John Zerzan, anarchist and Unabomber sympathizer, critiques industrial civilization’s reliance on technology—from military-funded systems like the Internet to wage slavery and environmental destruction—arguing it deepens isolation despite conveniences. He contrasts pre-civilization societies’ equity with modern coercion, supports property damage as protest against systemic oppression (e.g., Seattle 1999), and rejects unions like AFL-CIO for enabling corporate expansion. While acknowledging contradictions in his own tech use, Zerzan insists societal collapse risks violence unless transitioned through decentralized alternatives, leaving listeners to weigh his radical vision against civilization’s documented progress. [Automatically generated summary]
But so going quickly to my own website, I'm heartened to find under the links that we've got the story.
Here it is, Tallahassee, Florida, actually.
A 22-year-old British woman, British woman living in Florida is believed to have the brain illness linked to bad cow disease, first known case in the U.S. But check this, the woman is believed to have caught the fatal disease by eating beef in Britain at the height of that country's cattle epidemic in the late 1980s or early 90s, according to Dr. Steve Ostoff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
So all I can say to that is, thank God.
I just, you know, to imagine no more burgers, that's like, I don't know, to me, that's like a death sentence itself.
I love burgers.
And they're also running a story that says, super plumes rumble inside Earth.
Now, isn't that interesting?
And once again, I'm surprised, shocked, and pleased to find on my own website the story.
Two super plumes of molten rock appear to be powering through the boundary between the Earth's upper and lower mantle, perhaps feeding volcanoes and affecting movement of the planet's crust.
New evidence of these super plumes located between the south central Pacific Ocean and southern Africa come from studies of seismic waves conducted by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
So there you are.
The Earth's inner.
You know, last night was an interesting program.
It really was.
I really, really enjoy interviewing Red Elk.
He's really something.
Now, I know that many will say he's just crazy and balloony and talks to rocks and does all kinds of strange things, but you know what?
There's something about so much of what he says that resonates.
Never mind how it said.
Well, what he says resonates with me in a big way.
And I know a lot of you as well.
Listening casually, I would imagine you'd go, there's a nutcase for sure.
Hey, you know, are there any other anarchists out there?
Since we're having an anarchist-like night, it might be interesting to hear from anybody out there who would consider themselves to be an anarchist.
Would that be you?
This fellow is really something.
I mean, he's living the life, you know.
He's walking the walk.
But, well, you'll hear for yourself.
I mean, he's been involved in violent things.
Doesn't believe in any modern technology.
Doesn't use any modern technology.
So you'll not see a website for my guest.
First thing I checked.
I wonder if he's got a website.
No website.
Doesn't even have a computer.
Doesn't even have a car.
A popular Amtrak train carrying tourists and their cars on a non-stop journey to Washington hurled right off the tracks Thursday in rural Northern Florida, killed six injured dozens.
Well, what did Colombo do it?
Robert Blake and his bodyguard were arrested Thursday in the shooting death of the actor's wife nearly a year ago.
Police officers have taken Blake into custody at a relative's home in Hidden Hills.
Good name.
A gated suburban community where the actor moved after the killing.
Where'd he go?
Hidden Hills.
He was arrested for investigation of murder, according to the police.
Bonnie Lee Blakely, 44, you'll recall, shot to death last May a block from a Studio City restaurant where she and her husband had dined.
You recall he said he went back into the restaurant for a gun that he had forgotten or something.
A small plane, this really set off alarm bells everywhere earlier today, a small airplane crashed into the largest building in Milan, Italy, killing at least three that we know of now, injuring 60.
And of course, it was the building most associated with Italian capitalism, and everybody thought, oh, God, here we go, 911.
But of course, it was not an airliner, and tragic as it was, it looks more like it was an accident.
They think.
They think.
Israel completed its pullback from Jedin on Friday, according to Israeli radio, posting forces on the outskirts of the West Bank town and allowing residents to search for relatives in a devastated refugee camp.
Negotiations abruptly collapsed today between the Justice Department and Arthur Anderson over settling criminal obstruction charges related to the destruction of documents in the financial collapse of Enron.
The lawyer for the accounting firm Rusty Hardin notified government attorneys that the company was not in a position to make a decision on any criminal settlement.
We just agreed that we're just not there right now, said he.
The Senate, by, I might add, a wide margin, has put a kink in the president's plans for drilling oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge up in Alaska, Anwar.
The vote was a blow indeed to the administration, which repeatedly has cited development of Alaska's refuges oil as a centerpiece of its energy policy.
Well, it's a pretty damn, even if we get it, it's a pretty damn short-term solution.
I'll tell you that.
The oil is going to run out.
There will be, if we don't do something, all of my first hour guest last night, there are going to be wars over oil, and we're going to be in them.
Oil prices are going to go through the roof, and it is going to destroy our economy.
We had better get busy with alternative something, or it's, I'll tell you, it's going to get us.
We're still cleaning up the mess here in Nevada, southern Nevada, from the dust storm, the horrible windstorm we had on Monday, which has succeeded in coating just about everything around with a sort of a dense layer of terra firma.
The five brightest planets visible from Earth have lined up in plain sight to form a spectacular array that we won't see again until the year 2040.
So I may not, well, I might see that, but you know, I'll be really straining.
I'll have to have much better glasses by then, right?
2040.
So, might as well take a look now.
For the next four weeks, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, and Venus will appear tightly clustered in the western sky, forming a knot of planets that can be viewed in the evening despite the glow of light-soaked cities.
In other words, these are bright enough to make it through the most polluted inner city areas, and it might even be worth a drive out to the country, huh?
What do you think?
The five naked-eye planets are converging in one part of the sky from now until mid-May.
You can see all five at one glance, which is pretty unusual, quoting John Mosley, an astronomer at Griffith Observatory in L.A. Each evening, the alignment will assume different shapes as the five planets continue on the orbital path that will take them around the sun.
Planets orbit in the same plane, like grooves on a phonograph record, only at different distances.
Now, there are some out there, of course, who will suggest that planetary alignments and weird things that go on affect all of us here on Earth.
I don't know if I'm one of those people or not.
I don't think so.
We're having a drought.
We're having a really serious drought in the U.S. And here's a part of an article by Brian Hicks from a publication called The Cutting Edge.
