Quick correction from the interviewee: WE DON'T EAT RAW UNRIPE BANANAS!! 😂 I misspoke! We harvest UNRIPE (green) bananas and BOIL them, so they become a starchy staple similar to potatoes, with varying textures and widely divergent taste profiles. In Thai, the colloquial words you use for "unripe" and "raw" are the same, so I get mixed up. Languages truly are confusing... I'm serious: don't eat raw green bananas. They're disgusting.
Great conversation! Many cultures once labeled "hunter gatherer" by Westerners were horticulturalists working with native plants such as the Coast Salish while others abandoned intensive ag societies such as those in the Amazon who left the massive ancient cities for more autonomous shifting cultivation horticulturalist lives that utilized wild animal husbandry. Thoreau and Muir popularized wilderness after observing recently depopulated landscapes that were traditionally managed by horticulturalists. This has fed into the western idea of wilderness areas where no food is grown while still having sacrifice areas like farms, timber plantations, mines, and cities. Horticulture offers many options and when enough of us do it, there will be more opportunities for more gathering and hunting since we can revitalize the land and native species while growing food.
I don't know how I landed here, but I'm glad that I had the opportunity to listen to these two really interesting conversations on a subject that I've never been aware of. Thanks to both of you : )
This has gotten me to consider horticulture and delayed return as a viable goal worth going into. I will send this to a University professor associated with the food sovereignty program that I mentioned earlier. I remember reading Seaweed's Land and Freedom where he talked about how both nomadic life and of village living. And I thought both sounded really beautiful. But as I got into more anti-civ literature, I forgot about the village life in favor of the nomadic life. Not very related to the topic at hand but I think that I will probably do a deep dive into disability studies sometime in the near future, and I am curious how it connects to anti-civ anarchy. I talked to a friend of mine who is on the communist side of politics, and they asked the classic questions about ableism and primitivism. While I did not have all of the answers to all of her questions, I did point out that technological society requires extraction from so many places to get the materials to make the products. But this extraction ruins the land that people depend on, and is harmful to the bodies and psyches of the people who do the extracting. It is a fucked up way to address disability, having to sacrifice people and land far away(being the people and land that extract/are extracted) to treat people 'here' (here being the technologically developed country) it. @FeunFooPermaculture By any chance have you read or written anything on this topic? Thank you for your time. PS. I told my ex about the the unripe bananas and said that it was cursed. Very funny.
Well, thank you so much! That means (at least with one person) my efforts to provide examples that might cause some people to look at things they haven’t yet considered have been successful - yay! I haven’t read Seaweed’s Land and Freedom yet, but I’ll add it to the list. Thanks for the recommendation! Yeah, the disability issue (i.e. accusation of ableism) is not exactly the easiest thing to talk about, also because it’s so emotionally charged for so many people involved. But my youngest brother has autism (Asperger’s, and is thus not able to live a “normal,” self-sufficient life in modern society), so I’m no stranger to the debate, or to the complexities and complications around it. I haven’t written anything official on the issue, but I’ll summarize my thoughts right quick. First of all, as someone who has seen with his own eyes how fucking DIFFICULT life is for a disabled child - even in modern society! - I want to set the baseline for treatment of disabled people straight from the beginning on. It’s not like disabled people have it super easy in modern society - far from it! It’s exhausting, traumatizing, horrifying, shocking, degrading (and at least half a dozen negative adjectives more) how difficult everything is, not only for the disabled child, of course, but also for the parents. So it’s not like disabled people generally have it super easy in THIS society. That being said, first we might want to take a quick deep-time look at disability, and try to figure out how things were handled in the past. I remember reading an article that is exemplary of the point I’m trying to make here. Apparently, we have decisive archaeological evidence for people taking care of the disabled as early as 500,000 years ago - the humans in question are not even Homo sapiens, but Homo heidelbergensis: www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/82-humans-took-care-of-the-disabled-over-500-000-years-ago This shows that it is NATURAL to want to care for your child, no matter what. And as with all such findings, we can safely assume that this hasn’t been the very first time humans took care of a disabled child, but simply the first time we found evidence, half a million years later. The very fact that there is evidence from this long ago leads one to assume that the practice cannot have been that uncommon. And, as Rebecca Sykes writes in her amazing book about Neanderthal life, among Neanderthals it was also fairly common (the norm, rather than the exception), that disabled individuals, both the young and old, were cared for by their social group. To me, this comes as absolutely no surprise. Loving your child is a cross-cultural human universal, and