John Zerzan - When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

Notes from the Age of Pandemics

Also by JOHN ZERZAN:

Elements of Refusal (1988, 1999)

Future Primitive (1994)

Against Civilization (1999, 2004)

Running on Emptiness (2001)

Twilight of the Machines (2008)

Origins (2010)

Future Primitive Revisited (2012)

Why Hope? (2015)

A Peoples History of Civilization (2018)

John Zerzan

Notes from the Age of Pandemics

feralhouse.com

When We Are Human

Notes from the Age of Pandemics

Copyright 2021 John Zerzan

All Rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781627311120

Cover art by Sehejveer Singh via The Multicultural Childrens Art Museum and Education Center

arts4kidsoregon.org

Design: designSimple

Feral House

1240 W Sims Way #124

Port Townsend WA 98368

Printed in the USA

For Alice

Words fail.

by James V. Morgan

by James V. Morgan

Relatively few Western humans are willing to acknowledge how bad things really are now, the actual depth of it all, the reality of what is gone; not just the ecology, but the whole package; the social, the psychological, and physical array of what it actually means to be human; what has worked and what has not; the truth about what Homo sapiens evolutionary fitness actually is, and the lies about what it isnt.

John Zerzan is one of the few who unflinchingly tells it how it is. Not in theory. Johns writing as a whole offers arguably the most complete package of multifaceted objective reality to inform us what has actually happened to humans since a few of us (who were sociopaths) developed socioeconomic and political complexity a very short time ago. What has happened as a result of the emergence of elite-driven socioeconomic complexity? Rapid-fire evolutionary maladaptation has happened, and the effects accelerate every minute of every day in the 21st-century hyper-techno-domestication world.

Not only do most people have zero answers, most people incessantly avoid coping with the answers. Mind that there is an entire industry called academia supposedly tasked with providing answers (data) that will inevitably solve our human problems. Yet it is such an irony that academia, in so many ways, did develop its own quite accurate map(s) to the maze decades and decades ago. Academia has long acknowledged in so many ways that the complex, stratified, ultra-domesticated mass-society pathway is a catastrophic one, but the experts from the academies have simultaneously snake-oil-peddled their postmodern excuses to the masses, ultimately just to protect their own skins, as any threat to domesticated life means also a solidified threat to their own lives of complete domesticated dependency.

Never mind the world, or the integrity of our species, let me just log this new journal article in my CV so I can pick up the next research grant and get tenured with six digits. Meanwhile, yes, the world is fucked and most humans have fallen into utter madness. Read between the lines of whatever latest scientific publication you can find and youll see its all there. The scientific experts do certainly say we are fucked. But they also love postmodern excuses.

Ever since John got me tuned in to what postmodernism really is nearly two decades ago, identifying PM rationalizetions and excuses has become daily fare for me. Nearly every person one might attempt speaking to about the reality of our situation seems to have mastered the PM gaslight as a response. Its their day-to-day self-preservation: abandoning the death ship means giving up on all of this, abandoning my domesticated mental and physical Life Ship; so at all costs Do Not Abandon. Easier to chirp snide PM remarks and go back to poking away at my (Poison) Apple.

Did you ever consider what that logo on your little toy means? The Programmers obviously have known what they are ultimately reaching toward.

For the good of all, its time for all willing accomplices to start reading and listening to what John Zerzan has to say. John has got things figured out on a level that most people just dont, even the so-called expertsacademic, activist, anarchist or whoever else. This is not just about reading some literature. Take JZs analysis and figure out how to apply the critical points to your life and your future plans. Even better, take JZs analysis of our predicament and figure out how to apply it to raising your children.

As a professional academic myself, my take is that in the future the Zerzanophiles will maybe have inherited the earth and things will be light-years better than they are now. There is Hope. Abandon the death ship and step onto the authentic Life Ship. Its still there waiting for you to get on board. The gangplank is right before your eyes. First step: trash that stupid Bite-of-the-Poison-Apple-Phone and start learning how to be a human being again. What to do from there will become increasingly obvious with every step. Its When We Are Human.

The wide-ranging essays that comprise this book are so many points of light in a kaleidoscope you wont likely find elsewhere. Taken togetheror separately for that matterthey illumine basic realities and may just help in these dark days.

Systems-wide failure everywhere one looks. What ISNT failing? Every civilization so far has collapsed. Now there is only this global civilization and it is FAILING.

The perils and pathologies of modern life have come as a surprise to many. These pitfalls didnt show up overnight. The current realityor unrealitycant be understood without some grasp of how it began, what drives it.

Umair Haque (Eudaimonia, July 3, 2020) wrote, If Life Feels Bleak, Its Because Our Civilization is Beginning to Collapse. The coronavirus is one of many warnings that we can now see the end of civilization.

How did we get to this terminal place?

These essays try to shed some light on how it happened, and whats at stake.

Symbolic culture, the defining feature of modern humans, is quite recent, while non-symbolic cultureand intelligencego back very much farther. About 30,000 years for the former, three million years in terms of the latter. Ive addressed this before, most recently in The Way We Used to Be, and the following is largely an extension or update of that essay.

Contra Henry de Lumley, the symbolic is not one of the essential dimensions of human cognition.

Communication cannot be properly said to take place unless it is symbolic. Michael Haworth has explored Telepathy and Intersubjectivity in Derrida, Husserl and Levinas, The cognition that enables expertise is not usually reliant on the symbolic, including language. We are slowly discovering more about the richness of pre-symbolic culture, including ever-earlier examples of Paleolithic intelligence.

Culture in the widest sense is far from solely possessed by humans. A fine reminder is