Jared Diamond: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
By Jared Diamond
Discover Magazine, May 1987
 To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

Before the Fall: Evidence for a Golden Age

Before the Fall: Evidence for a Golden Age

By STEVE TAYLOR

If you asked them what life was like in prehistoric times, most people would conjure up an image like the famous opening scenes of 2001: Space Odyssey – groups of hairy savages grunting and jumping around, foaming at the mouth with aggression as they bash each over the heads with sticks. We take it for granted that life was much harder then, a battle to survive, with everyone competing to find food, struggling against the elements, men fighting over women, and everyone dying young from disease or malnutrition.

A whole branch of “science” has grown up around this view of the human race’s early history. This is a relatively new discipline of evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain all of the negative sides of human nature as “adaptations” which early people developed because they had some survival value. Evolutionary psychologists explain traits like selfishness and aggression in these terms. Life was such a struggle that only the most selfish and aggressive people survived and passed on their genes. The people with gentle and peaceful genes would have died out, simply because they would have lost out in the survival battle.

Endgame

Premises of Endgame

An Excerpt From Endgame by Derrick Jensen

Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

Revolution

by Gabriella,VAIDULUTE

There is no longer any left or right.There's the system and enemies of the system.

-Eduard Limonov

What I see is the growing rottenness everywhere. Our civilization is dying. Our culture is being killed. Honor, morality, nobility — those are all things of the past now. What we have today is crookedness and deceit and degeneracy in every aspect of people’s lives. I see the rise of every sort of perversion and filth. Moreover, I see this filth declared as normal, even admirable, by the media, and even sanctioned by legislation... I can see it on the streets of American and European cities. I can see it in the sort of television people watch or in the music they listen to... That makes me very, very angry.

Primitive Green:An Interview With John Zerzan

Primitive Green:An Interview With John Zerzan

by G Sampath, DNA

John Zerzan first shot into celebrity philosopher status in 1995 after the New York Times featured him in 1995 as a supporter of the Unabomber's anti-technology doctrine. He has since become a leading light of the primitivist movement in the US. In an exclusive interview with DNA, he explains why modern civilization is fundamentally anti-human, 'green' technology is 'psycho' and Stone Age is the way to go.

WHY PRIMITIVISM?
by John Zerzan

Debord biographer Anselm Giap referred to the puzzle of the present, “where the results of human activity are so antagonistic to humanity itself,” recalling a question posed nearly 50 years ago by Joseph Wood Krutch: “What has become of that opportunity to become more fully human that the ‘control of nature’ was to provide?”

The general crisis is rapidly deepening in every sphere of life. On the biospheric level, this reality is so well-known that it could be termed banal, if it weren’t so horrifying. Increasing rates of species extinctions, proliferating dead zones in the world’s oceans, ozone holes, disappearing rainforests, global warming, the pervasive poisoning of air, water, and soil, to name a few realities.

SEIZE THE DAY
by John Zerzan
The rapidly mounting toll of modern life is worse than we could have imagined. A metamorphosis rushes onward, changing the texture of living, the whole feel of things. In the not-so-distant past this was still only a partial modification; now the Machine converges on us, penetrating more and more to the core of our lives, promising no escape from its logic.