I don't know if you've been keeping an eye on the meteorological reports coming out of the East Coast, but governors from Maine to Florida could be facing a revolt reminiscent of Shay's Rebellion.
Sounds overly dramatic, but it is not.
In fact, there was a revolt of sorts just last summer in the West.
A group of farmers rebelled in Klamath Falls, Oregon for exactly the same reason a severe water shortage caused by drought.
What did they do?
Tired of watching their crops die of thirst, farmers broke into the Klamath Falls Canal and released about a million gallons of water into the valley to water their farms, but it did not help much.
The feds closed in to restore order and protect the water, and many farms turned into virtual dust bowls.
The same pattern is just about to repeat itself here on the east coast, and most residents aren't prepared at all.
It's not even two weeks into the spring season, and Governor of Maryland has already implemented water restrictions, declared a state of emergency in seven Maryland counties.
Some think he's junking the gun, but the writer of this article sees a crisis developing on a par with the natural gas squeeze of the winter of 2001 and the California electricity crisis of the last summer.
And I suspect, I'm not going to read the rest of this article, but it's obvious where he's going here.
And he's absolutely right.
As our weather changes, as the climate changes, if the results are less water, and here we're not getting much at all.
I mean, even in the desert, you expect a little bit.
And we have been having a drought for our area.
You know, it rains a little bit in the desert.
I mean, we used to get these wonderful monsoons that would used, you know, they'd come up and you'd have thunderstorms and maybe we'll get them.
But in recent years, they have been noticeably absent.
They've been missing us, changing.
And so things are becoming even more arid.
Check this out.
A United Nations report indicates that 40 lakes in the Himalayas are in danger of bursting their banks and causing devastating floods with little warning as far away as 100 kilometers downstream.
This is from the United Nations now.
The lakes form as mountain glaciers melt, and this process appears to be accelerating due to the effects of global warming.
Or let me insert here, whatever in the hell is going on, because I'm not sure.
Unless urgent action is taken, any one of these lakes could burst its banks with potentially catastrophic results.
According to a new scientist, to quote a new scientist, the floods used to occur about once every 500 years, but have become far more frequent since 1950.
So in other words, here you're seeing the reality of what is changing in our climate.
Right?
Here you're seeing an immediate effect.
40 lakes in the Himalayas, because these things are melting so quickly, are in danger of bursting.
Now, I think the time for debate is long over.
If you want, you can have argument about how much of man's hand is affecting what's going on.
But I think it's ballgame over.
The climate is in the middle of a change right now.
A fast climate change of some kind, I think, I believe, my personal belief is underway.
I just don't want to spend a lot of time arguing about why.
I don't think it matters.
You know, it's just happening, whether it's us or not or just cyclical.
You know, who cares?
To me, we should be turning our attention toward a modification of the way we do business and live so that we can accommodate the changes reasonably and remain strong.
If we stick our head in the sand about it, which is not hard to do where I am right now, then we're dead.
University of California researchers have solved a long-standing mystery for scientists trying to understand how Earth's climate can quickly shift between warm and cold modes.
The mystery revolves around the source of a rapid change in the geochemistry of oceanic carbon that occurred just as the last ice age ended between 16,000 and 20,000 years ago.
Based on analysis of carbon stored in tiny fossil seashells, the UC geologists suggest that the chemical change occurred because of dramatic shifts in ocean circulation.
They have developed a timeline of events that can be linked to previously described changes recorded in the ocean, in Antarctic ice cores, and on the continents.
Climate change experts say these changes reflect the type of events that could occur because of global warming related to human activities, their argument.
An explanation of the mystery and details of the timeline will appear in the April 19 issue of the journal Science in an article titled, The Cause of Carbon Isotope Minimum Events on Glacial Terminations.
There's a title.
Makes you want to grab it right up and read it.
The Cause of Carbon Isotope Minimum Events on Glacial Terminations.
The authors are geology professors Howard Spiro of UC Davis and David Leah of UC Santa Barbara.
That could be Leigh, L-E-A.
An understanding of the relative timing of this event is critical because the greenhouse gases that humans are producing are likely to affect not only the warming of the atmosphere, but also the circulation of the oceans.
According to Spiro, changes in atmospheric temperature can have immense effect on the flow of the deep ocean currents, which in turn will affect weather and climate worldwide.
Understanding the order of events that occurred when Earth warmed quickly in the past can help us model what might happen if the Earth continues to warm in the future.
Something that it appears to be doing very rapidly right now.
We're going to head straight into open lines and then anarchy.
Not that unusual, really.
this show.
unidentified
Trying to get myself ashore for so long for so long Listening to the strangest stories Wondering where it all went wrong for so long for so long Hold
on, hold on, hold on Do what you got So hold on, hold on, hold on Do what you got I'll be right back to you.
I'll be right back to you.
I freaking worry about any crime.
If you get wrong, you can write me.
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222.
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To rechart on the toll-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nye.
And I also agree with you that depending on what happens with the supply of oil, we're in for a big war, which is why I think the Senate was irresponsible in not approving oil exploration.
I agree with you, and I agree with the president, actually.
I think that in the short term, we're out of our minds.
Look, we proved on the North Slope that you can bring oil down safely.
Now, you can talk about the Exxon Dal D's if you want, but the pipeline scenario worked perfectly.
Didn't hurt the environment.
I think we could do the same thing at Anwar.
We've got to have short-term oil or we're dead meat.
But at the same time, if we don't start moving toward some alternative energy very quickly that's real, we're in deep cow pies.
unidentified
Absolutely.
And that's what the House bill provided for.
It provided for oil exploration in Anwar as well as other alternative energies such as the hydrogen fuel cells and so forth.
And I heard that the New York Times ran an interesting piece interviewing a Democratic senator, an unnamed one, from the Northeast, who was trying to get a compromise on the issue that would have raised the CAFE standards on automobiles in exchange for drilling in ANWAR.
And it was the environmentalists who wouldn't budge.
I'm looking at a definition of anarchism here, and it says that it's a belief that all forms of government act in an unfair way against the liberty of a person and should be done away with.
All of this, if you're a regular listener to this program, all of this is fitting in just like a thousand-piece puzzle going together.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
unidentified
If I'm not mistaken, he said that in the last 10 years, I believe, there's been a 600% increase in volcanic and earthquake activity.