parental love is generally not tainted by “abnormalities” or “imperfections” that their children exhibit/express. Of course we want our children to survive and have the best life possible. Accusations of ableism are all too often leveled by people who think that the inhabitants of the agrarian civilization of Sparta are just as backwards and “primitive” as hunter-gatherers. Anything before the Middle Ages is thrown into the same pot by those folks, and rarely ever examined in any greater detail. They don’t care enough to be interested in the nuances. They saw some “historical movie” (probably 300) where half-naked barbarians threw disabled babies off a cliff, and in their shallow minds they assume that this must have been the norm. What those people say doesn’t matter, and we should not waste precious time even talking to them. And, just to make it clear that I’m not romanticizing hunter-gatherer life, there definitely were occasional instances here and there where newborn children (both disabled or not) were killed: the infamous infanticide. But this is ALWAYS a last resort - no parent enjoys abandoning/killing their offspring, believe me. And sometimes, as sad as this is, there is simply no way around it. Especially in times when resources are scarce, hard decisions must be taken to ensure SURVIVAL OF THE GROUP - which ALWAYS takes precedence over the survival of any individual member. This is as true for humans as it is for any other species of animal - we are not special in this regard. Other animals will sometimes have to choose to abandon their young as well, and especially among social mammals this decision is never an easy one. But - contrary to what humanism, aehmm I mean HUMAN SUPREMACISM preaches - not every single individual human life is precious. Hell, MY OWN LIFE isn’t precious. What matters the most, always has and always will, is the health of the Land itself. The ecosystem at large. No individual animal matters more than the Great Whole. It all boils down to the dominant culture’s pathological and excessive fear of death. Sometimes, humans have to die! That’s not tragic (at least not from the bird’s-eye ecology view), that’s not “a problem to be solved” - that’s simply LIFE. We have to do everything in our power to prevent or ease the suffering of our loved ones, of course, but if we can’t do this anymore at some point we have to accept this as well and find ways of dealing with the resulting grief and pain. (Hunter-gatherers generally have vastly more efficient ways to deal with grief and loss, as a community, together with people who had similar experiences and can relate. People in modern society sometimes go as far as to kill themselves after losing a child, because they can’t handle the pain of it, whereas I don’t recall a single incidence of that happening among traditional societies. They had to confront pain and death for a few million years already, so you’d expect them to have developed good ways to deal with it.) I wrote an essay about death recently that might be of interest concerning the topic in this paragraph: animistsramblings.substack.com/p/where-we-go-when-we-die And since we now have established that the health of humans and the health of the land are not only connected, but are basically ONE AND THE SAME THING (if we look at the bigger picture), it makes sense to look at the root causes of the surge of people being born with various disabilities. I think it’s safe to say that at no point in history has disability been as common and widespread as in modern society. There are, of course, many cases that boil down to random genetic mutations/defects, but a non-negligible (actually, a steadily increasing) culprit is POLLUTION. Microplastics, PM 2.5, smog, PFAS, pesticides, exhaust fumes… Basically every compound that acts as a genotoxin, neurotoxin and/or endocrine disruptor has the ability to cause disability in those exposed to them (and to an ever-greater extent in consequent generations, because of bioaccumulation of those compounds in plants and animals), or at least to radically promote the misexpression of genes that underlie many disabilities. Another issue that comes to mind are hypersanitized modern environments that cause autoimmune diseases because the body is never exposed to the natural microbiome in the environment (and is thus too weak and inefficient). Another one are physical disabilities resulting from car- or workplace accidents and other activities enabled by industrial civilization. People who fucked up their backs and eyes because they sat in a chair and looked at a screen for 8h a day for decades of their life. And the list goes on and on. Thus it seems that the disability issue is, at least on the scope we’re currently experiencing, partly CAUSED by techno-industrial civilization, which consequently destroys and degrades even more ecosystems through mining and industry to produce “cures” (pills, medical equipment and devices - pretty much the issue that you correctly pointed out to your friend) for problems that are assumed to be just natural maladies of a cursed species condemned to eternal suffering. This is, of course, nonsense. No wild animal species successfully living the natural life it evolved to live for millions of years would be expected to be constantly sick and ever-threatened by infections, disability and early death - so why do we expect disease and disability to occur among hunter-gatherers with the same frequency as within our highly toxic, ecocidal modern society? And although it seems like a tasteless cliché to quote Rousseau as a primitivist (hahaha), he had a really good point when he said that “civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.” It is. It does.
