Rev Left Radio - Anarcho-Primitivism: Civilization, Symbolic Culture, and Rewilding

Episode Date: July 24, 2017

 Dr. Layla AbdelRahim is an anthropologist, author, Revolutionary, and anarcho-primitivist thinker who urges us to examine civilization, its premises, its psychology, its pathologies, and its manifestions (including capitalism). She sits down with Brett to discuss the philosophy of anarcho-primitivism and debunks myths that many leftists have about the tendency and the philosophy that goes with it. It's not a call to dismantle everything with no concern for who it hurts; rather it offers a way *forward* by insisting on an analysis that goes deeper than capitalism, and cuts to the core of our civilization, our evolutionary history, and our psyches. This is a must-listen episode!  Topics Include: Civilization, language, anthropology, symbolic culture, the use of language, the agricultural revolution, Marxism, the concept of "rewilding", meditation, train journies across Russia, going into nature, and much more!!!   ------ Links to Layla's websites, where you can find her books and writings: Layla's Work Layla on FB Please donate to our  Patreon Follow us on Twitter: @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB This Podcast is Officially Affiliated with the Omaha GDC and The Nebraska Left Coalition Random Song From Our Friends: The Brink by Rogue Element   Thank you for all of your support and feedback!

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the world, unite! We're educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. So we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn.

We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. People want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. Like, this is not my fault. And I think that's part of the distancing from white people who don't want to admit that there's privilege. when the main function of a protect and serve supposedly group is actually revenue generation

they don't protect and serve simply illogical to say that the things that affect all of us that can result in us losing our house that can result in us not having clean drinking water why should those be in anybody else's hands they should be in the people's hands who are affected by those institutions people engaged in to overcome oppression to fight back and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them.

God, those communists are amazing. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host and Comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today I have a very special guest, Dr. Layla Abdel-Rahim. Layla, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background? All right. I usually have difficulty introducing myself because, um, um, um, Well, you know, I happen to be a human being from the species of unwise apes

and who happens to be very interested and dedicated in questions of sustainable life for all species on Earth and for questions of self-realization of every individual and every person. And so this, of course, led me to my work in a variety of disciplines. And so anthropology, I bore a lot from biology, from economics, in order to understand how, what are the principles of life and how do different social, economic, and cultural choices impact our community of life and communities in general? That's awesome, and I'm super excited to have you on. You were actually recommended to us by a listener who really wanted to, you know, for us

us to give you a platform to come on and kind of give us your theory and your worldview. you, so I'm very honored to have you on. This episode is going to be centered around the politics of anarcho-primitivism and anti-civilizational politics, and so if you're ready, we can just go ahead and dive right in with the first set of questions. Perfect. All right, so let's start off with what is anarcho-primitivism, and how does it differ from other more orthodox variants of anarchism?

All right, so anarcho-primitivism is... I wouldn't say it's a framework, but let's say it's a methodology and a perspective on the available data, let's say, on life. Like what makes life possible, what makes life feasible on our planet, and where does the suffering come from? So, it's basically all aspects of forces or groups that have historically fought against oppression, against civilization, against different forms of human self-organization that imposes war, violence, and dispossession. They have always been interested, obviously, then, in questions of liberty. And, you know, they would frame them differently, egalitarianism or justice.

And so you have like a variety of movements through history that would address or focus on one of these or several aspects of oppression. Primitivism in this sense kind of zooms out. So if most of those movements, all shades of anarchism, socialism, communism, anti-colonialism, have focused on oppression from anthropocentric lens, they have inadvertently then fallen into the very economic machine that ensures the proliferation of civilization and then its expansion. So anarcho-primitivism zooms out from this human selfishness, egotism, and anthropocentrism, to look at, okay, if then life existed on Earth for billions of years, what were the principles?

And then by virtue of such an analysis or zoom out, you lose your high ground or your kind of position of supremacy. Because then you realize that, well, life knew how to proliferate and how to balance itself through principles that governed kind of equal and free anarchists. access to energy, to space. The sense of time would be then intertwined with that proliferation of diversity in life. The sense of space would be intertwined with that coexistence. And so then there's no place for the human ape

as at the top of a pyramid that has been designated itself as having the right to consume and to hunt and to kill and to possess eventually. So then you see that place and you look at what governs those societies, and that's mutualism. And our place in this then falls into how we can contribute to the proliferation of diversity in life. And so eventually then using this set of tools for analysis, which is observations from nature or wilderness, observation of historical cultures and cultural choices and communities, human

