Micah Saul: This project is built on a hypoth­e­sis. There are moments in his­to­ry when the sta­tus quo fails. Political sys­tems prove insuf­fi­cient, reli­gious ideas unsat­is­fac­to­ry, social struc­tures intol­er­a­ble. These are moments of crisis. 

Aengus Anderson: During some of these moments, great minds have entered into con­ver­sa­tion and torn apart inher­it­ed ideas, dethron­ing truths, com­bin­ing old thoughts, and cre­at­ing new ideas. They’ve shaped the norms of future generations.

Saul: Every era has its issues, but do ours war­rant The Conversation? If they do, is it happening?

Anderson: We’ll be explor­ing these sorts of ques­tions through con­ver­sa­tions with a cross-section of American thinkers, peo­ple who are cri­tiquing some aspect of nor­mal­i­ty and offer­ing an alter­na­tive vision of the future. People who might be hav­ing The Conversation.

Saul: Like a real con­ver­sa­tion, this project is going to be sub­jec­tive. It will fre­quent­ly change direc­tions, con­nect unex­pect­ed ideas, and wan­der between the tan­gi­ble and the abstract. It will leave us with far more ques­tions than answers because after all, nobody has a monop­oly on dream­ing about the future.

Anderson: I’m Aengus Anderson.

Saul: And I’m Micah Saul. And you’re lis­ten­ing to The Conversation.

Aengus Anderson: Hey man, how’s it going?

Micah Saul: Not bad, how about yourself?

Anderson: Doing well. I left San Francisco. That was a good run back there, and just drove up to Eugene, Oregon. And tomor­row morn­ing I’m going be talk­ing to John Zerzan.

Saul: Excellent. I’ve been look­ing for­ward to— I feel like I say this every time, but I think it’s true every time. I’m look­ing for­ward to this one.

Anderson: John is going to push the extremes of thought, here. I think he’s going to present some­thing that is in many ways one of the most chal­leng­ing cri­tiques that we’re going to have in this project.

Saul: Absolutely. Let’s real quick, give a brief intro to him. So, John Zerzan is one of the fore­most neo­prim­i­tivist anar­chist thinkers, philoso­phers out there. Neoprimitivism being the sort of striv­ing for basi­cal­ly a return to Stone Age tech­nol­o­gy, as they believe that the most impor­tant part of human inter­ac­tion is— Well, it was exact­ly that, is human inter­ac­tion com­plete­ly unmedi­at­ed by tech­nol­o­gy. And it’s all about the com­mu­ni­ty. It’s all about the inter­per­son­al rela­tions. And every­thing since then has just sort of got­ten in the way of that which is fun­da­men­tal­ly good about humanity.

Anderson: And there’s also a strong rela­tion­ship with nature that’s val­ued there.

Saul: Right.

Anderson: And I think this is going to be a fas­ci­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tion on the heels of my talk with Ariel Waldman. I mean, we’re look­ing at two rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent ideas of progress here, and we’ve seen them in in dif­fer­ent man­i­fes­ta­tions through­out this series thus far, and we’re going to see a lot more of it. Ariel and I talked a lot about what is progress? Is it tech­no­log­i­cal? Is it sci­en­tif­ic? When we talked to Max More ear­ly in the series, the ques­tion of progress being is it an expres­sion of man’s creativity.

Saul: Right. And I think with a with Zerzan, it’s going to be none of the above.

Anderson: What is progress? Is going to be human inter­ac­tion? Is it going to be a rich­er nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment? Is it going to be the way you exist in the envi­ron­ment? Is it going to be a dif­fer­ent type of free­dom and agency, in which case will there be unex­pect­ed con­nec­tions with some of our more lib­er­tar­i­an thinkers?

Saul: Or, is progress even some­thing that he’s inter­est­ed in?

Anderson: Right. Will he be some­one like Morton who sort of dis­pos­es [with] the idea of any sort of pro­gres­sive sense to his­to­ry and thinks about our exis­tence as some­thing that just is?

Saul: Right.

Anderson: There’s a lot of cool stuff here, and I have no idea where the con­nec­tions are going to go, but I think they’re going to be a lot of fun.

Saul: I think so, too.

Anderson: And with no fur­ther ado, John Zerzan.

John Zerzan: Well, I’m an anar­chist writer. I guess that’s the heart of it. I go way back to the 60s, after Stanford. So that start­ed things there, and I was also a union orga­niz­er in a kind of do-it-yourself union in San Francisco. And I think we were anar­chists, although we did­n’t use that word. I had an inter­est in the begin­nings of unions. What is the ori­gin of union­ism in England, for exam­ple, in the Industrial Revolution. And that kind of took me, slow­ly but sure­ly into the whole ques­tion of technology. 