@FeunFooPermaculture I appreciate the response. To open myself a bit. I am a transfemme autistic person. I have cousins and aunts and uncles from both my parent's side that also have austitic trait although they manifest differently. I have since I was a kid always meant to feel lesser than others, my parents always drilled it into me that they think that I am incompetent and will get myself killed if I am not under constant watch. I was good in academics, I was supposedly 3 or 4 years ahead of my peers in mathematics when I was 9 or 10, but that never amounted to anything. Because I was taught that the only thing that my mind was good for was academics, things like going outside, or having relationships with people, and so on were made out to be dangerous for me. There is a lot of other things that I will not mention, but the upbringing did a lot of damage to me mentally. Me being autistic was besides the point, I think I would have been fine if the people around me didn't treat me as being inferior or as defeated in advance. In 2022 I was doing research for nuclear chemistry for a university it was the highest paid job I have ever had, and I was so miserable doing it (because it wasn't fulfilling, science research was the only thing I was good at ,and because it was around this time I was questioning progress and technology) that I almost ended 6 feet underground. Since I was 5 or 6 I had a strong fear of death, and yet it was around 6 or 7 when I would want t not be alive, my whole life basically. It is a contradiction, and the main take away is that this modern life is not sustaining, neither on the level of the world or the individual. Part of the disability studies that I am reading is about how people use disability to justify taking autonomy away from the disabled. The essay “The Sexualized Body of the Child: Parents and the Politics of "Voluntary" Sterilization of People Labeled Intellectually Disabled," by Michel Desjardin (2012) is about how even though it is now illegal to forcefully lock away mentally impaired people and sterilize them against their will, the specter of the belief that mentally disabled people are defeated in advance means that parents convinced their children to get sterilized. On one hand it is voluntary, but on another hand the parents do this by undermining the competency, and confidence of their children to convince them that they have to be sterilized. And sterilization is a prerequisite for allowing these adults to engage in sexual activity. I get that the parents are likely facing a lot of stress and anxiety about raising children with mental disabilities all the way to adulthood and do not want to do so again with grandchildren who might also be mentally disabled. But I think that there are better ways of handling this without enforcing this narrative of defeat. If we were less alienated then it wouldn't just be the parents or an impersonal institution that helps take care of the intellectually disabled. Support would be more distributed and more personal. And instead of focusing soley on where they are weak, people should focus on where they are strong and capable. And nurture autonomy instead of restricting it. In regards to my experience with gender I contemplate between figure out a way to do hormone therapy without the need of industrial supply chains, or if I should get myself castrated. I think there is something to be said about how civilization through being patriarchal creates gender problems that supposedly only civilization can treat. If I were born and raised in a hunter and gatherer group I might still have some form of gender dysphoria, but I am sure it would not be the same as what I experience in my life today. I agree with what you have said. That Rousseau quote was spot on. I said something similar about the internet. The internet is a place to sometimes make connections with other people who can relate to one's struggles, and I am sure it has saved many lives. But would it be so necessary if the world around us wasn't so alienating, so racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, and so on. The internet is a product of civilization that barely resolves the problems of civilization.
Really enjoyed this two part discussion. Learnt a lot.
Well, thank you, Mr. B Doyle! Nice seeing you in this corner of the internet!
