The Great Game

Replay: Just in time for the Soccer World Cup, Da Dood Blog brings a repost of «The Great Game» from the heyday of Euro 2004.

Some of the links in this post have gone dead -- which is a shame -- please inform me of any new locations that you know of or find.

With the euro 2004 finals just over yesterday, the time is ripe for some Green Grass metaphors. Those of us who are playing for the team called Resistance, either consciously or unconsciously, need to be sure that we know what we're doing, and where we do it. The other team, Arrogance, wants us to fight them on the Grass, at the stadium, at *their* stadium. But that's their home ground, and they control everything from the referee to the audience, the media, guards and police. And we all know Arrogance has killed before, at their stadiums.

So the question is if we should follow these scary types into their stadiums again, only to play another game we are certain to lose. Sure, they want us to play them, so the audience can be amused and thrilled by the just struggle and so-called fair play. But the Grass may be Greener on other fields, on Grasslands with less poison. What if we cheated, and said we'd play one more match, but sabotaged their stadium instead? After all, we are the Resistance, and there is a war on, and what's at stake is everything we hold dear, plus everything our descendants will ever hold dear.

Indeed, there *is* more to Life than football. War, for instance. Through a Thunder of cannons sounded to hail the great führer nation, the gauleiter of civilization, I checked my calendar and it said 4th of July. That means the new emperors-au-naturelle were celebrating independence day. Independence from europe, where they belonged. Independence from natives, who they witch-hunted. But most important, independence from Mother Earth, as there were no bounds to this huge and gigantic newfoundland.

Back in oldleftland, or old europe, as the vaterland is now called, the Tribes were already wiped out through centuries, even millennia, through slaughter by imperialist soldiers, inquisitive priests, witchhunters and the like. We'll have no more of that closeness to Nature, harmony hippy crap, thank you very much! Amen and halleluya.

The attack on New York City in 2001 sure is seen by some, even by members of the Resistance, as some sort of sabotage act. Yet it seems pretty clear it was a staged event, aimed at preparing the ground for the final expansion of eternal europe, or more precisely, expanding the lebensraum of american civilization. Having spread to all parts of the once newfoundland and used nearly all of its resources, it was time to move on.

This means Arrogance is now a lot more unified and one-directional, all over the Earth, yet Resistance needs to be infinitely more diverse and pluralistic, using any means and taking the struggle to all Grasslands and all Terrains.

Under the pavement, the beach!

Civilization – The Sequel

I may be wrong, but I got this feeling that Civilization has now entered a new, deadly phase, a Phase Two. Maybe, hopefully, it is the Final Phase.

Whereas in Phase One you were forced to view Nature itself as a threat per se, and as only good in its ability to provide resources and products for human consumption, the new threat in Phase Two is Truth.

To be civilized today – in this day and age – you have to despise Truth like the Plague itself. («For what is ’Truth’ anyway? And is their ’Truth’ any better than our ’Truth’?», I hear the NeoCon yadayada already in my head...)

The common theme is the alienation of Man from his true origin and environment: Unspoilt Nature. The covert rationale for this alienation is as always: Power.

In Phase One, by giving you a raw deal or a contract – join the farmer village and we’ll protect you from Evil, Scary Nature – they also made you their slave, their tax subject, their debt slave, etc. And of course, they told you that no-one could live a life out there anymore, among the brutes and the animals. And you somehow believed them.

In Phase Two, by contrast, they gave you an extended and even scarier deal: Hey you! You better join up with us and believe whatever we say is true, or else! Otherwise we tag you as a terrorist – and BY GOD! we hate the terrorists. DON’T WE?!

In this new phase you are all of a sudden unpatriotic if you question their right to disappear anyone they like, torture anyone they like and even execute anyone they like, without even a shred of evidence. If you ask ’Where’s the proof?’ you show signs of Life and of an intellectual capacity above melting point, and thus you are undeniably an ’intellectual terrorist’ in their lists and databases.

