Stone Age Anarchism

A friend of mine once remarked: "We're either going to walk to the Stone Age or be catapulted to the Stone Age".

Most of us would view a return to the Stone Age with suspicious eyes. No television, no McDonald's some might lament. Others, more wisely, would look to vaccinations, stable food supplies and, to quote George W. Bush, "living in caves" when questioning a return to the Stone Age.

The Stone Age was a tough life with lots of suffering but strong people using sharp minds survived and thrived in an abundant world. In their observation and study of the natural world they inhabited, they were our intellectual equals. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond lauds a hunter-gatherer friend in Papua New Guinea as being just as intelligent as himself, a Western academic. It's just a different kind of intelligence based on different life ways. Don't be quick to judge people as not as intelligent as you just because they don't have a high IQ; after all if you invented the test you're going to do well at it.

At the start of the 21st century, many of us think humans have never been higher, never been more developed. Thanks to oil, we barely have to use our muscles anymore. We can eat what we want because if we make ourselves sick our doctors will have a cure or at least a long-term remedy. We all get cancer and other environmental diseases and consider it normal. We stare at screens all day and all night. Does putting a person on the moon make these truths moot?

Life is beautiful but it is also sad and full of suffering wherever you live. This has never changed. Even the very rich, hiding away from the world, are victims. Every time they squeeze that trigger on the Febreeze bottle, they can't escape cancer and the chemical soup soon to flow through their veins. Why me, I can hear them cry.

But the worst part about today is that we are taking down the rest of the species of the world with us. A third of amphibians are endangered and many are going extinct. The polar bear is about to join them. If you listen carefully you can hear rainforests felled in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. How many more species that we never knew (and never should have known) are silently departing at our hands. And very worst, we are pushing the earth's climate to levels unseen for millions of years. All because our greed is never satiated. All because the only way we know is up. Many voices warn against this ecocide but they are ignored unless they say we can buy our way out of climate change and mass extinctions.

Now realistically few people are going to choose the Stone Age over this rampant civilization. The advertising is just too good, think about all those car ads versus public transit; public transit always loses. It's too scary to actually have to take control of our lives. So we hand our power over to governments and corporations who are extremely happy to have it. They'll tell you that you can be sustainable and responsible as long as you pick up this new miracle product.

But more and more people are rejecting these false dreams and are taking their power back. They are turning away and powering themselves down. They are building communities and using the fading power of civilization to prepare for the low energy world to come. They are rejecting the state and only using their own two hands and their sharp minds to create what they need to create to survive. This means no destructive mines sucking minerals out of the earth to be sent to a factory in China to make a product that to purchase you must sell your labour and become a slave.

Humans can make homes without civilization. They can make tools without civilization. They can hunt and grow food without civilization. They can most definitely be healthy without civilization. Most importantly they can live in balance with the rest of the natural world and not threaten all life and leave their children and other beings with a diminished world.

These are the lessons of the Stone Age.

Civilization will never be sustainable not with 7 billion grasping hands and hungry mouths crying out for more, more. There is no plan. Civilized humans have no goal, no finish line. We have nothing to live for. If we are here for our children then why do we threaten their future? If we are here to "fix" nature then we have it coming and deserve our fate. Is it to know everything in the universe, to become gods? The only thing that makes sense, to me, is that we are here for ourselves, for this moment and we don't care about the future.

Turning away is finally a meaningful goal. Living as just another creature on this earth is a happy choice and one that I, and my friend and many more people are starting to make. Maybe the Stone Age is too far for you. Turning away is a start. The lights are much too bright the way we are all currently headed.