Human Iterations

(#4: Role-filling is moral nihilism.)

An Anti-Primitivist Essay

We do not consider “I was just following orders” to ever be a good excuse or moral justification. Neither is, “I was just following the environment.”

Though of course it's ludicrous to imagine our ecosystem personally issuing commands in a German falsetto to Nazi Stormtroopers, the basic issue of abdicating personal spirit and responsibility to external authority is the same.

Outsourcing our lives into the control of external systems is a surprisingly accepted practice in our society and whole swathes of people have come to believe that in doing so we can escape the energy of vigilance and self-animation. So vast is the acceptance, that there's a general sense that actions committed while self-placed under some external authority are, in some manner, of less personal responsibility than would be otherwise true. As if the choice to abdicate choice could ever be less egregious. Whenever we accept a form of external authority, we chew away at the personal processes of thinking and living in a sort of selective internal suicide. But rarely does it stay internal. Unaddressed and unbuffered by political rhetoric, our otherwise ongoing thought processes and interactions inevitably turn it corrosive. And what once might have been abstract and largely benign, if still a centrally accepted personal axiom, begins to noticeably seep out into our actions and intentions.

It's no secret that our most glamorous hierarchies and evils are assisted, if not entirely held up, by such abdications. But, conversely, many movements attempting to move away from such horrors have responded not by focusing on internally emergent conceptions of morality but rather on crafting or 'discovering' other external authorities. (The 'justification' used to support the latter over the former is that external sources are more 'objective' and thus provide greater functionality, but we shall see that such claims are false.)

Some of the most instantly recognizable and specific cases of role-filling passed as morality come from the Christian Church. (Ignoring upstarts like Tolstoy with all their boring "Heaven-is-Within" yammerings.) From semi-broad conceptions of manners of personal position within a larger system as moral goods, to actual behavioral code pounded into rocks, such conceptions of external morality have been adopted and fleshed out by many sincere people striving independently. ...And, of course, inexorably lead to empowered hierarchies and the justification of outright law.

In contrast, the extreme back-to-basics of Ecological role-filling do not directly lay down the specifics of some universal moral code, nor do they posit precise moment-to-moment structures of action. What is done instead is far more insidious, it embraces a generalized sense of external authority. The broad presupposition that we have a place within a larger system, and that our following of that externally defined role is a moral good.

In short, that externalities should rule us.

The fact that these externalities are labeled more material than social is an important detail, but does not change the underlying movement towards abrogation of personal spirit and responsibility. (And the mediation of material structures into guidelines for one's personal intent and action often comes through social instruments.)

By supporting chains of governance in the abstract, such ecological role-filling ultimately throws away self-definition and self-determination ...even though it may not have yet settled on particular rigid structures of personal participation.

The inherent problem is that, after embedding oneself in external causal sequences one cannot be assured of any moral force remaining in them much less being inherent. Externalities of any sort, by definition, are fundamentally unknowable and thus arbitrary.

Re framing and constructing one's life according to, variably, a biology-derived social equations or the drug-induced psychological synthesis of stimuli into personal instructions from an owl-spirit... though superficially different in structural source are identical in nature. They can justify anything.

And over many iterations, though such externalities may have been first broadly interpreted into producing anti-authoritarian behavior, without an internally emergent moral fire, they will justify anything.

The rejection of civilization and technology in favor of ecological role-filling, on the face of it, can't help but appear socially conservative. Still, most if not the overwhelming majority of primitivists have imported enlightenments from progressive movements of deconstruction, seeking to meld anarchist branches of Queer Theory within the critique of civilization. Despite anarcho-primitivism's macho appearance and reputation within the community, progressive perspectives and deconstruction of sexuality are widely embedded with the banner of Green Anarchy and some of the most energetic advances of relationalist anarchism insights have come via primitivist ventures. (Nothing makes folks face gender roles like a winter in the forest together.) But, although there's been some dancing around biological role-filling in regards to gender, one universal line been drawn, as it is inescapable from the most basic premise of anti-technology... However primitivism's ecological role-filling might be stretched to embrace the variance of gays, lesbians and bis; the transgenders are right out.

Because, of course, one's biological body is a component of one's role in the greater system that can't truly be changed without technology. The greater alteration of one's body's dynamics, the more dynamic (and from our point of view complex) the applied technology must be. This occasion of an anti-civilization interpretation of the environment's orders is but one sharp and early consequence of primitivism's broader-embrace of role-filling. More, of greater reverberation, are certainly to come.

As primitivism turns outward for direction from (interpretations of) ecological systems, the divergence between their resulting codes of action and our common feeling of a moral world will deepen. And one can only begin to imagine the depth to the insidious changes capable of spreading after a crash. When the touch of role-filling becomes more immediate.

This is just a basic reality. The embrace of one's position within a system internalizes and emphasizes one's connections to the system until the core person is subsumed and replaced by them.


A note on a functionable use of "objectivity" in this context: The exact same inert information patterns can be presented before multiple individuals. But that doesn't mean that such information patterns will or even can convey exactly the same meaning. A thing placed externally, being ultimately unknowable, is inherently more subjective and of less application than something internally emergent. You exist is an objective reality to you, but bodily pain or the "Color Red" are subjective to you. (And what's more, when drawn out or applied in any real sense, are exposed as arbitrary.)