Quick correction from the interviewee: WE DON'T EAT RAW UNRIPE BANANAS!! 😂 I misspoke! We harvest UNRIPE (green) bananas and BOIL them, so they become a starchy staple similar to potatoes, with varying textures and widely divergent taste profiles. In Thai, the colloquial words you use for "unripe" and "raw" are the same, so I get mixed up. Languages truly are confusing...
I'm serious: don't eat raw green bananas. They're disgusting.
Great conversation!
Many cultures once labeled "hunter gatherer" by Westerners were horticulturalists working with native plants such as the Coast Salish while others abandoned intensive ag societies such as those in the Amazon who left the massive ancient cities for more autonomous shifting cultivation horticulturalist lives that utilized wild animal husbandry.
Thoreau and Muir popularized wilderness after observing recently depopulated landscapes that were traditionally managed by horticulturalists. This has fed into the western idea of wilderness areas where no food is grown while still having sacrifice areas like farms, timber plantations, mines, and cities.
Horticulture offers many options and when enough of us do it, there will be more opportunities for more gathering and hunting since we can revitalize the land and native species while growing food.
I don't know how I landed here, but I'm glad that I had the opportunity to listen to these two really interesting conversations on a subject that I've never been aware of.
Thanks to both of you : )
This has gotten me to consider horticulture and delayed return as a viable goal worth going into. I will send this to a University professor associated with the food sovereignty program that I mentioned earlier.
I remember reading Seaweed's Land and Freedom where he talked about how both nomadic life and of village living. And I thought both sounded really beautiful. But as I got into more anti-civ literature, I forgot about the village life in favor of the nomadic life.
Not very related to the topic at hand but I think that I will probably do a deep dive into disability studies sometime in the near future, and I am curious how it connects to anti-civ anarchy. I talked to a friend of mine who is on the communist side of politics, and they asked the classic questions about ableism and primitivism. While I did not have all of the answers to all of her questions, I did point out that technological society requires extraction from so many places to get the materials to make the products. But this extraction ruins the land that people depend on, and is harmful to the bodies and psyches of the people who do the extracting. It is a fucked up way to address disability, having to sacrifice people and land far away(being the people and land that extract/are extracted) to treat people 'here' (here being the technologically developed country) it. @FeunFooPermaculture By any chance have you read or written anything on this topic?
Thank you for your time.
PS. I told my ex about the the unripe bananas and said that it was cursed. Very funny.
Well, thank you so much! That means (at least with one person) my efforts to provide examples that might cause some people to look at things they haven’t yet considered have been successful - yay!
I haven’t read Seaweed’s Land and Freedom yet, but I’ll add it to the list. Thanks for the recommendation!
Yeah, the disability issue (i.e. accusation of ableism) is not exactly the easiest thing to talk about, also because it’s so emotionally charged for so many people involved. But my youngest brother has autism (Asperger’s, and is thus not able to live a “normal,” self-sufficient life in modern society), so I’m no stranger to the debate, or to the complexities and complications around it. I haven’t written anything official on the issue, but I’ll summarize my thoughts right quick.
First of all, as someone who has seen with his own eyes how fucking DIFFICULT life is for a disabled child - even in modern society! - I want to set the baseline for treatment of disabled people straight from the beginning on. It’s not like disabled people have it super easy in modern society - far from it! It’s exhausting, traumatizing, horrifying, shocking, degrading (and at least half a dozen negative adjectives more) how difficult everything is, not only for the disabled child, of course, but also for the parents.
So it’s not like disabled people generally have it super easy in THIS society.
That being said, first we might want to take a quick deep-time look at disability, and try to figure out how things were handled in the past. I remember reading an article that is exemplary of the point I’m trying to make here. Apparently, we have decisive archaeological evidence for people taking care of the disabled as early as 500,000 years ago - the humans in question are not even Homo sapiens, but Homo heidelbergensis:
www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/82-humans-took-care-of-the-disabled-over-500-000-years-ago
This shows that it is NATURAL to want to care for your child, no matter what. And as with all such findings, we can safely assume that this hasn’t been the very first time humans took care of a disabled child, but simply the first time we found evidence, half a million years later. The very fact that there is evidence from this long ago leads one to assume that the practice cannot have been that uncommon. And, as Rebecca Sykes writes in her amazing book about Neanderthal life, among Neanderthals it was also fairly common (the norm, rather than the exception), that disabled individuals, both the young and old, were cared for by their social group.
