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Insane
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Some books :
Daniel Quinn - Ishmael (English) - Fiction, Books, and Daniel
The Story of B, by Daniel Quinn
Daniel Quinn - My Ishmael
Zerzan - Against Civilization - Readings and Reflections (1999)
Howard Zinn - a People's History of United States - 1492-Present
The Machine in our Heads--Glenn Parton
Alone in a Crowd
Online Reader - Project Gutenberg
Quote:
Observing a prisoner exchange between the Iroquois and the French in upper New York in 1699, Cadwallader Colden is blunt: “ notwithstanding the French Commissioners took all the Pains possible to carry Home the French, that were Prisoners with the Five Nations, and they had full Liberty from the Indians, few of them could be persuaded to return. “Nor, he has to admit, is this merely a reflection on the quality of French colonial life, “for the English had as much Difficulty” in persuading their redeemed to come home, despite what Colden would claim were the obvious superiority of English ways:
No Arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their Friends and Relations, could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian Friends and Acquaintance; several of them that were by the Caressings of their Relations persuaded to come Home, in a little Time grew tired of our Manner of living, and run away again to the Indians, and ended their Days with them. On the other Hand, Indian Children have been carefully educated among the English, cloathed and taught, yet, I think, there is not one Instance, that any of these, after they had Liberty to go among their own People, and were come to Age, would remain with the English, but returned to their own Nations, and became as fond of the Indian Manner of Life as those that knew nothing of a civilized Manner of Living. And, he concludes, what he says of this particular prisoner exchange “has been found true on many other Occasions.”
Benjamin Franklin was even more pointed: When an Indian child is raised in white civilization, he remarks, the civilizing somehow does not stick, and at the first opportunity he will go back to his red relations, from whence there is no hope whatever of redeeming him. But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and have lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness toprevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the firstgood Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.
There was always the great woods, and the life to be lived within it was, Crevecoeur admits, “singularly captivating,” perhaps even superior to that so boasted of by the transplanted Europeans. For, as many knew to their rueful amazement, “thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become Europeans!”
"A People's History of the United States"
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Quote:
The managers of Gulag's islands tell us that the swimmers, crawlers, walkers and fliers spent their lives working in order to eat.
These managers are broadcasting their news too soon. The varied beings haven't all been exterminated yet. You, reader, have only to mingle with them, or just watch them from a distance, to see that their waking lives are filled with dances, games and feasts. Even the hunt, the stalking and feigning and leaping, is not what we call Work, but what we call Fun.
The only beings who work are the inmates of Gulag's islands, the zeks. The zeks ancestors did less work than a corporation owner. They didn't know what work was.
They lived in a condition J.J. Rousseau called the state of nature. Rousseau's term should be brought back into common use. It grates on the nerves of those who, in R. Vaneigem's words, carry cadavers in their mouths. It makes the armor visible. Say the state of nature and you'll see the cadavers peer out.
Insist that freedom and the state of nature are synonyms, and the cadavers will try to bite you. The tame, the domesticated, try to monopolize the word freedom; they'd like to apply it to their own condition. They apply the word wild to the free. But it is another public secret that the tame, the domesticated, occasionally become wild but are never free so long as they remain in their pens.
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But none of them ever worked. And everyone knows it. The armored Christians who later “discovered” these communities knew that these people did no work, and this knowledge grated on Christian nerves, it rankled, it caused cadavers to peep out. The Christians spoke of women who did “lurid dances” in their fields instead of confining themselves to chores; they said hunters did a lot of devilish “hocus pocus” before actually drawing the bowstring.
These Christians, early time-and-motion engineers, couldn’t tell when play ended and work began. Long familiar with the chores of zeks, the Christians were repelled by the lurid and devilish heathen who pretended that the Curse of Labor had not fallen on them. The Christians put a quick end to the “hocus pocus” and the dances, and saw to it that none could fail to distinguish work from play.
Our ancestors I’ll borrow Turner’s term and call them the Possessed had more important things to do than to struggle to survive.
Fredy Perlman: Against His-story, Against Leviathan! (1983)
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I hope some of you get interested and read some of them.. Also see this movie :
Just as a small introduction of what is happening to the planet. Even if you feel "life is good" , it is unsustainable.
Research for soil erosion, soil depletion, deforestation, overfishing, overgrazing, desertification, plastic in the ocean, dead zones in the ocean, water pollution because of fertilizers and insecticides, peak oil, and so on.
This thread is about a different way people could organize. Not about renouncing technology. And everything is linked, the destruction of the planet is the reason people should think about this stuff. If we had 1000000 Earths waiting for us somewhere, there would be no reason for me to write this.
More links
The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard
The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq—By Richard Manning (Harper's Magazine)
The Gospel of Consumption | Orion Magazine
Quote:
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Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.
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The fact that there are new houses sitting empty while people lose their own houses, and at the same time people compete against each other, ready to work more and more but they find no work, (because there are too many houses, cars, and so on already) so they can't get a house, should raise some questions about our "advanced civilization". Logic and reason about what "we" do are gone, people would dig holes and fill them up again no questions asked if someone would pay them for that.
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Blog
One day there will be so many houses, that people will be bored and will go live in tents. "Why are you living in tents ? Are there not enough houses ?" "Yes there are, but we play this Economy game"
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