The bottom line is their subjects are now expected to look to them not only for food and shelter and protection from evil forces, but also for the hour-to-hour revision of the truth in their eyes. And if you deviate from this ’enforced truth’ in front of them or their extensive hierarchy of obedient followers – yes, even in front of your old mom or dad – you are immediately looked upon as some kind of a problem, a security threat.

Sometimes it just makes me so mad. And sad. But then I realize I just have to think about them as the System. Or the Shitstem, as they say in Jamaica. Somehow, if they work for the man, they also outsource their brain to the man, 24/7.

That’s the power of money, I guess. It makes the world go round.

Is that an office building or a jail?

Safely back in Oslo after the celebration of jól down south, I found myself with a new understanding. Or not new, but reinforced and articulated. While watching the BBC soap The Office with a friend who got the DVD for jól, from a friend at his office, I suddenly felt the urge to write down two words on somebody’s business card: Frivillig fengsel. Voluntary imprisonment.

What had dawned on me, or further crystallized, was the thought that we voluntarily go to the same office — or most of us do — every day, year in and year out, and for no apparent reason. We voluntarily limit our scope and creativity and freedom and opportunities, and we put ourselves in captivity for a very big part of our lives.

Back at the office the hours barely passed, they crept by like snails, like slow, slimy slugs. And I was bored as hell. And for two days it was like that. Then I googled for some inspiration. I found Mother Anarchy again, the great mother blog, and read about schools with barbed wire fences, that look like jails. Or concentration camps. And I followed her link and read more about unschooling.

Then I noticed once again her praise for Daniel Quinn’s novel Ishmael. I’d noticed it before and already decided to read it, and I also remember seeing it over at DarkGreen.org, at the home of the author of the brilliant feral novel Die Urmutter.

Walking home from the office I went by the library to turn in a DVD. Not expecting the book to be in the library, I casually made a search for Ishmael at the catalog computer. It turned out they had both the original and the Norwegian translation. Made my day! I borrowed the English 1997 edition and started reading it the minute I got home.

The fascinating thing as of tonight is that it sets out to answer some of the biggest questions I have been pondering for the last couple of weeks. Or more to the point: I’ve been trying to formulate what’s the Mother of All Lies — sort of the Alpha Lie — in this sea of lies that we call society. And it’s a feeling, but stays just a feeling, for most of us, unless we go after it and try to articulate it.

You have a feeling there’s something wrong with the world.

I will stop short of revealing what this supreme lie actually is; you should really go check it out for yourselves, if you read me this far!

Tagged unschooling, ishmael

The Concentration Post

Concentration is a double-edged sword — a gift and a curse.

On the one end of the sword, you have the Concentration Camps, the peak of Western civilization and industrialized cruelty.

And on the other, you have the «benign» concentration. You have concentrations of kids in a fenced area, the kindergarten, where the kids can play and develop social and elementary skills in a supposedly safe environment.

Of course, with such a huge concentration of kids in such a confined space, you will have all kinds of child diseases spreading like fire in dry grass. And occationally you will have episodes of child molestation, as grown-up pedophiles will be drawn to the kindergartens and orphanages like moths to a flame.

A little older, the child enters the ordered world of the school. The child learns order, discipline and, you guessed it, concentration. These «concentration camps» are where civilization grows and grooms its subjects, the Wild and untamed new citicens of the industrialized world.

And here concentration, at least apparently, is somewhat benign. The child is given a chance to develop what is undeniably an aspect of its natural self; the skills of thought and reflection. By learning the valued art of concentration, the child is formed and shaped into a modern, selectively skilled individual, detached from the Whole. Just as the doctor ordered.

Concentration in itself is the ability to shut everything out, and focus on one single field, like for instance maths, at the right time and at the present, specific task or problem. What is more generally termed intelligence or IQ, is really the trained or inherent ability to shut everything out and focus, concentrate.

Later in life, the subject may become a student at a higher education facility, where he will train to become ever more detached and focused on a narrow set of theoretical problems. His skills and trained abilities will in some cases be needed by a similarly specialized society, but nevertheless, the subject is now but a wheel in the vast machinery of civilization, and no longer a Whole person.