and non-human, then you realize that anarchism can work only if we see that ultimate supremacy. Okay, yeah, I totally see that. One way that, I'm still learning about it, but one way that I conceptualize anarcho-primitivism is this distinction between, you know, more orthodox forms of leftism. You know, they root their critique in capitalism as sort of the basis. of so many social ills that, you know, are promoted through the economic paradigm of capitalism, anarcho-primidivist, in my understanding, at least, would say capitalism itself is a manifestation of yet a further, deeper ill, and that ill is civilization. Would you agree with that, with that

framing? Exactly. Okay, so in that context, then, how would you exactly define civilization, and maybe you can touch on the agricultural revolution here? And so, like, when did civilization start and what is like fundamentally wrong with civilization okay so um well civilization um that's like your general well for me at least it was my fifth grade history textbook um you know where i first learned about the hindu valley and the fertile crescent um in misopotamia so that's present-day iraq syrian the middle east So, civilization began basically as a kind of, okay, so in my words, civilization actually is the byproduct of a certain cultural and socio-economic, socio-environmental decision of certain

humans to domesticate non-humans. And then eventually it led to human, to domesticating humans as well, sedentary and labor-oriented predatory social organization. So what does that mean then? It means that the material kind of effects of civilization, which manifest themselves into, well, growth, of domesticated humans and non-human populations for the purpose of using them as either labor or non-humans using them for food and for different things. Crops, you domesticate crops,

you force them also to reproduce more of what you want and exterminate everything else that poses a threat, So you see that settlement start growing and cities start growing. And with that came obviously, well, diseases, hierarchy, starvation, the health of humans and non-humans suffered. Longevity, obviously, then suffers. quality of life, happiness, and the joy of life in its diverse and unpredictable but yet harmonious wild coexistence then seeds to this hierarchical exploitative system of where the domesticator owns the lives, the time, the effort.

and the flesh of what then it conceives as its rightful resources. Okay, so for me, this is where I differ from other critiques in anarcho-primitivism, is that civilization is not the root of all evil. Civilization is a response to the human revolution in its anthropology, in its self-perception, social construction of itself, as the supreme predator. So predation then, and then you see that language, the birth of speech, human language, and art, representational art in the caves, coincides with the humans, taking that step. towards hunting, killing, and kind of vacating that previous spot in the diversity of life,

what I call social contract, where the human primates were disseminators of seeds to carnivorous killers. And the first technology towards civilization can be found then in that language and in the depiction that of animals that they would kill that allowed the human predator to alienate herself, because gender starts from there, himself, that he would kill, and And then those who give birth to the human resources settle and domesticate the plants in order to have that surplus to feed the hunter, to sustain the hunter during that hunt. And so settlement and domestication is a response to that decision. So not only is it this sort of physical separation from the natural way human beings have lived for, so long, but it's also representative of this sort of psychological split where the human being

starts to conceive of itself almost as an abstract concept. And that sort of psychological break from nature sort of perpetuates this confrontational attitude towards nature, this predatory attitude where nature must be confronted and where it can be preyed upon, it should be preyed upon, and where it can be beaten into submission, it should be beaten into submission. Is that a proper way of kind of understanding what you're saying here about that fundamental change in the human mind? Absolutely, yeah. So then from there we see, as you said, the rise of hierarchies,

the rise of what eventually would turn into kings and queens and monarchies and feudalism, which then again turned into capitalism. So what role does a critique of capitalism play in the broader critique of civilization? Absolutely. So the different critiques in themselves are actually very useful, because you look at, for example, critiques of epistemic racism, critiques of slavery-based economics, slavery- and race-based economics, which is connected to epistemic critique of racism, feminist critiques. of economic and political kind of capitalization of social power and social wealth.

You see queer theory offering serious challenges to how, under this whole capitalist system, gendered and gets conceived, used, and constructed. All of these critiques are important. The problem is that where they fail is that if you focus only on that little department without zooming out to connect them together to yet zoom out and to see how in the end, without this critique of human predation, you will end up reconfirming that very system that keeps evolving and finding new ways of using and abusing symbolic, you know, social capital, labor resources, you know, land, extraction economies, and everything, until finally,

it will devour the globe, the whole, you know, now life, the future of life is in crisis. And so this is the problem with people who adhere to one school or another. then they start fighting among themselves. So without looking at how the hierarchy places us in a way that we shall always keep using the resources in this hierarchy, in this food chain, we will predate on those weaker than us and we will feed those who are stronger than us.