I dis­cov­ered in the his­tor­i­cal lit­er­a­ture that the com­ing of the fac­to­ry sys­tem was not just a mat­ter of eco­nom­ics, it was also a dis­ci­pli­nary endeav­or. You have these peo­ple dis­persed around the coun­try­side and they’re rather autonomous and giv­en to riot­ing if they don’t like some­thing. Classic hand­loom weavers would be one set of peo­ple like that. So author­i­ty had a lot of trou­ble con­trol­ling them. But if you can some­how get peo­ple in the fac­to­ries work­ing four­teen hours a day or more than that even, at the begin­ning, then you have con­trol. They’re tired, they’re cor­ralled, and so forth.

All of these social ques­tions start­ed occur­ring to me. It struck me that you can push this all the way back in terms of a kind of inten­tion­al­i­ty of tech­nol­o­gy, that may be tech­nol­o­gy always embod­ies cer­tain val­ues or choic­es in a soci­ety, even includ­ing Paleolithic soci­ety. And now, at the oppo­site extreme when you’ve got the whole high-tech world, the tech­no­cul­ture, you can read in the tech­nol­o­gy what are the dom­i­nant val­ues. I find that real­ly instructive. 

And I also am puz­zled by how much that’s avoid­ed polit­i­cal­ly. It’s not a polit­i­cal ques­tion. Because, as we’re told always on all sides, tech­nol­o­gy is neu­tral. Well, it isn’t neu­tral. It’s nev­er been neu­tral. And the ques­tion of civ­i­liza­tion occurs, too. What is the fun­da­men­tal part of tech­nol­o­gy? And I think the answer is sim­ply domes­ti­ca­tion. As Jared Diamond and quite a few oth­ers, actu­al­ly, have said, the move to agri­cul­ture, domes­ti­cat­ing ani­mals and plants, and our­selves in the process, is the worst mis­take in the whole human sto­ry. Once you move to con­trol away from a freer exis­tence in which you basi­cal­ly take what nature gives, when you get on that path, every­thing else real­ly fol­lows from that.

Up to the point now where where you’ve got every extreme of that, nan­otech­nol­o­gy, where the con­trol is so pen­e­trat­ing or deep-going that you’re even con­trol­ling it down to the atom­ic lev­el, in genet­ic engi­neer­ing and all the rest of it, too, that starts with domes­ti­ca­tion. It’s just a fur­ther work­ing out of that log­ic fur­ther down the road. 

And you know, I dis­cov­ered it quite by acci­dent. I was work­ing on oth­er ques­tions. And I dis­cov­ered the lit­er­a­ture of anthro­pol­o­gy. It just opened up every­thing of how things were before domes­ti­ca­tion. The peo­ple did­n’t work much (and these are great big gen­er­al­iza­tions here but) but did­n’t work much, women weren’t objec­ti­fied, the nat­ur­al world was­n’t being sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly destroyed, and on down the line. Egalitarianism. Sharing. This is the car­di­nal fea­ture of mass soci­ety. And no anthro­pol­o­gy will tell you different.

It sounds like it was made up by a bunch of utopi­an anar­chists, but it was­n’t. It’s amaz­ing. And to me that’s got the most rad­i­cal impli­ca­tions. If we lived that way for two mil­lion years, look what we’re doing now. Look how we’re liv­ing now. Community is gone. That was face-to-face soci­ety, which is the only real community.

And we were real­ly laughed at. And I guess we still are by some peo­ple. You want to go back to the Stone Age. Well, actu­al­ly I do. That would be a good idea. But it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly lit­er­al­ly that, or does­n’t have to be, I guess. But, are we inter­est­ed in com­mu­ni­ty? That’s the touch­stone for me. And every­body now has to face the fact that it’s gone. Well, what hap­pened to it? As mass soci­ety devel­ops and becomes more of a tech­no­cul­ture, you have less and less of it. And the results to me are just stag­ger­ing. And one of the things I do well on, the shoot­ings. The ram­pant shoot­ings. The fam­i­ly slaugh­ters. Now it’s becom­ing pret­ty much a dai­ly thing. And that’s what hap­pens when you don’t have com­mu­ni­ty any­more. You don’t have the social ties. You don’t have the sol­i­dar­i­ty. We get the most patho­log­i­cal stuff. It’s very scary. And that’s not an acci­dent. It’s not going to go away. Unless we start work­ing on the ques­tion of how can we have com­mu­ni­ty again.