I mean, are we trying to, those who believe that man's hand is causing this global warming, are we trying to say that this is connected to increase in volcanic and earthquakes?
I've come to the point where I don't, I just, to me, I don't care anymore.
We're not going to be able to stop what man is doing.
There are countries all over the world, sir, that want what we have basically, you know, a couple cars in every garage.
Now, this accepts my guest coming up in the next hour, but a couple cars in every garage and washers and dryers and all the wonderful conveniences of life.
The rest of the world wants all of this, and when they get it, I don't think that the world can sustain that kind of demand, period.
unidentified
Well, I agree with what Stephen Greer in part had to say last night about technology definitely being suppressed, and we definitely need to really put pressure on any area we can to try to get this to come to the front.
I mean, this technology and to move in that direction.
Well, how much money would you like to lay on a table right now?
I would be willing to bet you when the time comes when we really begin running out of oil and or read that as oil becomes too expensive and the nation goes into crisis, at about that point, the oil companies will come forth with whatever it is that's going to be next.
Want to bet?
unidentified
Yeah, but you know, they do say that the biggest reserve of oil in the world is in the Gulf, and it's untapped.
So, I mean, there can be arguments made that we might have a hundred years, 200 years worth of oil still in the ground.
Let's say that's true, and we've got another 100 or even 200 years, which I don't believe, but let's say we do.
That's still in the time frame that means that we've got to begin moving towards something else because the supply is finite.
unidentified
Right?
Yeah, the advancement Of technology and growth and learning will make eventually in the next 30, 40, 50 years, I believe, oil consumption obsolete to a great degree, whether we use it up first or not.
They cannot keep the advanced technology for greater long periods of time from the human race.
Why has nothing ever been done by Hollywood about Tesla?
Boy, what a good point.
I appreciate the call.
Thank you.
Isn't that a good point?
Why hasn't there ever been a Tesla movie?
Or has there been, and I just don't know about it?
What an incredible potential movie that would be when you think about it, right?
Just absolutely incredible.
I mean, you could take the reality of Tesla, which is wild enough, and combine it with the myth of Tesla, and oh my, what a feature film you could produce.
I have this feeling we constantly give away million-dollar ideas on the show, which is fine.
I'm sorry to bother you with this question, but you had a guest on a few months ago that interviewed a person in Germany, I believe, that is getting information from UFO people, and he wrote a book about it, and he's interpreting.
We're waiting to hear if there's ever any resolution to this whole anthrax thing or if it's just going to go away and we're never going to see it again.
You know, I really want to open up snail mail again, but unfortunately, when you get thousands of pieces of mail, you've got to pay attention to that kind of baloney.
unidentified
Well, what I've been sent to you where I had to show my ID to Melody or what have you.
I never really watched either one much, but anyway, Blake arrested.
Okay, coming up, this should be, will be very, very interesting.
My guest coming up is John Zerzan.
He's an anarchist author, as he writes books, who believes that our culture is on a death march and that technology, in all its forms, must be resisted.
He corresponds and sympathizes with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
He believes that civilization has been a failure and that the system is fast collapsing.
Zerzan has been blamed by some for the mayhem in Seattle of 1999.
Of Czech origin on both sides of his family, Zerzan grew up in Salem, Oregon, took degrees in political science at Stanford, history at San Francisco State.
After organizing a union for social services, employees took postgraduate studies at the University of Southern California.
In 1966, he was arrested for demonstrating against the Vietnam War.
Nearly 20 years ago, he moved north to Eugene, Oregon, where he's since become something of an anarchist stronghold, where there have been some very fierce battles fought against gentrification and development.
He owns no car, doesn't have a car, doesn't have a credit card, has no computers, travels by bicycle.
He's financed his riding by selling his own blood plasma, but now makes his living doing odd jobs.
Does volunteer work with disabled people in the weight room of the local YMCA, as a radio show himself on KWVA local campus station on which he plays everything from classical to hip-hop.
He has recently been in Europe, in Spain, England, and the trip has enthused him.
He found that people there are ready for some movement that is pitched at a deeper level.
He thinks the riots in Seattle have inspired the world by providing the opening battle of a new movement.
Well, I guess anarchy or anarchism is a lot of things.
I think most basically it's the effort to identify and eliminate all of the different kinds of domination.
Maybe on another level, anarchism is the anti-globalization movement.
That movement now, by all accounts, really, is pretty much totally an anarchist affair, to make it more concrete.
And another way to look at it, it seems to some of us anyway, I'm not speaking for every anarchist, but I think it's, in a fundamental way, it's the desire to have a world that doesn't need running.
I think that's an anti-domination principle or urge.
I mean, there are a lot of different radical leftist philosophies that are so many ways to run the world, but what if we had a world that didn't need running?
Well, unless you can get people to freely engage in all the drudgery and everything that an industrial civilization requires for there to be planes and the rest of it.
Well, yeah, we have quite a congruence in thinking about quite a few things.
And I agree with you.
I think that what is the so-called manifesto, which is really the essay called Industrial Society and Its Future, really makes, to me it makes essentially one point, which I think is kind of inescapable.
And it's closely argued.
It's persuasive, I think.
Of course, I agree with it.
I have to admit that.
I already agree with it.
But the point is that the more a society becomes technified, the less freedom there will be and the less personal fulfillment there will be.
And I think he demonstrates that that's the case.
So the more technology we have, the less of that we'll have.
I think there is a distinction between the ideas and his actual practice.
But I would also say that I don't think when you examine it that certain people are so innocent as it was just widely claimed as if they were sort of random victims that have no role in a very awful project.
I think that's another point.
It doesn't mean that I'm endorsing sending a bomb to them, but what is their role and what's going on?
It is, in fact, incontrovertible, but what is controvertible is that we're not absolutely certain that it's man's hand here.
It could be a natural cyclical event.
One interesting thing, though, whether it's being aided by man's hand or has nothing at all to do with man's hand may in the end aid your cause of anarchy.
Because if we get a massive fast climate shift, man's hand or not, there's going to be a lot of anarchy.
I think if people consciously decide that they need to dismantle this whole system and go in a different direction, then it'll be the good anarchy, so to speak.
And if we're just passively consuming and avoiding the reality and it befalls us, then we won't be very equipped to make a good outcome out of it.
Well, first of all, I wouldn't want that power because if I did, I wouldn't be an anarchist.
