too counter-productive, in terms of a free and delightful communal existence. So that's why he puts so much emphasis on fruit and on orchard-based horticulture.

Which reminds me a lot of that Australian guy, what's his name, the prophet of permaculture, Bill Mollison. In don't know if he ever read Fourier, but there seems to me some strong parallels there. So, in other words, it's not the domestication of plants that is so much the problem, although in some ways it is a step down for gathering, from the point of view of the social freedoms, but that isn't so much the problem as it is the hierarchy that is necessary to do that on a large scale and to reproduce a society based on the virtual slavery of most of its inhabitants. Fourier's idea was that if you do that, if you have that kind of economy, there's no way you can escape the horrors of civilization, because it's the same package.

So, for example, I read some years ago an article by a woman whose name unfortunately I've forgotten, I've lost this reference, but it was a brilliant article in the school of Carl Sauer, American historian of plants, brilliant writer, I recommend him very highly. Her idea was -- alright, she said, for example, let's imagine a Stone Age tribe who are still in the nomadic gathering stage, so they're not pure nomads in the sense that they just wander aimlessly, they follow a yearly route, most likely. Most of these groups follow a yearly route, so that when the acorns are ripe in the forest, they're in the forest having an acorn feast. And when the fish are running in the river, the salmon are running in the river, they're by the river having a salmon blow-out. That kind of a life. So it's a kind of a movable banquet, with each area that they pass through providing one of the courses of this year-long banquet. I think that's a very nice view of life.

Alright, so what would happen as they gather the kind of plants that they're most fond of, which are, by the way, almost always things that get you high, rather than basic foodstuffs. Let's take hemp for examplem in Central Asia. What would they notice is that as they returned each year to their camp sites, they would notice that the hemp plant seemed to be following them, because whereas years ago there was no help growing around a Camp A, now there's all this hemp growing around Camp A. Well, hemp must love us as much as we love hemp! It follows us, right? It's a beautiful idea! And there's a kind of love relation, which almost certainly was more important to the women to the men, because they had been primarily plant-gatherers. The men, meanwhile, are having what I would consider -- she didn't go into this, but I would consider that there's a love relation between the man and the animals. There is already, between the hunter and the prey, as we know. It's not a hate relationship, it's a love relationship.

So domestication, to me, begins as this great erotic experience of nature, that we're not alone in nature, that the nature spirits love us, and want to do right by us, and they want to collaborate with us so that we will always have plenty of dope to smoke! Or barley to make beer! Or whatever it is, in the New World, it's tobacco. Tobacco is the first cultivated plant in the New World, because Shamans needed it. You needed it to do shamanism. Most people have totally forgotten this. If you told them that tobacco was the most popular and widespread shamanic drug in the world, they would never believe you, but it's true, in the New World, anyway.

As far as I can make out, all of the early cultivated plants were about pleasure, not about economy. So it's basically all a love feast, at its outset. And essentially, I think it continues that way, through the whole Neolithic. Basically what you're looking at, Kropotkin would recognize right away, "Oh, that's the Anarchist peasant village, with its little village council, and the elders and the grandmothers, who have advisory power, but no legislative power." It was exactly the kind of peasant ideal that Kropotkin was dreaming of. That was reality for 10,000 years! Until some evil magicians and some disappointed warriors got together and plotted how to enslave the rest of their own tribe. What could be more wicked and evil than that? And if you look in the archaeology, this is not fantasy, if you go back and look at the first dynasty in Egypt, or the third dynasty of Ur, what do you find? Human sacrifice and cannibalism, this is the basis of the state, is human sacrifice. Not just enslaving the peasants, it's worse than that -- EATING the peasants!

In the New World, in the MIssissippean Kohokean culture, which was based on Central American and South American models, and they were the mound-builders out in Mississippi, places like that between Mississippi and Ohio, in the Mississippi Valley. Let's say their last period of flourishing would be about the 12th century, so shortly before Columbus arrived. And what were they up to? They were a highly stratified society, with Kings and nobles on one hand and slaves on the other, and they also had a faulty idea about agriculture, they were not getting enough protein. They were only growing corn, they weren't growing enough beans, apparently. Even corns and beans is not enough. And so, what did they do? They started eating the slaves! We know this, the archaeological evidence is there!

So my interpretation of the effigy mounds in Wisconsin, which is what I wrote that essay about, was that these were folks who reverted, who escaped from slavery and oppression, went back to the woods, became hunters and gatherers again, but they had learned something from their oppressors, and that was how to build mounds. And instead of building mounds for defense, or for human sacrifice or whatever, they started building much smaller mounds with beautiful artistic forms as a way to show this religious reformism, or even revolution, that they were proposing, this back to nature concept. That's why all the mounds are of animals or birds, except for one, which is apparently a mound of a shaman. There were some human-shaped mounds. There's one left. It's a human figure with horns, so we presume he was a shaman. And these mounds are almost totally ignored by American archaeologists, because they're so hard to interpret. Why?

Hunter-gatherers, first of all, are not supposed to build things, this is against the rules. So right away there's a big problem with these mounds. Why were these hunters and gatherers building things? That's not the way they're supposed to act. My idea is that they were doing it as a deliberate religious response to this death cult to the immediate South of them, which by the way had penetrated with several colonies right into their midst. And they may have even escaped from slavery. At least they saw that this was bad shit they didn't want to be involved in and removed themselves, reverted, if you like, back to this earlier social form, where freedom and beauty and art, and they had time to make art, and there was clearly, as you yourself said, lots of things to eat in America in those days, you didn't have to do all his hard work, as long as you avoided all this massive, pyramidal shaped hierarchical society where the upper 10% was reduced to the horrible level of a religious justification for eating their neighbours!

So that's what was the gist of my article, and that's why these archaeologists got turned on by it, because they saw it as a response to this neo-conservative crap that says, "Oh look, the Anasazi, they ate each other. That proves that primitive people are just as evil and wicked as we modern people, in fact, worse." Which has been the neo-conservative idea for a long time. For them, there's no point, it's just glorification of the primitive, it's just hippie nonsense. And they use these anomolous archaeological evidence to prove their point in a very tangentious way, conpletely ignoring all the evidence to the contrary. And that's been the orthodoxy in academia for the last quarter-century, at least.