Aengus Anderson: When we talk about com­mu­ni­ty, how do we define it? I’ve heard it defined in a lot of dif­fer­ent ways. Some peo­ple say, ​“I have friends. I have com­mu­ni­ty. I’ve got cowork­ers, I have com­mu­ni­ty.” But when you’re try­ing about the dis­ap­pear­ance of com­mu­ni­ty what does that mean?

Zerzan: You don’t have com­mu­ni­ty unless you have account­abil­i­ty and the chance to take respon­si­bil­i­ty. That requires face-to-face con­tact. I think that we’re see­ing com­mu­ni­ty being rede­fined. Digital com­mu­ni­ty now. I mean, real­ly that’s com­ing on strong. ​“Oh, it’s just as good as the old-fashioned kind of com­mu­ni­ty.” But it isn’t. I think it’s com­plete­ly ersatz. 

I’m remind­ed of a 2006 soci­o­log­i­cal study in a jour­nal of American soci­ol­o­gy, a study of friends involv­ing how many friends peo­ple, talk­ing to thou­sands of peo­ple, adult Americans from the mid-80s to the mid-2000s. And two basic things came out. They defined, for the pur­pose of this study, a friend is some­body you con­fide in. Three friends. Average per­son had three friends in the mid-80s. Mid-2000s, two friends. And the the num­ber of peo­ple with no friends has tripled.

Anderson: So, they feel they have no peo­ple they can con­fide in.

Zerzan: Exactly. So, as dis­tinct from acquain­tances or cowork­ers or what­ev­er, that’s what they mean by friends, and I think that’s an impor­tant definition.

Anderson: I’ve talked to a cou­ple dif­fer­ent peo­ple about the idea of of dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ty ver­sus I guess phys­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty. And I spoke to a guy recent­ly named Gabriel Stempinski. He’s writ­ing a book on how we can share more and more of our stuff to com­bat impend­ing resource scarci­ty. For him, this is done through tech­nol­o­gy and it also has the side-effect of being some­thing that real­ly gen­er­ates com­mu­ni­ty. I’ve kind of heard the Facebook and Twitter argu­ments before, but what Gabriel was talk­ing about were online social net­work­ing sites that cre­ate tan­gi­ble phys­i­cal con­nec­tions like couch­surf­ing, where you actu­al­ly go and meet people.

Zerzan: Yeah.

Anderson: And for him, he’s real­ly inter­est­ed in the idea of tech being the bridge to con­nect peo­ple again in the real world. For me, that was kind of new, bring­ing that into this dis­cus­sion of is it one or the oth­er, is it dig­i­tal or phys­i­cal, and for him it’s, ​“Well, now there’s a lot of com­plex­i­ty out there. I use dig­i­tal to rebuild my phys­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty.” Can there be some val­ue to the dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ty in that way?

Zerzan: Well, I think so, yeah. That’s very good. I mean, he’s mak­ing use of it in a pos­i­tive way. But we should­n’t for­get that while we all use it— I mean, as an anar­chist, I use it. I’ve con­nect­ed with peo­ple all over the world. I would­n’t deny it. But at the same time, it’s just part of the larg­er move­ment of things. Of course I think it should be employed to the best of our abil­i­ties. But I would pre­fer it to go away because you can’t have the tech­nol­o­gy with­out all the rest of it.

The rea­son why we’re now real­ly already in the age of eco­cat­a­stro­phe is that most basi­cal­ly… Let’s just start with some­thing that’s kind of obvi­ous but we don’t think about it all that much. The indus­tri­al­ism nec­es­sary for the tech­nol­o­gy is there. It’s going on every­where. It’s going on in Brazil, India, China. We’re apt, I think all of us are apt to, ​“Well, the nice clean com­put­er, and you push a but­ton and then your con­nect—,” but it par­takes of the larg­er process, which is the sys­tem­at­ic destruc­tion of the bios­phere. Just for exam­ple glob­al warm­ing is pret­ty much exact­ly a func­tion of how much indus­tri­al­iza­tion there is. Global warm­ing start­ed two hun­dred years ago, so did the fac­to­ry sys­tem. So you have the rise of both of them. They’re inseparable.

I always won­der about peo­ple that are very pro-tech on the Left, for exam­ple. ​“Oh, we’ve got to keep all this. Of course. That’d be crazy.” You know, you want to pre­serve all of the lev­el of tech­nol­o­gy. The ques­tion that occurs to me is, oh so you want to keep how many hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple in the mines, in the smelters, in the foundries, in the assem­bly lines? I would like to see them be able to do some­thing else. But you’re going to have to keep them there one way or anoth­er if you want to have all this stuff.