The entire process of education and concentration or specialization is merely a grand scheme of detachment from Nature and systemized de-learning of Natural skills on a more all-round level. We see the consequences of this in every aspect of modern life. People can no longer cook for themselves, no longer care for their kids, no longer think for themselves, and their survival skills in the Wild are almost on a non-existent level.

Monks in the monasterys did this as well. They'd hide in some sort of fortress where they would not «be tempted» by the worldly things, such as the otherwise abundant offer of sexual and social pleasure, and they'd sit in their confined spaces and chambers and develop sickening systems of religious insanity. Like moral systems and detailed instructions about how everyone should live their lives.

A detached world of clerics and nons and monks, that would develop detached worldviews, that we still suffer under to this very day. And having promised to live in celebacy, they found other ways to satisfy their urges. Animals, slaves and children were frequent victims of their holy, but sickening, «celebacy».

And pretty much the same is the case with science. The monastery is replaced by universities and research parks, but the same high level of detachment from Nature and Wholeness haunts the scientists, and their thinking and worldviews end up similarly untrue, artificial and essentially sickening and disastrous.

The economists, the doctors, the engineers and the sociologists all go out into the world and try to shape it in the name of «science». Which is really just a new form of religion, for our time. For instance, they are able to bring themselves to developing and producing IBM international business machines and sell them to nazi concentration camp managers, who needed them to keep track of all the «subhumans», some of which were in for the poison shower, and some of which were selected for the experiments, all in the name of science. And they are able to bring themselves to develop and sell Zyklon B, the poison gas for the Final Solution. And they are able to bring themselves to develop atomic bombs, that fry entire cities. And they are able to bring themselves to develop napalm, AIDS, weaponized strains of diseases, depleted uranium ammunitions, etc. To name but a few of the «great» innovations and products of civilization, and their willing scientists and executioners.

And for the rest of us, there's always the abundant «opportunities» and supply of subcultures to sink and delve into, a sort of substitute for real Diversity, related to music, movies, clothing, gaming and all kinds of popular culture, to occupy our dead time, satisfy our concentration urge, and keep us from going mad in this insane world of ours.

One man who has gone the other way, the exact opposite way in this regard, is Amos Keppler. To learn from him and maybe be inspired by him, you can read an email interview I made with the man. After reading this, you may also want to check out his own blog, The Midnight Fire Blog, which can be found at this address: midnightfire.blogspot.com



Robin: Tell us about living in the Wild, Amos!

Amos: It’s awkward at first, but after that you feel like you’re slowly awakening from a bad dream. You stumble a lot in roots and such the first few days, but then your feet remember, more and more what your conscious mind has forgotten. And it’s slowly becoming second nature. The ability to live in the wild is in all of us.

Robin: And how did you provide food & cooking?

Amos: I didn’t usually cook. The fire was mostly for heat on cold nights. I was never totally self-sufficient, even though that was the goal, but I didn’t need to go and fetch civilized food often, and during the summer and autumn hardly at all. I experimented a lot and was lucky, I guess that didn’t catch more bad stuff. I was sick a few days now and then by ingesting inedible stuff. I learned a bit more as time went by, though I’ll say I’m still not skilled enough to survive for years. You get rusty again quickly, too, after having returned to civilization.

Robin: It must have been cold sometimes, and wet too. How did you keep warm?

Amos: I hardly got wet, and when I wanted a fire I made a fire by picking the bark of willow, scraping off its wet, inner «skin». What is beneath is dry as desert sand, and fairly easy to make a fire with. And to add to that I tap Resin from pines. It contains turpentine. I also make healing tea from the willow bark. There was a kind of cave, slight overheads where I could avoid the rain. I did wander a lot, though, and didn’t carry anything more than I could carry. That’s what any Nomad must learn. We must all learn not to gather more than we can carry.

And you toughen up after a while. Temperatures bothering you initially won’t, after a while.

I also try to absorb as much knowledge as possible of natural medicine and herbs, and recognize it in nature. That isn’t easy either. You can’t learn life only from books. They can’t be more than a supplement in the learning process. Experience is the milk and the key.

Robin: What were the first things you missed from civilization?

