In today's political debate, despite the large differences in opinions, everyone seems to take the continued existence of agriculture and industrial civilization for granted. Furthermore, they even seem to universally agree that it as a good thing. I completely disagree; I believe that a return to the primitive, pre-agricultural lifestyle is the best thing we can do for humanity in the long term, and the only possible route we can go if we even want to survive at all, instead of producing our own extinction and causing an end to the entirety of life on this planet.
Industrial civilization is unsustainable. We are riding a massive ten-thousand-year economic bubble which is soon going to pop if we continue on the course of industrial civilization. We have already far exceeded the earth's carrying capacity, and we are only able to carry on for the time being due to the fact that we have repeatedly bought ourselves a bit more time through the use of drastic artificial interventions that are simply not sustainable. We are quickly draining the earth of its resources faster than it can regenerate itself. Modern industrial civilization is simply a massive house of cards built on top of the continued extraction of oil, and this is something that simply can not be avoided or worked around. When we run out of oil, which will happen very soon, the entire house of cards will collapse, leaving us in ruins. It will be the worst catastrophe that humanity has ever seen.
Agriculture and industry are immensely harmful for the environment. Since the first seeds were planted ten thousand years ago, the human species has dramatically transformed the natural world, and not in a beneficial way. Agriculture is a massively polluting human activity that wreaks immense havoc and destruction on the natural environment. It requires the clear cutting of huge tracts of forest, it depletes the soil of its natural nutrients, it causes severe erosion, and through the use of irrigation it diverts enormous quantities of water from natural habitats where it is sorely needed. The impact of agriculture has only gotten worse in the last hundred years or so, with the advent of such things as factory farming, genetically modified crops, industrial agriculture, and pesticides.
Industry is so incredibly bad for the environment that even the horrors of agriculture are dwarfed in comparison. It requires the mass extraction of oil, which is unspeakably horrible for the natural ecosystem, and industrial corporations care nothing about the health of the environment. Chemicals regularly are dumped into rivers, toxic pollution is released into the atmosphere, contaminants are spread throughout critical natural habitats... the list goes on and on. In recent decades, the impact of the human activities of agriculture and industry have gotten so bad that global warming threatens us with an unstoppable runaway greenhouse effect that could very likely turn the Earth into a second Venus.
Agricultural and industrial civilization have been significantly harmful for humanity. Technology is worshiped with an almost cultlike passion in today's modern world, but almost everyone overlooks the horrors that technology brings. Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, we have created such things as chemical and biological weapons, industrial agriculture, nuclear technologies such as nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, the chemical industry, and industrial-scale mass warfare. Technologists claim that technology is beneficial to us, but whatever benefits we see are simply an unrepresentative facade that does not tell the story, and is outweighed by the massive negatives.
Technology and scientific progress have also had negative effects on the social fabric of human interactions. The internet may enable us to talk to people all the way around the world, but is that really so necessary or important? Consider that this same Internet has utterly destroyed face-to-face human interaction; you can rarely go anywhere without seeing literally almost everyone with their faces right up to their phones, oblivious to everything around them besides the three-inch bright screen directly in front of their faces. Also, instead of going out, seeing the world, and proactively making changes in your lifestyle for the better, people simply pop pills as a "solution" to every minor problem that they face, and this removes them from the true holistic experience of a fulfilling life that is in touch with nature.
Furthermore, many of the diseases we suffer today are solely diseases of civilization: heart disease, cancer, asthma, allergies, depression, liver failure, kidney failure, obesity, and much more. In pre-agricultural society, people lived long and fulfilled lives, and almost everyone was healthy and physically fit. The latter is something that can certainly not say about today.
The agricultural and industrial civilization of today disconnects humans from nature. This has serious tangible harmful effects that will come back to bite us if we do not change our ways. Ever since the dawn of agriculture, we have been evolving at an extremely fast rate. This is simply unsustainable: there is no way to get around this. Up until ten thousand years ago, humans were evolving very slowly, and this allowed our natural environments to co-evolve with us in a symbiotic manner, so that both man and nature benefited. However, ever since the giant mistake of agriculture began, we have been evolving far too quickly for the rest of the Earth to co-evolve. This has separated us from our place in the natural order, and the resulting imbalance, along with our massive deliberate destruction of the environment, has caused great damage to the earth. By returning to a primitive pre-agricultural lifestyle, we acknowledge and accept our humble yet special place in the natural order, returning us to a mutually beneficial relationship with the great natural world.
I firmly believe that the only way that humanity can survive in the long run is to end agriculture, dismantle industry, and embrace primitivism as our way of life. The notion of "progress" is simply not sustainable, and will doom us in the long run if we do not set it aside.
For me, personally, the only real question remaining is how we reach this in the best possible manner.
Do you agree with my support for a primitive way of life? What do you think? What are your views on the primitivist ideology?