If you want to ignore that, then you’re oper­at­ing on a sur­face lev­el and you’re not tak­ing into account a much more fun­da­men­tal real­i­ty that’s at work here. We are priv­i­leged Americans here, so we do tend to ignore that. Well, that’s a prob­lem in Africa or some­thing. But well, that’s the nature of it. 

Anderson: There are some real­ly big val­ue ques­tions that have just come up. And when you were men­tion­ing peo­ple work­ing in mines extract­ing the stuff, I think of the tech con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had with peo­ple thus far. And I’ve talked to some peo­ple who are very pro-technological devel­op­ment. There is a def­i­nite sense that even­tu­al­ly these peo­ple who are out in mines some­where pro­duc­ing these things for us will, as we did here, devel­op a high­er and high­er stan­dard of living.

Zerzan: Lifting all boats. Well, you get the argu­ment, and I heard Henry Kissinger say this, actu­al­ly. This was on pub­lic tele­vi­sion maybe twen­ty years ago, some­thing like that. He was being inter­ro­gat­ed by some­body who was real­ly very very crit­i­cal of the US role in devel­op­ment in Asia. Just lash­ing out at Kissinger. And Kissinger seemed to be almost sleep­ing through this. And at the very end, he turned to the guy and just looked at him and he said, ​“Let me get this straight. So you want to have a cred­it card and a car and a com­put­er, but you don’t want to have any Indians or Chinese have those, right?” Bang. He just swat­ted him away like a fly.

That’s a suf­fi­cient response. But it isn’t if you don’t want those things. Then you’ve got a cri­tique which cops to the impli­ca­tions of it. And there you have the choice. You want more and more of this? More ruin for the nat­ur­al world? More dis­ap­pear­ance of indige­nous cul­tures? And all the rest of it? Like, say Noam Chomsky is just fine with that. He says to me and to oth­ers, ​“Look, it’s mad­ness to mount this sort of cri­tique or alter­na­tive. We’ve got sev­en bil­lion peo­ple to feed.” Why are there sev­en bil­lion peo­ple? We did­n’t have this crazy, unnat­ur­al pop­u­la­tion growth before domes­ti­ca­tion. Or before indus­tri­al­iza­tion. So in oth­er words if you remove the indus­tri­al­iza­tion and the domes­ti­ca­tion, prob­a­bly you would have a more sen­si­ble, sus­tain­able pop­u­la­tion level.

And you know, if this fails, espe­cial­ly if it fails sud­den­ly, how many mil­lions of peo­ple are going to be dead with­in a week? But even if it was­n’t such a dra­mat­ic bang, we have to at least imag­ine and work toward the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a soft land­ing. We don’t want peo­ple to die. But we want to move away from this very vul­ner­a­ble and life-destroying over­all sys­tem. I want to bring it down, but not in some sud­den col­lapse. Of course that would be unspeak­able, a calamity.

Anderson: What is the alter­na­tive? What is the soft land­ing? What does that look like?

Zerzan: I think the soft land­ing has to even face up to de-domestication, to a return at some point— This would be my, and it’d prob­a­bly have to be a fair­ly dis­tant goal, reskilling our­selves in the lit­er­al sense of that word, too. How did we used to live? What were the solu­tions peo­ple had before fac­to­ries began to dom­i­nate the world? What do you have to know how to do? And that’s a huge order.

Anderson: I’ve spo­ken to a lot of peo­ple who I men­tioned have sort of a free mar­ket bent to their think­ing. There’s always a notion like, if you don’t want to par­take of this tech­nol­o­gy, don’t wor­ry no one’s forc­ing you to.

Zerzan: That’s not true what­so­ev­er. I did three hours with Art Bell, you know the all-night talk show guy. He was mak­ing that claim. It actu­al­ly was quite enjoy­able. He was quite open-minded. But he said, ​“I’ve got a com­put­er and TV set, every room in my house. And you don’t want that stuff?” He just could­n’t get over it. But he fell back on—this is kind of fun­ny, and he was­n’t being nasty about it. But he said, ​“Well, you should live in a cave, then. Or join some native group or some­thing. But you know the log­ic of your position.” 

And he’s part­ly right. Of course that isn’t real­ly a pos­si­bil­i­ty, is it? I mean, where are the caves? Were are the peo­ple that would you like some white guy to come and join their indige­nous soci­ety? What’re you talk­ing about? That’s as if you have free choice. But you don’t. I mean, These peo­ple don’t even seem to notice that the real­i­ty works against that, in every sin­gle way. The illu­sion of choice, yeah. The tech­no­cul­ture is a free choice? I can choose to live in the Stone Age, if I want? Not really.