But if people decided that they wanted the kind of community, which is a decentralized face-to-face human community, the kind of thing that we're speeding away from every day we get further from it,
and the toll of that on the human spirit and on society is ever greater, then the Work is cut out for us, then it's time to reverse this direction before it's too late.
And that's, I mean, another way to look at it, I am rather inspired by the current outlook of the literature in anthropology and archaeology, which talks about a natural anarchy or a state of anarchy, really that obtained for a couple of million years before civilization.
And now we really have a much different look at that, a different estimation than we used to.
In the past few decades, there's been quite a revision there, which is a whole topic in itself.
In other words, before government and armies and religion and taxes and everything else, there wasn't any need for the state, and people lived in a very direct way, in a face-to-face way.
And to me, that's the ultimate goal, is how do we get there?
Well, you could make the argument, of course, given the situation we have now, there's a need for police for the protection of people, especially women, because there's so much violence out there.
There's so much violence against women, for example.
It's plausible to say that if we and of course if we assume that things would only be worse without the state, without the cops and the army and everything, then if we believe the ideology that we're always fed, that if it weren't for those forces, people would just sort of kill each other and take advantage of each other, then of course you would believe you have to have all these forces of repression.
Even if you go back to like 2001, when the apes got the spark of intelligence or the creator, whatever did it, and the first thing they did was pick up a club and go hit somebody in the other tribe.
Well, I think that they're, according to the literature, people have the same intelligence, speaking of intelligence, that we do about a million years ago, or probably a lot further back than that, because, for example, people were cooking with fire.
They were cooking fibrous vegetables almost 2 million years ago.
The data goes back to 1.9 million.
And people were sailing or somehow navigating way outside of the site of land 800,000 years ago.
So, you know, if you want to look at the actual record, Homo or whatever we call humans back then had a lot of intelligence.
They didn't put it to building bombs and other things like that or monuments and so forth for a long time, really only until about 10,000 years ago, which is just really important.
First of all, there is no evidence of organized violence before civilization, really.
I'm not saying there was no interpersonal violence.
There probably was some.
These are generalizations, but there's a lot of stuff behind these generalizations.
Another one is people had to work all the time, and it was very precarious.
They had to scrabble all the time for existence.
Actually, the record, according to, you know, again, in the field, there was a huge amount of leisure time, and I could start citing a bunch of books, but I don't know if you want me to do that.
So that there really wasn't much work.
And that's kind of the reversal of the picture we used to have.
Another stereotype is the cartoonish version of the caveman pulling the woman by the hair into the cave.
Well, there's a lot of evidence to show that there was a lot more autonomy, that women had a lot more autonomy and equality than they did after civilization.
There was much more gender equity there.
And so, you know, things like that are really an amazing, they've informed my thinking a lot.
When I discovered this big revision back in the 80s, that is when I discovered it, it really affected my thinking a lot.
Because it gives you the idea that, you know, even though we're constantly told that, again, we would tear each other apart without the state and without the cops and all this other stuff like that, because people always did, well, they didn't.
Well, partly it's how you define technology, and to me, the problem begins with division of labor or specialization if you want to go all the way back.
It's not to deprive people of things, but it is to imagine a healthier place where people wouldn't be dependent on those things or trying to derive satisfaction from those things, which are destructive.
I wonder what kind of world it would be, and especially since even if we accept your argument academically that at one time things were chaotic but very nice with lots of leisure time and everybody was laying around and it was love, peace, and whatever.
Even if we accept that argument, you must admit that now we do have civilization, like it or not, in your case not, we've got it.
And to attempt to go to anarchy now would result in the things that you were talking about, you know, raping, plundering, killing, all of the rest of that.
I mean, that certainly would be a product of an immediate switch or even a fairly slow switch to a state of anarchy, wouldn't it?
Well, I think that that involves a whole lot of assumptions there.
I think the question of the material deprivation of people in the cities, if somebody just pulled the plug overnight, of course.
I don't think any of us are imagining that or embracing that kind of picture, but I think there are ways to begin thinking about other alternatives and other directions that can How?
Well, for example, we have to think that we are dependent on this perfected world system for food, for example.
But when you think about it, it's really quite irrational in terms of feeding people because the main idea of it isn't feeding people.
The main idea is making a profit.
So we have ended up with this system where, for example, a whole state grows one strain of corn or something like that, and then it's shipped all over the world.
And there's so much energy and time and so forth involved in storage and all of these other mechanisms that require so much, whereas the rather common sense notion of what might be growing right next to you to eat, that's not even, that would just be thought of as just wacky.
Well, then you pull down the high-rise and you pull up the freeway, and pretty soon you've got stuff growing there.
I mean, just think of all the earth that's taken up with roads and freeways and sidewalks and everything else.
Things could be growing there.
I have a friend, a late friend, actually.
He's with us no more.
But we were arguing with some people about this some years ago, and they said, look, if this was suddenly a liberated world, what is the first actual thing you would do?
Not idea-wise.
And we were sitting on this stoop, actually, in San Francisco, and he looked down at the street, and he said, well, maybe I just go down there and start trying to pry up the street and let it breathe and start changing things.
In other words, to get to an idyllic world of mainly laziness or idle time, depending on what phrase you want to use, you'd have to do a hell of a lot of work.
There's all sorts of media image inflation about certain people that if they talk to somebody, they have to create this whole thing in order to justify talking to them.
Okay, let me, to me, all of this computerization, the whole high-tech thing makes three points, well, at least three points, but I think there are three main things that it says.
It connects us, it empowers us, and it gives us all this diversity that you were just referring to.
Well, how come people have never been so isolated?
How come people have never been so disempowered?
And how come, as Frederick Jamieson said, this is one of my favorite quotes, we live in a society that has never been so standardized in the history of the world?
Well, and it's actually free at this particular moment until everybody's wired into it.
And, yeah, you can get online and do all these things.
And they're not going to, I mean, they're going to make some, they're You know, and then you might find it's too late to raise deeper questions or it makes it harder once you get everybody lured in.
But that's not the reason it was invented so that we could email our friends or whatever, our distant relatives.
Basically, the concept was that you'd have a kind of a spider web of communication so that scientists and government people, should there be a war, like a nuclear war or something like that, could communicate under any circumstances.
If you took out Silicon Valley or you took out Houston or New York, it wouldn't matter.
