December 2023
A doofus is a civilization in which a privileged few use centralized power structures to control the many instead of simply accepting the principle of sentient respect.
— An Alien Proposal (2023)
November 2023
It seems unlikely that our ancestral lineages could have survived if the animistic sensibility were purely an illusion, if this experience of the sensible surroundings as sensitive and even sentient were a callow fantasy utterly at odds with the actual character of those surroundings. The long survival of our species suggests that the instinctive expectation of animateness, of an interior spontaneity proper to all things, was a very practical way to encounter our environment—indeed, perhaps the most effective way to align our human organism with the shifting vicissitudes of a difficult, dangerous, and capricious cosmos.
— David Abram: Becoming Animal
October 2023
The power used to enslave and manipulate us is merely our own power, which we give away every day. When we stop doing this, the house of cards will come down.
— David Icke
September 2023
There are two kinds of safety. One answers the question: “When am I safe?”, the other answers the question: “When do I feel safe”. The first kind of security seeks its salvation in means that guarantee security, in devices, institutions, regulations. The world in which we live is basically experienced as hostile. Safeguards are provided against every possible and conceivable danger. My gaze becomes specialized in the detection of danger. Distrust becomes a virtue. I get dependent on buying more and more safety prostheses.
And everyone else becomes a dangerous competitor for the security resources that are always too scarce. I can only feel as safe as I can impose insecurity on others. The desires arising from this concept of security are in principle insatiable, because it is about securing a good that cannot be secured. It is about the preservation of the perishable from perishing, about the denial of death.
The other security stands in contrast to this, the security that I carry in my own body. It is based on my abilities and on my trust. “When do I feel safe?” means: I decide how much safety I consider sufficient for me. And the imponderable rest remains entrusted to God. This concept of security compels me to build up my strengths and abilities and to make friends with the world in which I live instead of resisting it. The point is that I feel able to cope with the dangers of life instead of arming myself against them. This security makes dependent on each other but independent of the whole. And it requires that I accept my finiteness.
You see: only one kind of security makes me needy, the other one enables me to be non-needy and disempowers the power.
— Marianne Gronemeyer: Sustainable Consumption (2007)
August 2023
It is said that good works are done in the light of day. If you need to compartmentalize something and create a hierarchical structure because you don’t want people at lower levels to understand what is being done at higher levels, it is a secrecy-based agenda, and it is based in fear, ultimately.
Good works are done in the light of day, dark works, evil works, works that are not geaared toward higher evolutionary progression in consciousness, they must be done in darkness because most people, if they were to understand what was really done – what the agenda was – would not participate in that system. So they have to be done in the dark. People have to be kept in the dark of the true agenda to essentially keep participating in it. And this is true of any hierarchical compartmentalized control structure. Once enough light is shed upon what the true agenda is those who have any modicum of conscience will withdraw their support from that agenda.
— Mark Passio, WOEIH 13
July 2023
If we were coal miners, we would be up to our knees in dead canaries.
— Michael Higgins
June 2023
It is so outrageously ridiculous that all the countries that claim to be the freest countries actually grant their inhabitants the least freedom and keep them under tutelage all their lives. Suspicious is every country where there is so much talk of freedom supposedly to be found within its borders. And if, on entering the harbour of a great country, I see a giant Statue of Liberty, no one need tell me what is going on behind the statue. Where one has to shout so loudly, We are the land of the free! one only wants to cover up the fact that freedom has gone to the dogs or that it has been so gnawed off by hundreds of thousands of laws, decrees, orders, regulations and police truncheons that only the shouting, the fanfare and the goddesses of freedom have remained.
— B. Traven
May 2023
We allow ourselves to get bogged down in the debate over what the science says and what it doesn’t say. It’s the same kind of technological approach to the natural world that got us into this mess. it’s all about trajectories and predictions and scientific models, acquiring knowledge, learning about the climate crisis as if it is not us that is in crisis. What we need to consider and focus on is not, how all the pieces of the climate puzzle fit together into our model of externalities but rather the cycle of trauma and dissociation that is implicit in our own subjective and dysfunctional relationship to the natural world which is crying out to us in distress. Then, only then, will we begin to discover insights into how to respond to the crisis.