To me, this comes as absolutely no surprise. Loving your child is a cross-cultural human universal, and parental love is generally not tainted by “abnormalities” or “imperfections” that their children exhibit/express. Of course we want our children to survive and have the best life possible.
Accusations of ableism are all too often leveled by people who think that the inhabitants of the agrarian civilization of Sparta are just as backwards and “primitive” as hunter-gatherers. Anything before the Middle Ages is thrown into the same pot by those folks, and rarely ever examined in any greater detail. They don’t care enough to be interested in the nuances. They saw some “historical movie” (probably 300) where half-naked barbarians threw disabled babies off a cliff, and in their shallow minds they assume that this must have been the norm. What those people say doesn’t matter, and we should not waste precious time even talking to them.
And, just to make it clear that I’m not romanticizing hunter-gatherer life, there definitely were occasional instances here and there where newborn children (both disabled or not) were killed: the infamous infanticide. But this is ALWAYS a last resort - no parent enjoys abandoning/killing their offspring, believe me. And sometimes, as sad as this is, there is simply no way around it. Especially in times when resources are scarce, hard decisions must be taken to ensure SURVIVAL OF THE GROUP - which ALWAYS takes precedence over the survival of any individual member. This is as true for humans as it is for any other species of animal - we are not special in this regard. Other animals will sometimes have to choose to abandon their young as well, and especially among social mammals this decision is never an easy one. But - contrary to what humanism, aehmm I mean HUMAN SUPREMACISM preaches - not every single individual human life is precious. Hell, MY OWN LIFE isn’t precious. What matters the most, always has and always will, is the health of the Land itself. The ecosystem at large. No individual animal matters more than the Great Whole.
It all boils down to the dominant culture’s pathological and excessive fear of death. Sometimes, humans have to die! That’s not tragic (at least not from the bird’s-eye ecology view), that’s not “a problem to be solved” - that’s simply LIFE. We have to do everything in our power to prevent or ease the suffering of our loved ones, of course, but if we can’t do this anymore at some point we have to accept this as well and find ways of dealing with the resulting grief and pain. (Hunter-gatherers generally have vastly more efficient ways to deal with grief and loss, as a community, together with people who had similar experiences and can relate. People in modern society sometimes go as far as to kill themselves after losing a child, because they can’t handle the pain of it, whereas I don’t recall a single incidence of that happening among traditional societies. They had to confront pain and death for a few million years already, so you’d expect them to have developed good ways to deal with it.)
I wrote an essay about death recently that might be of interest concerning the topic in this paragraph:
animistsramblings.substack.com/p/where-we-go-when-we-die
And since we now have established that the health of humans and the health of the land are not only connected, but are basically ONE AND THE SAME THING (if we look at the bigger picture), it makes sense to look at the root causes of the surge of people being born with various disabilities. I think it’s safe to say that at no point in history has disability been as common and widespread as in modern society. There are, of course, many cases that boil down to random genetic mutations/defects, but a non-negligible (actually, a steadily increasing) culprit is POLLUTION. Microplastics, PM 2.5, smog, PFAS, pesticides, exhaust fumes… Basically every compound that acts as a genotoxin, neurotoxin and/or endocrine disruptor has the ability to cause disability in those exposed to them (and to an ever-greater extent in consequent generations, because of bioaccumulation of those compounds in plants and animals), or at least to radically promote the misexpression of genes that underlie many disabilities. Another issue that comes to mind are hypersanitized modern environments that cause autoimmune diseases because the body is never exposed to the natural microbiome in the environment (and is thus too weak and inefficient). Another one are physical disabilities resulting from car- or workplace accidents and other activities enabled by industrial civilization. People who fucked up their backs and eyes because they sat in a chair and looked at a screen for 8h a day for decades of their life. And the list goes on and on.
