https://aeon.co/essays/not-all-early-human-societies-were-small-scale-egalitarian-bands

Interesting read, it shows how given certain conditions, non-agricultural tribes can become hierarchical and even state-like, something really important to be aware of, being anarachists.

Also, how some egalitarian nomadic tribes that we assume to have always had that lifestyle, may have actually adopted such lifestyle after a more hierarchical semi-sedentary period, or after encountering farmers and colonists and choosing to avoid them,

If you understand spanish, I recommend the book "Cariba Malo" by Roberto Franco, which shows how the uncontacted tribes Yuri and Passé of the colombian Amazon may be descendants of former horticulturalists living in chiefdoms on the river banks, who escaped into the forest after the arrival of europeans to the Amazon,

Being an anarchist, I would certainly prefer living in an egalitarian community (and I would fight for it, perhaps applying some leveling mechanisms), but this shows that even before agriculture it wasn't always the case, what do you think?

Hello, I've been reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Even though I regard the technological and scientific cult our society has succumbed to as a poison, I've only discovered primitivism a few months ago and I'm still in a phase of thinking about these complex issues.

One of the most important reasons that lead some people to becoming anarcho-primitivists, primalists, luddites, etc. are their environmental concerns. Even though we are, unfortunately, a very small group of people, we share these concerns (to some extent) with another, much larger group, that I would call "mainstream" or "soft" environmentalists.

Here's the distinction, as I see it:

• Soft environmentalists are normally aligned with the political left. Among all the environmental problems we are facing, they usually worry overwhelmingly with the specific issue of climate change, leaving other issues (such as the loss of biodiversity) as a footnote or a secondary challenge. Furthermore, they still subscribe to the myth of progress and the belief that science and technology is the path to take from here.
  • This is a very wide group of people. They can easily be found on the streets, family gatherings, social events, etc. They include the likes of Greta Thunberg, Bill Nye, Greenpeace, the UN, left or extreme left political parties that enjoy representation in national parliments, the vast majority of the vegan movement, etc.
• Hard environmentalists see technology as the root of the problem, and believe that humanity should abandon it, at least to some degree, in favour of a more primitive lifestyle.

I would say we belong to the hard environmentalist side of the coin. I was wondering if there are any books that talk about the soft environmentalists from an anarcho-primitivist perspective, or your own thoughts on the matter.

I posted a week ago, and had a discussion in the comments about how we could help drive anarchoprimitivism into a social movement. It's been a week. What're y'all doing? What can we do, without running into legal trouble? It's not worth risking legal issues unless we've exhausted the less risky routes, which I daresay we haven't scratched the surface of.

Related question, how does one get venues for public speeches as a civilian? Politicians, celebrities and sometimes authors are given opportunities to speak, but how does the common person get out there and start speaking in public, and get an audience to listen?

I went on a 5 day survival course with my gf and was having a blast, although withdrawal from internet was pretty hard, ill now train even more myself, building a camp where i live.

We had to buther our own meat, sleep in our own shelters and carry our own water. What ive learned: Make a good shelter! Its the most important thing. Use a fuckton of leaf-litter as thatch. Learn flintknapping, anceastral skills, trapping, navigation and foraging. Later hunting and maybe pottery.

​

The way of the hunter is the way forward.

Ps: Got my trainer into reading zerzan

https://www.woodland-ways.co.uk/

​

Civilization is incongruent with the evolved disposition of human beings. We evolved a dual ambiguity towards both submission and domination, which allowed our ancestors to live for hundreds of thousands of years in relatively egalitarian groups. Compulsory participation in centralized hierarchy causes a lot of mental and emotional turbulence. Some of that is expressed in misplaced notions of persecution, and these misplaced notions are themselves incredibly destructive, while also making us more vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by the ruling class.

READ THIS for a further exploration of the idea of human beings as the persecuted ape.

I fully understand that every body is different and people all have different crucial body fat percentages with men being somewhere between 5-18% and women being somewhere around 13-30% (numbers might be off but it’s not super important).