— Zhiwa Woodbury, Viewing the Climate Crisis Through the Lens of Cultural Trauma
March-April 2023
Liberty is the life-breath of a nation; and when the life is attacked, when it is sought to suppress all chance of breathing by violent pressure, any and every means of self-preservation becomes right and justifiable, – just as it is lawful for a man who is being strangled to rid himself of the pressure on his throat by any means in his power. It is the nature of the pressure which determines the nature of the resistance.
— Sri Aurobindo
February 2023
The existence of objective reality is debatable. Humans operate entirely, or almost entirely, in subjective realities created by their thoughts. By controlling what people think, mass media plants their intended reality into the minds of those who attune to the programming. In the absence of opposing narratives, the masses collectively adopt whatever reality they are fed. (83)
Since time immemorial, the greatest manipulations have occurred by presenting fiction as nonfiction, and by presenting fact as fantasy. That perceived distinction always fools most people. The most absurd stories are seen as real merely because they are in the newspapers, on televised news, or on websites that pretend to be truthful even when those news outlets are controlled by those with incentives to promulgate the most dangerous lies. (261)
— Thomas E. Uharriet, The Memoirs of Billy Shears
January 2023
Many have been able to recognize and oppose specific acts of tyranny by specific regimes, but very few have recognized that the underlying problem is not who sits on the throne; the problem is that there is a throne to sit on.
— Larken Rose, The Most Dangerous Superstition
December 2022
Satanism is not what most have been trained to think it is. […] The word ‘Satan’ comes from Hebrew, and means adversary or enemy. In the esoteric context, the original Hebrew word can be taken to mean an adversary to the Christ consciousness – nothing to do with the figure of Jesus, but instead concerned with humans accessing higher levels of consciousness and re-connecting to the divine source from which we all emanate. The concept of Jesus and other messianic figures are symbolic of this alchemical process. Satanism stands as the absolute antithesis of humans achieving this, seeking instead to keep them grounded in base consciousness, attached to the ego and all the material trappings of this physical plane. Given that the thoughts of the majority of people in the world today – from the moment they get up in the morning to the moment they go to bed at night – are concerned solely with what they themselves want or need right here and now, without a single consideration towards the wellbeing of others, most people can be said to have been manipulated by society into becoming [de-facto] Satanists. It’s a statement that will horrify many and bring instant denial, but it doesn’t stop it from being true. Are my immediate and personal needs, whims and desires taken care of right here and now? Am I all OK? Yes? Well then, what else in the Universe could possibly matter? That’s Satanism.
— Mark Devlin, Musical Truths
October-November 2022
A revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to the universal. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it.
— Sri Aurobindo; The Human Cycle
it is from the self-determination of the free individual within the free collectivity in which he lives that we have to start, because so only can we be sure of a healthy growth of freedom and because too the unity to be arrived at is that of individuals growing freely towards perfection and not of human machines working in regulated unison or of souls suppressed, mutilated and cut into one or more fixed geometrical patterns. The moment we sincerely accept this idea, we have to travel altogether away from the old notion of the right of property of man in man which still lurks in the human mind where it does not possess it. The trail of this notion is all over our past, the right of property of the father over the child, of the man over the woman, of the ruler or the ruling class or power over the ruled, of the State over the individual.
— Sri Aurobindo; War and Self-Determination
September 2022
Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such … [because] those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
— Hannah Arendt, Personal Responsibility under a Dictatorship
I’m here to destroy what isn’t true or good.
