Today at work, I was suddenly seized with a desire to know what Wikipedia had to say about "Croatoan". Nothing sparked this - at least, nothing I can track back in my mind. Let's just say that this started at my googling this word.
Back in the days of colonial America, a group of English settlers living on an island off the coast of what is now North Carolina simply disappeared. When a rescue ship came for them, they were gone, but on one tree was carved the word "Croatoan", the name of another island.
It has lately come to mean something quite different. Apparently, there are people out there who (no lie!) call themselves "anarcho-primitivists".
All of this technology? Really, really bad. Agriculture? Bad. Animal husbandry? Evil. Medical technology? Ditto.
What these people think is that we should all - well, first off, about 5.9 billion of us should die - be hunter/gatherers. Not only that, but they think that those choice few of us roaming around trying to live off whatever we can chase down and kill should forego language and apparently coherent thought.
When I read all of this, I could only smack myself in the head. What? They want to do what?
And here's one of the reasons they have for doing it. I got this from Wikipedia:
Other critics believe that solving social problems, e.g. oppression, torture, war, or disease would be more difficult without books, medical instruments (a form of technology), and the social structures of civilization...
Yes, I know Brad Pitt in the uncut version of "Fight Club" gives a speech about drying venison next to the kudzu-covered Sears Tower, but you have got to be kidding me.
One of the great thinkers of this movement is the Unabomber.
Do you think for one minute that one of these guys is out there cutting up future pemmican? I don't. I think they're fat, soft, bitter, resentful guys who would fall over in a dead faint if you told them they had to go hunt down their dinner without using a Chinese delivery menu.
If you're going to be crazy, go crazy all the way - one faction thinks these noble savages shouldn't even have metal weaponry. What are you going to do? Climb on Bambi's neck and gnaw him until he falls down?
Daily, I think the world is a crazy place. Today it seems crazier than it usually is. But that's what I get for using technology, right?
Oy.
1 comment:
I went to Wikipedia, and read about the primitivists. I think perhaps they have idealized the hunter-gatherer too much. Many of the North American tribal societies were hunter-gathers, almost exactly as they describe, but war, subjugation, and sex role differentiation were not exactly unknown.
Snort....
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