Amos: I didn’t really miss anything, and I did find that strange. I brought a laptop the first year, and a lot of batteries because a paper notebook isn’t really feasible when you have a lot of writing to do, and one of my reasons for learning to live and survive in nature was to write a book called Thunder Road Book One: Ice and Fire, about the and of civilization that will be published next year or the year after that. I also wrote a lot of poems. The thing about being a Storyteller, though, I can do in a tribe, too, after civilization is gone. Easily.

There will always be a need for a Storyteller around the campfire. Oral tradition is mankind’s natural way of telling stories. A wild tribe encourages diversity. It has to, to evolve and grow and becoming better suited to survive, both as a group and as individuals.

The second year I didn’t bring any advanced technology at all, except for a brief trip to the far, very far Norwegian mountains and «national parks», where I did drive. And kept «writing» in my head by memorizing everything, and I learned to contain it in my head. I can honestly say I hardly forgot more than a few words. It felt amazing. That, too.

The other reason is simple: Civilization will end soon, and we should help bring it about. It’s destroying everything making life worth living. I wanted to learn to survive for the case of survival itself.

I’m convinced civilization will collapse totally in the near future, because of Global Warming, the coming pandemonium and social political breakdown hitting us fairly simultaneously. Each and every one of them cataclysmic events in itself, but joined they’ll be absolutely devastating to a system denying nature, and its vast power. And I want to be ready. I’m not yet, but I am working on it.

Robin: What made you go back? (to civilization)

Amos: Winter, I guess, and convenience and habit and all the strains and shit of the web pulling us back to our chains. And you can’t really escape civilization, not as long as it is There, as long as it exists anywhere. It will exist inside us, until we rid ourselves of it, totally, like disregarding rotten food, and avoid festering still ponds. Btw I wasn’t really sick a day out there, but the first day I got back in I got a cold…

Robin: Will you go back again?

Amos: I do go back all the time. I haven’t spent months outside in a couple of years, now, though. But I’m constantly prodding, probing, both mentally and physically the true life of the Human Being. That btw is the most enduring and prevalent realization you get out there: We belong there. It’s our home. The cities, this current walking dead life isn’t.

Robin: Thank you very much! Maybe we’ll bump into each other someday out in the Wild!

Amos: Paths that cross will always cross again.

Tags: primitivism, anti-civ

It's funny how they shoot you down when your hands are held up high

It's funny how it works, the world of politics and movements, you may think that one side is eating the other, only to find that the jaws belong to the latter and are really eating the former. A bit like a game of Go. You need to be sure what structures are secure, and you have to be as focused on the plans of your opponent as you are on your own. Who can you trust? We used to have left and right in politics, these days we only have right right and left right. Right right wants to get rid of voting, and left right wants to be just like right right. And green orgs are really brand names to be built and sold as certificates of greenness, and no-one wants to really annoy the corporations for fear of losing their ads and sponsorships. Who can you trust? As everyone claims to be in opposition to this system you find they are all an integral part of it and you have to be severely drugged or busy or reduced to count them as opposing groups, still you do, and everyone does, and the falseness of it all makes you sick, makes you wanna get drunk, makes you wanna drink orgs people under the table, or smoke weed, the only green they'd ever been. Having seen these people wanna make dough, wanna lead stable family lives, therefore selling their org asses to the corporate bosses for stability, for a regular income, green washing green dollar bills, something dies. Who can you trust? Who can you trust, but the person who owns nothing, who rejects it all, who has nothing to gain from what he's doing, who has no reason to be controlled and careful, who sees no point in not being free? A simple rule of thumb: If it has a budget, it's part of the system!

Welcome to the desert of the real

Call it Compromateria, the Construct or the Matrix, it can in any case be argued that The Matrix has you. As the world that has been drawn over your eyes to blind you from the real, the Matrix is the totality, maybe even the totalitarianism of modern day civilized life.