The Internet would continue to function because of the Godzillion neuron-like connections that it has.
Well, I think another thing is that when it became known what could be done with this, it really, bottom line, is about the movement of capital and the ever-faster movement of transactions in the global marketplace.
And, you know, again, you can attract people even though that's not what it's all about because people can email people for free and all that.
The British Prime Minister did say one time that what's happening with electronics and computers and satellites is one day going to all collapse, that billions of dollars, while you sleep, billions of dollars transfers through computers and satellites all across the face of the globe.
It never rests.
It's going on all the time.
And one of these days, there's going to be some snafu, big snafu.
Well, I think it's more like people will step away from that for various reasons.
I mean, this connectedness, for example, it's a cliche, but we don't know who lives next to us anymore because we're all just crowded in and we're we're told that this is this great connection, but we're becoming less and less connected, of course.
Big thing about how many people are becoming more withdrawn from civic and political and social stuff, how the rise of one-person households has just boomed in the last decades.
We're becoming, for various reasons, just shrinking into these little zones.
Blowing it up is pretty dramatic, but it might be abandoned by people who see its real result in so many, many ways.
For example, I'm sure that product you were just touting works just fine, but like all that stuff, it looks real clean on the shelf.
But when you think about what happens to the earth to get it, all the toxicity, all the drudgery, all the smelting, the plastics, the furnaces, the mines.
Running on Emptiness, The Pathology of Civilization, Future, Primitive, and Other Essays.
Against Civilization, Readings and Reflections, Elements of Refusal, Questioning Technology, a Critical Anthology, and Questioning Technology, Tool, Toy, or Tyrant.
Actually, none of these, virtually none of them were written as books, but they're more collected essays kind of things, which, like Future Primitive is the other one, much like that.
that were written over a seven or eight year period or collected in the book.
They cover a number of things, not just technology but Did you scribble them while a candle burned in the background in a little hut somewhere in Idaho?
Well, the anti-globalization is probably the most obvious place where if there is a new movement to contend with all this, it is taking that form at this time.
And you mentioned Seattle back at the end of 99.
These mass demonstrations have gotten bigger and more militant around the world.
You know, they can't even hold these World Trade Organization or World Bank summit meetings without the wrath of thousands of people in the streets, although September 11 has caused a certain setback in this country, definitely, because of, well, for obvious reasons.
That has put a chill on things temporarily.
I think that's very temporary.
So in terms of that militancy, I think it's informed by more and more understanding or more and more questioning of what is civilization, what is technology, what is this trajectory of modern society, and how deep would we have to go to get to a healthier place.
And so I think, again, I'm not by any stretch saying I speak for all anarchists.
That wouldn't be an anarchist thing to do.
And there are definitely some anarchists who believe that you can't speak all the technology, like you do.
There are anarchists who think it's just, like you said, it all depends on how you use it.
Well, I think it's going in a good direction so far.
In other words, real resistance in the streets, for one thing.
And so I advocate property damage.
Instead of just symbolic, polite, hold up your sign, do what the cops tell you, it's going to take more than that to undo this whole ghastly cancer of technology and capital that's destroying the whole planet.
Yeah, but a lot of times what's intended to be property damage, you know, when people go out and blow up abortion clinics or whatever their cause is, they end up killing people.
For example, the Earth Liberation Front, they've burned down a lot of buildings and so on, but no one has been injured, much less killed, in all of these various arsons and so on.
But it's not just an academic question.
It's a real question of what people get hurt.
If a cop attacks you and you defend yourself and the cop gets hurt, well, what about that?
And I think there's also another dimension, by the way, there's a fantastic video about Seattle called Breaking the Spell.
A local videographer here, Tim Lewis, made this, and he's marvelous.
But anyway, the title of that, it refers to breaking windows, but the real meaning, and it comes out in the video, in the film, is that you break the spell of conditioning.
We're all caged animals.
We're all suppressed and repressed.
And there's a realization that you can move against oppression.
You can do something about domination.
And there were people up there who said, for example, I thought we'd never see white people really fighting.
And, you know, that went on for almost a week up there.
And it wasn't just, I mean, it spread.
And that's the kind of thing that's going to have to happen.
When you destroy, let's say, a corporate building that you think is egregiously affecting the environment in some way, do you think that the publicity from that and the thinking of the people that read that publicity aids your cause or harms it?
You know, I think the most basic thing that I got was that people know that something different is needed, that the old answers, including the old radical movements, the left-wing stuff, doesn't do it.
Let's stick with Europe and the differences there for a second.
It's mainly socialist.
And the tax rates there are unblinking believable.
I mean, they're just unbelievable.
They're unbearable.
Yeah, the streets are clean and the buildings are clean, but the people are subjected to the kind of tyranny that would make America look like truly the land of the free.
And of course, in the third world, where indigenous cultures have tried to stave off the empire for hundreds of years, not just something, first world protest movement.
And it's not true, for example, well, sorry if I'm jumping around here, but that not everybody wants to become a consumer on the model of North America or something.
I mean, there are people who realize what a bad bargain it is to give away your authentic culture for what?
The things he believes, there are a few contradictions, of course, in what he says and what he does with regard to what he believes, but those are concessions I guess you might have to make to a modern world.
So you really weren't exactly alive except for the very, you know, very end of it, same for me.
Now, if you had been, though, and Hitler was marching across Europe and the Jews were being incinerated from your political perspective, what would you have done?
What if there was some kind of revolution that I'm talking about, other people are talking about, then other countries might just take advantage of that.
You could put it that way, perhaps.
And then what would happen if we undid all this stuff, including all the high-tech weaponry and everything else, then we'd be prey to the other people that haven't done it yet.
And the police that we have now that respond to social disorder, or in some cases, what I'm sure you consider to be social order, without them, we would have rape, we would have robbery, we would have plundering and all the worst kinds of things.
I'm going to read you what I think is a parody article.
This appeared in The Onion, whatever The Onion is.
It might be a website.
I don't know.
But it's a parody, I think, obviously.
It says, Nevada to phase out laws altogether.
Carson City, Nevada.
The Nevada legislature voted money to repeal all laws within the state and prohibit the use of any new laws.
Laws have been good to the state of Nevada, said Governor Kenny Gwynn, between swigs of Jim Beam.