In what ways would a, if it was, even pot or maybe it is who knows but maybe it's going to happen regardless but what would a sort of anarcho-primidivist ideal society look like is is there any going back is the psychological split that gave rise to civilization and thus capitalism is there any way that we could rationally or or sort of like responsibly geared down or is it just going to have to end in some sort of catastrophe because the momentum of thousands of years of civil civilization is so strong that there's no way to, you know, kind of shift gears and get out of that mentality.

Well, that's another kind of myth that is usually attributed to anarcho-primitivists, is that, well, you want to take us back to the cave. Well, you know, as much as I would have loved to live in a cave, and actually, I really enjoyed the caves, the Neanderthal caves in the Crimea, visited there in 2006. Well, the result of civilization is this unsustainable human population growth. So there's no way you can have 7 billion in marching on people move into caves. So obviously we cannot go back to a sustainable number of humans as we were, say, 300,000 years ago or even 10,000 years ago, or even beginning of the 20th century.

So that's not what anarcho-primitivists are saying. You go back. You go forward with what you have. And the way to go forward is not to hide your head in the sand and pretend that these painful questions just don't exist because they're uncomfortable. We have to address them and to see that, first of all, the first question is that the way it's going on, it's unsustainable for, first of all, other species, and without other species, we are doomed. So it's just like, in the end, the collapse is going to affect everyone, and unfortunately us, in the very end, because those are higher up the human hierarchy,

we'll find ways to extend their existence as long as possible, but it's just impossible to survive on a planet that won't have fresh water and oxygen. Okay, so unless they somehow figure out how to change that, you know, base of human life on this planet, which is science fiction, and it just won't happen. Okay, so where do we go from facing the facts as they are? And facing the facts that $7 billion and marching on is not sustainable, but obviously we're not going to then say alamalthus.

Well, you know, too bad, you know, those who can't afford to survive die off. Obviously not. Okay. So then we're going to start rewilding our own relationships within our hierarchy to include non-humans in a way that then will naturally control our propensity to proliferate under domestication. the birth of human population was triggered because it was a requirement of domesticated humans and non-humans to produce resources okay and you see that for example you compare domesticated dogs and wild wolves how many pups the wild wild wolves have, and they have those pups within specific seasons.

They keep their population growth at zero. And so that's why they get threatened by human expansion, because then if you don't proliferate, the more you are killed, the less there will be. so-called predators in the wild, reproduce very rarely. And so, but the humans, when they took that decision to become predators, actually switched their reproductive clock and started demanding, you know, by memetic means, more and more human resources, you know, those who would go to farm, those who would protect and defend, you know, so the military, et cetera, et cetera.

So then the step to realizing how the economy of wilderness works and rewilding our own relationships with our domesticators and our propensity to reproduce. will curb and will start seeding those deserts that were created by human civilizations to inviting more diversity of life and sharing. And by inviting that diversity of life, instead of, for example, controlling all the crops, you plant apple trees and then you're the owner and you have the farmers or the peasants who work for you. and those who guard and those who sell them, and instead of using that monocultural, hierarchical system of extraction, if you allow a diversity of plants in that land, if you see that ownership

of the human labor and the crops that, say, apple orchards yield, you will find that There will be more life, a more variety of crops, and there will be less need to have humans who will be then exploited, you know, either in wars or in other. So the path to the future depends on how willing are we to really live. And if we want to live, then we have to learn how to let life proliferate and live in joy and its diversity. Absolutely. So right here is a pivotal point in our conversation because I think so many,

leftists, so many anarchists or Marxists or what have you, have a view of anarcho-primitivism as a fundamentally regressive one that, as you correctly said, well, they think that it means a going back to a hunter-gatherer sort of environment of, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago. So so many of the critiques of anarcho-primitivism come from this characterization of it as just tear down the hospitals, tear down, you know, the drug companies, down the roads and infrastructure, just destroy civilization and let's just go back to living caves. But what you are saying is that is fundamentally false. And the truth of the situation is that there is no going back. All we can do is go forward. And the way to go forward is to

understand this critique, internalize it, and then begin the process of which you refer to as rewilding. Is that fair? And if so, can you go on to define what rewilding means on a personal or maybe societal level? Yes, absolutely. That is exactly so. And I guess the critique comes from a misunderstanding of anarcho-primitivist and John Zerzans' warning, which was taken out of context. So he warned that in his analysis,

that civilization is unsustainable. Civilization is cruel, and civilization will ultimately lead to economic, social, ecological collapse. So that was taken out of context, and then the reaction was, oh, so you are waiting for collapse. And that is not what the critique entails. The critique entails that, okay, you want that. collapse in order to start re-envisioning on its ashes a new future but the analysis shows that that future cannot exist on a dead planet okay so then how do we take into our hands wilding, okay, or making life viable.