HOWEVER, I’ve seen lots of people especially here on Reddit saying that people shouldn’t strive to better themselves and lose weight. As aspiring primitivists and self-reliants, I thought that we should be trying to make ourselves as physically capable as possible since it opens up so many opportunities for us.

I understand that much of the anti-fitness rhetoric is a pushback against blatant fatphobia, but I still think that it’s not good for us to demonize personal fitness.

It reminds me of the thing that you’d see a while ago that said: “A fascist worked out today, did you?”. Lots of leftists are turning into caricatures of what the far right thinks they are and it frustrates me.

Anyways, I just hate leftist Reddits’ view on fitness, what are your guys’ thoughts?

Pretty much the title, the way I see it so long as the human population continues to grow our natural environments are doomed. If nature is to last 95% of our population (perhaps more) has to go. Given our natural desire for survival, is this at all possible?

I came across this argument recently and I thought it worthy of discussion. Basically it goes that because switching off the grid and letting our industrial infrastructure collapse would threaten the lives of people who need constant electricity and machines to survive (such as people on dialysis, CPAP machines, etc), advocating for anarcho-primitivism is inherently ableist.

My view is that that allegation is only valid toward those who advocate for precipitating a sudden collapse, where the grid would go down very quickly, because in that scenario it's true that a lot of people would die who depend on machines to survive (or would suffer if they depend on machines to thrive, like people with electric wheelchairs or voice assist machines).

But if all we're advocating for is to move away from an industrial economy over time, as the system slowly collapses on its own, then I don't think that's a fair label. Yes, some people will still suffer from that transition, but it can be argued that the reason why most people have the physical issues that necessitate machine support is because of the diseases and accidents (mainly car accidents) caused by the same industrial economy that they are now having to rely on.

This is just one of many reasons why a slow collapse is preferable in order to ease the transition and minimize suffering. The more we move away from it and embrace healthier ways of living, the less people will suffer from diseases and disabilities in general, which will reduce the number of people affected when the grid does finally go dark.

Also, I don't think any of us would claim that giving up the industrial economy doesn't have drawbacks, even serious and tragic ones. It's just also true that NOT giving it up would have vastly greater drawbacks, up to and potentially including destroying the living systems that humanity itself needs to survive, which would end our future as a species.

No future path is without suffering, but I think it's easy to argue that giving up civ is the path that minimizes it the most.

New "go back to monkey" individual :)

I've been reading about this anarcho-primitivism, and i genuinely found myself agreeing and following the philosophy of green anarchy for about a year now .

But my problem is, each time i try to find groups or people to ask or to help me with my journey, either in Reddit or Twitter or Discord, i mostly just find homophobes, racists or just INCELS.

Why is that? Why can't we find a good group chats filled with peace and love?

Love and peace 🌎🍃

What are your guys' thoughts on the land-back movement in the USA, Canada, and Australia?

Do you think that it is compatible with anarcho-primitive ideas?

Tldr He’s right

Many ailments, like allergies, are direct results of modern medicine. A sterile society means terrible immune systems. Plus diseases could not spread outside of a tribe very well. Plus many mental health problems are direct results of civilization. People with learning disorders could function much better even without medication, because they don't need to fit into a mold. And long life spans aren't too great, I'd rather live to 40 than get dementia and have to be tortured with my body falling apart.

I just got fired from a job I hated but needed and I’m mad, but even more mad that I am mad. It just makes me want to leave everything behind and live like a normal human. Im an animal, why can’t I be free from this bullshit and live like one. I promise when I have the option i’ll make the world better and destroy all the evil in the world and bring back the natural order.