But ultimately, after considering what's best for the long-term economic growth and prosperity of the state, we decided that lawlessness or excuse me, lawfulness just wasn't a good idea.
Nevada's laws, Gwynn said, this is parody folks, will be slowly phased out over a five-year period, easing residents into a state of total anarchy.
Gambling and prostitution have already been decriminalized, and car theft is slated to follow in 2004.
Bans on murder and rape will be lifted in 2007.
Though the elimination of the rule of law has been a topic of discussion in Carson City for some time, it only recently gained favor among a majority of state legislators.
Critics always argued that if we allowed gambling and prostitution, it was simply a short leap to lawlessness, said Senate Majority Leader William Reggio, R.A.G.I.O., flanked by a pair of armed strippers.
It didn't sink in for a while, but we eventually just sort of looked at each other and said, why not?
Without laws, Nevada could offer a whole range of entertainment and lifestyle options never before imagined.
As a result of the eradication of laws, more than 20,000 police officers and other law enforcement officials stand to lose their jobs.
The law should be offset, however, with the creation of new jobs in new fields.
Quote, nothing stimulates employment like lawlessness.
We estimate this move will create more than 400,000 jobs in such newly legal professions as prize fight rigger, ticket scalper, drug runner, bribe coordinator, and arsonist.
In the construction industry alone, some 20,000 workers will be needed to build whorehouses and install stripper poles in fast food restaurants.
Though Monday's decision eliminates the need for them, Nevada lawmakers will retain their jobs.
The people of Nevada can rest assured that their state senators and assemblymen will still be taking care of their needs, be they sex, drugs, or a quick CNO to lay down on the Lakers plus six, Gwynn said.
As for Nevada's elected officials in Washington, they'll still be in Congress.
But to be honest, they won't be doing a heck of a lot.
They'll mainly just be hanging out, seeing what the other states are up to.
Gwynn highly recommended that Nevada residents buy a gun, learn how to use it if they plan to remain in the state beyond December 31st, when all gun purchasing and gun use regulations are repealed.
When the clock strikes midnight, January 1st, 2003, at survival of the fittest, said Gwynn.
My lovely wife, Demic, can already pick off tin cans from 50 feet, and my son is becoming highly proficient in explosives.
I strongly suggest you all do likewise.
Reaction from Nevada's residents has been largely positive.
I've been waiting for this moment for 20 years, said Reno blackjack dealer Dale Everson, polishing his new machete while enjoying a lap dance.
Pretty soon, said he, I won't have to worry about speeding tickets or emission tests, only common sense and inherent decency of the people of Nevada will govern this state.
And that is the code of the social order, whatever social order you have.
Law is its language, its code.
In other words, it wouldn't do any good to just get rid of government.
I mean, that's the classic anarchist thing, smash the state.
You just get rid of government.
But, of course, if you don't change the social system, then you're not really helping anything because it's still going to give you all these problems.
Well, in places, you know, there are examples on earth of where they have smashed governments and they end up with all these warring fiefdoms that spring up, these little kingdoms that people create at a macro level, building eventually to another government.
In other words, it seems like an inevitable evolutionary process.
Even if you smash government, it's going to come back, like it or not.
It's not a very promising picture, but it just seems like maybe when the worst of it is coming into view, when people consider what kind of a world,
what kind of society their children are going to have in just, say, five years, and you've got all of these things coming to pass, the fullness of civilization, in other words, then maybe the scales fall from people's eyes and they have to get rid of the whole thing if we want to have a chance at some Freedom and health.
And I think that's what's going on.
I mean, look at what kind of a society, for example, is it that virtually no one can get through the day without some kind of drug or drugs, legal, illegal, whatever.
Where kids now, I mean, that's not enough to give kids Riddle.
And now, you know, kids as young as two are taking these heavy antidepressants.
There's tens of millions of people on antidepressants, adults, that is.
You know, the teenage suicide rate has tripled in the last 30 years.
Well, we don't know the whole picture, but again, the first two million years, we didn't see evidence of that kind of thing because there was a certain harmony.
There was a certain connection with each other in the natural world.
I mean, even granting whoever of us is right, relatively, but you can see the utility of having everyone think that and having it pounded into us from every institution, every angle forever to keep us in line.
And, you know, that is very useful to the system of hierarchy and domination so we don't stray out there.
In fact, they always said that.
Outside the city walls, it's death and doom and, oh, you don't want to go there.
You're lucky we've got these troops here to keep you here because it's not safe.
And I mean, since the beginning of civilization, people have been told that.
And, you know, it's just a kind of myth, whether it's true or not.
You see, the thing was that then, at least certainly in some of history, or a lot of history we can document, the people who didn't live behind those walls and have the protection of those walls and whatever organization protected them, for the most part, died in bloody puddles.
Listen, when we find tribes generally that have escaped detection by civilization, we usually go in and give it to them, frequently with disastrous results.
I don't support the state having the power over human life to start with.
So if you predicate all the rest of this stuff, then you're in this kind of situation where the logic tells you that that's okay to do this and that.
But I don't accept any of that.
That whole string of stuff starts at a place that has to be unplugged, so you don't keep getting this kind of stuff.
Whether it's the nationalism, the religious fundamentalism, all these are just symptoms of these are the things you get from civilization.
They're always the things you get from civilization, and they keep on happening, but with worse and worse results, because there's the technology to do more horrible things.
With the technology, you can have industrialized Holocaust.
You can have jetliners fly into skyscrapers at the scale of death that you didn't have before.
I think religion is just one of those compensations or consolations that comes along as the real stuff slips away, then that's the thing, that's part of the progression to civilization.
You get the claim that things can be healed on some imagined realm, which is easier than facing the real realm, which is here and now in this world, that that's where the healing happens, or else it doesn't happen.
The rest is an illusion.
Well, it's a comforting illusion where millions of people go for it because people are so deressed and so sad and so deprived, so you've got people flocking into churches.
Well, then if on September 12th, what was your attitude?
That we should, well, gee, this only happened because of the way we are.
That's why this happened.
It didn't happen because there's some madman, from our perspective anyway, who thinks that our religion is all wrong and whose main objective is seeing us die.
I mean, it wasn't like they wanted a change in U.S. policy of any particular sort.
Well, I don't see how they can be all-out war because there's only one superpower.
I mean, it's the war of just the U.S. bombing whoever it wants.