And this is where my critique of all the revolutions that took place so far in an attempt to, well, first, you know, we know the French, the British revolutions, the American revolutions, the Russian, the Chinese, all the wars against colonialism and revolution after revolution in Africa and Asia and Latin America, have ultimately failed precisely because the epistemic foundation of human supremacy was never addressed. And so the revolution, the predatory revolution, the original revolution that kind of ruptured us, from this community of life and diversity of life and the joy of life was a revolution an epistemic anthropological revolution in self-conception and so

we have in order to really succeed this time we have to again understand what is at stake in the ways in which we envisage ourselves envisage our roles in the society. So, for example, we can start by, okay, what is society? If you consider that society is the humans with whom you have economic networks, these are very alienating, highly segregated economies and groups and networks, that kind of, if you could feel you can thrive in that network, then it's because you have a lot to exploit below you. So how are you going to envisage yourself outside of that network?

Is it a specific gender with whom you mostly interact and with whom you have the most important economic exchanges? What is the hidden economy behind that what you do not want to acknowledge you have access to, what makes that materialize? Once we start understanding the effort, the economic input and output and extraction and consumption that is behind everything that we take for granted, this is where the epistemic revolution will take place, because then you will understand that how predatory it is, and you will understand how to invite a diversity of beings from other classes, human social classes,

and for me social class can be organized by gender, by race, you know, all of these epistemic classifications have a value in this economy. But this is where Marxist analysis is really useful and helpful, because then you can understand how we are alienated from both what we extract and what we produce. And once we start facing that and understanding the whole economic mesh in which everything exists and inviting others from other species, other classes, human and non-human, this is where the rewilding begins. What do you give back to that wild community

that you allow to exist for its own purpose to simply enjoy life not for your pleasure, not for your profit? Then we start to rewild ourselves and we will find that actually the quality of our experience on this earth will immediately rise, will have like we will be less stressed because we'll be less predatory and being less predatory we will not expect a predator to constantly loom over our shoulder because the

ultimate predator is us consuming each other yeah that's really interesting the notion of looking over your shoulder for a predator and these sort of boogeyman that we can instruct in our minds is almost a natural outgrowth of that sort of paranoia of being a predator. And what you're talking about when you speak of rewilding and the epistemic revolution, I find that fascinating and I really think that leftists of all stripes need to really be honest and listen to what you are saying, Layla, because you are taking this tendency of anarcho-primitivism and really giving it a wonderful defense and you're knocking down so many caricatures that are pushed up against it, as you mentioned earlier.

But when you talk about the epistemic revolution, I've heard the term civilized and wild narratives be brought up in your writing and you're talking. So what is the difference between civilized and wild narratives and what role does that play in the sort of epistemic revolution that you were talking about? Oh, yes, absolutely. And that's actually part of the title of my second book that came out. with Rutledge in 2015. So the first part of the title is children's literature, domestication and social foundation, narratives of civilization and wilderness. And that was based on my doctoral

dissertation in which I looked at the ways in which these fundamental premises of civilization and wilderness, then play out in narratives that we think are fiction or science or holy texts and even revolutionary children's books. And so when we do not understand what is in those principles, then it's easy to take in this book, I use, for example, an example of, say, Anne of Green Gables or Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, which apparently, to many, at first sight, might appear to be a feminist or kind of anti-proletarian poverty-stricken kind of revolutionary text. text, okay? It's difficult to imagine that some people actually think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in those terms, but apparently many do.

Okay, so again, here, if we understand, well, or analyze, the underlying premises of civilization as those, first of all, monocultural, hierarchical, that naturalize killing, okay, so it's based on hunting, right, on domesticating of animals for human use on rape, because if you force crops to reproduce what they would not have chosen through their intricate and intimate community of pollinators and disseminators then that is rape and we don't think in those terms of crops but but this is what we do we don't think of the in those terms of the turkeys that we have modified in such horrendous ways that they can't even reproduce themselves we have to force inseminate them. Okay, that's rape. And then you look if this is the principle of civilization, then there is no way that any civilized text, no matter how revolutionary it might

claim to be, that will ever challenge that very economic basis. And so look at and then evolutionary theory, you know, scientific interpretation of facts will then be tainted by these norms that we take for granted, as we don't even see them. Scientists then become biased because they accept, you know, they don't see this as a problem. And so they will end up, no matter how much they sincerely may want to topple, you know, oppressive economics, they will keep reconfirming the same structure. Okay, and so it's very linear because it always goes towards a certain goal. Extractionist, that means violence, rape, racism, all that, forced reproduction is part of that narrative,

towards who will then gain access. And so Charlie in the chocolate factory shows that, okay, if there's one boy who wins the lottery, will inherit this hierarchy. With the umpalumpus, those poor creatures brought in crates from obviously Africa, because where else this cook would grow, and we'll work for you and dance and all of you will live happy.

