The simple life
The JOB is the unquestioned goal for all free citizens of the world—the ultimate public good. It is the clearly stated exit goal of all education and the only sanctioned reason for acquiring knowledge. But if we think about it for a moment, jobs are not what we want. We want shelter, food, strong relationships, a liveable habitat, stimulating learning activity and time to perform valued tasks in which we excel.
I am often told that I should be grateful for the progress that western civilisation has brought to these shores. I am not. This life of work-or-die is not an improvement on pre-invasion living (before white settlers arrived in Australia), which involved only a few hours of work a day for shelter and sustenance, performing tasks that people do now for leisure activities on their yearly holidays–fishing, collecting plants, hunting, camping and so forth. The rest of the day was for fun, strengthening relationships, ritual and ceremony, cultural expression, intellectual pursuits and the expert crafting of exceptional objects. I know this is true because I have lived like this, even in this era when the land is only a pale shadow of the abundance that once was. We have been lied to about the 'harsh survival' lifestyles of the past. There was nothing harsh about it. If it was so harsh-such a brutish, menial struggle for existence-then we would not have evolved to become the delicate, intelligent creatures that we are.
But there I go, romanticising the past again. Time to yarn with somebody who's far better at that than I am, a famous thinker in the American anarcho-primitivist community whose work has often been dismissed as 'noble savage stuff. John Zerzan is an American of Czech descent.
His book titles include Running on Emptiness, Twilight of the Machines, and Elements of Refusal. He argues that civilisations oppress people through scarcity paradigms, while Indigenous communities have free societies based on paradigms of abundance.