Civlization is the real enemy

In a primitivist society; people would dieof plague and toohache. Life span would go down; education would go down and we would all get stupider. Not all people can hunt and gather; quadripeligics and paralysed people cant do that. Are you condemning them to die. Primitivism isnt natural; ever since the beginning of time people have been evolving and progressing. Primitivists like John Zerzan praise nutzos like the Unabomber who commited mass Terrorism against innocent people; even tried to kill Jesus Chomsky. Media portrayed the Unabomber as an Anarchist, and primitivists and the unabomber gave the terrorist name to anarchists.

 

have a laugh:

oh yes, puberty is a hard job, at least for some...

 

Unless you use mechanical farming methods, there *is not enough food* to go around. It doesn't matter how hard you work at being a hunter-gatherer, if there isn't enough food, there isn't enough food. And if technology is (somehow) banned, you can't do anything about it!

 

and free of "market conditions" we can skip extensive agriculture and practice a far more reasonable way of production, starting with the evasion of overproduction, thus minimize the necessary area under cultivation, optimizing the use of resources like fertilizer and water and improve the used techniques further - doing all those things which are now condemned as "unprofitable"...
working harder?
i have strong doubts that i would have to work longer or "harder" if all those still willing to work would get a chance to contribute to the necessary work instead of being unemployed just because "rationalisation" of the labour force makes better profit.
with full employment and job sharing we would be able to reduce the weekly working hours even now to an average around 33 hours - in germany the actual average is around 43,5 hours per week.

 

Cow eats 16 kg of plants and produces 1 kg of meat. If we stopped 'producing' animals like products, there would be enough food for everyone. And why does being primitivist means not using mechanical tools ? If I had to choose sides between primitivists and pro-technology lunatics, I would choose primitivists.

 

And please tell me how you plan on extracting metal ores, smelting them, casting them into useful shapes and then assembling them without using technology? How are you going to pull ploughs without enslaving animals? Are you going to use people to do that? I mean, we could do that using tractors powered by oil or renewable electrical sources, which can plough 10 times as many crops and therefore provide for more people, but that is verboten under primitivism. Is all of that 16kg of plants even viable food for humans? How long would it take to gather without technology to gather it or to tell you where it is (maps require technology remember!)? How do you plan on moving it around the globe to where it's needed? You going to carry a surplus of grain across the ocean to somewhere that needs it? What if there's a drought or flood that kills a community's crops? How are you going to even communicate that effectively to provide disaster relief? Or are those people just fucked? That seems pretty callous, if your goal is to liberate the human race. Or what if a new virus, or even an old one, starts spreading among people or crops or trees? What are you going to do about that? You just going to die out? That sounds like liberating people by murdering them because your religion says you can't use a certain technology. Fuck that noise.

But hey, if you can use mechanical tools, exactly at what point do you draw the line? So a forge and tongs in the hands of a single blacksmith is not technology, but a factory that can cast hundreds of items at once is? Or is it? What about regular pliers vs locking pliers or mole grips, is the former kosher but the latter is forbidden because it requires more precision to make? You know they both rust away just the same, right?

 

Hell, what if you live in a part of the world that *can't* grow crops? I read a piece in a scientific journal a year ago that was talking about the validity of vegetarian or vegan diets on a global scale, and the conclusion it came to was that, yes, it definitely is possible to do this with modern farming methods in temperate climates... but in desert or arctic climates, it isn't possible with the technology they have because most of these areas are too poor to produce a useful number of plant based food. So those people will have to continue eating animals, die out, or move hundreds or thousands of miles into already crowded parts of the world where there wouldn't be enough food anyway in order to satisfy anarcho-primitivism.

 

you mix up two things and i don't think you got the primitive position right:
there is already enough food to feed 7 billions of people worldwide, the problem isn't the production in general but the actual market prices - most of undernourished people are simply too poor to buy what they need - perfect example is india, where hunger is still endemic while the state supports the export of food, cotton for the textile industry...
there is also a distribution problem in areas suffering from war and natural desasters - nobody really gives a shit about the causes - example from the horn of africa:

more recent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_East_Africa_drought

decreasing the meat industry will help to decrease the area under cultivation considerable, thus giving nature more space to recover - but we still will have problems like the need for certain vitamines like B12 for little children growing up - or we have to increase the pharmaceutical/synthesizing of the stuff in an immense degree - so what?
all honours to your love for animals - but do you want to watch your primo-neighbors slaughtering the few remaining wild animals the old way with spear and arrow? Nike can tell you some stories about the mass of severely wounded and left to die animals her collectivists and she found in their woods after "hunting-weekends" of some paleolithic enthusiasts...
those idiots regard division of labour and contribution to collective effords as "repressive" for the individual and blame prehistoric agriculture as the trigger for our actual misery - do you still prefer such culpable ignorance to a reasonable approach, including Nikes point of optimising agriculture as soon as it's free from capitalist pressure?
i hope not.

