“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, February 23, 2023

Sapiens LOL

 Professional jealousy and a genuinely urgent sense of his utter and dangerous wrongness led me to write Humankind as a riposte to Sapiens. What Graeber (was just befriending him when he died) and Wengrow say about Harari is the shiznit, every time (The Dawn of Everything). Basically, he's popular because he tells people exactly what they already know. Humans are special and different and liable to transhumanist godlike becoming. And there's "no way out" of inevitably oppressive social structures. Which is why he gets to talk at Davos and I don't. Grrrr...

The professional jealousy slash outrage nadir was in Blackwell's Bookshop in Oxford 2019. Harari was on every single "important books" table, I assume he has an agent who insists on this. I was in the basement at the bottom right of a shelf at the back about "Earth Science." 

I can't get an agent because I have trouble telling people what I'm going to write, because creativity. So I do it all myself. I tried a few times and then just said, fuck it. I'd rather publish cheap and free things that agents don't like, anyway. 

That anarchist review someone sent me entirely misses the point of why Graeber and Wengrow wrote that. It's the same reason as why I had to tell John Zerzan to stop stalking me. It's a big old flaw of a lot of anarchist thought that it's caught in an Enlightenment rhetoric, whether upside down or the right way around: first we were great, now we're fucked. A fall narrative without the Jesus stuff. It's one reason Marx wrote "Who educates the educators?" The concept "Man" jerking off one more time. Colonialism upside down served with lashings of cynical reason. Destroy. 

1 comment:

ilinx said...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/remet1/comment/hp347te/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

(reddit haha)

wow, zerzan be goofy. sorry to hear that. i take your point about that line of anarchist thought being a fall story sin-jesus, but the video series made by this one dude (the one who wrote the linked comment above) is not like that at all.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU4FEuj4v9eBWP22ujafheoEejbQhPAdl

chugga-chugga,
belch-belch,
accompanying sentences
are useless for polar bears