And I don't know if that's a war.
It's like Iraq.
You can kill several hundred thousand Iraqis.
They're lambs to the slaughter because they accept or they suffer under a certain regime, and here comes another regime that's bigger and stomps on them.
If society got rid of all the cops in government and let all the rapers and pillagers run loose, wouldn't it just be a question of where you would place your faith in good or evil?
I'm thinking our society basically places its faith in evil by assuming that if you let all the criminals run free, that they're going to come kill us.
And that's the kind of thing that I think that seems like a basic thing.
Well, yeah, well, we were kind of talking about this before.
In other words, what causes all the awful behaviors?
It doesn't come down from heaven, in my view.
It comes from what happens in society.
It comes from the pressures and all of the ways people are damaged and deformed, and then you get awful results.
And then what do you do with them?
But it doesn't occur to enough people yet that the way to stop this whole cycle is to think about what would a society be like that doesn't turn out all kinds of antisocial behavior.
And I'm not saying there's no antisocial behavior.
There is, but why?
I don't believe it's human nature.
If you treat people well, they behave well.
If they're abused in a thousand different ways and messed up, then they're going to be dangerous.
In other words, in a lot of really family-oriented, close-knit American households, some youngsters that come up for some indiscernible, inexplicable reason become completely antisocial and start slaughtering people.
Now, up until that moment, they've been raised with a mom and a dad and a tight family unit and all the things that I'm sure you probably believe in, and yet they go berserk.
So there is documentably uncontrollable, inexplicable, antisocial behavior.
Would you have no means whatsoever to control that?
Well, no, but it's not a real simple, obvious equation, at least not always.
I mean, that child, there may be a loving family, but it's part of the child exists in this whole larger culture and gets all kinds of other stuff in all kinds of other settings, you know, from media, from school, from everywhere else.
And there's, I mean, we don't know.
I'm not claiming to know how all these things exactly connect or don't connect.
But, you know, his family isn't proof against the larger unhealthy situation either.
I mean, something of a protection, but not much, maybe.
Okay, but before you call for a dissolution of all things that would protect us from anti-social behavior of this sort, in the process, you're taking away those things that create the behavior.
I mean, in other words, you don't need a defense against them if you're not creating them if they don't exist beforehand.
I mean, and, you know, for example, there was no, and you probably won't believe this one either in terms of the anthropology, just to jump back there for a second.
But there was no infectious disease, no degenerative disease before civilization.
That's just about all the diseases.
They exist before civilization.
They are products of civilization.
So in other words, what are we going to do about all the disease?
Yeah, but if you track the record of civilization, as many pitfalls and road bumps and potholes as there may be on the way, at the beginning of civilization, we had all kinds of sickness and death and disease and plague.
And much of that has been eradicated.
And documentably, during the period of civilization, man's average longevity has increased very dramatically.
In fact, early in civilization, John, you'd be dead and buried long since.
Well, there's a couple of things to be said to that.
One is all of these diseases that technology was supposed to have gotten rid of, not all of them, but a lot of them are coming back, and there's a whole host of new ones.
Mad cow disease, West Nile virus, there's a whole long, in other words, technology always says just a little more technology and we'll have it.
Well, actually, this is so widely known, February National Geographic has a long article, and that's a very orthodox source.
And then that's what they're saying, drawing on all the evidence.
So, in other words, it hasn't exactly won the day.
Yeah, people live longer.
People are kept alive, but it's another one thing to consider, though, is what kind of life, if you have to take all these drugs to be normal or at least, you know, not totally chronically depressed or have some of these diseases now, they're multiplying and people don't even know what causes them, like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia.
I could go on and on about that, where people are really miserable on a visceral level who can stay alive longer.
And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with staying alive.
John, to get that heart to you, my God Almighty, we've got to do the most heroic kinds of things to get that heart to you and into you and beating and keeping you alive.
But I'll tell you, I don't feel frustrated or oh, I feel somewhat frustrated when you look at what's going on.
but i also feel very hopeful about things i think people are starting to see they already feel it and i think people are starting to We're at the bottom of the tail.
Listen to the words, because I think this is what the Johns were talking about.
unidentified
And all the people living for the day in my life, no country is hard to do nothing to kill or
I'm going to die for I know religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye From west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255 East of the
Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222 and the wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295 to rechart on the toll-free international line call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with our bell from the Kingdom of Nigh.
And I think one question, though, is the dreaming.
Aren't we dreaming if we're thinking that this we're not thinking to allow the present trajectory just to go on and given what it's producing more and more?
John, I think you are exercising eminent common sense.
I think you're a dreamer with your feet on the ground.
I would generally agree with you with some qualifications.
Maybe I tend to agree a little more with Art in that rather than taking it to the ground, the technology to the ground, that we should really seriously start applying the brakes.
But I think it tend to be a little bit of a conspiracist point of view that maybe a lot of this technology, whiz-bang technology, especially in the way of our toys and our everyday gadgetry, is one way of distracting us so that we remain basically powerless.
And I see a lot of the mass pathology of our society going hand in hand with this mass and overplight technology.
I just wonder what you think about that.
And do you think that there should be a spiritual component that to make your system work, there has to be a very broad-based spiritual component and people have to generally become more wise?
I mean, I think people did have a kind of communion with the natural world, and there is maybe that's my kind of definition of the spirit or spiritual having that intact connection with the world and with each other.
And you don't have to invent other realms.
You have the spirit there.
I agree with what you're saying.
There is a lot of distraction.
There's ever more stuff to buy, and it's always obsolete.
And people are working more and more.
In fact, the gadgets are making them work more and more when you think about it, huh?
I mean, the beepers and the cell phones and all the different ways you can't even get away from work when you're not working.
I mean, that's all true, but one can argue that as technological, even social progress, or one can argue, as you are, that it is actually the exact opposite.
Right?
Both arguments are interesting.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with John Zerzan.
Hearing you tonight is just confirmation of a lot of the decisions I've made personally.
Quick question, though.
From somebody who has taken his own steps five years ago to basically give away everything I owned and walk away from a six-figure job, leave my sports car at the airport, the whole nine yards to start a whole new life away from seeing myself basically buy what I was owning and what I was buying.
What would be practical advice that you would give sort of pseudo-anarchists out there for how they can continue along their path without maybe going to the extreme of living in a cabin without any possessions at all?