By the way, let me just add, I real­ly respect the peo­ple that are on the land, try­ing to work out some of these prac­ti­cal prob­lems. You know, the per­ma­cul­ture, the Fukuoka Method, or what­ev­er. These kind of anti-industrial projects. I’m not doing that work, you know. So I’m in no way poo-poohing it. But they’re not exact­ly liv­ing in caves or ful­ly going native or some­thing either. They’re not. They’re in this world, too.

Anderson: You’re up against a huge task of, there is a whole sys­tem of thought that is now con­sid­ered to not be a sys­tem of thought, right. It’s embed­ded into becom­ing normal.

Zerzan: Well put.

Anderson: The tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems, sys­tems based on free mar­ket eco­nom­ics. When I was think­ing about this project, I was think­ing what are all the dif­fer­ent things I could iden­ti­fy as being assump­tions about nor­mal­i­ty. And those two were sort of the biggest ones. The idea of tech­no­log­i­cal progress as being equat­ed to good, and there being sort of a tele­o­log­i­cal sense that we’re mov­ing towards some­thing. And then on the oth­er hand the notion that the free mar­ket is the nat­ur­al state of things, and that the indi­vid­ual is the base unit of that. 

Both of those ways of think­ing seem very phys­i­cal­ist, like they’re about stuff in the world. You mea­sure progress by hav­ing more stuff, more com­pli­cat­ed stuff, more choic­es for stuff. It seems like what you’re offer­ing is a world in which val­ue is root­ed in some­thing very dif­fer­ent. If we throw out tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety and we lose things that peo­ple asso­ciate with val­ue, what do you get in return? I was curi­ous about that.

Zerzan: Well yeah, these are a lit­tle vague. I mean, whole­ness, imme­di­a­cy, which I think by the way are spir­i­tu­al val­ues as well. I think peo­ple haven’t lost the yearn­ing for con­nec­tion, real human face-to-face con­nec­tion. If they have, then all this is point­less. We’re wast­ing our time, right?

Anderson: Do you think that’s some­thing that’s a yearn­ing we actu­al­ly could lose?

Zerzan: I don’t know. I hate to think that. I remind myself it is con­ceiv­able that maybe peo­ple will all be tak­ing anx­i­ety med­ica­tions and drugs to sleep. I could imag­ine a world where every­body’s tak­ing drugs, just to get through the damn day. We’re get­ting there, get­ting there pret­ty fast. But it’s con­ceiv­able that it would still function. 

Anderson: So there’s a real ques­tion of the good here. Let’s say we look at one hypo­thet­i­cal, which is the cur­rent log­ic of the world con­tin­ues. We strive for more and more com­plex­i­ty, and we begin chang­ing our own genet­ic make­up, and we expand into space. That’s kind of the extreme tech­no end of some of the some of the inter­views I’ve had. What is not good about that? Can you have a sense that that isn’t good, com­ing from a place that is any­thing oth­er than spiritual?

Zerzan: Well, that’s right. That’s some­thing I’m sort of come to late­ly, rel­a­tive­ly late­ly. I was in Croatia, and the woman there said, ​“I think this whole green anar­chy move­ment is at base a spir­i­tu­al move­ment.” And I was real­ly floored by that. Because I just had this feel­ing, I think that’s right but I have no idea why. Because I’m an ex-Catholic. And jeez, at my age I mean it’s so late that I came to be more open to things like that. Mainly my thing was, ​“Get away. I don’t want any­thing reli­gious. I’ve been burned by that. I was beat­en by the priests as a kid. I don’t want to hear about it.” 

And now I real­ize that ain’t the whole pic­ture. Come on. That’s throw­ing every­thing out with the bath­wa­ter. Because I’ve met more and more peo­ple, including—and some of this has just been so amaz­ing­ly refresh­ing. Like, a good friend of mine who’s almost a clas­sic Black Bloc anar­chist, ready to rum­ble, ready to mask up. Just a great per­son. And he had a whole spir­i­tu­al side which he nev­er brought out. Because it’s not, you know, in terms of the anar­chist thing…let’s face it, that’s not what we’re talk­ing about. But there is a spir­i­tu­al side, I think you’re right. We are talk­ing about fun­da­men­tal things. And that is a val­ue choice, just like the tech­nol­o­gy embed­ded in there are the val­ues and the choic­es of the dom­i­nant order, whether we make them con­scious­ly or not. They are choices.