Thus it seems that the disability issue is, at least on the scope we’re currently experiencing, partly CAUSED by techno-industrial civilization, which consequently destroys and degrades even more ecosystems through mining and industry to produce “cures” (pills, medical equipment and devices - pretty much the issue that you correctly pointed out to your friend) for problems that are assumed to be just natural maladies of a cursed species condemned to eternal suffering.
This is, of course, nonsense. No wild animal species successfully living the natural life it evolved to live for millions of years would be expected to be constantly sick and ever-threatened by infections, disability and early death - so why do we expect disease and disability to occur among hunter-gatherers with the same frequency as within our highly toxic, ecocidal modern society?
And although it seems like a tasteless cliché to quote Rousseau as a primitivist (hahaha), he had a really good point when he said that “civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.” It is. It does.
@FeunFooPermaculture I appreciate the response.
To open myself a bit. I am a transfemme autistic person. I have cousins and aunts and uncles from both my parent's side that also have austitic trait although they manifest differently. I have since I was a kid always meant to feel lesser than others, my parents always drilled it into me that they think that I am incompetent and will get myself killed if I am not under constant watch. I was good in academics, I was supposedly 3 or 4 years ahead of my peers in mathematics when I was 9 or 10, but that never amounted to anything. Because I was taught that the only thing that my mind was good for was academics, things like going outside, or having relationships with people, and so on were made out to be dangerous for me.
There is a lot of other things that I will not mention, but the upbringing did a lot of damage to me mentally. Me being autistic was besides the point, I think I would have been fine if the people around me didn't treat me as being inferior or as defeated in advance.
In 2022 I was doing research for nuclear chemistry for a university it was the highest paid job I have ever had, and I was so miserable doing it (because it wasn't fulfilling, science research was the only thing I was good at ,and because it was around this time I was questioning progress and technology) that I almost ended 6 feet underground.
Since I was 5 or 6 I had a strong fear of death, and yet it was around 6 or 7 when I would want t not be alive, my whole life basically. It is a contradiction, and the main take away is that this modern life is not sustaining, neither on the level of the world or the individual.
Part of the disability studies that I am reading is about how people use disability to justify taking autonomy away from the disabled. The essay “The Sexualized Body of the Child: Parents and the Politics of "Voluntary" Sterilization of People Labeled Intellectually Disabled," by Michel Desjardin (2012) is about how even though it is now illegal to forcefully lock away mentally impaired people and sterilize them against their will, the specter of the belief that mentally disabled people are defeated in advance means that parents convinced their children to get sterilized. On one hand it is voluntary, but on another hand the parents do this by undermining the competency, and confidence of their children to convince them that they have to be sterilized. And sterilization is a prerequisite for allowing these adults to engage in sexual activity.
I get that the parents are likely facing a lot of stress and anxiety about raising children with mental disabilities all the way to adulthood and do not want to do so again with grandchildren who might also be mentally disabled. But I think that there are better ways of handling this without enforcing this narrative of defeat. If we were less alienated then it wouldn't just be the parents or an impersonal institution that helps take care of the intellectually disabled. Support would be more distributed and more personal. And instead of focusing soley on where they are weak, people should focus on where they are strong and capable. And nurture autonomy instead of restricting it.
In regards to my experience with gender I contemplate between figure out a way to do hormone therapy without the need of industrial supply chains, or if I should get myself castrated. I think there is something to be said about how civilization through being patriarchal creates gender problems that supposedly only civilization can treat. If I were born and raised in a hunter and gatherer group I might still have some form of gender dysphoria, but I am sure it would not be the same as what I experience in my life today.
I agree with what you have said. That Rousseau quote was spot on. I said something similar about the internet. The internet is a place to sometimes make connections with other people who can relate to one's struggles, and I am sure it has saved many lives. But would it be so necessary if the world around us wasn't so alienating, so racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, and so on. The internet is a product of civilization that barely resolves the problems of civilization.
This episode is going to trigger Kevin Tucker.
This is indeed a common reaction to the episode