ever after in exactly the same violent structure okay so then if language is a is the grammar the technology that helps the system to self-propagate then my question was can we standing from the fact that we are say, diseased by civilization, occupied, civilized, domesticated by this predatory, kind of almost alien within ourselves that makes us act against ourselves. Is it possible? And it is possible. I found there are some texts. So in this book, I use the example of, well, different indigenous stories, some stories from north of Russia, where I was born. And even in a civilized setting, Tuvi Janssen wrote The Moon in Trolls in Finland during World War II. She started during World War II, and she went on until this.

70s, like those nine books on the movement trolls. And I found that the premises of these books are wild, just like the premises in those stories told by indigenous people in the north of Russia. And they could be indigenous, they could be ethnically Russian, or there are different nationalities and ethnic groups in Russia as well. So it doesn't matter. What What makes them wild is that the human, first of all, there's no grammar to situate the human as the highest rightful predator or owner of every good outcome in an economic transaction. There is no linear kind of movement in logic towards that human human winning over other forces, animal or non-human.

There is no grammar that expects the protagonist to beat something and then emerge victorious against something else. It is just the movement trolls is amazing because it's like different kind of normal of the story experiences of little woman troll going through life in a diversity of life, with dangers looming out there because obviously there could be danger, but in the end, if you know how to tune into that harmony of diversity, that your family is never static and monospeciousist or monoclassist, then everything will be fine.

And the most important part is that you can never take a grammatical rule extracted from whatever happened in that story and apply it next time. So it kind of follows this, that if it's chaos, that's moving through the universe and we all are particles that kind of dance and tune to each other but every time it's something new and every time it works out because you were intelligent and wise and wild to have figured out how to move with that community would you say that there is a role to play for people that are sympathetic

to anarcho-primidivist ideas or the ideas that you're expounding today, there's a role for artists and filmmakers and authors and novelists to take into their own hands the duty of rewilding the mind by putting into their work these wild narratives? Would you say that that is one way that people who are sympathetic to these ideas can operate in the real world and start to sort of change the minds of other people? Ultimately, the ultimate maybe optimal thing would be for everyone, because this is what narratives of wilderness tell us is that if there's no moral of the story, there's no rule for

protagonists to emerge as protagonists as heroes, then everyone, in whatever moment of time and space experiences some communication with others, regardless of their species or class again, regardless of language, like you go to a forest and you will experience an encounter with trees, with bugs, with, with, with animals, with, with animals, with, animals. They are protagonists and you are protagonists in that moment. And this is your story. And you can share it with others. But ultimately, it's what you live and how you end up not being a warrior or kind of the supreme user of that space. But you tune into the economy and you see, you look into that, what you bring to that economy is exactly what you take.

Then you become a protagonist and then art and stories themselves start becoming really relevant and wild and ever evolving. I, in my personal life, I find that when I'm stressed out, when I'm struggling with the or anxiety, one of the main things I do is I go into nature. I set my life aside, even if it's just for a few hours, and walk around alone in the woods. And it's almost an experiment, if you would like to use that term, to test these ideas because I find that when I immerse myself in nature, when I let my thinking and my internal dialogue slow down and I feel myself as an awareness inside of the, you know, beauty and depth of nature that is, it actually has a profoundly healing

effect on my psyche and on my psychology. So do you think that by rewilding, you should try to as much as possible interact with nature, embed yourself in it, and just sort of let it consume you for a while as a way of sort of breaking down, you know, civilized narratives or however you want to frame it. Absolutely. And the critical word here, I love the way you phrased it, is to embed yourself, which means that you become responsible, bound to a social contract, a pact that we have with life, that what do you then, if you felt that emotional,

healing? Did you bring emotional and other healing to that community? So then it becomes much more powerful. It doesn't, it stops being consumers because what a lot of now, even, you know, school programs realize that, well, you know, kids suffer from depression. I saw a few articles in The Guardian and other places, well, you know, if kids, poor kids in downtown, say

Los Angeles, don't have access to the ocean and so you take them on the bus to the ocean for the first time and then you kind of feel good about yourself because, you know, you took them on that bus, they ran around and then you take them back. Or

there was another project. Well, you take them and they clean the ocean and it's like excuse me none of these are solutions for permanent healing of these kids and them being stuck in situations where it becomes only like according to your generosity that you could take a bus to take them and clean their whole lives they will be most probably if they're in the ghetto, they will be serving you and cleaning. So there's nothing fundamentally new to the capitalist and civilized economy that devastates human and non-human populations.