 

I was just trying to counter Benths 'Forcing everyone to be hunters and gatherers would eliminate the population thing beacause everyone would starve in your society.'. Though I know you are right ( both you and jbastard ), i still think there would be a way of surviving. I know that, without any proof, it's stupid to say it that way, but I just think we're not prepared for nature, and that we don't know anything about it ( as idividual, and I'm sorry if someone lives in villige / woods ). I, myself, know very little about surviving in nature, and I don't have any 'needed' skills.

 

you can get a unpleasant picture of the way of survival with the better ones amongst those "post apocalypse" sci-fi/dark future stories - first everybody will fight each other for the rotting stuff in the former supermarkets, after that they'll hunt dogs and cats, then the rats - and after that the handfull of survivors will have to find out that "nature" is almost empty and bare of any illusions - just try to imagine what would happen to your city if...
the average primo-headhoncho is a desk person, zerzan and doom jensen tried desperately to make some impression on political movements, failed badly because of their ambitious selfstylisation and questionable gimmick-ideas - nobody took them serious - so finally they decided to do their "own thing", meanwhile at least that much successful, that they already started to competete against each other, "breakdowners" vs. "revolutionaries" - backed up by survival books and "above politics" light..., not to mention bumbs like daniel quinn, explaining the world via a "telepathic gorilla", some childish and more than simplistic dialogues, fitting for those customers seeking cheap thrills and easy explanations - see sheep drix:
it's all the fault of these white christian demons...

 

The Primitivist critique of the scientific method is baffling. So let me make sure I have this straight:

Taking an objective approach to understanding the natural world directly causes objectification of humans and a disregard of ethics? Therefore fuck science.

Open up a science textbook aimed at 12 year old kids and read the first chapter. One of the first things it tells you is that science *only* deals with things which can be objectively measured, and that ethics falls outside the realm of science. However, it also states that ethics must be weighed into the equation whenever a decision is made based on scientific evidence, and that what is logically the best move may have terrible ethical implications. It then gives you examples.

So that's that fucked then. Nobody is saying that science needs to govern our actions absolutely, and can only ever give part of the answer when you're looking at putting some sort of plan into action. And we didn't even need to dismantle civilization to get here. Bugger me.

 

we had this science discussion already some time before:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6644
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6745&start=60

and it's sometimes quite amusing how some enthusiasts bounce around between "all science is evil" and "scientific truths" if necessary, just to backup gimmicks like "agriculture spawned repression" - quite desperate in case of the worshippers of the "noble savage" myths and really daft in our time without a realistic alternative - except we would go fascist and play global genozide...

and for this i guess i'm faaaaar too smart and just not disorientated enough...

 

U.S. Predator Drone Strikes. That is all.

 

There's actually not much doctors can do for you that you can't do for yourself just as well or better, except for maybe heart surgery, in which case, you're probably doomed anyways to be honest. Removing things from the body doesn't make it healthy. Medications cause new problems as they solve them. I supppose I'd like to ask you to elaborate on which functions you greatly expect doctors to perform to maximize your health. Most people can be trained in emergency treatment/medicine to be just as effecient as a professional. I'm 27 now and part of growing up was realizing that "functional adults" or "professionals" have about the same amount of specialization in their given fields as I might in areas I take the time out of the day to study. I feel we need to take a great deal of time to reexamine what defines unwanted technologies and separates them from useful tools. I'm not claiming to have answers, I just like talking/typing and listening/reading in return.

 

There are many diseases that can not be treated without medicine. There would be more infections due to no anti-biotics and that can lead to death. Many more people will die of aids. If you are willing to sacrifice millions of people for your utopian idea, then that society is not worth having, how will we play music and download free music via file-sharing without Technology. That would be a very boring society. People will die from toothaches like they did in the old west. People will die young from AIDS and HIV. If someone got injured; they would die. If your society means leaving innocent and injured people to die; your society is wrong and ruthless. I believe strongly in Healthcare and believe it is very importnt to human survival and should be free. I believe a primitivist society is the apocalypse because it has infiltrated the Anarchist Movement and fooled radicals into being a primitivist, and later die due to no medicine or peroxide or die of loss of blood.