It’s very post­mod­ern. It’s very hip now. Everything is a social con­struc­tion. Nature is in quotes. There is no nature, there’s nev­er been any nature. it’s just our con­cep­tion. I think of an Earth First woman. I remem­ber one thing she said, ​“I can take you by the hand into the for­est. Does this look like a con­cept you?” And some peo­ple, they would still maybe cling that. That’s just real­ly hard to fath­om. But some peo­ple are pret­ty far gone. 

Anderson: Well, I spoke to a philoso­pher in Davis awhile ago. He’s writ­ten a book called Ecology Without Nature.

Zerzan: Oh, Morton?

Anderson: Yes. He cer­tain­ly talks about the idea that think­ing about nature as a sep­a­rate thing is actu­al­ly an imped­i­ment to under­stand­ing that we’re part of a holis­tic system.

Zerzan: Maybe you could help me with this. I find that real ambigu­ous. I think that could be put to obvi­ous­ly bad uses. Bad in my def­i­n­i­tion, any­way. I sort of think he’s try­ing to have it both ways. He’s going with the post­mod­ern tide, but he’s also try­ing to say it’s help­ful to go that way in sup­port of nature. When you start going down that road…

I found it inter­est­ing that a cou­ple of years ago Žižek took up Morton, big time. Was thrilled to dis­cov­er this ecol­o­gy with­out nature idea. Now Žižek is a Stalinist pig, in my view. And he finds it won­der­ful that glob­al warm­ing is going on. Why would this guy be so in favor of Morton’s key thing? He’s not on the side of of the nat­ur­al world. Maybe Morton should pay atten­tion to that. What is your own respon­si­bil­i­ty for these things? I mean, he can have any idea he likes, but look at the consequences.

Anderson: It seems like you have a real sense that nature has value.

Zerzan: Yeah, intrinsically.

Anderson: And where does that come from?

Zerzan: I don’t know. Maybe that’s just very intan­gi­ble. I haven’t real­ly thought about that all that much, but if you can’t see that, then I don’t know. Then then we real­ly are in bad shape. It’s absolute­ly clear to me. I want whole­ness. I want to get rid of all these lay­ers of medi­a­tion. And I know the assump­tion for me is every­body wants that. But not every­body wants that.

Anderson: Right.

Zerzan: But I’m think­ing (again, my opti­mism), if this is made artic­u­late, then we may dis­cov­er that pret­ty much maybe every­body does want that. but in the absence of alter­na­tives, in the absence of access to oth­er ways of look­ing at all this, peo­ple haven’t even heard of this. If you’re look­ing, well then you can find stuff. But if you’re not even think­ing of look­ing, why would you be looking?

Anderson: That con­nects into some­thing I’d been want­i­ng to get to, which is the idea of the Conversation. We have these dif­fer­ent ideas of what is good. How do we bring them togeth­er? How do we talk about them? Does talk­ing even matter? 

Zerzan: I’ve tak­en up the point of view that you’ve got to have the actu­al mil­i­tan­cy. That’s what dri­ves the ideas. That’s what puts it on the map. I mean, I remem­ber 60 Minutes came here after anti-WTO at the end of 99, the rather famous Seattle deal. Because the Eugene anar­chists were sup­pos­ed­ly behind smash­ing up down­town. I think that goes to who might have done what. But any­way we were call­ing the tune. Because peo­ple want­ed to know, why would peo­ple do that?

To me, when you do some­thing like that and you com­bine it with a coher­ent com­mu­niqué, a state­ment, then a cer­tain num­ber of peo­ple get to read that. And they would have the same ques­tion: why would peo­ple do some­thing like that? That’s crazi­ness, you know. But they say, this is why we did it. And they go, ​“Ah.” Some peo­ple, I’m not say­ing every­body, sud­den­ly goes, ​“Shit. I nev­er heard that before.” But you know, it’s potent. And that’s why you have the [boat?].

Anderson: Is this a move­ment that can’t par­tic­i­pate in con­ver­sa­tion because of that? I’ve spo­ken to a lot of dif­fer­ent peo­ple with a lot of dif­fer­ent beliefs, and I don’t think any of them would espouse prop­er­ty dam­age. Does it estrange people?

Zerzan: You’ve got to get seri­ous at some point. It’s unavoid­able. Yeah, some peo­ple are going to be hor­ri­fied. They’re going to be opposed to it. You’ve got to go through that. You’ve got to show why, how seri­ous this is, and how the rest of it has­n’t worked. And they’ll agree or they won’t, but there’s no get­ting around it. You can hold your sign and do what the cops tell you to do, and noth­ing will change. It will only keep get­ting worse. 

Anderson: To change minds, it seems like con­ver­sa­tion isn’t enough?