So embedding, I like the way you put it, embedding yourself in that community is giving people access to a... spot that they will rewild and open up to the growth of plant diversity, food diversity for non-human and human alike. And you see such attempts, I know some deep green filly is involved in attempting to rewild, you know, Philadelphia in a more meaningful way. How do we, and of course, there will be a lot of resistance because the minute it will start threatening the capitalization of space and gentrification and, you know, different new ways

of recuperating of different spaces and human and non-human resources for this hierarchy, of course, will have resistance. But you see these attempts throughout the world, like total liberation groups in Europe, reach out to Tunisia, to Turkey, to Georgia, in order to make meaningful total liberation spaces for humans and non-humans precisely in ways that will embed more and more people into these wild economics where you will start being accountable before yourself and before that community of diversity. Yeah, I mean, once you start feeling it, so once you have those experiences in nature, there is this sort of internal pull or, you know, you're compelled to go back because

it is so intrinsically rewarding. And so this notion of trying to have organizations that rewild certain areas or, you know, create little spots for children to go to, non-coerced, not in the context of cleaning up for the system and all of that, which I think were great critiques. But I love that idea, and I think it's important. Sort of some of this revolves, and you mentioned John Zerzen earlier. Specifically, you talked about the use of language with relation to narratives. what is John Zersen's critique of language and symbolic culture specifically? Because I think that really touches on what we're discussing here in a deeper way. Absolutely.

So John Zersen basically observed that language and symbolic thought and symbolic representation allowed up. to kind of this degree of separation from that which you are then going to use or consume. And in anthropological research you can find in my book, especially the second, the Rutledge book, I list like a whole bunch of anthropologists. Jack Goody, Walter Ong, among others, who observed that actually literacy emerged with agricultural civilization, with hierarchy, and literacy, the first texts were not poetry or even religious texts. the first texts were actually lists of who owes whom and that kind of solidified so literacy

then was a further step in the developing of that technology of alienation that John Zerzer observed that even before literacy that started with hunting solidified and made permanent those relationships of death that you no longer are bound

to the community of life where if you take something, for example, if we are primates and we eat, we're on the trees say in Central American, we eat avocados and we take and throw away the pulp of the avocado well, we eat the seed of the avocado.

And then the avocado grows. And this is how we agree together with the avocado that it gives us some flesh and we help it spread the seed, whilst birds and butterflies help pollinate and cross-pollinate and spread a variety of possibilities of all. offspring. Okay, so we kind of rupture from that and we take a step away from this and we suddenly change our self-conception. And we become at a certain point scavengers and then suddenly decide, okay, we are no longer going to heed that pact, that contract, we are going to hunt. And what is going to help us through generation

maintain this decision is something that then becomes kind of almost like a mimetic or genetic imperative that then solidifies in the texts and the stories and those lists of who owes who, And it's no longer that we owe the berries or the avocados, it becomes we owe those who domesticate us in order to consume and help spread that hierarchy and desertification. So literacy also plays because what I say, again, scientific literature, well, starting with, say, Peter Krapotkin's theory of evolution through mutualism, well, his book, Mutual Aid, A Factor in Evolution, where he observes that mutualism is guarded, or mutual, Ballistic economies in the wild are guarded by empathy. So if you feel the suffering of the other, regardless of whether that other is a human being or non-human being, most animals then respond, even predators, respond to other species' children,

cries, okay? So it's almost like they have, and they heed, that pact they have with life, that we're going to consume the old, but you will have a young lioness you know, risking her own life and starving, protecting a baby deer or a baby gazelle. Okay, so symbolic thought by representing a relationship as something not other allows us to withdraw and not to feel what we would have instinctually felt. So it kind of then superimposes itself on reality that when we are domesticated, we start looking at reality

through specific narratives, we don't understand that reality is what it is. And this is what we see in a lot of the clashes. You would have very decent white supremacists. that's an oxymoron well in in their lives in their milieu they're very decent honorable

human beings you know really sincerely arguing that their vision and maybe they sincerely believe sometimes you know

well when reality comes to you know testing okay we'll Is it because you did not know that, say, a race that has been exploited by your forefathers still suffers, would you give up, you know, some of your goods, some would and some would it? But let's say, like, some of them don't know. The narrative allows them to actually, honestly, not feel and not know and be close to that. experience. If you take away that narrative and a lot of them, if they felt that suffering and they realized that, okay, I can do something not to hear those screams of pain, they would do it. They would go and rewile themselves. So the narratives then help keep the status quo even in cases where there would have been a sincere disruption, well, desire. to disrupt that economy and it solidifies that economy and keeps transmitting and

this is where I my analysis of the text and the literature in the scientific text and some of them you know like I said you claim to be revolutionary the film up same thing well you know two poor people and there's like civilization growing around and I discuss that in my book and And Ellie, like, they work all their lives, and she's the one who dreams to go to the mountain top in South America. And finally, it's like a heroic feat. Well, she dies, and so her husband is old, and he takes off in the balloons.