— Mark Passio
August 2022
If you’re not outraged you are not paying attention. — Mark Passio
I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore! — Howard Beale in: Network, 1976
July 2022
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
June 2022
Today we are taught to believe that society doesn’t owe us a living,” says [Rajani] Kanth. “Well, in simple societies they felt the exact opposite. Everybody owed everybody else. There were mutual ties. People didn’t rely on a social contract that you can break. Instead, they had a social compact. You can’t break it. You’re born with it, and you’re delighted to be part of it because it nurtures you. That’s very different from a Hobbesian notion that we’re all out to zap each other.
— Lynn Parramore in, Have We Been Denying Our Human Nature for Four Hundred Years? Eurocentric modernism has unhinged us from our human nature, argues Rajani Kanth in his new book – Films for Action, 20170314
May 2022
When you come to the natural world as raw material for “your ideas,” it has already happened. That’s not the beginning. No, you could never have got there if some other separation had not already occurred, that allows you to view the natural world as something ‘potential’ and not actual, not a living, breathing deified being, but something that’s waiting for you to smarten up and figure out how to smelt it, so you can make a Tesla.
— Stephen Jenkinson at LondonReal, Ryan Rose.
April 2022
In an earlier age, the absence of language was used as an argument against the existence of thought in other species. Today I find myself upholding the position that the manifest reality of thinking by nonlinguistic creatures argues against the importance of language.
— Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
March 2022
…technologies found incornpatible with sustainability and diversity on the planet must be abandoned […] There is no denying that all of this amounts to considerable adjustment, but it’s not as if there were much choice. Truly, such change is inevitable if sanity and sustainability are to prevail. To call this adjustment “going back” is to conceive of it in fearful, negative terms, when the changes are actually desirable and good. In fact, it is not really going back; it is merely getting back on track, as it were, after a short unhappy diversion into fantasy. It is going forward to a renewed relationship with timeless values and principles that have been kept alive for Western society by the very people we have tried to destroy.
As for whether it is “romantic” to make such a case, I can only say that the charge is putting the case backwards. What is romantic is to believe that technological evolution will ever live up to its own advertising, or that technology itself can liberate us from the problems it has created. So far, the only people who, as a group, are clear-minded on this point are the native peoples, simply because they have kept alive their roots in an older, alternative, nature-based philosophy that has proven effective for tens of thousands of years, and that has nurtured dimensions of knowledge and perception that have become opaque to us. It is the native societies, not our own, that hold the key to future survival.
— Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred
February 2022
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
― Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions
January 2022
In an earlier age, the absence of language was used as an argument against the existence of thought in other species. Today I find myself upholding the position that the manifest reality of thinking by nonlinguistic creatures argues against the importance of language.
— Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
December 2021
Each domain of experience acquired its character and consistency in relation to some opposing domain. Medicine can ameliorate the human condition only so long as it doesn’t abolish it. Science is helpful only insofar as it recognizes itself as a highly artificial mode of perception and doesn’t try to eliminate the complementary domain of common sense and practical judgment. Formal education retains its distinction only in a world in which knowledge acquired for its own sake is its complement and equal.
— David Cayley, Ivan Illich. An Intellectual Journey
October-November 2021
Touring the world’s churches, art galleries, castles, and museums cannot prepare you for this experience. The severed heads in the galleries of Venice and Milano, the molten lead poured into the mouths of those who disagreed with French kings, the drawings of wretched poverty, the frescoes of war, the murder of infants are common themes, and European and Asian cultures are suffused with violence and war. Yet here on a green mountain overlooking the Pacific [Gulaga Mountain, New South Wales], a different world was imagined. And not just imagined, but lived [by the Yuin people].
[…]
its principle and its ethos are variations on a single theme — continuity, constancy, balance, symmetry, regularity …
One of the most striking things is that there are no great conflicts over power, no great contests for place and office. This single fact explains much else, because it rules out so much that is destructive of stability … There are no wars of invasion to seize territory. They do not enslave each other. There is no master-servant relation. There is no class division. There is no property or income inequality. The result is a homeostasis, far-reaching and stable.