 

most problematic after a breakdown would be the lack of water supply - we had countless examples of war- and natural desaster situations where the lack on clean drinking waters led to cholera and typhus epidemics, infections with all kinds of coli bacteria resulting in serious illnesses like the legionaires death, not to mention parasitic infections with all kinds of worms and nematodes, heliobacter pylori and other nasty stuff only treadable by medicine.
two of three kinds of hepatithis are only treadable with antibiotica, the third is lethal anyway - and right: veneral diseases would be a great problem. even before HIV would claim it's toll.
Looking at less well supported regions like the egypt region around the upper nile give numerous examples how vulnerable our species still is for parasites and infections - the same goes for jungle regions in central africa and asia where rats spread lethal pleasantries of hardly known fewers, malaria is still a problem for more than a third of the worlds population - we in the developed countries just don't realise it thanks to our easy accessable faucets and the comfortable climate.
without hospitals every fucking inflamed appendix would become a risk, breast and head injuries a death sentence, "simple" broken bones on the arms, hands and legs would have a chance again to cripple and disable people for the reminder of their life - just read reports from the middle ages or the early modern era about the - in our modern times - laughable reasons for disablement, poverty and early death. the same goes for any kind of fire-related accidents - without electrical energy heating via open fires will be necessary again - and the victims of carelessness or bad luck would grow in numbers and asking for anti-biotics and analgetica.
Most of chronical problems like diabetes or a loss of kidney-functions are treadable today - but only with specialised medics and equipment to keep people alive and active because they have a fucking right to live. Personally I don't see much sense in organ transplantation, but it's a very personal thing if you need a replacement and have to decide either to die or to live seriously disabled and depending on heavy medication - it's just too easy to judge about the costs if you're not uninvolved, a discussion of the limits of modern medicine is healthy as long as it's free of sectarian believes and the absence of dogmatism.

 

How would my manic depressive father get lithium without professional doctors, medical scientists and technicians? In the primitivist world, he is left to simply go out of his mind for no reason? Without his medication, he is not functional! My mother had crones disease, she needed major surgery to fix that. How do you create a sterile environment in a cabin? What about precision medical tools? Anaesthetic? What about the tools necessary to diagnose an illness, like those very big, very complicated CAT scan machines or x-rays? Can't build one of them out of twigs and wishful thinking.

And your comment on professionalism is baffling. And narcissistic. A jack of all trades will never be as good a surgeon as someone who does this as a specialisation. A professional surgeon only does surgery. He has experience, spends time practising and training, keeps up with medical science developments so that he is always on top of his game. You can not do this for every single conceivable vocation.

I challenge you and your primitivist mates to design and write an entire computer operating system, cure AIDS, plumb in a house, cut down and prepare wood for building materials, grow food and find the Higgs Boson faster than a team of computer scientists, medical researchers, plumbers, lumberjacks, famers and particle physicists. You think you're somehow better than someone whose dedicated their entire education and most of their adult life to something they have a passion for, you do it.

 

Guess I'm far from being a primo-romantic misanthrope, but I do see - and actual out of almost every-day-experience - the problems and limits of modern medicine. Around here much talk goes about doctors and surgeons working like car mechanics, the cuts in the health system already showing consequences for your lifetime if your injurance is "bad" and you are unable to pay for the necessary treatment. It's too much of a business by now, we had serious misdiagnosises with local doctors dealing with too many patients in record time - the best one was declaring a pregnancy to be a stomach mucosa - well the boy is now three months old, the doc had to pay for his mistake...
Shortages and cuts in the hospital etats can make you very ill or kill you, lots of resistent pathogens are around, but cleaning and hygiene on station are too expensive - the same goes for the "normal" care for the hospitalized patience, last month one of our neighbors died in hospital - and they didn't noticed it for 16 hours - shortage on nurses and
The medical trade is big business, from the doctors up to the industry and large parts of it give a shit about the humane aspects or something like a responsibility towards an health educational approach. Okay they argue against nicotine and booze abuse - but keep too silent about wrong diet, dangers of enviroment pollution or the lack of work safety measures - only a third of the work force reaches the retirement age still working, the majority steps back much time before becoming 65 because of cardiovascular diseases, weight problems or worn bone joints - most of the problem comes from diet too rich on cholesterines and other too-much-stuff.
psychopharmaka is another problem especially for the youth, it's easy to get a whole chemists shop at home just to survive 6 hours at school, depressions were becoming a pandemic and my favorite wild men and women (suffering from psychosis or schizophrenia) still have three or more turns per year in the completely overcrowded psychiatry out of town - despite the fact that some took their daily pills since decades - under control of "specialists"...
We already achieve small successes with talk-rounds and joint sports, with some i visit museums or arts exhibitions, okay, drops on a glowing stone, but at least we spare the fourth turn into Bedlam if we are lucky - and for humanity's sake, supporting self-help-groups couldn't be more "out" officially - quite contrary to that you never have any problem applying for some pharmacy test... of course under preclusion of liability for loss - fucking capitalism...