And you will see that the narrative then sneaks into and normalizes, naturalizes the fact that if the woman is dead, it's enough to have. have her picture going to the top of the mountain. It's as if as good as you know, should have made it as they actually claim it to be a feminist narrative and it's

symbolic. It's very symbolic. Well, just a photograph. But then if you look at the reality of that economic culture, what happened to her? She was consumed and she died

old and frail who had forgotten and abandoned her dream. And you look at how the white man who goes to live Ellie's dream enters the space of so-called South America and nothing exists in South America except for him and that symbolic dream. And so if you don't have that text,

if you go to South America and you experience, you experience what if you go to the forest and you see what the petroleum companies are doing you will not want to participate in that economy absolutely absolutely and this is maybe getting a little off the rails here but everything that you're saying is leading my mind to this thought because it's something that i've done in my own life and when i talk about going on to the forest. This is an activity that I partaken. And that activity is meditation. When you're talking about symbolic culture, when you're talking about language, what we're talking about in some respect, or at least it leads back to this idea of talking to ourselves in our heads all day.

And that is a veil of thought that disconnects us from the world around us and the people around us. And in my personal experience, I have found that when I am keeping up a consistent and deep meditation practice, my empathy explodes. My care for other people, my care for the world around me, the boundaries between me and everything else start to get loose and start to dissolve. And I find, I don't know if you've had any experience with this, but what are your thoughts on meditation and the notion of that as a tool to sort of deprogram your mind from this symbolic culture? well I totally agree with the way you interpreted where the danger and that's the danger of language is that then you know a term like this will be taken in say a new age economy and taken to mean that well meditation is you and yourself and you are so important and love yourself I'll take completely, you know, pay me money, I'll teach you how to love yourself.

So it's totally taken out of the original context of where, as you point out, that meditation is actually where you become one with the cosmos. when you become one with everything around you here and beyond and the stars where you feel that depth of connection because in the end we are made of the same substance as this earth and as the stars and so it's opening up to that empathy and it's not closing into how good you want to feel and the world is burning. And so, yes, absolutely.

I would maybe, well, maybe meditation would be the best term to describe it in this sense, but it's really going out into it. to the forest and experiencing it, not like what you said, not with that cognitive, stuck in language, you know, obsessive, compulsive, like, you know, rerunning this and that. But really turning off of that civilized linguistic existence to understanding what happens within you and without you on this multi-level wild intelligence that we are yet to kind of retrieve because we have that and we can have that if we stop being enmeshed in this domesticating linguistic existence.

Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right when you talk about the way meditation or the culture, you know, the East Asian culture of Buddhism and meditation has been co-opted by the capitalist corporate state and their practices. So now you'll see these huge Fortune 500 companies having meditation time with their workers where they all come together and they sit in a room and they meditate. And that increases productivity. I mean, that makes me want to vomit, just saying those words. But there's something much deeper there. And there's something much deeper in that culture if you, if you care to, to, to delve into it. And I would, I would even argue that by embedding yourself in nature for extended periods of time, nature itself sort of does that work. It starts to break down

the conceptual apparatus because you're so disassociated from the society, if you stay in nature long enough, that nature will start to ease you out of, of those thought patterns and kind of embrace you, you know, in its own existence. And you have to sort of start a doubt, your body and mind to the natural world around you. But yeah, I don't know, I just thought that was interesting. I think it does fit into some of these things that we're talking about. At least in my experience, it's 100% conducive with these notions of like symbolic culture and language and getting past that.

Absolutely. Actually, I had experience like that in 2005. So we went back to Russia, my husband and my child. And so we were, like, in the north of Tver region, in the forest, in the forests in Russia. Oh, my goodness. You go, like, on the rivers canoeing and sleeping on islands. And, you know, within, like, you adapt within days. And, you know, you use language to the minimum. You don't scream at the kids.