Zerzan: Well, I don’t know. And nobody knows what’s effec­tive. We haven’t been effec­tive yet. I’m not say­ing, ​“Oh, it’s sim­ple propo­si­tion. Anarchists know how to do it. Look how well we’re doing.” But since I see the oth­er stuff is not work­ing, let’s go this way and maybe we’ll break through. Maybe not. Maybe that was wrong.

You know dur­ing the Unabomber thing, (I think of this some­times.) when the media was ask­ing us when Kaczynski was send­ing his bombs in the mail, they want­ed to catch us say­ing, ​“Oh, we’re down with that.” And I always said, if they asked me, ​“I’m not in favor of send­ing bombs in the mail, but those peo­ple that got the bombs in the mail, they’re not inno­cent, either.”

Anderson: But is any­one innocent?

Zerzan: Well, there you go. There you go. We’re all stuck in this. We are all a part of it. And you know, I embody all these con­tra­dic­tions. Or hypocrisies. And it reminds me of Art Bell. You should live in a cave. But I’m try­ing to con­tribute to the dis­cus­sion. I’m try­ing to write and offer some­thing. And you’re right, that’s a con­tra­dic­tion. Here’s the prim­i­tivists who flies around the world and every­thing. But that was­n’t my choice. I did­n’t ask for this world. Tentatively, any­way, I’m mak­ing the deci­sions as they go as to how to try to do my lit­tle bit.

Anderson: And yet you’ve said you’re an optimist.

Zerzan: When I was a child in the 50s, I real­ly was­n’t get­ting it. I just felt on the out­side. I just was not… I just felt like, stu­pid. I’m not say­ing I saw through it but I just did­n’t seem to fit. When the 60s came, wow. It was just a mir­a­cle. You just got this feel­ing like the wind had turned. Just a sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty and inno­cence, and it was just fab­u­lous. And it seems to me once you taste that, you still have that taste. I feel just blessed that I was in that time and place.

Micah Saul: Well, damn.

Aengus Anderson: I feel like we need a new exple­tive at the begin­ning of every conclusion.

Saul: Yes.

Anderson: And ​“Well, damn,” might be kin­da light for this one. That was a great conversation 

Saul: That was awe­some. I don’t know what I was expect­ing, but that blew my expec­ta­tions out of the water. I was also real­ly impressed at just how well he con­nect­ed to a bunch of oth­er peo­ple. We pre­dict­ed ear­li­er that he and Lundberg were going to have some sim­i­lar­i­ties. I think in some ways he’s going a hell of a lot far­ther than Lundberg. I thought the rela­tion­ship between him and Gabe was real­ly inter­est­ing, talk­ing about com­mu­ni­ty. He seemed actu­al­ly real­ly respect­ful of the fact that tech­nol­o­gy can engen­der real com­mu­ni­ty in the real world. I found an inter­est­ing con­nec­tion to you

Anderson: Hm.

Saul: He was talk­ing about the hor­ri­ble increase in shoot­ings we’ve seen, and he links that direct­ly to a decrease in community.

Anderson: Yes.

Saul: And it just made me think of the arti­cle you wrote short­ly after the Giffords shoot­ing.

Anderson: For the Tuscon Sentinel, yes.

Saul: Yes.

Anderson: Where I was argu­ing that a lack of com­mu­ni­ty sense basi­cal­ly made the shoot­ing of our Congressional rep­re­sen­ta­tive Gabrielle Giffords possible.

Saul: Right.

Anderson: And maybe this is one of the many sur­pris­es in the con­ver­sa­tion that I had with John. Many of his ideas res­onate with me far more than I expect­ed they would.

Saul: It seemed like you were both hav­ing a real­ly good time.

Anderson: Definitely a lot of fun, and real­ly provoca­tive. At the same time, while I think there’s an amaz­ing cri­tique, I don’t buy the solu­tion. And I feel like we got into the ques­tion of the good a bit. I real­ly liked that at the end of the day he’s will­ing to say that he’s essen­tial­ly a bio­cen­trist, that life and nature has intrin­sic value.

Saul: Yes.

Anderson: And that’s a dif­fi­cult, maybe impos­si­ble thing to explain why. Maybe that’s some­thing that you can only get in an ara­tional sense, call it a spir­i­tu­al sense. But the same ara­tional sense that makes Doctor More want to nev­er die. It felt like we got down to that point of the good. And there’s some­thing kind of cool about that, but there’s also some­thing kind of alarm­ing when I think of John and Dr. More. Because both of them will admit that they have ara­tional desires, one case bio­cen­tric, and the oth­er case anthro­pocen­tric. And those things are kind of non-negotiable.

Saul: Exactly.

