FERAL

Fer-al adj. wild, or existing in a state of nature, as freely occurring 
animals or plants; having reverted to the wild state from domestication.

We exist in a landscape of absence wherein real life is steadily being 
drained out by debased work, the hollow cycle of consumerism and the 
mediated emptiness of high-tech dependency. Today it is not only the 
stereotypical yuppie workaholic who tries to cheat despair via activity, 
preferring not to contemplate a fate no less sterile than that of the 
planet and (domesticated) subjectivity in general. We are confronted, 
nonetheless, by the ruins of nature and the ruin of our own nature, the 
sheer enormity of the meaninglessness and the inauthentic amounting to a 
weight of lies. It's still drudgery and toxicity for the vast majority, 
while a poverty more absolute than financial renders more vacant the 
universal Dead Zone of civilization. "Empowered" by computerization? 
Infantilized, more like. An Information Age characterized by increased 
communication? No, that would presuppose experience worth communicating. 
A time of unprecedented respect for the individual? Translation: 
wage-slavery needs the strategy of worker self-management at the point 
of production to stave off the continuing productivity crisis, and 
market research must target each "life-style" in the interest of a 
maximized consumer culture.

In the upside-down society the solution to massive alienation-induced 
drug use is a media barrage, with results as embarrassing as the 
hundreds of millions futilely spent against declining voter turnout. 
Meanwhile, TV, voice and soul of the modern world, dreams vainly of 
arresting the growth of illiteracy and what is left of emotional health 
by means of propaganda spots of thirty seconds or less. In the 
industrialized culture of irreversible depression, isolation, and 
cynicism, the spirit will die first, the death of the planet an 
afterthought. That is, unless we erase this rotting order, all of its 
categories and dynamics.

Meanwhile, the parade of partial (and for that reason false) oppositions 
proceeds on its usual routes. There are the Greens and their like who 
try to extend the life of the racket of electoralism, based on the lie 
that there is validity in any person representing another; these types 
would perpetuate just one more home for protest, in lieu of the real 
thing. The peace "movement" exhibits, in its every (uniformly pathetic) 
gesture, that it is the best friend of authority, property and 
passivity. One illustration will suffice: in May 1989, on the 20th 
anniversary of Berkeley's People's Park battle, a thousand people rose 
up admirably, looting 28 businesses and injuring 15 cops; declared 
peace-creep spokesperson Julia Talley, "These riots have no place in the 
peace movement." Which brings to mind the fatally misguided students in 
Tiananmen Square, after the June 3 massacre had begun, trying to prevent 
workers from fighting the government troops. And the general truth that 
the university is the number one source of that slow strangulation known 
as reform, the refusal of a qualitative break with degradation. Earth 
First! recognizes that domestication is the fundamental issue (e.g. that 
agriculture itself is malignant) but many of its partisans cannot see 
that our species could become wild.

Radical environmentalists appreciate that the turning of national 
forests into tree farms is merely a part of the overall project that 
also seeks their own suppression. But they will have to seek the wild 
everywhere rather than merely in wilderness as a separate preserve.

Freud saw that there is no civilization without the forcible 
renunciation of instincts, without monumental coercion. But, because the 
masses are basically "lazy and unintelligent," civilization is 
justified, he reasoned. This model or prescription was based on the idea 
that pre-civilized life was brutal and deprived-a notion that has been, 
amazingly, reversed in the past 20 years. Prior to agriculture, in other 
words, humanity existed in a state of grace, ease and communion with 
nature that we can barely comprehend today.

The vista of authenticity emerges as no less than a wholesale 
dissolution of civilization's edifice of repression. which Freud, by the 
way, described as "something which was imposed on a resisting majority 
by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to 
power and coercion." We can either passively continue on the road to 
utter domestication and destruction or turn in the direction of joyful 
upheaval, passionate and feral embrace of wildness and life that aims at 
dancing on the ruins of clocks, computers and that failure of 
imagination and will called work. Can we justify our lives by anything 
less than such a politics of rage and dreams?