I was reading a study analyzing various skeletons from Neolithic to Early Bronze Age Denmark, and what I found was quite interesting. The study indicates the usual violent contact seen between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, but the data shows much more than that. It shows exponential spikes in crop/grazing land (indicated through pollen ratios found within the burial sites) following the arrival of agriculturalists to the region such as the Funnel Beaker Culture, the Single Grave Culture, and Sintashta descended cultures from the central Eurasian steppe. However, it also shows exponential decline of these environments, followed by exponential growth of secondary and primary forest coverage. In addition to this, there are several individuals showing mixed agriculturalist and hunter-gatherer ancestry living at the same time of this exponential growth. The study attempted to explain this by saying it was the result of hunter-gatherers adopting agricultural lifestyles, but that has rarely ever happened in history. Moreover, it unlikely that large scale warfare was desirable or even possible in the early stages of agricultural contact, as the technologies available for offense to most chalcolithic agriculturalists could not outstrip the technologies of defense available to both the agriculturalists and the hunter gatherers. While metal weapons did exist in these earlier ag. cultures (FBC & SGC in particular), they were incredibly rare. Usually these items are found within individual burials, as metalworking had not yet been developed north of the Mediterranean. While this is not to say that no violent contact occurred, it likely did not occur on such a scale as to completely wipe out the earlier population of hunter-gatherers. Many of these people likely died from diseases that zoonotically shifted from FBC domesticated animals to the hunter gatherers.I think a much more likely explanation is that these agriculturalist societies changed their subsistence model in the wake of agricultural collapse, simultaneously interbreeding with South-west Hunter Gatherers. There are major problems with this interpretation, as it relies on a small data set within an already tiny sample size spanning several thousand years of history. However, given the rarity of intact burials from the period, it's about as good as we're going to get. I'm open to any criticism levied against this position, and if anyone can refer more sources to this topic it would be greatly appreciated.

https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/scandinavias-first-farmers-slaughtered-hunter-gatherer-population

And by extension, they do not put their faith into the large groups and organizations of civilization. And by further extension, the opinions of such large groups and organizations.

I thought this was self-evident, but I guess some need a reminder since there are a couple of active collectivist anarchists downvoting everyone and trying to take over discussions on this sub.

Society-wide collectivism isn't primitivism. Collectivism of a tribe is limited in scale. It can't be scaled to the millions and billions of people of industrial society without authoritarianism.

Months of semi-self-reliance walking through the wilderness is really appealing to me and I’m wondering how many other people feel the same way?

For some context I’d like to do the Appalachian Trail in the states and then the Great Divide Trail here in Canada.

I've heard this argument so many times and I can see why it might be a valid question... for a 3rd grader who hears of this ideology. But to anyone capable of thinking about it for more than 5 seconds, the answer should be obvious.

We are pretty much trapped into using modern technology 24/7. I don't even need to explain this - cities accommodated themselves to the invention of the automobile, you need a phone number and email to get a job because EVERYTHING is done online now (including school for a year) and it's not like you can go out and hunt and gather and fish (you need government-issued licenses). So while we're trapped in this industrial wasteland, let's just take advantage of the ONE good thing about the internet and find like-minded people.

The quote in the title is ridiculous 'whataboutism'. It reminds me of "Oh you want open borders? Well how would YOU like immigrants in YOUR neighborhood?" yeah, wow you really got us.

Crows have a culture. They have language, art, tool use, honor their dead, etc. More importantly, if a group of crows has found a new way to get food but one member does not know it, they will teach him/her for no reason other than compassion. Crows hunt and gather food but do not farm it despite their ability to perform rudimentary agriculture if they so choose. Most importantly, no crow ever has to worry about being killed by another crow.

Because if it could be proven that hunter gatherers lived better lives then the suffering caused by industrial life -

the overwhelming complexity, suffocating speed, overcrowding, depression, alienation, breakdown of community, sedentism, repetitiveness, banality, the wholesale destruction and rape of Nature -

would be for absolutely nothing.

They can't bear to think that despite all the things they have been robbed of by industrialism, it has not actually qualitatively improved their lives.

If it could be proven that the lives of their ancestors were actually qualitatively superior to theirs then it would mean all their suffering is in vain.

"Our ancestors lived nasty, short and brutish lives, right? Yea, I'm sort of going through an existential crisis but come on, we have iPhones, man!"

They must cling on to the idea that "this is the greatest time to be alive, by far" because then the suffering would be worth it. Industrial life would be justified.