What would be your advice for somebody like me who would want to continue on this road but isn't really prepared to take it to that extreme?
Well, it sounds like you have been taking it to extreme.
You've been walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
I mean, I'd be real interested to hear what you're doing.
You evidently feel you weren't giving something up.
You were gaining something by walking away from all of that high pressure, I suppose, and all of the rest of it.
unidentified
Yeah, but along the way, I mean, I've taken a lot of lumps.
I've taken people looking at me like I'm, you know, and that's not really the issue.
The issue more for me is at this stage in my life is just trying to wake people up.
I'm currently, I've gone into mental health, so you guys talking about antisocial behavior rings a lot of truth to me.
And what they're actually finding out with antisocial behavior is that it's actually an adaptive tool that people are beginning to use to adapt to an insane society.
And I guess my question is, so I can let other people on, is what can people who are like me, who are listening to you tonight, apply on a level which wouldn't be as extreme as burning it down and waiting for it to rise from the ashes?
But what can we do to rebel, to sort of do things that wouldn't be to the extreme of getting arrested?
Because I mean, I've done things on my own that would qualify, like you said before, as walking the walk.
Well, by the way, on the mental health thing, I just today got the brand new Adbusters magazine, and the whole theme is mental health.
And there's a couple of pieces that speak right to what you were saying that agree with the point about that it's an adaptation, the disorders.
Well, I think everybody has to make that decision on their own.
I think the most fundamental thing is how do we get the dialogue shifted into the real stuff and not just all this peripheral stuff?
Because it's not going to really happen until everybody starts questioning this and working together and thinking together and questioning together.
And to me, some of the rest of this actually is related to that.
In other words, just to step back for a second, for example, the property destruction in Seattle, for example, that put on the table some new ideas that, you know, you can have all the good ideas, but you've got to back them up somehow.
Well, now maybe we're getting to the stage where, quote, respectable dialogue or acceptable dialogue is going to include necessarily questioning things at a deep level, questioning these institutions that we all used to take for granted.
So anything that contributes to that, I think, is the real work.
Whether or not you're in the streets or whatever other kind of activist stuff, I think, to me, that's the real point.
If we can all start talking and really calling these things into question, it's going to change.
Since you're on 500-plus radio stations right now, the Federal Communications Commission regulates the broadcast of radio and television and other aspects of things that go through the air.
They do this because without it, there would be anarchy.
In other words, the Johns of the world and others would just begin broadcasting on any old frequency, and pretty soon nobody would hear anybody.
I mean, you would have such a mishmash of signals that nothing intelligible would get through.
So in this case, you make the case that the regulation allows the intelligent transmission of communication.
And without it, and with anarchy, you would not have the intelligent transmission of communication.
You would have a big jumble of nothing that you could understand.
So you would obviously be against this kind of regulation.
if you think that it's legitimate to visit some damage on a corporation that these mega commercial radio stations, I mean, I don't have a lot of respect for the stuff that they're pumping out as part of the...
Well, not on a national coast-to-coast deal, but that's not the ideal.
I mean, if we're, and I am talking about an extremely decentralized, localized thing, and if there was the technology for it at all, I mean, I could as well imagine that there's a lot of little, tiny, low-powered ones that are not, that can cooperate in some way and still be very, very localized instead of one voice that booms across the whole country.
But you know, but it is the only way, and the reason you're doing it is because it's the only way you can get your message to be received by millions, an absolute necessity in today's civilization.
But I'm also, I mean, I just, I'm a bundle of contradictions here, but I'm actually also uncomfortable with the idea that any one person's idea or just a few people's ideas would have that much influence.
In other words, the real healthy thing would be, and I hope we get there real soon, where everybody's ideas are part of this, and it doesn't even require anybody who's writing books or otherwise to be on some national radio or TV talking about it.
Well, no, and I would be out of business in terms of this role very, very happily because I am uncomfortable with the contradictions of it.
I mean, I'm not inflating my importance or anything, but, you know, that's part of the goal, though, is to break this all down to where you don't have this massified, nationalized culture where just a couple of people get heard.
But, John, doesn't the fact that you are being heard legitimately without being torn apart here, doesn't that validate the system in a way?
I mean, the amount of freedom, you know, this great First Amendment thing we have, here you are, a gigantic contrarian with even some violent tendency, perhaps, and you're on the air speaking.
So far, I have friends from Eugene that are in prison right now, and the way things are going just in terms of just the legal climate and all that stuff.
I mean, in the short term, we're going to need the oil.
We need to make a very fast transition to alternative fuels, but probably in the short term, we're going to need the oil.
So I don't know if it's good news or not.
I mean, we did on the North Slope, John, other than the Exxon Valdez, which was a shipping disaster, the pipeline from the North Slope has been, frankly, fairly environmentally friendly.
It hasn't, in fact, caribou up there kind of cozy up to the pipeline because it's warm and they like it and they seem to reproduce a lot around it.
Well, the question of energy, though, if you want alternative sources of energy or the old sources or any sources, but for what?
I mean, to run the same system.
I mean, that isn't that, to me, that's the question, whether we should keep it running.
There's a lot of things that should never have been done, but now we're scrambling to have the energy to keep them going to build more freeways and destroy more of everything all over the world.
that's the difference so between the two of us i a i want technology to march forward but i want to do it intelligently and i think we need to start We need green energy.
We need solar panels.
We need wind generation.
That sort of thing.
That's, I guess, my compromise and sort of where I might meet you a little bit, but you don't even want that.
And when you look at all these things, I mean, you know, it's everybody's decision or opinion as to how much of this do we keep running.
And if you just replace all the energy sources, like I guess I sort of just said, by new ones, you don't change anything, except you just have different sources of energy.
you've still got the same industrial civilization.
You're just running it some other way.
And some of these things, by the way, they're not very non-toxic.
I mean, some of these things, you know, they take a lot of hit to produce these panels and so on.
It's not like that's perfect any more than, say, the bike that I'm riding.
I mean, that comes out of a factory and working and metal extraction and everything else.
Really could have gone on mostly forever with this.
Very, very interesting.
John Zerzan, an anarchist, to the point of violence, and certainly some cases.
And now you've heard what he's had to say, and you can digest and think about it, and think if it makes sense to you, or if there were too many contradictions there for you.