You don't actually, like, everyone kind of tunes into it. And I remember, so I left my church. child and her dad with the friends there, and I had to go to a conference through Finland in Norway. And so it's like north of Tver region, I'm like, okay, and I know Russia very well. So I take the midnight train, I emerge from the forest, hop on this midnight train to St. Petersburg, in order to take the train to Helsinki. And so I didn't realize I was back civilization in the morning when I stepped it was luckily the final station in Petersburg so I stepped down off the train and that city I did my master's research degree on

on rock music there it's like I have never seen this city before I had no idea what to do with the ticket I had in hand where to step how to ask what to ask and I'm like I'm so lost I felt like I had no idea where I was I had no idea what like I've ushered towards you know there's buses what what is a bus it's like it was so painful to remember that oh the bus will take me from the train from this train station to the next where I'm going to take oh I have to take a train oh that's what I came on train you know it's like it's alien it's alien it's so and then finally I don't know how long it's like everything is slow motion and I'm kind of forced it was so painful to remember the vocabulary the technology

and you know finally like okay you know I got back unfortunately yeah absolutely well we're well over an hour we deviated a little bit from the questions I was going to ask but this has been a wonderful conversation. I absolutely love this. You've taught me a lot. I know you taught my listeners a lot. When I framed the, when I kind of advertised the fact that you were coming on to discuss anarcho-primitivism, there were so many, you know, caricatures, which even I myself have fallen preyed to. And if people saw this sort of questions and outlines that I made for this episode, they would immediately see my own caricaturization of anarcho-primitivism and the errors that I made in thinking what I thought it was. But you have done all of us a service by defending the

position and correcting so many of the errors. You're an absolute delight to talk to. I really appreciate you coming on. It means so much to me. I'd like to have you on in the future because I find you to be totally fascinating and to be thinking in ways that there just aren't a lot of people that are thinking in those ways. But before we go, before we say our good buzz. I want to just say thank you, Brett, it was really wonderful to discuss with you. And yes, absolutely, I'd be happy to discuss more in the future. Wonderful. Now, before we do go, though, can you please let our listeners know where they can find more of your work and maybe some recommendations for anyone who wants to learn more about anything we've discussed in this interview? Well, absolutely, I have lots of stuff on my

website. So it's leila.milsov.org. So, L.I.com. a Y-Y-L-A-L-T-S-O-V-Mil-S-O-V-Mil-S-O-V-O-RG. And, yeah, there's a lot of links and videos and articles and information on my books. Both books are there. You can order them through the publishers, the Amazon, or the library. There's libraries. Use them. So it's a delight to discuss with you, Brett, and I hope this was helpful for everyone.

Yeah, absolutely, and I will put all that information in the summary of this episode. I'll put the link in there so people can find your work and be directed right towards you in the easiest way possible. So thank you again, Leila, for coming on. It's been a wonderful conversation and an honor to talk to you. And now we hear of animals and plants going extinct every day, vanishing forever. In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles, and rainforests, full of birds and butterflies. But now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see. This is it, yeah.

This is the end is nine. It's the onslaught of war against the planet. We're the enemy. It's right outside your door. We're destroying it mile by mile. Be prepared for the unslaw. Yeah. This is how we doing it.

Yeah. Take away all on the crap, nothing matters but the vinyl. I want to blast back to the days of a primal. The pre-complicated type of guy is my idol. Itemized billy for the kill and the survival. We've had the red letter from the banks of nature. Real by a war with the tanks and vapor. Mass greed, massacres, mines by the acre.

We master in nothing, slave away to the paper. With battery hens, we tend to fake flavor. So civilized, we're not friends with the night. Labor, love to war monger of falsify favors, fortified killer singing innocent behaviors. We sat waiting obese, pulsating, floating with the devil waiting to pulsating. We rubbish in others at sweet pavements, pack away the streets as I reach for the cavemen. I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in our ozone. I'm afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it.

All this is happening before our eyes, and yet we act is if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. Can you believe we've reached these peaks are forever-beam. Earth's not an evergreen. It's necessary men leave. King sea-wash trees of the man grease. So the man grows grow in the piece of a stampede. My peace row. We're no more cologne of the man they loan.

Proving up no noses. Black Death brings you ring a ring of roses. Twenty square mile as the ring row closes. Concrete over the ring. But now the fox glove blows in the foliage of hold and the rope be sold breaks down decomposing Similar to fabric of the life we've woven, yo I kick rind straight from the broken lines of mine's over to beat the explosion Catch criminals out looting in the open with no hope is a getting ghost no joke

I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in our ozone I'm afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in All this is happening before our eyes, and yet we act, is if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. Thank you.