Anderson: And I think there’s a self-assurance there because of that that I find a lit­tle alarm­ing, in both cases.

Saul: I guess the con­cept of the ara­tional is alarm­ing to me, in some ways. Even though I know that any notion of good or any notion of val­ues is going to come down to some deep-seated belief that you can exam­ine all you want, but it’s hard to explain because it’s just deep-seated. And it may be ara­tional. Now, even though I believe that, I have a hard time accept­ing it, that…I don’t know, that your belief sys­tem can be based on… not noth­ing, but on some­thing you can’t describe.

Anderson: And it may be inflexible.

Saul: I tend to view myself as a fair­ly ratio­nal per­son. And it’s dis­turb­ing to me to think that if I go down deep enough, I’m prob­a­bly com­plete­ly ara­tional as well.

Anderson: Yeah, and it prob­a­bly would­n’t take many steps to get there.

Saul: No. Not at all. Look how quick­ly you’re able to get there with people.

Anderson: And if that is dis­turb­ing. If the ara­tional­i­ty that under­lies all of these dif­fer­ent ideas of the good, right… Because essen­tial­ly, all of these dif­fer­ent things are val­ue claims. All of those are com­ing from an ara­tional point. It makes you won­der, how do you have the Conversation? Or do you just have one side that ulti­mate­ly blud­geons the oth­er side down? 

Saul: Maybe that’s anoth­er rea­son that we find it disturbing.

Anderson: You mean because we want the Conversation to be possible?

Saul: Because we want the Conversation to be possible.

Anderson: Yeah. And I did­n’t feel from from my talk with John that it real­ly was. He men­tioned with a lot of anar­chists you break stuff, and that’s how in the­o­ry you make your point. And he said, well look, we don’t know that this method has been tried and test­ed. Maybe there are bet­ter ways to do it. But it did­n’t seem like con­ver­sa­tion, in the way that we’re think­ing of it, was real­ly on the table. Because for them too much is at stake. The threat to the plan­et is so grave, the threat to what is good, the threat to human nature as they define it… It’s real­ly hard for me to be sym­pa­thet­ic with that sense of sure­ty about any­thing, much less that con­vic­tion that you have to make state­ments that involve dam­ag­ing prop­er­ty. Isn’t every­one com­plic­it in this sys­tem? Where do you draw the line? Even when I like some of the cri­tique, it’s hard for me to not just see the real­ly right­eous side of this.

Saul: Right. Regardless of how strong your beliefs, or maybe even the stronger your beliefs are, the more impos­si­ble it is to live a non-hypocritical life.

Anderson: Which is some­thing that John him­self says. Like, he can’t go live in a cave. There’s no way to opt out. As with every good con­ver­sa­tion, in every big set of ideas there are always a lot of inconsistencies. 

Saul: Yes. And it’s those incon­sis­ten­cies in some ways that make peo­ple so interesting. 

Anderson: I com­plete­ly agree. They’re work­ing through all of these ideas, too. And they’re work­ing through them in their own ways. But ulti­mate­ly they’re tackling…we’re all tack­ling the same questions.

Saul: Right.

Anderson: And none of us have cre­at­ed this uni­fied field the­o­ry of how the world works. None of us have a con­vinc­ing meta­physics for what is good and what is bad in all situations.

Saul: There’s no sil­ver bul­let, but maybe if we strive for it, we find something.

Anderson: And that’s where the opti­mism comes from, right?

Saul: Yeah. No, exact­ly. Everybody’s an opti­mist. Are you an optimist?

Anderson: I don’t think I’d want to go on the record as one, but after Morton’s treat­ment of cyn­ics, I’m pret­ty wary of say­ing I’m one of them. I mean, Morton’s right. We would­n’t be doing this project if we weren’t in some way optimistic.

Saul: No, exactly.

Anderson: It just comes back again and again. And I think that’s what I like so much about our inter­vie­wees who real­ly push us. And John cer­tain­ly does that.

Saul: Yes.

Anderson: He is look­ing for a rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent and much bet­ter way. He’s got the guts to dream it and artic­u­late it and be dis­missed as a crazy man. In the same way that I think you can say that of Dr. More.

Saul: Absolutely.

Anderson: And in both cas­es, though there is much I dis­agree with, there is much that I respect. 

That was John Zerzan. record­ed June 22, 2012 in Eugene, Oregon. 

Saul: This is The Conversation. You can find us on Twitter at @aengusanderson and on the web at find​the​con​ver​sa​tion​.com

Anderson: So thanks for lis­ten­ing. I’m Aengus Anderson.

Saul: And I’m Micah Saul.