An ever increasing degree of substitution, or representation, makes up the world we now live in. The safety of the Tribe, living close together and protecting each other from natural peril, has been replaced by the city walls. And thus you put your trust in society, and in the priests and emperors of the walled community. Within civilization, your direct exchanges with Nature to make a living have been replaced by trade and money and debt and taxes. All the Plants and Animals and Landscapes you once saw every day around you, have been substituted by symbols; words and numbers. The River is now an amount of cubic meters of H2O, or kWh, belonging to the emperor and to be manipulated as he sees fit. The myths and ethics of the early tribes are replaced by central planning for economic growth. Fellow human beings are pawns and slaves to the emperors and the priests.

So physically we all live in Compromateria now, inside the Construct reality. And there's even a carefully programmed PR image version of reality for our minds, for our total enslavement to the ruling elite. But like Mr Anderson in the Hollywood movie, we too can allow our curious other half, the Neo identity, to explore the boundaries of the Matrix and ask the question: What is the Matrix? For there are holes in the Matrix, glitches, and there are people like Morpheus to help us see the world as it really is.

Welcome to the desert of the real. The world may not look very good or attractive from the viewpoint of the real. But nevertheless, it is real. The world of industry and politics and war and capitalism is dead destructive, almost beyond recognition. It is perfectly understandable that people, like the Cypher caracter in the Hollywood movie, will choose the fake, prefer the beautiful, tasty world of the Matrix to the real world. You can't blame them, for the real world looks more and more like a desert, and the last spots of green, wild Nature are swept away in a furious pace.

Nature is, however you choose to see it, what we came from and where we are and are finally going. The body cannot function without the mind, and humanity cannot prevail without the services of Nature. As Daniel Quinn suggests in The Story of B, we are all descendants of men and women who chose to take from Nature, instead of living with Nature. For millions of years, our kind had been living in relative harmony with Nature, and within Nature, before eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge in the garden of Eden, as the Bible puts it, or before taking the control of fire from Zevs, as the ancient Greeks would say. Civilization's own PR people, the makers of the Matrix, ie the priests and politicians, have been spinning the garden of Eden event ever since as the beginning of man. This we know, of course, is utter bullshit.

In a seemingly innocent preview of what was to come, the Takers took the fire that they now had the knowledge to control and use for their purposes, and used it to slash-and-burn nearby forest. This area, the first ever taken from Nature, was then used for agriculture or grazing animals. This in itself didn't harm Nature much, as the early farmers took their slash-and-burn project elsewhere, leaving the exhausted soil to recover. But the new brainchild, that of dominating Nature, was born and would grow ever bigger.

This is where we deviated from the great common biological evolution, and became the demons and destroyers that we are in the eyes of all other species.

Dream versus work

Most people today are ripped out of their Dream most of their nights by some noisy annoying alarm clock, ending their playful and creative free hours of the day in order to prepare them for work. Some choose to silence their alarm for another ten minutes, for another half hour, but they nevertheless end up going back to work, after a frustrating effort to make their Dream last just a little bit longer.

Back at work the Dream may still haunt some of us, puzzle us with the tiny fragments of it we still remember, although most of it is gone due to the brutal slaughter performed by the alarm clock. And the Dream goes on, through the day, competing with work tasks for our attention. Sometimes when we fall ill, catch a cold or maybe the flu, we say to our inner self: Oh, what a relief! Is this for real? Can I actually finish my Dreams and get up when I want to and do what I wanna do?

What a Dream! What if every day could be like this? What if I could stay home, and care for the people around me or in my community, instead of commuting and caring for other people in other places, while having people from yet other places coming to my home or my community to care for the people I care about? Is this Utopia? Is this just a Dream?

What if freedom meant being free? What if we could all liberate ourselves, so that we all could have meaningful, bioregional and liberal occupations, so that we could all work with the stuff we care about, Dream of the stuff we work with, and then get up and be inspired by our Dream in the things we do the next day? Follow our Dream, set it into play, explore the Dream and the Dream-like states, follow the White Rabbit into the holes, to see how far they go and how far they can take us, how far we can get and how much we can see that is hidden, that is out of sight, that is forbidden.

I was bitten by a Tick the other day in the woods and I slept for sixteen hours straight waking up in my tent with a clear memory of this Dream I had that we were demons. That all the plants and animals saw us and feared us as demons. They may be right.

The scream of the Butterfly.