— Bruce Pascoe: Dark Emu
September 2021
There is war in this world, a war between morality and ethics. The two words are equated to disguise this – to disguise the fact that the ethics of the individual and the morals of society have diverged and moved far away from each other. For only morality can be manipulated and misused by the controllers for their own purposes, and only through morality can masses of people be controlled. It is up to each and every one of us to decide which side we will fight on, and we must choose a side, because today man has only two choices: to be moral and unethical, or to be ethical and immoral. Do you listen to society and what others tell you, or do you listen to the laws of life, the inner voice that nature has written into your heart with its own hand?”
— Chnopfloch: Fachidioten, Gurus und der Krieg
August 2021
What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to “normalize” collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order.
— James C. Scott: Against the Grain
Juli 2021
Plants are so unlike people that it’s very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have, have been inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs for so long that to say that one of us is the more “advanced” really depends on how you define that term, on what “advances” you value. Naturally we value abilities such as consciousness, toolmaking, and language, if only because these have been the destinations of our own evolutionary journey thus far. Plants have traveled all that distance and then some—they’ve just traveled in a different direction.
— Michael Pollan, The botany of desire. Random House 2001
June 2021
The psychology of the Underminer is something different from the way the “experts” tell us human beings should behave. The conventional models of human response are based on the civilized world and, yes, there are common strands in all cultures but, for instance, when a death occurs in a tribal culture that has, like all animals, accepted death as part of life then denial is not part of the equation. Neither is bargaining – for how can you bargain with the inevitable? When Elisabeth Kübler-Ross posited her model for bereavement, it was always going to a be a model for how the civilized human deals with death; it took no account of the way all humans deal with death, for not only are we all slightly different in our approach to everything – not just bereavement – we, as de facto civilized humans, are freaks. Homo sapiens civilis never evolved. Civilized humans have been created in the image of the machine: we don’t behave as normal human beings any more.
— Keith Farnish: Underminers
April-May 2021
How do you respond to your critics who say that back-to-the-trees was neither possible nor desirable? Isn’t a simple life, or primitivism, as they hold, a return to barbarianism?
First of all, I’m not talking about a backward movement, because then I would buy into the civilized rhetoric of progress and ascent. Civilization has not moved the human race forward or upward. It was not an evolutionary logical progress; we have simply stepped out of the large consent of primary peoples who see the Universe as an indivisible living whole, and themselves an integral part of it. So if we choose to apply the word “back,” it would be in the sense of backing out of a dead-end road. Civilization has taught us a lot of things which cannot work; that’s something we might be grateful for – provided we leave enough of our habitat intact to be able to make use of it.
— Jürgen Hornschuh
March 2021
For anybody who studies history seriously, it is a major puzzle how we, today, can live with what, to the people of all previous times and places, would have been considered unfeeling brutality and absolute nonsense.
— Ivan Illich in David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future
February 2021
Having good intentions and obeying all applicable moral laws is not sufficient to avoid inflicting harm if one’s worldview is based on the illusion of separateness
— Joyce Huesemann Michael Huesemann: Techno-Fix. Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment
January 2021
Most people don’t realize what these [tribal] peoples have — don’t realize why they’d rather die than give it up… In any case, what humanity came up with during these first three million years was a way of life that works well for people and that is sustainable — that could have promised life for humankind for millions of years more — an accomplishment greater than any of ours, though of course less flashy.
— Daniel Quinn: If they give you lined paper write sidways
December 2020
if Palaeolithic lifestyles were so basic and primitive, how did humans evolve with trillions of potential neural connections in the brain, of which we now only use a small fraction? What kinds of sophisticated lifestyles would be needed to evolve such a massive brain over hundreds of thousands of years? What kind of nutritional abundance would be needed to develop such an organ, made mostly out of fat? How does the narrative of harsh survival in a hostile landscape align with this fact? If our prehistoric lives were so violent, hard and savage, how could we have evolved to have such soft skin, limited strength and delicate parts?
— Tyson Yunkaporta: Sand Talk